'Let Me Tell You a Story' by Fenella Brandenburg

Let Me Tell You a Story: Presupposed actualization and the discourse of architectural development plans.

By Fenella Brandenburg.

Limited edition: only 10 available.

This essay is by the infamous academic and agent provacateur Fenella Brandenburg. Brandenburg is well-known for her appearance as keynote speaker at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography (4WCOP) in September 2017 at Huddersfield University, alongside David Bollinger.

• Published by Urban Gerbil
• Size: A5
• Pages: 33
• Black and white images: 2
• Colour images: 3
• White cover with blue text

Abstract of essay:
This essay discusses how architectural development plans form a narrative that tells a story of the future space being proposed. This story, embedded in a discourse that is circulated by those in authority in regard to the project’s manifestation, has two main effects. Firstly, it changes the subjectivity of those involved in the decision-making process and, secondly, the ideological structure surrounding the development makes the anticipated project, in the minds of those involved, exist in advance. These effects are known as presupposed actualization. By providing an example of a development project carried out in the UK in the 1960s - and by using theories around narratology, ideology, discourse and representation – the author demonstrates how this comes about through the telling of a story and because of the material actions undertaken by those invested in the project.

You can buy your copy for £4.00 + UK postage.

From Ivory Towers to Passionflowers: Tina Richardson Interviews Fenella Brandenburg

 

My interview with Fenella Brandenburg coincides with her move from academia into the world of a full-time writer-author. Here we talk conference storm-outs, academic superegos, psychogeography and passion projects. I hope you enjoy our dialogue: as C. S. Lewis said ‘Fenella is on the move’!

I find Dr. Brandenburg sitting - not coincidentally, I’m sure – in the Islington café she insisted we meet in, called ‘Tina, We Salute You’ (her little psychogeographic joke). When she told me we were meeting here, I honestly thought she was making up the name. I’ve included the photo above to prove its existence.

Dr. Brandenburg, who was promoted to Reader just before her retirement from academia (it turns out this was her way of saying ‘f**k you’ to Higher Education), looks very unlike the person I saw last at the 2017 4WCOP Psychogeography Conference. It transpires she was wearing a white bobbed wig and was dressing like a ‘bag lady’ in order to maintain her disguise. It seems there is now no reason to keep up the pretence. I note that she actually has somewhat Titian hair (not unlike my own) and is a zappy dresser: not a fleece or ankle sock in sight!

Brandenburg, who recently moved from somewhere in the North of England (she seems reluctant to say where, for some unknown reason – although the academic rumour mill says it is related to reports of stalking made by another academic) to Islington to, as she says “Be with my peoples”. The pressing questions are ‘why her move from academia?’ and ‘what was the fallout of 4WCOP?’. Here is the transcript of our interview in full and unedited:

TINA: Thank you for meeting me, Fenella. I love the choice of venue. How have things been since you left academia a month ago and how did the university feel about being snubbed when you resigned the day of receiving your readership?

FENELLA: Well, it had been a long time coming, the Readership, and I had been overlooked on a number of occasions. I actually only hung on in HE for that long so that I could resign when I finally received it. You know the adage ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, well the ‘cold’ was about 5 years of torture, but was well worth it. The adage turns out to be true, but for all the reasons that are the opposite of what is implied by the adage, if one wants to get semantic about it. That, and also I heard rumours that that Bollinger bloke was moving to my university, and I just wasn’t up to having to deal with his ‘advances’ any more.

T: I’d like to talk about David Bollinger later, if that’s alright with you, but for the moment, what have you been doing, since you left?

F: Well, I very speedily set up a local writing group. I plan to take the same approach that the postmodern university does to how it ‘tasks’ its own academics. This is oriented around what HE calls the Work Load Model (WLM), however I will be calling my model of work allocation applied to the members of my fiction writing group the WLF, The Work Load Fiction. I think this will work out well for all concerned and it allows me to take a firm hold on what is happening and provide a hypodermic approach to the management of the group (for those of you not familiar with the term it comes from communications theory, it means top down and coming from above). People love being micromanaged, despite their protestations to the contrary.

T: So what do you see as being wrong with academic workload being managed by those who are clearly qualified enough to be managers?

F: The WLM epitomises the postmodern university par excellence. It is the moment where the university’s bureaucratic superego reaches its full potential in the daily control of its academics. For Freud, the superego represents all authority figures (initially the Father), but eventually the part of the individual that negotiates with the id (the basic instincts), producing the ego, the aspect of the individual that is presented to the world. On the level of power, say a Foucauldian model of power, if you will, this is tantamount to a kind of self-surveillance. I am absolutely behind the WLM and have no problem in bringing it into the creative sphere, in this case fiction writing. Creative people can get completely out of control, there is no absolute structure for them to adhere to, and they must be constrained at all costs.

T: Thank you, Fenella. I’m not sure everyone would agree with you there, but I appreciate your candour. Can I ask you: Why the move to creative writing?

F: Well, I’d met my 5 year plan: to leave at the point of my Readership. Let me just say, plans are incredibly important: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 year plans are not fiction at all, whatever academics say. They help keep you on track and ensure you meet targets, which are not at all unreasonable despite what you may read in regard to those adversaries of HE research-related policy. In regard to my move: I’m a well-published academic (as you know, your own publishing company has published some of my work on 'presupposed actualization'). I’m already an author. Really, how hard can it be?

T: Can we talk about psychogeography? What are you currently working on in that field and do you still consider yourself a psychogeographer?

F: Well, I am currently working on a project on abandoned shopping centres in the US. Partially inspired by your research on the Trafford Centre. I am also looking at a rural space, the Black Forest national park in Baden-Wűrrttemberg. As you know, I was born near there and I inherited my family cabin in the area. I am however, somewhat offended by your second question: that I may no longer consider myself a psychogeographer. I appreciate the damage done by the paper Bollinger and I delivered at 4WCOP 2017, but I feel we more than made up for that in our paper based on Ballard’s Concrete Island in 2019.

T: Talking about David Bollinger: can I ask you some questions about some of the gossip about where you and he were located. During 2016-2020 rumours abounded about where you were both working. I heard that Bollinger had an office in the Psychology Department at Huddersfield at one time. But managers in that school denied that he even existed, despite him clearly having a desk and a label on the door. One of the academics - a friend of mine, Dr. Alex Bridger - said he knew Bollinger was there as he saw his coat over the back of the chair. That, and he actually shared an office with him. I also heard that you had a temporary office in the old Maltings building, that once was the Geography Department at the University of Leeds, but has now been demolished. You also, purportedly, had an office in the School of Design at one point. But then, I also heard that you were popping up in online Zoom meetings at MMU in the early days of Covid.

F: I cannot vouch for Bollinger. You could ask Charlotte Tilbury, his wife. She’s a counsellor and also writes for The Guardian, I believe (good luck with her psychoanalysing that miscreant, is all I can say!). However, I can confirm that I did work at Leeds during the period you mention, and I will supply proof of that, which you can include on your blog. [included above]

T: Thank you for your clarification of the rumours, Fenella. Can I just ask one more question before we end the interview, for our psychogeographic audience? Where do you see psychogeography going?

F: Well, as you know, you very arrogantly labelled the current phase of psychogeography as ‘The New Psychogeography’ in your own book Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. I have to say, however reluctantly, that I am more on the same page as Bollinger with this: psychogeography is reaching its zenith inasmuch as it is now all about its own undoing and negation. This is best summed up by an urban-walking colleague of mine, who will remain nameless, who said, when I asked him the question ‘Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?: ‘I’ve no idea why the psychogeographer crossed the road, but I bet when they got there they found Iain Sinclair had already written about it’!

T: Thank you so much for your time, Fenella.

'Presupposed actualization and the discourse of architectural development plans' by Fenella Brandenberg

Let Me Tell You a Story: Presupposed actualization and the discourse of architectural development plans.

By Fenella Brandenburg.

Please click here for free downloadable copy of this essay.

Abstract of essay:
This essay discusses how architectural development plans form a narrative that tells a story of the future space being proposed. This story, embedded in a discourse that is circulated by those in authority in regard to the project’s manifestation, has two main effects. Firstly, it changes the subjectivity of those involved in the decision-making process and, secondly, the ideological structure surrounding the development makes the anticipated project, in the minds of those involved, exist in advance. These effects are known as presupposed actualization. By providing an example of a development project carried out in the UK in the 1960s - and by using theories around narratology, ideology, discourse and representation – the author demonstrates how this comes about through the telling of a story and because of the material actions undertaken by those invested in the project.

The Trafford Centre Meets Concrete Island

Fenella Brandenburg and David Bolinger will be together again at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography on Friday 6th September at 12.30. The haven't presented together since 2017, when Fenella stormed off the stage in a strop. Here's hoping that their 2019 conference talk goes a bit better. This will be a performance-style talk at the cusp of J G Ballard's fictional Concrete Island and the non-fictional place, the Trafford Centre in Manchester.

I am hoping that Brandenburg will contribute a blog post after the conference, but last time I asked her she said “Are you kidding! There is no way I want to be associated with that load of bimbling idiots”.

All welcome! It is free, but please book your place.

The Precession of the Demolition: A Baudrillardian Thought Experiment

By Fenella Brandenburg

I was talking to Tina Richardson this week, my new colleague, about the office that we share and the building we are housed in at the University of Leeds. It’s now known as '28 University Road' and is temporarily being used by our school, The School of Design. There is a notice on it that says 'Formerly Geography East'. Tina says she knows it as a geography building as she taught there a few years ago and some of her geography friends had their offices there, too. Apparently the building is due for demolition, and even though it looks like a dodgy little white stucco temporary building, it has an interesting history, being at one time a maltings.

As you can see from the above image, there is a big old map in the background, just outside our office. There is also another old map in the corridor. The building is very warm, although I have not worked out where all the heat is coming from (maybe an underwater spring reminiscent of Journey to the Centre of the Earth), and the corridor has a strong whiff of some kind of sweet-smelling mould, which I actually really like. It is quite scruffy and you could say it is 'falling apart', but it definitely has a charm and we both really like it there. In fact we don’t want to move, which brings me to the purpose of this guest post, which, in a way, I am writing on behalf of both of us: if we staged a pretend sit-in on the day the demolition begins - the day when university officials appear in hi viz jackets with their clipboards, and men with hydraulic excavators and loaders enter the building – what would happen?

Bear in mind this is not a real sit-in. It is just a pretend (fake), one!

Well, as has been written before by Tina Richardson in a post about staging a pretend faint in a public place (A Hysterical Simulacra), all the apparatus that would be employed in a real situation would also be employed in a false one, since, from the outside, both look the same. This is Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra. You will not be able to stage a fake sit-in, because, as Baudrillard says: “the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements”. He goes on to explain that it is required that “everything is reduced to the real…to the established order itself” and the system operates in order to “devour any attempt at simulation”. In other words, the structure, as it appears in organisational form (what Louis Althusser describes as the ideological state apparatus), is unable to see beyond its own ideological appearance and incapable of seeing anything above its own order of simulation.

However, Baudrillard also goes on to say, and I think this is actually key in these types of thought experiments, it actually occurs even before “institutions and justice come into play”. Which is interesting as initially this sounds a bit like a contradiction. Nevertheless, what he says following this is: the simulation can never be punished as such, because it can only either be punished as a less serious offence (because of a lack of consequences), or as a crime against the judiciary when various state officials become involved (e.g. the police). He goes onto say that either way it is never punished for what it is, a simulation, “since it is precisely as such than no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power”.

So, what about staging a sit-in?

Picture this: myself, plus Dr Richardson, and the odd member of staff, a group of recruited students (maybe from The School of Performance and Cultural Industries) 'stage' our sit-in in the student common room, right near the entrance to 28 University Road. We all know that this is a performance. We are not there to make a protest or get in the way of the bulldozers. This is a simulation. The contractors open the door to see a whole load of protesters sitting in the common room, with their placards saying 'Save 28 University Road', 'Keep this wonderful heritage site!' and 'Don't demolish the famous maltings'. They go back to the site office to get the boss. He takes one look at the resistant academics and students and heads to the university administration building, returning with the man-from-estates who promptly calls the police for fear of any potential litigation somewhere down the line...

At what point did this simulation become real?

The Fundamentals of the Psychogeographical Method - Conference Paper

The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography is happening again this year on the 8th to 10th of September at the University of Huddersfield. I thought you might like to see details from the paper that Fenella Brandenburg (occasional guest blogger here at particulations), is giving with David Bollinger (guest blogger at notanotherpsychogeographyblog).

Abstract
Bollinger and Brandenberg are world leading psychogeographers and in this key-note talk they will take you on a grand tour of what psychogeography is all about and will explain how to go about creating your own psychogeographical adventures. They will also be promoting their new book, The Fundamentals of the Psychogeographical Method, which will be published by Dodo Press in 2018. Their soon to be published book has received outstanding positive reviews from well-known psychogeographers such as Luther Blissett, who said: "this book will change your life!". Victor Salamanca described the book as "a journey into the heart of darkness and a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Bollinger and Brandenburg’s vivid prose. I’m sure that it will be read in a thousand years from now" and also Rudolf Rudenski commented that "Psychogeography is in crisis. Anyone that calls themselves a psychogeographer is actually a pseudo-psychogeographer. Bollinger and Brandenburg show us how to carve a path through the crap of psychogeography and they boldly point the way to a new way of doing psychogeography foregrounding an agenda for social change and action".

The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 3

By Fenella Brandenburg

Continued from Part 2

(this is the final part of this series of posts)

Since the Enlightenment the university’s relationship with industry has grown out of a direct response to an economic need. This meant the university reacted to the demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, meaning that attempting to demarcate commerce and HE as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce. As far back as 1990 academics were writing about the application of a commercial formula to every aspect of education. Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures – terminations and program closures – can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

Hardy’s comments imply a potential move by many academics into other professions with those remaining having to become defensive in order to protect themselves and their future within the institution.

These illustrations are provided so as to emphasise that the current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism in general and their response to politico-economic events. While cuts to funding in HE are going to have an impact on those studying and working at the university, the effects of capitalist oriented processes on those at the university can be both subtle and furtive.

Mark Fisher makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader is required to complete for each module they oversee (2009: 41). He says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide “a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output” (2009: 42). Mary Evans puts it succinctly: “Since God no longer exists, we have invented assessment” (2004: 34). Evans says of both the Jarratt Report (1985) and the Dearing Report (1997) that they imposed “upon universities a quasi-democratic ethos of collusion with the values of a market economy” (2004: 23). Consensus is all that is needed to enable bureaucracy’s seamless transition: “The ‘right’ process is established, the rules of the game set, and what is then required are cooperative and consenting players” (2004: 62).

Dissent becomes difficult in a system that sees the student as consumer, service and product of the system (Fisher 2009: 42), because the ability of students or staff to direct any grievance to a recognisable figurehead is difficult. Any challenge of/to the system simply points to another set of figures, attached to which are a set of further criteria. Or, instead, the result of the query may just appear as a re-framing and re-presentation of that data back to the enquirer: “the best performativity [...] comes rather from arranging the data in a new way” (Lyotard 2004: 51). Bureaucracy, as an instrument for measuring excellence in the corporatised university, as Fisher describes, “floats freely, independent of any external authority” (2009: 50). It produces a style of surveillance culture for academics that is rather like an invisible postmodern semblance of the time and motion study that constantly hovers over them in the form of a bureaucratic superego.

This constant checking is part of the everyday administration of the contemporary university which attempts to measure production in the same way that a factory would through the use of the nebulous term ‘excellence’. The use of the term ‘excellence’ has changed over time. For example, in the transcription of a lecture given in 1991 at The Centre for the Study of Theology at the University of Essex, David Jenkins (the Bishop of Durham), uses it quite differently. This lecture is entitled ‘Price, Cost, Excellence and Worth – Can the Idea of the University Survive the Force of the Market?’ While it offers a critique of the corporatised university, Jenkins uses the term ‘excellence’ in a similar way to how the term ‘mastery’ might be used: “everything is concerned with ‘price and cost’ and not with ‘excellence and worth’” (Jenkins 1991: 31). It is likely that the term ‘excellence’ has become appropriated by corporations (and the university) because of its convenient vagueness. The pervasive audit culture enables a form of micro-management without the manager appearing in bodily form. Richard Hill says that technology has enabled this ideology to proliferate, since administrators are often no longer needed to carry out many tasks on the behalf of academics, now measuring forms are often online and accessible by all through their desktop computer (2012: 172).

Hill highlights the common use of the word ‘excellence’ in taglines and slogans used by universities, providing examples from Australian HE institutions: “‘Integrity, Respect, Rational Enquiry, Personal Excellence’ (Edith Cowan University): ‘In the pursuit of excellence in teaching and research’ (Griffith University): and ‘Excellence, Innovation, Diversity’ (University of Wollongong)” (2012: 60). He describes this as “corporate-speak” and while he uses a flippant writing style to explain how these taglines operate on the unconscious, he nevertheless hits upon a significant point in regard to how language is linked to how we view the world: these “phrases [...] send certain images racing through the collective psyche of prospective students in the hope of instilling some sort of lasting semiotic effect” (ibid.). And this is apparent when Readings states: “the question of the University is only the question of relative value-for-money, the question posed to a student who is situated entirely as a consumer” (Readings 1999: 27).

Bibliography:

Evans, Mary. 2004. Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities (London and New York: Continuum).

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).

Hardy, Cynthia, ‘‘Hard’ Decisions and ‘Tough’ Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline’, HE, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.

Hill, Richard. 2012. Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University (Sydney: New South Publishing).

Jenkins, David. 1991. Price, Cost, Excellence and Worth – Can the idea of the University survive the force of the Market? (Colchester: The University of Essex).

Lyotard, Jean-François. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 2

Image: Baird Point at the State University of New York

(referred to by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins)

By Fenella Brandenburg

Continued from Part 1

The idea of the student-consumer has become more significant since the public-funding cuts that followed the global recession beginning in 2008. The 2013 National Student Survey (NSS) asking students for feedback on whether their degree courses were ‘value for money’ resulted in 29% of them stating it was not (Public Finance 2013). This study coincided with the first group of British students (excluding Scotland) being subjected to the rise in course fees from approximately £3,000/year to up to £9,000/year. The study was criticised for asking the wrong question because it was placing the student solely as a consumer of a product that might be expected to be directly commensurate to some kind of financial gain (for instance, a graduate job), rather than providing a question based on knowledge gain. Hence, the question posed tends to encourage an answer in the negative. Nevertheless, one could argue that for the other 71% it was ‘value for money’, perhaps a higher result than might have been expected with such a significant course fee rise. However, the question itself reflects the trend to express the acquisition of knowledge through exchange-value rather than use-value.

Like academics, students are also subjected to university bureaucracy in the form of surveys that measure their teaching and service satisfaction at the micro and macro level. Mary Beard describes the lack of a response to the questionnaires by students as “survey-fatigue”, and in an article in the BBC news magazine looking at the pros and cons of student surveys, states that the problem with the student survey was that it was seen as an absolute measure of course quality, when actually students can mark courses down for a host of different reasons, such as extensive reading lists (Beard 2013).

However, the latest tuition fee rise and the other cuts in HE funding by the British government, appear under the popular media-generated term of ‘austerity measures’. In 1989 in an article entitled ‘The Management of Austerity in Higher Education: An International Comparison’ Manuel Crespo stated:

The management of higher education in a period of uncertainty, budgetary constraints and real or apprehended decline in enrolments has become a major issue in Western developed countries. Since the late seventies different HE systems have devised strategies to adapt themselves to shrinking resources. (1989: 373)

As the new British Prime Minister in 1997, Tony Blair hoped that 50% of young people would go to university. He stated that: “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for HE” and “will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them” (Blair 2005). Nevertheless, later he was accused of reneging on this promise with many later media interviews hinging on the semantics of the above statements, especially the “no plans” reference (ibid.). It appeared that the structures and money were not in place in order to support Blair’s wishes. Neither were they at the point of the later 2010 coalition government in Britain, when the current, and greatest, course fee rise occurred. This response to public sector cutbacks in periods of austerity, while not a new money-saving strategy, nevertheless, in the contemporary university – which operates on the guidelines set out in the Jarratt (1985) and Dearing Reports (1997), where HE institutions are expected to operate like corporations – means that today they are evaluated primarily in economic terms.

Concluded in part 3 (upcoming).

Bibliography

Beard, Mary, ‘A Point of View: When Students Answer Back’, BBC News Magazine, (2013), [accessed 6 June 2013]

Blair, Tony, ‘Did Labour mislead over tuition fees?’, Channel 4, (2005), [accessed 7 June 2013]

Crespo, Manuel, ‘The Management of Austerity in Higher Education: An International Comparison’, Higher Education, 18, 4 (1989), 373-395.

Public Finance, ‘Degree Courses ‘Not Value For Money’ Say Third of Students’, Public Finance, (2013), [accessed 6 June 2013]

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 1

By Fenella Brandenburg

In The University in Ruins (1996) Bill Readings says that it is ‘excellence’ in its manifest bureaucratic forms which is the driving force behind harnessing the university’s function of the past and in postmodernity placing it under the forces of the market (1999: 38): “Like the stock exchange, the University is a point of capital’s self-knowledge, of capital’s ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from the management” (1999: 40). The Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) are perfect manifestations of Reading’s critique in action.

Readings dedicates a whole chapter to the notion of ‘excellence’, which he considers to be the watchword of the contemporary corporatised university. Its effectiveness within the institutional apparatus cannot be underestimated and in order to deconstruct the university discourse it is important to understand the way excellence operates. For Readings, ‘excellence’ is a hollow term that has no absolute definition (1999: 24). He states: “An excellent boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane” (1999: 24). A 2013 article in Times Higher Education mentioned “teaching jargon” and states: “despite repeated claims of ‘teaching excellence’ on institutions websites, there was little elaboration of what this meant in practice” (Matthews 2013: 8).

Readings also makes reference to how the consumer-orientation of the university ties in with technology, a large focus of Jean-François Lyotard’s critique. Readings says: “All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information” (1999: 39). Capitalism uses technology in order to circulate information and enable a pooling of resources into a “generalized market” (Readings 1999: 32). In the university it is the term ‘excellence’ that helps promote the propagation of this data and mobilise its message. Readings says ‘excellence’ becomes translatable and usable by anyone who wishes to describe it within any phenomenon, in whatever way they choose, by any criteria (1999: 24).

One of the functions of excellence is how it helps promote the processes of circulation essential to capital’s operation in regard to power. Previously, the nation-state sat in the centre of civic life and produced streams of power emanating outwards (the institution being one of the representatives of the nation-state). Readings says that today, however:

Capital no longer flows outward from the centre, rather it circulates around the circumference, behind the backs of those who keep their eyes firmly fixed on the center. Around the circumference, the global transfer of capital takes place in the hands of multi- or transnational corporations. (1999: 111)

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of this process and adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses.

Upon repeated use the language of the university of excellence becomes normalised, but it has ideological origins which are needed for it to function within the capitalist system, both within and outside the university. The language that excellence adopts, while serving the purposes of the corporatised university, also has the function of creating a type of abstraction, which removes the output of the system – the data that is promulgated – from not only the material practices that are required to deliver it, but also from the staff who work in the university and produce this data (or are party to producing the data). Thus, the term is often used without compunction, without question and without an understanding of the material effects of the process that underpins it.

Continued in Part 2

Bibliography

Matthews, David, ‘Global faculty made up of bachelor’s boys and girls’, Times HE, 19/26 December 2013, p. 8.

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Down the Rabbit Hole or Reflections on Post-Truth Reality (Part 2)

Part 2: How Can We Challenge ‘Truth’ Today?

By Fenella Brandenburg

For Part 1 of the blog, please click here: Are We Really in a Post-Truth World?

Do we need to give up on the idea of truth, or revealing it, since the ‘rules’ appear to have so drastically changed? I would like to attempt to answer this question under the rubric of poststructural theory. I believe we have to constantly rethink our strategies in order to challenge those in power, because complex environments require well thought out approaches. I’m not convinced that those undertaken in the 60s and 70s will work today, whether they are activist in nature, or operate on analysing the textual instead, such as discourse analysis or deconstruction. I don’t mean that they have no value, I mean that if all bets are off in terms of the value attached to what truth is (and we are not just talking about what truth is or not here, but also the recognition that truth has less purchase and to some is completely irrelevant), then maybe we should not look at what is being said, but look at something much more fundamental to that, who we are and what our place is in the world. I propose to do this by using Gilles Deleuze’s theory of The Fold (1993).

Deleuze uses Leibniz’s theory on the Baroque (the folded subject) to help explain the position of the individual: the subject is perspectival, it is its point of view and represents a particular moment. Deleuze explains how the Baroque differentiates two forms of folding: material and soul that exist on the two levels of Baroque architecture - matter on the lower, and soul on the upper - where each floor is labyrinthine, extending to infinity (2006: 3). However, these two floors are connected, and Deleuze suggests this connection is formed by another fold (2006: 4), thus there exists a means of communication. On the surface of a fold there is the means whereby a point can develop producing a singularity (when discussing Leibniz, Deleuze uses ‘singularity’ to describe the perception of movement). This is a point of inflection (the place on the curve where the tangent crosses it), what Deleuze describes as an “elastic point” (2006:15). These inflections are potentially innumerable and become available perspectival positions. This folding, created by inflection, creates an “envelope of inherence” and Deleuze explains that this inclusiveness simultaneously creates the fold at the moment the fold forms this inherence (2006: 24).

Thus, we have the process of aggregation in the folding: the folding creating the force of inclusion, but at the same time this incorporation is forming a fold around that which has been gathered up. Deleuze explains what this means for the soul described by Leibniz (what occurs on the upper floor): this windowless floor, covered with drapery, is inclusive to the point where the process of enveloping is so encompassing that a soul is formed (ibid.). This is not a place, exactly, nor entirely a point of view, but “what occupies point of view, …a soul, a subject” (ibid.). In this process of inclusion, which concurrently forms the fold, it becomes apparent how an inside can be formed from an outside: the windowless floor, defining the soul for Leibniz, creates an intact subject, a soul attached to a body (matter).

So what does this model provide us with in terms of explicating the problem of post-truth?

We can now begin to see how our sense of self-hood, which appears to be inside us, actually comes from the outside and is formed in a little pocket we conveniently call our ‘self’. The normally polarised inside and outside become connected in the model of the fold, therefore contradictory terms become reconcilable: truth/lie, us/them, and so on. The outside, therefore, is found on the inside, the other is in myself, and the answer to the unthinkable paradox of what truth is, is in thought itself.

This has multiple benefits in regard to our problem at hand. The fold, whilst forming an envelope which situates the subject at that point of view, in its act of folding over also enables that subject to see itself. The subject can be self-reflective (and reflexive), can see its place in the world and has agency in terms of moving their perspective (by simply moving along the fold). Also, it means that what may present itself as impossibility (for example, a paradox such as how can the truth be a lie), is not separate from the understandable, but actually contained in it, and formed as a fold of it….

Please note: I have been invited to give a joint talk at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography in September 2017 with David Bollinger. While Dr Bollinger and I have had some academic differences in the past, and some not-so-academic differences, we are attempting to get past these in order to present a lecture at this year’s congress.

Bibliography:
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. The Fold. Trans. by Tom Conley (London and New York: Continuum).

Down the Postmodern Rabbit Hole or Reflections on Post-Truth Reality (Part 1)

Part 1: Are We Really in a Post-Truth World?

By Fenella Brandenburg

I was discussing the possibility of the idea of post-situationism last week when visiting a colleague at Huddersfield University and later reiterated the conversation to Tina Richardson. She asked me how this might fit into to the current concept of post-truth and invited me to write a guest post for her blog. This post is in two parts that I have set up in question form:

Part 1: Are we really in a post-truth world?
Part 2: How can we challenge ‘truth’ today?

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that post-truth was the word of the year in 2016, not least because of its new dictionary inclusion. But, these kinds of phrases are always problematic when taken up into media discourses, because eventually they begin to self-deconstruct, although one could say that is a positive side-effect. In the West at least, we can all recognise the major socio-political shift that took place in 2016, nevertheless post-truth is not really new and doesn’t herald a new cultural epoch, despite the seismic shift we all feel has befallen us. Post-truth sits perfectly well into the concepts that, as theorists, we situate within postmodernity. One only needs to pick up a text by Jean Baudrillard to understand that the grounds for post-truth have been being built on for many decades. We don’t even need to look at his 21st Century texts to find the seeds of post-truth, because he set it out neatly for us in his formulation for the simulacra (levels two, three and four) in 1981:

Level 1: “it is the reflection of a profound reality”
Level 2: “it masks and denatures a profound reality”
Level 3: “it masks the absence of a profound reality”
Level 4: “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum” (2006: 6)

Feel free to choose any of the above to apply to a specific situation you are attempting to analyse under the rubric of post-truth!

We can also look at the significant work that Michel Foucault has carried out in regards to truth, power, knowledge and discourse to understand that truth has no bearing on something that can be considered absolute, or real, in any sense at all. In regards to the semantics of a specific instance, ‘truth’ is not a function of the words and sentences themselves, but the whole network of factors which form that specific utterance in the propagation of a specific statement (for example a media announcement - as it would have been for Donald Trump on Thursday 16 February 2017). These statements exists through a form of appropriation and are legitimised through the utilisation of the forces that exist in an event-like state around them. For Foucault “a true discourse engenders or ‘manufactures’ something that does not yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it” (1980: 193). There we have it! We are not in a post-truth period at all, it is simply that the very concepts that underpin postmodernity have just reached critical mass and have finally been recognised on a quotidian level.

But…..whether you believe that post-truth is a new or even ‘real’ thing doesn’t change the fact that we sense that something has shifted to a very significant degree. So, what does this also say about how we can question the current climate of alt-facts? I will be covering this in the next part of the post in regards to deconstruction and post-structural theory

Bibliography:
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1980.