So this is the time of year when I’d usually write some kind of overly poignant piece that draws out themes from my last year as a lecturer in Higher Education. There are many things that I could write about so I started planning a long essay and was part way through picking out a pretentious alliterative list of themes like compassion, capitulation, complicity and critique or subversion, silence, scepticism, and self-destruction when I realized that there was only one thing that I really wanted to write about: ambivalence.

Ambivalent (adj) – “having simultaneous conflicting feelings or contradictory ideas about something,”

I think that I first encountered ambivalence as a developed concept in the work of Catherine Casey where she talks about individuals being acculturated into an organization incompletely, coming to both love and hate it – coping through jokes, sarcasm and humorous deprecation – saying for example that they love working at the organization, but also can’t wait to leave. There is something in the paradoxical duality of this kind of emotional double-bind that characterizes the last few months for me.

Permanent Contracts

As of the 7th of May, I am no longer a temporary member of staff at the University of Kent. I’m now on a permanent Teaching and Research contract and I’m also the new Director of Studies for the Bsc Management programme. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, I feel an otherwise inexplicable sense of relief that I am no longer facing the prospect of being unemployed in the middle of a global pandemic. Indeed, given that my contract for the current academic year only lasted until July 31st, 2020 and given that Kent has been having well-publicized financial difficulties, I’ve been applying for jobs whenever I could over the last year, operating under the assumption that my contract wouldn’t be renewed. In the spirit of the very first post on this blog, here’s a list of universities that I applied to who passed without inviting me to interview: Swansea University, University of Huddersfield, University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, and of course the University of Manchester – my alma mater which didn’t invite me for an interview in the department where I did my PhD, even though they seem to be in dire need of someone to teach the compulsory management and organization studies modules on their undergraduate programmes after the mass exodus of critical scholars from the school in the last few years. I did get invited to Loughborough, Strathclyde and Exeter for interviews but they ended up not working out.

To say that I felt anxious and unsettled at the prospect that July would arrive and Kent would tell me that my contract is up would be a gross understatement. The last time that  I was unemployed my mental health deteriorated so drastically that to think about re-entering that psychological space is to confront a void of abject terror. Indeed, I recall vividly the profoundly uncomfortable and disquieting experience of watching colleagues on temporary contracts like mine from Bristol, Newcastle and Sussex getting laid off and not knowing if I’d be next. Finally having job security should have been a source of profound relief. Yet my response to it has been muted. I didn’t celebrate or do much of anything, I just kept doing exactly what I’ve been doing.

It is not lost on me that contractual flexibility as precarity is an incisive tool of corporate control, breeding certain acute forms of uncertainty and terror in the workforce in order to secure compliance and encourage enthusiastic self-exploitation. Indeed perhaps this is why I feel a curious kind of apathy about the whole process, as though the university had finally agreed to pay me for the job that I was already doing. Colleagues will know that I’ve been publishing, going to conferences, and participating in the research culture of the university (e.g. going to research seminars etc.) as though I was on a Teaching and Research contract for my entire time at Kent. It is a common enough story in which the protagonist has to prove themselves as virtuous (e.g. as dedicated, hard working, committed, capable and so on) in order to be accepted and accept themself as an individual. Yet now that it’s my actual job, I have a strange sentiment of ambivalence about it. As if to say: “OK … so I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing, shall I?”

The impossibility of moderation 

For those unfamiliar with academic work let me clarify that marking is never a one person job. On my 500 student Introduction to Management module there has to be a team of people doing the marking under my guidance. Readers of this blog who are familiar with my pathological control issues will anticipate how much I struggle with this. If there was enough time, I’d want to mark them all myself, that way I’d arrogantly be able to believe that they were “done properly”. Indeed, on my smaller modules I obsess over marking and split hairs over whether to award, say a 65 or a 68, but when you’re trying to direct others, you’re often just grateful if they can get in the same classification (2:2, 2:1, First and so on) as you. Indeed, fatigue even got the better of me this year and by the time I was 150 papers in, I was content to just get papers into the right classification. This became much worse once I started moderating.

At Kent, marks have to be moderated – a small sample has to be double-checked by a second marker before they’re sent to the external examiner to also be double-checked. In theory this is a useful bureaucratic system that ensures that marking is consistent, fair, and accountable. In practice, it’s highly flawed and subject to interpersonal politics. For example, on CB312, I ended up with a team of markers, all of whom were senior and more experienced colleagues. If a colleague awards a mark that you don’t quite agree with, what is the correct course of action for raising it, knowing how political academia is and that offending a particular colleague might be the difference between you getting a promotion in the future or not, and also because you think that your colleagues should know what the correct marks to award are (even if they aren’t subject experts) by virtue of their experience – when they don’t it creates self-doubt, uncertainty, and a profound sense of being uncomfortable, as though you had to explain how contraceptives work to your parents.  More pertinently, if a senior and more experienced colleague does a bad job, do you send it back to them with supportive commentary and tell them to do it again, or just do it yourself? I ended up remarking quite a few essays because colleagues didn’t pay attention to the plagiarism score of the essay and gave high marks to essays with significant plagiarised content, or because colleagues awarded marks that didn’t add up (e.g. Essay 1 = 78, Essay 2 = 72 but total mark awarded was 77), or a colleague delaying marking the essays until after the deadline had passed (so I just gave up and started marking them).

These are difficult questions and someone with more political skill than I would have had the sophistication to come up with better answers to them. Eventually, I think that I became ambivalent to the process and just capitulated, marking the papers myself to fix any errors, or just caving in to any proposed changes made by colleagues moderating my work – the supposed collegiate discussion that should be involved in negotiating marking, never really taking place because I was riven by this intense feeling of caring (and wanting to ethically ensure that my students get the grades that they deserve) and not caring and just wanting to be done with the politics of it all.

Much like my previous reflections on marking these are things that I am “not supposed to say”, because the human experiences of marking have to be scrubbed out in favour of presenting it as a neutral and “objective process” but I think that Higher Education would be a better place if more academics spoke openly about their experiences, so that’s what I’m doing.

There are more examples that I could give: ambivalence about my Scout Troop making a centralized decision to not even try to do any online Scouting, ambivalence about a paper that I’m working on which has now gone through so many revisions that I feel a sense of emotional and ethical detachment from it – not really caring about it’s nuance or whether it reflects my academic values – just doing and saying whatever I think will get it published, ambivalence about current events etc. etc. to the degree where I’m beginning to view ambivalence as pathological, as some kind of cultivated response to the current social milieu. As though, to return to Casey, I am being disciplined and acculturated in some way but incompletely and my unfinished character shows in my black humour, ambivalence, indifference, sarcasm, and so on. Who knows?

But what does Skittles think about systemic racism?

As every major political figure, pseudo-celebrity dog, and Instagram influencer feels compelled to say something about the dreadful injustices of racism and the disproportionate numbers of people of colour who die in police custody in so called “developed” countries like the US and the UK, even organizations are beginning to chime in. Ben and Jerry’s, for example, loudly proclaims that “Silence is not an option” in a definitive statement that suggests that the organization will not stand idly by as racial injustice continues. In response to this resurgence of “brand activism” we are encouraged to play a perverse game of “count the coloured people” on corporate boardrooms to determine if the activism is genuine or empty and performative. At this time of great social and political uncertainty, we look to great leaders like Seth Rogen (whose #Instagramactivism is covered in international newspapers) in the absence of satisfying action from our elected officials and ask the most pressing of questions: What does Ja Rule think?

I would like to take this opportunity to remind readers of this blog that I am most likely an idiot.

But what does Ja Rule think? The meme goes back to an old Dave Chappelle routine where he critiques celebrity-culture. He challenges us to reflect on why at a moment of national tragedy like the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001, or a moment of political import like the 2016 American presidential election, we would even begin to pretend to care what a celebrity like Ja Rule thinks. The filmed murder of George Floyd has become a much needed catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement but it has also led to every celebrity or person of vague public interest feeling compelled to perform their disgust as solidarity on social media or write overly poignant opinion pieces in The Guardian. Importantly for someone who studies organizations, it has led to a wave of similarly performative pronouncements from major organizations, decrying the horrors and injustices of racism and posting #BLM on their social media pages. Even Nike is on board. As though their care and concern, genuine or empty, matters at all.

This isn’t new. For years, LGBTQ+ people have been complaining about the co-optation of pride by corporations, as the radical nature of the event is lost and it is increasingly commodified by the presence of brands in the unfolding dynamics of ‘pink-’ or ‘rainbow capitalism’ which much more articulate people than I have tried to weigh up the pros and cons of. Even if some might see it as disrupting heteronormativity in the long term, that doesn’t make it any less disturbing, as the same corporations whose interview panels reflect biases against the LGBTQ+ community or invest in the economies of countries where being gay is a punishable crime, put rainbow flags all over the social media page and pass out rainbow themed merchandise at pride. This kind of transparent pandering is often unintentionally funny. Earlier this month, I laughed out loud to myself in the supermarket for around 10 minutes at the realization that Skittles had made an all white bag of Skittles to support the LGBTQ+ community, saying “During Pride only one rainbow matters” and had in the process accidentally made what could be called a white-supremacist bag of candy – a beautiful evidencing of the reality that, as it always has, capital will say and do absolutely anything that it thinks will maximize profitability.

While there are many ways to think about this problem of co-optation – from the pragmatist argument that says that this kind of public performance of solidarity as marketing-tactic is important as it lets marginalized groups know in what stores they’d be safe, to the critical argument that calls into question the moral decay under contemporary capitalism that leaves us so unable to reaffirm ourselves as “good people” that consumption decisions become less about function and more about constructing an “ethical self”, and even the odd argument that there must be LGBTQ+ people/BLM supporters in the organizations themselves who want to use their platform to vocalize support and solidarity – the one that I want to focus on is corporate personhood.

The moral and ethical implications of corporate personhood have been the subject of academic debate for some time with various iterations of it cropping up – most recently Ken Greenwood’s argument that if corporations are people, they should act like it. That is, they should be responsible and accountable to the same standards to which we would hold other people. People like Ja Rule. It is here that my personal comedy is apparent as after reading every tweet, every newspaper report of another organization affirming BLM, every gesture by an organization trying to show solidarity, I laughed to myself and thought yes, but what does Ja Rule think about this? A way perhaps of vocalizing the absurdity of a corporation which actively benefits from the colonialist histories and mores of capital, claiming to care about the lives of people of colour, but also because, I am apparently an idiot who thinks in memes.

But this is how Ja Rule thinks. Repeatedly throughout his oeuvre, Ja Rule extols the virtue of the pursuit and agglomeration of money as an end in itself rather than a means to happiness. In the hit song Always on Time, he reminds the listener that he lives by the credo of MOB or “Money Over Bitches”. In Race against time he says: “For every lock, there’s a key. The only thing that ever made me click was cash money”. Indeed, there is a certain religiosity to his preoccupation with money. In the context of the extended Christian imagery of Only Begotten Son, he proudly proclaims: “I won’t cry cause I live to die, with my mind on my money and my guns in the sky.” Capitalism itself is nothing more than the machinic multiplication of money through the processes of investment and the production of commodities. Infinite replication. Everything else is incidental.

While there is certainly more to Ja Rule thinking than just an obsessive pursuit of money, it is in this kernel of insight that we can garner understanding of why organizations try to insert themselves into activist conversations. Inserting yourself into a conversation that has nothing to do with you would be (if done by an actual person) rude and discourteous but  for a ‘corporate person’ it makes perfect sense that they should chime in on the discussion because their only desire for doing so could be monetary replication. The mythologies surrounding this are dense and convoluted. In fact, the corporate person believes their audience to actively wonder what they think and so chime in the belief that “the public care what they have to say” because of course we do. We’d be lost without the marketing machine. Many of us would have believed that white supremacy was perfectly acceptable until Ben and Jerry’s told us that it was bad. Indeed, even Ja Rule tweeted out his idea for reducing the incidences of police killing unarmed people of colour (one of the first replies is the Dave Chappelle clip).

Yet this is not done out of malice or ill will. Rather, there are a broader set of technosocial conditions that produce in the corporate person the idea that the audience cares what they have to say, produce in the news media the idea that what the corporate person has to say is worth reporting, and produce in the audience a desire to hear what the corporate person has to say, as though it could be anything other than a transparently shallow and calculated marketing tactic. Blizzard tweeting in support of BLM after their stance on the Hong Kong protests is the best example of this; Blizzard are here ‘clicking with cash money’ calculating that BLM support with net them fiscal gains, and angering the Chinese government with “Free Hong Kong” rhetoric would bring disastrous losses. Yet perhaps Blizzard does not even know that it is calculating this. Perhaps that’s what Ja Rule thinking actually is: a cynical calculation that is not even apparent to the one doing the calculating.

Does the corporate person know that it is just adopting the pretence of care in order to maximize revenues, or does it believe itself to be acting authentically? I wonder what Ja Rule would think about this?

The UK is still in COVID-19 induced lockdown.  I’ve been resisting writing anything about it because I didn’t want to contribute to the deluge of non-commentary and other “hot takes” that we can see about it on various outlets or say anything that might be understood to preemptively  critique the extensive array of publications that we’ll likely see in the next 12-24 months about the impact of the lockdown on work-life balance, identity work, human-technology relations, gendered work, and so on. I have however been interested to chart something over the last few months – various kinds of collective sentiments and iterations of shared emotional experience. Mostly in response to people not following the rules of the lockdown.

Recent news items have been filled with the “scandal” of people hoarding and panic buying or breaking the rules of the lockdown and failing to social distance. I have followed with great interest recent comment threads on Reddit and Twitter (see #lockdownuknow) which chronicle no small degree of hatred for individuals involved in such practices.

Lockdown outrage on r/britishproblems

At first I thought that these types of reactions were easily readable as what Tim Kreider called “outrage porn”. The intoxicating nature of anger, particularly when it’s collectively felt. As he says, “it sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.” We look at these “evil” people, going to the beach, hoarding toilet paper, buying up all the fresh fruit and vegetables, visiting their second homes, continuing to go out to parties, sunbathing, and so on, and we hate them. We are enamoured by that hatred, it excites us. At some point in our enjoyment of this vilification it occurs to us that it might be envy, that we wished that it was us still “out and about”, but the idea that we are actually just jealous is far too dangerous and self-reflexive a thought, so we have to quickly quash it.

While there are many great examples of outrage porn foregrounded by British newspapers recently (for example, the nerd community turning on Neil Gaiman for breaking lockdown and travelling internationally), let’s take the following example, which I wanted to include in case anyone ever asks me why certain newspapers are recommended on my modules at the University of Kent and others are treated as unreliable.

6th May, 2020 newspaper headlines (clipped from the BBC News’ newspaper blog)

Note which papers chose to have the Neil Ferguson story on the 6th of May and which ones chose to highlight that the UK now has the worst death toll in Europe. What is important and in “the national interest” is not the story of a potentially malicious degree of incompetence by a democratically elected government leading to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Britons, but the story of one professor who broke the rules in order to have a tryst with their a romantic partner. The titillation. The scandal. The cheap amusement and banal thrill. How could we not put that on the front page?

Lest I be accused of being a naive Guardian reader, the paper has certainly not resisted the temptation to have its share of outrage porn on the front page of its website.

Front page of the Guardian’s website: 23rd March 2020.

Look at these golfing bastards not social distancing when we have to. We hate them and that hate makes us feel good. It excites us in a way that we cannot quite describe. We get a particularly perverse joy from joining in the hating of them in comments sections and social media threads. How dare they do this? It is the thrill of outrage porn that I kept coming back to, the enjoyment of the hate.

The more that I thought about this peculiar thrill of stimulated outrage, the more that I  could see it connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “microfascism” which I’ve written about before on this blog and in print. Specifically, I remembered the following quote from A Thousand Plateaus (p.215).

“Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.”

The microfasist impulse presents itself most clearly when we not only want others to follow the same rules that we do, but we want them to want to follow the rules. It should not occur to them to question them or to challenge them; that thought should not exist in the horizons of possibility. In doing so, they pose a threat to the images of conformity, unity, and homogeneity which fascists always invoke in order to justify their palingenetic ultranationalism. Some part of us enjoys participation and complicity in these kinds of fascisized formations. As Deleuze and Guattari comment in Anti-Oedipus (p.29): “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism.” Desire becomes so perversely contorted that it comes to desire its own repression, seeking out fascist formations, seeking out (in this case) a simplified other to hate and the comforting voice of a trusted newspaper telling us who “the bad guys” are. We thus transform ourselves into judge, jury, and “neighbourhood SS man” in order to mobilize this feeling of hate for the other who doesn’t desire in the same way that the desire which constitutes us desires. Yet in so doing we showcase our own insecurity and lust for power. In breaking the rules, these others make us question whether we are following the right rules, their difference or deviance is itself a threat to us (Ian Danskin talks about this in his video series on “Angry Jack”), we become uncertain about our own choices at the same time as they are reaffirmed by the vitriol of a self-righteous and self-important anger that we can join in an be a part of. This is how microfascism aggregates and agglomerates itself creating a kingdom of petty fuhrers who all loathe the lockdown-breakers.

Edit:  25th May, 2020. I almost never edit these blog entries after the fact but rarely have I ever been proved so prophetic. Over the last few days Dominic Cummings has been dragged through the mud by both left and right wing presses for breaking the rules that he helped to set out. The horrible lockdown-breaker, it feels good to hate him. As I watch him become a scapegoat for all of the stored vitriol and anger that people have over the government’s handling of the pandemic, I reflect on the image of a magician doing a sleight of hand act. Owen Jones expresses my sentiments:

I love the word “frisson”. It’s one of my favourites. Like “denouement” and “emolument” it’s a word that we get from Latin via French and to my ears they all have some kind of intrinsic sonorous beauty. Because mine is a very specific kind of idiocy, whenever I think about the beauty of language I think about two things: A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. While I’m far too proudly disordered a thinker to ever be a Kantian, there is something that has always captivated me in the way that Kant describes the sublime by saying that:

“the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy […] aroused by the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate.”

The experience of the sublime is of being a small figure on the shoreline staring up at a monstrous tidal wave; unable to perceive the entirety of it, afraid (and not afraid) of its power and destructive beauty. In my attraction towards the ineffable, I find myself drawn to the word “frisson” – “fever, illness; shiver, thrill” – a visceral embodied reaction, madness shooting through the limbs – again and again to describe what I feel when I listen to Sylosis. For example, when the vocal line in Altered States of Consciousness proclaims “Death is here and he’s been clawing at my thoughts again” I always get chills. A fever, a thrill. Something arrives or something leaves and you triumphantly celebrate or mournfully reflect respectively. Frisson.

Sylosis’ new album Cycle of Suffering was released earlier this month and, except for occasions when I’ve been listening to a particular piece of music to remember a particular set of texts or thoughts, I’ve had the album constantly on repeat. The songs are all infused with a curt brutality that announces itself proudly (I have arrived) all resplendently inflected with the speed and technicality that have always drawn me to the band. The songs are monstrously powerful when performed live and when I saw Sylosis at the Islington Assembly Hall a few days ago I could not help but reflect on why I am so fond of their work.

Sylosis on stage at Islington Assembly Hall – 13th February, 2020.

When asked to describe why Sylosis is my favourite band, I often comment that Josh Middleton writes the songs that I would write if I were a better musician. This is no slight praise because I write music that I like, in keys/scales that I like, at the tempos that I like, in arrangements that I like. To say that someone else can write exactly the kinds of music that I love, penning the songs that I wish that I was skilled enough to, is something not only significant but at least a little absurd, particularly because Sylosis’ compositions aren’t particularly complex. This isn’t free-form jazz or that particularly perverse form of prog that has many time signatures and tempo changes for the sake of it; it’s mostly 4/4, mostly high bpm, mostly minor scaled galloping and shredding. Yet, almost every Josh Middleton release has met me at a time in my life when I was trying to do the same thing that it seemed to me that the person writing the music was trying to accomplish, whether this is the robotically fast and precise musicianship of Edge of the Earth (my favourite album of all time), the dark atmospherics of Dormant Heart, or the heavy groove and complex sludge of the Passages project (Eternal Solar Flare has my favourite crescendo in any piece of music), each time I was trying to write something similar into my own music.

There is a kind of perverse(?) experience of parasocial relationship/kinship to Josh Middleton as a musician at work here which is at least a little ironic given my extant critiques of the subject. More broadly my fascination with the musicianship of Sylosis means that there is a redoubling of focus on the personhood and embodiment of the musician who must play compositions of at times absurd difficulty that test the boundaries of the possibility of skill, precision, and endurance. In my amateurism, Sylosis songs are physically painful to play because of their speed and as my fatigued fingers fumble over my fretboard trying to make it through just one, I can’t imagine playing an entire hour of it in a live show, to say nothing of the fact that I play bass (or bass as rhythm guitar – as any Not Above Evil song can attest) and the lead guitar parts (which I can’t actually play) are much more difficult. There is a feeling of a certain kind of shared sickness somewhere in the vicinity of an imagined mutual self-inflicted suffering – I write music that hurts to play, why would someone else do this to themselves?

Deleuzian writing about music tends to wax lyrical to the point of being incomprehensible (as I’ve been doing), the exception being the inimitable Ron Bogue, whose work on heavy metal remains exceptional. In Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Bogue describes the electric guitar as it appears in heavy metal as elevated to the level of “electric industrial machine” (p.40); entangled in the production  of all kinds of deliberate othering of the conventions of sound, the nature of the guitar deliberately distorted and rendered as a monstrous other to itself. Heavy metal as a genre has been analyzed to Death (ha) based on its transgressive nature (of gender norms, of musical convention, of aesthetics etc.) but few come close to Bogue when he describes “heavy metal” itself as aptly named:

“for both words convey something essential about the music. It is heavy in that it is emphatically percussive, “thick” in texture, and highly amplified in the lower registers. It is metal in that its sound is dominated by a particular gamut of high-distortion, low-frequency “grinding,” “crunching” timbres produced by amplified solid-body electric guitars.”

This description itself has a kind of beauty (and humour, imagining Ron Bogue, who I’ve always known as the kindly paternalistic figure of the Deleuze Studies community, nodding along to Cannibal Corpse with his notebook out, tracing the various musical becomings of a “Hammer Smashed Face”).

There is indeed a certain kind of becoming-sonorous, a resonance, an endless corporeal reverberation that is produced in the moments of a live heavy metal show when the sound is so loud that hearing stops, feeling is overwhelmed, sense is revealed to be inadequate and one simply becomes musical, an undulating part in an affect producing and agglomerating machine. I always find this difficult to describe. It is perhaps like being swallowed up by something that one cannot quite see, something thick and amplified, from the deeps of musical registers, grinding and crunching your body through a feverish sickness that one can’t quite make sense of as it occurs beyond the limits of thinking. Sylosis does this for me better than any band that I know.

I’ve been interested in an idea for some time: music as a concept, a tool for thinking, or a mode of engagement with thought beyond thinking. There are echoes (ha) of this in different places in Deleuze and Guattari’s work (e.g. the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus) but I’m still working on this. What is certain for me is that I’m going to think about it while listening to more Sylosis…

So 2019 is over and one of the most noteworthy things happening in the last month was the UK’s general election. While I’m far from a politics scholar and so won’t offer any stats or breakdowns of different voting demographics, the election results resonated very strongly with two things that I’m interested in thinking about at the moment and so (as an ongoing research log) I wanted to take the opportunity to pen my thoughts on them.

Ermahgerd muh leadersherp!

The first thing that came to my mind when the reactions to Labour’s defeat came pouring in was a clear aperception of a muffled voice crying “Ermahgerd muh leadersherp!!1!!” – thus further evidencing that I am an idiot who spends too much time on the internet. It was with a complete lack of surprise that I watched people articulate a sense of frustration and upset, targeted at Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn. The ire and frustration directed at Corbyn and solely at Corbyn resonated with a critique of our over-emphasis on the figure of “the leader” that I’ve been articulating in my classroom for some time. I have a guilty pleasure love of Reddit reaction threads to big events (elections, disasters etc.) and here are some of my favourite comments:

Unelectable. Worst leader in generations. With this much vitriol being thrown his way, you’d think that Corbyn had personally visited each home in Britain to insult and demean the public, not benignly offered socialism. Corbyn’s decision to refrain from giving a clear stance on Brexit was also the cause of much ire (things on Twitter were mostly the same).

The Guardian was also filled with opinion pieces, with everyone suddenly realizing that a socialist leader in an era where the Left as a whole has been losing ground across Europe was a problem. Even Polly Toynbee chimed in by suggesting that while the manifestos were magnificent, it was Jeremy Corbyn himself who caused the terrible election result and in the process “did this country profound, nation-splitting, irreparable harm”. Let’s set aside that this is a circuitous admission that electoral politics is purely a popularity contest – nothing to do with ideas or ideology, simply whether you’re the most likeable kid in the playground – because this is one of those thoughts that you’re not supposed to say out loud. Indeed, I staved that thought off when Richard Burgon was claiming: “People on the doorstep weren’t complaining about our policies, and we wouldn’t have had the policies … if it weren’t for Jeremy’s leadership.”  My (admittedly juvenile) reaction to this line of argument is to simply hear someone yelling “Eomergard muh leorderhshop!!!1!”

To me, all of these post-election ‘hot takes’ are reductive. To unironically quote the smartest person that I know: “thinking about which leaders are to blame and who should be scapegoated is wholly inadequate to apprehending the complexity of the social and political problems which Brexit reflects and of which it is the product”. Indeed, a shifting patchwork of proper names who accrue blame for Brexit and the current state of British politics, with JEREMY CORBYN emblazoned at the centre, is never going to be adequate to a full analysis that disentangles the complexities of the social, political, economic, and historic factors that produce something like a Brexit-focused election. But this is not something that many are willing to think about. That a problem may be unintelligible does not gel with our sensibilities. Instead we are more interested in trying to “find the right great leader”. Of course we don’t need to work all levels to undo the ideological overwriting of the class consciousness that was naturally allied to the Left through trade unions. No we need a phenomenal leader to stand behind. Only when this “Great Man” (for it is of course gender coded) or messiah comes can the Left be saved.

I was flabbergasted when George Monbiot suggested that it wasn’t Labour leadership but rather our collective immersion in social media where ‘truth’ has become unquestionably plastic and the collective agendas of the press controlled by the wealthy. A scandalous idea. What do you mean it wasn’t Daddy’s fault; I thought that I was supposed to show how grown up I am by crucifying Daddy? To be fair, Monbiot defers blame to ‘the oligarchs’ (i.e. not one leader but a few shadowy nebulous wealthier leaders), but still, progress of a kind.

If I was a betting man, I would guess that Labour is going to adopt the ill-fated strategy of focusing their critique solely on Boris Johnson, and his name will be their catchphrase for the next few years being as synonymous with everything that is wrong with British politics as “Trump” is for the US. And thus the overestimation of the potency and powers of leaders will go on and we will continue to use them as little more than unfortunate figureheads for collective successes and failures.

What if nothing changes? #Accelerate

Recently I’ve been getting back into the work of Nick Land, a fringe figure in Deleuze Studies. For a time in the 1990’s, Land was producing some of the most insightful and creative Deleuzian work in the English speaking world. The essays in Fanged Noumena – which I’m still slowing making my way through – are some of the most innovative in terms of developing Deleuze’s style of thinking and writing; a mad production and proliferation of concepts. Drawing on many of Land’s ideas, particularly his writings on capital, a number of critical scholars and philosophers, disenchanted and disillusioned with continuously failing modes and practices of resistance to the capitalist mode of production and enchanted by the trajectory and speed of technological progress, have begun to advance what has been described as Accelerationism, a belief that the best mode of resistance is an acceleration of capitalism’s dynamics. In their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Mackay and Avanessian (2014, p. 4) define Accelerationism as

‘the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding and abstractive tendencies.’

Drawing on the works of academic luminaries like Mark Fisher and other authors who find their inspiration in the Marxist traditions of Lyotard or Deleuze and Guattari, Accelerationism tells a rather bleak story that suggests that modes of resisting capitalist capture are futile, that capitalism cannot be ‘greened’, reformed, made to be benevolent, or made to serve broader social interests through the striking of a Faustian ‘new deals’. Rather, the most meaningful mode of resistance left is to accelerate capitalism’s destructive tendencies and see what comes next.

Many Accelerationists are fond of quoting the following passage from Anti-Oedipus, which obviously signposts my interest in it:

‘What is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? […] Is there one? – To withdraw […] Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough […] Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, pp. 239–240)

That is to say, perhaps the way to resist capitalism is to push it to its limits, to pursue fully the logic of decoding or the axiomatic of extracting surplus value until they arrive at their most extreme conclusion, all surplus value extracted, all growth targets achieved, all possible labour rendered, the planet Earth reimagined as an uncommodifiable and unliveable plane. The Accelerationist position revels in the idea that we might seek to encourage capitalistic destruction as a mode of revolution and envisions various techno-futurist dystopias in which this might be possible.

There are certain aspects of Accelerationism that I don’t agree with. For example, I agree with what I read as Viveiros de Castro’s objection to its Prometheanism, and I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the turn to neoreactionarism that is a part of Nick Land’s later work. It also seems to me that many misinterpret Land’s essay Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production when he speaks about the potential limits of capital.

“All of which is to raise the issue of the notorious “death of capitalism”, which has been predominantly treated as a matter of either dread or hope, scepticism or belief. Capital, one is told, will either survive, or not. Such projective eschatology completely misses the point, which is that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part.” (Land, 1993, p. 68)

Because to me this speaks less to the need to accelerate to catalyse the death of capital and more to the impossibility of there being any outside to capital. Capital will sell us the possibility of its death when that becomes the means by which to achieve its ends. Is this not the best explanation for “corporate environmentalism”? This is something that I’ve been thinking about often over the last few months. I raise it here because it made me reflect on the election results. The political Left in the UK now seems to me to occupy a position that is best described as “accidentally accelerationist”.

I make no secret of my love for Thomas Harris, and one of his most eminently quotable passages is the following in Hannibal: “There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.” The happy anticipation of being about to feel contempt. The Left seems to be currently actively expecting and verging on actively willing our society to collapse, for all to come to ruin so that it could say “I told you so”. See peasants, I told you to vote for Corbyn. Now the NHS is privatised, firms have taken their business to Europe, the gaps between rich and poor have increased and austerity is still ongoing. I told you so. Which is to say that the Left is currently hoping that some part of Accelerationism is true, that the tendencies of capital to privatize rather than seek public interest, to agglomerate private wealth, to consistently make the poorest and most vulnerable worse off, to exploit natural resources for its gains, spurs some kind of societal or ecological collapse.

The worst case scenario for the political Left is that nothing bad happens. We see that the Tories have already committed to raising the minimum wage. If the NHS doesn’t fall apart, if there isn’t mass unemployment, if Brexit doesn’t wreck the economy, if there isn’t mass homelessness, or spikes in violent crime etc. etc. then it is likely that those long-standing Labour seats that turned blue in December will stay blue with more to come and we will not see a Labour government again in my lifetime.

This to me is as interesting as it is perverse. Of course, most politicians are simply bureaucratic functionaries, bumbling along and doing what they think is in the best interest of the country. However it intrigues me, in a way that makes me reflect on the appeal of “Leadership”, to think about a Malcolm Tucker-esque figure, sitting in Labour HQ right now, realizing that the best political strategy may not be resistance but acquiescence. “At thy choice, then […] Come all to ruin.”

Anyone who knows me will recognize the notebook pictured above because I’ve been carrying ones like them around since 2012. They can usually be found sticking out of my back pocket or placed almost defensively on the table between me and the person to whom I am speaking in what I imagine must be the most curiously threatening non-threatening gesture: “Be interesting or I’ll start reading something that is.”

I started a new notebook recently. While the corporeality of a new notebook is both a gift and a curse (the enticing song of fresh pages turning versus the annoying sensation of sitting on a book that has not yet adapted to match the contour of my arse), in thumbing through the old notebook in a kind of farewell gesture I came across a number of fragments of ideas. These partial jottings, questions posed to no one but my future self, scribbled random thoughts and etcetera are of great interest to me because they always reflect an intellectual space that I previously occupied which is now irrecoverable. All that is left is the writing, what Artaud might see as the waste parts of the thinking and the self that did the inscription.

A few of these notes are short and stood out because of various things that I’m working on or thinking about at the moment. For example, the following note, which I wrote from a place of great frustration as I tried to write a paper explaining the heterogeneity of concepts.

“We already know that concepts are heterogeneous”

She says “I love you. “I love you too,” you reply. Neither of you mean the same thing.

When I explain why I chose to study Deleuze and Guattari for my PhD and why I’m still so fascinated by their work, it is concepts that I end up placing the most emphasis on and being most interested in. The concepts that we use to think are always moving and shifting around us. Nothing has any kind of fixity. Concepts are always changing, growing, and evolving. We already know this as it is an intrinsic quality of our language and our experience but it is often easier to pretend that we do not know, that the things that we say or the concepts that we use to think have a kind of permanence that lasts beyond the act of saying them. For Deleuze, this is a reflection of our collective entrenchment in the metaphysics of identity, a mode of thinking that privileges stable states and being over change and becomings. This is difficult to explain to people without a background in philosophy, so I am always looking for simple examples that get the point across.

Some notes, however, prompted longer reflections and I decided that one was also important enough to include here. For example: “You wouldn’t know a dystopia if you were living in it. Indeed, ours is the most boring dystopia possible.”

If you were living in a nightmarish and totalitarian dystopia, would you know? I wrote this question down with no context and can’t even recollect exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote it. I speculate that it may have been related to the fact that I recently binged the exceptional Amazon series The Boys. While my “nerd credentials” are severely lacking when it comes to comic-book fandom, I have always greatly enjoyed the proceeds of the dark deconstructions of the superhero genre like those of Alan Moore or Frank Miller (e.g. Watchmen or The Dark Knight). While I might be underqualified to make such an observation, The Boys seems to follow in their tradition. What interests me in particular about The Boys is that – at least in its filmed incarnation – it seems dystopian only because we see it through the lens of the directorial gaze which shows us the dysfunctions of the Supers as well as the corrupt and manipulative nature of the corporation, Vought International, which employs them for its own revenue maximization – embracing all of the most gross tropes of the society of spectacle in order to profit off of the value of the superheroes under their employ.

The character of Homelander particularly interested me as he functions as a critical reflection on what an impossibly strong, fast, and unkillable being would be like if it walked among us. Gone is the image of the benevolent image of the Superman as a messianic saviour, now Superman is a brutal tyrant who decides with absolute freedom who can live and who should die.

I reflected that what Homelander renders salient is the reason that I enjoyed the Snyder/Nolan take on Superman in Man of Steel. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was inherently a symbol of unwavering hope, whereas Henry Cavill’s explores the question of whether it is possible to be hopeful at all in a world that seems to offer nothing about which one could be hopeful. Its message is that there is no good in the world unless you make it for yourself; there is only loneliness and isolation. The film seems to propose that to maintain ones status as a shining beacon of hope in such a world is the act of a super-man, someone beyond human. To choose to be good when it would be so much easier, or so much more fun, to stamp out a human life like it were that of an unwelcome insect, is what it means to be an inspiration in the present. This is something that I (however problematically) try to explain to my students, virtue is not virtue when it is convenient or when being virtuous is your most profitable option. However, movie critics whose opinions I respect didn’t enjoy Man of Steel and in retrospect deemed it disappointing.

Back to The Boys. What I enjoyed about the show in the same way that I enjoyed Black Mirror and Hannibal, is that reflective of the contemporary milieu, it explores the dark, the horrible, the uncomfortable, the unwelcome. Characters are sexually assaulted/coerced, superheroes are murderers who cannot be stopped, overpowered, or harmed, characters die meaningless deaths, unfettered capitalism leads to the privatization of policing and then national defence. We enjoy watching this as it shows us not a fantasy, but rather, it renders salient a particular dynamic that we wish we could see within the present where there are evil men who do not die, who kill with impunity, profit off of the insecurity of others, and stand above the law – the unsettling ambiguity of contemporary life means that none of these things are easily observable and when they are, the feel like cheap spectacle.

Indeed, the show is at its most subversive where it gives us glimpses of a reality where everyday life looks almost exactly like ours. We follow “The Boys” in their fight against the Supers and we see how their quest is justified by the Supers’ brutality, but what we do not see is how life must be for the millions of people who are not victims of and have no reason to hate the Supers. They’re pretty happy watching the spectacle of a races, films, buying merchandise, and seeing criminals torn to shreds on the news. The little snippets that we see are deliberately evocative of contemporary superhero culture – in order to see it, one need only imagine that the characters in the Marvel movies were real and that we’d received the films in the same way, created the same fandoms, had their posters on our walls, and tucked ourselves into bed under Captain America duvets, all while the good Captain spent his private life enjoying kicking orphaned refugee children to death.

In this sense, we might reflect that we live in the most boring possible dystopia. There aren’t even jackbooted, masked fascists kicking ethnic minorities on my street corner. There is only a casual acceptance of state surveillance, death from overwork, hero-worship of leaders and politicians, and exploitation and mass ecological destruction carried out by corporations for profits, in ways that are too unclear to point to or hold to account. Much like the background characters in The Boys, we wouldn’t know that we were in someone’s dystopian nightmare and would likely ignore the realization if we were told. It’s easier to keep believing that everything is ok.

This reminds me of something that Werner Herzog said, regarding the fact that he encouraged a colleague to watch Wrestlemania: “You must not avert your eyes. This what is coming at us.” Herzog is suggesting that if a collective, anonymous body of us wants to see this empty spectacle of sweaty, oiled up male bodies contorting and writhing, then the poet, the filmmaker, the artist, the critic, must not look away. It’s hard to keep looking when things are bleak. I wonder if there is not an abdication of the pessimistic ethics of hopelessness. A resignation to continue to live even as things are not getting better and indeed, to live with the negative visualization that begins from the assumption that things will not get better. Nietzsche’s old quip about gazing into the void is here poignant because of its relevance. One cannot continue to stare; it takes a psychological toll. Indeed, the more that I read of Mark Fisher’s work, for example, the more that I wonder whether he looked too long at the existential void of capitalist realism. Even Accelerationism doesn’t offer much hope and it may indeed be difficult for many to live without it. However, I wonder if we do not have a responsibility to continue to look. To see and feel all of the social’s miscellaneous effects, to not avert our eyes as Herzog suggests.  In order to diagnose, critique, and make sense of the culture, you must, for Herzog continue to look at what is happening and see the dystopian. What this tells us about The Boys is something simple, we are currently living through a time that is so disparaging that it makes more sense to us to kill our gods than to believe that they still care about us. We are too reflexively cynical to allow ourselves to believe in kindly Superman, saving a kitten stuck in a tree, and instead find it easier to believe that the super-man is a brutal, self-centred, rapist who lives entirely in the service of capital. The latter is perhaps not only a more believable story, based on the stories that we see and hear every day, but it is the one that we want to be true as it also serves to render intelligible the reality in which we find ourselves – helping us feel that we understand what is taking place. We must keep looking at the social, political, and technical forces that produce a society unwilling to believe in a wholly and perfectly good superman.

What Herzog’s injunction means for the wider society in which we live, however, is more troubling. We need to keep thinking about the anonymous collective body whose desire is interested in the production of misery, of inequality, of suffering, as a spectacle that it can watch. So called instances of poverty porn, or films that feature the manipulative manager – are they acts of subversion and truth telling, or attempts to provide clear individuals for us to be outraged at and ignore broader systematic and structural issues.

May you always live in interesting times. This piece of apocrypha reads like a blessing and a curse, a disbarring of the joys of an uneventful peace in favour of a condemnation to always be busy, to always live in times of tumult and change. Between Brexit, rising business uncertainty, and the assorted harbingers of economic recession, the broader macro system seems to be in “interesting” states indeed, but there are many interesting little things going on in my life at the moment. While none of them might inspire a full entry in this research log, as an agglomeration they indicate a cross-section of my life, and by virtue of this indicate the kinds of experience that I think are important to chronicle because what it is that an “academic” does is still a nebulous and difficult to fathom thing for many people. This is perhaps not helped by the fact that I often fascetiously say that my job is to spend the majority of my waking time reading alone and then occasionally talk to people about what I read and/or tell them to go read things that I read. Perhaps in trying to enumerate some of the things that I’ve been doing recently, some of this might become clearer.

Think Kent Lecture

So in April this year, I accepted an invitation to do a recorded lecture about my research as part of the “Think Kent” series. I still have no idea why I did this. At the time I remember putting myself forward, thinking that there would be some kind of screening process during which someone would say, “We’re not sure that your research is the right fit for this kind of thing.” These are public facing videos that reflect the University trying to put on a good face and show its importance and competencies to the world, so surely (I reasoned) they’d pick someone whose work doesn’t sound like a hallucinated fever-dream, an intentionally maddened play of concepts and nihilistic provocation based on the work of an obscure French philosopher. They would certainly pick someone who doesn’t refuse to make their work “business relevant”. Surely, someone who will neither confirm nor deny that they go out of their way to try to produce work that is difficult for management to co-opt wouldn’t get chosen? Clearly, I was mistaken because I soon found myself in an empty lecture theatre being filmed.

There is a perplexing surrealism to speaking to an empty room. I’ve gotten used to “performing” from doing Not Above Evil videos but this wasn’t pretending to play a piece of music that I’d obsessively recorded. It was one shot at saying something vaguely coherent. Looking at the finished product, I can tell that I am some kind of odd mixture of nervous and uncomfortable because of the space that I’m in and the curious way that the empty room is making my voice echo. Anyone who knows me will know how slowly I’m speaking here because I’m hyper-aware of the fact that my words are being recorded to be viewed in perpetuity. However, if for whatever mad reason, someone is looking for information on Deleuzian ethnography, or working with concepts, then this is not a bad start. I ended up speaking about the two papers that I’ve already published, going on a bit of a tirade on time as a concept and a bit of a tangent on microfascism. Things certainly could have gone worse.

Msc HRM marketing video.

I’ve also been showing up in the school’s marketing material for the Msc Human Resource Management– which is again perplexing because technically I’m not a permanent employee and didn’t sign a release but perhaps it’s best not to think too hard about these things. Indeed, I know that I was chosen because I was the only person around on the day of filming who couldn’t think of a good enough reason to say no when asked, rather than because they picked an intentional diversity tickbox/the youngest member of staff, or indeed because I’m a particularly good lecturer. In fact, as I watch myself autistically spin my clicker and giggle to myself – clearly enjoying my own humour regardless of anyone else’s experience – I pity every student who’s had to do the same thing.

Organization in the Anthropocene.

I’m still working on my paper on the Anthropocene. I haven’t submitted it yet and am toying with the idea of turning it into a book. I need to come to a decision soon because a) the deadline for conferences is coming up and I need to get my abstracts in and b) I only have one paper in review at the moment and need to start getting things in so that they can be published before the end of 2020. Still, I reflect on my Anthropocene paper more than other things that I’m interested in at the moment, not because of the excellent books that I’ve read since the start of November, including:

• On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
• The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
• The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour
• Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth by William E. Connolly
• Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway

Nor indeed because I have stopped laughing to myself at the absurdity of Sir Tim ‘I did not believe in climate change until they got a little girl to explain it to me’ Clark (an oversimplification of his comments, but still if they’re not going to try to scale back on the number of flights then I’m going to make jokes). Rather, my interest lies in a niggling thought related to a Guardian report from early this year where an Extinction Rebellion protest clashed with a working class driver just trying to do his job. Frustrated at being held up, the driver said “Nothing changes anyway, we’re fucked, none of this will work, mate,” I admire the driver’s optimism. He says what we are all scared to: that the rallying cry that I’ve heard from environmentalists over the last decade of “It’s not too late to change!” is the greatest marketing slogan ever invented. A company that can tap into the environmental market stands to make millions, while preserving the very system of capitalism that is rendering the planet uninhabitable. Nothing about this analysis is new. Wright and Nyberg were telling us in 2017that corporations can’t lead the fight against climate change, but the confrontation of the climate protesters interested in the future of the human race versus the man driven by precarity to have difficulty caring about anything beyond the present is one that I can’t stop thinking about.

Leadership and Schizoanalysis

I greatly dislike contemporary leadership research. Whenever I discuss it, its desperately difficult to avoid using words and phrases like self-flagellation, circle-jerking, fellatio- scholarship, and useless wank. So much of it is borne out of a crass and intensely problematic kind of tendency to deify particular individuals as great leaders or is a product of the desire to be such reflected in a chronicling the traits, behaviours, language habits, fashion sense, gender, and so on, of the great leader. While the psychosexual politics of our continued hero-worshiping of  leaders does interest me, the pseudo-intellectual pontification and grandstanding of “this is what it takes to be a great leader” is desperately dull. At times, I narcissistically feel that I’m the only person who can see that, for example, Enron’s Jeffery Skilling and Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, are exactly the same – not in terms of their traits, or style and so on, but in terms of the ways in which their behaviours are not only produced and legitimated but necessitated by the mores of contemporary capitalism; taking advantage of capitalism’s own hubris to construct a reality that people can invest in; one that they will believe because a great leader sold it to them. History repeats itself; we keep going in circles and doing the same thing. I had an idea to write a paper about this, ostensibly chastisizing the CMS community for being complicit in the production of a social fabric that was not only amenable to the whims to toxic leaders but which required these individuals because they are the means by which contemporary capitalist organization generates profits.

I did not, however, think that any journal would take that kind of polemic so I was stuck with it sitting on the shelf until I could find some way to publish it. Then Gerardo Abreu Pederzini, a colleague here at Kent, approached me and asked me to write a chapter for an edited book on thinking about leadership in new ways. The rest is history. I’ve put the chapter on my academia.edu page, but it’s available on Google Books, Amazon and so on. I’m really surprised by how quickly the book was put together and I’m grateful to Gerardo, not only for including me, but for placing my mic-drop on leadership scholarship as the last chapter of the book.

CB312 – Introduction to Management

For reasons that I don’t understand, seeing my name on the door makes me unreasonably happy.

An update on what I’m doing at the moment wouldn’t be complete without discussing CB312, my first year undergraduate module. My first taste of what it was going to be like to deal with this course came early in September when administrative staff got in touch to tell me that the course was oversubscribed. There were 500 enrolled and the largest lecture theatre only sat 471. What I wanted to say was that we’d never have all 500 students present, but I let myself get convinced to do two lectures, a smaller on for 30 students and the main one for the others. It’s currently Week 10 and attendance at both is around 50%. Moral of the story: trust your instincts.

It’s more work than one would think to manage such a large and ultimately unruly group of students; all of the little questions and queries add up to a lot of emails. Still, more work than them are my own anxieties and desires for control. While I’m teaching 8 of the 24 seminars seminars, on a module of this size I have to rely on seminar leaders to teach the rest. I want to instruct them on what to do but I know that I should be respecting these ambitious and indeed very bright young researchers by letting them do their own thing and figure out their own ways of teaching, but my obsessive tendency to want things to be a particular way has proved to be a lot to constrain and I’m constantly trying to make what I say to them sound more like advice and less like instructions – difficult given that all that I want to do is give instructions.

Fortunately, I can still give instructions in my classroom. I often reflect that my classroom is one of the few places where I belong by default, where my rules are the correct modes of conduct, my interests justified by my curriculum, and my prejudices are legitimated throughout the marking criteria. The problem with first year undergraduates, of course, is that they don’t have enough of a sense of what they’re supposed to be doing in order to listen to instructions. Indeed, few things in academia make one more cynical than having to deal with first year undergraduates.

A few weeks ago, CB312 sat a formative exam consisting of one of three fairly basic essay questions. The number of dead family members, sudden cases of diarrhoea, period pains, generic illness, broken alarm apps, pets in distress, and other excuses that I’ve had to deal with over the was mind boggling. It’s difficult to not become cynical (as many colleagues do) and to see them all as individual people with legitimate problems and needs. What I find particularly difficult, of course, is when they inevitably ask me whether they can sit the exam at a different time or place and I have to say no. This hurts not just because I have to be the “bad guy” and fall back on a bureaucratic impersonality that is unconcerned for their difficulties, but because the Module Guide explicitly says:

Please note that if you miss your allocated test time for any reason you will be marked as absent and receive a grade of zero for this assessment. You will not be able to sit the test at any other time or place.

There are instructions there. Why can’t they just read them?

Actually marking these essays has been equally disheartening. There is a corporeality to marking that is unacknowledged. My neck and shoulders are sore because of the way that I tend to hunch over the student’s essay paper and my jaw hurts from the way that I grind my teeth when I’m under stress. Most concerningly, I gave a series of instructions – or rather a list of things that I expected every essay to include. The number of students who didn’t pay attention to these directives, or read them and ignored them, or couldn’t do them, is an inducement to the most acute form of despairing. Every 2:2 that I’ve given out so far has been accompanied by a comment which tried to hide my sadness that I gave a list of requirements (e.g. has a definition, is able to discuss the key principles of the topic, contains a discussion of a case study example) that the essay was not able to include.

Such are, I think simply the burdens of teaching a course like this. I love my classroom and it is unquestionably where I belong but delivering the big lecture is psychologically draining in ways that are difficult to articulate. Something about the knowledge that any slip-up, any misremembered detail, any ambiguity will be memorized and reproduced on a final year exam creates an ineffable air of pressure. I can’t say that I won’t be glad when it’s over, but I am indeed looking forward to my much more relaxed final-year undergraduate course next semester.

Things that aren’t reading

I’ve continued to go out with the IMC and a couple of weeks ago we went out to Snowdonia for a training/assessment weekend.

November 2019: Training with the IMC near Llyn y Coryn.

I reflect on how guilty I used to feel about taking “time off” from work (even weekends) in order to hike or practice with my band in what is perhaps the most troubling reflection of how overwork gets legitimated in the academic community. The guilt of not reading is informed by the fear that someone in the room tomorrow will be cleverer than you are, having read more books, thought more about a given social or political problem and so on, and I’ve never been able to get over it. However, a combination of factors – not the least of which is me getting too old to give a shit – have meant that I don’t worry about that as much any more and I’m all too happy to spend the weekend wandering around the hills and continuing to develop my topographical understanding.

Photo Credit: Neil Pickford

Special thanks to Neil Pickford who seems all too willing to continue to take impressive pictures of me staring at maps.

Time in my office

I finally achieved a long standing dream of mine of having an upside-down backwards clock. There are now two ticking clocks in my office and I refuse to syncronize them, their mildly off-time (ha) ticking reminds me of a heartbeat and I pretend that the Dark Lady of the sonnets has pulled me into her bosom and I am listening to the tumultuous beating of her heart – some kind of primal rhythm beyond understanding or comprehension. This is a small and at least vaguely absurd thing to be passionate about, but I don’t care. Look at how cool my clock is.

Look at this clock.

I spend a lot of time in my office at the present. Reading, writing, marking papers, responding the emails, filling out forms, and so on – all of the things that constitute an academic job but there never seems to be enough time to do all of the things that I want to and there’s always another book to read. Still, since time is upside down and backwards, it means that everything is ok.

I have been getting back into hiking. I never really fell out of love with it, but didn’t get much time to do it while I was doing my PhD.

My trusty battered map-case on Hollins Cross – August 2019.

Recently, however, I’ve had great weekends in the Peak District, Snowdonia, and the Brecon Beacons with transport and company supplied by the IMC. Indeed, though I don’t usually celebrate birthdays, I spent my 30th on the top of Kinder Scout, with a book and a hip-flask of Lagavulin. It was the happiest that I’ve been in some time. Being alone on a mountain with no one around for several kilometres, fits into a perverse fantasy that I have of myself as retiring to be a “wise man on a mountain top”, who people come to ask what the secret of happiness is, to which I respond with by quipping “the secret of happiness is when people leave you alone on your mountain…”

Hiking near Drosgl with the IMC – November 2018.

I’ve also been working on my micro-navigation skills, and have forgotten how much detail of a landscape one can elaborate out of the cartographic lines on a map. I enjoy staring at maps more than I used to (thanks to Neil Pickford for what is now one of my favourite photos of myself: me staring at a map). A small bump in a contour line on a 1:25000 map is a dip in the side of the mountain that confirms direction – the corner of a fence line a way to recognize a bearing. The map-world-eye interface is something that I regard with increasing curiosity, not just because it is a thing that I enjoy in which I lack expertise, but also because it is breathtaking in its nuance and complexity; an exercise in of lineological divination. Rather than reading a world that is already there, the map-eye-world assembly is continuously birthing itself; terrain and endless undulating gradients constituted from the significations of lines.

Pen-y-fan seen from Cribyn – September, 2019.

Predictably (or at least thematically given the nature of this research log) this made me reflect on some of Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary on cartography. At several points in A Thousand Plateaus they make reference to works of classic psychoanalysis and comment that Melanie Klein or Freud himself lacked a full understanding of cartography but perhaps the most fruitful way to understand the importance of the cartographic to Deleuze and Guattari is to consider their commentary on the educator Fernand Deligny. They say the following:

Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths of autistic children by means of maps: he carefully distinguishes “lines of drift” and “customary lines.” This does not only apply to walking; he also makes maps of perceptions and maps of gestures (cooking or collecting wood) showing customary gestures and gestures of drift. The same goes for language, if it is present. Deligny opened his lines of writing to life lines. The lines are constantly crossing, intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of drift intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she lost— what happened?—or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and rapid movement—and that gesture in turn emits several lines.’ In short, there is a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other. As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing. It is an affair of cartography. (A Thousand Plateaus. p.222-223)

Thinking about lines, cartography, and schizoanalysis, is of course nothing new (indeed, I’m currently excited to see what Barbara Glowczewski’s new book is going to say in this regard). Even I went through a period of being almost obsessively interested in lines and what Tim Ingold calls “lineology“. Here the question of the line returns as that of  trajectory, movement, and life. A life composed of and by lines, trajectories, vectors, and various moving offshoots. This, we note is a radically different way to how most of us will think about questions of who we are. Most of us imagine ourselves to be stable things that change little over time, points on a complex social map (to dredge up a dated image from the sociology of Peter Berger) that intersects with various identities and demographics.

Edale seen from near Ringing Roger – August 2019.

Thinking through the logic of lines, life is not understood as a static thing, something with a truth, or an identity to be defined, discovered, or connected to a place, a people, or a collective. It is a line shooting through time, “constantly crossing, intersecting for a moment,” running across various gradients and through various spaces. Deleuze and Guattari thus ask: “What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? […] Which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming?” (A Thousand Plateaus, p.203), in other words, what are you becoming? They are asking a question about what your life will have looked like, once all of the trajectories, connections, criss-crossings and revolutions have been made known, inscribed on a diagram like Deligny’s that showcases how lines come alive.

Walking with the IMC on the way back from Sqwd yr Elra – September, 2019.

I view this with fascination in the most banal sense whenever I view my Google Timeline which will often chart my movements between home, scout meetings, The University, and Sainsbury’s, carving a blunt trajectory of my moving around.  I would love to see a system that accurately does this while I am hiking, mapping out the criss-crossings as I move over different footpaths, contour lines, and landmarks in a curious mirroring of the different subjects, ideas, and lines of thought through which I pass as I get older, “my lines” involved in more and more messy criss-crossings with those of the other people in my life.

This entanglement/disentanglement interests me for obvious reasons; not the least of which are existential. A community that you leave behind and never interact with is an entanglement which one’s life radically tangents from, a romantic tryst over the summer is a brief convergence or period of time in which you run in parallel followed by a spiralling and jettisoning. A vocation becomes a predictable series of knots and tangles that are familiar to others, a series of knowable notches that can be read like a map. What mad patterns would we end up scrawling out if we could diagram our lines. There is almost a poetry to this kind of lineology, one that we’ve yet to be able to fully find in words.