Thanks!

Thanks everyone for a great day. We recorded video and audio of both sessions which will be posted up on the website as we get them online. We’re also planning a series of podcasts exploring ideas and accounts which came up in greater detail.

There will be another event, with a similar format, next academic year. The same theme applies: how can academic research help inform and sustain political resistance? If you’d like to suggest a speaker for us to approach then you can do so here.

Also you can now follow us on Twitter: @dis_of_dissent

Ruth Levitas – The Necessity of Utopian Thinking

What does it mean to say utopian thinking is necessary? On the face of it this is an odd claim, for utopia is generally associated either with idle and unrealistic speculation or with malevolent totalitarianism. Yet a little over a hundred years ago, H G Wells wrote that ‘the creation of utopias, and their exhaustive critique, is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’.[i] Wells wrote this as sociology was becoming a distinct discipline, and he wrote it as part of a critique of claims to ‘scientificity’ which systematically ignored both normativity and the future.

However, the idea of utopia as method has a lot of purchase in our present situation. It entails the imagination of holistic, institutionally specific, alternative futures and it has three modes:

An archaeological mode, which involves making explicit the idea of the good society embedded in particular political positions. I have done earlier work on this in relation to the Thatcherite New Right and to New Labour, and it is equally necessary with the ConDems ‘Big Society’ and wider policies.

An architectural mode, which involves the imaginary reconstitution of society as an alternative set of institutions and practices.

An ontological mode which makes explicit the nature of subjects and agents interpellated in these societies – and which has a particular bearing on the nature and purpose of education.

Given the tendency to associate utopia with blueprints and totalitarianism, I should say that such a method must be reflexive, provisional and dialogic. Its purpose is to expose the present to critique and the future to democratic discussion and formation. Utopia in this sense fulfils the strictures of Andre Gorz:

it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do.[ii]

Social Theory and the Politics of Austerity

A round table session from Discourses of Dissent exploring how social theory can help us understand the politics of austerity. How do theoretical justifications of austerity work to constrain public debate? How does the current government’s incongruous blend of neoliberal realism and superficial progressivism relate to what went before it? What resources can we find in social theory to critique the coalition’s agenda and it’s relationship to the wider crisis of late capitalism?

Social Theory and the Politics of Austerity

Ruth Levitas, University of Bristol – The necessity of utopian thinking

Sasha Roseneil, Birkbeck, University of London – Criticality, not paranoia: Registers of critical social theory

Karen Rowlingson, Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham – Why doesn’t the British public seem to care about inequality or the cuts in public spending?

Suggest a speaker

A quick post to draw your attend to our experiment in crowd sourcing the planning for a symposium. We’re planning another event (probably next academic year) and we’d like to get your input into who we should invite. If you think of a speaker who would address the theme of Discourses of Dissent in an interesting way then please do let us know.

Sasha Roseneil – Criticality, not paranoia: Registers of critical social theory

Steve Fuller – Lincoln to re-connect the university with its roots

Mike Neary, Professor of Teaching and Learning at Lincoln University, has just announced the formation of the Social Science Centre, which promises to be a self-organizing cooperatively owned corporation (with teachers and students as peers) devoted to higher education — very much in the spirit of the original medieval universities. It is refreshing to see this ‘back to basics’ approach at a time when universities have lost their sense of identity by playing in too many fields at once.

It is worth pointing out that the general economic model of cooperative ownership for universities has received some sympathetic media coverage in recent weeks, including here and here.

 

John Holmwood – The Idea of the Public

Steve Fuller – What are we defending when we defend public universities?

Dan Hind – Media Reform and the Public University

Steve Fuller – Time to Revisit the Port Huron Statement?

At the final discussion session of this week’s ‘Discourses of Dissent’ workshop in Birmingham, I raised the need for academics and students concerned about the future of the university to consolidate a positive position — something beyond simply protesting budget cuts and tuition fees. A model for such an activity is the famous Port Huron Statement of 1962, which established Students for a Democratic Society in the US. Inspired by C. Wright Mills, for the following decade the Statement provided the intellectual springboard for co-ordinating university resistance to the military-industrial complex that had colonized American campuses during the Cold War. Even the original rhetoric is worth emulating today. Here is the statement.

You may also find the Google-generated reception history of the Statement of interest.

Perhaps we need a second ‘constitutional convention’ meeting at Birmingham and Midland Institute to draft an updated version of this statement? Given the eloquence and forthrightness of the original Statement, it might be worth paying attention to how it was composed: My general sense is that, like the US Declaration of Independence, the main draft was by one hand (Tom Hayden playing Tom Jefferson) with various editorial inputs.

Ruth Levitas – The Necessity of Utopian Thinking