Male and Female Slave Universities

The “multidisciplinary art practice” Atelier Van Lieshout in the Netherlands has developed architectural models of what they call a Male Slave University and a Female Slave University – dystopian comments on the ongoing commodification and marketization of higher education under present-day managerialism.

Both Slave Universities form part of ALV's “SlaveCity”, where people are held captive and enslaved by capitalism and virtual(ly worthless) money.

SlaveCity is “rational, efficient and profitable”. In tune with current thinking, it is the world's “first 'zero energy' town; [...] a green town where everything [including humans] is recycled and a city that does not squander the world's resources”:

www.ateliervanlieshout.com/works/slavecity.htm

On arrival in SlaveCity, people [including students] “have to pass the Welcoming Center. [...] Old, cripple[d], sick and bad tasting people will be recycled in the biogas digester”:

www.ateliervanlieshout.com/works/welcomingcentre.htm

The people at ALV describe the Male Slave University as “made to train the slaves for better performance and [...] linked to a[n] environmental friendly biogas installation”:

www.ateliervanlieshout.com/works/maleslaveunivesity.htm

The Female Slave University is an “elegant and efficiently designed education center [...], a contemporary labour camp”:

www.ateliervanlieshout.com/works/femaleslaveunivesity.htm

Professors “are the only ones receiving payment for their work”. Students “are being educated to function good and efficient within the objectives of SlaveCity”, which notably resembles our own society. Living conditions afforded to slaves in SlaveCity are reminiscent of those of employees in any urban sprawl of our days. Working conditions of students and young researchers and academics are as precarious as those at most universities we may know.

It is where democracy and the massification of higher education lead. Egalitarianism means equal enslavement.

Change of address

As announced earlier, on 16 February 2009 the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) was incorporated as an international association under Swiss law.

Contact information for SCIS has thus changed. For two years following the end of our tenancy of the cottage at 39 Tenant Lain, at the entrance of University of Sussex campus, we could, under UK postal rules and regulations, continue to use that address for our correspondence. As this period is now ending, please note the change of postal address. Any mail should now be addressed to:

Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society
1200 Geneva
Switzerland

E-mail should be addressed to: e.kofmel@scis-calibrate.org

Thanks for taking note.

The "Phantom of Heilbronn" exposed

So much for DNA evidence. For some years, German law enforcement agencies have been hunting the so-called “Phantom of Heilbronn” – a female whose DNA was found at more than fifty “crime” scenes (from simple school pranks to the murder of a police officer), in Germany and beyond. Month after month reports appeared in the German media as to where her DNA had been found most recently, affording reporters the opportunity to fill page after page with speculations as to how the same person could be involved in so many vastly different “crimes” and why police weren't able to track her down.

Now it turns out that the DNA that was “found” at the crime scenes does not belong to any (serial) criminal(s), but most likely to a woman working at the place of production of the cotton swabs used to extract DNA samples from “evidence” found at the various crime scenes.

The swabs had been contaminated with a worker's DNA during production, and police, naturally, did not notice.

www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,615608,00.html

Seems that is where the trust in non-tangible evidence like DNA samples leads. Not the “serial criminal”, but the “case” turns out to be a phantom. In truth, the “criminal” police were hunting never existed. One of the most high-profile criminal “cases” in Germany turns out to be nothing but a miscarriage of police work.

I suppose the unidentified woman will now be charged with obstruction of justice. I don't suppose police will be made responsible for their trust in “scientific” evidence that isn't scientific after all.

On getting arrested in the UK

As is well known, since the 1990s the United Kingdom has become the country most densely populated by CCTV cameras. In all major cities, everyone is being watched almost every moment of their lives – when they are in public, and often even while they are in private.

Still, many people do not perceive just how rapidly the UK is turned into a surveillance and police state (defined as a state in which the police – and other intelligence agencies – are largely uncontrolled and left to do as they please). To everyone with a sense of history, the situation must be reminiscent of the build-up to totalitarian rule under Nazism in 1930s Germany.

Laudably, the “Guardian” newspaper continues to expose the worst excesses of British policing. Here a selection of articles published in the last few months.

On the powers of British police to arrest anyone for any reason whatsoever:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/mar/06/civil-liberties-police

According to this article, “[a] retired senior police officer has expressed concern about the 'sweeping power' that he claims is being abused on a daily basis in all of the 43 police forces” of the country. He, a former police man himself, even started a petition “against police powers to arrest any person for any offence” – including “not wearing a seatbelt, dropping litter, shouting in the presence of a police officer, climbing a tree, and building a snowman”:

petitions.number10.gov.uk/PowersofArrest/

As he explains, under section 110 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 no arrest has to be justified by police anymore.

A similar statement has been made by Dame Stella Rimington, former head of intelligence agency MI5:

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/17/government-exploiting-terrorism-fear

It is not me but Rimington who calls Britain a “police state”.

On the driving force behind such sweeping powers of arrest, the Association of Chief Police Officers – a private company that is not subject to any public scrutiny, but nevertheless runs its own secret intelligence unit –, see this article:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/feb/10/police-civil-liberties

The website of the ACPO:

www.acpo.police.uk/about.html

“Why was ACPO so keen to make every offence arrestable? Look no further than the DNA database. The more people the police arrest, the more profiles they could add to the database. [Already] the profiles of more than 7% of the population, including one million children[!], are on the DNA database”:

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/27/dna-database-children-criminal-record

Half of those on the UK's DNA database have no criminal record. As everyone arrested is entered into the database, one can conclude that half of those arrested are never convicted of a crime. People falsely arrested and then not prosecuted or found innocent will not be removed from the database.

In his petition, the former senior police officer writes: “young and inexperienced police officers, (and soon, PCSO's [police community support officers]), are being trained that arrest and detention of a suspect is the first option in most encounters with the public. This sweeping power is being roundly abused ... and puts you, your wife, husband or partner, your children and your friends at risk of arbitrary action by the police”.

The situation is even more dire for foreigners (such as students, doctoral candidates and postdocs, but also occasional visitors) in the UK: Reportedly from April 2009, the new UK “e-Borders” scheme will be collecting the biometrics – including fingerprints, DNA, iris patterns, and face recognition – as well as travel information and credit card details of everyone entering or leaving the UK, by air, sea, or rail. Information on an estimated 250 million journeys a year into and out of the UK will be stored in one central database for up to 10 years. Moreover, foreign residents in the UK already require an identity card that contains biometric data. This scheme is to be expanded to British nationals and European residents by 2012. The “national identity register” will be yet another database containing information on millions of people:

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/25/data-surveillance-identity

This obsession with surveillance and data collection is bound to lead to consequences such as those experienced by some UK residents of Muslim origin, described by a court as “of good character and well-respected in their communities” that have been prohibited, under UK anti-terrorism legislation, from spending any of their own money – with no way left to them to challenge the measures imposed on them. Such persons are rendered “criminally liable for activities as mundane as spending the change in their pockets” and will be punished with up to seven years' imprisonment if they do. One of the men reports asking his solicitor whether his “son was allowed to buy me milk from the shop ... The answer was no”. No one in their households is allowed to work because any household income “would count as the transfer of funds which could be used for my benefit”:

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/03/terrorism-welfare-spending-law

If you are a foreigner it may happen to you that you get arrested on an occasional visit to the UK on the basis of some wild accusations, totally unproven, simply so police can question you, search you, fingerprint you, and take your DNA sample for entry into a plethora of databases – all of which they cannot do without an arrest, for which, however, they need no justification whatsoever. There has to be no intention of charging you with a serious offence or crime and no evidence against you. Police may then release the foreigner, who is neither a UK citizen nor resident in the UK, on police bail and expect him to return after so many months (of investigations that start only after the arrest!) to the UK at his own expense. If he decides not to follow up on such highly questionable arrest, he may become wanted in the UK. However, it is then up to UK police to request such a person's extradition from another country. In which case UK police will have to make their case in a foreign court – where they can't exercise the sweeping and uncontrolled powers granted to them in the UK.

Closure of the Philosophy and Politics departments at Liverpool University

An interesting development in the cyberstalking case. For some time, one of the preferred outlets of the stalker has been the Philos-L mailing list, which is run out of the Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool. Despite the fact that no bona fide member of that list ever confirmed any of the accusations of the stalker, or said that they had been defrauded by me, the list owner, a Professor of Philosophy at Liverpool, continues to give the stalker free run of the list to spread his or her falsehoods anonymously or under assumed identities. Albeit I submitted early on evidence to the list owner that conclusively disproved the stalker's made-up claims, I am still blocked from responding on the list.

Today now, the “Guardian” newspaper reports that the Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool is to be closed because of poor showings in the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE):

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/liverpool-rae-closures

An article has also appeared on the “Times Higher Education” website:

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405704&c=2

The research in that department, which runs a mailing list called “Philosophy in Europe”, is of national interest at best, according to the RAE results (a nation-wide peer-review exercise carried out, in this case, by other UK philosophers). This at a university that claims “international excellence” as a whole. The department and its professors are “under-performing” in the words of their own university management. They face “realignment and repositioning, transfer of activity to another higher education institution, and closure”, according to information circulated on Philos-L.

My purpose here is not to gloat about the misfortune of others (or just a little). For me, it is neither here nor there whether there continues to be a Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool (or the mailing list, for that matter). It remains to be hoped, though, that the experience of being at the receiving end of a highly public negative assessment of their own activities and (life time's) work will give the Philos-L owners pause and cause them to think about their active and instrumental role in degrading and vilifying me and SCIS.

Despite their forlorn attempts to explain away the RAE findings, and whatever one may think of that exercise, certainly the RAE assessment is based on significantly more facts and a more objective “truth” than the defamation campaign that has been permitted to go on on that mailing list.

Sadly, a former Senior Research Associate of SCIS, Prof Joseph V. Femia, may also be affected by the developments at Liverpool, as the Politics department equally stands to be axed. The author of an earlier (and more limited) book on anti-democratic thought, Joe Femia (Professor of Political Theory) would have been my doctoral supervisor had I decided, in 2005, to take up an offer to do my doctorate at the University of Liverpool, rather than at Sussex.

Against "social theory bureaucrats"

Having been affiliated to the University of Sussex and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought (SPT) for three years now, I find it expedient to explain my take on social and political thought.

First and foremost, with my research on anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic thinking I hold SPT to account for the full scope of the phrase “social and political thought”. It was the width and breath of this specification that induced me – in its interdisciplinarity and intellectual openness, incorporating social sciences, arts, and humanities in one programme – to choose Sussex as the university to do my doctoral degree at and SPT as the programme to do it in.

Unfortunately, I quickly gained the impression that SPT does not always live up to its promise. Probably due primarily to the smallness of the programme and the reliance on a small core of academics (six or seven) that keep the programme alive, too often the interests of the programme appear to be limited to the interests of these academics and to formal social and political theories. This, I believe, is a severe organizational, but also intellectual shortcoming.

I assume that there must have been a reason for choosing the phrase “social and political thought” to designate the programme and that what is currently being done in the programme is not necessarily all the programme does allow for or indeed intends. In particular, the founders of the programme used the word “thought” rather than the word “theory”. SPT is not a programme in “social and political theory” (or theories), but in “social and political thought”.

I make a distinction between thought and theory. This may well be due to the fact that in my doctoral research I am looking at a kind of thought that has just as often been put in the form of literature – plays and novels – as in that of philosophy. Neither plays nor novels or philosophy qualify as formal scientific theories. Nevertheless, what the authors of the plays, novels, and philosophies under consideration by me express is social and political thought.

Quite often this thought is presented in the form of aphorisms (i.e. Nietzsche) or short sequences of dramatic dialogue (e.g. Ibsen) rather than in the systematic manner of academic theories. My own research will be the first attempt to systematize this kind of non-systematic thought and come up with some form of comprehensive theory.

I realize that the stress of my research on subjectivity also somewhat clashes with the realities in SPT. Should people doing a programme in social and political thought be made to think on their own – or should they be turned into “semi-automatons” (as Alex Higgins put it to me in 2006)? Attending the regular SPT graduate seminars during my time in England, I could not fail to notice (and find increasingly irritating) that no one seemed to be talking about their own thoughts in these seminars. Everyone appeared to be talking about what others thought (mostly some two hundred years back) and how to interpret it – but is anyone in SPT actually creating social and political thought themselves? And should not students and doctoral candidates in a programme like SPT be encouraged to create and explore contemporary and future systems of social and political thought of their own?

More polemically put: Is there such a thing as “social theory bureaucrats”? Archivists and classifiers and re-classifiers of social theories? People whose first impulse on encountering an independent thought is to catalogue it? Other people develop library management systems – is SPT a programme developing social theory management systems?

I do think that social and political thought is not a theoretical matter. Differently from social and political theory, social and political thought ought to incorporate an active and activating element – be this acting in a play, joining a political movement, or founding a research centre of our own. Seeing the ontology that I will be attempting to systematize in my research as the foundation of a new political system (to be expanded on in other, later research projects), I am in a somewhat similar situation to Marx. He found communist thought pre-formed in all sorts of texts and social movements, but it was him systematizing it. His intention, famously, was not primarily to write a social theory, but to do so in order to change the world.

Again, it is atypical for someone in SPT to be writing about thought that might lead to deeds in the future rather than to be interpreting dead thinkers. But as all political movements are based on social and political thought (or ideologies) of some kind – even if they are never being formulated as systematic theories –, this must, in my understanding, be covered by what the phrase “social and political thought” implies and thus be justifiable and accepted.