2. Technology

I realize asking such questions can come across as strident, blunt or even rude. However, I am guided here by another refreshing aspect of Eribon and Louis' approach to reinventing theory: their willingness to be disrespectful. Eribon explains it best in Returning to Reims. Praising the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for having insulted the liberal sociologist Raymond Aron in 1968 for being a "defender of the bourgeois establishment," Eribon stresses the importance of "daring to break with the conventions of polite academic 'discussion'—which always works in favor of 'orthodoxy' and its reliance on 'common sense' and what seems 'self-evident' in its opposition to heterodoxy and critical thought " (p. 101).

In drawing attention to the fact that so many writers in the UK attended public schools and Oxbridge, I'm therefore not just making a crude and ill-mannered point about class inequality, a point that's already quite familiar by now in any case. I'm also trying to explain why so much of the culture in England remains doggedly liberal humanist, middle class, and anti-intellectual. At the same time, I believe theory can help us to understand this situation and to think it through. Is the idea we should avoid difficult "jargon" in order to communicate better with the so-called ordinary people really so self-evident? Is it not rather an instance of what, following Antonio Gramsci, we can call society's manufactured "common sense," the ideology used to maintain the status quo—and more and more today to eliminate reasonable dissent? Is this one of the reasons we're experiencing an ongoing backlash against theory, not just in journalism and the media but in academia too? The reason theory is important and should not be dismissed, no matter how abstract its ideas and how challenging its rhetorical style (and no matter how badly some 'star' theorists have behaved on a professional or personal level), is because it enables us to understand our modes of being and doing in the world and conceive of them differently and so change them.

That said, it's not my intention to suggest we should all simply read more French theory: that we'd all now be posthumanists in England if only Napoleon had won at

#### Anti-Bourgeois Theory DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

characters. Just 1% had a BAME lead character, 96% having no BAME characters whatsoever [12]. Not is it only literary culture that's affected by what Eribon describes as the "terrible injustice" of the "unequal distribution of prospects and possibilities" (p. 52). Comparable statistics can be provided for the arts, drama, music, business, politics, the law, medicine, the military, the civil service, the media, and journalism. 54% of the UK's "top" news journalists were educated in private schools, for example; while of the 81% who attended university, more than a half were educated at Oxbridge, with a third attending just one institution, Oxford [13]. Moreover, 94% of all the journalists in the UK are white and as few as 0.2%

In a modest bid to counter such inequality of opportunity and stalling of social mobility, the BBC Radio 6 presenter, Cerys Matthews, has said she wants to program less music on her show by artists who've been given a leg up by virtue of attending public school and more music by people from all walks of life, including women and those with a working-class upbringing [15]. Which makes me wonder: if we do want to foster culture in England that's not so liberal and humanist and antiintellectual and if we do want to develop an understanding of life, agency, and subjectivity that is more complex—or at least not quite so outdated and elitist should we adopt a similar stance? Instead of setting up prizes like the Goldsmiths in order to reward literature that is daring and inventive, should we publish (and perhaps read and cite) fewer texts by people who went to public school or Oxbridge

I realize asking such questions can come across as strident, blunt or even rude.

In drawing attention to the fact that so many writers in the UK attended public schools and Oxbridge, I'm therefore not just making a crude and ill-mannered point about class inequality, a point that's already quite familiar by now in any case. I'm also trying to explain why so much of the culture in England remains doggedly liberal humanist, middle class, and anti-intellectual. At the same time, I believe theory can help us to understand this situation and to think it through. Is the idea we should avoid difficult "jargon" in order to communicate better with the so-called ordinary people really so self-evident? Is it not rather an instance of what, following Antonio Gramsci, we can call society's manufactured "common sense," the ideology used to maintain the status quo—and more and more today to eliminate reasonable dissent? Is this one of the reasons we're experiencing an ongoing backlash against theory, not just in journalism and the media but in academia too? The reason theory is important and should not be dismissed, no matter how abstract its ideas and how challenging its rhetorical style (and no matter how badly some 'star' theorists have behaved on a professional or personal level), is because it enables us to understand our modes of being and doing in the world and conceive of them differently and so change them. That said, it's not my intention to suggest we should all simply read more French theory: that we'd all now be posthumanists in England if only Napoleon had won at

However, I am guided here by another refreshing aspect of Eribon and Louis' approach to reinventing theory: their willingness to be disrespectful. Eribon explains it best in Returning to Reims. Praising the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for having insulted the liberal sociologist Raymond Aron in 1968 for being a "defender of the bourgeois establishment," Eribon stresses the importance of "daring to break with the conventions of polite academic 'discussion'—which always works in favor of 'orthodoxy' and its reliance on 'common sense' and what seems 'self-evident' in

and more by writers from other backgrounds? [16].

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

its opposition to heterodoxy and critical thought " (p. 101).

black [14].

2. Technology

60

Waterloo. Like Eribon and Louis, I want to promote heterodoxy and critical thought; and I want to do so to the extent of daring to break even with the conventions of theory and what it's currently considered to be. For this tradition of critical thought has its own blind spots that lead it to accept certain assumptions as common sense as well.

Many of these blind spots relate to how neoliberalism and its technical systems (e.g., social media such as Twitter and YouTube, professional social networks such as Academia.edu, online research portals and disciplinary repositories such as Elsevier's PURE and SSRN) have found ways to incorporate those theorists McKenzie Wark calls "general intellect" in her book of the same name, who are today typically employed as academics as opposed to the public intellectuals of the past such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir [17]. My point is not that contemporary intellectual laborers are merely constituent elements of the general intellect or "social brain," who's only purpose "is to keep commodification going and profits flowing." I do not deny that such commercially oriented theorists are, as Wark says, also trying to "find ways to write and think and even act in and against this very system of commodification that has now found ways to incorporate even them." My argument is that their efforts to do so contain a number of blind spots—or, perhaps better, datum points—which limit their "ability to grasp the general situation [18]." This is especially the case as far as the bourgeois liberal humanist categories and frameworks with which they continue to operate are concerned. For them, too, datum points such as the unique human author, originality, creativity, immutability, and copyright are in practice held as self-evidently providing the basis for well-mannered debate. Far from theory enabling individuals and groups to think differently about what they are and what they do, the taking-for-granted of such categories and frameworks leads many intellectual laborers today to likewise work in favor of orthodoxy and the perpetuation of the established order.

This is why I'm interested in experimenting with ways of working I'm aware a lot of people might find counter-initiative and difficult to grasp—and perhaps even to take seriously. I'm exploring what forms our work as theorists can take if, in its performance, it does not simply go along with the pressure the neoliberal university places on us to deliver more ever quicker, and the accompanying spread of managerial technologies of measurement and commodification such as rankings, citation indexes, and other metrics. But I'm also exploring what forms our work can take if it likewise avoids falling into the trap of trying to counter the politics of the accelerated academy and its technological systems by resorting to a form of liberal humanism by default—evident in demands to "slow down" and go back even, or "assertion of the intrinsic value/unquantifiable character of scholarship [19]."

This last part is tricky. There's actually no easy way for us to avoid adhering to liberal humanist ways of being and doing as authors and academics—no matter how posthuman the content of our theory may be. This is because there's a strong link between our copyright laws and the production of liberal humanist subjectivity and agency. (As Mark Rose shows: "Copyright is not a transcendent moral idea, but a specifically modern formation [of property rights] produced by printing technology, marketplace economics and the classical liberal culture of possessive individualism") [20]. This link, in turn, means there are no nonliberal and nonhumanist alternatives to publishing and sharing our work on a copyright all rights reserved basis that are legally and professionally recognized. And this is so even with regard to those instances in which a writer identifies as having a fluid, nonbinary identity that is neither male nor female, and adopts personal pronouns such as they/them/their.

In large part, this lack of alternatives is due to the fact that, although the UK, USA, and Europe have different requirements for copyrightability, in all of them, copyright is dependent on the figure of the singular human author. From this standpoint, our current copyright laws have a threefold function: (1) they protect the author's economic and moral rights, as is generally understood. Yet—and this is something that is less frequently appreciated—they also participate in; (2) creating and shaping the author as a sovereign, liberal, human subject; (3) and in making it difficult for the author to adopt other forms—forms that are capable of acknowledging and assuming (rather than ignoring or repressing) the implications of texts coming into being through the various multiple and messy intra-actions of an extended assemblage of both humans and nonhumans.

subject of neoliberalism by default. (It's an attitude on the part of internet scholars that's encapsulated perfectly, albeit unwittingly, by a remark of Shoshana Zuboff's on

In other words, a form of liberal humanism, along with the attendant concepts of the self-identical autonomous human subject, the individual proprietorial author, linear thought, the long-form argument, the single-voiced narrative, the fixed and finished object, originality, creativity, and copyright, acts as something of a blind spot or datum point in a lot of established theory. The writing of peer-reviewed, sequentially-ordered, bound and printed-paper codex books and journal articles is a

professional practice that is perceived as transcending the age in which it is

employed, which means continuity in these matters tends to be valued more highly than transformation, let alone revolution. It's a manner of operating that is taken for granted as fixed and enduring (although in actual fact the activities and concepts it involves are constantly changing and being renegotiated over time), and that constitutes a preprogrammed mode of performance that many academics adopt more or less passively in order to construct theoretical frameworks and draw conclusions, hence the lack of care shown by even the most politically radical of thinkers for the

It can even be argued that the failure to denaturalize and destabilize what, for the sake of economy, I have referred to as the liberal humanist model of subjectivity—to confront and rigorously think through liberal concepts of human rights, freedom and property as they apply to us as theorists (although we understand philosophically that critical theory's questioning of liberal thought must involve questioning these concepts too)—is one of the reasons it's been relatively easy for the commodifying, measuring, and monitoring logic of neoliberalism to reinterpret our ways of being too. With the wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive framework of modern capitalism, neoliberal logic is not necessarily always going against the liberal rights and values that many of us continue to adhere to in practice. It is rather, as I say, that under this logic aspects of our liberal ways of being and doing have been intensified and transformed into another, specifically neoliberal interpretation of what, among those rights and

It's a set of circumstances that has left many of us in a state of melancholy, of unresolved mourning, for what we have lost: unresolved, because the liberal manner of performing as academics and theorists is not fully acknowledged as something we are attached to, so it's not something we can work through when we do experience it as a loss. This, in turn, can be said to have led to a state of political disorientation and paralysis. Since it's a loss we cannot fully acknowledge, we are unable to achieve an adequate understanding of how the process of corporatizing the academy can be productively reinflected, or what kind of institution we should be

Still, the problem is not just that the political rationalities of neoliberalism find it relatively easy to shape and control any efforts to counter the becoming business of higher education by acting as liberals and calling for a return to the rights and values of the public university (i.e., of academic freedom and trust; of fundamental as opposed to applied research; of individualized rather than mass teaching; and of the relatively autonomous institution, the primary function of which is to help build and maintain our democracies through the education of their citizens, and so to contribute to public value in that fashion rather than through the generation of financial profit). It's also that such calls have a tendency to moralistically discipline and reproach, if not indeed close down, attempts to question their own, often ahistorical, liberal premises, and to search for different means of being and doing as scholars that are neither simply liberal nor neoliberal. We could go so far as to say

surveillance capitalism: "Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.") [27].

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

materiality of their own ways of working and thinking.

values, are deemed to be most significant.

63

endeavoring to replace the neoliberal university with.

Do the restrictions imposed on us by our laws of intellectual property explain why most radical philosophers today work in a surprisingly conservative (i.e., liberal) fashion? Even political theorists who are known for engaging directly with new forms of subjectivity and social relations, such as those associated with the horizontalist, self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Standing Rock Sioux, gilets jaunes, and Extinction Rebellion protests are no exception. I'm thinking here of Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, Slavoj Zizek, etc.; the list is an extremely long one. By working in a conservative fashion, I mean texts such as Assembly [21], Podemos [22], and Crowds and Party [23] are all written as if they were the absolutely authentic creative expressions of the minds of unique sovereign individuals who are quite entitled to claim the moral and legal right to be identified as their singular human authors. They are then made available on this basis for economic exploitation by a publisher as commodities, in the form of books that can be bought and sold according to a system of property exchange that is governed by the logic of capital and its competitive, individualistic ethos.

The situation is not helped by the fact that when radical thinkers do turn their attention to how scholars operate nowadays, their concern is predominantly with the neoliberal subjects we are supposedly transitioning into with the help of digital information technologies. They are not quite so concerned about the particular configurations of subjectivity and the related information technologies (i.e., commercially copyrighted, printed-paper codex books and journal articles) we are changing from. The point I'm making here is that it's of fundamental importance to pay close critical attention to the latter, too. This is because in practice it has typically been a liberal, humanist subjectivity. When it comes to the actual creation, publication, and communication of research especially, this model of subjectivity has occupied a position of hegemonic dominance within the profession—and, in many respects, still does. The reason is simple: liberal humanism is built into the very system of the university [24]. As Christopher Newfield explains with regard to higher education in the USA, "a consensus version of university humanism has long consisted of 'five interwoven concepts: the free self, experiential knowledge, self-development, autonomous agency, and enjoyment.'" What's more, "university philosophers and administrators did not simply espouse these concepts as ideals but institutionalized them [25]."

If liberalism, in a nutshell, is concerned with the human individual's right to life, liberty, and property, together with the political conditions and institutions that secure these rights (e.g., constitutional government and the rule of law), what's really being condemned in many accounts of the corporatization of the academy is the manner in which a version of liberalism is being intensified and transformed into another, specifically neoliberal interpretation of what, among those rights, are deemed most important: the unassailable rights of property and extension of the values of the free market and its metrics to all areas of life [26]. Yet, as I say, the focus of critical attention has too often been on the process of change, and especially on what we are changing to (capitalist entrepreneurs, including entrepreneurs of our own selves and lives), and not on what we are changing from. What is a predominantly liberal, humanist mode of academic personhood is, in effect, held up as some kind of solution, or at least preferable alternative, to the shift toward the constantly self-disciplining, self-governing, self-exploitative

#### Anti-Bourgeois Theory DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

the author's economic and moral rights, as is generally understood. Yet—and this is something that is less frequently appreciated—they also participate in; (2) creating and shaping the author as a sovereign, liberal, human subject; (3) and in making it difficult for the author to adopt other forms—forms that are capable of acknowledging and assuming (rather than ignoring or repressing) the implications of texts coming into being through the various multiple and messy intra-actions of an

Do the restrictions imposed on us by our laws of intellectual property explain why most radical philosophers today work in a surprisingly conservative (i.e., liberal) fashion? Even political theorists who are known for engaging directly with new forms of subjectivity and social relations, such as those associated with the horizontalist, self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Standing Rock Sioux, gilets jaunes, and Extinction Rebellion protests are no exception. I'm thinking here of Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, Slavoj Zizek, etc.; the list is an extremely long one. By working in a conservative fashion, I mean texts such as Assembly [21], Podemos [22], and Crowds and Party [23] are all written as if they were the absolutely authentic creative expressions of the minds of unique sovereign individuals who are quite entitled to claim the moral and legal right to be identified as their singular human authors. They are then made available on this basis for economic exploitation by a publisher as commodities, in the form of books that can be bought and sold according to a system of property exchange that is governed by

The situation is not helped by the fact that when radical thinkers do turn their attention to how scholars operate nowadays, their concern is predominantly with the neoliberal subjects we are supposedly transitioning into with the help of digital information technologies. They are not quite so concerned about the particular configurations of subjectivity and the related information technologies (i.e., commercially copyrighted, printed-paper codex books and journal articles) we are changing from. The point I'm making here is that it's of fundamental importance to pay close critical attention to the latter, too. This is because in practice it has typically been a liberal, humanist subjectivity. When it comes to the actual creation, publication, and communication of research especially, this model of subjectivity has occupied a position of hegemonic dominance within the profession—and, in many respects, still does. The reason is simple: liberal humanism is built into the very system of the university [24]. As Christopher Newfield explains with regard to higher education in the USA, "a consensus version of university humanism has long consisted of 'five interwoven concepts: the free self, experiential knowledge, self-development, autonomous agency, and enjoyment.'" What's more, "university philosophers and administrators did not simply espouse these concepts as ideals but institutionalized them [25]." If liberalism, in a nutshell, is concerned with the human individual's right to life, liberty, and property, together with the political conditions and institutions that secure these rights (e.g., constitutional government and the rule of law), what's really being condemned in many accounts of the corporatization of the academy is the manner in which a version of liberalism is being intensified and transformed into another, specifically neoliberal interpretation of what, among those rights, are deemed most important: the unassailable rights of property and extension of the values of the free market and its metrics to all areas of life [26]. Yet, as I say, the focus of critical attention has too often been on the process of change, and especially on what we are changing to (capitalist entrepreneurs, including entrepreneurs of our own selves and lives), and not on what we are changing from. What is a predominantly liberal, humanist mode of academic personhood is, in effect, held up as some kind of solution, or at least preferable alternative, to the shift toward the constantly self-disciplining, self-governing, self-exploitative

extended assemblage of both humans and nonhumans.

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

the logic of capital and its competitive, individualistic ethos.

62

subject of neoliberalism by default. (It's an attitude on the part of internet scholars that's encapsulated perfectly, albeit unwittingly, by a remark of Shoshana Zuboff's on surveillance capitalism: "Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.") [27].

In other words, a form of liberal humanism, along with the attendant concepts of the self-identical autonomous human subject, the individual proprietorial author, linear thought, the long-form argument, the single-voiced narrative, the fixed and finished object, originality, creativity, and copyright, acts as something of a blind spot or datum point in a lot of established theory. The writing of peer-reviewed, sequentially-ordered, bound and printed-paper codex books and journal articles is a professional practice that is perceived as transcending the age in which it is employed, which means continuity in these matters tends to be valued more highly than transformation, let alone revolution. It's a manner of operating that is taken for granted as fixed and enduring (although in actual fact the activities and concepts it involves are constantly changing and being renegotiated over time), and that constitutes a preprogrammed mode of performance that many academics adopt more or less passively in order to construct theoretical frameworks and draw conclusions, hence the lack of care shown by even the most politically radical of thinkers for the materiality of their own ways of working and thinking.

It can even be argued that the failure to denaturalize and destabilize what, for the sake of economy, I have referred to as the liberal humanist model of subjectivity—to confront and rigorously think through liberal concepts of human rights, freedom and property as they apply to us as theorists (although we understand philosophically that critical theory's questioning of liberal thought must involve questioning these concepts too)—is one of the reasons it's been relatively easy for the commodifying, measuring, and monitoring logic of neoliberalism to reinterpret our ways of being too. With the wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive framework of modern capitalism, neoliberal logic is not necessarily always going against the liberal rights and values that many of us continue to adhere to in practice. It is rather, as I say, that under this logic aspects of our liberal ways of being and doing have been intensified and transformed into another, specifically neoliberal interpretation of what, among those rights and values, are deemed to be most significant.

It's a set of circumstances that has left many of us in a state of melancholy, of unresolved mourning, for what we have lost: unresolved, because the liberal manner of performing as academics and theorists is not fully acknowledged as something we are attached to, so it's not something we can work through when we do experience it as a loss. This, in turn, can be said to have led to a state of political disorientation and paralysis. Since it's a loss we cannot fully acknowledge, we are unable to achieve an adequate understanding of how the process of corporatizing the academy can be productively reinflected, or what kind of institution we should be endeavoring to replace the neoliberal university with.

Still, the problem is not just that the political rationalities of neoliberalism find it relatively easy to shape and control any efforts to counter the becoming business of higher education by acting as liberals and calling for a return to the rights and values of the public university (i.e., of academic freedom and trust; of fundamental as opposed to applied research; of individualized rather than mass teaching; and of the relatively autonomous institution, the primary function of which is to help build and maintain our democracies through the education of their citizens, and so to contribute to public value in that fashion rather than through the generation of financial profit). It's also that such calls have a tendency to moralistically discipline and reproach, if not indeed close down, attempts to question their own, often ahistorical, liberal premises, and to search for different means of being and doing as scholars that are neither simply liberal nor neoliberal. We could go so far as to say

that, far from part of the solution, calls for a restoration of the importance of the liberal values of the public university and the traditional humanities, although they may have their hearts in the right place, are actually part of the problem.

book offer succinct analyses of individual thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Hiroki Azuma, and Paul B. Preciado, Wark's focus in "On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" by the writer and novelist Amitav Ghosh [32]. In this nonfiction book, Ghosh contemplates the environmental crisis and global warming from a literary perspective that has its origins in the Indian subcontinent. As far as he is concerned, climate change is not just about ecological problems or even capitalism and its carbon-based political economy. Climate change is about empire, it's about imperialism, and above all, it's about climate justice. Providing an account of Ghosh's influen-

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

tial lectures on the great derangement thus enables Wark to conceive of a geohumanities project that brings earth science into contact with "post-colonial voices that have pushed back against imperial mappings of the world." In doing so she acknowledges that approaching climate change in terms of social justice brings with it a conceptual challenge. "One has to avoid excluding the diversity of human voices," Wark writes, quoting from The Great Derangement, "and yet at the same time avoid excluding the nonhuman world and rendering it a mere background, or "environment." One has to voice "the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences [33]." Ghosh approaches this conceptual challenge as a literary problem. The difficulty, however, is that climate change (or climate crisis or climate breakdown as many are now terming it in attempt to describe more accurately the environmental emergency we are now facing) goes far beyond what can be expressed in the form of the bourgeois novel. The issue is summed up for Wark by the fact that "fiction that takes climate change seriously is not taken seriously as fiction." Hence some of the best responses to the Anthropocene have been provided by science fiction. Hence, too, Ghosh's concern that we are now "entering into a great derangement." Wark describes this as "a time when art and literature concealed rather than articulated the nature of the times and the time of nature." In place of dealing with the Anthropocene, novels become choked with what, following Franco Moretti, can be thought of as "filler, the

everyday life of bourgeois society, its objects, decors, styles and habits [34]."

The reason the bourgeois novel is obsolete, then, is because it has not "adapted to new probabilities." Instead, Wark characterizes the bourgeois novel as "a genre of fantasy fiction smeared with naturalistic details—filler—to make it appear otherwise. It excludes the totality so that bourgeois subjects can keep prattling on about their precious 'inner lives.'" Yet, as we have seen, critical theory has not been adapted in the Anthropocene either. In fact, to include it seriously in the argument Wark makes about literature and art only serves to place further emphasis on the idea that we are arriving at "a great derangement," a period when no element remains in its original place. For ours is a time when established theory too can be said to obscure rather than express the changing nature of the times and the time of nature. As with the bourgeois novel, it's a derangement that works through formal limitations. In the case of theory, these limitations involve the named individualistic author, the immutable object, intellectual property and so forth. As with the modern novel, the screening out of this scaffolding "continues to be essential" to the functioning of what we might now rather teasingly refer to as bourgeois theory [35]. To further paraphrase Ghosh by way of Wark, here then is the great irony of theory in the Anthropocene: "the very gestures with which it conjures up nonhuman actors, objects and elements "are actually a concealment" of them [36].

The performance of serious theory today is thus as formally limited to bourgeois liberal humanism as the novel. This means it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of political theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To sample and remix Wark's text on the novel in the Anthropocene in order to further undercut notions of the author as

65
