In some ways, authentocracy’s more obvious and cynical manifestations are already beginning to lose some of their power. The continued emergence of unambiguous nativism, which has only accelerated in the year since Authentocrats was completed, is perhaps beginning to render authentocracy’s various strategies of hedging and ventriloquy obsolete. Two years ago, a figure like Richard Angell was dutifully reporting what he heard from the doorstep and tearfully imploring the left to listen to their natural constituency; now he happily appears on panels with Melanie Phillips and Brendan O’Neill. The sensible adults who beat their breasts over Corbyn’s unelectability in 2016 are, in 2018, debating whether ethnic diversity poses a threat to the West at Spiked front events. Ethnonationalist creeps like Goodhart are increasingly recognised for what they are, and increasingly less coy about it. Kennedy’s work, in this book and elsewhere, is partly responsible for this, of course. With any luck Authentocrats, with all its piss and vinegar, will help to abolish the thing it diagnoses, and its usefulness as an immediate political intervention will be short. [read full essay]
The assimilation policy, which was predicated on the assumption of white superiority and black inferiority, proposed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be allowed to ‘die out’ in answer to what was seen by the settler culture as the ‘Aboriginal problem.’ In order to facilitate this so-called solution, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were separated from their families and placed in homes like Moore River where the principle aim was to indoctrinate the children so that they would assimilate into and eventually be absorbed by the white culture. In short, they would be ‘bred out’ of existence. The practice of child removal, which began in the early 1900s and continued until the early 1970s, has had a devastating effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as a whole and led the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report, Bringing Them Home (1997) to conclude that the principal aim of eradicating Aboriginal culture constituted a cultural genocide. [read full essay]
A prominent first-person narrative strategy employed from Dante to Proust works in such a way that by the time the character’s story comes to an end, they’re ready to become the writer who will then relate the story we’ve just read. Dante the pilgrim becomes Dante the poet; Marcel becomes Proust. Their stories begin as soon as they cease. This is not so in My Struggle, in which the pilgrim and the poet are identical; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Karl Ove Knausgaard. His struggle is less to get to the point where he can now finally write My Struggle than it is to actually write it, which he is in the process of doing throughout all six books. [read full essay]
The essential promise of ‘big data’ is that it may sometimes be possible to surface characteristics of the domain under analysis that we don’t initially know how to specify in detail: we can find things we we didn’t start out knowing how to look for. Bridle later quotes the researchers behind Tri Alpha, an approach to machine-enhanced investigation of the space of possible fusion reactor designs, who describe their system as ‘attempting to optimise a hidden utility model that human experts may not be able to express explicitly.’ There is something of the sublime in this: that which is ‘inexpressible’, for which we have no concept, can take form as a ‘model’ which then becomes a tool for further investigation and reflection. [read full essay]
To those outside of academia, it can be hard to convey the relentlessness and co-ordinated nature of the cultural attack on higher education. The lie that there is a crisis of free speech in universities seems to have become common wisdom, and liberal media outlets have been remarkably weak at countering it. In the past year, two successive Tory secretaries of state for higher education have made it a central focus of their public statements, starting in December, when Jo Johnson proposed an Office for Students which would have the power to fine universities for no-platforming speakers. This – as well as the OfS itself, the seriousness of whose conception was amply demonstrated by the proposed inclusion of Toby Young on its board – was obviously unworkable, but that was hardly the point: open season had been declared, and the culture war against higher education had moved from the op-ed page to the front bench. [read full essay]
This is the authentic voice of post-1968 squatland, and it is not a shrill or hysterical one. It is found also in the famous Christiania in Copenhagen. A former barracks was occupied by young leftists, who then invited locals to come see 'the forbidden city' – and create it. Their manifesto called for 'a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community. This society is to be economically self-sustaining, and its common aspiration is to be steadfast in the conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted'. This is not the same thing as squatting a row of bombed-out terraces, and different even to the CPGB's 1940 occupation of the Savoy. It was not intended to draw attention to housing poverty, but to something else – that 'psychological destitution', represented by the entire post-war world of 9-5 work, technocracy, full employment, Fordism, predictability, the nuclear family, advertising, property development and municipal housing. [read full essay]
Your success in turning around the lives of young men is admirable and should be encouraged. But there is something that worries me, and I think it runs deep in you. When it comes to any dissent, you are quick to anger, even a little bitter, as if you’re carrying a slight from long ago, an unhealable wound. Ironically, it is as if you’ve taken a moment of life’s unfairness personally and can’t let it go – it’s become sublimated and now manifests itself as a kind of victimhood. Except, following your own wisdom, you’re not allowing yourself to be weak or cowed, but stride meaningfully and with purpose into the suffering world. But it’s still audible in the almost shrill way you speak about ‘the post-modernists’, when you refuse to discuss ‘white privilege’, when talking more generally about women and gender politics. It’s visible in your face – you start to flush and vibrate. [read full essay]
Although forms of non-monogamy have been practised since time immemorial, both tacitly and openly (think of the maitresse-en-titre, the eromenos and the cicisbeo), it is only relatively recently in the history of the Judaeo-Christian West that women have been able to talk about wanting something other than monogamous marriage to a man without incurring considerable censure. People have become increasingly disinclined to enforce normative social mores upon others, and as a consequence it has become more acceptable to question what were once considered non-negotiable conditions of adulthood, such as chastity, monogamy or the necessity of having a partner at all. If the rules do not suit you, they can be ignored or rewritten. [read full essay]
One of the most remarkable things about the last few months of strike action by UCU members has been the support shown by most of our current students. They have spoken out, joined picket-lines, and gone into occupation across the country – generating imagery reminiscent of the ‘Millbank generation’ to which many of their younger lecturers (including me) belong. These students aren’t just out there to defend our pensions. They’re there for a bigger cause: the ideal of the university as a community of learning, not another neoliberal marketplace. [read full essay]
A certain slant of light remains at the centre for any poetics of winter. Whatever else literature of those dark months takes as its concern – the crunch of snow underfoot, the strange material effervescence of one’s breath, even the liturgy of Advent – all aesthetics of solstice ultimately is about the half-luminescence of the low winter sun. To sing a song of winter is to sing a dirge. Representations of the season must deal with the expiring embers of daylight, effervescence’s spindly dying glow as the year progresses, the subtle yet sublime awareness of the hazy light of the shortening day. Approaching whatever collapse awaits us, feeling the rising temperatures of a 21st-century December, or perhaps knowing the grey ashen chill of future nuclear winter, what is reassuringly uncontrollable is the predictable tilt of our planet’s axis. Our seasons remain a pagan liturgy, enthralled to the motion of the sun and moon, and our poetry is similarly moved. [read full essay]
