The Cynical Educator

Ansgar Allen

Ground down, disenchanted, but committed to education. Unable to quit, yet deploring everything education has become. We suffer a weakened and weakening cynicism. This cynicism exploits the last remaining educational commitments of an otherwise broken workforce, draining that workforce of its final pleasure: Revolt. Our cynicism is reactionary and conditional – exhausting where it might invigorate, rendering complicit, giving safe passage to bad temper – but can be reclaimed. We need more cynicism, not less. With The Cynical Educator a revived, militant Cynicism affronts us. Drawing on a long history of religious denial and philosophical intrigue, it brings our educational bad faith to the surface. It confronts the educated with the fruit of their conceit.

About the author

Ansgar Allen is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Sheffield and author of Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason.

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Joy Forever:
The Political Economy of Social Creativity

Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder (eds)

The book published by F/SUW in cooperation with MayFly Books gathers papers based on presentations at the conference Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity, organized in Warsaw in October 2011. It includes contributions by renowned thinkers and artists, including Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Massimiliano Tomba, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Martha Rosler, among many others.

The title Joy Forever refers to the false promise of a common happiness, constantly played out by the proponents of the creative class and creative economy – the very promise that since Romanticism has been ascribed to art itself, a vow which remains unfulfilled. The aim of F/SUW’s publication is to scrutinize the false promises of distributed creativity as an ideology of cognitive capitalism. The authors devote themselves to critical examination of the structural links between art, creativity, labour and the creation of value under contemporary relations of production. Some of them do not stop at a critical diagnosis but go further, reflecting upon potential alternatives to the status quo.

The book covers more than the issues of a narrowly understood art world, despite the fact that it pays a lot of attention to them. Art is conceived here as a social lab, where innovative ways of organizing of labour, socializing both for labour and through labour, as well as different types of production, speculation, generation and accumulation and appropriation of value are experimented with and tested.

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Critique of Creativity:
Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’

Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds)

Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of ‘intelligent design’, the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.

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Lacan and Organization

Carl Cederström & Casper Hoedemaekers (eds)

The work of Jacques Lacan has become an influential source to most disciplines of the social sciences, and is now considered a standard reference in literary theory, cultural studies and political theory. While management and organization studies has traditionally been preoccupied with questions of making corporations more efficient and productive, it has also mobilized a strong and forceful critique of work, management and capitalism. It is primarily as a contribution to this tradition of critical scholarship that we can see the work of Lacan now emerging.

In this edited collection, a number of organizational scholars have made common cause with political theorists and psychoanalysts. Together they explore the many intersections of Lacan and organization. The contributions address a series of pertinent questions: What are the new templates for control in the workplace? How is subjectivity produced in contemporary organizations? And how can a Lacanian reading of contemporary work politics render new insights into resistance and ethics?

This edited collection includes contributions from Peter Fleming, Rickard Grassman, Jason Glynos, Campbell Jones, Carol Owens, André Spicer and Yannis Stavrakakis.

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New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty

Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”

Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.

Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.

This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.

“After the highpoint of the subversive decade 1968-1977, Italian autonomist Marxism and French theory of desire meet at the intersection of two different methodologies of subjectivation. Social recomposition of the working class and molecular proliferation of desire merge, and together open a new space for theory and for social action. While the ideologies of the twentieth century are falling, Toni Negri and Félix Guattari trace the lines of a new vision of autonomy.” – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Published in collaboration with Autonomedia and Minor Compositions.

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‘The Leading Journal in the Field’:
Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management

Peter Armstrong & Geoff Lightfoot (eds)

‘I am often told, “Don’t waste your time reading books, you’d be better off reading the leading journals in your field.” Unfortunately, the authors of this book have closely read some of those articles: examining arguments, with simple principles and words, plus a touch of irony – and a shared belief in ideas and debates. The suspicions that we all have in a part of our head appears in its ugly nakedness: what is this social game that authors in leading management journals play? What grants them their truth effects? This is a book that one should read the day one enters the academic field; and then regularly thereafter so as not to forget.’ Professor Jean-Luc Moriceau, Telecom Business School (France)

The standards of scholarship prevailing in the social sciences of management are indicative of an atrophy of the critical function. This results in a kind of tribalized authoritarianism, a dispersed oligarchy of the gatekeepers in which the congeniality of ideas and findings with their own have replaced judgments based on the quality of argument and evidence. The authors in this volume turn to the practice of practical criticism to destabilize authority in the social sciences of management, and to assert that it must be possible for criticism of scholarly outputs – particularly those of established authority-figures – to be heard and debated.

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Upsetting the Offset:
The Political Economy of Carbon Markets

Steffen Böhm & Siddhartha Dabhi (eds)

Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures.

‘If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from resigned to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading… the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

‘Anyone concerned about the future of the planet (is anyone not?) should read this book. The contributors give powerful evidence and argument to show that the carbon trading regimes favoured by the world’s elites will not work – and are, indeed, set to make things worse. But the message is not negative. There are alternatives, both effective and desirable.’ Professor Ted Benton, University of Essex, UK

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Organisation Studies at Exeter Business School, University of Exeter, UK. Siddhartha Dabhi is a researcher at Exeter Business School, University of Exeter, UK.

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Art and Contemporary Critical Practice:
Reinventing Institutional Critique

Gerald Raunig & Gene Ray (eds)

‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

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Ethics and Economy: After Levinas

Dag G. Aasland

‘Rather than succumbing to the easy temptation to blame business leaders for anything that went wrong in recent years, Aasland looks for the remnants of good in business as such. This leads him to ask the right questions: one should, for example, not ask why a leader did the wrong thing but why such a leader did not do it. A thought-provoking and hugely original essay is the outcome of this approach.’ René ten Bos, Radboud University, The Netherlands

While today many express astonishment at ‘ethical scandals’ in business, in this important new book Dag G. Aasland asks why, in capitalist economies, such scandals are not more common or even the norm. Taking his lead from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this book proposes a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the meaning of ethics and economy. This elegantly written text offers a clear statement of the importance of a Levinasian ethics of the Other for thinking through and beyond the limits and persistence of economic rationality. This book invites readers to step beyond the enclosure of business ethics and takes us beyond ‘business as usual’ but also beyond ‘ethics as usual’.

Dag G. Aasland is Professor of Economics and Head of the Department of Working Life and Innovation at the University of Agder, Norway. For the last few years his teaching and research has concentrated on ethics in business and management, especially from the perspective of the works of Levinas.

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Negations: Essays in Critical Theory

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse’s Negations is both a radical critique of capitalist modernity and a model of materialist dialectical thinking. In a series of essays, originally written in the period stretching from the 1930s to 1960s, Marcuse takes up the presupposed categories that have, and continue to, ground thought and action in our administered society: liberalism, industrialism, individualism, hedonism, aggression. This book is both a testament to a great thinker and a still vital strand of thought in the comprehension and critique of the modern organized world. It is essential reading for younger scholars and a radical reminder for those steeped in the tradition of a critical theory of society. With a brilliance of conception combined with an insistence on the material conditions of thought and action, this book speaks both to the particular contents engaged and to the fundamental grounds of any critique of organized modernity.

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