Student Occupation of the University of Nottingham

Last night a friend sent me a text to let me know that the undergraduates at Nottingham had occupied a building in solidarity with the residents of Gaza. The friend of mine, who is an undergrad in theology and religious studies here in Nottingham, was in on the initial occupation and it appears that it has continued largely unharassed by the administration but has also been stonewalled by the administration with regards to the demands put forth by the occupying students. Of those demands I am most pleased to see the demand for full scholarships available to Gaza residents to come study in Nottingham. Below you will find the first communique of the students. I encourage you to keep track of the occupation via their blog.

NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY OCCUPATION TO DEMAND ACTION FOR THE PEOPLE OF GAZA

Last night, students at the University of Nottingham are occupied lecture theatre B62 of the Law and Social Sciences building on the University campus, to protest Israels’ actions and demand urgent action from the University management.  The occupation will not end until our demands are met by the University authorities.

Over the past four weeks, Israel has unleashed the might of its military against a defenseless population living in one of the most crowded places on earth. These attacks are ongoing and have now destroyed much of the infrastructure of Gaza and left thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, dead.

The appalling Israeli attacks have cost the lives of over 1,300 Palestinians, injuring and maimed many thousands. Tens of thousands of civilians have been left homeless and displaced. Head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, John Ging, is now joining international calls for an investigation into the war crimes of recent action. Israel stands accused of using banned weapons such as phosphorus bombs, attacking medical facilities, including the killing of 12 ambulance men in marked vehicles, and killing large numbers of policemen who had no military role, amongst numerous other atrocious crimes.

Motivated by the escalating crisis in Gaza, University of Nottingham students have occupied space on campus and issued a set of demands to the University management calling for immediate action. We stand in solidarity with students at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, Birmingham, Essex Warwick, Sussex, Oxford, Manchester Metropolitan, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Queen Mary’s, and Bradford Universities; all of whom have occupied parts of their Universities in support of Gaza.

This is a non-violent and inclusive protest. All at the University of Nottingham are encouraged to participate. During the occupation we will adhere to the same codes of personal conduct that are expected of us as members of the academic community.  Any disruption to our peers’ education is expressly against our wishes and we will respect the rights of others to disagree.  Universities should be places where freedom of expression, debate and critical discourse are encouraged, and the student movement in the UK and internationally has a proud tradition of protest and solidarity actions against social injustice.

The occupied space has become a place for discussion, debate and education.  There is food and drink; and we are organising lectures, talks, conferences and film screenings!  The occupation is being coordinated on a consensus basis, with roles and tasks for everyone who wishes to be in some way involved.  If you are interested in getting involved in a particular aspect, be it media work, food preperation, posters/fliers, coordinating or any other task, do head on down to B62!

We welcome all those who are concerned about the plight of the people of Gaza to come along and join us in this empowering action to work for peace and justice in Gaza. So, come on down! Join the occupation!

For updates and a full list of our demands see: http://occupationnottingham.wordpress.com/

Nottingham Uni in Solidarity with Gaza

The concept of obviousness

What do we mean when we call something obvious? Clearly there is an intersubjective element involved. We understand what someone is saying when they claim something is obvious to them, but that is a derivative sense of the word — for something to be obvious tout court, its obviousness must be acknowledged by nearly all interested parties.

Yet it’s not simply intersubjective. The contrast with something like a stereotype is helpful here. Everyone knows that white people like macaroni and cheese, for instance, but I don’t think we’d say it’s “obvious” that white people like macaroni and cheese — something is missing, and that seems to me to be any reference to objectivity. It is in the nature of stereotypes to be impervious to counterevidence — when someone sincerely holds a stereotype, any exception is written off as irrelevant, not affecting the “grain of truth” that the stereotype possesses.

In obviousness, then, there’s some element of objectivity involved, as we can see from the phenomenon of something being obvious once pointed out, which otherwise would’ve gone unnoticed. Yet again, obviousness is not simply objective. For instance, I don’t think one would properly say that it’s “obvious” that the earth goes around the sun, even though that is in fact the case — and is nearly universally acknowledged. So again, what’s missing? It seems to be the intuitive grasp we associate with the obvious. No one, from looking up at the sky, comes to the spontaneous realization, “Oh, of course the earth revolves around the sun!” The intuitive stance is the reverse, and we must sacrifice our intuitive sense to get at the truth in this case. (But conversely, it’s not “obvious” that the sun revolves around the earth, because everyone acknowledges that to be false despite appearances.)

How, then, do we get at the particularity of the obvious, distinguishing it from the intersubjective, the objective, and the intuitive, while maintaining its relationship to all three? I propose that something is obvious when everyone thinks that everyone will intuitively take it to be objective.

A modest suggestion

Particularly in writing for the general public, we need to call neoliberalism “nihilist capitalism.” There are, after all, non-nihilist forms of capitalism such as Fordism and Social Democracy that attempt to instrumentalize it in order to generate broadly-shared prosperity — which should of course be the goal of any economic system, right? Instead, we have capitalism as an end in itself, an entire society continually “tightening its belt” to enable the piling up of wealth for its own sake. We have a significant minority of people in this country who even view capitalism as some kind of morality play, in which hard workers are suitably rewarded and laggards punished — and any wealth is prima facie evidence of past auto-bootstrap-pulling.

The result isn’t even good capitalism — value is only value if it’s circulating, and as we’re seeing now, virtual capital with nowhere to go eventually disappears. More seriously, though, it’s hugely destructive, sucking the life out of everything that by all rights should escape from economic logic — health care, education, etc. — and beyond that, it may actually kill us, or at least a significant number of us, in the form of environmental disaster, as it’s already killing a significant number of us in the rolling disaster that is life in broad swaths of the Third World. Is “nihilist capitalism” a moralistic name? Yes. Is it probably alienating and extreme-seeming to some? Yes. But it at least begins to reflect the sheer malignancy of what we’re dealing with.

I am officially horrified

Routledge just sent me an order form to subscribe to their newly-acquired Journal of Management, Spirituality, & Religion.

A Singularity Peep-Show

In a week of historical happenings, this article on black holes and “naked singularities” (i.e., whereupon singularities, the tiniest prick of what’s left of a star collapsed upon itself, is without the veil-like event horizon that separates us from any encounter with or knowledge about it) is easily the most interesting thing I’ve encountered all week.

Another possibility is that singularities may really have an infinite density after all that they are not things to be explained away by quantum gravity but to be accepted as they are. The breakdown of general relativity at such a location may not be a failure of the theory per se but a sign that space and time have an edge. The singularity marks the place where the physical world ends. We should think of it as an event rather than an object, a moment when collapsing matter reaches the edge and ceases to be, like the big bang in reverse.

In that case, questions such as what will come out of a naked singularity are not really meaningful; there is nothing to come out of, because the singularity is just a moment in time. What we see from a distance is not the singularity itself but the processes that occur in the extreme conditions of matter near this event, such as shock waves caused by inhomogeneities in this ultradense medium or quantum-gravitational effects in its vicinity.

Obviously, considering the crowd this blog draws, this idea has some potential philosophical relevance. Or, as Adam said when we were talking about this, “Quick, somebody email Agamben this article, NOW!”

I rather like this bit especially:

To explore how naked singularities might provide a glimpse into otherwise unobservable phenomena, we recently simulated how a star collapses to a naked singularity, taking into account the effects predicted by loop quantum gravity. According to this theory, space consists of tiny atoms, which become conspicuous when matter becomes sufficiently dense; the result is an extremely powerful repulsive force that prevents the density from ever becoming infinite [see "Follow the Bouncing Universe," by Martin Bojowald; Scientific American, October 2008]. In our model, such a repulsive force dispersed the star and dissolved the singularity. Nearly a quarter of the mass of the star was ejected within the final fraction of a microsecond. Just before it did so, a faraway observer would have seen a sudden dip in the intensity of radiation from the collapsing star a direct result of quantum-gravitational effects.

Would that we all, upon our demise, effectively exploded.

There is something rather beautiful, and indeed ecological, about the notion of death, the singularity that is fully our own, and thus in a way where we are fully ourselves, as a similar “extreme condition,” whose effects on everything surrounding is without adequate measure.

Ghosts of Conferences Past and Future

Clayton Crockett has organized a conference on theology and energy. Catherine Keller will be giving the keynote. Other contributors include Jeff Robbins and Mary-Jane Rubenstein. Further information is available here.

Despite my strictures on discussing the movement that sponsored it, I also point you toward this review of the “Grandeur of Reason” conference, which both Anthony and Alex have passed along to me. (A highlight for me was that my notes over Il Regno e la Gloria got a shout-out and the author (rightly!) credited me as the coiner of the term “messianic nihilism” to describe Agamben.) Alex points out that speculative realism, one of the hottest new topics in the field of sexiness and thought, also comes in for significant discussion.

The bleeding edge

From the AAR 2009 call for papers (emphasis added):

Theology and Continental Philosophy Group

We invite proposals for papers or panels on the topic of how might resources in continental philosophy propel new thinking on the following: 1) The disappearance/reappearance of nature in new philosophies/theologies; 2) Creation or creativity; 3) Flesh; 4) Hospitality, sovereignty, and border crossings; 5) The eroding boundaries between theology, philosophy, spiritual practice, materialism, and cognitive science; 5) The work of Charles Taylor or Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari. We welcome proposals on other topics of interest where theology and continental philosophy intersect.

Is it just me, or do they stop just short of saying, “We particularly invite proposals from Anthony Paul Smith”?

On academic blogging in general

What do we think of Kugelmass’s thoughts on the drawbacks of academic blogging?

First Order of Business

There is a lot on Pres. Obama’s plate now, but nothing is as pressing as taking up David Schmid on his nomination of Slavoj Zizek as the first-ever Secretary of Culture.

The last holdouts?

Stanley Fish writes today about the dire effects of the corporate ethos of the modern university, something that has been thoroughly documented by Marc Bousquet among others.

Fish focuses on the almost certain decline of humanistic learning, which leads me to ask a question: might schools of theology wind up being one of the last holdouts? Their advantage is that they are in some sense professional schools, designed to train ministers, yet that very training requires a broad, if selective, education — to understand the Bible, you need to understand ancient cultures and languages; to understand theology, you need to understand philosophy; to preach effectively, you need to understand contemporary culture, and many of the kind of ministers who go to seminary would agree that this includes its “high art” manifestations.

Clearly there are blindspots, but the traditional disciplines within the divinity school curriculum seem to me to be among the most “inherently” interdisciplinary — meaning in practice that in many schools of theology, the entire university, at least the humanities side, is reproduced on a small scale.

Now sadly the mainline Protestant churches that support traditional seminary education are in a decline that does not seem reversible. The endowments of established churches and other factors will likely allow them to survive past the point where most people would expect them simply to fold, and trends like the rising number of young people who seek seminary education to prepare them for non-religious social work may help to prop up the schools themselves to a degree. That’s why I ask whether such institutions may be the last “holdouts,” rather than the eternal home of the humanities.

Now I do think that corporatization is not inevitable. Indeed, you’d think that an increasingly prosperous society would have more, not less, ability to support a body of accomplished scholars as opposed to a cadre of exhausted adjuncts. The decreased public support for universities that led to cost-cutting measures was not inevitable, for instance, but the result of a conscious ideologically-driven choice.

For this problem to be solved, then, requires changes not just within the university, but within society at large — something that will take time, if it turns out to be possible at all. In the meantime, it seems to me that schools of theology can at least keep the candle burning longer than it otherwise would have.