How did we get to here?

It may be wrong for an anthropology student to be so fascinated by causality, but here I am, and here we’ve all ended up. In the grand holistic human scheme of things, there’s too much going on to even know where to start figuring out where to start, and doing so in the social sciences at least seems to diminish any true validity at its best, and devolves beyond prejudice and discrimination at its worst. Cultural materialism lacks nuance, strips agency away from those studied, and places the anthropologist in an undue and dangerous position of academic superiority. However, the Jared Diamonds of the world, with loose terminology and an unfounded romanticisation of before the agricultural revolution, seem to sell more books than any critique of the theory that I have read*.

So why causality? I feel that from a young age, I have been taught to some degree that if we can figure out the root of a problem, it’s easy to rip out this root and solve it. If we can just utilise Graeber’s theories of bureaucracy and identify the key actors and motivations in university bureaucracy, a naïve version of myself thought at the start of this course, we can lobby these actors for change, or at least develop strategies to organise and fight their actions. This was easier to think than to do. I have a penchant for being overly ambitious with projects that I get involved in, and whilst I am wont to call it a character flaw, I know it colours my opinions about the end results. 

 As with anything I’ve ever done, on reflection, I have mixed feelings about the outcome. My first reflection for this course played on trying to hold opposing ideas and emotions within my mind at the same time and having them – and everything in between – hold an equal subjective truth. This in part fed into the workshop task I brought to the final session – to think of a moment of decisive importance in your life, then to imagine either its opposite or something else entirely happening instead. Taking this opposite, the rest of the task involves figuring out how you would still end up the same person, in the same place, at the same time, reading this now, even though a pivotal part of your life went differently. This can be done as abstractly, absurdly, or concretely, and realistically as you like. The question is what, if anything, ever changes? What would cause or reverse this change? And how did you get to here?

If I’m being transparent (and a little self-indulgent), then this little thought experiment came from a dream that I had around October that has deeply affected me since. Without boring anyone with the details, on a dark, sharp Atlantic coastline, an old radio picked up warnings of natural and manmade disasters seemingly from the future on a one-way connection. As a result, there was a book, always open on a double spread, where one side would record events as they should have happened, and the other side recording the events as they did happen, with interference. I still wonder who was on the other end, what it meant if they didn’t warn of something, what their intentions were, or whether playing with the past really changed anything in the end. In that complex, dynamic state, I was the butterfly whipping up the hurricane, and I formed a part of how they got to there, wherever there might be.   

Chaos and complexity and systems theories and the like often fall into the trap of explaining complex outputs with simple inputs **, or vice versa, and sometimes throw process to the wind entirely. I may still disagree that process should be the main output of this course over concrete change, but I am grateful to this course for teaching me the value in processual understanding, and positionality there within. To some extent, it’s not how did we get to here, but how do we exist in a flux of being here from one second to the next? 

What does all this mean for the bureaucratic and neoliberal behemoth we’ve spent the last year trying to decipher the future of? How does the knowledge that our past, present, and future selves exist in a permanent state of causality (and effect) help us deal with self-replicating bureaucracy and the ills it causes through ventures such as casualisation and corporatisation? 

There’s something to be said in understanding our positionality, and weaponising our privileges for some greater goods†. It’s preaching to the choir to suggest that uprooting the neoliberal tendrils of the university doesn’t just mean a return to some pre-Thatcher era, but instead requires some form of radical rebirth. But the bureaucrats have the advantage of permanence and power here, whereas individual students come and go, and are made to feel powerless by design. Do we build a makeshift trojan horse to try and redefine the system from within, or do we throw rocks at the city walls hoping they’ll crumble and make way for revolution? Whatever we and our successors do, hopefully this course can stand as an experimental testament for understanding the flaws of our university, and imparting critical pedagogies to those who would otherwise not have access to them. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of its first run, and thankful to those that first brought it forwards. 

There are many causal factors that resulted in this course being created, and everything turning out the way it has. As I’ve said, I’m not one for materialist explanations as to why that might be the case, but the desperate atmosphere of disillusionment with the university breeds a space for these radical courses out of necessity, and I’m sure we’ll see more in the future. What we do now is how we get to there.

But how did we get to here?

Well, if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have had to ask. 

* I am painfully aware of the irony in how reductionist this is of the academic dialogues surrounding materialist theories.

** As a side note, if anyone has any recommendations for crossovers of chaos theory with radical political thought, I would greatly appreciate them.

† I can’t say ‘the greater good’ whilst keeping a straight face and not thinking of Hot Fuzz. 

I’d like to offer my sincere apologies for submitting this so late – I thought the deadline for reflections was the 10th, not comments, and have been on a digital hiatus over exams.

How did we get to here? / The future of our university by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0