The post, which appears below, was originally published here.

There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government’s internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan ‘information wants to be free’) are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It’s more that the deep logic of the internet’s history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.

In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government’s move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.

What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.

The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.

It’s no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called ‘biopolitics’ – a politics of governing the individual body and soul.

Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, ‘bite-sized’ policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.

Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity – the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.

Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what’s good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.

So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It’s one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.

Yet, there is another left tradition.

That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.

This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens’ desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.

It’s part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It’s part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.

The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It’s precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I’m not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I’m much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That’s a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.

It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.

But there’s a broader point here.

We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Therapeutic cultures, cyber-utopian discourses, marketing moves – all encourage us to tell our stories and rearrange the bits of the world as narratives (if not ones entirely of our own making). There’s something here of what Michel Foucault diagnosed as the diffusion of the practice of confession – and an incitement to tell one’s truth – from the Church outwards into the culture. Now, it would be too simplistic to condemn this (or, for that matter, to offer an enconium to it). Sweeping judgements on social trends tend to say more about those doing the judging than the reality – revealing, all too often, the value judgements they attempt to conceal.

One question, though, could be addressed to Stutchbury – what is, in fact, involved in the demand that policy conform to a narrative?

It’s a demand journos, particularly at The Australian, seem to make very frequently. It obscures a heap of ideological baggage. It can’t be just any narrative. It has to be the preferred ‘reform’ narrative.

Let me get one last thing straight. I’m a fan of story-telling. I like to tell stories myself. But a narrative doesn’t have to be coherent, or sustained by evidence. It’s not the same thing as an argument. It might be a good thing if that were realised – that accountability to reason and truth and evidence can be the price of seeing everything in terms of narrative.

Update: On Paul Kelly.

Such books are apparently “inappropriate for a mainstream shop”, according to a spokesperson for Australia Post.

Jessica Au at Meanjin‘s blog Spike has put her finger on what’s at stake:

Yet no matter what kind of spin you put on it, this is clearly regressive behaviour, which again harks back to the days when books were treated as smut rather than literature. Behind it are the assumptions that consumers are not capable of making intelligent decisions about their purchases, that children’s innocence is paramount and that anything related to sex must be p*rnographic and therefore improper. As a government-owned corporation, Australia Post has simply shown that it will panic at the smallest kick of dust and do anything to preserve a conservative brand image.

The Popular Penguins range has been a huge success in a climate when it is increasingly difficult to sell titles – they’re affordable, diverse and easily recognisable in their eye-catching (but not-even-remotely-explicit) orange and cream covers.

Strangely enough, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was banned in Australia until the 1960s, remained unscathed. Presumably Australia Post are okay with references to ‘f*cking’ and ‘c*nt’, but not so much a Foucauldian analysis of sexuality and repression.

In the course of my research, I’ve been reading lots of net history. There are exceptions to the rule, but the same dichotomised themes tend to recur again and again without resolution, and as a number of authors, including the excellent Fred Turner, point out – too many concepts have been taken over from 90s style cyber-utopians and Californian boosters without much reflection on their adequacy. One of those is Howard Rheingold‘s “virtual community” (and to be fair to Rheingold, he’s much more nuanced than some of his academic epigones!)… We seem to be stuck in a hermeneutic circle – of the bad kind – suspended between online writing as media substitute and online communication as pure public sphere. If what occurs online falls short of either (heavily) ideal(ised) type, then it appears to fall into the worthless category by default.

Let’s have a look at some antidotes.

First a quote from communications scholar David D. Perlmutter:

…for most of the history of our species, we were creatures of small groups and personal ties: Bigness, as in cities, crowds, or news networks, has not changed our affinity for one-on-one love, friendship, and affinity.

There is, of course, much sociological scholarship bemoaning (or celebrating) “weak ties”, “the fall of the public man [sic]“, an “individualised society” and so on. Sometimes I think this is a matter of taste – a fair bit of social theory that floats free from empirical research can be very affect laden – not always a bad thing, but it needs to be a subject for authorial reflection. Call me a Weberian if you like! Nevertheless, it is fair to say that modernity brings about at least a sense of isolation for many.

A lot of the critique of things like blogs, social network sites, and the practices associated with them, goes to the alleged illusory quality of online interaction. “Facebook friends aren’t real friends and Facebook will destroy friendship!”… There’s also a privileging of presence over a putative absence because embodied communication is mediated rather than direct or face to face (a false dichotomy which ignores the mediation of all communication) which slips very easily into a claim that communicating online is selfish or solipsistic. “Folks just write about their cats”, “Blogging is just attention seeking!”…

These critiques seem to me to be based on completely flawed premises, and they’re reinscribed from all sorts of angles. It might be a conservative bemoaning “bowling alone” or a post-structuralist talking about online communication as a “technology of the self” (without really getting what Foucault was getting at, I hasten to add).

Aside from the presence/absence thing, I could also mention the fact that “strong ties” and “weak ties” is an inadequate taxonomy. Friendships, relationships, family ties, work relationships, relationships with pets, feelings about non-human objects or places – all are dynamic and variable rather than static and invariant – because they’re precisely constituted through relationship – even when the other is (apparently) absent. It just isn’t the case that there are two opposed poles of “real” and “virtual” friendships, never the twain to meet.

So how to think about online interaction? A bit of preliminary speculation…

I was also struck by Geert Lovink‘s observation in Zero Comments that the scholarship of blogging hasn’t been taken up by literary scholars expert in the arts of writing the self – keeping a diary or a log, that is to say. Whether or not he’s fairly characterising the absence of such comparisons or analyses, I’m not qualified to say. But it does seem intuitively right that blogging, twittering, status updating and all the other panoply of online writing techniques have something in common with diarising – even to the point that there’s a compulsion to do so, as Lovink suggests.

It also seems to me that there’s an extensability of trust involved in sharing a diary with others, which is analogous to the sort of dynamic privacy involved in writing the online self – it’s variegated according to who can and will read it, and it’s also much more other-oriented.

If it is true that modernity erodes connections, then perhaps postmodernity seeks to recreate that feeling of connectedness virtually?

I think trust, and the ability to put oneself out there, which is actually an act of trust, is possibly the key. I’m not saying, mind, that all such interactions will be characterised by trust, and as we’ve seen in spades over the last few days, some are otherwise motivated, to put it charitably. And I don’t want to go all cyber-utopian on you either…

But I do think when we’re taking the good with the bad, we should see trust as a sort of aspirational or motivational tendency – a horizon of the practice of online communication, if you like. I think it’s much neater and possibly more analytically useful to understand online behaviours and practices in these terms rather than through reductive comparisons to other sorts of practices, or testing them against impossible and never realised ideals.

Happy New Year 2009 image courtesy of zltgfx at flickr – reproduced under a creative commons licence.

There are quite a few cultural constants of New Year’s Eve – fireworks (and the illegal ones in my neck of the woods certainly woke me up with a bang at midnight), revelling, and resolutions, the topic of today’s post. I haven’t traced the origins of the custom, but it makes intuitive sense that the social rhythm of time would prompt reflection and introspection and a desire to make a new beginning at the most significant turning point of our secular calendar. Perhaps time off work also contributes. No doubt there’s an aspect of secularisation in this cultural moment – examination of conscience and a resolution for amending the self have been part of a huge constellation of mindsets and practices in the West for a very long time, as Michel Foucault taught us.

From a sociological point of view, Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s thoughts about freedom are interesting here. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that we adopt, and test against our surroundings, a set of dispositions and practices oriented towards the world – something similar to what Pierre Bourdieu subsequently dubbed a habitus. And that word’s not chosen lightly, because as over time we make certain choices, we shift the field for making subsequent choices – aware or unaware, we pursue a certain direction. We’re part of that lifeworld in which we choose, and can’t really stand apart from it. And over time, the “sedimentation” of those choices can narrow our sense of the possible. Probably one of the reasons why another stock cultural truism of the New Year is that resolutions are doomed to fail is that we over-estimate the degree to which individual will alone can reshape our behaviours and attitudes. Not surprising in a deeply individualist society (and some of that sense of the choosing self also harks back to the dissemination and transformation of the confessional urge).

The best way to make a resolution stick, of course, is actually to change the field of forces at play – and thus a work of imagination and re-imagination is required. There’s also more chance of success if a new direction is something that takes into account the collective and intersubjective dimension of our intentions’ path through the world. Maybe the distinction between tactics and strategy is a useful one for thinking about all this. So, it’s not terribly surprising that resolutions often fail or peter out.

But enough of the sociologising! I tend to be a fairly future-oriented person, but also hopefully a realistic one, so I like to think in terms of shifting my situation towards a particular goal and setting that goal as a horizon, recognising that I’ll never completely get there and that one has to tack and adjust to a dynamic set of circumstances. So, since I ended 2008 happier and healthier than I’d been for some years, I’d like to try to keep it that way! On the work front, I’m looking forward to settling in further to my new half-time job as a researcher with the Smart Services CRC, to covering the Queensland election for Crikey and to a few other exciting opportunities that are either at the conceptual or planning stages. Working in fields I’m deeply interested in conduces to the health and happiness things, of course, and I’m vowing to learn from past mistakes and not take on too much, because a slower pace of work over the last six weeks or so has re-opened my eyes to all the other fabulous things I can be doing, and the pleasure of doing them in good company.

Two “traditional” resolutions are on the table, though. One is to cut down on smoking, which I think is more realistic than giving it up in a flash. The other is to take an actual holiday – one which doesn’t involve tacking on a bit of socialising and sight seeing to an interstate work trip. Whether or not I achieve these goals is probably a matter of how I can work – and work with others – to reconfigure the whole pattern of my everyday life, as I’ve been implying above! But my fingers are crossed.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

If you look at things over the long term, there are a range of secular trends common to most developed states (and part of the problem with less developed states and the process of post-colonial state formation is that there’s a sort of recipe for what a state does that might be very difficult to replicate in the absence of the conditions of its possibility). The British liberal state of the 19th century managed to govern with a tiny civil service – departments of state such as the Exchequer used to employ only around 20 or 30 people as recently as the 1860s. The vast amount of state employees were in the military, with the post office a distant second. Government – to the degree that there was government – was devolved to largely amateur institutions, and government didn’t do very much. Historically, European states spent almost all their revenue on war and defence. From the late 19th century onwards, there has been a constant trend upwards – and outwards into civil society – but even the “advanced liberalism” of Lloyd George in his guise as a reforming Chancellor only had a footprint, if you like, of around 15% of GDP. It’s also important to underline the fact that much of the increase in state expenditure was driven from below – from a more active and more enfranchised citizenry.

The significance of the “crisis of governability” of the 1970s was the conclusion drawn that the public sector had reached its limits. At around the same time, democratic socialists in Britain – and Australia though we didn’t really have the debate here in the same terms – began to lose their sense of forward momentum and any sense of socialism as transformative. Thatcher, as I’ve suggested, in many instances strengthened the reach and power of the state – “big state conservatism” or liberalism is no new thing. It didn’t spring into being with Bush or Howard, as an examination of the records of Reagan and Fraser would indicate.

But nevertheless it does make sense to talk about neoliberalism. If it’s true that there are strong secular forces shaping the size and the state in a certain direction, it’s also true that attempts to reorient the scope and direction of the state’s activity are important, even if they don’t actually practice the anti-statism they preach. After all the construction of a market economy – embodying the precepts of possessive individualism – was not just a victory of certain social formations and their ruling ideas over others but also a project which required a massive expansion of the reach if not initially the size of the state – in order to overturn notions of a moral economy and to facilitate the transformation of both work in the direction of free labour and of factors of production as tradeable, among other things. It’s what Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”. Much of the trend from the mid 19th century onwards was to further expand the state’s reach and scope through transferring activities in the economy from private to public governance. The last few decades have been about turning that around – in a way. But this has also required both a further expansion in the reach of the state and a self-imposed restraint which has proceeded under the sign of globalisation.

Incidentally, my argument elsewhere has been that globalisation is horribly confused as a social scientific concept – it tends to conflate far too many processes, suggest a unilinear direction where things are a lot more complex, and mistake effects for causes. But the mistaking of effects for causes – a characteristic of neoliberal globalisation talk (“there is no alternative”) – is itself deeply ideological. What is clustered under the name of globalisation does, and is intended by at least some actors, to do work in the world. In short, it’s an ideological rather than an analytical concept, and its force is such that it attains facticity.

It’s wrong to think of any political ideology either as a “coherent system of ideas” (the polsci 101 definition) or as only oriented towards the size of the state or the degree to which the state dominates “the commanding heights of the economy” or seeks to set market forces free. That’s partly because political ideas are often parasitic on and subsequent to forms of rule and techniques of governing, as it were, and partly because, sociologically, I don’t think you can make a meaningful distinction between the ideas and the institutions and individuals who are their “carriers” – as Max Weber would say.

Just as the state is better understood as an assemblage of institutions embedded within society and reflecting many of the conflicts and tensions within the social body than as some sort of monolith confronting “civil society”, so too ideologies are woven from a whole variety of cloths for a whole range of reasons. They’re as much about weird and misguided shadow boxing in the op/ed pages over the fetish of Hayek as about any abstract theoretical wonkery. There’s no “essence” of liberalism, or of socialism for that matter. Some ideologies have a closer articulation to reason – because they’re understood in terms of reason not necessarily because they are reasonable – than others. The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason. But it’s as unreasonable to compare “Soviet Marxism” to some ethereally pure and ideal Marx, whose texts are incredibly complex and often contradictory. But let’s be fair here – there’s no “classical liberalism” either which is entirely amenable to rational redaction.

In many instances, what we’re doing when we talk about ideologies is textual analysis. Modern political philosophy is far more akin to textual criticism and hermeneutics than it sometimes thinks. It’s a technique of ordering texts – confused, complex and intriguing texts – and giving them a shape and a coherence they lack. It’s also an atemporal and ahistorical enterprise – acting as if liberalism is The Two Treatises on Civil Government or communism is Capital or the Grundrisse. In actuality, these texts are inseparable from their contexts, both historical and in terms of the work they are made to do as lodestars or fetishes of subsequent or concurrent practices. An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.

Ideologies, in short, are what ideologies do.

Ideology is also the will to govern, and how that will seeks to embody itself in steering the ship of state. It embodies a particular (ideal) relation between state and citizens.

It can be useful to use some of the ideas about and from ideologies and the arguments for political analysis, but only if we remember that at best what we’re talking about are ideal types. The world of politics is far far messier than any ideological prescription. As is policy.

Where we can reasonably argue that there is meaning in what we say is where we can identify a general orientation – and which forces have a sense of movement and momentum behind them. The big problem social democracy has is that it’s lost any sense that there is a coherent project. It’s lost any sense of working on the world to transform it.

Neoliberalism has both.

But neither has the coherence that their adherents – or many analysts – might think.

But what matters is that people think they do – it’s a truth effect in Foucault’s terms or a social fact in Durkheim’s. And there are still meaningful distinctions to be made – but they’re often to be found in the nature of the rhetoric and the framing of problems and the underlying assumptions rather than false propositions such as “if a state is bigger than x% of the economy it’s social democratic”. Most important are the effects ideologies create on thought and action, and people’s material circumstances, and in what they enable and what they constrain. All of those are somewhat artificial distinctions analytically, but they’re useful. What we should be looking at is how they frame that object called “society” and what principles they use to manipulate it and how they divide it up, how they create friends and enemies. It’s this sense in which concepts like “aspirationalism” and “social justice” – or “transparent information” – become imbued with both meaning and the capacity to be mobilised to do stuff.

And their ethical commitments are vital.

Elsewhere: Another segue from Jacques Chester at Troppo.

There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more.

- is such an incoherent notion. In part that would be because the bricks she’s used to construct her discourse (her word, not mine) now no longer fit together anywhere so neatly as they once did, because the mortar of her political obsessions has grown old and cracked. But I’m not particularly interested in doing that, so I’ll use her as a segue to a consideration of the latest shot in the “higher education wars” – an article today by Gavin Kitching entitled “Paralysed by Postmodernism”.

I’d have thought that Australian universities might be more accurately characterised as paralysed by cloying bureaucracy and crippled by underfunding, but anyway. Kitching is a Professor of Politics at UNSW. In a decade of teaching politics at tertiary level – on and off – I haven’t come across any of the scholarly work which underpins his professorial chair. No doubt that’s my problem, not his. But I do know the work of Professor John Frow, whose acerbic reply to Kitching in today’s ALR hasn’t been published on the web. I don’t actually care much for Kitching’s argument. You know as soon as he starts going on about Alan Sokal exactly what’s coming, and Frow is quite right to suggest that the notion of “postmodernism” in the context of academia lacks all, well, rigour. If there was ever a postmodern tide that washed through the academy, it well and truly receded about a decade or so ago. But I dare say that the culture warriors – like the largely imaginary object of their critique – never bother much with empirical evidence or that self-same truth they claim to hold in such high regard. Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t want to run across Frow as a thesis examiner if you had any weak points in your argument or methodological meanderings. His critique of Kitching’s lack of rigour and offences against logic is withering, and justified.

But what concerns me is something we had a foretaste of last year – with the unprincipled attacks on QUT PhD student Michael Noonan and his film project on disability and comedy – which sought to use him and his works as political footballs in the service of several agendas, some of which had a lot more to do with very mundane matters internal to QUT than the grandiloquent claims made about the defence of scholarly values in which they were clothed. Kitching attempts to prove his thesis, as Frow observes, not by engaging with the works of any of the philosophers he criticises (and he doesn’t handle Wittgenstein very adroitly either), but by examining – as evidence – a sample of honours theses from his own School.

Kitching claims that the students who choose to write on theoretical topics are “the best and the brightest”. That may or may not be so – we have no way of veryifying the assertion, and perhaps some of those who pursued theses in empirical political science at UNSW may differ. As Frow points out, to show that there is a lack of precision in student work on Foucauldian concepts shows nothing whatever relevant about the rigour of Michel Foucault’s thought itself, and given that one would not expect work of the same standard as a doctoral thesis from an honours student, is totally meaningless unless there’s some way of assessing whether there’s more “rigour” in the work of those students who might write from a perspective informed by, say, John Rawls or Jurgen Habermas. In other words, Kitching’s own essay lacks even a basic standard of methodological rigour, and his conclusions are therefore worthless except as petitio principi assertions.

But, since the golden thread that runs through a thousand and one attacks on “postmodernism”, and a thread that is woven tightly into Albrechtsen and Ali’s webs, is the political claim that the consequences of such scholarship is ethical relativism, a Professor of Politics might wish to consider ethics in this context. It’s here that I find it astonishing that Kitching can blithely hold up work by students in his own School as objects of ridicule in his polemic. In some, but not all, universities, honours theses are publicly available. Doctoral theses are universally so, because they are public contributions to knowledge.

But many universities do not make honours dissertations available for public dissemination, because they haven’t been examined in the same way as higher degrees (a process more rigorous, if you like, than normal peer review) and because their point is to train a student for higher level research rather than produce knowledge from research practice. What Kitching is actually doing, of course, is not using the insights of these student authors but rather using them as data for the point he (so sloppily) makes. Had Kitching made a proposal to his own university for ethics clearance (though perhaps articles in the papers and books for Allen and Unwin don’t actually constitute research), I very much doubt that it would be granted. And it should not have been. The idea that students’ work should be appropriated to make polemical and political points is an ethically reprehensible one. These theses were not written to form part of some sort of public political intervention, and Kitching very plainly has a duty of care to students who study in his own university and discipline.

I suspect this trap – which incredibly the anti-relativist Kitching fails to see he’s fallen into – arose because he’s trying to take the “dumbing down” narrative beloved of Kevin Donnelly and his epigones and the “postmodernism is evil” one employed in a different if overlapping culture wars context, and to conflate them. But if he’s actually concerned with standards in his own School, and here obviously the examiners and supervisors of student dissertations have input into quality just as much if not more than the students themselves, surely a Professor is well placed to raise such concerns internally? And surely that would be the way an ethical scholar concerned for rigour and truth would behave?