INTRODUCTION TO THE
BARBER WHO READ HISTORY
Rowan Cahill and
Terry Irving
[‘Introduction’ to Rowan Cahill
and Terry Irving, The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History,
Bull Ant Press, St. Peters, 2021]
This book is a collection of our
writings authored individually or jointly during the writing, but mostly
following publication, of our co-authored Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits
and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010). They cover a broad range of topics
concerning the writing and practice of history, the social and political roles
of historians, the nature of the modern academy and of academia, and
biographical and autobiographical portraits. In common is their linkage to the
writing of our book, and to robust discussions and feedback following its
publication. In common too is a conception of the scholar as an activist,
taking part in public discourse and movements for social change.
The pieces were published in a variety
of online and paper-based publications and sites, their circulation boosted by
our uses of social media and various data bases. So far as the modern Australian
academy is concerned, and we have honorary associations in this system, these
sorts of publishing outlets tend to be frowned upon, and the use of them
discouraged. They fly under the radar of career determining algorithms and ratings’
convolutions, systems which limit, restrain, and confine humanities’ academics
in particular, regarding what they write and publish.
While Rowan had previous
experience of online journalism and commentary, for Terry it was a new world,
his long involvement in writing, editing and publishing confined to the
traditional paper-based world of academia. It was our publisher of Radical
Sydney at the time, Phillipa McGuinness, who strongly suggested as we came
to the pointy end of publication, that if we wanted our book to be successful
it would be advantageous if we took to social media and became proactive in
promoting the book, rather than letting the publisher do all the running. So we
jumped in, and with increasing confidence expanded our online work and
visibility. Suffice to say, at the time of writing the book is still in print
and selling after a decade; not an insignificant achievement in the world of
Australian publishing.
The immediacies of online
publishing and feedback, and the reach, nationally and internationally of our
online work were enjoyable and appreciated. The data bases we used provided
ongoing statistics regarding views, downloads, the location of users, and the
use and citation of our works. It was feedback well beyond that of the limits of
our paper-based experiences. And as we variously dealt with copyright issues
and put more of our respective back-catalogues of work online, they too
benefited in terms of exposure and use.
We had come to the writing of Radical
Sydney as labour historians, but from different biographical and work-related
backgrounds. Rowan’s work had largely been conducted outside of academia in
trade union and social movement publications. That said, during the writing of
the book he was also engaged in doctoral work (successfully completed in 2013).
Terry’s long and successful work, on the other hand, had been conducted within
academia, in peer reviewed journals, books and forums.
We had co-authored previously in
the 1960s and 1970s as new leftists, but now spent considerable time in the new
century working at creating a common and seamless voice, and a form of historical
writing that was at once authoritative, instructive, enjoyable, and readable by
audiences beyond the specialist niches of academia. A result of this process
was the focusing of existing reservations and disquiets we both had about
historical writing, in particular labour and social movement history, and about
academic knowledge production generally within the modern neoliberal academy,
and with its dissemination.
We adopted the term ‘radical
history’ for the type of historical research and writing we saw ourselves engaged
in and advocates for. In our essay ‘Radical History and Mainstream History’ we
identified this as having three distinguishing features: its subject matter,
its political stance, and its relationship to its audience. As we explained:
Radical
historians write about the struggles of disempowered people to stand up to
their oppressors and exploiters, and to take control of their lives by
attacking coercive authority and by socializing power. They tell stories of
resistance and agency, not of ruling and maintaining order, which are the signs
of ruling class history. Radical historians, secondly, are partisan. They write
with a social purpose, and in doing so they draw on radical philosophies and
methods. They write history as a political act. Thirdly, although writing about
the past, they want to encourage people in the present to resist and rebel.
Because the radical past was always being made anew their work is pregnant with
possibilities, alerting their readers to the possibilities for action in their
own situations. This has consequences for how they write. Readers must be given
space to reflect on the present as well as the past. It is not enough to tell
stories; the stories have to be shaped by theory, sharpened by the historian’s
passion, and riddled with unresolved political questions. Moreover, whether
writing for other radical intellectuals, engaging with scholarship and theory,
or seeking a wider audience, radical historians place a high value on clarity
of expression, avoiding like the plague the over-theoretical language of
academic in-groups, and their self-aggrandizing citation of trendy thinkers.
Embedded in this formulation of
radical history is a critique of the modern academy. We were not spring
chickens with regard to critiquing universities. Between its creation in 1967
and its winding up in 1972, we were amongst the founders and part of a radical
education experiment, the Sydney Free U. This arose out of contemporary student
and staff dissatisfactions within Sydney University, and more generally our opposition
to how we saw university education at the time, with its flawed emphasis on ‘training
for the economy’, and with its continuation of the ‘forced-feed learning
techniques’ that began in the school system. The Free U envisaged another sort
of academy and educational experience. Based in rented premises off-campus,
this had democratic and self-management principles at its core, and worked at
bringing together scholarship and activism for social change. At its height
during the Summer of 1968-1969, some 300 people were involved.
Following publication of Radical
Sydney in 2010, and nearly forty years after the Free U closed its doors,
we again focused on and wrote critically about the modern academy. The economic
imperative was still central, but now more so than ever. Now, well and truly, the
human and complex processes of teaching, learning, research, and knowledge
production are toxically superintended by business models and corporate-style
managements and processes, couched in weasel words and spin. Decision making
was and is delivered by fait accompli, put in place top-down by highly paid
elite advisors and HR professionals, and administered by compliant bureaucrats.
While democratic governance gets a run in formal and public descriptions of
governance and decision making within universities, this tends in reality to be
lip service and as scarce as hen’s teeth. In many Australian academic
workplaces, while the word collegiality is thrown around with abandon, in fact caution,
timidity, fear are toxic.
The worth of research and
writing in this production model is less about its social worth, its
contribution to the creation of a better world, its address of social
injustices, and the promotion of a common wealth, than it is about how much funding it attracts
and where it is published in a hierarchy of ranked journals and a hierarchy of
academic publishers. In turn this fosters in the humanities and social
sciences, scholarly genres largely accessible only to fellow scholars trained
in the genre discourses.
We regard all this as tragic,
and it was a focus of our writings post-Radical Sydney. Knowledge, understandings,
and ideas with transformative social, political and cultural possibilities and
potentials are locked up behind the paywalls of academic journals published by
multinational publishers, who benefit from the labour of academics who they do
not pay; and in prohibitively expensive books with small print-runs, often set
and printed at low cost, that few read.
The multinationals make vast
fortunes from this process, and academics buckle down, keep noses to the
grindstone, because this is how you keep the roof over your head and food on
the table. And this is how you advance careers. As for the work produced,
novelist Umberto Eco saw it clearly in his medieval murder mystery novel The
Name of the Rose (1980). Central in this is a monastic library in which the
books and their contents are ruthlessly and murderously limited by the
librarian with regard to their access and reading, the library acting as a
knowledge prison that silences books. Treated this way, argues main character
Brother William of Baskerville, books are “dumb” because without readers, they
are just collections of signs that produce “no concepts”. As with books, so too
with academic articles. In the writings collected in this book we challenge
this system, both in the saying, and the doing.
As 2021 got under way,
authoritative data began to be reported by the Australian media on the
devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and associated border
security laws on Australian universities. Data had been available previously,
but it was anecdotal and piecemeal. Now,
according to data released in February (2021) by Universities Australia, the
peak body representing Australia’s university administrations, it is clear that
at least 17,300 academic jobs have gone, with the ominous expectation more will
follow. Not included in this count are the jobs lost amongst the precariat, casualties
of the slash and burn of courses and programmes across Australia and attendant organisational
changes. This large body of insecure university workers was estimated in
mid-2018 at 94,500 people, mainly in teaching-only roles. They were, in effect,
the engine-room of the university system.
Like on old-time ocean liners in
the days of steam, these were the unseen stokers deep below decks, stoking the
boilers that enabled the decks and photo opportunities above to glisten and
shine. It included many young researchers stitching together incomes on a
semester to semester basis, trying to earn a living, many striving to build
future academic careers. On the eve of the pandemic, for example, the
University of Wollongong (NSW) topped the bill with insecure work; according to
Gender Equality Agency data (2016-2017), it had the highest insecure workforce of
all Australian universities, coming in at a whopping 76.8 per cent. While we
have not seen supporting data at the time of writing regarding job losses in
the precariat overall, anecdotally we understand that the biggest part of this is
in the humanities and social sciences.
Hard data too of the parlous financial
straits of the universities emerged, something their administrations had tried
to paper over during 2020, and which the media had obligingly passed on. As the
result of the 2020 pandemic crisis, gone are the billions of dollars long
harvested by Australian universities via international student fees ($10
billion banked during 2019), with the largest percentage of this coming from
China (37 per cent in 2019). Prior to 2020, this was a financial booty Australian
university administrations recklessly banked and planned on, often ignoring
cautionary advice to the contrary. In 2019, for example, this provided 27 per
cent of their revenue. Given the state of Australia’s deteriorating relations
with China in particular at the time of writing, and the resurgence of White Australia
attitudes that have re-emerged blatantly in recent times, this treasure chest
is unlikely to be refilled any time soon, if ever.
Metaphorically, and overall,
this is not a James Cook/June 1770 Endeavour situation, where your ship
is holed below the waterline on the Barrier Reef, so you toss cannons
overboard, lighten ship, then beach and repair it and successfully continue the
voyage. Rather, in our view, this is more akin to a Daniel Defoe/Robinson
Crusoe situation, where one is cast ashore on a desert island because your
ship has sunk, and a new beginning has to be figured out and built with
whatever can be salvaged. If we are correct, then this will be a long process.
Hopefully, despite being shattered and demoralised, the staff who are left will
be able to contribute from below to that re-building.
One thing is certain; a lot of
fine, critical, dissident scholars are never going to be able to work as they
once did in the ‘publish or perish’ regime. They are now outside the system,
and their jobs have gone; some have contractually burnt their bridges in the
process of redundancy. If they want to remain active and research and write and
publish, they will have to finds ways and means and alternatives outside the niches
and highly specialist routes they were trained to travel.
They will have to build, in
effect, a new and autonomous intellectual sphere, and wherever they find
suitable sites for this – in the thinking of ecological and other social
movements, in Free Schools and Universities, in communities strategising to
escape oppression, among radical labour thinkers, etc – their unifying
experience will be that of building a moral universe guided by socialist
principles and politics rather than academic careerism.
And the same applies to radical scholars
who remain in the universities. Their task will be just as difficult: to
reclaim the universities for learning and scholarship by resisting the current
neoliberal, audit culture; and to orientate their teaching and research to the
autonomous intellectual sphere generated by the struggles of movements for
social change outside the academy.
We hope that our words and thoughts
and examples in this book go some way towards helping both groups.
Some of our essays are quite
short; we include them because we want to show our thematic and intellectual
consistency. Readers interested in the details regarding original publication
of the various pieces, and footnoting where it was provided, will find these in
the Notes at the end of the book.
******
NOTES
The
founding manifesto of the Sydney Free University, ‘The Lost Ideal’, was
published in the Sydney University student paper Honi Soit, 3 October
1967. It is available on the Reason in Revolt site at
https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/htm/a000522.htm For a later
generation’s review of the Free U experiment and discussion of its current
relevance, see Nina Dillon Britton, ‘The Free University: A people’s history’, Honi
Soit, 26 October 2020
<https://honisoit.com/2020/10/the-free-university-a-peoples-history/>.
For a powerful critique of modern universities, and for a practical vision of
change, see Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What universities actually
do and why it’s time for radical change, Monash University Publishing,
Clayton, Victoria, 2019. Connell was one of the founders of the Sydney Free
University.
March
2021
