1) It is striking how deep the will goes to fulfil idiotic demands from the state. I know of no single department in the UK that refuses to submit Research Exercise responses. In almost every department these exercises are a major consideration in hiring staff too. In every department there are people taking on managerial roles with responsibility for these things. We need to find ways of letting anyone who does this know that they are enemies and that we intend on destroying them.
2) The impact agenda is a means of measuring arts against sciences. It is no surprise that arts do badly, in that we don’t make medicines that save lives etc. There are two options: either we take seriously the idea that the arts and humanities can be involved in the total transformation of the world and the redemption of history (that we should say that’s what we’re up to on impact forms; including the raising of the dead and the transformation of historic suffering into eschatological justice); or, the arts and humanities should withdraw absolutely from participating in any of these measurements.
3) Participating in state strategies for measuring impact and the like is all part of a race to get one’s hands one a meagre amount of funding. Currently state funding in the UK in the arts and humanities is equivalent to the turnover of a single medium-sized university. It’s a race we should refuse to participate in, and those who continue to do so should be left to rot.
4) The institution of secondary literature ought to be abolished immediately. People who believe in sustaining it ought to be punished by being forced to read it. This is made more urgent by the current frameworks in the US and the UK (alongside the conditions for getting permanent academic jobs), which require enormous amounts of publishing, usually of very poor material.
5) The situation of thought in the arts and humanities is strange. In the last last 40 years, extremely far left and critical ideas have prevailed (my God, if one thinks of the extreme right one finds Foucault.) We should have no qualms about saying that we understand that people are given the opportunity to do research because of what they believe (rather than the myth of “being good at research”), and that this in general is in no bad thing. Just that the problem is the things you have to believe in to get a job these days are professionalism, publishing, management, shininess, arse-licking, etc, all of which run directly counter to the widely-acknowledged best thinking in the arts and humanities. This is a contradiction worthy of exploitation.
6) Fundamentally no-one has time for research. Everyone should be extremely explicit and public about the research that can’t be done under the current conditions.
7) It seems that one of the only options left for serious thought in the arts and humanities is outside of the universities. We should be starting conversations about counter- and anti-institutions. They should not take the form of the ridiculously bourgeois EGS/Birkbeck Institute for Humanities/Global Center for Advanced Studies and other ridiculous over-priced pseudo-critical finishing schools for hipsters run by already highly-paid professors. They should involve teaching courses to friends too, and learning from friends. Even a bunch of stoned people in a shed are capable today of producing critical thought far more advanced than most of what is said and done in universities.