Dear Haim and All,
I agree with most of what you write, but want to point to some views that pushing impact is actually counter-productive, to which you also allude. Two such views come to my mind and surely there are many more. One is Adorno's claim that Kafka has much more of impact than Brecht in denouncing capitalism (Adorno even analyses the very term 'impact'- worth revisiting by those who are not prejudiced against Adorno) and Jacques Ranciere's discussion of the impact of 'Madame Bovary'. If we want to include cinema then we can mention the well known impact of Godard on television advertising. In short, there is always a possibility of subversion, intended or not, when serving the enemy. Whether it will change anything in a wider scale, I'm not sure, though.
Greetings,
Ewa Mazierska
________________________________________
From: Announcement list for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Valentine, Jeremy [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 10 November 2012 21:21
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Against 'Impact'
Like (a lot).
-----Original Message-----
From: Announcement list for the British Association of Film, Television
and Screen Studies [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Haim
Bresheeth
Sent: 10 November 2012 17:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Against 'Impact'
Michael,
I have read your article on the Putney Debater. Well put, indeed. As
academics, we have failed to counter the privatisation of higher
education, and our union, UCU, has also failed to realise the great
danger of this process. First the government (of Labour, at the time!)
made education into a commodity by marketing it and forcing HEIs to
charge the full rate, and then they continued by putting the market
values into REF. There was hardly as substantial opposition to REF, for
obvious and complex reasons, but that meant we have played into the
hands of the marketisers, and now there seems no way back to liberal
education.
Would Einstein rate at all under 'Impact'? Would Freud, Webber, Keynes,
Russell do any better? and I am not mentioning Marx, who had the kind of
impact which is not quite appreciated by REF... I can hardly think of
one intellectual whose work is likely to rate high under the real impact
criteria. Unless you can show the colour of money in your research, this
government does not believe in its importance. In a country with three
parties, all of them right wing, all of them inclined against social
change, equality and grass-roots democracy, it is hardly surprising that
academics have also become part of the bulwark of the middle class
against democratic change.
Many academics have been centrally involved in struggles on the left,
but very few have really fought the privatisation of higher education.
RAE and REF are examples of us as a community becoming co-opted, acting
as part of the controlling interests and hoping that by low-towing we
may come out better than others. RAE and REF have been divisive and
corrosive even under Labour, and now under the coalition of the rich and
comfortable they are so much more so. But how many of us are ready to
realise this, to act on it?
I think we were silent partners in our own destruction, collaborators in
the process of shackling our gifts to the mast of capital. And I am not
saying that social impact is not important for me; of course it is, but
not the kind of impact REF is searching for (in vain, in most cases...).
The advancement of society, the value of knowledge to its healthy
operation, the potential of democratic change - this is the kind of
impact our systems will squelch and squeeze out.
Please feel free to disagree with my innate pessimism....
Haim
On 10 November 2012 15:41, Michael Chanan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates.
> Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals.
> However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about
> 'impact'. So, she'd found out about the institutional regime of
> evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is
> this the game that applicants ought to be playing?
>
> Read more at Putney Debater, http://bit.ly/SLh8nx
>
> Michael Chanan
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