Gender trouble at the Birkbeck Boys’ Institute for the Humanities

MH

‘It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do’

The BIH, or Boys’ Institute for the Humanities, as the Birkbeck Institute is widely known, has had a coming of age – that is to say, gender. Long-simmering complaints in the College over the apparent inability of the Institute’s directors (Žižek and Douzinas) to think of women who might have something to contribute to its extensive programming finally boiled over when the Club’s international division (Žižekian) could muster only one female speaker among the thirteen it advertised for ‘On the Idea of Communism’. Given the publicity surrounding the event, and the already-existing disquiet about the conference organizers’ proud declaration of unanimity among all the speakers, in advance, on one ‘precise and strong thesis’, this was finally something that the Institute’s steering committee could no longer ignore.

It agreed to set guidelines for organizers of future events requiring them to ensure that speaker lists do not ‘over-represent’ any particular group. No sooner said than undone: the Institute then went on to advertise a debate on Cosmopolitanism (for the weekend prior to the Communism event) without a single woman speaker, leaving the director scrambling around for excuses, about how precipitate publication of the programme (ten days before the event) had given the impression that there were no women speakers, when there was actually to be… one more added to the publicity.

This is not just an institutional issue for Birkbeck, of course, but a symptom of the political culture surrounding the Žižek–Badiou ‘Gang of Two’, for whom the whole thirty-year period of the New Left must be travestied and its political gains forgotten (feminism, anyone?) – especially within the Left itself – in order to clear the ground for the ‘return to reason’ represented by the latest French philosophico-political vanguard.

Institutional anxiety about the event was intensified when the combination of its success at attracting an audience and its pricing policy (Ł100 and Ł45 for students) placed the Idea of Communism in danger of looking like it was even more in tune with the times than it realized: to wit, a cynical and hypercritical financial scam. But when a group of students gave advance warning of interrupting proceedings they were quickly bought off with the promise of a free live video room and a little platform time.

By the time the day arrived, an alternative, ‘updated’ programme had been composed (it is said by students at SOAS). This sprinkled women speakers in among the boys throughout and replaced Badiou’s Introduction and Žižek’s final remarks with talks by Stuart Hall and Sandra Harding, respectively; adding for good measure, Subcomandante Marcos on ‘Intergalactic Decentralized Communism’, a Skills Sharing Workshop on ‘Alter-Communisms!’ and a concluding ‘Collective Trance: Channelling Karl Marx’. Jean-Luc Nancy, whose participation had been heralded as his being ‘in attendance’ throughout, but not speaking from the platform – in the end, he was unable to make it – was to be joined by Christine Delphy and ‘members of migrant and feminist groups’.

Thus, for the first day, Angela Davis on ‘Women, Race and Class’, Lynne Segal on ‘What Feminism Did to Communism’ and Nancy Hartsock on ‘The Proliferation of Radical Standpoints’ interspersed themselves between Michael Hardt, Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward. At the conference itself, Hardt acknowledged at the outset of his talk that this would certainly have been a more interesting event. But he spoilt that a bit by then emphasizing, US-style, how much his thought owed to the women speakers on the ‘fantasy’ programme – sending some bemused listeners back for another look at the index of Empire. Day two saw Silvia Federici and Vandana Shiva offering papers on ‘Creating Communities of Care’ and ‘Ecofeminism and the Challenge to Western Communism’; with Sheila Rowbotham teaming up with Huw Beynon to oppose Rancičre’s ‘Communism without Communists?’ with ‘Communists without Communism’, and Hilary and Steven Rose sympathizing, ‘Alas Poor Marx’. (It was a characteristic feature of the conference itself that few of the speakers dwelt on Marx, to the puzzlement and annoyance of a large section of the audience. There is little room for Marx when Badiou is setting the agenda for unanimous agreement.) The programme for the final day pitched Donna Haraway (‘On Interspecies Communism’) against Vattimo’s ‘Weak Communists’, and bell hooks (‘Ain’t I a Communist?’) against Balso’s Badiou masquerade, ‘Communism: A Hypothesis for Philosophy, An Impossible Name for Politics?’

All of which leaves a question hanging in the air: who are the more imaginative political thinkers: Badiou, Žižek, Rancičre, Negri and the rest, or the anonymous students of SOAS? It’s not hard to imagine what even old Bertie Brecht would have answered to that.

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