Justin Murphy podcast, “HAU did this happen? With Digital Editor Enrique Martino (live)”
September 15, 2019
Justin Murphy: I've always admired David Graeber so I was surprised to read Claire Lehmann's recent article about him and the anthropology journal HAU. Turns out that the Digital Editor of HAU hangs around my private forum and he's promised to tell us the whole story. I have also emailed Graeber's agent inviting him to come on for his own episode, to tell the whole story as he sees it.
Please note the HAU Digital Editor is autonomous and independent of the journal's editorial collective and board. He speaks in a personal capacity and does not represent the views of the Society or its editors.
Justin: Today we are going to be joined by, in fact we are already joined, by someone named Enrique Martino who is the digital editor for an anthropology journal called HAU, by the way real quick Enrique am I even pronouncing that correctly how do you pronounce it HAU or I don't know Maori?
Enrique: Depending on how you try to pronounce it I’ll know which side of the controversy you’re on.
Justin: Ok, I'll stick with HAU even if it reveals my ignorance. So for those of you who might have no idea who Enrique is or what HAU is or you might just have no clue at all what I'm talking about I'll give you a very quick introduction basically a few days ago Claire Lehmann of Quillette wrote an article about a recent drama in anthropology that David Graeber seems to be at the center of and the way Claire Lehman tells the story is that you had this anthropology journal called HAU and it was kind of struggling and there was a very kind of passionate and ambitious editor of this journal who was trying to do everything he could to whip it into shape and make it successful but people like David Graeber and a kind of coterie of people around David Graeber pretty much tried to sabotage this person, his name is Giovanni da Col, the editor in question here, and basically all I know is that David Graeber vehemently disputes the account that Claire Lehmann puts forward and Claire Lehmann vehemently disputes the account that David Graeber is putting forward. There's all kinds of back and forth and he said she said and frankly a lot of it is kind of bizarre and hard to judge for yourself. There are all these screenshots floating around some of the documents you see make it look like this editor of the journal Giovanni is a kind of deranged aggressive madman who's extremely abusive and fails to pay his you know journal workers and is exploitive and even verbally and physically aggressive. So there’s an an anecdote in one of the allegations about him literally choking out by the neck a employee or collaborator with the journal
Enrique: He wasn’t an employee of the journal no
Justin: Yes we're gonna go over all of it you'll get to kind of explain everything from your perspective. I'm just saying those are some allegations and then you talk. I actually did a lot of messaging recently with Giovanni and he has a very different account of it and when you hear a little bit more about the details a lot of these allegations don't seem so as scandalous as as they seem at first and so we're gonna turn it over to Enrique in just a minute to give his side of the story and what kind of unpack who Enrique is and and how he sees it and in all of this and then he'll unpack his story but very briefly before we kick off I what I want to do really is explain to my audience why I'm even interested in this and and this will be kind of the last that I talk it's gonna be mostly Enrique talking. I just wanted to kind of situate this to most of the people watching this and who know my stuff and my work know that I'm not a journalist and I never really sought out any type of role or function in a journalistic sense and to this day.
I'm not especially interested in being some kind of investigative reporter or like I'm not trying to get deep into the weeds of current affairs and you know make my show this kind of place where I tell you what's going on in the world in a kind of breaking news sort of way but I have become quite interested in this story for much larger general reasons and I think these are the reasons why you to people listening to this might also find this quite an interesting case study because from my perspective ever since I retired from academia a few months ago for those of you who don't know I was a professor for almost six years in England, and I left academia and I realized that when I started hearing about drama within academia I started hearing it and seeing it in a very different light because what I think is going on here is that academia is actually a very weird and twisted world that most normal people watching from the outside, really, there are a lot of things that normal people really don't understand and I have this kind of a unique position now where I was very recently you know a career academic so I know very first-hand have a lot of those things work and I'm a social scientist so I have a kind of I hope somewhat sophisticated model of what's really going on in an underlying sense but now that I'm retired from academia I have no alliances within academia I have absolutely no reason to mince my words or to keep my mouth shut about anything so I feel like I'm in this unique situation where I can kind of investigate and and explain what's really going on in a lot of these weird bizarre confusing academic dramas and so that's one reason why I'm kind of interested in this and for some reason I've kind of become in the center of it. Like David Graeber has been messaging me and Giovanni's messaging me and so on and Enrique here who were joined by today is actually a member of my forum, my Discord server so in a weird way I am actually kind of somehow involved in this so I figured you know why not let's do this let's I'll try to read everything I'll try to really figure it out as best as I can as honestly as I can and I'll talk to all the relevant people and who knows maybe my weird internet projects can play a weird kind of journalistic role, kind of clarifying the underlying truth of these weird dramas where people are saying totally different things and frankly where sometimes people's lives are really being destroyed. I'm excited by the opportunity of possibly playing some kind of objective mediator role to you know let the truth of whatever the situation might be I frankly don't even know what it is yet but to let that truth get out there in some way. So this is an experiment this is kind of the most like journalistic kind of conversation or work that I've done since I can remember so and that's why and I think I hope you all will also be interested in this because frankly I think you're gonna see more and more of conflicts like these coming out of academia and often what's really going on under the hood is much larger political battles so I'm going to try to translate these current affairs and these ambiguous confusing controversies into helping people decode like the larger political structures and conflicts that are actually playing out underneath the hood because it's usually much deeper and more interesting kind of abstract issues that are really at work in why these types of controversies are kicking off in academia more and more. So that's my two cents that's what I'm bringing to the table and why I'm interested in this. I just kind of wanted to set that up for people. Now Enrique I would like to turn it over to you first of all if you don't mind I just want to ask you a few things about yourself. Could you tell us like how did you first get involved in HAU, the anthropology journal we're gonna be talking about?
Enrique: So I suppose it's a slow entry and then suddenly I kind of found myself I suppose at the wrong place at the wrong time or right place at the right time. I was a HAU author. I submitted up my book manuscript in 2015 even before I completed my PhD, so I got a bit ahead of myself, which is also part of the story in 2014-2015 all these young academic wanted to publish in HAU, everyone was submitting their work and so I was one of those who kind of added to the pipeline. Then I was involved as an Associate Editor a year after, during the time where there was an new Interim Editor [Michael Lambek]. I didn't consider myself working for HAU since all I did was review and help special issues through without pay or anything. I was also on the editorial board is a group of like 80 scholars anthropologist mostly who read the submitted papers anonymously. And then at some point early last year [in 2018] because I saw the type of social media HAU was doing and the type of social media that other anthropology journals were doing was basically just convergence towards the same, it was very boring very repetitive stuff and then so I kind of proposed that maybe I join the social media team and try out a few things and then basically my first week so to say on the job, it was a group of nine or ten people, Graber wrote his apology which is what kick-started the whole public phase or stage of this ongoing controversy and then well the entire [social media] team obviously quit right away they're like ‘take my name off the website I don't want to be associated’ and then became part of this dynamic the first week of half of the Editorial Board resigning. Those academics that resigned and were on Twitter announced their resignation to big fanfare, getting hundreds of likes, the most likes they've ever gotten, so this kind of dynamic of social media also incentivized this defection from the editorial board and created the sense of disarray and collapse of the journal. They generate their own overwork 'toxicity' so to say by forcing everyone to keep pace with them, and their hyperdrive is immense, because they derive a lot of entertainment and self-satisfaction from this 'shitstorm' (many of them, mostly the younger ones have become online celebrities so to say, or acquired a new fame, e.g. tweets by Boellstorff announcing their resignation from the ed.board or for example Boellstorff saying “OA is viable. Maybe HAU can be saved. But GDC must go.” have received 100s of likes and retweet, which is truly exceptional in academic social media, no other message in their profile has even come close to receiving so much 'cheer' and 'applause'. All this creates an 'incentive' to 'defect' and these came on cue, excellent mediators and part of the ritualised public disgracing. Some if this ship-jumping was a salutary sieve, as there are clearly unbearable people you can’t have a level-headed and lucid exchange with. So that's why it's basically a social media story although there's a lot of background story I'll get into in a bit, which is the build-up to this because when the shitstorm was announced by Graeber and put in motion by a few other people through their petitions and release of these leaked documents they you also, at that point and before that point I actually had no idea about any these I suppose rumours, allegations, things like this. One of the things I found weird is when everyone starts talking about ‘oh you didn't hear, you haven't heard, he did this, this happened’, and the fact that you hadn't heard before is all a way to show you that know you weren't in the in the inside circles of anthropology because you hadn't heard of it. It’s a typical way for secret societies to entice new members to join and keep their hidden made up information have some kind of effect in the real world, like ‘there is more that you will ever know unless you join our circle’ quackery.
Justin: Real quick, how long were you working with how before this kicked off.
Enrique: I suppose two years as an Associate Editor
Justin: And you had never heard of any of these allegations before then?
Enrique: No, not at all, I'm not very well connected, so I did my PhD in Germany, in Berlin, they don’t have much conference funding. I'm now in Spain. It was all very much an American based in Chicago thing, through Graeber’s network that happened.
Justin: Right, so for people listening it's probably worth mentioning that you Enrique are kind of uniquely comfortable and free just talking about what happened because you are relatively as you said unconnected and you don't really have career prospects that are going to be helped or harmed by anything you say today is that right?
Enrique: Yeah I mean basically I'm immune in Spain. In Spain if people hear about hautalk they'll would brush it off. There's definitely bigger issues at stake also in academia in Spain around precarity and things like this. I mean my independence is relative because I am now HAU Digital Editor, which as the only remaining member of the social media team my role didn't exist before, I have had to take over quite a few things that I suppose previously was done by Giovanni and a few other people, like website management, social media, different things. So I'm part of the editorial collective but my role is completely autonomous from them so I'm Digitla Editor, and the Editorial Collective do the editorial work.
Justin: Okay so in other words you are still invested in HAU and the brand and the journal so you do have a horse in this race and in that sense you still believe in the journal and you're a part of it and and you support it, is that right?
Enrique: I suppose yes I mean I am not an official emissary in any way and I'm not I'm not a PR man or if I was I'm a terrible one anyway because the past 15 months have a non-stop reputational destruction of HAU. And I'm not actually particularly anti David Graeber I mean I'm quite directly inspired by his work but when it comes to HAU, it's a strange thing to witness because you can see his every step of thinking on twitter, because to me, what I feel, with the information I know, some of which I can share today, to me it seems like Graeber is like the feeling I get when I tried to for example untie a knot or operate some kind of mechanical contraption, I can't tell what's going on, pulling on the wrong strings, loosing a sense of causality and a sense of the shape of this corner of reality. Graeber I feel like he's losing and you can kind of tell so in a sense he's kind of left-wing equivalent of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I mean Taleb I think I respect more because he's always fully honest and he's kind of chaotic because he operates on the limit of a rational and that's it's kind of his field but with Graeber it's much more of the strange emergence of a guru figure, I mean he reminds me a bit of the Bhagwan in Wild Wild Country, he combines petulance and morals force he wants to become you know the great, the king of great guys so to say, and it's a strange procedure because there's a lot of tricks or even con-artistry involved because what he does he just asserts things confidently, he gives you his confidence so you don't have to think for yourself or create your own timeline based on the available information. He just asserts things, very confidently, which is I suppose why Taleb likes him because they mirror themselves that way.
Justin: Okay great so we're just kind of building a picture and the minds of our audience of kind of who you are. So when David Graeber wrote his apology, essentially everyone who was working for HAU kind of focked away and fled the scene and they didn't want to be associated with the drama but you were one of the few people who stayed and you are right now the Digital Editor but you speak in a perfectly personal capacity you're not kind of representing the journal in any way today is that right?
Enrique: Yeah, definitely
Justin: Right but listeners should note that you obviously are still on board with the journal so in some sense you know if people are trying to suss out how your biases might lie it would be kind of with defending the journal, arguably, which isn't a problem I just want to kind of lay things out clearly about who you are and who you represent or whatever. So how well do you know Giovanni, the editor who's at the center of this controversy?
Enrique: I've never actually met him. The thing is it, as an author I do remember and then I do get a sense of how the people started relating to him, I can understand how they I suppose incorporated him in their own subconscious as this type of demanding figure because he was quite, he was un unorthodox editor in the sense that would write emails about you know reminding you of your deadlines which when you have a manuscript due or a deadline, that's the one thing you don't want to do to trigger someone's anxiety, someone's stress etc, So he probably wrote I don't know hundreds of emails a day when he was editor, I received a few of them in total, but other than that it was just editorial matters.
Justin: Okay so why don't we start with the apology written by David Graeber that in your words kind of kicked everything off, I think you said something to that effect, could you walk us through a little bit about what exactly David Graeber apologized for and what was true and false in that statement?
Enrique: So I suppose Graeber will be able to explicate this more but I think he held the door open for a series of people that he had been working with to gather petitions and testimonies around their experiences at HAU, as HAU staff under Giovanni da Col, and so the apology was directed at them and it was vague, he wanted to let them speak and make their case and open up a space for them, and a few days later then their petition came out on this blog called footnotes. He did play some naivete because there is more documents that revealed he was since late 2017, he was very much part of the committee of the coup, so to say, ‘what can we put together what information can we gather whose testimony can we cite in order to basically create a shitstorm to force Giovanni's hand into resigning and then so I suppose that was the strategy. But then it came at a strange moment because in 2017 HAU was already being restructured, so Chicago University Press had I suppose leased HAU, to publish it and take overall production responsibilities, copy-editing etc things that have been done quite informally before or semi-professionally, and even Giovanni da Col wasn't any more in charge, HAU was taken over by a Board of Trustees, which were 10 academics who also then fled the scene in June 2018 mostly, because it's just too much to deal with, and then even though they had read all their all the petitions of accusations that were circulated privately by Graber before that. I mean I had no idea I wasn't in these private inner circles, so then I think the petition can only understood, the petition is June 2018, but the backstory here, the build up that can explain why and how the petition unleashed hautalk as a kind of shitstorm and the many many effects of it, we'd have to look at HAU before, I I didn't know that much about it, but I did I suppose participate and observe it along the way and like other anthropologist too so suddenly its a moment for the discipline to turn its eye onto itself become participants and observers into the crisis of a publishing outfit or a type of startup which is HAU. But what's clearly happening is also many many symptoms, the searing and kind of tectonic tensions within academia between generations, between employed and underemployed, between professors and students, between various various groups, and a whole cast of these pomo ‘activist-scholars’, and that's all kind of coming together through the shitstorm. So its quite difficult to untangle because a lot of it has nothing to do with HAU, a lot of it's basically about real issues elsewhere.
Justin: So that’s really good, I want to get your take on what the underlying mechanisms and issues are but let's say just a little bit longer on the details of the case for people who are totally confused, could you maybe, one way to attack this is to say did you read Claire Lehman’s article.
Enrique: Yeah, definitely
Justin: Would you say that that article was generally true as far as you could tell or were there any notable falsehoods or errors in that article that you could tell?
Enrique: So the article is quite good, quite a faithful retelling a reproduction of a report that was produced internally by HAU by this transition committee which was headed by a few scholars, one chair, 7 very famous professors, because those were available on Twitter o this account called hauleaks.
Justin: I just want to say for people listening, so just to summarize Claire Lehmans article, the title is something to the effect of David Graeber cancels a younger colleague, that's the basic message of the article, that David Graeber is basically being a bully towards someone who's younger who's much more precarious over issues or claims that are dubious at best and that so that's the overall story that Claire Lehmanns tells at least as far as I remember it, and I read the whole thing closely so that's what we're talking about so so go on.
Enrique: It's interesting, I mean the article, which is what Graeber is obsessing about, it that it made it seem that he had fabricated [sexual harassement allegations], that he tried to metoo Giovanni [on someone else behalf]. I mean its true, Graeber is right there were plenty of other issues involved [that were not about sexual harassment], but the other issues that are also very much talked about in these reports that Claire links to, to the hauleaks accounts, the key statement that this report makes is that a lot of the “allegations were presented as evidence themselves” and this quotation, but I think person produced report didn't really have like the sexual harassment fabrication in mind but rather things like financial misconduct which actually was like the primary charge so already in 2017, I can tell from reading the same reports, some of the people with HAU working under Giovanni were kind of concerned that he wasn't keeping books and so they suspected but he was embezzling and then they used that as like that first move so to say to try to get rid of Giovanni.
Justin: In your view is there any truth to the claims of financial misconduct?
Enrique: So that's one of the issues of utmost concern because that is a crime but HAU had a treasurer in late 2017 and then she did with the books right away and it's just like okay I mean everything's fine, he just didn't do the books which is I mean I don't know how books work and academics don’t know how to do books so it's also like the last thing on the list while you're building a small publishing startup.
Justin: So I mean that's your read on the matter that basically it's just the books weren't being done so it was a bit chaotic but there was no real wrongdoing as far as you know is that your is that your position on the matter?
Enrique: Well with the treasurer and now with the move to Chicago it's clear that there was no wrongdoing. And even then, starting from this initial accusation a few other things spun off, so I you know around the claim of Giovanni’s carelessness around the keeping of accounts, no one else saw the accounts etc, there was no treasurer during this period, etc. And when he heard that someone was like saying ‘oh you're an embezzler’, he was like ‘yo, no you can't say this that's a type of slander, you're accusing me of a crime’, and then in response to that people took that as a type of legal threat, ‘oh you say im slandering you, you are basically legally threatening me’, so that's where like the second that kind of accusation like bullying and threatening kind of comes in.
Justin: Okay, right, so in your view Claire Lehmans article is generally fair and isn't really erroneous or unreasonable in any particular way if I'm understanding you correctly and so far in your view the allegations of financial misconduct are mostly unfounded or completely unfounded as far as I'm getting from you
Enrique: Yeah completely unfounded it was a ridiculous, I mean it was idea of suspicions like to generate it, I suppose that if you don't know how the money is being held we haven't seen their accounts, then suspicions can be legitimate but then the treasurer makes like a full account and say okay there was no unusual expenditures, all wages have been paid etc by the end of 2017 . And we can get into the details in a bit but I think the important thing with Claire Lehmans article in Quillette is that [Graber tried to make] this metoo connection [because the other charges wouldn’t stick], and now Graeber is saying that he didn't even try to make make it about metoo, even though it's a bit disingenuous because from day one a lot of other kind of this cast of I suppose late stage academic pomos, kind of collapsing everything into social media terms used the hashtag metoo, they were like ‘this is anthropology’s metoo’, its like ‘uh, it had nothing to do with metoo, what are you talking about’, and then two prominent anthropologist who I can't name, but I will just say they are the equivalent of like Saira Rao, who is this basically radlib on twitter, they wrote kind of you know how this is the metoo moment anthropology and there’s even people making connections of HAU with, every few months this bubbles up, with like the Avitall Ronell case in NYU with the MIT Media Lab kind of horror story, and it's like ‘what’, but then I meam Graber when he now claims that he says he doesn't link it to metoo it's disingenuous because he's still talking about these like group of HAU staff as ‘survivors’ and he is now saying ‘oh but it was just about workplace wage issues’, but then no one in the history of world has ever referred to anyone working via email as a ‘survivor’, like they survive Taskrabbit, they survived MechanicalTurk, because they have been emailing a boss who's demanding and correcting and underpaying. And this is one of the key dynamics I mean Giovanni never met in any of these people, it was all a remote office.
Justin: So let's pause on this real quick because one of the more bizarre allegations when you look through all these documents is that, and when I say documents by the way people you should take note that Enrique is totally right that most of the documents are just someone somewhere alleging something but it's in the form of a Twitter screenshot so therefore that has the aesthetics of a kind of evidence even though it's really just kind of glorified hearsay so keeping that in mind, that what I mean when I say documents, but nonetheless these are you know formal letters that were written at one time or another from one person to another person so you know it's not nothing. But in any event one of the more bizarre allegations that you see in these documents is that at one point or another Giovanni is accused of promising haverkers to academics coming to his conferences or publishing for HAU. Can you speak to any of that you have any idea what that's referring to is there any truth to that.
Enrique: So I hadn't heard of this at all, but I started hearing about when Graeber at some point was like ‘I have dirt, even bigger dirt that I can't release’, but then it turns out that this dirt was formalized in Graeber’s letter that he circulated amongst a group's colleagues that basically Giovanni was using HAU funds to pay sex workers right. And it turns out that that it was just basically a private joking conversation between Giovanni and the other guy who was at HAU were having and joking like ‘how extravagant could we make this workshop you know let's make it on my island, let's make it over here, let's have sex workers’ so it was like a private conversation and that I suppose is in bad taste, extremely distasteful, but then the way this works is through a cold retelling, because they were friends and then I suppose they stopped being friends and then the way someone can transform this type of memory of a conversation with a friend into a kind of ‘oh misallocation of funds, intention to hires sex workers’, running a kind of ‘sexist exclusionary space’, which none of women academics or authors at HAU even remotely mentioned this, so it was kind one of these things that emerge from the pile of a kind of strange confounding or short-circuiting of what were intensely personal relationships between friends who started HAU, it was like a small of friends or people became friends during the process, and then at some point that friendship dynamics stopped.
The guy, the number 2 at HAU, had been telling Graeber and others that Giovanni had talked about getting him a sex worker for a conference. The guy didn’t actually literally think that he had been offered him a sex worker in lieu of payment, but that is the version that Graeber ran with. The scene is actually kind of hilarious, I really can't imagine the ears of someone who hears this and reads intent into or out of it. Graeber also says that Giovanni offered him once a a “women of the room”, which is exactly how a joke would say it, in the tradition of extravagant hospitality which is of course a lost tradition in the institutions now, thats what makes it a joke. It's all about the tone and escalating delivery, the laugh comes from the impossibility of conceiving any actual route to it, the ‘plan’ or ‘offer’ is no such thing when someone laughs, because laughing is what saves the brain from actually scheming or devising it (inversion of intent). I can however imagine the tedious cringe of the repressed adressees of this joke, who as Zizek would probably say display external sexual prudence in public but are in reality the more depraved ones and likely exactly the clientele type of actual escorts at hidden hotels nearby conference venues. Academic conferences are well known to be massive hook up occasions for even the nerdiest of incels and femcels, so that is another implicit dimension of the joke, ‘your such an incels you can't even hook up in an academic conference and need a prostitute’. Maybe it truly is their spiritless humorlessness, resulting from an inability to sustain these different levels of reference in the imagination that maintain the possibility of irony or a joke. The guy is not dumb and understands a joke, same with Graeber in theory even if he displays bottomless pit of bad faith, but in this case it he purposively weaponized this anecdote to add something scandalous to his list of accusations and deny the context of the joke and suddenly, a pathetically last resort move really, hold it up in public as a serious thing. Giovanni is truly Italian and not very bourgeoisie at that, and it was inevitable that some Americans will, willfully or not, misunderstand or redeploy the joke as another sign (sharing sexual stories or sharing obscene jokes is one of the main way to test or increase the bond of a non-sexual friendship, which Giovanni and the other guy mutually engaged in). I don't blame hautalks puritan middle class doughy sourfacedness at this public airings of this truly intimate nonsexual dimension of toxic male friendship, but the prefix ‘misogynist’ ‘sexist’" etc as Graeber appended in the group email leaked by hauleaks is entirely a knife or a button for him, he is the opposite of a naïve idiot. His sudden concern and deployment of it was political and based on the political and institutional conjuncture of late 2017, that is metoo and HAUs move to Chicago.
I should say quickly that it is a strange case in anthropology and in publishing altogether because it started in 2011 as a kind of startup and quite quickly it became the journal of the discipline of anthropology, it was massive it was publishing almost 50 articles per issue, there is over 500 articles already in the archive since 2011, book symposia reprints, etc everything was going well and Giovanni he had this theory which is revealed in his last farewell editorial, he called ‘performative abundance’ so he starts with a story of a medieval siege where the castle is surrounded and then the Queen or whatever in the castle says you know ‘to show them how well we're doing we should take our last ox, slaughter it an fil it up with all our corn and then give to the besieging soldiers, so they everything is going well and then this as a type of strategy or operation of enterprise, you act as if everything is aplenty, everything is expanding as a was to attract further wealth and abundance. On the one hand this seemed to work you know more author's, better quality, it had received the stamp of approval from the big names in the field. But clearly in the steam room other things were happening since it was a very small operation. Publishing, I mean I don't know about the publishing industry but I can imagine that everyday life in publishing is full of friction, it's a messy business, problems arise, theres delays, little mistakes, every mistake was compounded or every mistake has to be followed by fix, a bit of fuss, a bit of emails and then you get a sense that there is this kind of escalating frustration which is quite unsustainable if it's kind of a fast-paced high turnover environment. So the other people who were involved with how until 2015 [-2017], they left, they were PhD students like Giovanni, like ‘fuck it, I need do my PhD’, not everyone can become a publisher, there wasn't even enough salary for one editor, they all took honoraria, which was basically a way to say just pay less than a salary because there wasn't enough money. So Giovanni and other people did a lot of fundraising to try to make it sustainable and achieve salary status instead of honoraria. But that was only achieved with the transition to Chicago which already in 2017.
Justin: So let me stop you there real quick so in a lot of the allegations that I read through a lot of them have to do with essentially financial payments a lot of people said things to the effect that he wasn't paying people on time and he was over working people and you know manipulating and extorting people essentially to do more labor than they then they were supposed to to get their money and all this kind of stuff. But then Giovanni told me in in a private chat that none of these people were even his employees technically so could you could you kind of help us sort out the claims of that type of financial wrongdoing and is that just getting kind of exaggerated by people or what was going on with that.
Enrique: Sure, from what I know, from what I can reconstruct from my own timeline because I will have to look at all these old emails, so these first few years of HAU, it it was basically a group of friends and I suppose they didn't pay each other but no one called each other that they're ‘their master’ or ‘I'm being enslaved by you’, because it's a type of voluntary activity and association that you know takes a while to actually talk about the working relationship as one of boss and employee to even reach these languages of labor rights. It's important, one of my specialties is labor rights.
So the timeline is that Giovanni was on sabbatical, a few other editors took over and then when he was back, the team he found himself with was hired by his main second guy I suppose, and so he didn't actually hire them or anything, I don't know if he signed the contracts with them, but I suppose it's kind of a failure of his own leadership, you know you have to hire people that you can work with and he clearly couldn't work with them, but then because there was no other type of attachment in that relationship except money because people were there either as a part-time job, because they were students or graduate students or because they were there as interns who wanted to get a leg into the publishing world so they were working there for a few months. Even though now it has been abolished since 2017 since the reforms, there's no honoraria, there’s no interns, etc at HAU. But then what arose was the problem with using money as a type of managerial technique, so if you want to control productivity of the people who you work with, then maybe put an incentive and you promise a bonus for outstanding work, over-production, or you discount if the task is left on completed or the person leaves before and the problem with using money to control people's productivity is that, first of all first, it is inherent in the structure of the honorarium, so you only got paid at the end of the year which is already a problem, because if you want to leave before, you've been working six months and you want to fuck off because you can't stand Giovanni, there was talk of “fine, we can’t pay, you forfeit your honorarium, according to the constitution” unless you complete the assigned tasks, which were vague anyway, like ‘see three books through to production or oversee this issue’ but then people don't really know how much work is involved in overseeing three works, contracts never specify that level of detail. There is definitely an issue of “responsibility drift”, but contracts are a peaceful capture and mode of exploitation, there is no such thing as an infinitely spelled out and transparent contract, it’s a liberal fantasy.
Justin: In your experience Enrique was Giovanni ever, is it true that he was especially aggressive and kind of unreasonable with that sort of thing?
Enrique: I actually did work in HAU Books for a while last year because other people left and it's definitely a pain, there's so many steps, so many emails and then easy room for complications, delays and mistakes and I wouldn't wish it upon many people unless they kind of already know how to do it because if you try to learn on the job, you have no idea how publishing works, it was all not professionalized definitely, and Giovanni I mean he had a very good working relationship with other people so it's definitely something to do with the people who were there who organized the petition, a small group. There were many other people involved in production previously there were people working with Giovanni more indirectly as freelancers but it seems to be that this was the people working closest with Giovanni, I wasn’t working that closely with him so I don’t know.
Justin: Okay that's fair enough I was just kind of curious and so I would say probably the other huge allegation against Giovanni that is to most people's minds kind of most damning is the allegation of physical violence essentially. There were reports about how he basically strangled someone in in his office at one point do you want to speak to that, do you know if that's true or is that false or is it exaggerated or what.
Enrique: This was another one of these rumors I suppose just to signal whether you're in the in the coterie, inside circles, ‘had you heard of this rumor do you know who it is’, and I had no idea because I don't go to these big conferences, I can't stand them. It what people do at conference, someone beat up someone in anthropology conference that's like the gossip of the day, but I really hadn’t heard of it. But I think the context that is revealed from the letter, doing a bit of reconstruction without saying names or traces, I don't know why the place is redacted, but then the situation was basically it has nothing to do with HAU, it was Giovanni’s friend and he was actually a professor, Giovanni was a PhD student, so I don't know if they're the same gen-x generation though, but then and the setup is that they were friends, it had nothing to do with HAU, Giovanni was going to stay in his place over Christmas and apparently they had stayed with each other before and they had slept in each other sofa, they've gone out drinking, they wanted to climb together, things friends clearly do.
Giovanni showed up at his flat, this story is in the screenshot of the letter, in the winter, clearly in the northern hemisphere in a deep winter, and then the guy didn't show up so Giovanni then went to the department and then you know what triggered his attack was when the guy appeared he said to Giovanni ‘you should be grateful that I even let you stay’, and then he said ‘fuck you’ to Giovanni, which is the equivalent of basically shoving your head your head down and shushing you, so Giovanni stands up and the whole scene is described in very kind of cartoonish ways, describing saliva, and like smoking coming out of the ears like Popeye, very slow motion, Giovanni stands up after the swear-off, there’s an akward upright facing each other, he seems to make the first move in a tussle, where is he gonna grab him, is he gonna grab him by the hips, that would be bit awkward, is he going for a bear hug, he grabs him by the neck then the other guy quasi-simultaneously grabs him by the neck, it's probably this extremely awkward dance that wasn't too brutal because then they clearly both let go again and no one had any marks or bruises, and I don't know what they did afterwards but I think that's the situation of the letter as I read it. I think there was even a police report for assault, but the local police dismissed the case altogether. I mean it's definitely unfortunate that that you know maybe people could get physically harmed but this escalation it could have been better and also even more comical if it was just you know people saying fuck you over and over again, showing each other the middle finger and then reaching a stalemate, like this video of two French jay walkers who are just flipping each other bird and it's like two minutes, at least some kind of physical intervention kind of breaks that tension and people freshen up again which is what happened. And this had nothing to do with HAU so it's actually irrelevant to his activities as an editor or even to his character because basically the past months people have been digging for like anything Giovanni has ever done in the past 20 years, people have come out of the woodwork and like started sharing completely irrelevant anecdotes, and well this type of falling out with a friend exists, he's not the only person I know who has had a tussle with someone.
Justin: Sure yeah so in other words what you're saying is a whole bunch of interpersonal issues and conflicts and fights that maybe have accumulated over time are now getting kind of shoehorned into this is a scandal that is supposedly all about HAU but in fact you know the way you're pitching it is it's kind of like everyone goes through life they have different relationships, you know fights, you have conflicts you have difficulties of various kinds and like if right now everyone I've interacted with over the past like five or ten years decided to kind of like report anything bad that I did to them in one hashtag on Twitter and they told their stories about every bad thing I've ever possibly done and they called it one scandal about like one specific thing then it would sure probably look like ‘oh wow this is really bad Justin it's like really really bad’, is that kind of what you think is going on here?
Enrique: I mean on a social media dynamic definitely. Giovanni was investigated I mean the workers did raise their concerns internally and then that's what produced these report, what produced the restructuring, so Giovanni was actually punished, he was reprimanded by the Board of Trustees which means I think he then didn’t work for a bit and then he wasn't allowed to have any subordinates, like this type of close contact every day dozens of emails, a day kind of correcting, you know very close working relationship to subordinates, only with freelance professionals who never let it get beyond contractually agreed arrangements, and who are spared the psycho-dramas that other people inside the academic community might start narrating in their own heads. In a sense the board applied an economy of punishments and they calculated ‘okay this is what we did this is what needs to be done to fix it’, I’m happy to read it as a bureaucratic documentation that constructs exoneration and removes guilt, and they didn't take it into account like things that were irrelevant to the publishing of HAU because what's been happening with hautalk is just different dimensions basically, including I suppose character assassination.
Justin: So I think something that's kind of important in the story at least as far as I've been able to make sense of it, not enough people have been talking about it, is that it sounds like what was accomplished with the HAU journal is very very unique and impressive, so it's very very rare that you would observe in any academic discipline some small group of people create a relatively small-scale experiment to create a new journal and then that new journal very rapidly goes primetime to not only become quite influential but to become actually the flagship journal of the discipline at least that's what people are telling me, it's one of the flagship journals of the discipline, that's extremely rare, it's very rare for someone to be able to build that kind of out of the blue and although a few different people were part of this it does seem to be the case that is it fair to say that Giovanni was kind of the one of them the crucial leaders of this process. He arguably more than anyone else was responsible for growing this into the kind of dominant powerful force in anthropology that it was, that's my understanding of it you can correct any of that if that's wrong, but I think that's actually really important for people to think about, because academia, there's a lot of resentment in academia there's a lot of people who really are uncomfortable with other people doing anything that's very powerful or big or significant it's kind of like tall poppy syndrome is what they call it in the UK or and I think Australia also, is that you know if there's one person who's kind of very aggressive and visionary and wants to build something really big and actually goes and does it and has a lot of success in doing it, I'm not saying Giovanni did all this single-handedly but it seems like the picture I'm getting from connecting all the dots is that he really did do a lot of work to build up the the kind of extraordinary success of this particular journal and something that makes sense for my mental model of academia is that whenever anyone does something like that in academia, the fact is like academic there's just a lot of resentment and kind of low-level kind of simmering frustrations and anxieties and tendencies for academics to kind of shit on anyone who kind of punches above their weight too much let's say and so that I kind of have a sense that something like that is going on is that fair to say at all or does that resonate with your perception?
Enrique: It’s multi-pronged, many prongs, a lot of forks, so it was an unusually successful enterprise and prolific and then to authors he in a sense also unorthodox editor, basically producing way to much, there's plenty of open access journals, there dozens of journals in anthropology but sometimes they produce like two or three articles. It was clearly this theory of performative abundance, it was it was over the top. And part of the resentment build from authors who actually had submitted to HAU, and with Giovanni, all those emails were unscripted, good editors, normal academic journal editors they just write like they're a chat bot, they just say ‘thank you for your submission’, automated, so they don't trigger any authors or cause any turn of phrase that can be misinterpreted as passive aggressive, but then he just wrote like free and this obviously lead to, through hundreds of emails a day, to a few authors who are academics and think of themselves as above a mere editor, so one of these cringy dweeby academics who published in HAU, she's above me, so I can name her, I can punch above my status, you know punch up, Emily Yates-Doerr, she actually reproduced an email with Giovanni and published it in a blog to say ‘oh this shows that he's abusive and intimidating’, it was Giovanni asking her for article processing charges which was a policy introduced quite late for an open access journal, only in 2015 because they had no money, and they had no money to pay anyone, so its ‘fuck if you're from a rich ass university like University of Amsterdam and have an ERC grant or you're from an Ivy League apply to your library for an APC’, like even ‘if you don't get it will we’ll accept the article’, but university libraries have these funds to support open access publications, so he was like ‘apply’, and she was like ‘oh but my fund is already going to another article’, so he’s like ‘okay choose you know this article or that article, I can’t help you’, so they were like “this is part of this pattern of being a bullying type editor”. Its fully freudian, always reverting to the sexual relation and its symbols, an transference of male impunity for domestic abuse into the professional workplace, the theme and language they used lies along the axis, “being silenced”, “being doubted or gaslighted”, “not daring to speak out” “complicity of the relatives and in-laws” “we thought we loved HAU”. I can imagine they are proposing a 'radical love' academia, zero pressures, zero deference, and full consent in the sense of the parameters being structured on ones own terms. Yates is also this excruciating bizarre Karen, “can i speak to your manager type”, who reported my less bland tweets via the hau account to her supervisor to try to get her to resign from the editorial board.
So this first prong of resentment builds among some authors and then and I think the second prong is the much larger group of people who were basically rejected as authors. A lot of the hautalk people were like people who at some point wanted to publish with HAU, because HAU did a strange thing where it combined prestige, old name prestige, Cambridge, Chicago, with a kind of radical publishing, it was open access, it was free, it had this kind of definitely 2012 moment of openness as radical which clearly doesn't entail automatically especially if you look at the internal mechanics and the labor relationships, but then so all these people were rejected, like it's clear that there's a lot of personal history. So, he's one of your reply guys, this guy called Hans Steinmüller, professor in LSE, David Graeber’s colleague, also above me so I can punch up, he’s been obsessed with Giovanni since they were flatmates, they were friends in Halle, Germany at the Max Planck and then at some point Giovanni was also just like ‘no bullshit’, he wouldn't publish his friends if their work was shit he was like ‘fuck you I'm not publishing this, this is crap’ and then that is like sticking a dagger in the heart of an academic and then so I suppose he carelessly he made a lot of enemies this way by you know focusing only on the content or what he thought was his vision or the type of quality he wanted for his anthropology journal, and a lot of the people who he was maybe friends with felt rejected. So there’s a lot of these personal connections and they’re the other ones who are keeping this vendetta going, they're the ones behind the scenes write emails, open up inquiries try to get all sorts of things to keep the story going. Like Steinmüller ex-girlfriend, Solange Chatelard, who was involved in personal falling out with Giovanni over the exlusion of Steinmüller contribution in an edited collection of HAU, suddenly 7 years after this minor incident ouside their shared flat in Halle, she comes out of nowhere and writes this elaborate concern-trolling request to all of HAU and Chicago like repeatedly, about why Sarah Green’s proposal hadn’t been implemented, even though they had, and tried to deligitmize the Executive Councils investigation, again like Sarah Green had been trying to do, in these god-forsaken über and pseudo-buercratic jargons of conflict of interests and transparency. Her function was small-arms fire to get rid of the Trustees and other board members, to resign from under the pressure of ever more extravagant demands like an “independent external inquiry and audit, in a transparent way” I think she said. Another effect was to provide a space in the non-anomyzed email thread to set up people to reply in a virtue signaling kind of way ‘oh I don’t like bullying and I am pro-transparency internatioally, I resign’. She came out quite happy almosly smirkily content about her effectiveness in purposively slowing everything down and dragging things on and into the past where they had already been resolved, and the trustees were all fleeing then after her emails on June 18th 2017. There's a lot of personal tangles there that I was totally unaware of but that can be reconstructed quite well now because you can spot them, they shriek with vendetta.
Justin: So you're reminding me of an observation I had when I was going through the allegations and the documents that are on Twitter and there's one letter from someone at Stanford, I forget who, well you don't know who writes it because all the names are redacted except for Giovanni's but there was one letter from I believe it was from someone at Stanford and I definitely could see quite clearly that there was some disingenuous exaggerated hand-wringing going on in that in that letter because there was all this stuff about how HAU and Giovanni were basically like engaged being in some kind of unfair or unreasonable quid pro quo and because there apparently there was some kind of arcane system where different members of the collective had to contribute different sums of money and then they had the right to kind of run their own sections of the journal and this sort of thing and there was all the stuff in the letter about how the person was like clutching their pearls, they were like ‘it seemed to me like it was a pay-to-play scam where HAU and Giovanni were asking us to contribute money in order to be able to have a voice in the journal’ and acting as if that was like this kind of rare unique unjust thing, but academia is filled with that I mean it's absolutely normal most of the kind of collective editorial arrangements that happen within academia, it's more or less some type of quid pro quo where the amount of power that contributing institutions have is a direct function of how much money they're bringing to the table. I would say that this is the norm more or less in academic collaborations of one kind or another and everyone knows that, it's very very very normal so to see this letter from Stanford kind of clutching pearls and hand-wringing about that I got a pretty clear vibe from that that I was like this is some disingenuous posturing because everyone knows this this kind of stuff is all over the place can you speak to that?
Enrique: Yeah I mean its so clear, it oozes from that letter, the disingenuousness, it's fucking Stanford for christ's sake, I don't know what kind of endowment they have but it's probably a half a trillion and like it was this open access journal that basically depended on some departments, especially the rich department of Anthropology, the kind of old guard in the UK a few universities in the US, they were the ones first to sign on and the membership was like between a 1000 and 3000 a year I think, I also collected some from the Humboldt University where I was, a thousand, and then that didn't automatically allow you to kind of have a special issue or book symposium but maybe you were given first reading and then the Stanford professor, James Ferguson, thought it you know, it was discussed that it's you know ‘maybe you should renew your membership’ and he was like ‘no we decided not to renew the membership but publish the book symposium on my book’ and then Giovanni was like ‘fine we won't publish your book symposium’, because the authors had not submitted their pieces yet anyway, and then that was clearly like the rage of a professor who's being denied attention in the journal, but you know the normal expectation of anyone who can kind of understand reciprocity and basic modes of operation academia, especially trying to find money from endowed departments, very endowed departments. A lot of these are totally ordinary and outside of the academy they're even more ordinary so like it was this type of grandstanding of like this faint outrage expressed with coldness and fake politeness, pearl-clutching, etc.
Justin: So it'd be good now maybe that we've kind of covered some of the basic facts of the matter at least from your perspective we could now do a little bit of riffing on what we think are really the underlying processes like what's really going on here under the hood and one thing that comes to my mind immediately is that what I think a lot of people don't understand when they read about these types of controversies from a third party or outsider perspective isn't that academia is filled with really quite cynical and ugly types of processes and tendencies. I mean some people will be familiar with at least superficially some of what I'm talking about right like everone knows it's very very business-oriented now every academic and every academic organization is now subject to increasing kind of performance requirements performance measures that you have to kind of submit to a variety of different boards and institutions and departments it's increasingly bureaucratic - to an extreme degree I think especially in the UK like if you're if you are a publishing academic or you're running a journal the amount of paperwork that you have to do for various different bodies on a regular basis, like all kinds of quality control stuff and ethics stuff I mean it's really, people don't understand unless you've worked in this unless you've been in academia you really can't understand how bad it's getting which is the layers of red tape and kind of bureaucratic crap that you have to deal with and then the increasing kind of economic pressures to essentially function like businesses all of those things and pressures to get grants, individual pressures on individual academics to get grant money to bring in money in order to get their promotions or whatever I mean the whole system is so intensely kind of nasty and exploitative and also bureaucratic so it's like it's all the downsides of the business world it's just as competitive it's just as much pressure and exploitation and kind of nasty capitalist types of ways of thinking and acting just as bad as it is in the business world but it has the added disadvantage and the added annoyance of you don't you don't even get to operate freely on an open market you have to deal with all kinds of social and political back massaging to get the things that you need and get the things that you want and all types of bureaucrat red tape you have to you have to jump through, so many hoops you have to jump through, so the state of things as of right now is much worse and more I think psychologically painful in many ways then people realize on the outside and I think that it seems pretty clear to me that this is essentially one of the big background factors to this to this bizarre controversy because like if you're in academia and you're invested in a career in academia whenever you have these types of conflicts you can't really point to the underlying the big elephant in the room because you share that with everyone like you're already invested in that game so you know one can throw up their hands and say actually 99% of this conflict is like really basic bullshit that makes this entire system and kind of career lifestyle nearly intolerable. You can't just say that that's actually what's going on because it doesn't it doesn't help when you're embedded in that situation, everyone has to agree to not talk about those things and then make conflicts between each other and try to you know throw another person under the bus to make sure you don't get thrown under the bus or whatever but when you're actually trying to figure out what the fuck is going on from an outside perspective I think 90% of this type of stuff is actually just nasty pathological features of the contemporary academic environment that basically makes people super unhappy all the time makes people super on edge all the time, makes people constantly kind of frustrated and upset they don't have enough time to do things, they don't have enough time to do the research that really matters to them. All these types of different frustrations other people getting ahead faster than you even if they're not as good as you there are all types of things like that make people really really upset and so that's just something that I think is really important to flag, like I think that's usually going to be about 90% of what's really going on under the hood of these particular conflicts.
Enrique: Yeah, the thing is a lot of people brought other, their own issues to the table, which had nothing to do with HAU, and indeed HAU was targeted because it was a small publication without a proper institutional support or home, it was a kind of non-instition and allowed hautalk to explode without impunity. What I see is clearly so many layers of class composition. So the people who are most in this type of shitstorm are people outside the Ivy League's, so graduate students outside the Ivy League's because they see that the system is rigged. Only the people from Chicago or from Berkeley or Cambridge get all the jobs and I mean there's no real insight in that, it requires no acuity to see this, I mean it's obvious that the people there will get the jobs, because that's what people use for proxies and if you don't have a connection you are basically out of the labor market, that's how most labour markets work. It be good to tell people beforehand how labor markets work, including in for example publishing, where they hire on work-experience usually gathered after a short internship etc. There's this large class of basically unemployable, structurally unemployable kind of people in the academy and a lot of hidden unemployment, a lot of people joined the shitstorm who were now working maybe in NGOs or museums or something and they're like they still kind of consider this academic battle theirs. And even a lot of bachelor students because they already see themselves as exluded from the future of the profession and your aspirations are clearly not realizable unless you go from you know from Ivy to Ivy.
It’s strange, because but they're the most enthusiastic people about academia I've ever seen it's it's really strange, so they spend all the other days that they're not kind of shitstorming one or another thing. (The one person involved in hautalk, she was the one who became famous for shit storming Barbara Ehrenreich, remember her tweet about Mary condo and then the reply tweet “you did a racism, you did an imperialism, it is clear that you have not atoned for the intersectional nature of your crimes”). They spend hours composing these kind of sordid threads. But you know what is the economy of time here? like how can you spend your entire day on Twitter doing this, how will this help your job prospects and then on the one hand it does because people are building the reputation on the backs of this, I suppose, reputational destruction and they become mini-famous, they organize panels, they go to conferences, on Twitter they all document every step of the conference they check you know who they're meet with, their “friends”, they do these business cards which are like virtual business cards sending them links to their websites that are always super sleek super academic in a boring way it's like a 4D CV, my publications which are a few blog posts, my academic interests which are irrelevant or it's like a boring cover letter so it's like this strange investment over-investment to this academic self-presentation and then one of the things that came out of hautalk was a boycott of HAU, HAU was represented as a kind of prestige in academia, and these are most of hautalk, I would say like 60% of hautalk is these people who were resenting the system is such and are trying to overturn it, and this is their strategy which I mean might work or may not. On the one hand they first they attacked HAU for making a “transgressive desire” possible, of making like a return to the classics cool again, you know how anthropology was pre-1980s, which had nothing to do with colonial anthropology or white anthropology, because there's as much local anthropology in the early 20th century from all over the world, penning “customs of the country”, as there was overtly colonial anthropology designed to be useful for colonial administrators, and that type of anthropology is basically a hundred times more valuable than some random American PhD student doing the PhD on dating apps today or their own subcultural niche. The entire hautalk became about you know HAU as “elite white colonial patriarchy” etc one twitter cliché after another, and all these people they didn’t even know about HAU, they're not the HAU readers, many are even outside social anthropology, like maybe they belong to these strange American fields that I don't know anything about like medical anthropology, biological anthropology, so they’re like “I'm gonna a boycott HAU”, its like “don’t worry, you weren’t going to be published in HAU anyway nor did you ever read HAU”. This was the biggest most also confused group, their misery and rage, suddenly had a name, and it drew from long-standing traditions of American anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism, thinking that their boycott of what they consider the “elite” of the University was going to make a difference amongst the elites who really don’t care.
Justin: I think you said a really interesting thing about how a lot of these people who are most resentful about how academia fucks them are nonetheless still really invested in academia and I think that's a really really good point and that's really the crux of a lot of the weirdness that you that you're seeing from these types of protester individuals it's like I also find this bizarre and I've been thinking about a lot myself like when I go through the hautalk hash tag and I see like these people's stories it's like how if you hate academia so much if really if you really think that it's so elitist and brutal and it allows you know terrible people to be abusive and violent and if that's really what you think academia enables or does well then why are you even interested in joining it, like why do you want to be a part of it like why don't you in that case do something like I'm doing and go totally independent and try to overthrow academia by creating something bigger and better and more honest and more truthful and more humane and whatever whatever your vision of a better intellectual life is why don't you just focus on building that and doing that right. I think that's like really symptomatic of resentment essentially where you're like you're hating on something and maybe you do really hate it but you're equally invested in it and and what you hate is really yourself in a lot of ways, is that fair to say, or am I being too harsh?
Enrique. On the one hand one could just understand like if they hate HAU so much if they won't read HAU, then don't, it's fine, make your own journals write your own things, but they're not doing that, like they first need to destroy what came before or was identified with being prestigious, which is I suppose a good strategy. But then they also are very obsessed about these petty academic things like metrics, I think they've managed to hack the academy in that sense, that's why their strategy is so effective because they do things like “yeah boycott and you can't cite them you need to cite me or you need to cite this person”, these younger authors. Because academia is pyramid-scheme in a sense of you cite up, you cite a professor who you want to get their attention or you want to be associated with.
This trick is interesting, they found a shortcut into the academy by redirecting attention and citation, publishing random pieces in low quality journals, they go around guilt tripping everyone to cite them, and now they say if you assign or cite a HAU text its like a slap in the face, but gun to my head, I just can’t read their trash. The normal is awful to, they want to break this elite institutions reproductive cycle of younger doppelgängers, dressing, talking and looking the same, but the new contenders are cops essentially, a bit like Kamala Harris, they don’t want to transform the system, they are carrying with them the most unpleasant aspects of the status quo, its pure careerism.
I think fundamentally it's not there is this kind of envy or resentment at the success of HAU, like “oh no one should have it so good why did he get all the attention, why didn't I get the attention”, that's kind of classic reading of resentment or envy. I think its more narcissism itself. Someone like Giovanni also represented for them basically a graduate student who made it, he was promised, he doesn’t have it anymore, a full-time salary in Chicago he didn't need to do any academic tasks, things academics hate, so the narcissistic question is “why am I not able to do that, why can’t I shine like Giovanni, what is and who is holding me back, why can't I publish with these great people, who is harming the expression of my potential”, which is fundamentally a narcissistic question and then the things that they find that are the cause of their setbacks or being held back is let's say “the academy, the institutions, the low stipends, the peer review system that rejects you, we need rethink the peer review, we can go forward without rejections”.
Justin: I think what's also a good point that you made Enrique is that in some sense these pathological tendencies do seem to be driven by some objective constraints that actually do characterize academia like a lot of this perverse behavior does make sense in the context. I think the underlying reason why is because so much of academic funding comes from a few big pockets right, it's usually like big funders at the nation state level, so like America has the National Science Foundation for instance in the UK it's some other organizations both British and European and but in in any event in any national context in academia there's usually a few big players who have most of the money and to do things to do research to get grants and you know often to have your salary paid you you have to bring in a certain amount of money from these relatively constrained set of big pockets and that does lead to weirdly antagonistic incentives so like Enrique made a good point about citations for instance, like there is a kind of scarcity mentality and in some sense it is actually kind of fair because you know attention is scarce and there's only so many people in academia and you know if all of the citations are you know being earned by a relatively small minority in a particular journal or what-have-you there is actually a game to be had, there is a payoff to be won if you and your buddies can do anything to basically take down that big reservoir of attention and influence and citations if you do that you do kind of build a name for yourself and then if you have your own journal that might gain in influence relatively and then you'll get more citations. So that's just a one example but there's many other kind of patterns in academia where because of a relatively small number of big funders everyone is basically fighting tooth and claw in a way that ironically, and this is where I'm going with this, is actually more perverse and brutal than on the open market and this is something I've really been struck by over the past few years for me, because I've kind of been in and out now, is that the brutality of the competition the exploitativeness and just the cynicism and the sheer kind of strategic manipulative prowess of the actors in academia can often be way more brutal and intense and insane then what you find in the day-to-day business world of small business people just trying to kind of build something of value on the open market and I'm far from any type of like capitalist booster like I'm you know I think capitalism is generally a kind of civilizational catastrophe and in the long run but you know there and there's definitely some psychos in business like obviously there's some really perverse and abusive people in the business world, but they're relatively small in number and they're there like at the top right, so you have people like Steve Jobs right who's like notorious for being a kind of abusive aggressive asshole. So obviously capitalism can select for you know that type of personality and kind of in incentivize it and encourage it but that's a relatively small number of people whereas like most normal people who are just trying to make it in some kind of small business context they're actually like pretty pretty reasonable people, they genuinely don't want to be like actively exploiting or abusing anyone and so but in academia you actually have to be pretty cutthroat you have to be like extremely cynical and competitive and political in that regard and so in a weird way because of the context like people think that academia is people who don't want to be competitive and they don't want to be business oriented and they want to be just humane relaxed intellectuals thinkers and writers but the fact of the matter in academia is that all of the incentives and institutions select for some of the most aggressively kind of cynical manipulative dishonest and disingenuous types of social climbing types of people and a lot of people I think don't realize that.
Enrique: Yeah, it was this type of like opportunistic moment. I mean academia sucks, I hate academia more than anyone and HAU was for me actually a kind of refuge outside academia like in the sense that it actually was not connected to any University in particular, it was basically good content like and other other journals I stopped reading ages ago because it's just like this game of publication, getting it out there blah blah, but in HAU there was something more kind of old-fashioned and scholarly about it, and I suppose behind that was just like a small team and totally overworked etc but then in the end it was “weak” in the system, HAU was a small operation and that's why its been so vulnerable to destruction, reputational destruction and disaffiliation, and exclusion from the discipline. People from HAU can't really like make conference panels anymore they can't announce anything without being immediately surrounded again by this clamour, and its like these people's they come with you know legit problems, that have nothing to do with HAU, they arise from you know stagnation in the academy, bottlenecks, the impossibility of ascension.
The idea is like to pick better targets, like if you really want to criticize the Academy then go criticize the Academy like don't, you know, don't use HAU are your scapegoat. In most departments you will find similar stories, and that's the thing it does need to be a kind of non ritualized conversation, it really needs to be kind of a turning inward or a looking into the ugliest aspects of academia that are writ large. Some of these accusations about Giovanni, like being this figure that can “control careers”, you know, professors are the ones who control careers, like Giovanni has no influence in any selection committee, it's a group of professors and then they decide who will become their colleague and then there there's many different factors. They won't listen to an editor. They drew on this imaginary of corridors, officers, title holders, behind closed doors decisions that are common to university, but did not exist in any way at HAU. By imagining also this kind of persecutory Giovanni who would try to interfere in your career prospects if you left HAU without finishing your tasks, they also completely imagined this sense of being like an early modern journeyman or proletarian, where masters and employers would instill collective discipline by creating a network of informal vouchings and letters of reference from previous employers before they would hire someone new that would assure them of competence and that they didn’t leave their previous employer out of sabotage or foot-dragging. Academia doesn’t work like that, you get 2 letters by someone who supports you and that’s it.
It’s also insane what was heaped onto him, what would he had to take the blame for, what he was accused of, is either much more prevalent or basically just a substitute for what's going on in their own departments. Because most these hautalk people had never met Giovanni or even read HAU. It was a projection of their own unconscious, what they were trying to express. I mean respect to people kind of making you know long sulky threads, communicate in reaction GIFS and ALL-CAPS, and share their generalized microtraumas of academia, but it is this strange phenomenon of heaping around HAU, of what is basically neurosis at prestige, manic depression, panic at precarity in a situation of a world-historical crisis of the university, austerity, the loss of certain humanities wings, etc and no new jobs there.
There is also this competition element in hautalk, grounded in the same logic of academic neoliberal competition, so like instead of making like a proper critique of their surroundings and their systems that structure and limit them, they instead go for trying to make a name of themselves, by making these “cry-bullies” escalating demands, which is one of the dynamics of the academy anyway, making increasingly more outrageous or unlikely claims. So a lot of people in hautalk made their name by saying first “oh let's let's ask for answers”, and then “let's boycott HAU”, “let's boycott any author that has been associate with HAU”, so they create this arbitrary domino that make it seem like they are “revolutionary” against the “prestigious old academy” but then they're just trying to find the quickest way in and missing their targets entirely. They are bizzarly conformist expressions of the bureaucratic desires of the aspirant applicants/supplicants.
Quick story, it's quite relevant. I went to this seminar in Spain in my department about the these anarchist Republican militias during civil war, where they kind of went haywire, like they missed their targets, there was a lot of anti-clerical violence, they just started killing priests instead of killing fascists and capitalist. They basically went a rampage killing priests, and this presentation was about like the testimonies of the people who were in these militias and then they were like “well you know we didn't really want to kill priests but like in order to get respect within the groups of militias you had to do it” do something “radical” which then meant killing priests. In the end no one really felt troubled by the priests or anything but that was like the internal dynamic of why people hit the wrong targets and maybe that's why the Spanish Civil War fucked up its goals. Because a lot of these hautalk people they think that they're like cultural revolutionaries, and people even accuse them sometimes of being like the new Red Guards, but then if we lose the premise that they are in any way revolutionary, that they're basically the strongest elements that move them are career opportunism and certain strands of vindictive vendetta within these personal entanglements, it’s clear its not about a revolutionary movement, it's only superficially about destruction of icons, about grafting on the aesthetic of struggle sessions, you know “confess your complicity” if you're on top, you're automatically guilty, they force people to wear these kind of disown hats and banners like the Red Guards did to their professors. The cultural revolution in China itself was actually quite sophisticated, it brought a lot of new forms of post-feudal forms of consciousness and in this, these academic shitstorms I don't see it, they are a branch another family tree, at its root it’s mass moralizing dogooders (#dobetter #bebetter is an actual hashtag), creating an almost frictionless community within them, a process that is very effective at accelerating the reputational-damages of their targets. I see a lot of reactive sadism, the “spirit of revenge” as Nietzsche called this excitation arising from the mnemonic-consciousness of “you are evil, therefore I am good”, communally it works as a kind of humiliation or scapegoating, “we’re going to slowly destroy you in this life slow painfully, publicly, but also in the afterlife, you name will be filth”. I don’t get, or don’t know if their long game will game will work, what is the economy of time again, endless sour-faced feels-posting, it's definitely not revolutionary, it's a symptom of an academic collapse, is my reading.
Justin: I think that's very astute, I think that makes a lot of sense and I've observed as much myself. Now I would love to hear more about your observation that you said before about how class has a lot to do with all of this in some strange ways because I was when I was looking through the hautalk hashtag the other day, you know some of these stories of like academic trauma are, I mean, I really you know I really do feel for people and I don't mean to be insensitive but some of them I have to admit were a little funny and I found myself kind of rolling my eyes. One of them was this guy talking about how you know his story of academic trauma involved something like at one point he couldn't afford to live in San Francisco so he had to he had to you have to suffer the move to Montreal instead and I'm just kind of like it's hard not to roll your eyes at some of these some of these people because what's interesting is it seems like, I would love to hear your perspective, it seems like a good number of these protesters in the hautalk hashtag are themselves quite upper-class well-to-do people is that is that a fair reading or how do you read it?
Enrique: I mean who else studies anthropology? In another epoch these hautalk people would be the missionaries (who were always like the third-born from well to do but not feudal elite families, while the older siblings took over the family business or tried their luck in politics), kind of do-gooders, pious and well-to-do. I suppose their experience of graduate school is becoming plunged in a kind of precarity because graduate students do become precarious (they could have more easily chosen different careers where this precarity was not as severe as in academia), even semi-proletarian, but then they think of it a temporary, they think of themselves as basically temporary embarrassed professors, in the old American myth. Like even if they haven’t engaged in any scholarly activity (like extensive fieldwork or research or scientific publications) they already call themselves scholars and future professors. But yeah, where does this imagination or desire come from? For example in my family, they hate that I work in university because in Spain that's like the lowest form of prestige, it's like in India you become an engineer or doctor otherwise your family doesn't respect you. But I suppose in other circles, it's like “professorships”, there's a certain kind of aura attached to it, so there’s this run-up of hundreds of people trying to become professors and like I don't understand because in Spain, in my department there is like one PhD student, there's just no follow ups in certain fields, no one wants to become a professor (its very badly paid, for phd and postdoc level you can earn more money working in a call center at age 18), so that one guy would definitely have a job.
Justin: Right, yeah like I come from a working-class family like neither of my parents went to college and always you know never had a lot of money and when I decided I would seek to become a professor and pursue the academic game I was quite braced to not succeed you know, it's a difficult career to break into, there's a lot of luck required and it's just the numbers the sheer numbers are bad, there just aren't that many openings and there are tons of PhD students every year so I was like quite realistic. I was braced to not be successful. I was lucky in and I was actually quite successful but if I didn't get a job like a permanent tenure track job in academia if I did not get that I would have just went on to some other job like I would have just figured it out and I wouldn't have been so butthurt. I don't think but I think what happens is as you said if you're from like an upper-class family in some situations being a professor is kind of like the lowest rank that you can have without being an embarrassment to your family's social class and so what happens is like people who come from well-to-do families who, they don't want to be a surgeon or they don't want to be a CEO they don't have that type of drive for whatever reason for them it's like academia is kind of like the easiest way that they can have a minimally respectable position without having to like do a lot of really hard work in different domains and so a lot of those people they pursue academia but then when they don't get a successful job or that it doesn't turn out how they wanted it to, those I think tend to be some of the people who are the most insanely rabid in the current context of the kind of culture wars around academia, is that kind of what you're saying?
Enrique: Well that's what you are saying!
Justin: Well I though I was agreeing with you but feel free to differ however you want.
Enrique: I mean the class composition angle I was looking at was more I suppose the new class relations internal to the academic system, I mean where you were before is not strictly too relevant in the sense that like, I mean, this guy from the sulky thread, who went to Berkeley, I don't actually know anyone well who went to an Ivy League school PhD program, so it's also this foreign world that I had to learn about, but you know someone goes to Berkeley because they know that the people at Berkeley have an easy time to get a job, in academia, in law, in anything, it's the inside track and then when it doesn't work out obviously you're outraged like “hey why is the profession, the academy failing me, people like me”; well now its an issue because even the people at Berkeley have difficulty getting jobs but structurally it's been failing everyone else who's gets PhDs or you know tries to continue tertiary education in lower-ranking universities sans prestige (from where most of hautalk people emerged from, and who presumably had applied to the top programs but were rejected, so that adds to the wholesale resentment). And in those programmes at most you can become a teacher, you can’t get into R1 research institutions after that, so they develop this overt identity as a teacher, a spreader, correcting the young minds in community or state colleagues or small liberal arts schools. They been locked out of the academic prestige game for a long time and yeah and now they're developing creative strategies to try to continue in the system. Their problem is that they want to continue within the University, either by helping it fall apart a little bit, toppling a prestigious publication and those associated with it, so there is a new space and you can kind of enter. Everyone on twitter is very happy when someone gets a job, this is the hands-down the worst part of academic Twitter, when someone gets a job and announces it and gets like a thousand likes and everything is vicariously overjoyed “I’m so happy for you”, meaning “I wish I was happy”, but it's like fuck you what about all these other 999 other people who you know for a fact will never be able to get a job or funding. It's a really schizophrenic dynamic.
Hautalk is primarily a north american complex, and outside of the “traditional scholarly community”, or rather they have their own separate forums, etc put in HAU’s case 95% were never authors, peer-reviewers or even part of the HAU reading public. It was essentially half a dozen student leaders, their simps, and hundreds of active spectators, with vanguardist identities but sociologically composed of suburbans from white settler countries who treat queer and indigeneity politics as their own 90s hip hop. 90% of their political identity and activity is forming their own click-'cliques'. The movement requires a constant stance-taking on the basis of little information and everyday occurrences, and indeed revolves around this “sharing of horror stories”, which on closer inspection are no such thing. They need subjects of trauma, however minor, because that is internet economy here, if you don’t have a tragic dramas you must effectively create one, even if its only from a rebuking email.
Graeber: I'm curious to know Enrique, what's your read on David Graeber , because you and I both admire him you know you said that before and I've always kind of appreciated his work and I came up I came up there Occupy Wall Street like I got I got really radicalized in Occupy Wall Street and it was really transformative for me in a very good way that I am still very proud of and still a part of who I am and how I think and my politics and so I've always kind of thought he's cool and looked up to him in one way or another and I guess I still want to frankly. I didn't really want to believe Claire Lehmann’s article in the way that she was framing it but it does seem like there there's definitely something screwy going on. I don't know what it is exactly but what what's your model of David Graeber like what is he doing and what game is he really playing.
Enrique: So his long-con is a “coup”, he wanted to take over HAU, like that was clear from, from everything, so Graeber was the editor-at-large, he co-wrote the founding manifesto with Giovanni da Col, which is a brilliant editorial of HAU’s type of anthropology, it introduced a range of new concepts, “stranger concepts”, that aim to revitalize the discipline of anthropology based on its own traditions, so instead of looking to kind of continental theory, or trash from the 90s, it proposed to look at the anthropological archive and do “ethnographic theory”, which is you know, ethnography, experiences, other people's thoughts and out of that you develop stranger concepts you develop a type of philosophy based around other societies believed, but even from these societies, but then so the manifesto is a brilliant move and during his time at HAU, he published everything, a lot of things he published in HAU, because I suppose he had “special access”, there was no editing involved there was probably little peer review or Graeber could reject it really easily, so he could basically also have his way with Giovanni in that sense like “publishing me this, I'm not gonna edit, give me time here”, other editors they're not that compromising they're also don’t really care for David Graeber and his style. Graeber basically had Giovanni as his own private work-horse, he publish half a dozen of his lengthy and often rambling pieces (which he would be asked to revise for other journals) and submitted an crazy untenable 600 page book co-written with Sahlins On Kings. Graeber clearly bore witness to Giovanni and the editorial team’s state of overwork and exhaustion and he did nothing to fundraise, nor did he propose changes to the publishing model or arrangement, he signed off on the 2013 constitution which included these ‘draconian’ clauses, like no pay for unfinished tasks, etc... Only Carole who replaced Sara Green in summer 2017, did this, in part because Giovanni secured the deal to have Chicago UP take over much of the previous functions of HAU managing and assistant editors.
Justin: Real quick, for people listening who don't know about this, like this sort of thing might sound corrupt or something but it's not, that's basically, well it arguably is but that's very very normal. I mean every kind of peer-reviewed legit academic journal and almost everyone that I've ever known of any way in in any discipline I've ever been aware of has these types of informal structures it's just it's just a simple fact that if you are very close socially to the people who founded a journal or who currently run a journal you are going to have an easier time publishing in it and that that's just how it works.
Enrique: Yeah, and if you are big name for sure. So he wanted to take over HAU. After his “HAU apology”, five days later he also writes or signs on behalf of this suppose Revolutionary Committee saying “okay Giovani resigns, me and a few of the old people who were kind of gathering on HAU from the beginning take over”, this person from Helsinki, Sarah Green, who was actually in HAU in between 2013 and 2017, overseeing this entire kind of steam, building up of steam, and then she left. So they weren't to get rid of Giovanni and take over, there were even plans by Graeber and Sahlins to rename it etc. I mean it was clearly a political ploy, in this type of Shakespearean drama like you know using agents other tactics you know but the overall aim was to take over HAU in this kind of revolutionary way. I mean initially just by threat, Graeber wrote an email to Giovanni and of December 2017 that was like “ok Giovanni get the fuck out of here we're gonna publicly shame you” and then Giovanni didn't cede, so then they publicly shamed him, but they had everything lined up. So Graeber, I mean it's fine it's I suppose once you're in high-stakes academic politics you can organize a coup if you want to you can write revolutionary takeover demands, etc, but then what I’m finding strange about David Graeber is the quality of his thinking, so I mean this thing with the term “survivors”, since day one he's been saying like “the survivors of HAU”, there's probably like hundreds of tweets where he says “HAU survivors” and then he’s like replied to Claire Lehmann, “oh no its not about sexual assault”. If you use the word survivor it's either you basically trying to attribute the qualities of a killer or rapist to someone, someone who attacks mercilessly, who is cold psychopathic etc which is the way Giovanni is now appearing. You know it's strange because from my experience is an author Giovanni is actually very generous and kind of flexible and demanding but in a strangely respectable way. Graeber is basically I suppose character assassinating someone which is a strange thing to do I mean people engage in this a lot but it just seemed disingenuous and then I don't know why he's doing it because he's clearly like you know using this moment opportunistically, post metoo, and the phenomenon of enormous petitions or anonymous testimony and he happily goes along with the same kind of category collapse that is happening, you know not being able to distinguish the difference between abuse and you know an email over some kind of fuss and you know thinking or seeing is about differentiating things that's what the eye does and that's what the mind does, so like now this demand of like “no no no you have to see it in my terms”. I mean everyone has read the same documents, everyone's has seen the same things, Graeber, many other people but you know as you say, like this reality is split it’s forked, we're all looking over the same thing and then some of us see a certain element of interference, strange amplifications, kind of wild associations other people see PTSD victim, they see you know what's this guy from the Tunisian Revolution the guy who set himself on fire, Mohamed Bouazizi, you know some kind of victim that a movement can then kind of rally around like it is this kind of like revolutionary kind of setup. Then we have to keep in mind you know the spectrum of things I mean you can't just bridge categories and play different language games like imagine I would say “oh I was I was a carpet bombed with emails by Giovanni”, “he did a Srebenica of accounting”, like it's totally absurd and Graeber is being ridiculous.
He wants what he wants, he’s petulant, and he won't stop, he won't let go, he's been at this for 15 months (and 9 months before that, so over two years) and the people are HAU, his former colleagues are like “come on man, just let it go”, he is the one who keeps going.
Justin: Right that's an interesting read on it and that all sounds quite plausible. The more I've been reading about it all the more a certain mental model has come into my mind that is not totally different than what you're saying but it adds a little bit of a wrinkle what I think is kind of going on with David Graeber just this is my current best guess as someone who's just relatively unconnected to all this I don't really have a horse in this race at all personally other than trying to understand it correctly and kind of extract the underlying model because I'm interested in how these things work, you know in a scientific way. I said before I actually want my bias is in favor of David Graeber in some sense I want to like him like I don't want to accept that he might have kind of really drunk the kool-aid of kind of like the social justice warrior moral panic that I do think in many ways we are going through something like that I want to think that he's smarter than that and he's more independent and honest than just you know um yeah jumping headlong into this into this kind of trendy fashion at the moment. So I was trying to basically put myself in his shoes and think about like what might be going on and understanding in a way that's more charitable maybe and because look I mean would what it does see what does seem clear is that like David Graeber seems to be playing some type of political game that isn't a totally straightforward or transparent just because he did say at one point that sexual harassment had a little to do with it and then at another point he, there was some documents showing that he was part of the larger kind of political plot that he's kind of organizing with people and so trying to understand this I think there are a few wrinkles people should be aware of one of them. You said yourself Enrique before which is that the dominant attitude in kind of left-wing academia is this kind of cultural revolutionary model where it's like to create a more just society it's necessary sometimes to be quite creative with words and you know even if it looks like in the short term you might be stretching the truth a little bit or you know using words in a you know somewhat let's say creative way you would kind of rationalize it in this way to yourself and well “that's what you have to do to be able to change the culture” and it's necessary to change the culture to make it more just or whatever. A lot of academics can easily justify you know kind of massaging the truth in different ways because hey after all power is just composed of verbal structures and material realities intersecting so if it's nothing more than that then it's you know it's fair play for progressives to essentially play the same game to create justice or something like that is how the rationalization goes. I think that's a crucial part of the kind of psychological process underlying a lot of these phenomena that we're observing now but the other thing I wanted to add is that it seems to me what a lot of people don't realize is that to be a successful academic, to be prolific and to really make an intellectual impact through a career in academia you have to be brutally focused and you have to be able to put your head down and just focus on your work and you actually have to train yourself over long periods of time to not pay too much attention to the current affairs of the day to the controversies on Twitter like, in other words what I'm saying is being charitable to David Graeber to be as prolific and successful as he is to be like you know a genuine and pretty powerful successful academic intellectual you have to basically use a lot of heuristics and you can't afford to look deeply into things it honestly is what I'm getting at. I was not as successful as David Graeber I'm much younger I was in academia for a much shorter stint than him, but I remember very clearly and this is something a lot of people don't understand if you haven't been there that to succeed in an academic career you're constantly you're constantly working and you have to be brutal about what you pay attention to and what you don't pay attention to and therefore what I'm getting at here is I think what could be going on is when David Graeber gets an email from like a organization of graduate students saying “hey David, there's this guy Giovanni he's been really bad to us for a long period of time here's all the things he's done” or whatever and those people reading the email might have their own motives and you know whatever. To be someone like David Graeber you don't have the time to or energy to actually go through all of those allegations and try to confirm or disconfirm them or to look into the underlying motives or the track records that these various agents are on, you know representing. You don't have the time and so I think probably what happens is especially as you get older, not to play a kind of like ageist card, but I think it is realistic to imagine that if you're a successful academic and in the stature of someone like David Graeber not only have you kind of learned to not give a lot of energy or attention to these various things because you're focused on your work but as you get older you kind of understand the culture on the ground a little bit less I think that's fair to say, its charitable I think to assume that he doesn't actually know how perverse a lot of these like graduate student types of people are nowadays, like academia is filled now with really pretty, it's hard it's hard because I don't want to be brutal like I have a lot of sympathy because these people are getting fucked in some ways like their career prospects are really bad and so I'm sympathetic but the types of people that are coming into grad schools and to academia today are a very different type of person I think than the type of person that David Graeber would remember going to grad school with, that's for many reasons many of which are not these people's fault but I think David Graeber at his stature and in his age probably is naïve, with all due respect to him, he's probably a bit naive to the intensification of strategic cynicism that is now normal and average in the types of people that are going to grad school today and coming out of grad schools today. I think he's probably a bit naive to that and when people say “hey David can you sign this petition” he has a kind of ethic and a kind of personal history of “of course I'm gonna trust students”, “of course I'm gonna trust survivors, of course I'm going to throw my weight behind these noble you know downtrodden individuals and groups” and I think he probably just doesn't have the time and energy to really look under the hood because it's confusing it takes a lot of time to figure out who's who's who and what's what and I think he's probably at a point in his life where he just is signing petitions with not enough kind of critical attention I think honestly because I noticed this also with the Noah Carl situation, the Cambridge or Oxford lecturer who basically lost his job because there was a protest campaign against him for having some type of relationship with like racism or whatever I don't know the details honestly very much but what I do know is that I'm actually a researcher in fields that are related to that guy Noah Karl and I knew the name Noah Karl from his perfectly legitimate reasonable political science research on the relationship between ideology and IQ and things like that or whatever he's done a bunch of work on political ideology so I knew his name from his perfectly reasonable legitimate research in in those literatures and so when I saw that campaign to get him fired I noticed that David Graeber signed on to that and that seems to be like a as far as I could tell that's a moral panic because like people call Quillette like a journal of like race science and that is just false, I mean that that's just really really motivated reasoning and it's really superficial and unfair so it seems to me that's kind of my one of my underlying models and what I think is going on here. I think David Graeber is just like a little too quick to sign on to petitions nowadays because I think he's kind of getting he's kind of getting manipulated in some sense I think. People are getting him to sign on to campaigns that are actually like quite flimsy and unreasonable, and a whole bunch of motivated reasoning kind of piled upon itself but I've been ranting enough on that what do you think about all that Enrique.
Enrique: (Not in this case, he basically instructed the petitions and even composed many of the letters) I don't know man, Graeber, he's pretty much a genius, I mean he's very very perceptive, astute, etc, he pretty much knows exactly what's going on.
Justin: You think, I mean it's so hard to keep up, like if grad students come to you with like these stories about how someone is an abuser or whatever, do you know how much time and energy it would take to really go through them personally and kind of try to seek what's really going on I think like it's just easier and it's kind of necessary if you're a productive academic you don't have time to like deal with kind of personal critical investigation into these things you have to commit decisions about who you trust, whose team you're on, whose team you're not on, and then just go with it. All I'm saying is I think that's leading him to getting pulled into more cynical games than he might realize.
Enrique: Graeber is not getting pulled into anything he starts these things. I mean he's been in shitstorm since he joined Twitter. I remember in 2014 versus the Novara media people, versus the Jacobin editor, like he's relishes it, he knows exactly who's who and what's going on and then with Quillette, I mean so I did him the honor of comparing him to Taleb because they're very astute they know what's going on and like Quillette is it's unfortunate that this piece was actually published in Quillette because anthropology it's a big no-no to even be associated with like, ah, I don’t know who you would call it “inquiries into differentiation based on blah blah”. I mean Quillette I see it as like basically classically liberal, the way they describe themselves is correct like I've read a lot of shit from the 19th century, John Stuart Mill Malthus, etc, these people sound like stuff published in Quillette. I mean and only because it's liberal, classically liberal, that historically also contained a lot pro-colonial attitudes, high amounts of elitism, using kind of scientific empiricism to justify different things like imperialism and also this type of early scientism based on statistics, like the guy who invented statistics and phrenology, Galton, he basically ended up platonizing “races” and like thought that you could kind of measure averages, you know like you measure height or girth, and there are people of different average heights etc and like that seems straightforward but then they weaponized mythical-aesthetic archetypes of uneven heads that came out of the pseudo-science of criminology and deployed analogic thinking and was like “maybe if bigger heads have bigger brains and bigger thoughts”, but that's not how it works, the brain is a complex system, that’s not how societies work, societies are social and technical systems in combinations etcetera, so like it's a non-debate but like anthropology people obviously already had Quillette in its sniper-eyesight because of this, just like Graeber.
To me is seems the mirror image way when like right-wingers say like “oh so you like socialism, you like Allende and Pol Pot”, its like these are two different things, or like “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez means Stalin”, its like what are you talking about. It’s the same way this radlib online left treats the right too like “oh these standard liberals are fascist”, some of it is just liberal and liberals are also a bit racist etc it's no big deal to admit that and not equate it with fascism proper. It’s like they are both the inverse of eachother on the same two-dimensional flat surface, with everybody else being Feynman standing over them in 3D space, imagining the utterly confused state of mind of these 2D people. But I think here Claire went after Graeber, because Taleb initially sided with Claire around the Noah Karl issue in November so he sent Graeber tweet saying, you know principle of symmetry, “if you mob someone, expect to be mobbed”, because Graeber was complaining that he's getting mobbed by the Quillette people and then so Taleb was against Graeber, but then at some point Graeber convinced Taleb, and then maybe Claire kind of blames Graeber for Taleb’s turning against her which was extremely severe (in August 2019 on twitter). I think statistically it makes sense to me what Taleb was saying that intelligence doesn’t work on averages, etc. But this the backstory here, between Graeber, Claire and Taleb, and Graeber’s beef with Claire now, which is unrelated to HAU. It could have been published somewhere else, I don’t know why it wasn’t. The 15 months were there, but I supposed the Quillette piece published because of this backstory with Graeber like 15 months were there but you I suppose it was published because of this backstory with Graeber. These “classical liberals” are “not great, not terrible”, the only good thing is the jurisprudence they formalized, uncorrupted court systems, judges reasoning, unanimity of being judged by peers, distinguishing between testimony and evidence, there’s literally a different stand or exhibition in courts for these two separate processes. Testimony can become evidence, but only when corroborated so to say. Evidence is not just any piece of paper or witness, the process is complicated, what is that witness pre-existing relationship to the defendant, etc.
Justin: That’s interesting, I didn't know anything about Taleb playing any role in all this.
Enrique: Yeah because you know you went after Claire hard in August (2019) and then I suppose she’s recomposing, which is fine, but then Graeber, I mean he's basically a Titan, in anthropology and even in social theory, he's once in few decades type of guy and he wants this. You know he has no real connections in academic, I think he's liked outside of academia because he hates academia and he doesn't really act like a professor and he always takes the graduate student side etcetera, so he’s not like a typical professor, he’s a man-child, like he’s close to retirement age and a workaholic, always publishing always kind of doing stuff, so I think he's on top of things on top of his game, he's just also a very strategic thinker but what he managed to do through social media is dissimulation, redirection, stratagems. I mean this is clearly what's at play and yeah, it’s willed, he willed it into existence, because Graeber knew it was resolved in 2017, all these issues of backpay, outstanding pay, the board had addressed this, people outside Giovani at HAU were like “what the fuck you doing okay let's pay them, of course, pay them” and then like “you don't get to control payouts and honoraria anymore.
Justin: Interesting, so you actually think that David Graeber is really is the mastermind behind all of this and it's essentially a conscious ploy on his part for power really is what you're saying.
Enrique: Yeah, pretty much, if you give it a political reading and you get the timeline right, it lined up perfectly. The grievance was basically less than a handful of people at HAU who were in contact with Graeber, and Graeber was the leader, I mean he also has this maternal side that is kind of odd, expressing care, attention, concern, even goes out of his way. He's a busy man and he spent days, weeks (months) on this shit. There is some kind of complex there in Graeber’s person, personhood, that I haven't really understood or I don’t know some kind of like trauma with his mother, about you know he has this whole article in The Guardian (October 2017), about how his mother was kind of metooed (in Hollywood in the 1950s or 60s), but then yeah so there's something there personally and he knows exactly the energies involved, what he whipped up and he used that, he weaponized metoo, and he weaponized all these other things for his own kind of academic play to takeover HAU.
Justin: Okay, interesting now I feel like we're coming up on two hours now and we covered a lot of ground. You definitely I think brought a lot of things into focus for me and for people listening obviously I would be quite keen to hear other people's parts of the story but this has been illuminating as far as it's gone for sure. Do you have anything really important about this situation to add, that we haven't talked about yet that you'd really like to discuss or share.
Enrique: It goes in circles, hautalk, that's why its so frustrating, it's this kind of spiral you revisit. I don't know why it's never-ending I mean I will just simply say like some point it has to stop, you know, choose better targets, What else do they want, because they keep making demands, Giovonni's out, he's outside of academia, outside of publishing like what's what else do they want I don't understand. There was not an economy or calculation of punishment, there was this type of public humiliation, because Giovanni like he was the perfect scapegoat for anthropology, his days were counted, he was predestined to be the scapegoat because he's a very unorthodox type of person from you know the stories so he embodied these strange dualities, bridging certain dualities, so he represented on the one hand as a kind of kingmaker in the discipline, like a king but also you know criminal and non-scholarly and kind of brash; kind of like an insider from Cambridge connecting everyone but also as an outsider, comes out of nowhere from the Mediterranean onto the scene in the UK and US. He's from Italy so he has this like pathologized Mediterranean masculinity, he dresses well, clean-shaven, people describe him as bit corporate, like anthropologist don't look like that basically, so he fit the bill perfectly to become the discipline’s scapegoat.
Justin: Yeah, that's really well put because I've also been thinking about that in reading all of these documents is that it almost seems to me like Giovanni da Col is a type of man that pretty much isn't allowed in academia anymore and hasn't been for some time and reading about him I kind of got this impression of like wow it's kind of amazing that this guy lasted as long as he did, not because there's necessarily anything especially bad or wrong with him, I'm not saying, what I'm saying is he's a type of person, a type of man in particular, and it just seems to me that over the past several years the types of traits that he has are traits that are increasingly looked down upon or frowned upon or sometimes you know explicitly punished and he doesn't seem to have the traits that are increasingly rewarded in academia which is essentially the traits that are most rewarded nowadays in academia are a kind of really wishy-washy flexibility with one's words and expectations such that you can kind of paper over any difficult or unfortunate reality using you know a very agreeable flexibility of verbal capacity. I feel like you know you have to be obviously extremely tolerant, you have to be very kind to everyone at all times and you know you have to be socially very adept at that type of agreeability politics and to degree you're able to do that and massage that you can get quite far to the degree you're rash and a bit disagreeable especially if it's has a kind masculine kind of flavor to it that sort of stuff is just you know, it's being pushed out and I think the people who would defend that would say that's a good thing right, that's removing patriarchy that's making things more equitable and stuff. In a lot of ways what I'm describing I'm not like pushing some kind of conspiracy theory, it this is quite conscious, this is what people say right, this is what people in academia say, that's that they want to remove this type of like brash masculinity that that's it quite explicitly the goal of a lot of people and I think it's working so it's kind of a me it's kind of a wonder that he's made it as far as he has honestly
Enrique: Yeah, I mean because he worked in Tibet before like in development or something and then came into academia with plans (while doing a Phd in Cambridge and he still doesn’t have a formal Phd) and you know as a graduate student you're supposed to be kind of hapless and kind of mockingly self-deprecating, but he was very focused and knew exactly what type of anthropology he liked. He had a certain vision for anthropology, but in the end he wasn't even that kind of self-obsessed or kind of self-aggrandizing which is typical of neoliberal graduate students, he just basically created a space for what he considered good anthropology, what he would like to read, which apparently a lot of people agreed with, indeed that's what I wanted to read too, in relation to my own interests. But then so yes people, they attacked the person, they've broken the project and now we don't have the person that's fine, but then we also don't have the original vision of the project so then like the casualties are multiple, you can brutally get rid of people you don't like, that's just how kind of a those group dynamics work, other people were also excluded in painful ways. You know no one likes this kind of young white doppelganger professors, basically these kind of young dweebs who are already acting like professors and come from these professorial families, those are even worse. But he's not that type of guy either, he's was kind of this third type of figure who doesn't even often appear in academia, let alone anthropology. But he's definitely been attributed, projected many more things than he's kind of capable of, that's part of things of witchcraft like witches can be in many places at once, they can hurt remotely, at a distance, they eat children instead of raising them etcetera. I mean my main beef is like HAU basically stopped production, like there's a production line with authors, and you know just to not be kind of painted or brushed with the big brush “of oh you're part of enabling abuser” “you're part of a racist kind of colonial science anthropology” like this unwieldy brush is being wielded by all these kind of random people on Twitter who don't know what anthropology is you know call themselves scholars and just like brushing everyone, and everyone is trying to get away, so the project kind of more or less fragmented quite severely, the authors are down etc so I mean I don't know if it was worth it, the people who organized this, Graeber and basically a handful of people who he was working very closely with to organize this, who was there from the beginning and he knew what this going to become, I don't know if it was worth it, because yeah they got rid of Giovanni, but you know is everyone happier? In a sense HAU was a false promise people went to HAU, to you know be happier, to have a better career, make better connections, etc and then some people, let's say 10% of people who worked with HAU, they went there and they came feeling like shit, overworked, underappreciated, underpaid etc that's just most graduate students experience. They came out not with what they wanted to extract from the relationship, and now its just turned into this, there's like hundreds of dimensions now, so I don't know when it will end. The thing is it's part of this like collapse of the university and recomposition, so in the university, this loss of trust in figures of authority professors, ever these reports written by the interim board, very respected professors people who were like to a year ago lauded, but what they now is received with like a “no you're lying you're you're gaslighting me”, it's like what the fuck and then this is totally strange kind of like collapse of any form of trust in the academy. Except Graber, he’s somehow king of always being the good guy and I don’t know when Graeber is going to be shitstormed, but its I mean it's inevitable. It's been less of this kind of circular firing squad where everyone will go down because the reasons are increasingly petty, in this case I mean it's not been this Ouroboros eating itself it's been scapegoating, clearl one target, community surrounding it so I don't know what this will turn into, but the dynamic if definitely old school communal dynamics within anthropology.
Justin: So maybe that's the best way to wrap it up is just kind of discussing very briefly like where all this goes, it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly you think probably the they'll be more and more of this kind of scapegoating and the grievances over which people create scapegoats the grievances are going to become even more and more minor, basically people are going to be able to mobilize these types of campaigns successfully over you know infractions that are less and less severe until what, until in the final analysis is it just like there's three people left in academia and they're basically getting each other fired for you know the most minor infractions. Is that how you see it, is like the long-run equilibrium in your in your estimation that it's just going to get worse and worse until it kind of cannibalizes itself into nothingness.
Enrique: Scapegoating absolve some people for a certain amount of time, that’s the whole point of a scapegoat, you wash away your sins, HAU has because a river that washes away everyone's sins, like “oh yeah we also or didn't have interns, down with precarity, HAU is at fault”, and then everyone's is like hoping no one will kind of spot them and then that can only go on for so long. Initially they just wanted to remove him, they wanted to replace him, and then this same dynamic will play out, “I want to replace the professoriat”, and what’s the best way to get rid of them, a quick elimination mechanism? Some will be removed, others are immune to shitstorms, so its not this collapsing dynamic, more like a slow rotation, being dangled over a fire or dagger, or finding the Achilles heel, their days are numbered too. Anyone who is senior, anyone who has been a bit bossy, anyone who has tormented a student, and tormenting here for them means criticizing, tormenting means rushing, so this shit is gonna go on for a while until people are like fuck it, you know, you either recompose true intellectual work outside of academia, maybe independent journals, maybe anonymous journals maybe just a much better reddit, where people can’t just shitstorm eachother since its semi-anonymous and its about the intellectual content not the kind of petty personal kind of job things so then I think this will lead to a radical kind of separation, you know some people will get jobs, they’ll have published a book by a second-tier university press or publishing conglomerate with like a print-run of 300, held mostly by libraries, with a handful of people in the narrow field consulting it cursorily, and they'll tweet about it on Twitter and everyone will vicariously holler you know “great you're doing great girl” you know this kind of pathetic kind of clapping while in between those moement everyone holds a vigil for those who can’t get ahead in the system, its very schizophrenic and it's clearly unsustainable intellectually.
Justin: Well put, that's I think as good a prediction as any. Enrique thank you very much for coming to talk with me and spending two hours of your day to kind of break this down for me I really appreciate it.
Enrique. Let's see how it goes I should have filtered myself I bit more. I pulled a Murphysim, which is you know, speak truthfully, don't hedge it too much, don't filter too much, become aware of the gaps in knowledge, try to untie knotted words and see the void, don’t subscribe to an easy narrative, etc. It was necessary, someone at some point people need to start talking with they how they see it because everyone's been observing the same things, it's just no one has been allowed to add to it in the public conversation any other element so yeah let’s see.
Justin: I also wanted to say to you Enrique that I really appreciate you’re candor, especially from what you said before that when David Graeber wrote his apology about HAU, you know a lot of the people who who were working for the journal or were associated with the journal basically jumped ship immediately out of out of fear basically, so it sounds like you did not do that and not only did you not do that but you're willing to talk in public on video live which for a lot of people for a lot academics especially, at all related to any type of controversy, I would say the overwhelming majority of academics would never dare go on a livestream to speak live about such a hot-button controversy so my hats off to you that's really cool of you.
Enrique: You should have told me that before, maybe I'm just a bad academic.
Justin: No no, it just seems like you're an honest transparent straightforward guy so I appreciate that about you and I just wanna thank you for that and shout that out for you
Enrique: Cheers let's see. I’m sure I’ll get a bit of flack from my colleagues at HAU, who reminded to say remember this is now “HAU’s perspective or opinion or line or reading or opinion on Graeber or anything”, this was just a certain reflection because I am planning to maybe write just publicly up to at some point maybe. And if I write I have to be honest, there’s nothing worse than a dishonest writer.
Good night, thanks for having me and farewell.
[The transcript of the podcast has been slightly edited to remove ‘you know’ ‘ums’ and other fillers, and amended with more precise details which were overlooked during the live podcast.]