Amphitaxis

Amphitaxis is another attempt.

To which I am now going to add queeries.

Queeries*, ontologies, epistomology and phKO: on the tyranny of the Subject

or, the other way round.

John Lindsay Reader in Information Systems Design Kingston University

Introduction

This paper is in three parts, and each part is in three parts. These may be re-organised, or colour coded. One thread deals with the knowledge organisation and information systems which are necessary to make a rhetorical position. The second deals with the tyranny of the Subject as it is constructed within the University, sometimes called discipline, or faculty. The third deals with LGBT, which I thought perhaps a type of sandwich.

The first section deals with the meeting which gave rise to this, organised at Glasgow University in November 2007, under an umbrella of Gender and Women's Studies, of Politics, of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Policy, bringing together academics, activists, administrators of LGBT.

The second deals with the silences I heard during that meeting, to which I pointed, which deal with a special type of organisation, a special knowledge of activism, and asked whether the academics were silent because they simply don't know, because they are making political choices, or whether they are denying?

The third deals with strategy and tactics, what is to be done, and by whom? I was sponsored by the University and College Union to attend the meeting, so strategy must be partly directed at and the responsibility of the Union, but also of its members. But social activism appears in all sorts of communities and the University is only one engagement.

These threads and sections need to be given illustrations, or numbers, or names, in order that they may be re-oriented according to desire for orientation.

I am going to use the string IS::KO to mean the combination of information systems and knowledge organisation which include the books in libraries, the material in galleries and museums, the archives, the scratchings of humans activity. And the computer, the new still machines, with the camera and the telephone.

phKO I am going to use a post post modernist approach to the Subject, it means politics, history, philosophy as Subjects and disciplines in the University Knowledge Organisation. After the Archeology of Knowledge and the Order of Things.

LGBT is not of my making, I am using it simply because the organisers did.

Queeries

The Queeries I have been developing for many years. They have never been bibliographied, but after the meeting I simply noted the re-occurence of some of them, in the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow, a couple of medals recorded in the catalogue, with Winckelmann, who has been a long term one. In the National Gallery of Scotland, a new translation of Michelangelo's poems to Tommaso, and Michelangelo was next to Winckelmann in the Hunterian. In the National Gallery of Scotland, two Titian's, poesie to Philip 2. And in a bookshop I picked up a reprint from 1972 of *

Queeries are a matter of history, perhaps what is called art, but that gets us to the matter of form, of medium, and matter.

That gets us quickly to politics, and to decoration. It would be much easier if we used Dewey, than words, 306 mapping onto a variety of 7 and 9. This is where phKO meets IS::KO

The politics of national galleries and museums, of libraries, of universities have been knowingly distorting, lying, hiding, denying, trivialising, these tales since the Symposium. Unless, of course, I am wrong, and there is nothing there.

Politics and Subjects

Politics is at least not political science. When I was a student the game was played of neutrality, distance, objectivity. But now the gaze is known. Yet still the game is played. Sociology, anthropology, even more suspect, more challenged, leisure class theory, n dimensional people.

Yet there has to be a scientific method.

There has to be a standard of fact, logic, argument, and that means history, even of the most local and most recent.

That raises the universality of the particular, the connection between the moment and the couple. What is true of one place is true and not true of another, and of time.

The accounts are either in documents or in minds. Both are selective, the collection of things even more so, and their cataloguing and classification almost totally untheorised. This is IS::KO

The terms which are allocated, the concepts, renaissance, enlightenment, classical, gothic, all contain Subjects, A Blunt Dialectic. A special category is the nation, the state, the nation state. but people live in cities. It is in cities, not in nations that LGBT achieve human rights? People also live in small towns and these stories will be different, but for human rights and identify they move to cities.

Human Rights is the subject of the Glasgow meeting? The UN declaration of human rights has in section 19 the freedom of expression, and access to information. This it was possible to use with the profession of librarians but meets limits of fascism and that is politics, but it is also history, and philosophy.

"Men having sex with men." "Gender assignment at birth." "Sodomy laws." "Gross indecency." "Buggery." These were just a few groups of words I picked out during the meeting in Glasgow which are in some sense symbols. But is discourses these symbols permeate, some of them in literature, some of them in art, but isn't literature an art? So of them in courts of law, which perhaps should be regarded as literature, or art? But is it politics?

Identity is a sort of category. We might have a cultural identify, a sexual identity, gender identity, is identity a universality?

Classification

Whether one is one and all alone, or divided into two, a binary, subject, object, or a trinity, Father, Son, Ghost, Ego, Id, Superego, Or anything more complex, up to Dewey and UDC things are put into categories, history, politics, philosophy, LGBT, and these categories are only but also boxes. phKO; IS::KO

It has become possible to consider a category heteronormativity and to challenge it, that might be gender studies but it is less likely to be engineering. Norms and the normative may be challenged in film, but in chemistry?

The classification of activism will be like the classification of politics. There is representative activism, the case of Chris Smith, and there is participatory activism, the self organisation of people in groups? How would we classify the activities of Peter Tatchell, in Bermondsey in 1983? Or of Edward Carpenter in 1883.

Some of this stuff will be in archives. The National Archives and the Metropolitan London Archives have begun to play an interestingly new role. Museums and galleries are a different case. Libraries yet again. Which of these are dependent on publishers? They have their own case. How many objects are there?

Trades Unions

Now we come to the meet of the matter, how was gay liberation won?

Here is one story, but it is a particular one.

The march on the Saturday, the wearing of the "glad to be gay badge", meant it either had to stay on, or had to be taken off.

And thus comes Monday.

What is to be done?

Even the Cambridge Apostles debated why Mondays can't be like Saturdays.

It seemed that coming out was work was essential.

But that would be foolhardy without allies.

The allies would have to be the trades union.

But here comes the accident of time, and I don't think I can remember the sequence, for there was also the rank and file group, and there was the professional association. I talked with a couple of people who were connected across these, and found that there were others engaged in the same process.

Now history and memory has gone, for there are now no documents. The leaflets, the ephemera, is not collected. It had been, but that is another story. I have a memory of John Warburton being sacked, of Susan Shell, of Ian Davies. These were written up at some point in a pamphlet, The Word is Gay, and in another, Gay Rights at Work, (GRAW). There was writing in Librarians for Social Change (LfSC), and a letter in the Library Association Record, a conference, or open space gathering, at North London Polytechnic, perhaps more than one, and one at Bethnal Green Library. At some point there must have been something in an internal bulletin of the International Socialists, and there was a double page spread in Socialist Worker. At some point there were motions to union conferences. But before there were motions at branches, leaflets at demonstrations,

In 1967, it was recorded in an exhibition in Liverpool, the Tower Hamlets Branch of the National Union of Seamen, (NUS) passed a motion calling for a section in the bill passing through Parliament that it exclude the Merchant Navy, and, the exhibition claimed, the seamen claimed, they were successful. In 1970 the Curator of Southampton Gallery was sacked, in 1974 the Curator of Leicester Gallery, and I had known nothing of those until very recently, Trevor Thomas I think might still be alive. Arthur Jeffress had committed suicide, yet his collection went to Southampton, and they still sacked he who achieved this. But after John Warburton, Susan Shell, Ian Davies was successfully defended and re-instated.

[In 1957 John Wolfenden had written a report which ten years later resulted in an act. One story is that his son is or was or is gay, Thus material conditions determine consciousness and the dominant ideas of the ruling class, (DIRC) change. There had been campaigns and activisms during and before this, but that is another series of queeries. ]

What had been achieved was that rank and file shop stewards, people who are predominantly not gay, had been prepared to raise the issue in their workplaces, in their trades union branches, and then speak. In parallel the Right to Work Campaign, these shop stewards had been arguing for the rights of the unemployed, and for connecting struggles over job losses, closures, with the rights of women, and LGB (I must be truthful, I don't know when or where the T came up). (There had been radical drag, but that is another matter).

Then the Anti-Nazi League, ANL did the same thing on racism, in the fight against the emerging far right. But the ANL, RtW, R&F shared the same set of ideas, and the same set of people and these had been won by the argument inside the IS.

I can't remember the places or the dates, though some of these will be listed in Socialist Worker, of the meetings, why socialists should support gays, but I have Cliff's article in Socialist Worker and that appeared in The Word is Gay. But some weeks I was doing up to five. These were in towns, and had been organised. They had leaflets. People had taken them to their contacts to try to get them along.

Yet in the Gay Movement we heard, and we still hear, that straights will not support the sexual minorities.

And this simply is not true.

It depends on the politics.

And the history.

For we have been here before, and the work on past continues to need digging.

The link between the ideas of socialists and the ideas for sexual liberation re-emerge and are washed away by the next group of activists, professionals, academics, who want to defend their strategy.

And these things happen in parallel.

The precursor of ILGA was completely resistant to the argument about the workplace and the trades union. And at the Glasgow meeting we were told it has expelled the lovers of boys. Niemoller reminder.

But the Anti-Apartheid Movement was eventually won round. And the ANC, and the South African Government.

And there are other cases which need writing.

Yet academics who know nothing will assert that what they know is true, as they have always done, and that something they can't see, because they wont, isn't.

Eroti-CISM

Now we begin to generalise.

For the argument about gay rights, about passing for straight, about being yourself, or human nature, about mad, bad, sad, about difference and diversity, about human rights, after World War 2 must have become a more easy argument. Sodomy, buggery, are other matters. Fellatio getting close to the bone. Wanker hasn't really changed its meaning?

Writing about these things, in the manner of the Sun or the Daily Mirror, has a dual purpose. Televisual scandal too. The role of the media we grasped and worked on. Mine was libraries, collection and classification.

But then there was porn.

This had always been an antequeerian activity, the scholarly approach to stuff.

But defending its publicity.

The attack by Mary Whitehouse on Gay News was the first general campaign where I realised it wasn't up to me any more. The Right to Work March went to Brighton to demand the stocking of Gay News. The placards were designed, made and distributed. Her attack was frocked in religion but that allows only for another to be added to politics, history, philosophy.

(I'm quite prepared for minor disputes on the connection between Gay News and Porn. Or Mary Whitehouse and Jesus hanging on a cross.)

It is what pulls your enemies out of the closet and onto the streets that makes clear what is at stake.

If you look inwards to your own struggles you might not be clear what it is you are actually fighting about, human, rights, art, nature,, truth, goodness, right, freedom, liberty, or whatever, but look at what your enemies name, what they call things, what it is that gets them into gear, and it will be clear.

And there have been no shortage of opportunities.

Children are their special case.

The defenders of capital punishment are the defenders of the rights of the unborn.

The floggers and spankers are the defenders of the innocence of children.

The sexuality of children remains the fault line. The demonisation of paedophilia, the removal of paedarasty from the lexicon of right on struggles, removes the debate of Platonism from the understanding of the present. But this sacrifice will return to haunt us.

And the activists, in order to defend their budget stream use the same arguments as their enemies.

This is dangerous.

My pleasure is much more simple, in an Arcadian pastoral, walking without clothes.

But then think how little we have gained, for to talk your clothes off and go for a walk is a revolutionary activity.

And this is the totality of the generalisation, for as long as men have tools with which to fuck women, some men will think they have a right. Now are we back at strategy, for some women will support them, or at least not support us.

But as long as we have commodity fetishism, alienation and reification, men will see their other, external, tool, as a weapon.

That was the dialectic of liberation.

Within the trades union it is possible only to argue the politics of the possible.

Within the political party, it is possible to argue what now I wonder?

Within the professional association, it depends. The charter will give the framework.

Within the local community there have recently been openings in Local Agenda 21, sustainable development, and there have been world summits which have opened local chances.

And this gets us to RAE.

The Research Assessment Exercise is a leisure class theory for one dimensional men in which they play with the taxpayers' money in order to DIRC. In the process, queeries are squeezed for their's isn't a subject.

The activists are squeezed too, for each panel has a dominant idea and activists cross panels in the same way as borders are crossed in communities.

The main output of the RAE is the thing called the published paper in the refereed journal, what is called peer- reiview. But who are the peers of the queeries?

How is good activism sorted?

There can be bad activism. Blair's is bad activism. But not in all parts. So is it simply what suits? Or is there better generalisation?

There is now a category called sustainable development. This includes cultural diversity. The professional societies validate courses in universities. Courses teach sustainable development, and perhaps cultural diversity. Were these categories the result of research, or of activism, and were these peer reviewed?

But all these peer reviews?

How are they organised so we may make use of them, even if only for critical theory?

Once upon a time, they were in libraries, with catalogues. Now they are perhaps in computers.

So where are the queeries?

The first case after the Glasgow meeting was www.theses.com. Grep strin "hommosexuality" produced 57 hits.

This is the total of all the research theses published in Britain, as best achieved. 57 hits.

What appear within the 57 is itself interesting.

In the period since say 1987, the first RAE, are these the people who are the beneficiaries? Is this the world gained?

Human Rights

The discourse of Human Rights is a space where politics might be activated, but we need a thread of explanation why we are not dealing with the dialectics of liberation. (1967.)

There has been the collapse of the USSR with the parallel demise of the world's Stalinist Parties which were called Communist, as was the USSR.

But with them has gone the rank and file trades union organisation in a downturn in workplace self organisation. Or even representative trades union organisation.

It is in the workplace that people experience the daily, but for academics, activists, professionals, that workplace presents a unity in which the rhetoric of right materially differences the discourse of nature.

What we need to do, above all else, is to rebuild the trades unions, in the workplace.

But this is not the agenda of LGBT rights activists.

I remember when very young having to teach the Ballad of Reading Gaol for that was in the text.

A boy says, "Are you queer too, Sir?"

On that hung a life.

We don't appear to have gained much? Glad to be Gay was the badge.

The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights was the title and theme of the Glasgow meeting. The political argument is what is best done by representation, and what by activity. The political argument is what now is to be done in the wealthy west about international development? But there is also a political argument about how knowledge is organised and the impact of the organisation of knowledge on learning, teaching, research, and activism.

Outstilations

These are events at which points are made and media materialised. They are given names. Sometimes they are written up, like queeries. They form grep strings on which the IS::KO may be queeried.

Antequeerians

This is a list on jiscmail, and now a group on Facebook but also events during LGBTQ* history month in which the five great institutions in London are targeted for their presentations.

Blunt Dialectic

This has been a series of seminars at Kingston University near London, working from the 1938 text of A.F.Blunt, A method for the documentation of the humanities.

Cambridge Apostles

This started as Wittgenstein's Poker, but hasn't yet had a proper opening.

Choice of Hercules

A series of seminars at Kingston University which turned into a series of presentations for people interested in knowledge, information, data and metadata, KIDMM. New eivdence is popping up all the time. It started with a secular cantata of Bach, and moved to a mangotope of Clive. It hangs on Handel.

Taking a kissybion for a walk.

A paper read at the Institute of Historical Studies in the University of London for the first LGBTQ* history month, in February 2005 has had a couple of further outstilations.

Up the English Garden Path

The idea of the English Landscape Garden spread through Europe towards the later part of the 18th century. Was this the first LGBT language since Plato?

Some of these have been written up in Information, Systems and Social Change, and deposited in the British Library.