In a book on the convergence of global culture and critical politics in the twenty-first century, it is not surprising to find a discussion of the Pussy Riot phenomenon. From the moment they staged their “Punk Prayer” in a Moscow cathedral in 2012, the group achieved global celebrity and forced attention on particular political decisions and alliances of Vladimir Putin. the group has also embodied many of the key concepts of Michael Kennedy’s new book. While not intellectuals in the conventional sense, they surely convey intellectuality, a practice in which knowledge has consequence, autonomous of other sources of power (p. 43). They have created a public, locally and globally, that eagerly follows their story and archives the videos they have produced. They offer a way for scholars (of feminism or democracy, for example) to articulate and deepen essential ideas about power and resistance. And they both create and help to make global knowledge about Russian politics and Russian protest.
What is surprising, in a work that calls for attention to global inequalities of various kinds, is to find that in Kennedy’s account the women of Pussy Riot themselves are silent. Instead we encounter Madonna, as she expresses solidarity with them and as they in turn learn about Madonna’s support during their trial. We also hear from the director of an HBO film about Pussy Riot. But the collective and its members remain subaltern objects of our gaze. Their intellectuality—as demonstrated in their numerous essays at pussy-riot.livejournal.com—is absent; nor can we see their own role in the propagation and flow of their ideas. Michael Kennedy certainly deserves praise for the wide range of topics he brings to the reader’s attention. The dense prose of Globalizing Knowledge demands that its reader engage with critical global intellectuals, but for this reader they remained distant. A promising set of ideas instead serves to hold together disparate discussions that often, as in the case of Madonna, mask a strongly U.S.-centric approach. The “global” remains frustratingly out of reach.
Kennedy’s aim is to consider how intellectuals, embedded in institutions and networks, engage in the globalization of transformative knowledge. How, he asks, can the scholar, and knowledge institutions in which scholars are embedded, encourage social, political, and cultural transformations at the global scale? If intellectuals have become an unfashionable subject, he would not only return our attention to them but bravely expand the scope. It is easy to love the organic intellectual in the thick of an uprising, but Kennedy wants us to appreciate, and think critically about, how institutional networks—universities, foundations, and even scholarly journals—engage publics and foster transformation.
The book is loosely structured around the various concepts Kennedy wishes to explore: knowledge itself, intellectuals, institutions (especially universities), networks, publics, flows. Of particular importance to Kennedy is place. Poland, where his research began some 35 years ago, is often invoked, as are places like Kosovo and Afghanistan where his career as a university administrator has brought him. He is acutely aware that these contexts are not equal—as of course they could not be, in a study of the flow of ideas. Some places have more access to networks of ideas than do others; Kennedy’s essential idea is that intellectuals can design institutions and networks embedded in or surrounding those institutions that transform or redirect the flow of knowledge. His long experience in Sociology and International Studies furnishes an excellent vantage point from which to draw together insights.
Yet the tools here are abstract and often needlessly pluralized; many, like “knowledgeability/ies,” do not appear in the index and so remain frustratingly obscure. A key problem, though, lies in the very nature and origins of the transformations about which Kennedy writes. As a scholar engaged with revolution and with intellectuals throughout his career, Kennedy is committed to the idea that people make change. Yet the text tends toward the exclusion of the very people whose agency he would recapture. The focus on “flows” is crucial here. As Augustine Sedgewick has recently argued (“Against Flows,” History of the Present 4(2) [Fall 2014]: 143–70), “flow” as a metaphor privileges those who benefit from the idea that everything is liquid, and in fact derives from the discourse of capitalism. What flows is natural, and those who participate in the flow are superior to those who cannot. Analogously, those who participate actively in the flow of globalizing knowledge (like Madonna or HBO) have a position superior to those who are at best along for the ride.
In place of the capitalists, Globalizing Knowledge celebrates Western, mostly American, academics and Western, mostly American, institutions. They are able to recognize, participate in, and direct flows. In the chapter on intellectuality, after making a convincing, extended case for the intellectuality of three world leaders—two of whom, Richard Lagos of Chile and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, were educated in the United States—Kennedy turns to Occupy Wall Street, sharing his own pictures and reminiscences of the movement. A few activists are mentioned as evidence of the intellectualit(ies) driving the movement, but despite the knowledge the movement has produced (see for example theoccupiedtimes.org), it suffers the same fate as Pussy Riot, rendered mainly through the eyes of prominent academic observers. A serious commitment to uncovering globalized knowledge surely requires being open to the possibility that knowledge is produced at the margins and under the radar. The chapter entitled “Knowledge Institutions and Universities of the World” is even more disappointing. All the institutions discussed are top-ranked American universities. What do globalizing knowledges look like from the perspective of a university in Prishtina, Shanghai, or Johannesburg? This can be known, and is not trivial to the project on which Kennedy is embarked. Finally, in a section entitled “Places in the Social Sciences,” Kennedy explores globalized knowledge by counting up articles on countries around the world in “leading” journals in sociology and other disciplines (pp. 162–85). Does this preclude the possibility of globalized knowledge flowing in other places, appearing in journals in languages other than English?
Other main actors in the story include the Social Science Research Council, the World Economic Forum and its competitors, the Open Society Fund, etc. Each of these is unquestionably important, and Kennedy is right to focus attention on the way they engage in the world. But just as other literature on flows makes the workings of capitalism natural, the absence of alternative perspectives in Globalizing Knowledge also makes the leadership of these institutions and intellectuals seem inevitable. They may invite others to the table, but they hold the floor. Their voice, it has to be said, is less than inspiring. Time and again throughout the book Kennedy quotes the mission statements of various university or foundation initiatives; readers will recognize the dead programmatic voice familiar from their own university websites.
Michael Kennedy’s aims in Globalizing Knowledge are important. We ought to think about how knowledge works in global conditions, and to be prepared to engage with transformational thinking internationally. But to do so, we should decenter our perspective. Rather than observing flows or managing networks, we need to get inside and interpret the networks and the knowledge-making that exists in the world.
