Smith at Auschwitz: Research Product #5
The Production(s) of Smith (1)
The core business of the industry that Smith works in is the production and consumption of knowledge. By way of recompense, the University that employs Smith transfers money once a month from one of its many bank accounts, into an account that Smith keeps. If the contract of employment that exists between Smith and the University is severed then the University will stop transferring money into Smith’s account.
The contract that exists between Smith and his employer obliges him to perform certain tasks and if he refuses to perform these tasks, or if the University deems that Smith is performing them badly, then his value in the University’s own internal market place, as well as the wider market within which organizations of knowledge production and consumption are situated, will be reduced. The decline in the value of a commodity like Smith – who is frequently animated, like a clock or a toy robot - can take several forms, including the degradation of its symbolic value. If Smith’s productive capacity becomes so impoverished that the cost of the University’s investment in him is determined to be in excess of the return which the University expects to make on its investment, then the possibility of Smith’s foreclosure will arise.
When Smith addresses a room full of people he is engaged in a promotional exercise that involves the transfer of knowledge. Patterns of knowledge consumption during Smith’s performances are uneven. Sometimes the distinction between the production of knowledge and its transfer is unclear. Note that Smith’s distribution of knowledge involves the use of words. The University’s customers will exchange money for words, and it is often the case that payment is deferred on the understanding that it will eventually be made. In principle, the pecuniary value of each word that Smith expels during a performance is quantifiable. There surely exists a formula for calculating the price of words like these, but neither Smith nor I know what it is.
Sometimes Smith talks about interesting things. He uses his right index finger to point at pictures that he projects onto a screen that glows. Sometimes these include pictures of things that Smith has made, including: a) the photograph of a young woman posing outside Block 15 at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005, and b) the photograph of a male catering assistant posing in the grounds of a university in North London in 2007. In exchange for words expelled, and other gestures, Smith receives more money than many in the university, but not nearly as much as others. Remuneration most obviously takes the form of money, but is not limited to that.
At work, Smith stages all kinds of performances – in classrooms, corridors, stairwells, canteens and offices. Be assured that in spite of appearances they are only ever staged by Smith to maximize his own financial, professional and emotional well being. The maximization of Smith is potentially equal to the maximization of the University. When the University’s and Smith’s interests coincide then there may be a period of relative growth. When they diverge, then, for the University, the productive capacity of Smith’s performances are negligible. However, the deterioration of Smith will not necessarily be consistent with the deterioration of the University. While Smith’s decline will generally have a negative impact on Smith’s value as a commodity in the University’s internal market place, the impact it will have on the value of the University itself will usually be slight. Because it employs a lot of people, quantities of production at the University are relatively high. And, because it is in a state of permanent technical and administrative revolution, quantities of production will, during periods of relative economic stability, invariably increase. Increases in production usually result in the reduction of the average cost of each unit of production. This is one reason why, during periods of stability, the University is prepared to exonerate Smith’s failure. Like the catering assistant in Smith’s photograph, Smith is a unit of production – albeit, of course, an entirely different class of unit.
The Photograph
After class one day, in May 2002, Smith returned to his office and found a book there containing fifty one black and white photographs, purportedly taken by a man called Wily Georg (1993). According to information that Smith found on the book’s dust jacket, in the summer of 1941 Georg entered the Warsaw Ghetto and produced an illicit photographic record of some of the things he found there (ibid: 110). Compiled in 1992 by Rafael F. Scharf, Georg’s book is called In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941 and, according to Scharf, Wily Georg was an ordinary radio operator in the Wehrmacht, one of several German repressive state apparatuses (Althusser, 1971: 148) that should on no account be confused with either of the following other German repressive state apparatuses that were also operating in Poland at the time: the SS (including the Einszatsgruppen), and the Gestapo (op. cit: 110).
Smith’s attention was arrested by the image of a young man, who was looking straight into Georg’s camera and, therefore, into Smith as well (ibid: 79). He noticed that the young man was holding a metal cup in his left hand and that the white enamel paint on the outside of the cup was chipped in three or four different places. The young man appeared to be standing quite still and his body’s comportment suggested to Smith that standing still was 'habitual', so to speak. Smith thought it was strange, under the circumstances, that no-one else in Georg’s photograph appeared to look quite as desolate – or despised - as him.
The young man’s left hand was bandaged, and whilst the bandages on his hand appeared to be doing exactly what one would expect them to do, the ones that were loosely wrapped around his feet looked so desperately limp that it occurred to Smith that they were actually a kind of sandal, and not really bandages at all. In addition, the young man appeared to be wearing a sack cloth undergarment, on top of which was something that might once have been a smart blue sleeveless cotton shirt, or even a child’s dress, but which was now in such a state of disrepair that in order to remain attached to his body, it appeared to require the support of a piece of grey cloth that was probably once, said Smith, ‘as white as the rest of his body might have been.' Although his style of dress was different to that of all the other people in Georg’s photograph, there was, for Smith, something about the young man that profoundly compromised his abjection. His legs were obviously damaged - the skin was torn in several places – but the young man’s face looked, according to Smith, ‘remarkably well’; physically at least, if not temperamentally. Unlike the ‘musselmanner’ in Margaret Bourke-White’s famously iconic photographs (Callaghan: 1998), taken immediately after the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945, this young man’s dereliction, said Smith, ‘is less than convincing’. (1)
In fact, had the young man dressed and posed like the other people in the same photograph – most of whom also appeared to be looking into Georg’s camera and, therefore, into Smith as well – then, according to Smith, the state of his physical frame alone would certainly not have been enough to distinguish him, socially, from: the ‘smart’ woman in the black dress, the ‘sprightly’ young boy in the cap, the ‘pretty’ girl in the floral chemise, the ‘sturdy’ man in the rain coat, the ‘somber’ man in the dark suit, and another girl in a dress which, had the photograph been in colour, would almost certainly have been red or blue or grey or yellow. In fact, whilst the young man’s clothes looked like they had been worn repeatedly and never washed or repaired, the condition of his face suggested to Smith that, incredible as it might seem, these garments might not actually have always been worn by him at all. In short, it seemed to Smith that the disconnection between the young man’s face in particular – which was full of 'youth' – and the rest of his person, hinted at what Smith refers to in his notes, as ‘the kind of performance one might actually associate with someone in fancy dress’ (2005: 17). Indeed, if some reasonably well-to-do young Polish, or even German gentleman, on the other side of the ghetto wall, had one day decided to cross over into the ghetto itself and, whilst there, chosen to impersonate one of its inhabitants, then this young man, according to Smith, is precisely what they might have looked like.
Perhaps the young man’s ‘pantomimic aspect’ is one of the reasons why he continues to remind Smith of himself, such as he was, aged somewhere between seventeen and twenty two years old? Which is to say that although Smith’s identification with the young fellow in the photograph might at first have been physiognomically motivated, the uncanny nature of the relationship that still persists between Smith and the young man in Georg’s picture was, and most probably still is, about something more than bone structure and pigmentation.
The Performance
On August 12th 2005 Smith arrived at Auschwitz for the second time. On this occasion he travelled there by train. On the way to Auschwitz, he visited several other places in Poland, each of which had also served a similar purpose: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Majdanek.
En route to Oświęcim (אָשפּיצין) from Kraków, Smith wrote (2005: 13): ‘I admit I was really surprised, more than a little disturbed in fact, to see so many stars on the trees outside… dangling from yellow aerosol nooses.’
Unlike most visitors to Auschwitz, the camera that Smith used that afternoon was a medium format Bronica SQ-B. Also unlike most visitors, Smith used a Metz flashgun to illuminate his photographs, almost all of which he took during the day. Like most, but not all visitors, Smith took a number of photographs inside the old extermination camp, but then unlike most visitors, Smith boldly approached some of the other visitors – people he’d never knowingly met before - and asked them to pose for him. Mostly they agreed. Unlike most ‘serious’ photographs that make reference to the Holocaust, the photographs Smith took that day were colour-saturated pictures that, according to Smith, invoke ‘the iconography of middle-brow fashion advertising’ (ibid: 24).
•
‘‘Jews were genocided. Now they’re doing Palestinians. Stop them.’ There were other things written on the walls of the womens’ barracks,’ said Smith. ‘Most of it was just scatological, but some of it combined scatology and sex. Like, for example, ‘We fuck your Jew mother up the shitter’’.
•
The svelte young woman who emerged that day from Block 15 was wearing a blue, white, red and grey striped sleeveless shirt, a white cotton skirt, a pair of blue sandals, and black toe nail polish that was almost exactly the same colour as her hair. The exposed parts of her body – her arms, legs, neck and face – were tanned, and it was obvious to me that she was the most beautiful woman that Smith had ever seen that day.
He explained to the young woman – who was nothing if not agreeably assertive - that he would be grateful if she would allow herself to be photographed by him.
‘I'd like to photograph you for a project I'm doing’, he said.
I noticed that she nearly didn’t smile, almost as soon as he’d finished speaking.
•
‘Perhaps there were as many as ten of us sat in a circle in the attic room at the party I attended in Ladbroke Grove twenty three years ago,’ said Smith, later that evening at the Hotel Glob. ‘In the center of the circle was the same young man who moments earlier invited us to go upstairs with him. Of course, not everyone wanted to go, but I never thought twice about it. The young man – who earlier presented me with a small gift called (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais (The Clash: 1978) – shuffled like Colombo from the centre of the circle to its outer edges where each of us was sat cross-legged, and although I am unable to remember every detail of the operation that followed – whether, for instance, our host prepared separate shots or whether instead we were each dispensed part of a single pre-prepared dose - I do clearly remember the feeling I experienced then, after being injected, and how it wasn't dissimilar to the feeling I experienced this afternoon, when I looked through my Bronica SQ-B at somebody posing in front of the womens’ barracks at Birkenau.’
Smith photographed her twelve times. The act lasted five minutes. That she didn’t look directly at Smith is immaterial. That she didn't do that doesn't necessarily mean that she wasn't looking for him. Perhaps her performance was staged for him and in spite of him? Likewise, although it's possible that she experienced pleasure from knowing, or imagining, that there was something about her performance that pleased him, it would almost certainly be a mistake to assume that she was only performing in order to please him. Although that is possible. Either way, just as I think that his relationship with her was socially parasitic, so I believe that her relationship with him was of an entirely similar order.
Smith didn’t ask for her name. Neither did he instruct her to pose in any particular way. However, had she done something that he'd considered inappropriate, for whatever reason – smiled, for instance – then he would have told her not to. Interesting to note that in situations like these, Smith thinks he's responsible for convincing people that they're responsible for making their own decisions.
It wasn’t the pose she assumed – the performance she chose to re-enact – that startled him, but the fluid, flawless way in which she articulated herself. The way that she turned her left foot four inches in front of her right, and then rotated her right foot fifteen degrees further to the right, whilst bending her right leg slightly at the knee, all in one slight, uncomplicated movement. But despite all that, Smith knew very well that however seductive its iteration, the pose she struck that afternoon in Silesia was actually no more or less than the accomplished reproduction of precisely the kind of pose one might find every day in glossy magazine pages, and on billboard posters, in most western and many non-western countries. Including Poland. It was a brilliant facsimile, and no less seductive for it. Much like Smith’s own performance - which also embodied a set of codes and conventions appertaining to the performance of a type of photography. Despite their obvious lack of originality, Smith and the girl delighted in their actions, which, lest we forget, were carried out only meters away from the spot – now derelict - where the industrialized and highly original production of death once included gassing and burning.
Advertising Smith
Toruń is a medieval town in Poland (pop. 206,000), often referred to in promotional materials, including tourist brochures, as the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus. (2)
According to Copernicus (Rosen: 2004, 174): ‘Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth's motion. The earth together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.’
Watching Smith forage about the corner of the small park on the outskirts of Toruń where his Research Product #4 (RP4) billboard posters are being displayed, I realise that he is the only element in motion there. Like the sun in Copernican theory, each billboard remains perfectly still. (3)
Smith is holding a video camera in his right hand. From time to time he raises the camera to his face. Occasionally he mounts the video camera on a tripod and points it at something. Sometimes he points it at one of the RP4 billboards, or at a person, or group of persons, in the corner of the park where the billboards are. On one occasion he places the video camera – made by Sony – directly onto the green and yellow grass, tilts the camera fifteen degrees in an upwardly direction, and then inserts a damp matchbox, which he discovered earlier today in Rynek Staromiejski, near the famous Church of the Holy Spirit, under the lens.
Smith’s video camera is now pointing at a square photograph of the young woman he met four years earlier outside Block 15 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Fig. 1) In Toruń the young woman’s image is juxtaposed with a bright pink rhombus that reminds me of Mr. Blobby by Noel Edmonds, and which contains two horizontal lines of black text, one above the other. (4) The upper line says: ‘Oświęcim-Brzezinka Październik 2009’. The bottom line reads: ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau October 2009’. The photograph of the young woman is framed by another rhomboid, the colour of which corresponds directly with the colours in the photograph. The two objects - the second rhomboid and the photograph of the young woman - whilst conceptually distinct, are somehow perceptually indistinguishable.
On the left hand side of the photograph of the young woman is a vertical strip containing seven rectangles, each of which contains a colour that's different to the colours contained in the other adjoining rectangles. The colours contained in the strip are: red, purple, blue, brown, green, black and yellow. Note that the colour scheme used in RP4 appears to reproduce the nuanced colour coding system that was used to classify inmates at the various Nazi concentration and extermination camps: Yellow = Jew; Red = ‘Political enemy’ (including communists); Brown = Roma; Green = ‘Professional criminals’; Blue = Forced foreign labourers; Pink = ‘Sexual offenders’ (including homosexuals); Black = ‘Asocials’ (including alcoholics) and Purple = Jehova’s Witnesses. 10 Note also that the diegetic elements that constitute RP4 – photographs, colours, shapes etc. - are complemented by innumerable non-diegetic elements. Examples of non-diegetic elements that exist in the vicinity of the RP4 billboards include: cobble stones, leaves, flowers, trees, a hamburger stand, two bus shelters, passersby. (5)
Unlike Barcelona, Toruń is not a colourful city, architecturally speaking. In fact Smith’s impression of Toruń – an impression I share – is of a city that is invariably beige. In this context, one might say that Smith’s billboards are, chromatically speaking at least, quite outstanding, which may account, in part, for the nature of most people’s initial reaction, something which, in general, persistently realized itself through the enactment of sudden and highly irregular locomotive procedures.
Couple A is composed of a man (B) and a woman (C), possibly in their late twenties. Smith and I believe that an intimate connection exists between them, but as a result of the limited amount of information available to us, it’s quite impossible for either of us to be absolutely sure about this. Couple A descend the steep decline that connects Bydgoskie suburb to Toruń’s town center via Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park, and, on reaching level ground, they immediately enter the vicinity of Smith’s billboards. Unlike many other couples in the park, B and C remained physically detached from eachother throughout their encounter with the billboards. B is wearing a dimpled grey plastic bag on her right shoulder. I notice that the bottom of the bag is adjacent to the lower part of her right thigh which is insulated by material that looks like corduroy. ‘More likely corduroy than linen,’ I think, ‘because linen would offer little resistance to the wind, which, although not strong, is cold today in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park’. C is wearing a black rucksack, a small one, exactly the kind I imagine people take away with them, on leisurely day trips to places like Poznań or Włoclawek, or Gdynia. But almost certainly not Lublin, which is several hundred kilometers away. (6)
The billboard in the left hand corner of Smith’s exhibition space in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park, just off Rapackiego Square, contains the image of a pre-pubescent girl in smart but casual red trousers and a matching red t-shirt, emblazoned across the front of which is a concentric pattern of small pink bubbles, in the middle of which are the letters: ‘R’, ‘F’, and ‘G’. (Fig. 3) I can see Smith standing several metres behind her, discretely pointing his video camera at Couple A. Smith's wearing a brown fleece by Folk, a pair of blue Levis from American Classics on Endell Street in Covent Garden, a blue t-shirt by American Apparel, the collar of which is just visible, and a pair of brown, open-toed Birkenstock sandals. The girl in the photograph, who, like Smith, is, in a manner of speaking, also pointing a camera at Couple A, is posing in front of an elongated spherical monument – composed of human ashes - that was built on the site of an extermination camp, located on the edge of the village of Sobibór, not far from Poland’s border with Ukraine. According to historian Raul Hilberg (1985:338), between April 1942 and October 1943, approximately two hundred thousand people passed through Sobibór.
Writing in 2011, about the contents of a glass case in the small museum building that can be found there today, Holocaust tourist Jennifer Rosenberg blogged, ‘There were so many in (there) that I actually counted them. There were eleven visible dead flies.’
After gazing briefly at the photograph of the young girl, B continues to move briskly forward in the direction of the exit gate, directly opposite the place where I’m standing now. But then suddenly B looks left again, in the direction of the first RP4 billboard. And then immediately after that she stops moving altogether. At this point it occurs to me that B isn’t ‘loitering’, which is potentially ‘aimless’, but ‘lingering’ instead, which is actually ‘purposeful’. For at least 2 or 3 seconds, the heel of B’s left shoe is disconnected from the path upon which her other shoeis still firmly planted, and I think she resembles a ballet dancer I saw once, performing gracefully, on tip-toes, years ago, in a street near Buckingham Palace.
C is standing next to B now. And for some reason I’m convinced that they are no longer looking at the picture of the girl with the silver compact camera anymore, but are gazing intently instead at one of Smith’s other posters, the second billboard, the one immediately to the right, that contains the image of two girls, who are perhaps a year older, I think, than the other girl, the one in the red outfit, the one posing in front of the monument at Sobibor. (Fig. 9) These girls, who are both almost as thin, I notice, as the waiters and waitresses at Oświęcim’s (אָשפּיצין) Hotel Glob, are standing in front of Restauracja Skorpion, which is opposite Oświęcim’s (אָשפּיצין) main railway station. Like the legend in the box next to the image of the young woman standing outside Block 15, the legend in the box next to the photograph of the two girls outside Restauracja Skorpion reads: ‘Oświęcim-Brzezinka Październik 2009’, and below that, ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau October 2009’.
For what was almost exactly four seconds, Couple A stood perfectly still, opposite the poster of the two girls. Then, perhaps no more than 2 or 3 seconds after walking away, B and C both turned their heads to the left, suddenly and simultaneously, and appeared to gaze again at the photograph of the two girls, standing outside the restaurant in Oświęcim. Perhaps they were taking in other posters as well? It’s possible. But from where I was standing, it was impossible for me to tell.
This performance, or one just like it, is enacted by four other couples, and three individuals - two women and a man – in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park between 1.45pm and 2.20pm on October 17th 2009. In all of these cases Smith and I believe the following things occurred:
1. On encountering the RP4 billboards the spectators’ attention was arrested by the relatively startling visual material they found on display there. In particular, most spectators were engaged by: a) models, in whom the majority identified morphological characteristics that the models appeared to share, either with themselves – that is, the spectators - or other people with whom the spectators may be acquainted, b) the generically familiar nature of Smith’s photographs, as well as the reassuring manner of their display. (Smith and I believe the idea of the billboard itself is inextricably tied up in most people’s minds with the idea of consumer capitalism, and that there are few things as reassuring as the aestheticization of a commodity).
2. While visually striking, we believe Smith’s images are not, in themselves, compelling enough to arrest locomotion for more than, at most, three or four seconds. Evidence for this was provided on each of the above occasions. However, it was usually the case that after having resumed locomotive activity for an average of no more than four seconds, the attention of most spectators was arrested again by something else they appeared to detect or identify in Research Product #4.
3. We are both convinced that there’s a straightforward explanation for the ‘double-take’. Although spectators in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park were perhaps at first seduced by the visual audacity of Smith’s billboards - itself a consequence of Toruń’s architectural monochromism - it was their computation of the words that accompanied the photographs – the names of the camps – that for at least the second time that day arrested their attention.
To conclude, we believe the spectators’ first ‘act of looking’ engendered a ‘moment of acute interest’. Despite regularly allowing oneself the opportunity to look at a billboard poster, it seems that one rarely ever exercises one’s capacity to actually stop and look, in Toruń or anywhere else for that matter, which is of course exactly what happened that afternoon on several occasions in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park, where the spectators’ ‘intensity of interest’ was specifically signalled through the brief but dramatic curtailing of their locomotive capacities. As for the second act of looking, this occurred when the information that we believe most spectators initially registered in Bydgoskie Przedmieście Park – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanak, Sobibor - but then for some reason repressed, was immediately returned to the…
Conclusion: Production(s) of Smith (2)
…value of Smith is not exclusively contingent on his ability to conduct a class efficiently. In the University, the impact that one’s capacity to effectively transfer knowledge has on one’s value as a commodity is remarkably limited. In fact, the value of Smith is principally motivated by his capacity to produce knowledge which is intended for dissemination beyond the University, by legitimate knowledge distributors like, for example, the Polish street art organization, Galeria Rusz, who curated Smith's exhibition.
Earlier we suggested that during times of relative market stability, Smith’s failure to perform diligently and efficiently will rarely be fatal. A dip in the value of his own personal ‘stock’ – triggered, in particular, by his failure to produce 'legitimate' knowledge - may provoke a raft of unwanted responses on Smith’s part, including paranoiac fantasies, feelings of shame, worthlessness and frustration. However, in certain circumstances it very often appears to be the case that such failures will rarely, as I say, provoke a punitive response from the University. To reiterate, during times of economic growth in particular, the University is often prepared to overlook failures of this kind, (which is not to say they go unnoticed). However, in times of crisis, when the provision of funds for knowledge organizations like Smith’s is dramatically reduced - for whatever reason - then it is interesting to note how the promotional nature of knowledge production – (including photography) - as well as the principle of competition between employees, both of which are always at least underlying, invariably becomes violently apparent. (7)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joanna Górska and Rafał Góralski at Galeria Rusz in Toruń for hosting RP4 (and itourist?), Syd Shelton at Graphicsi for designing the posters, Stephen Foster at John Hansard Gallery, and Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery for hosting the performance in 2013 on which this essay is largely based. Finally I would like to thank the performers themselves for putting on such a fantastic show that day in Belfast: Raymond Waring (Willing), Marta Kotwas and Iain Millar. Dziękuję bardzo!
'Smith at Auschwitz: Research Product #5' originally appeared in Photographies, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 2015.
Endnotes
1. According to Primo Levi (2003: 64) the term ‘musselmanner’ (moslems) was a slang word used at Auschwitz to describe what he calls (ibid.) ‘the submerged’; those physically and emotionally emaciated inmates who’s ‘deaths had begun before that of their body’.
2. See http://www.visittorun.pl/
'3. See eds. Górska, J., & Góralski, R., (2009) Art Moves 2009. 'Research Product #4' is based on Paul Antick’s public art project 'itourist?' (Antick, 2007). In December 2006 ten 'itourist?' billboard posters appeared on the streets of North East London and Southampton in the UK. At the same time five itourist? billboard posters were exhibited on the main highway between Prague and Terezin (formerly known as Theresienstadt) in the Czech Republic. Paul Antick’s posters were designed by Syd Shelton and contained photographs taken by Antick at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibór, Bełżec and Majdanek in the summer of 2005. itourist? was supported by Stephen Foster at John Hansard Gallery, Joanna Górska and Rafał Góralski at Galeria Rusz and Professor Adrian Rifkin at Middlesex University. See Jane Tynan’s (2012) 'Photography, Familiarity and the Holocaust: A Conversation with Paul Antick' in Afterimage pp. 14 – 16.
http://www.jhg.art/event-detail/87-paul-antick-itourist-/
4. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220390/Pictured-The-abandoned-ruins-Mr-Blobby-theme-park-ravers-trash-site.html
5. See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/markings.html
6. See http://www.majdanek.eu/
7. Note that, as well as increasing the university’s symbolic value, the production of legitimate knowledge, by the employees of universities like Smith’s, presently attracts discrete income parcels that are delivered to the university by the state, and that the size of each income parcel is contingent on the quantity and quality of legitimated knowledge(s) produced by select members of the university. Legitimated knowledge is evaluated by the state according to criteria that generally remains unclear to many of those whose work is measured against it. Currently most English universities receive monies based on judgements made about the legitimacy – or otherwise – of knowledge produced by their employees. See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/. According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (2012): ‘The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the…system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). The REF will be undertaken by the four UK higher education funding bodies. The exercise will be managed by the REF team based at HEFCE and overseen by the REF Steering Group, consisting of representatives of the four funding bodies. The primary purpose of the REF is to produce assessment outcomes for each submission made by institutions: The funding bodies intend to use the assessment outcomes to inform the selective allocation of their research funding to HEIs, with effect from 2015-16. The assessment provides accountability for public investment in research and produces evidence of the benefits of this investment. The assessment outcomes provide benchmarking information and establish reputational yardsticks.’
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