A Radical Education.

Education is not a model good.

I went to hear a pretty interesting discussion from Irit Rogoff, Florian Schneider and Kodwo Eshun as part of the build up to their Berlin Education Summit. There’s been quite a bit of chatter about this on various lists, which is fine, but this was the first time in a while I’d really tuned in (battling a debilitating sense of we’ve been here before and before and before [for sanity's sake I've disabled the previous three links]). Irit kicked off with comments on two tendencies in thinking about education in Europe, the Bologna Process aiming at some sort of compatibility conversion coherence across degree offerings in the EU countries. The second tendency a proliferation of self-organising Arts School formations, or what Florian called ‘non-aligned initiatives converging around “education”‘. Education here is becoming a ‘model’ for various initiatives, where the key terms are, it seems to me, ‘new methods’, new initiatives, new models, ‘radical pedagogy’, ‘collaborative work’ and proposals ‘to change the terms of the debate away from a purely bureaucratic engagement with quantitative and administrative demands and from the ongoing tendency to privatize knowledge as so-called “intellectual property”‘. So far so good. I guess. The Summit is the coming weekend.

I did not take accurate enough notes at the talks, but I was a little uneasy even where I welcome these ideas and where I have a lot of ground on which to agree. The problem is that when we think of Education as a model, I want to retch for my gum. What is it to promote education as a model in the new economy - creative economy, culture industry - context of the abstracted immaterial multitudinous spaces of net-activism et al? I am not convinced.

Here, for example, a key sentence I would like to discuss:

‘The model of education has become central to a range of creative artistic practices and to a renewed interest in radical pedagogy. As a mode of thinking an alternative to the immense dominance of art as commodity and display as spectacle, education as a creative practice that involves process, experimentation, fallibility and potentiality by definition, offers a non-conflictual model for a rethinking of the cultural field’

Seems to me there are several things going on here. Not all of them thought through as radically as might be. Forget the ‘non-conflictual model’ since this is relegated to the cultural field and we know that class conflicts are not operating there, correct? The ‘thinking as alternative’ to art really does grab me. An alternative to commodified art, though, would be what? Fabulous possibilities distract me - Popular votes on which pictures hang on the walls. The Tate Modern emptied out. No more National Gallery souvenir postcards. Free access, and free coffee, to all museums? No, that is not what is meant - what we have is a renewal of experimentation, creative practices, process and potential. Although interestingly the word ‘fallibility’ cuts diagonally across these invigorating, but you have to admit, fairly standard educationalist terms, I am not concerned too much with the threat this model will pose to commodification. Confined to the cultural field or not, this is, surely, just what the smartest employers want - new thinking, new opportunities.

Rather, it seems, the model of education needs to be rethought, since this kind of modelling is perhaps one of the main ways in which the promotion of education is a promotion of some pretty old modes of thinking. This thinking is smuggled in at the very moment that it claims to be new. A radical pedagogy in a context where education is seen as a good model, is still education that has not thought through the ways this very model operates to train operatives for hierarchy within the cultural economy and hierarchical society at large. Education as a model has not yet thought through the ways education is not simply or unproblematically a social good.

There is another view; someone might be forgiven for insisting that education is more often about affirmations and consolidation of eurocentric, patriarchal, hierarchical class-based, systems of Fortress exclusion. The playground as learning curve, leaning towards the tuck shop, the in-group, the out-group, the fashion parade, the Cinderella School for Creative Types, the finishing School for corporate dining, the Endomol drill surveillance routines, the preparatory sessions for international diplomacy, the wanker complex, the God complex, military formation, alpha drones, beta drones, innovation and incubation centres, career prospects CV padding, cultural studies clubs and Diners’ Club, life skills, open day - these and many more ‘lessons’.

I totally agree that the old collegiate model of Education should not be protected, worn and frayed as it is. But to renovate that model with a ‘radical pedagogy’ without questioning the projected model as model is also suspect. For conflict then. For delinking from Capital, since breaking the divisions between those inside and outside the old model can also prepare the ground for even greater commodification, commercialization. What if we saw education as a Trojan Horse for exactly that old enemy, and then looked for ways to tow the thing out to Margate and burn it down.

“They have something of which they are very proud. They call it education. It distinquishes them from the goatherds” - Nietzsche, I think from the fifth section of part one of Zarathustra.

Kodwo of course then started his talk with anecdotes and humour, and thereby twisted all this around in several other directions. I am not so sure his trip to Mumbai, testing (another great educational game) Mike Davis’s formulas about slums by making a film, will work to displace the deeply entrenched prejudices that slum-talk now carries in theory-circles (see here), but his notion of education as creative sabotage is as appealing as his insistence on talking about Scritti Politi and Luciana Parisi from CCS. Futurism, delinking from capital, creative sabotage, fallibility, the pre-emptive unalignement from models and - did I hear a feint echo - the ruthless criticism of everything that exists (Marx to Ruge) were bouncing around even as the model was reinforced. If this is the way the Summit goes, it will be an engaging weekend at school indeed. All summits need a good saboteur.

From: John Hutnyk - Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies
Work: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
Blog: http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/
Links: http://tawdrysouvenirs.blogspot.com/
Events: http://whats-on-occasionally.blogspot.com/

Theory of Shit

In Volume III of Capital Marx has a little section discussing the utilisation of ‘waste’ (Abfällen) in the production process. Capitalists search for economies at the best of times (i.e., when they gloat over ever greater extraction of surplus value) - but this becomes more urgent for them when the costs of production increase, by agitation or because of rises in the cost of raw materials. Nothing worse than an event that jeopardises rates of profit, hence protections, tariffs, search for new cheaper sources of material, associations to regulate production, and so on. These are joined with technical innovations, streamlined organisation, adulteration of products to stretch it further, cut corners, various dodges and wheezes and all manner of gains (the wheezing is of those who must work longer hours).

Maybe waste is not always the best way to think of this, or rather it should be thought of more fundamentally, faced more explicitly. Felton Shortall at Goldsmiths last month talked of Marx getting on with writing his ‘economic shit’. I’ve not yet tracked down that reference, but was amused to find on page 77 of the English translation this discussion:

‘The same is true of the second big source of economy in the conditions of production. We refer to the reconversion of the excretions of production, the so-called waste, into new elements of the production process, either of the same, or of some other line of industry; to the processes by which this so-called excretion is thrown back into the cycle of production, and consequently, consumption, whether productive or individual … It is the attendant abundance of this waste which renders it available again for commerce and thereby turns it into new elements of production’ (Vol.III:79-80 L&W)

‘Exkremente’ is the word Marx uses, which is then termed Abfällen in the gloss, ’so-called waste’. There is something to be said for a critique of recycling that would need to be raised here - I am not anti-environmentalism except where its bosses’ environmentalism - an ideology of productivity gains will not save the planet. Here the recycling is a consequence of increased production as industry expands, and is a direct consequence of the capitalists interest in off-setting the rise in cost of raw materials (perhaps because uppity suppliers of such materials wanted a better deal for their stuff). Whatever the case, the consequence of Exkremental production recalls Marx’s discussion in Volume I where the bread the workers got to eat was shown - by those heroic factory inspectors, such as the immortal Leonard Horner - to be adulterated with all manner of gunk- eg., sawdust, chalk, and worse:

‘Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral elements’ (Vol.I:249 Intnl Pubs)

There then follows an extended discussion of the working conditions of bakers (hungry Marx - later he dwells on a recipe for soup!) and of the adulteration of other consumer products. As he also does later on in Vol III, here he notes that waste products find their first uses in medicine: - according to Parliamentary Commission reports on the adulteration of means of subsistence, even opium was found to contain wheat flour, gum, clay and sand, with several of the examined samples containing ‘not an atom of morphia’ (Vol.I:601n). Bad quality drugs is still too often the rule.

The discussion of waste in Volume III has to do with large scale production and economies at a time where needs must ‘force’ the capitalist to find ways to maintain rates of profit amidst various constraints or while necessarily expanding production - [we are very soon getting to crisis theory and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall etc.,]. I am entertained here to observe that discussions of excrement often come at times of impending crisis and capitalist paranoia.

So I think this excrement-crisis linkage could be claimed as basis for understanding the turn to shit in some of the work of, say, Georges Bataille (World Wars, depression), or Dominique Laport (1960s France, 1968 as a whole - all that horrid tie-die). In popular culture too - Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket springs to mind - ‘you will find yourself in a world of shit’ as the Marines trudge through the wasteland they made of Vietnam - and in the 1980s Salmon Rushdie’s Padma the dung-lotus asks: ‘what’s the point of all your writing-shitting’ (Midnight’s Children). [Another time I need to go back to read Artaud - 'my woks are only waste-matter, once they leave my body they cannot stand up by themselves' in Derrida Writing & Difference].

But do we have a satisfactory theorist of shit who can relate it to crisis and economics? What is all the discussion of pollution, climate change and carbon footprints telling us today about our decrepit world (what’s a carbon footprint if not code for something else?). Mick Taussig’s book Defacement looks closely into the pan to reveal the public secrets at stake - we all shit, we don’t discuss it (but some turd has nicked my copy). Maybe I want a theory of rubbish that treats this global muck. A waste processing theory, a sewer-age. All too predictable (regular) I am sure, but what a wonderful world in which we live.

From: John Hutnyk - Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies
Work: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
Blog: http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/
Links: http://tawdrysouvenirs.blogspot.com/
Events: http://whats-on-occasionally.blogspot.com/

Learn To Like It - archival 1990 ……………. . [click to enlarge]

From: John Hutnyk - Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies
Work: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
Blog: http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/
Links: http://tawdrysouvenirs.blogspot.com/
Events: http://whats-on-occasionally.blogspot.com/

four quibbles

Several arguments I’ve had lately have stalled in what I am tempted to call a kind of ‘ontological disarray’. That is, the people I start these conversations with, in affable conviviality (ie in the pub) seem to give up too quick and angry. We each know these are necessarily first moves, so why concede/defer? Is it because I am slurring my words horribly, and threatening to punch people? But I am pretty sure that is not what is going on, at least not every time. Here for the record are the themes:

1. Contemporary art is not revolutionary and smells bad

Artists and critics have merged in a discursive boosterism that promotes ‘contemporary art practice’ as the be all and end all of socio-cultural or intellectual worth. This is at its worst when the boosterism is mitigated by an enthusiastic embrace of, at least a rhetoric of, challenge, critique, interdisciplinarity or conceptual experimentation (these are not ‘the same’). Sometimes the prime pumped place of the artist-critic-practitioner is glorified as disruption, provocation, and even chaos. It seems as if the dilemmas and complicities that stalled Dada and mainstreamed Surrealism vis-a-vis politics (no less than three major exhibitions planned) plots the tempo of the treadmill upon which we are condemned to run forever.

2. Piracy-smear

Pirates have been in fashion for quite a while, despite the efforts of Disney and Johnny Depp. Is it just a shallow question then to ask if they are still worthy of our attention? - either as the forgotten first wave of neoliberal capitalism, or as cool multiculturalist anti-slavery activists with boats. This theme at least has a Deptford connection, and appropriately the argument was on the steps of the Town Hall - and was over the work of another of those celebrants of pirate-chic whom I quote here:

“The decade between 1716 and 1726 was the golden age of piracy, Marcus Rediker informs us. The significance of piracy during these years was twofold – it was multiracial and it was against the slave trade. They blockaded ports, disrupted the sea lanes. The pirate ship ‘might be considered a multiracial maroon community.’ Hundreds were African. Sixty of Blackbeard’s crew of a hundred were black. Rediker quotes the Negro of Deptford who in 1721 led ‘a Mutiny that we had too many Officers, and that work was too hard, and what not.’ They also prevented the slave trade from growing. This was the complaint of Humphrey Morice, MP, Governor of the Bank of England, owner of a small fleet of slavers, who led the petitioning to Parliament and who suffered severe losses in 1719, the year that serious blacking commenced. A naval squadron was sent to west Africa. Four hundred and eighteen pirates were hanged. The conjuncture of apparently very distant forces, struggle for common rights and the Atlantic slave trade, in fact met in intimate proximity” Peter Linebaugh in Mute

Linebaugh has a good line on Daniel Defoe though - and we can hear the echo of Marx’s comments on Crusoe from part one of Capital, which is always fun. Here is Linebaugh again:

“Robinson Crusoe, Mariner was published in 1719. The book dramatises the labour theory of value, glories in the intricacies of the division of labour, and puts the European foot (Crusoe) on the African neck (Friday). Alexander Selkirk, the actual person who was the prototype of Robinson Crusoe, died in February 1721 as a sailor in a naval squadron that was sent to west Africa to extirpate the piracy interrupting the slave trade” Peter Linebaugh in Mute

OK, Let’s discuss.

3. Consmopolitanism yak yak

The debate in Manchester called ‘the conversation‘, where I was lucky enough to share the stage with Mary Louise Pratt, descended into something not quite farce. Is the discursive effort deployed to elaborate an equitable global cosmopolitanism worth the effort? I mean, compared to other efforts to organise and institute an alternative to Capitalism? THe conceptual arabesques around cosmo seem very often to rehearse Eurocentric imaginings (Hedwig was right to say: ‘You, Kant, always get what You want’).Is this Kantianism from outside not quite close to a plan that contains cross-border disruptions in a cultural resource marketing regime? I have yet to consume all though, having just bargain bonus snapped up Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism ‘because’ it has a special extra half-size promo wrap with picture and quote from none other than Kofi Annan. Whoa, bestseller! [Thus, more on this is to come - a longer post on the conversation with M-L-P that I have been saving... too lazy ... to write up soon... promise...]

4. “Maoist” Philosophers are hot stuff, shaboody

Alain Badiou as the latest theorist refashioned from obscure secret to the next theoretico-personality cult idol of the chattering teacher-class, as reviewed by Peter Osbourne in Radical Philosophy. I was intemperate enough in my criticisms of this to suggest what those theorists who become publishing fashion (as it has to be said is the fate of AB, no matter how excellent are the efforts of Alberto Toscano et al) are rarely elevated on the basis of their personalities. Rather, the personality cult here is that of the veritable hordes parading amongst the campus seminar cliques carrying aforesaid idols’ books and quoting key concepts like badges. Of course I am not against sloganeering - heaven forbid - but a slower reading and a resistance to the way display table choices shape debates might be welcome. That conversations about Mao, or politics, or borders, or democracy are shaped by a confluence of The Today Show (radio current affairs) and the display of shiny books shelved by author name (in places like the LRB or Tate Bookshops) seems just another sad consequence of the same idolatry because the discussion never gets beyond personal presentation. The latest theorists now, the next ones quick. Shop shop shop. But I am among the worst in many ways - buying books on impulse because of the quality of the binding, because of an innovation in format (Iconoplush!) and other foibles that deserve attention. This is very far from Mao. As is Badiou. Try this instead: Comrade Gaurav at Goldies.

[Pics are Michael Leunig cartoons - from my Saturday paper every week in Melbourne through the 80s and 90s].

From: John Hutnyk - Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies
Work: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
Blog: http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/
Links: http://tawdrysouvenirs.blogspot.com/
Events: http://whats-on-occasionally.blogspot.com/

Trinket Crimbo

XMAS TEACHES KIDS TO LOVE CAPITALISM

This old graffito favourite (I will post pics sometime) returned to mind this morning when I was rudely awakened by some god-bothering Bishop (Nazir Ali) on Radio Four’s Today Programme complaining in ever so slow plummy tones that something about diversity legislation - vaguely referenced as ‘political correctness’ - meant that some employers were stopping employees from putting up tinsel at work or employees were reluctant to put up workplace xmas trees for fear of offending co-workers of other faiths. This being an issue in the workplace strikes me as ironic and beside the point - as in missing the point by a whisker, but certainly missing. The trouble is - as the BBC went on to explain - they could find no employers who had actually ‘banned’ christmas; that there was no expectation that the churches would not be well attended come the day; and that calls for a return to celebration of the ’summer festival’ that was colonised by Christianity were not really likely and frankly seem a bit, um, medieval.

Now it might surprise some that I am a fan of old Charlie Dickens, but maybe he did not make the connection between work, money and christmas clear enough when he got the ghosts to work their sentimental magic on old Ebeneezer. At least he made the connection, unlike the radio this morning. Maybe the BBC team were just filling the Today programme stocking with a seasonal puff piece, and I shouldn’t be bothered, but I do get misty eyed when I think of all the misery - work work work till you die, ho ho ho - that is inaugurated with the early years’ induction to capitalism that 25/12 and the fondly remembered fat fool (’money bags’) entails.

Redistribute wealth in commemoration of the day after - 26 December is Mao’s birthday - instead of this conjunction of church and capital that jingles your bells in mockery of your creative labour - only a few coins left rattling in your pocket, creativity appropriated by the bosses, entombed in a data entry capsule, force fed on stale fruit cake to fatten you up for a slaughter that takes about 50 of your very best years…

Off to the beach then - bah humbug. ha ha ha. (the pic is from Xmas 1962)

John Styth Pemberton’s Real Thing - 3am

Back to Blighty, past 3am and I can’t sleep - good, so that’s back to normal then. Jet lag is the real thing.

But the real thing is coke. Aren’t you glad that ain’t true. I like those Cola slogans from the past: In 1896 the company’s slogan was ‘Coca-Cola: a brain tonic for women and children’. In 1944 as GIs were marching up the road to Rome, killing fascists and handing out nylons, the slogan was ‘Coke: Universal Symbol of the American way of Life’. In the 1960s: ‘Coke is it’ - wow man. And in an apocryphal story (I guess - its also sometimes said of Pepsi in China) there was a northern Thai dialect that did not have abstract nouns and so everything had to be contextualised - someone’s hope, Miller time etc - and so the literal translation for the slogan ‘Coke Adds Life’ came out brilliantly as ‘Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead’.

Now Humphrey McQueen has a fine book on Coca Cola called The Essence of Capitalism which I’d happily recomend, but I got the slogans from a helpful little text in German that goes on about nefarious links between Santa and the corporation (see the story about the Sundblom ad of 1931; but also see Snopes for a technical critique of the suggestion that Coke invented the jolly red giant who - as I think we could gloss it - teaches kids to love capitalism).

I remember visiting a temple in Northern Thailand once and at a stall inside the temple grounds, selling coke from specially ‘donated’ coke frigidaires, I spoke to a Coke executive who was on holiday and he related the then company ambition to get Chinese Cola consumption levels up to the level of Australian consumption of a litre per person a year. This would then yield more profit than American consumption, which was an 8 Oz bottle per person per day (late 1980s) . I am not sure what is the scarier statistic, the one about American consumption, or that the exec said that Coke’s only competition in China was water.

But most recently the campaign against Coca Cola and its corporate crimes has taken off in India, and elsewhere. And with good reason… As the cat Felix Guattari said it: “it is clear that the third world does not really ‘exchange’ its labour and its riches for crates of Coca-Cola… It is aggressed and bled to death by the intrusion of dominant economies.” (Guattari 1996:238). cited in Souvenirs.
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From: John Hutnyk - Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies
Work: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
Blog: http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/
Links: http://tawdrysouvenirs.blogspot.com/
Events: http://whats-on-occasionally.blogspot.com/