30 August 2012

Higher education as public relations

Mary Beard blogged about the Open University's absurd ads for spin doctors.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/08/university-publicity.html

I commented:


I think they're just seeing how far they can push us without getting their shins hacked. Or their spins reversed.
There's a more general aspect to this zeitgeist stuff. It ties in with the Romantic dissolution of genre boundaries (exploding in the novel form in the Enlightenment, and culminating in things like Brecht's "epic drama" and Joyce's "poetic novel" last century). For some decades now it's been eroding the boundaries between fiction and documentary (ficumentaries and reality shows etc).
The historical ground for it of course is the dissolution of class (ie rigidly, materially hierarchical) society. The philosophical ground is the transition from analytical to dialectical reason/logic (A equals A, you say? Hmmmm). Living, moving and becoming more than dead, static and either/or.
Which affects us in our everyday lives by making us conscious that we are not just living but being seen to live. And exist in a permanent state of metamorphosis through our interactions. We make ourselves (poesis) not just invent, but make, shape.
Except that society (still rigidly class-determined) is struggling to the death against this change. It might as well struggle against the tide of course, but as a result of its resistance all this is happening but no one is aware of it. ("They do not know it, but they do it", as Marx comments in Capital.)
And examples of it happening are all around us, particularly in the US, the most dialectically contradictory country on earth. Like the focus in schools on shaping yourself in relation to your classwork - oral presentation. You are your image. A company or institution is its perception. Careers and billions in profit depend on this.
And people being what we are, we examine it and make a science out of it, excising all the critical bits on the way.
It's international and damn near universal now, because the social transformation is so delayed. The zeitgeist juice impregnates the whole body of the world system deeper and deeper because of the immense material pressures involved.
So humans are the deliberate synthesis of their social conventions and their innate selves. However, the refusal to grasp what's going on means that the innate self bit - the "poor, bare, forked animal" - is obliterated. What's left is the social self that flatters the system. The "furred robes". But since the times are in a state of chassis the unconscious forces itself on us in the form of nightmare and dystopian imaginings. The emperor's new clothes are both furred robes and dissolved in air, flickering before our eyes like strobe lights.
Which means we get spin doctors and social masseurs and Big Media pushing the Big Lie with the straightest of faces and immense self-importance, while a few brave souls (Chomsky, Wikileaks) are busy trying to slow down the strobe and reveal the emptiness at the heart of the Emerald City, so to speak.
Mary is on the side of the angels here, asking who is managing the light show, and why. So our small, voluntary, blog community is standing up to the huge, professionally funded educational institution, and can point to the rising tide, or at least the rising pressure it is exerting.
The nice thing is that keeping the zeitgeist locked up demands a huge amount of effort and resources. And although it takes resources and effort to liberate it, they are infinitesimal in proportion. This will be evident in some decades when capitalism has disappeared down the plughole and sucked bourgeois society down the drain with it.
In the meantime, the truth is a mighty warrior, and a warm and sexy companion to boot. Blake wrote: "Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed." Which is basically what we're doing as we make and shape ourselves in our opposition to the absurdity and inhumanity of the prophet Gobbledegook and incomprehensible Profit.

23 August 2012

Women against rape who don't want Assange extradited


Interesting article in the Guardian entitled “We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited”:

I commented:

Proportionality is the key to a rational understanding of this affair. And the disproportionate and unusual aspects of the prosecution of this case are made very clear by Naomi Wolf in this article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-sweden-8-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-by-naomi-wolf/
A rational understanding of the affair is of course not the key to its resolution. That lies in a powerful political confrontation of the reactionary and inhuman forces hounding Assange by those fighting for justice and humanity. It is good to see that imperialist states (Sweden, Britain and the US) by no means have things all their own way in this conflict. Their material interests (extracting profit from us at all costs at the expense of our lives and dignity, and violently and deceitfully defending this robbery) confront ours head-on (the Marikana massacre is a recent blatant example of this - the Sharpeville of the Black Bourgeoisie). But although they have the upper hand as yet with their jealously guarded monopoly of violence and propaganda, they are constrained by self-interest to observe certain rights and freedoms allowing us to organize and agitate against them (it's called bourgeois democracy and it's necessary for capitalism to work optimally, and it enrages them as much as competition does, and is just as frequently disregarded by them if they can get away with it).
In this case the material interests ranged against the imperialists include those of exploited minor capitalist states (neo- and semi-colonies like Ecuador), and even the strategic interests of more powerful uppity competitor states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, for instance), so Assange is not solely dependent on public opinion or rags like the Guardian for his safety and defence.
The shocking thing here is really the imperialists' complete lack of concern for women subjected to rape and violence. There has been no massive, long-term campaign in any of the media attacking Assange (and going on about the sanctity of arrest warrants and legal procedure) to highlight and combat the scourge of oppressive everyday sexual practices. Date rape, marriage rape, repressive laws (Oil ally Saudi criminalizing women drivers, say, or the US witch-hunting of professionals providing abortion and sex advice), sneering and smearing attitudes demeaning and humiliating women at work, etc. If what Assange is accused of were taken seriously by the propagandists using it to attack freedom of speech and of information, then they would be permanently apoplectic at the behaviour of the thousands of men in our laddish, macho cultural world who refuse to wear condoms, force themselves on drunk or sleepy or unwilling partners, and never ever ask for explicit permission to get their leg over.

22 August 2012

Assange, material interests and rational discourse


There's a good article by Seamus Milne in the Guardian today. “Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange”.

I commented:

This article is simple and straightforward. Its foundation is the potential consequences for Assange of the material threat posed by his Wikileaks activity to the material interests of the US and its allies, including Britain and Sweden. These consequences are manifestly terrifying. The most evidence for this is the treatment being handed out to Bradley Manning and the whole procedure of extraordinary rendition. In the name of proportion it considers this aspect of the affair to outweigh the elements touted as central by the anti-Assange lobby - law, the legal system, and the rights of women. And the need for justice to be enforced to the letter. Proportionality reveals that this mountain of abstractions is wobbling atop a speck of fly shit in terms of substantial violation of law, legality and the rights of women - the shit is there, but if we compare every component of the accusations being made with similar or worse misdemeanours we know to be committed all day every day but which are never brought to court or given the same headline treatment, then we can see it is a speck of fly shit. No serious drive to discourage rape or other violence against women would use the methods or tone of the anti-Assange campaign or spray ideological filth all over the arena. 
In this affair substantial material interests are at stake, and it's worth noting that in such conflicts rational discourse is not the way things are done. People fight for their interests (or what they think are their interests) using any means they can. The British state spends thousands of pounds on an unprecedented show of police force around the Ecuadorian embassy, for instance. No rational discourse there. 
What we can do, in the interests of rationality, is to analyse the degree of reason in the arguments put forward by the conflicting sides. Where substantial state interests are concerned there is no such thing as an impartial judge, history is clear on that, so our analysis won't decide any conflict, but it will show us which side is closer to reality and the truth, and so which side is most likely to emerge victorious in the long run.
The US, Britain and Sweden will claim they are closest to truth and justice even while they are tumbling into the dustbin of history, and will heckle and bully the world to believe them.
But they look more and more like incompetent enemy agent Chico Marx in Duck Soup when he says: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

20 August 2012

Hidden curriculum and philosophical teaching


An article in the Guardian Teacher Network discusses the problem of bringing a philosophical approach to teaching, in contrast to "teaching to the test".
I commented:

Schools are an institution to socialize children and make them ready for the role allocated to them by society. This is a massive matter operating on a massive scale. The working class is huge, and schools are there to refresh it - not to make self-employed creatives or employers or administrators of all the kids. 
Traditionally, independent and critical thought is not required of workers or the poor, and as someone says here, it fails to recognize the barriers society wishes to keep in place, so it is liable to cause more problems than it's worth if it is instilled and encouraged in education.
So independent thought runs slap bang into the wall of Philip Jackson's Hidden Curriculum. The glass ceiling keeps women from rising in society, and the glass wall of the hidden curriculum keeps working class kids in their parents' factories, offices and dole queues.
The corollary of the hidden curriculum for teachers (education workers in general) who want to see it gone is the Double Curriculum. That is, we (I was in this game for twenty years, in a difficult school in a deprived are, goes without saying really) have to work both to the official curriculum and the liberating curriculum. 
Most, that is MOST, teachers won't even be aware of this, let alone contemplate undertaking such a project. And for a lot of teachers attempting it, the result will be burn-out - it's just as frustrating to bang your head against a glass wall as a brick one.
The solution is to organize publicly and politically against the hidden, reactionary curriculum - get it out in the open. Work for a programme of educational change incorporating all the effective learning methods mentioned here and in other discussions within a programme of changing society so that all people will have guaranteed meaningful employment with a guaranteed democratic say in managing their work and everything connected with it. In this way learning and work will become meaningful, not just spiteful hostile abstractions, and the activities of learning and working will be performed with pleasure and a satisfaction we rarely see today.
This is the only realistic way to better education for everyone. If the political and social perspective is set aside, we'll just see a repetition of the vagaries of education policy over the past century in Britain and other developed industrial countries (ie imperialist countries, like Sweden or the USA).
Utopian corners of good educational practice can and will exist meanwhile, of course, and provide a growing list of excellent examples to learn from... but cultivating a tiny model garden in an industrial wasteland will never satisfy a truly independent and critical mind. It's the wasteland that needs transforming.

17 August 2012

A short reading list


On a discussion list DO wrote the following:
"The sapient brain continues to evolve, and teaching methods continue
to improve, but the underlying hypothesis of traditional liberalism
(John Locke & Voltaire), and of Marxism, that the human brain is a
blank slate or general-purpose computer waiting to be programmed or re-
programmed, is biologically preposterous.
"
And  I replied:
Locke and Voltaire might be liberals (traditional??) but they're not so much philosophers as popularizers. The blank slate thing is the hallmark of mechanical  materialists - empiricists like Hume and a lot of the enlightenment encyclopedians. It has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas. Stalin's social-darwinism is related to it, of course, but that has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas, either. D, I think you should take time off from reading folks like Lakoff and dig into the mother lode of modern ideas. For me this means the following short reading list.

Kant:                 Critique of Pure Reason
Hegel:                Phenomenology of the Spirit
                           Science of Logic
Marx:                The German Ideology - part 1, Feuerbach (including the Hegel section)
                           The Grundrisse 

Too skeletal? ;-)

Add before:   
Machiavelli:     The Prince
Hobbes:            Leviathan
Rousseau:        The Social Contract

Include:
Kant:                  Critiques of Practical Reason, and of Judgment
Marx/Engels:   The Communist Manifesto
Engels:               Anti-Dühring
Marx:                 Capital I-III and Theories of Surplus Value

Add afterwards:
Freud:             The Interpretation of Dreams
Lenin:              The State and Revolution
Trotsky:          The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed
Chomsky:       Cartesian Linguistics        

All of them (and the idea of  evolution which I haven't "crystallized" in a single book recommendation cos that shouldn't be necessary) are concerned with ripping away illusion, false appearances, and exposing the real elements and forces at work in our lives and our world. With the possible semi-empiricist exceptions of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. Kant in fact going too far the other way and declaring impossible the unveiling of the hidden depths of the Thing-in-Itself. The least empirical hard-nosed empiricist you can imagine :-)

For a light-hearted frame to all this, I'd recommend Lucretius On the Nature of Things 
"Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
Suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque." 
rounded off by Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique.

The alternative? Being consigned in perpetuity to Intellectual Hell - a dim, draughty, library with hard, splintery, rickety chairs, flickering lamps, traffic noise, machines throbbing and whining at unpredictable frequencies and volumes, musty air, moaning twitching whimpering snivelling readers radiating chill not warmth, with inaccessible and scrapy loudspeakers pouring out Stephen Hawkings reading the collected works of Jacques Lacan. For ever.

Cheers

Chops


On Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuador

There's a trite little article in the Guardian purporting to give a Swedish view of the Assange case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-few-friends-left-sweden
I commented:

Karin Olsson ignores the most important factors in this case.
The first and most obvious - the elephant in the room, the big picture - is the proportionality. 
Assange is NOT under official suspicion of any crime in Sweden. He is NOT charged with any crime, let alone absconding from a trial or a sentence. The offences in relation to which he is wanted for questioning BEAR NO RELATION to the issues relating to his fear of a miscarriage of justice leading to his rendition to the USA, neither in substance nor proportionality. Potential exemplary punishment of bad sexual behaviour during an otherwise consensual encounter would be better exacted in a case WITHOUT THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC ASPECTS of this one. 
In this case the severity and seriousness of the political and strategic tensions involved are beyond dispute, which can't be said for the severity and seriousness of the alleged sexual crimes involved. 
Sweden has a concrete record of handing people over to the USA in collaboration with the CIA in breach of international law - the case of the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden) is the most flagrant.
The USA has demonstrated very clearly the kind of treatment Assange can expect if it gets hold of him by its treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning is alleged to have supplied Wikileaks with a great number of secret US documents. Assange is the head of Wikileaks and therefore responsible for annulling the secrecy not just of these documents but all the documents published on Wikileaks, most (but not all) of which are diplomatically and politically embarrassing to the USA. So Assange can reasonably expect even harsher treatment. 
And since threats should taken into account where a reasonable assessment of fear is concerned, the threats of execution and assassination made by senior public officials in the US are highly relevant.

There's a good article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot about the situation now: