draft writings by Stefan Szczelkun

The Scratch Orchestra

2011-09-08T12:49:00.001+01:00

In 1969 Michael Parsons and Cornelius Cardew wrote a draft constitution for a 'Scratch Orchestra' that changed the idea of what an orchestra could be. The 'constitution' allowed for structure when needed but it also gave a space of enormous freedom and inclusivity. For a start the concerts were to be 'dealt' by the youngest members first which instantly turned the authority or Cardew and Parsons on its head - Parsons has yet to deal a concert. Also gone was the hierarchy one had come to expect in the symphony orchestra, with the highly skilled players all slavishly following the composers score. In the Scratch Orchestra the 'scores' could not be followed slavishly even if we'd wanted to - they required a good deal of interpretation and improvisation. The orchestra was much more like a set of improvisers on a model inspired by free jazz.

The structure was provided by the accumulaton of cryptic Fluxus-like scores that had evolved from the open composition classes that Cardew and his friends had been running at Morely College. They were published in the form of a school exercise book and called the 'Nature Study Notes' - every new member was given one. Cardew had also previously created a magisterial visual score called 'Treatise' that had almost completely done away with the conventions of musical notation. He was in fact an accomplished graphic artist and had been earning a living in this field. Anyway this meant that visual artists were welcomed into the ranks of Scratch Orchestra as well as accomplished musicians. In fact anybody who showed interest was welcome to join - there were no qualifications required, or interviews to be endured, to become members.

These factors all gave the concerts of the Scratch Orchestra a lively and theatrical anarchy in which all the conventions of an orchestra had been thrown out of the window except the most crucial one: that of people playing together in concert. There were often 50 or more players and so were equivalent in labour resources and acoustic volume to the symphony orchestra. By the mid C20th the Symphony Orchestras had come to occupy the peak of Bourgeois cultural achievement and seemed to hold an impregnable position. So this revolutionary reconstruction of its form was a serious challenge to the British establishment's cultural hegemony. The Symphony was also symbolically important - the worker musicians all following the notation of the bourgeois composer and his conductor - a simple model of the social and economic productivity that had proven so profitable. Of course the composer often got his tunes from the 'folk' but that was seen as simple raw material or a natural resource that needed no acknowledgement.

For a working class person like me who, for various reasons, felt alienated from any conventional cultural career this was an ideal opportunity. I felt it was a like a research group from which culture could be remade from the ground up. I had already read John Cage calling on us all the start again 'from scratch'. Playing was taken back to its freer meanings of following impulses of symbolic actions without pre-defined goals. But even as young people few of us ever got to play in such a large group.

Oddly it was the freedom that was encouraged that led to fierce internal debates about the inherently political nature of the Scratch that was its downfall. Rather than leading to an appreciation of what a challenge this structure already held out and how to nurture, maintan and defend it, the most influential players decided that it was in fact too bourgeois and decided that the only correct 'line' was to play explicitly political music. But this held little challenge to the predominant aesthetic. Perhaps as an organisation based on voluntary labour it would, in any case, have been a difficult thing to maintain for a long period.

The Scratch Orchestra lasted about 2 years but led to a lifetime of influence and connection between those who had thrown themselves into it.

For a full history see the chapters on The Scratch Orchestra in John Tilbury's book 'Cornelius Cardew (1936 - 1981) a life unfinished' Copula 2008.

Transcend Money!

2011-08-18T20:23:00.003+01:00

It is possible the subject of my last blog is more urgent than ever when we see article warning financial system is indeed on it last legs in the Guardian. Here's another interation of it in more plodding prose.

Transcend Money!

A tool that will soon allow us to evolve beyond capitalism?

Assumptions

1. That to go beyond capitalism will need collective technological innovation; as well as being organised outside of capital interests with a will to evolve through the affective knots of our own histories of oppression.

2. That this innovation will be about how to express what we want, think about it and then produce and distribute the goods in an intelligent and equitable fashion - without the mediation of money.

3. Money - the universal equivalent of exchange. and all other forms of exchange and barter will always favour inequalities and often lead to irrational modes of production and anti-social distribution of resources.

4. Technologically we have the tools to produce a surplus for all whilst only working about 3 days a week. And that it is capitalism that gets in the way of the equitable realisation of this potential.

5. Our 'smart phones' will over the next few years contain Near Field Communication NFC technology designed to make payments. This is the bridge that will enable us to convert cash exchanges to an economics based on information.

Aim

To prepare for this moment. To outline the direction and describe the shape this technology, that will take us beyond capitalism, based on a confluence of current developments.

Method

To achieve a technology that allows the rich comparison of options to our consumption that is under the control of each individual in each of the various and diverse communities they might belong in. A lot of simple ideas must come together outside of corporate control. These are:

1. An intermediary use of a cash/payment device that will provide rich sources of information on possible purchases and recent goods being consumed. This information will be about the environmental and health impacts of your consumer choices in the place you are at any time. These can be short and long term effects. This will be made visible on a handheld computer/phone via graphic open-source app type softwares.

At the moment this sort of analysis is used by major store cards to predict spending patterns and offer incentives and the data is not shared with consumers.

2. If connected to metabolic inputs this could build up a picture that could tell you the probably effects of lifestyle choices and make suggestions, when requested, or how to make better choices. This could take the drastic level of displaying your life expectancy based on an aggregate of current patterns or a softer approach might be to suggest delicious recipe alternatives. It could show also larger collective choice impacts eg to live without Tetrapak would mean... Presenting graphics of gains and losses, costs and implications of alternative fluid packaging products with comparative recycling costs in your area.

3. Clearly your weekly shopping list is central to this but other goods such as phone or mattress choices can be unpacked in terms of the options and current environmental research implications. For phones this might relate to radiation levels and and rare metal mining impacts. A core aspect of this is to trace each product to its originating resources. That is why we need to tap into logistics.

4. Lifeworld needs outside of the realm of shopping, such as care could be considered in relation to health and environment and use of time. These are currently intangibles in relation to the system of monetary values.

5. Your ethical choices can be programmed in and be open to evolve in response to research and debates. If you chose not to support the arms industry then the best financial and corporate products to avoid this would be displayed as well as informing, perhaps, of the latest CAAT actions. This can also include levels of risk assessment by you favorite pundit etc. So if you think that the levels of C02 production pose a drastic short terms risk you can express this in your ideal choices which might imply political policies you'd pursue/support rather than actual individual lifestyle choices. Gone will be the stressful reading of those tiny texts that describe a products ingredients. If you don't want a certain E number in your body an alert sound will let you know.

6. The collective results of this activity need to be able to acrue a dynamic collective aggregate of public opinion and its sub-communities. This is when the patterns generated by our desires, thinking, choices, actions become political. Buckminster Fuller proposed a Geoscope; a geodesic screen display that would provide a graphical interface for global resource trendings and be used to predict and debate the likely outcomes of policy choices. We will need to connect out micro consumption patterns with such global green accountancy.

This can be related to a radical logistic design which can predict ideal places and scales of production and relevant production technologies and their capacities and 'costs'.

If the values inherent in this information can find a cultural form free from corporate interests then it is my belief that that their validity would outstrip money and soon make it obsolete, showing it to be counter productive as a means for co-ordinating goods and giving impulse to human activity. The modeling would I believe indicate that money strategies produce more negatives than a more direct relation between human need and its fulfillment.

Conclusion

Yes you can read the papers and obsessively look online to get the same effect! But its a full-time job and constantly undermined by corporate control or dilution of this information. Capital has always worked against collectivity. "In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart." Eli Pariser The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

Pariser was writing about the trend to profile online networkers in order to channel advertising and information to their needs. We must design software that reverses this trend - we need to be profiling the commodity and its genesis.

"The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives" Eli Pariser The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

the purchase info card idea would attempt to reverse that engineering...

http://www.macvideo.tv/news/?olo=email&newsID=3321206

Mobile phone payments to replace cash by 2016: report

PayPal estimates that £2.5bn will be spent using mobile phones in 2016

Cash Less Ness Now!

2011-06-03T23:00:00.190+01:00

Thinking about an intervention into upcoming changes in payment technologies with the potential to replace cash with information...

We need to think in more detailed ways about moving to a cashless economy. I don't mean simply use of credit cards and paying with your phone. I mean an economy that gives to everybody the essentials of a good life and openly debates all harmful products and activities. I'm not talking tokens or barter here but a truly rational, or if you prefer sensible, distribution of goods.

Information is very important in spite of the 'info society' becoming a banality. As a start in this direction we are close to being able to have a payment device which will give full information on any product that is bought - giving full health, environmental and social impacts both before and after purchase. These could evolve, through app writing, a visual shorthand style so a mass of date can be read and sorted with ease leading to a very dynamic flow of judgements.

I envisage the card being programmed by the user with their own criteria of risks and balances of pleasures, such as health risks and environmental impacts, including energy usages. This data can be demographically displayed with software like that developed by Danny Dorling's World-mapper team to also be read as collective and localised trendings. These results to be debated on-the-spot and more widely so that trending collective values that underlie consumption patterns, an so economics, can expressed in objective terms. This objective reflection of 'pubic opinion' can be under constant review and critique. Disconcerted areas or other nexii of problems can be focused on by artists and other specialised researchers. Certain problems may not be able to be reductively quantified and this is just the sort of area in which value formation should be underpinned with cultural processes that use all our senses.

We can perhaps best envisage how this would work in our weekly heap of recyclable and non-recyclable domestic waste. Waste and its implications in any area would be a key aspect of this feedback system using well-proven and by now ubiquitous GPS. Computer games might allow different scenarios to explored - like do we really need to live with Tetra-pak in Kent? Alternative products could be displayed and the projected implications on our weekly budget calculated. Maybe some apparently difficult-to-recycle packaging material might have advantages. It is said that certain plastic bottles can be recycled using less energy than glass bottles. But as you develop your own set of criteria, perhaps through a set of games, the process of selection becomes quicker to review and judge. The whole thing can of course be updated live as the situation develops.

Capitalist economics basically needs to be replaced with an evolved democracy in which people can feel fully informed about the effects of their productive use of tools and the full implications of their consumption of products and services. This would include transparent risk assessments. The motivations for technology development and innovation would follow a model that survives in science, open source software development and with artists. People are extremely well motivated by a collectively expressed need. Wikipedia is, in part, an example of this human enthusiasm.

My info-feedback 'cashcard' should be designed to operate on a non-corporate model. A group of a certain size would form to use and self-manage their cards. The software could be franchised on an open source model learning from Paypal. The temporarily cash base of the card would be tied into individuals Bank accounts or similar. The local franchise groups of say 100 users would be in charge of their own micro economic cloud. E.g by adjusting the rake-off for each transaction they could control how their collective currency circulation was put to use. These options are difficult to detail at this stage. Groups might have different cultural preferences: one groups card/phone screen might display their current life expectancy profiled from current consumption. Another might be halal or kosher or vegan.

The feedback apps that tie in the data on currently available commodities to their global effects are the point at which I find it difficult to gauge the realism of this approach for immediate development. Is there sufficient public data out there now? That is the question. Are there nodes of data non-availability that would give problems? It seems to me it could be workable with a partial data set. Lack of data would be a big indicator for research focus. Protected data could be a political challenge or the technology itself would come to challenge products that don't divulge their data or origins and so would lose customers on this account.

In its early forms it would at least be a wonderful educational tool and provide a lot of entertaining strategy games in relation to the weekly shopping tasks and more long term budget plannings. Outcomes could be as realistic as provision of recipes on the one hand and details of opening times of local recycling facilities on the other. One prosaic outcome might be simply food shopping lists that issue a weekly challenge to try something new, more healthy or that is in season, and at the same time cheaper!

The long term aim would be to replace the profit motive with collectively evolved consumption ethics. And to prepare global society using current micro mobile computers to be able to coordinate resources without the need for the mediation of capital. The informational matrix would simply overtake or outweigh cumbersome, clumsy and often irrational monetary mechanisms. For this to occur it would have to develop on an open-source model and be resistant to corporate buy-out. Of course the tendency of the managerial class to self-reproduce will still resist the demise of their own class with its attendant illusory statuses.

Protecting this model from corporate control, and so a closed cycle of development, may be the most intractable problem. Or it may not... because of things like peoples (recent) experience with F*bk's control of the data they've accumulated and should have rights to, which amounts to F*bk owning the data that their social network relies on. Then there is the personalisation issue in which advertising and search results are increasingly tailored to our online profile. This sort of thing may make people ready for models which are resistant to corporate control whilst devolving control and 'ownership' to known sets of users.

Making visible the implications of daily choices. eg a joint of meat that contributes to Amazon rain forest depletion. Or even a joint of meat that might be, because its sourcing data is not made public. The pressure then brought to bear on making all commodities have sourcing data available to such public use. Of course cheap meat production itself is a major source of CO2 and has land-use and long term food resource implications that might motivate vegan app writers and graphics animators to get busy on a plug-in.

When I was self-building I was made aware that small budget increase in the region of a percent increase in total costs could make impacts on interior design and life quality far in excess of their impact on my weekly mortgage/rent payments. Fanlights above doors, widths of doors, underfloor insulation, ceiling heights, built in speaker wiring, etc. these all impact very little on overall building costs but make a noticeable difference to the final quality. The apps connected to the cashcard/smartphone I'm talking about could highlight such alternatives to any aspect of your spending/consumption. A small added expenditure might have a key impact on your life quality or health... A gym membership could easily be compared with a small allottment in overall health effects and costs.

The argument here that Marxists I come across seem to disagree with is that money, the 'universal abstract equivalent', is inevitably tied to capital. But it seems to me that you cannot have money without its accumulation and without profit. There is no communist money. And yet with a rich informational feedback relation to resources, manufacture, distribution and need you can have a more complex set of equivalences. The universal abstract equivalent flattens value and leads to famine, war etc. Certain human needs should be met even if they do not comply with the uncertain and mechanistic laws of capital. Thinking of the well-known example where food prices rise in times of famine. The only way to control capital would be a heavy world 'socialist' state or IMF type outfit - both of which are unsatisfactory. This kind of approach is being rejected by a powerful world grassroot demand for more direct democracy. We need new thinking.

There is also the idea that a new democratic social order is not an issue of technological innovation. Probably the hype about the liberatory nature of the internet and the subsequent disappointment at its corporatisation has contributed to this. However the relatively bloodless rise to power of the capitalist class itself was underpinned by the 'new' technology of the book and the discourses and literature that arose from it, amongst other things. Perhaps the phone/computer/cashcard is the technology that could facilitate the shift to a democratic form of cyber-communism. The key shift in our mindset would be the idea that we all take responsibility for our 'conscious evolution'.

The 'card' idea is simply a fusion of current technical developments: visualisation of complex demographic data, open data trends, green accounting, radical logistics, near field communication, feminist gift economy, reverse gamification, Idea Street, even the organic and Fairtrade movements, Freeourdata, and lesser known stuff like Bucky Fuller's Geoscope, Mark Pawson's Free Stuff Parties, The People Speak (theps.net), 59 varieties of free books and free food distributions, squatting,

Now working in loose association with Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett at Furtherfield.

Transcend money - leads in and out

"The use of payment rituals and technology to escape the grip of capital"

Visualisation of complex demographic data, http://www.worldmapper.org/

Open data trends, http://www.openinformationfoundation.org/

Green accounting and sustainability measurement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_measurement

Sustainable development http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/what-is-sustainable-development.html

Radical logistics, ( & RFID & QR code ) e.g.
'Bridging the gap between the physical and the virtual: a (Q)uick
(R)esponse'; by Library staff Gil Ackerman, Emma Mires, Ellie Murphy and
Emma Woods. at Univ of Westminster.
"QR codes have the ability to provide context-specific information at the
point of need and to connect the physical world to the virtual world,
enabling online materials to be more “visible”."
https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/libraryqr/

near field communication, http://www.nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com/nfc-phones-list/

The X Ray app Open Object app by Jessi Baker.

feminist gift economy: http://www.gift-economy.com/

gift economy overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy#Burning_Man

Reverse gamification, http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification

Online user profiling - Eli Pariser http://crimsonflame.bigforumpro.com/t4242-eli-pariser-beware-online-filter-bubbles

Idea Street, http://www.sparkdev.co.uk/showcase/show/idea-street

Even the organic and Fairtrade movements, having pushing in the right direction...
http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/resources/films/fairtradetowns.aspx?dm_i=5QB,GWBP,1O9FDZ,1DNPG,1

Freeourdata, http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/2006/03/hello-world/ <http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/2006/03/hello-world/>
http://txfx.net/2009/02/26/facebooks-bizarre-definition-of-data-ownership/

Bucky Fuller's Geoscope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoscope

Data Visualisation with BBC Backstage DataArt

Mark Pawson's Free Stuff Parties, refining the rituals of giving, recycling, sharing stuff in detail.

The People Speak http://theps.net/people.html

59 varieties of free books and free food distributions, e.g. http://www.bookcrossing.com/

Pranav Mistry on potential of projector/cameraphone. For this project see 7.08 + 12.15 mins
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Thomas Greco; http://beyondmoney.net/the-end-of-money-and-the-future-of-civilization/

squatting,

Spread betting ace Simon Cawkwell, son of an Oxford Don says: "The working class are incredibly stupid. You can sell them anything if you appear to sell it sincerely." ES 13/9/11 p.3 of Spread betting guide.

From Marc Garrett: http://onthespiral.com/unifying-value-universe

from Ruth Catlow (with annotations by me)
:
Mary Flanagan, 'Critical Play': esp on 'rewards'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ8R9iiGk9g

Denis Roio 'Jaromil' - Quoting Bernard Lietaer: “We can’t imagine to enter the Information Age
without changing the fundamental and most used communication tool:
Money”. At the CCC camp 2011 we intend to follow this call and break the
foremost taboo of our time which is, indeed, Money.
http://tinyurl.com/5w9auul

Michel Bauwen's Peer to Peer foundation; P2P which proposes a awkward mixure of gift and reformed captialism.
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

Tim Jackson 'Prosperity with Growth': http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/23/properity-without-growth-tim-jackson

"Through 'Squatting Supermarket', the artist Salvatore Iaconesi aka xDxD.vs.xDxD looks at how our everyday lives have evolved through shopping"... " The vast network of connections that form the background story of a product is made explicit and accessible, making ecosystemic, narrative and poetic use of the data tracking and manipulation techniques that corporations otherwise exploit for purely commercial and/or political ends – the cross-referencing of data from barcodes, RFID tags, credit cards and financial transactions" http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=1074&lang=en

OUR QUEEN OF HEARTS - TRUE? (1997)

2011-05-10T14:52:00.003+01:00

Believing that tears are an outwards sign of an inner healing process - from my experience with co-counselling - I let myself, albeit alone in front of the TV, join in with the national grief on the Sunday of Diana's tragic death. It was good to become part of such a groundswell of benign emotion and it made me into a Diana's death junkie for the following week.

It was also an interesting phenomena from the viewpoint of democratic culture - there seemed to be a huge diversity of people who initiated and invented rituals of grieving from the beginning. As they took over public spaces, without asking permission, and brought their floral tributes and messages they gradually fused a new collective cultural identity. This was not a media induced mass hysteria, as was still claimed by some 'dis-passionate' left critics, but a individually thoughtful and passionate 'commune-ist' process. Some of the most creative rituals, such as the night-time tree shrines outside Kensington Palace or the act of strewing flowers onto the moving hearse, spread with extraordinary speed and cohesion.

But what was the subject of our grief? It doesn't seem enough to end with the answer "Di", even if qualified by a version of "I felt I knew her". After all she was not a real relative or friend, to most of us, but a symbol. Many people expressed surprise at their depth of feeling. So what was this symbol and what pain or loss did it access in so many of us? Had we in fact come to rely, often unbeknownst to ourselves, on what Diana represented and now suffered real loss? Or did it remind us of our own unfinished emotional business? My own sister had died of anorexia and I had, at the time, been unable to grieve this awful tragedy. As the week wore on this link became more apparent but did not explain everything that I was feeling. I think Diana may also have struck a deeper chord within our communal psychic histories...

The very core of all forms of oppression, in the construction of the oppressor role, is the control of feeling and empathy for those who are to be oppressed. No one who has not had their feelings turned to stone can coolly coerce and exploit, routinely belittle and degrade other humans. Diana was important because she refused the 'stiff upper lip' so central to the maintenance of the oppressor role model whether it is upper class, adult, white, able-bodied or whatever.

She also knew the rough edge of being oppressed as a woman. As a national leader and charismatic figure she held up values, that have been almost entirely locked away in the private world of women, and pushed them into the public sphere.

One of the central planks of classism is the denial of the innate intelligence and judgement of the plebs. She, herself, had failed to get any 'O' levels. She had no intellectual standing, and yet she clearly thought for herself and decided as wisely as any intellectual could, what were the priorities of the day. And underlying each of these topicalities were the ground values, not of profit or mechanistic achievement but human caring. It is this non-intellectual but somatic intuitive wisdom that so many people can identify with and which made her 'ordinary' in spite of being a Sloane.

Unlike many of the upper class dames of charity work, who conduct their good works with a good deal of condescension and at arms length, she knew the value of physical contact, and of listening with respect to each individual. But raising money for charities was not her most significant activity.... after all this is what women of her class are expected to do... it's part of their traditional 'duty'. Admittedly the style with which she did it was radical. But her radicality reached a new level when she got behind the world-wide campaign to ban land mines. This is the point, rather late in the day, when I became a fan. This unglamourous campaign really needed just the high profile presentation she was able to give it.

If we humans are to end war, and I believe we now can, we need allies from the upper classes to turn their backs on the warrior tradition that poisons the thinking of our national elite. The myth of the chivalric roots of the aristocracy have recently been revealed by radical or honest historians as a romantic gloss on a much more sordid reality. The nobles of yore were in reality little more than gangsters who ruled through terror and savagery. They were brutes with an elegant facade. War was a cult. War was seen to be a cultural necessity. War was a motor of honour. Personal value was measured in terms of its inhumanity.

Thomas Hobbes described the psychic power that could be focused through the image of the of the wealthy sovereign in his book 'Leviathan' published in the 17th century. The subservience of the population could be extracted from the limitations of direct brutality and power could thus be extended over a greater area and the accumulation of wealth further increased... leading to further spectacle and increased mesmeric dominion.

Diana, as a Princess, subverted the mechanisms of this ancient spectacle and put its power, which had anyway long been sidelined as an aspect of an often jingoistic national pride and glory, and redirected the glare onto human frailty... her own and that of all those others she so actively empathised with. In this she broke the cardinal rule of upper class detachment. The meaning of the sovereign spectacle was reversed, reflecting people's power to care for each other rather than the power that a sovereign can exert by not caring. Rulers can only dominate and exploit by being emotionally immune to the suffering and ignominy of those they subjugate.

Just as the glamour of the sovereign can bind a nation in subservience it can also be used to highlight other images of more human relations. Rather than service and duty expressed in pomp and a petrified and haughty definition of human dignity, the spectacle became one of the ordinary frailty of our lives from which comes forth the sweetness of human caring and finally the courage to begin to end humans harming humans.

But this was also a stage too far. The Palace and that sub-section of the upper class that lead the military with their friends the international arms industrialists and dealers may well have been initially relieved at her death only to be perturbed at the scale of mass reaction in which her 'Queen of Hearts' was taken quite literally. She was raised above the Queen in a kind of posthumous peoples coronation. Could Diana be more dangerous in death than she was in life? Britain is the worlds second largest arms exporter and has one of the oldest warrior traditions embedded into its ruling elite.

Let us hope the talis(wo)manic Queen of Hearts has, with her death, sacrificially fractured that aristocratic warrior tradition - which has so poisoned our politics. We need ways to redefine human dignity as openness, vulnerability and honesty, something which the mass displays of creativity surrounding the royal homesteads seemed to be expressing. And to redefine honour and valour as the ability to insistently bring simple human values of caring for each other to the centre of our politics on a world scale.

What was remarkable about the outpouring of grief, from what seemed a truly broad cross-section of an often invisible British public, was in how much it can concentrate values that in her life often appeared, at least through the media, as too dilute and aligned with weakness. The same passion for caring that ordinary people carry too quietly through their lives suddenly seemed, in this unified expression, awesomely powerful. The establishment and press were visibly shaken.

The effect of grief on such a scale may be like a national therapy session in which a people can gain deeper strength and courage in its own convictions and intrinsic worth after having these undermined by centuries of oppression...

The national outpouring of tears in Poland on the occasion of the new Polish Pope's visits and powerfully validating sermons, was one of the factors that gave rise to the emergence of Soldidarnosc. The West had considered such a thing impossible. What will our grief shift? What new thoughts and courage will it release? What might be the sum total of such effects?

The media attempted to accommodate the verbal expressions of grief in phone-ins... which asked for peoples ideas on what form a monument to Diana could take. The establishment formalised and enclosed the need to write in their Books of Remembrance. But these controlled official channels were overtaken by the anarchic display of writings, framed by flowers, that were posted in the parks and on the streets. This flood of direct cultural expression was on a scale which is rare if not unique. Such public expression could create a different quality of popular culture. It could give popular culture an intellectual discourse which is open to all. One that defines itself in terms of such active bottom-up cultural expression and values rather than in what art 'the great and good' think is best for us to passively consume.

But the results are a ongoing struggle and we can see this in the manner in which the landmine issue was included or dropped from the array of issues to benefit from the new Diana fund or foundation. The rightist Daily Telegraph's 'Diana Memorial Fund' claimed to be making land mine victims its prime target. Their strategy would seem to be to get in and defuse the issue away from banning weaponry. Earl Spenser, in spite of the power of his funeral tribute, talked of the random violence of landmines as if weaponry as a whole were not a scourge. Even the liberal wing of the aristocracy is unlikely to take up support for a campaign which could escalate into a general banning of arms manufacture.

When she first died a world-wide ban on land mines was held up as the most fitting monument to her memory. But as the week wore on the banning of land-mines was mentioned less as the reality of a fund came to the fore. In this inevitably public and spontaneous process it is possible to see the establishment regrouping to resist the radical popular will to end humans harming humans beyond the conventional equivocations of a class and capital bound Christianity. Without, in a word, the hypocrisy of history.

Since the Chartists 150 years ago, the main hopeful change in the world has been a low bass groundswell, a drift of geological immensity towards urban democracy... A slow and uneven move towards peoples power world-wide has been inexorable; unmapped by our learned men; unrepresented, and perhaps unrepresentable, in the mass media; it shudders gradually forward.

For democratic change to empower the individual to create channels through which to make a clear collective expression there needs to be the kind of spontaneous and autonomous cultural forms we saw opened up in the reaction to Diana Death. If we are to be realistic and demand the impossible, an end to war and oppression, we must connect the everyday (caring values) with their imaginative expression as a collective response.

The media reportage, I had been glued too, had run out of ideas by Tuesday night so on Wednesday I ventured out into the real world to visit Kensington Palace to 'see for myself'. As an old lady had said on television; "You've got to have been there...", and she was right: the messages, letters, poems, posters, framed photographs, collages, flags, paintings, constructions, banners, teddies, candles... all surrounded by flowers... every flower in the world was there from garden daisies to exotic blooms that must have cost the earth... the air heavy with fragrance. Then the thousands of people reading and contemplating and talking in hushed tones. All sorts of people... more women than men but still a lot of men. But it was in the prolonged reading of this library of death and love, that the popular discourse comes out and hits you like a psychic earthquake... The subtext, surfacing explicitly and at times poetically was something that cannot come through a mass media or an art gallery system, with their inevitable layers of filters.

Intellectuals have heard much about the 'crisis of representation', it makes a very concrete sense here. On the TV you cannot peruse the messages in your own way adding your own poem, nor smell the fragrance, nor sense the scale of passion for the basic and direct values of human love and caring that are so eloquently expressed here. The medias lack of ability to represent what is essential to human survival, the collective complexity of the processes of cultural re-evaluation, is a critical lack in what is supposed to be our main tool of communication.

The communion of a good rave or festival, the euphoria of a football match (even with fixed seating)... has something of the base atmosphere, and feeling together, but perhaps without the ability to express and share personal feelings... So, not Diana but the individual writing and making and then the people reading and listening. All the women surrounding the Greenham Common camp and decorating the fence in the eighties was in the same league but without the personification of goodness and loss which can be so moving and without the urban setting allowing access to so many thousands.

In a way it showed a direct people's publishing... a grassroots broadcasting. People who had taken time to write so carefully could watch TV and see strangers reading their work... They could see how their work was becoming part of complex and dynamic cultural discourses which would spiral away from the sites. Established power has always been threatened such direct unmediated mass communication...

Many of the messages would have been considered treason in my childhood... it was practically a peoples coronation, Diana was given her HRH back, the Queen was publicly castigated for her stoicism on the railings of palaces and Prince Charles was asked to abdicate in favour of William (on the understanding he would take after his mother!). To my disappointment the land-mine issue was mentioned only rarely. Overwhelmingly the theme was love and death. It reminded me of the content of sixties pop songs but somehow it seemed more radical in this context... It could be that it's my analysis that's changed but there was also the implied challenge to the definition of 'those who reign over us'. After a couple of hours reading at Kensington Palace I was left with a sense of a profoundly caring, magnanimous, wise and morally responsible population - rarely the response of hysterics.

The image of what it means to be British has in this intense week been changed from a reserved and exclusive image derived from those of the ultimate oppressor class - the imperialist rulers - to an warm and inclusive image derived from its commoners. Democracy may have come of age. An old model of what it is to be human has been blown away. It has taken an emotional catharsis that engulfed middle England to make it possible.

Aspects of a minority progressive culture, embodied in Diana, has swept through the population. Like the applause which swept from the crowd outside through the open west door into Westminster Abbey, after Earl Spenser's tribute, the public will can restructure tradition when it finds adequate expression.

Stefan Szczelkun. 9 - 9 - 97.

Originally published as a Working Press pamphlet

Video Pedagogy 2

2011-04-14T17:32:00.016+01:00

Video Pedagogy - A recent experiment using student shot video as a tool for research and learning. 2011

I had previously tried to get my University to make its small number of tapeless video cameras available to MA students with a simultaneous installation of edit software on computers that the MA students could access (2009/10). There seemed to be some mysterious bureaucratic inertia that got in the way of this being realised

This year it occurred to me that development of ubiquitous video camera technology has overtaken these problems by putting a camcorder into almost every phone. When I polled my Interpreting Space module students they all had access to a video camera either in their phone or as a function their still camera. More than half were already regular users of YouTube and so I realised the scene was set and we did not need any technological support from the university to introduce video as a research and learning tool to investigate space. The students seemed keen and I set up a free YouTube channel for them to upload clips to.

The module was based on a series of visits to spaces with different characteristics. Each student was to use video to record short video clips of less than one minute of what they observed of the sites we visited. Video has certain inherent qualities that make it suitable for capturing space. We experience space most often whilst moving through it. Panning around a space give a better record than a widescreen photo and gives a better sense of the dynamic elements like people. Zooming can be used to move from context to detail. Video can record changes of light and the time-based qualities of weather and, using a sequence of shots, show how events change a space. In addition most devices record basic sound which is also important in bringing a scene to life.

Before the module started I was thinking that video was primarily an aide memoire so we could discuss a space we had visited back in the seminar room and relate it to the theory we'd been reading. However much more than this was quickly achieved by some students. The poetic potential of taking shots from particular viewpoints or capturing details that belied the whole was intuitively taken by students - several of whom were practising artists. This allowed the video to be making a statement on our experience of complex spaces with multi-layered histories such as Kennington Park or Trafalgar Square. This kind of work made it clear how video making could be part of the interpretive process.

Editing was not recommended as this was not a film making course as such. However a few students used editing skills that they already had to put together simple video edits as part of their assessed presentations. One person intercut archive footage with recent footage of the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin which has be transformed into a communal play area. Another used shots of the brutalist architecure of Trellick Tower, overlaid with scrolling quotes from theory, to good effect.

Others used video footage to good effect from within Powerpoint. A shot of the statue of C19th actress Sarah Siddons in Paddington Green was over powered by the traffic noise and that was used effectively to discuss ideas of dislocation. Another student used a variety of shots in Victoria Station to illustrate how people contribute to the dynamic feel of the space at different times of the day. Seems obvious but when woven with some ideas from De Certeau the result was original and stimulating.

Finally some feedback from the students: "Brought the spaces we visited alive."; "Allowed us to share in other peoples perceptions"; "Became easy to relate to theory"; "A really useful way of moving between observation of space and theory. The theory can lead you to an interpretation of the space or the space can allow a connection to be made to theory."; "It helps us to pay attention to our surroundings and understand how space works"; "The video made it easier to show what was going on in my brain"; "I really enjoyed going to the same place together but coming back with such varied results - showing how different peoples brains work"; "It was good but we needed more time discussing the results and relating it back to theory"; "Firstly I'm a technophobe so just uploading a clip to YouTube was useful. It was surprising how peoples video all together gave a rich record of a space"; "Using moving image is the best way to capture a moment"; "Useful in relating our experience to theory in the seminar room the following week".

Conclusion: Academia is used to particular tools and perhaps feels uncomfortable with new ways of accessing knowledge especially when they are non-verbal. At the same time outside of academia people are increasingly using tools like video cameras in intuitive ways, to expand their communicative possibilities. And then uploading, accessing and discussing the footage on online forums like YouTube and Vimeo. It seems self-evident that universities should begin to explore the use of such tools of investigation and learning. The conclusion of my previous research into use of video in teaching suggested that students who might feel relatively excluded from the field of literary expertise might be more at home with video and computer technologies. The implication being that an increased use of video would help to 'increase participation' in higher education, an aim expressed in many policy documents. This mostly related to showing students videos clips from professionally made material. But my current experiment suggest that shooting video can also be potent a potent pedagogic tool.

http://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com/2010/03/visual-pedagogy-challenge-to-literary.html

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - useful conclusions

2011-02-04T21:01:00.013Z

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

It is nearly 50 years since this book was published.

These notes focus on the last part of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in which Jurgen Habermas makes some proposals. I start by referring to the earlier key criterial derived from an analysis of the C17th Bourgeois public sphere which achieved the establishment of a new class order mainly through the pen and the book rather than blood and the sword.... On the cultural left we are so used to hating Habermas and hating everything capitalist and bourgeois that we lose our perspective on what an achievement this tectonic shift in the ontology of class relations was.

First to recap the basics pages 36 of STPS give a summary of the criteria for a successful public sphere to arise:

1. A kind of social intercourse that 'disregarded status' and gave precedence to a collective agreement on the better argument.

2. Being able to raise common concerns through public discourse - a setting of agendas from below. Literary and cultural meanings ascertained through debate rather than being defined by a cognescenti.

3. Everyone has to be able to participate - (at least if they could buy the literature!) Even if they can't buy the 'literature' (have access to the web?) they could participate in the oral debate. If they couldn't buy prints they could see them in the printshop window displays and debate them on the pavement. This brings up the question of the role of literature or equivalent.

This was based on the new technology of publicity - the printed word... as well as urbanisation. To what extent are these criteria universally valid? Is some kind of publication of writing necessary?

Further conditions of Bourgeois Public Sphere: Precondition of shared a literature that reflects inner life (p.171) Secondly the precondition of 'objective' market values creating a community with little conflict in the sense of fighting over resources. (see final discussion)

This is still a radical set of criteria for a public culture - for instance the current Exploding Cinema in London defines itself as having: NO STARS, NO FUNDING, NO TASTE. and offers to show any film that is sent to it. This is in a context of a dominant culture of selection by experts, funding from the state or corporate bodies and a celebritised media space.

The degradation of the original Public Sphere occured throughout the mid to late C19th. It was a bit more than the re-asserting of elitism. Habermas discusses in some depth the growth of the state, the mass media as well as the concurrent enlargement of the right to vote. He doesn't discuss the final state of this which is a C20th state education for all.

The ideals of liberty, equality, inclusion championed by the Bourgeois public sphere are embedded widely into our culture, and when actually applied universally (as Marx suggested) they are still radical! In the original public sphere it seems these things were offered as if for everyone when the Bourgeois knew all along that really 'freedom' only really applied to those who could afford it. Also it was an idea of freedom that was based on the capitalist free market. Even as the masses achieve leisure their spare time is filled with commodity fetishism rather than articulating their own liberation.

Chartism was a mass movement that had its own public sphere i.e interconnected discussions that led to the Charter. Working class cultural forms and leisure are not discussed by Habermas. The Chartists did not achieve the class evolution that the BPS did. Their achievement was more a more diffuse class consciousness and a laying claim to a sense of political entitlement.

Today 'publicity' is sometimes bought with genuine concessions usually in the mode of: 'Everything for the people, nothing by the people!'

"Publicity was, according to its very idea, a principle of democracy not just because anyone could in principle announce, with equaL opportunity, his personal inclinations, wishes and convictions - opinions; it could only be realised in the measure that these personal opinions could evolve through the rational-critcal debate of a public into public opinion... for universal accessibility was understood as the precondition that guaranteed the truth of a discourse and counter-discourse bound to the laws of logic" p.219.

It is embedded in the UK publishing culture ISBN s etc. I was surprised how few controls there still are to publishing books and getting them accepted into the general book market mechanisms. Of course old established and well financed publishers can claim precedence but this is not built into the basic systems such as ISBN. The thing is that books do not now have the same position of influence in the culture as a whole. Now everyone buys books but do we raise agendas and discuss them as a public? We now have a surfeit of fragmented media information and no time to reflect.

Habermas points out that an effective abstract future Public Sphere needs a coherent public which is in communication freely enough to allow common concerns to arise.... and then to proceed with a widespread discussion of those concerns that explores all avenues... without compulsion or guidance. There would also have to be researchers on hand to supply information that was needed as well.

In the classic bourgeois Public Sphere it was assumed that: "As a sphere emancipated from domination all power relationships would be automatically neutralised within a society of small commodity producers" p. 223.

The bourgeoisie deferred to the 'objective' judgements of the market... Was this a magical ingredient unique to that time in history? Is it necessary? Do we have to accept 'Chantal Mouffes need for 'agonism' or Howard Slaters more nuanced and radical concept of affective classes in our idea of debate?

One contemporary problem for any public sphere is the 'unresolved plurality of competing interests' (p.234) that exist in the modern world. But its not that every issue needs to be resolved in a public sphere its just that there a broad sets of interests in common that do exist that cut across the cultural diversity that exists in most metropolitan centres. For me one of the main one is the common interests of working class people (defined in this instance as all those not benefiting in the longer term from the wealth generated by our own work, and those who relate to this class through culture and upbringing).

Was the classic Public Sphere not at all inclusive in reality? Was it only coherent whilst in opposition to the violent coercion of a Feudal system? Mouffe says we need 'us and them'. Do we now have a common 'enemy'? Or are we all gadget addicts when we are not chemical or betting addicts. (ie is the consumer an addict? Burroughs?)

On the other hand the idea that the "public is to set in motion a critical process of public communication" is still embedded in our political life.. the extent to which this can be realised is the measure of the degree of democratisation. see p.233

There is an optimistic conclusion to the penultimate chapter of STPS (6). Which is that increasing wealth could lead to a lessening of competition amongst the population. Two conditions for a return of an effective Public Sphere would include:

1. Minimising of bureaucratic decisions and the shifting of those decisions into a public process. This is a problem for the left as it is used by Tories to dismantle services with the rationale of cost cutting.

2. Finding universal interests that can be seen as more important than areas of conflicts of interest. Something like climate change? Or the projected global food price increases? But even unsensational issues like the tendency to inflict less punishment on young children can be profound in preparing the ground for a less irrational zone of human communications.

The outcome of the struggle between "a critical publicity and one that is merely staged for manipulative purposes remains open" p. 235.

His concluding chapter is Chapter 7 'On the Concept of Public Opinion'

Public opinion is not necessarily formed through rational debate. It is still politically powerful if it gains any publicity. The lowest form of public opinion is that measured by simple acclamation (applause or not). The public are still in communication to form a shared opinion even if it is just to witness the result of the opinion poll or hear the volume of applause.

"Public Opinion takes on a different meaning depending on whether it is brought into play as a critical authority in connection with the normative mandate that the exercise of political and social power be subject to publicity or as the object to be moulded in connection with a staged display of, and manipulative propagation of, publicity in the service of persons and institutions, consumer goods, programs." p.236

There is a elite group (who consider themselves best informed and most intelligent) that debates within the state what the interests of the state are. This is "in the midst of a public that merely supplies acclamation" p.238

Habermas thinks that the life expectancy of a politics based on acclamation rather than critical discussion is by no means certain.

"At first it (opinion) is still identified with 'expression on a controversial topic' later with 'expression of an attitude', then with 'attitude' itself. In the end an opinion no longer even needs to be capable of verbalisation; it embraces not only any habit that finds expression in some kind of notion - the kind of opinion shaped by religion, custom, mores, and simple 'prejudice' against which Public Opinion was called in as a critical standard in the C18th - but simply all modes of behaviour." p.241. Habermas says all forms involve at least group processes and to that extent have value. He considers levels of 'this area of communication'; from those topics 'normally not controlled by ones own reflection' such as attitudes to death penalty or sexual morality which he sees as "taken for granted". On a 'second level' he proposes "the rarely discussed basic experiences of one's own biography are verbalised" eg might include attitudes to war or security. p.245 . A third level of "often discussed things" ie insignificant things that are set up by the culture industry; X Factor to the latest soap scandal (but even within this are controversial issues?). The first level of taken-for-granted opinion includes a 'historical sediment' of primordial prejudices (my e.g. glamour?) but the taken-for-granted type of opinions generated by the culture industry "have both a more evanescent and a more artificial character. These opinions are shaped within the medium of a group-specific 'exchange of tastes and preferences'" p.245. This begins to sound similar to Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about distinction?

He tries an idea of the subliterary which is ideas that are 'taken for granted in a culture because of deep-seated traditions" and post-literary which is the material "generated by the culture industry" p.246. Of course this ignores the agency of oralacy which has generally been ignored by academia. (Exceptions Walter J. Ong and ....)

The old "bourgeois domain of interiority" that was fed on literature still feeds themes to the Culture industry. What is missing here is how to apply this principle in which a group consciousness is pre-cultivated by a shared consumption of artworks. The suppression of working class novels is interesting in this regard. Has it been happening through music? This is a question I approach with the Agit Disco project.

Habermas's has a clear emphasis on rational discussion? I believe that an emphasis on the power of rationalisation defined as thinking for which reasons can be given, and preferably reasons from empirical research, is something I agree with. There is a historical dimension for valuing this kind of systemmatic or scientific model which is based in the historical facts of scientific achievements; the other material grounding on which of the bourgeois era's accumulation of wealth is based. However the question is; how does art relate to the idea of rationality?

Habermas tends to be a realist. He sees our best hope currently in organisations that are democratically run and the space between them.

"The degree to which an opinion is a public opinion is measured by the following standard: the degree to which it emerges from the intra-organisational public sphere constituted by the public of the organisations members and how much the intraorganisational public sphere communicates with an external one formed in the publicist interchange, via the mass media, between societal organisations and state institutions" p.248

How does web2 and social networking (other new communication media of the last 50 years) change this?

Habermas clearly defines a future goal:

"A concept of public opinion that is historically meaningful, that normatively meets the requirements of the constitution of a social welfare state, and that is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development." p.244

Is this what is happening in Egypt? What part would visual culture play in this?

Habermas quotes C.W. Mills (The Power Elite 1956) who gives four criteria for defining an autonomous or political idea of Public Opinion.

1. As many people express views as receive them

2. Public communications can be answered back to

3. Opinions formed can find an action outlet even against prevailing authority

4. Authoritative institutions do not penetrate and direct the public (which needs autonomy)

If these conditions do not prevail a 'mass' is formed. If they do it is a 'public'. p.249

Social networks seem to fulfill these criteria? The communicative interconnectedness of the public seems crucial. The nature of this communicative action is something that Habermas explores in his later Theory of Communicative Action (1981).

Habermas' conclusion in STPS is that domination and power will continue as a historical negative if no attention is given to a structural transformation of the public sphere.

?Do you agree? How can this be achieved? What are the spaces in which this is happening to some extent?

What spaces could be created or adapted to contribute to this transformation?

refs

http://theps.net/

Crucial Questions

What is the equivalent to literature of the BPS? Myth of deep subjectivity/ taste.

Can we do without the objective reference to market values of the BPS? Is this Hab analysis right anyway? (it doesn't feature in the 3 criteria. 'obective' market values creating a community with little conflict. Maybe our productvity is now such that the is a theoretical overproduction technically possible. But in say Egypt the market still deals with distribution imbalances and seemed to supply food to a "economy that had come to a halt".

What sort of universal shared values are there? Positive world trends indicate a common striving shared goals?

Egypt allows various aspects of making democracy real to be discussed:

How will the state be reduced or bypassed? Law and police.

What is the role of the military?

What is the role of the media? Hegemony... The Kings Speech...

If anyone is reading this book please contact me. I have copious notes and quotes from the rest of the book I can send you. Posting of this has been overtaken by the events in Tunisia and Egypt... see comments below for relevant updating.

See also my post on Jonathan Schell's 'Unconquerable World'...

Rediscovering Baudrillard's System of Objects

2011-01-13T15:05:00.005Z

Jean Baudrillard The System of Objects 1968

b1929 - 2007 (Some highlights from the Verso edition of 2005 focusing on his key ideas)

He is describing...

"A global response that founds our entire cultural system" p.217

He proposes that objects are 'in perpetual flight' from their structural elements towards their 'secondary meanings'. p.6. These meanings arise in relation to the system ideology. p.9. An understanding of objects must entail a critique of this systems practical ideology.

"Technologys structural dynamism is paralysed, at the level of objects, in the differential subjectivity of the cultural system, which itself retroactively impinges on the organisation of technology." p.10

He writes about the atmosphere of interiors relating to Barthes .... Q. p.29 "Systematic technicity calls forth systemmatic cultural connotation" p.49

He sets forth a history of the object

Functionality or the lack thereof: Quite a lot about car tail fins (now almost lost to common knowledge!) and antiques and their authenticity.... for a description of 'traditional symbolic objects' see p.218.

The abstraction of the object from its function is discussed...

"Every object has two functions - to be put to use and to be possessed. The first involves the field of the world's practical totalisation by the subject, the second and abstract totalisation of the subject himself outside of the world" p.92

He compares love of objects to out love of pets! p.95

" Any object immediately becomes the foundation of a network of habits, the focus of a set of behavioural routines. Conversely there is no habit that does not centre on an object." p.100

ie objects imply practices.

Technology - automatism and miniaturisation. 1910 - 1940 seen as 'the era of inventions'.

"A complete pataphysics of the object is awaiting description" p.121. "Behind every real object is a dream object" an imaginary mode p.126

The interest in Pataphysics explains the obscurity of some of his future writings...

Market forces ensure that the consumer object has a short life. 'Planned obsolescence'

Class differences

"Increasing status is nothing but a game, for all differences are integrated in advance." a game of deceit... requiring an ever expanding system. p.165

Equality before the object will never happen !

"This perpetual cycle of aspiration and disillusion, dynamically orchestrated at the level of production, constitutes the arena in which objects are pursued." p.167. "Everything shifts before our eyes, everything is being continually transformed - yet nothing really changes." p. 167

His discussion of credit is prescient. - p.171 + p.175

Advertising

"Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation." p. 178. Advertising displays our collective buying power... "we all live and breathe this buying power" p.187

Advertising is free to all. Even if it fails to sell you the object of its content it sells you the system. p.188. "Advertising is less a determinant of consumption than an object of consumption" p.189. We "partake of a travesty of the social entity and enjoy a warmer, more maternal, and more vivid atmosphere" p. 190

Advertising asks us to regress to earlier needs, whilst masking social realities.

"Society assumes a maternal role the better to preserve the role of constraint" p.191. "The image disappoints: its function is at once to display and simultaneously to disabuse." p.192. We only get a phantasy of satisfaction. p.194

The ideology of the commodity is primarily about deception.

Advertising appeals to our desire for solidarity to 'fuel competition between people'. p.196. "Advertising is a plebiscite whereby mass consumer society wages a perpetual campaign of self-endorsement." p.198

Why are theories of advertising not fashionable now!

Consumers can be made to feel uniquely cared for a join a monotonous conformity all at the same time. Freedom comes to means 'free to project one's desires onto commodities' p.203

Live conflictual human relationships are 'replaced by a personalised relationship to objects' p.204

He forsees Bourdieu's 'Distinction'...

"Let there be no mistake: objects work as categories of objects which, in the most tyrannical fashion, define categories of people - they police social meaning, and the significations they engender are rigidly controlled." p. 209. " ...a universal system for the identification of social rank" p.212

"Advertising does not liberate drives; first and foremost it liberates phantasies that serve to inhibit those drives." p.211. He discusses the alienation of our deep tendencies and internal conflicts.

He forsees Foucault's bio-power on p. 212 (+ p.139 )

"Nothing has really changed - it is just that strictures on self-fullfilment are here no longer imposed by means of oppressive laws or norms of obedience; repression is ensure through 'free actions' (buying , choosing, consuming)"

Baudrillard sees positive aspects in the system of (consumer) objects:

1. It is also like other semiotic codes... in that it is arbitrary.

2. It makes ranking codes clearer (altho' they become more obsessive) and later he says this is an 'illusion of readable social relations, behind which the real structure of production and real social relationships remain illegible'. p.214. So it doesn't lead to liberation.

3. It generates universal signs for the first time in history...

A contemplation on Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman', Allen Lane + Yale UP 2008

2010-05-09T21:38:00.001+01:00

The Craftsman

Richard Sennett is one of those eminent intellectuals that is humane and intriguing. His writing is discursive and sometimes verges on rambling, but will pull itself back into some kind of shape just as you are about to give up. He gets away with this because his powers of description and analysis are at times acute to the point of being sublime.

This book is an example of class as 'the elephant in the room'. 326 pages on craftmanship and no mention of class as such! As a good establishment figure he starts by going back to the classics quoting Aristotle from his Metaphysics: "We consider that the architects in every profession are more estimable and know more and are wiser than the artisans, because they know the reasons of the things that are done." (from H. Tredennick, 1933). p.23. He sees the value put on the craftsman going through a series of historical stages: "drudge, slave, worthy Christian, avatar of Enlightenment, doomed relic of preindustrial past..." p.293

Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie (1751 - 1772) held the craftsman in high esteem p.88. We learn that this Enlightenment precursor of Wikipedia, subtitled 'a dictionary of the arts and crafts' had a radical political agenda embedded in the process of its production. This was expressed as the way in which work and skill and the use of tools and machines was depicted with a radical empathy towards the workers. The research process was incredibly hands-on with Diderot not only visiting workshops but trying his hand at acquiring manual skills.

Sennet says; "A, perhaps the, fundemental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror tool" for the physical movements of the human body." p.95. Diderot used illustrations to depict decisive moments that could not easily be described in words. This is fundamental to the gap in knowledge and understanding between the classes - between the literary class and the rest who are embedded within oral culture. Even now with most people doing office jobs that are mediated with words, the recognition of way of knowing and communicating based in a corporeal oralacy persists.

"Language struggles with depicting physical action, and nowhere is this struggle more evident than in language that tells us what to do." p.179

"Our Enlightenment ancestors believed that Nature furnished humanity at large with the intelligence to do good work; they saw the human being as a capable animal; demands for greater equality depended on this conviction. Modern society tends to emphasize differences in ability; the 'skills economy' constantly seeks to separate smart from stupid people. Our Enlightenment forebears had it right, at least as it concerns craftsmanship. We share in common and in roughly equal measure the raw abilities that allow us to become good craftsmen; it is the motivation and aspiration for quality that takes people along different paths in their lives. Social conditions shape these motivations. " p.241

Possibly his optimism gets to be plain idealistic when, for instance, it is applied to the holy cow of John Ruskin who he sees as exhorting "artisans to reassert their claim on societies respect". Ignoring the context of his Romantic to rightwing agenda. Later he conflates Dewey, Ruskin and Morris who are apparently all saying that:

"Good craftsmanship implies socialism."p.288. Really he could make a better, less romantic case for saying that, but he doesn't, he can only show a weak empathy with this historical echo. A strength of the book may be that his sense of craft encompases a wider sense of production than that of Morris.

He has much to say about 'the Intelligent Hand' p.149 The key ability is that of

prehension... which consists of anticipation, contact, description, refection. (referring to Raymond Tallis) In my study Sense-Think-Act manual dexterity was a basic category. But my desire for a simple ontology may have missed some of the eye/brain/muscle loops that go to make dexterity.

"The full scenario of practice sessions that improve skills is thus: prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form. In this narrative, fit-for-purpose is achieved rather than preconcieved." p.161

"Development of an intelligent hand does show something like a linear progression. The hand needs to be sensitised at the fingertip, enabling it to reason about touch. Once this is achieved problems of coordination can be addressed. Integration of hand, wrist and forearm then teaches lessons of minimum force. Once these are learned, the hand can work with the eye to look ahead physically, to anticipate and so to sustain concentration." p.238

He recognises that the most subtle mental abilities like intuition, are part of craft ability.

"How intuitive leaps happen.... They occur in 4 stages." p.209

1. a sense that what isn't could come into being. reformating...

2. establish adjacency. bring stuff together.

3. comparison by 'dredging up tacit knowledge'. suprises appear.

4. recognition of a practical result - with aura/ wonder. brought back down to earth.

So here he implies that the intellectual might also be a 'craft' worker. If she can be freed from the historical class baggage of the literati, the intellectual might be able to return to the working class. The radical difficulties of this argument in which the hand is no longer the sensual appendage of discovery are not explored. What is then 'stuff'? and how is intuition 'brought down to earth'? He suggests some answers earlier when he talks of being 'aroused' by materials - in three ways: altering, marking and identifying them with ourselves (p.144). Also a kind of intellectual that argues from the empirical.

The idea is easier to develop if an investigative tool is involved: "Three tools, the telescope, the microscope and the scalpel - challenged the medieval view of humanities place in the world" p.195

"Closer to modern times.... the amateur's foraging curiosity seeming of less value than specialised knowledge. Yet the expert has few strong rituals to bind him or her to the larger community or indeed to colleagues." p.246

We have to remember that Sennett's prime manual craft is that of a musician. His early potential in this direction having been cruelly ended by an injury.

He even applies his ideas of craft to social organisation.

"The well-crafted organisation will focus on whole human beings in time, it will encourage mentoring, and it will demand standards framed in language that any person in the organisation might understand." p.249. "The capacities of our bodies to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations." p290

Is this could be taken as a blueprint for a workers control, worker management. But left hanging as it is by Sennett it can be ammunition for the libertarian management froth.

Defining craft ability

He compares the design obsession of Ludwig Wittgenstein as architect with his more pragmatic contemporary Adolf Loos... p.262

From this he deduces some guidelines:

* "The good craftsman knows the importance of the sketch- that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin."

* See that "positive value on contingency and constraint" problems can be reformulated as opportunities.

* Recognise that there may be a 'measure of incompleteness' in the object.

* Avoid perfectionism!

* Know when to stop.

He makes the relation of craftwork being close to play. Improvising to establish consistent, tested collaboratively agreed rules...

"play is .... a school for learning to increase complexity." p.272

"Three basic abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship." p. 277

1. 'make a matter concrete' - focus with eye of fingertip

2. explore its qualities.

3. 'expand its sense' 'open up a problem' being always open to do things differently. Adapting from other domains of skill...

Avoiding class

He does back flips to avoid talking about class... in spite of this he says things that are useful in understanding class oppression:

"The innate abilities on which craftsmanship is based are not exceptional; they are shared in common by the large majority of human beings in roughly equal measure." p.277. "...the basic capabilities to specify, question, and open up. These are widely diffused amongst human beings rather than restricted to an elite." p.291

He provides a good summary and critique of IQ intelligence testing as completely contrary to the skills required by his very expanded concept of craft work. One of the main characters in the development of IQ testing was the leading eugenicist, Lewis Terman who developed the original model of Binet and Simon c1915 "wanted to identify the exceptionally stupid and to sterilise them". p.281. Of course IQ was successful in becoming the dominant concept of what intelligence was.

Sennett reckons the best critic of IQ is Howard Gardner, who added touch, movement, hearing and the ability to communicate with others, and to be self-reflective, to give an expanded concept of intelligence. Intelligence is seen as more embodied, more complex and diverse that the unitary figure represented by the IQ score.

"Rather than mental resource, the craftsman is more likely to be threatened by emotional mismanagement of the drive to do good work; society can collude in that mismanagement or seek to rectify it. These are the reasons why I've argued ... that motivation is a more important issue than talent in consummating craftsmanship." p. 285

Here he seems to slide away from a more radical conclusion. What about his own 'The Hidden Injuries of Class' (1993)? It is those hurts that often give rise to the emotional mismanagement of our selves. This cannot be reduced to motivation although that is central.

My conclusion:

He is a reformer rather than a revolutionary... he seems not to have the courage of his convictions - and as a governor at LSE perhaps he is now too embedded in the academic establishment to put his head above the parapet. "In a modern economy, dislocation is a permanent fact." p.268 His idea that everyone can govern themselves and so become good 'citizens' p.269 sounds a bit closer to David Cameron than anarcho syndicalism.

On the other hand: he most radical moment is his proposal that:

"Nearly everyone can become a good craftsman." p.268

"Modern society sorts people along a strict gradient of ability. The better you are at something, the fewer of you there are." "Craftsmanship doesn't fit into this framework.... the rhythmn of routine in craftsmanship draws on childhood experiences of play, and almost all children can play well. The dialogue with materials in craftsmanship is unlikely to be charted by intelligence tests; again, most people are able to reason well about their physical sensations." p.268

He appeals for the dignity of manual work even if he has to do it with classic allusions.

"The mis-shapen figure of Hephaestus is meant to suggest that material domestic civilisation will never satisfy the desire for glory; that is his defect." p292. Sennett's last word is that he is "the most dignified person we can become." p296

Bibliography

Gardner, Howard. 'Frames of Mind: the theory of multiple intelligences' Basic Books NY 1983

Sudnow, David. 'Ways of the Hand' MIT 2001

Tallis, Raymond. 'The Hand: a philosophical enquiry in human being' Edinburgh UP 2003

NB I read a Penguin version of 'The Craftsman' that was given away free with the Times newspaper c the end of 2009.

None of the above - some random ideas

2010-04-28T21:43:00.001+01:00

Manifesto of One - some ideas for those who would vote 'None of the above' if there was a box giving that opportunity on May 6th.

* Get rid of money. Yes I know it won't be easy to persuade everyone to let go of their savings... Yes I know the first year or so could be a bit tricky. but the longer term benefits out weigh the perceived risks.

* Have an economy based on the three things: freely available labour, resources, distribution technologies.

* Everyone to understand and direct this economy with a new form of transparent non-monetary accountancy linked to an open logistics - which is basically the coordination of labour, resources and distribution.

* This money-less economy is part of a wider new way of understanding the world in using dynamic mapping and social network like web2. Worldmapper.com (effects of policies on people) to Geoscope (futurology of world resource planning proposed by Buckminster Fuller in the Sixties now possible)

* Make the understanding and training required to running society equitable one of the main activities of youth and beyond. ie workshops, seminars debates, information gathering etc. Make all education curricula subsidery to such activity - the collective and practical solving of local social problems.

* Quickly agree on world priorities. Predicted as probably: clean water, sufficient food, shelter, clean air. Sustainable energy, lower technological impacts on ecology, universal education, universal suffrage, lower and slower consumption.

* Accelerate development of living standards worldwide to the point at which population self-stabilises. This will also reduce mass migrations between areas of poverty and wealth.

* Limit and practically end the commercial production of weapons. Turn the excess of weapons into tools. Have one army based on the United Nations model with the sole purpose of preventing the rise of a dominating power.

* Celebrate the tool makers and especially the designers of semi-automated production machinery and open software. These nameless people make us free.

* Redesign leisure to be emancipatory rather than mind numbing

* Make human mass gatherings, games and celebrations the central act of humanity. Look after and husband the places that such gathering can happen in.

* Extend the principles of democratic justice to all social injustices: from random juries to public enquiries into truth and reconciliation (South Africa).

* Allow a 'Place 2 Be' model to extend from their current success in schools to every neighbourhood to allow us to take care of emotional well-being and mental health. Teach everyone how to use their attention and develop listening skills, to give emotional support to those around them.

* Artists, and everyone, encouraged to make their 'statements' at the most opportunities possible. Cultural activity seen as being key to the way we evaluate our totality and adapt to a changing world using all our senses. The more free and active the cultural activity the more wise our society will be.

* Art and music studios to be opened in every locality following the model experiments of Room 13 in schools in Scotland and now globally. Led by artist but open to anyone who wants to take time out to express themselves.

* Experiment with the human social capacity to reach wide-spread understandings through all types of communications.

* Make the care of children the priority for future proofing the human evolution. Spread childcare knowledges. Support parents. Accelerate, celebrate and encourage the existing trend to end the use of punitive harming (hitting!) of children in order to 'control' them.

* End domestic violence. Especially violence against women.

* End social isolation of old people and others on a street by street basis. Conversion of Neighbourhood Watch to this purpose.

* Turn to each other at every opportunity. Use the power of attention, appreciation, strategic questioning and listening to elicit exponentially improved thinking.

* End encarceration and imprisonment except for chronically anti-social, psychopathic and dangerous individuals.

* Put working class women in charge of almost everything from local resources to higher level policy formulations.

* Housing rights are held (securely owned) through occupation and use. Formations of community are encouraged, valued and celebrated. Goodbye to all landlords and abstract ownership of land at a distance.

* Achieve or defend healthcare for all on demand. The debate on what is a reasonable level of medications needs and when hospitalisation is required etc to be an open and public debate. Continue with and extend the practices and ideas of preventing diseases.

* Understand the mechanics of all oppressions, dismantle them and be vigilant about the long-terms after-effects.

* Replace the dynamism of the profit motivated drive to innovate technologically with a consideration of the conscious evolution of humanity. Who do we want to become?

* To make sure there are social arenas and schools in which all people can meet, mix and work together closely. Work peacefully against the formation of both ghettos and closed communities.

* Schools? or knowledge and skill exchange centres? These sort of places might have equal numbers of very young and very old people. Of course inclusive of all people of all types of ability and difficulty and needs. Horticultural and culinary skills and practice to be at the centre of such places.

* Education curricula rethought starting from basic human abilities.(Sense-Think-Act) and from skills widely needed in the world (keyboard use) and learning about each others cultures.

* Supermarkets might morph into community distribution centres for basic essentials.

* There might be a rather quick change to more local manufacture using more local resources - e.g. a return of vernacular building techniques based on local materials.

* Every south facing surface of all buildings would be adapted to make best possible use of solar radiation. Existing technologies of insulation of and heat exchanging ventilation systems would reduce the heating needs for energy and in fact aim to feed the national grid with locally produced energy.

* Tree planting and culture to be one of the priority activities.

* Much higher production of locally grown food would provide a necessary security against any fear of logistical breakdowns in the more widespread distribution system. Many currently grassed areas would be made productive in this way.

* As there is no more waged work. Self-discipline and production efficiency would be a matter for each workforce or skill area to think about. The development of work would focus more on the quality of the work day, which would give us sufficient motivation for regular attendance.

* End the valuing of 'intellectual' achievement over 'manual' achievement and the limited ideas of intelligence that have be institutionalised by the narrow ideas of IQ. End the grading of school achievement on these lines.

Visual Pedagogy: a challenge to literary orthodoxy?

2010-03-04T12:19:00.001Z

Visual Pedagogy: a challenge to literary orthodoxy?

A greater use of visual pedagogy would probably lead to widening participation in Higher Education

The University of Westminster’s Widening Participation Strategy document does, to its credit, focus on the participation of people living in London who are currently excluded. What becomes clear is that behind the euphemisms like 'non-traditional background' the people who are excluded are pretty much all working class. Now it is a generalisation but what working class people of all cultures tend to share in common is the ‘lack’ of a literary heritage. They are not brought up by parents or carers who revere literature. They are however, of course, fluent in many other media of communication. This is, broadly speaking, oral culture as against literary culture. Oral culture tends to embrace visual media more intimately than literary culture does. The status of comic reading is a case in point here. We find that there are very strong historical reasons for this.

In her book 'Artful Science: enlightenment entertainment and the eclipse of visual education" (1994) Barbara Stafford argues forcibly that there was a popular visual pedagogy in the early C17th. This often took the form of performance in which advances in science and technology were brought to public notice by often spectacular and nearly always entertaining demonstrations. The erstwhile performer might use their own body to dramatically demonstrate things such as the properties of electricity! These sorts of performances happened not only in institutes (Like Westminster Universities own HQ on Regent Street) but in fairs, coffeehouses and other places where people gathered to be entertained and informed. We have to remember that every speakers corner, in almost every market place, was effectively the 'university of the streets' at this time.

(Footnote: Going back much earlier the craftsmen who drove the medieval industrial revolution, that produced technology like windmills and galleons, would communicate their ideas with demonstration pieces that they would lug around the country with them.)

"Images like conversation, proved to be maddeningly elusive and difficult to control. Power was at issue, especially when the producers of graphic designs claimed displays could be as instructive as texts and as entertaining as carnival shows" Barbara Stafford (1994) p.281

"This 'primitive' or representational dimension of communication - composed of dramatically enunciated iconic, metaphoric and symbolic messages- became increasingly undermined through disembodied data caste in lead" ibid p.196

Stafford goes on to show how these ways of educating the public were challenged and undermined by the literary establishment. Pedagogical performances were made to seem akin to the illusions of cheap tricksters and magicians and not worthy of the gravitas of serious learning. But at the same time the literary culture of the middle class was continuing a long process of separating itself from lower class oral cultures and we can feel class prejudice creeping into discourses.

"The ability to find meaning in forms, colours, odors, and textures tended to disappear in the post-Lavoisier era of the 1780s, enamoured of quantifying set-ups" Barbara Stafford (1994) p.202

We see that lower class cultures tend towards orality including an immersion in more visual means of communication. At the same time the academic world of the universities saw visual communication as being below the remit of serious knowledge, which was a literary affair. The fewer pictures a book had the more serious it was.

“The playfull combinations of meaning invited by the cabinet of curios was replaced by systemmaticaly organised bits that required 'the interpretation of experts'.” Barbara Stafford (1994) p.255

Stafford's work has been reinforced by David Howe who has revived the concept of the sensorium originally used by Walter J. Ong and Marshal McCluhan. A sensorium is the proportions in which a culture prioritises the use of the different senses. Western cultures are generally typified as predominantly visual. But in a more detailed view lower classes (e.g. children, women, working classes, black people etc) use a wider range of the senses and also tend to be consumers of visual media. Meanwhile knowledge is directed by an austere and iconoclastic discourse of black letters on a white page.

I asked a lecturer who has been using a lot of video in teaching (Martin Doherty) to give me a summary of the 'methodological difficulties' involved in the use of film in the construction of history? His answer gives some idea of the bias that those who espouse a more visual pedagogy face

"How long have you got?!" (The arguments may be summed up as…) "… movies are all balony, or faked, or staged, or exaggerated, or simplified, or partial, or biased, or propaganda, and so heavily edited that they are completely corrupted; that if the cinema is a window onto a lost world, then it's a filthy, broken, tiny one, with a lousy view." MD email June 2005

So our academic and literary mindsets have evolved to exclude visual pedagogy over several hundreds of years. This heritage is bound to be deeply influential when we come to consider enhancing student learning with use of visual resources. Of course the literary academic world has to study the visual. It illustrates in literary analysis but stops short developing a visual polemic. Jurgen Habermas makes a strong case for the rational potential that is inherent within language and culture (1981) but in the end, his arguments are enclosed within and refers almost exclusively to written discourse.

Of course university culture is embedded in a particular class based world view that goes back to its original function of providing cadres and functionaries for the new city states of Europe, beginning in Northern Italy some 800 years ago. A function that is still an important part of its remit. Now of course the state is hugely enlarged.

We are now in a situation in which a majority of the world’s consumer population are viewers of a globalised visual media. These media disseminate a powerful 'visual rhetoric', which we need to be become reflexive and critical about and without retreating back into the literary. This is gradually pushing academic knowledge into a crisis of becoming increasingly irrelevant to a world in which visual communications are increasingly predominant. This argument is reinforced by both Stafford and Howe. This crisis can be addressed by taking the need for more visual pedagogy seriously.

It can even be argued that the aporia of sensory knowledge that is built into the ancient precepts of academia are key to the errors of thinking and knowledge that have contributed to many wider world problems.

"The notion that the typeset text forms the rule and highest principle of interpretation must finally be put to rest for a democratic hermeneutics of pattern recognition and visual design to be created." Barbara Stafford (1994) P311

Visual pedagogy will enhance teaching for some students in particular. These are the students who have grown up without a deep book culture within the family and peer group. These people will often have had a stronger oral and often visual culture - comix rather than classics, television drama rather than visits to the theatre etc. This is not just a white working class of course and it is often the new immigrant groups who have less members attending 'good' schools and getting home tuition in 'good' English. At the same time such groups may respond avidly to visual media, with which they are likely to already be more conversant with than books.

At the same time visual pedagogy will make university knowledge more relevant to all students in the 21st century.

"I try to get students to think of film and films as artefacts in themselves - not simply to look at the plot or the 'surface of reality' with which they are presented - but instead to see movies and film as social constructs and to understand that someone, somewhere is grinding an axe.

More prosaically, so many students nowadays learn about the world in visual terms - they don't read as much as teenagers did in the 50s, or 60s or 70s, because there are so many 'easier' distractions like 24-hour TV, computer games, the internet etc. Often when I use visual material on modules which are not ostensibly 'visual' (like a module on the history of the police), students will say that the most interesting aspects were 'the video clips', or 'the newsreels'. Some colleagues will say that I am pandering to students, and that they 'are not in the entertainment industry' - but we are to an extent, and anything which interests or intrigues or hooks students has got to be worth doing." Martin Doherty June 2005

Apart from the cultural barriers there are of course technical ones of staff training. Most staff need to be able to sit in on classes taught by those with these visual skills, hear a technical commentary on how the package was put together and attend a training workshop.

As another lecturer, theatre specialist Steven Barfield, reminded me the arguments for the use of visual resources and the reflexive pedagogy that surrounds each use also needs to be subject and curricula specific. A central issue for the study of video records of theatre performances may be the verity with which the video communicates the live event, which is similar to the study of paintings through digital or photographic copies.

"Visual materials such as video, DVDs etc helps (theatre) students to visualise one possible way a play texts could be staged. The danger here especially with films (filmed plays are more authentic than playtexts translated into films, but less watchable due to differences between the mediums) which only supply one non-contingent directorial viewpoint is that students become fixated on this one to the detriment of the performative possibilities located within the play text." Steven Barfield June 2005

The use of media in French may be more diversified as it is not just the language and its contexts that are being studied, but also the culture and value structures. A diversity which may bring to the fore many complex considerations of the displacement of language and the synoptic representation of whole cultures.

Illustration or visual discourse?

Clearly the enhancement I'm really interested in is not that of adding colour and so sensory interest to something that is plain. Although that in itself is valid as a pedagogical technique. The point is to go beyond the use of illustration to the point at which the visual material is a necessary part of the argument. Now constructing visual 'arguments' is a contentious matter, which I won't take on here. However suffice to say that the visual argument may need something other than narrative and instead may be seen as montage.

"I am particularly interested in the use of contrasting examples, for example how in the 1920s and 30s portraiture of Qing emperors is combined with the image of the opium addict to form the racist Western image of Fu Manchu. In this way, video images become closer to something like a montage, with all of the pedagogical advantages that implies" Mark Harrison June 2005

And more from Mark Harrison who takes a special interest in China:

"In terms of pedagogical effectiveness, I think visual material is often seen as an extra tool. There is a tendency to see text and speech as the most legitimate medium for teaching, and visual material as "easy" or somehow less serious. Obviously, I disagree. I think visual material can add a new layer of knowledge in the classroom, if it is used effectively. That is the key - new technology means one can make visual "quotes", using short excerpts, in a way that simply wasn't feasible before, when visual material meant "stop the class and show a video".

The issue of the curricula specific nature of application effected my research methodology as it soon became clear that each usage area needed tailored questions in order to spark a response. The blanket email didn't really work but a process of question and answer, tailored to each discipline and module worked much better and the results produced were in depth rather than broad because of it.

However it does seem, even from the limited response I have received, that visual resources are used across a range of quite different subjects. And, although there is a range of material, it is film that comes out as the media that can be made use of most flexibly. The feature film has an enormous amount of labour put into every frame and is a rich repository of meanings, many of which are quite arbitrary to the intention of the narrative. We may be able to taste the historical flavour of an epoch from a well-made period drama.

We might go so far as to put forward the hypothesis that there is not a subject within humanities teaching which is not, or could not be further, enhanced by the use of visual resources. It is however the argument that visual pedagogy could make a key contribution to 'widening participation' that is perhaps the most compelling reason for giving this are further attention.

Stefan Szczelkun

Research funded by a grant from Westminster University but previously unpublished.

The Unconquerable World

2010-02-28T20:28:00.009Z

'The Unconquerable World: power, nonviolence, and the will of the people'

Jonathan Schell 2003

Summary notes, quotes and comments

My world view changed dramatically in one way after my involvement with Solidarnosc (Polish Solidarity Campaign) and the following collapse of totalitarian communism throughout Eastern Europe. There were two things that emerged from this that amazed me. First that the changes happened with minimal bloodshed. and second that we had no idea that such changes were at all possible - the general common sense we had from the media was that if there was any uprising 'the tanks would role in' as they did in Prague in 1968. This sense of amazement was underlined when Apartheid fell. Again without much bloodshed and completely in contrast to the general belief of what was possible in the West. I had been told many times that apartheid would never fall in my lifetime.

This showed my that our knowledge from the daily media is severely limited. And that the conditions that make such immense peaceful changes possible are not visible from any individual viewpoint. The other possibility is that if they could be seen they would not have happened because they could then have been counter-acted - repressed. So the title of Jonathan Schell's book immediately appealed to me. 'The Unconquerable World'. You can never kill or effectively silence the already 'silent' majority. When change happens that has the active support of majorities of populations there is nothing that armies and much less police forces can do to stop it.

My interest in this book is in wanting to know how huge waves of solidarity comes into being and effect non-violent change to the surprise of the 'mass' media and the intellectual establishment. The human evolutionary urge towards democracy and freedom and its capacity to be socially intelligent and come to strategic agreements in very large populations.

Schell starts by looking at the relation between politics and violence. The link between men /patriotism and death in battle goes back to the Athenian, Pericles. From this classic root political morality has held onto the need for 'standing up for principles with force', which in practice quickly descends to "plunder. exploitation and massacre" (we might add rape). In the C5th St Augustine conjoined this with Christian love... by theorising 'separate realms' for political and religious morality. Politics has thus long been wedded to violence and it is hard to conceptualise a political ideology that does not have a resort to violence clause. As Schell says there has been, "an age old reliance of politics on violent means" (p.4)

For most of the book Schell seems a classic liberal in not drawing connections between class and war. Very much later he does make these connections but weakly and never mentions the arms industry nor the military classes, never mind oppression. This however ma be a diplomatic choice of language.

Schell puts forward his main thesis that "violence has now become dysfunctional as a political instrument".p.7 and that "forms of non-violent action can serve effectively in the place of violence at every level of political affairs." (p.8)

The logic of war has been that the violence escalates with political and technological progress up to the point of total annihilation. (referring to Clauswitz). The key political progress has been the idea of democracy. Even the worst democracy carries within it the principle of equality which is a deeply seated contradiction to an also deeply embedded practice of inequality (class). (Tocqueville) Ironically modern national democracy allowed for a new kind of army, in which it was possible to mobilise masses of men prepared to die - apparently in defence of their own national interest and the principle of democracy. The disaster of the modern war system was fed by an unholy confluence of democracy, science, industrial revolution, and imperialism which developed through the C19th. (to which I would add class oppression!)

Power came to be widely defined by the ability to wage war. Imperialism is described as "a monotonous record of one sided slaughter" (p.75) He argues that there was an end to limited war between 'great powers' after 1870 (p.44) After that we had 1914 and the period of total or world war until 1946. After this came the period of Cold War in which the public appearances of a strategic balance of power became more important than the reality of a balance of actual power. The A-bomb made a balance of actual power obsolete. (p.62)

Peoples war - wars of national self-determination

British democracy was underpinned by a racism that denied its colonies the same democratic rights it had been forced to gradually concede to the lower classes at home. Massacres were followed by (re)educational programmes or

westernisation to provide an intermediary class schooled in Western languages and customs, all of which was impregnated with the thorough-going superiority of the white man and his Western system.

The first modern Peoples War was the Spanish resistance to the French invasion 1807-14.(Saragossa, p.68) A peoples war that showed how a superior force can be worn down by lesser military strength contrary to the classic rules of conventional warfare. The main need was to endure, and have an armed population. George Washington understood this need for persistence. The big downside of people's war is that the whole people become subject to retaliation. (p.81) In the Japanese retaliation against the Chinese communists the population dropped from 45 million to 25 million. With this level of violence political ideals are what buoys up the resistance. It also allowed humanitarian treatment of prisoners by the communist forces to be maintained.

In a peoples war it is important that war is kept subordinate to politics. Schell posits that this is the first stage of extracting politics from the war machine. In practice this means the creation of a civil administration from the ground up. For Mao the most important goal and foundation of this politics was the redistribution of land from rich to poor. A militarised politics can easily segue into a totalitarian politics via conventional warfare: as it did in China against the American backed Kuomintang.

Peoples war became the principle instrument of self-determination and social change in the Third world from around the 1950s. If a population is united, an imperial war against it is difficult to win. De Gaulle understood this in relation to Algeria 1958. Even when he had achieved a military victory it did not lead to a political one. In Vietnam the war was 'won' by the fierce resistance to waging it within the USA, and by the endurance and increasing political solidarity of the Vietnamese.

Cold war

The nuclear stand off produced a stalemate in the war system. The last resort was unusable.

"In both(nuclear deterrence and people war) violence became not so much an

instrument for producing physical effects as a kind of bloody system of

communication, through which the antagonists produced messages to one

another about will." (p.97)

Nuclear deterrence became a conflict waged by appearances to produce intangible effects on leaderships and populations. Peoples war also came to be decided by intangible effects on hearts and minds of both sides. In both situations the capacity of violence for achieving political ends was thrown into doubt.

Revolution

A similar belief in violence pervaded western theories of revolution. Right left and centre theorists and leaders agreed that that revolution had to be violent. Power was only understood as an effect of violent coercive rule. (except for a few voices e.g. Tolstoy) Only two expressly political theorists thought consistently about non-violence. The were Mahatma Gandhi and Hannah Arendt.

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi believed that courage was a more important attribute of those seeking liberation than a desire for non-violence or Satyagraha. At one point he even acted as conscription agent for the British military in South Africa. (date)

Gandhi appealed to the 'spiritual' strength of Indian peoples to oppose the Western Imperial (war) system.

The assumption here is that tyrants and ruling classes alike only have the power that we invest in them. Give them nothing and they are naked and have no power.

"The central role of consent in all government meant that non-cooperation -

the withdrawal of consent - was something more than a morally satisfying

activity; it was a powerful weapon in the real world." (p.129)

"Non-cooperation is not a passive state, it is an intensely active state -

more active than physical resistance or violence." (p.130 from Gandhis

Essential Writings p.99)

Gandhi programme of Satyagraha ("the quiet and irresistable pursuit of truth") was accompanied by 'the constructive programme'.This campaigned and organised to achieve concrete goals such as justice for workers, peace between factions, village hygene and diet, the condition of women, etc. The idea was to do anything to impede or resist that which obstructs the solidarity of the nation and on a positive side actions that facilitate the production of a grassroot political culture.

Later in Eastern Europe the idea of resistance itself was brought into question, in that it could attract or give an excuse for violent repression. There was an increasing emphasis on the constructive programme - doing things to improve peoples lives and on the way to increase solidarity and connection. Things that were more difficult to oppose...

"Constructive effort is political power" Gandhi Essential writings p.259

Comment

The thing to learn here is that a grass-root programme for social betterment needs to proceed any radical Political programme. Grassroot social organisation comes into being for expressly practical purposes. This provides organisational and network structures and leads to increased social solidarity. When this is widespread then it is possible to achieve a political consciousness and to carry out non-compliance to change oppressive political super structures.

Libertarians in the UK have been working on this basis for years and the Poll Tax victory was an example. However it is poorly theorised, has not been adapted to changing social conditions, has had little continuity, no leaders with the prominence of Ghandi, and has never been expressly ambitious - in having no limits. The problem is how to make such a strategy effective in a commodity rich political landscape such as Britain. Even the poorest do not perceive a radical lack because their lives are rammed with cheap shite from satellite TV - sport and porn, to cheap drink, drugs and nutritionally poor but more-ish food. How to move the majority into seeing 'liberation activity' more exciting than all that?! People do know that all is a shallow way of filling a life-time and in the spaces of ennui that drugs and media junk inevitably leave... but how can the deeper satisfactions of local organising get into those spaces?

What are the immediate goals that could be held out for practical achievement? Basic survival needs of shelter, food and energy are being 'met'. The demand for additional quality of life in, say, housing or food, can seem like a finicky middle class desire! Meanwhile those in more dire need are divested of conditions of social solidarity and the connections to those of us who have the skill and resources needed.

How to excite the activists, the radical protesting minority about organising locally rather than putting all their energy into actions of radical non-compliance that are utterly divorced from broader populations?(geographically often). A revolution first happens in peoples minds. This change happens through constructive self-help to realise achievable short term goals.

Representation of Revolution

Back to Schell (p143) He looks for the non-violent actions that are part of what are often represented as broadly violent revolutions. He defines violence:

"Violence is the method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Non-violence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few." (p.144)

He discusses The Glorious Revolution of 1689 in England.

"London was in fact the first of many modern capitals whose rebellious spirit was to infect and destroy the allegiance of an army of an ancien regime" (This was William of Orange versus King James, with defections at the non-battle at Salisbury etc)

Schell then examines the American, French and Russian Revolutions. He makes the interesting observation that revolutions are typified as violent and the subsequent establishment of a new regime is assumed to be peaceful, whereas the reverse has "more often been the case" (p.144) in the French revolution, the American, even the Russian...(p. 175) More people died making Potemkin the film than in the actual storming of the Winter Palace! (p.178.) The Russian Revolution was more of a victory of a 'mass minority' than a real peoples revolution as happened in France or America. (p.183)

There has been a near universal failure of theorists to predict the non-violent fall of powers.

"Washington was always aware that his most important task was to insure the

survival of his own forces - not strictly for military purposes but to

personify the unconquerable will of the American people" (p.157)

Thomas Paine said: "Tis not in numbers but in unity that our great strength lies"

In the American Revolution 'Committees of Correspondence' were formed for "mutually fostering and co-ordinating activity". These were the basic political unit.

Burke realised that it is only by cultivating the love and admiration of the people that a ruler can raise taxes or an army or get voted in. This love "infuses into (army and navy) that liberal obedience without which your army would be base rabble and you navy nothing but rotten timber". (p.159)

East Europe

Schell's sources here are Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad. He uses them to try to understand the intellectual underpinnings of these changes. In their beginnings they "did not aim at state power" (p.191) but aimed at "achieving immediate changes in daily life" within what was called 'civil society' a term that goes back to Paine (p.194) This is like Ghandi's 'constructive programme'.

The setting up of institutions independent from the state or the ruling classes... is the key activity in preparing for a revolution. In Eastern Europe this took the form of civic and cultural activity (p.195) e.g. 'Workers Defence Committees' provided concrete assistance to those in trouble with the authorities, and their families. Other terms used to describe for such activity include:

'flying university'

'parallel structures'

'second culture'

'revolutionary councils' (Arendt)

Comment

Havel suggests no discourse with the centre of power but that activists should "fight only for those concrete causes, and fight for them unswervingly to the end". (p.196) Compare this with Gandhi's earlier call for courage . Chosen well these independent institutions will rattle the establishment. It is a matter of no compromise at this stage which makes all the difference. Britain has had many half hearted attempts at independent 'civil' societies that are much too civil and compromise too easily with power. This is because the middle class as a whole are not excluded from state power, as people were in the Soviet era, and in fact tend to take the leadership of most social initiatives and guide them into compliant positions, and away from confrontations or challenging positions.(which I witnessed several times in my work in Kennington Park)

Perhaps the idea of cultivating 'a predisposition to truth' (Havel/ Ghandi) is a crucial path to widescale agreement on non-compromise.(p.197) This is not so far fetched and is what the 'activists' could bring back from their distant protest camps. To act fearlessly in pursuit of truth is what the middle class leadership of Britain most often lack!

Back to Schell on Eastern Europe

Konrad argues that a large middle class is a good guarantee against dictatorship. (p.198) I see this as the weakness of those 'people' movements. The path of least resistance to get new leadership in place is to let the intellectual middle class manage society (which they are brought up to expect) or develop their entrepreneurial instincts. Jacek Kuron on the other hand shouts out "Don't burn down Party Committee Headquarters, found your own" (p.200) Again is this an invitation towards to conventional idea of a party.

The final collapse of the USSR was not like the rest of Eastern Europe as it was a mainly top down operation rather than one of peoples power. True there was still a remarkable and unexpected lack of violence.

Schell reiterates his thesis

"The professionals of power, in or out of government, were consistently caught off-guard by the failures of superior force and the successes of nonviolence." (p.216)
Again we see that contemporary political theory could 'neither forsee nor explain' the successes of non-violent people power.

Arendt's ideas of power

Hannah Arendt's redefinition of the word 'power' (On Violence 1969) with a

strong echo from Paine. She says:

"Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in

concert." (Arendt On Violence p.44 Schell p.218)

She goes so far as to deny ascription of 'power' to individual action.

Weber is probably more realistic in asserting that power is the assertion of

will in a social relationship.(p.220) But this does mean that in limiting

its meaning Arendt can discuss political power in more detail. The

assertion of the will of the tyrant is ultimately an illusion, the tyrant is dependent on his supporters. The spectacle of sovereign is an illusion. Violence can never create real political power in Arendt's sense.

"To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very

high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the

victor in terms of his own power." (Arendt p.53 Schell p.222)

What about the brainwashing inherent within military training?

Burke "Liberty is power: when men act in bodies,"

According to JS Mill (date) public opinion guides will and "a great part of all

power consists in... willing allegiance" (Schell p229)

This does lead us to the contemporary media, which is often largely concerned with the management of public opinion.

Non-violent change in liberal democracy?

Schell sees the 'taming of violence' being written into liberalisms 'genetic code'. His example is the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. Although he sees non-violent action being only 'curative' or reforming in the context of a liberal democratic system. A disappointing conclusion... but does this allow him to be published?

I think it more persuasive that it is in the 'code' of human culture itself. The ability to form cultures in common, to come to complex sets of agreements via oral communication. The situation of why this sort of change might not be possible under a liberal regime is not analysed by Schell. Is there actually probably an even greater control of people minds and the processes of underground culture formation than under totalitarian regimes?

Unfortunately the learning from the efflorescence of people power after the demise of the USSR seemed not to include any defence against the next wave of exploitation led to the capitalist market which came rampaging in. This is not analysed by Schell. Nor how such people movements can maintain their momentum after the overthrow of rigid despotisms.

The battle to 'manage our destiny' has become a prime focus for the corporate class. The main example seems to be how Obama harnessed 'crowd technologies' to achieve his historic victory.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030519/schell2

A summary is on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconquerable_World

See also my more recent post on 'Public Sphere'

The Science of Human Beauty

2010-02-26T22:07:00.002Z

Notes after a presentation by Viren Swami in late 2007

The psychological discourse on human beauty has been occupied by research from Evolutionary psychologists, which has in the last ten or fifteen years been mainly concerned with the ‘waist-to-hip ratio’, or WHR. Viren Swami pointed out that this research, which purported to show that men preferred higher WHRs in women, had a poor methodology that used crude outline figures which hid mens preference for healthy Body Mass Index, or BMI. His own and collegiate research shows that BMI is as important, or more important than WHR. Evolutionary Psychology assumes we have not evolved since prehistoric times in the way male desire translates into visual cues and this is universal. VS points out his own research which show the influence of ethnic, contemporary media exposure and particularly economic factors. He finds for instance that desire for higher BMI is related to hunger!

Question: Was the focus on WHR based on prior research which systemmatically prioritised the visual cues of desire? Where things such as: face (itself composed of many elements which could be analysed), hair, leg shape, breasts, hands, feet, skin, genitalia, buttock shape, height, etc found to be insignificant in relation to WHR? The tests described, choices made between female outlines, seem designed to produce reductive results.

To me all these things are important aspects of glamour (as in allure) and the WHR or BMI are only singular factors even if they are the ‘most’ influential. Even if each aspect could be given relative value the dynamism of the relations between each aspect would put considerable strain on any reductive ‘proofs’. Add to that the complex cultural variables and the reductive methodologies measuring single variables seems to have limited use. This does not mean that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ only that the dynamic complexity of such multiple factors makes it appear to be a personal evaluation.

Would it not be possible to use computers to model dynamic responses to complex variables? On the other hand what about using the the choices of real people… much more expensive and difficult to sort out what factor had what effect.

Another point is that in selecting an actual sexual partner we will choose within realistic limits given by our own attractiveness quotient. We are not going to choose people who will reject us. So most people learn early to choose partners within the range specified by their own appearance. Desires outside of these strict limits are left to the realm of fantasy celebrity worship or pornography,

Just to complicate any research, as VS pointed out, factors like wealth, age and health can trump any physical characterics.

VS indicated how our appearance grades our life chances from job applications to being treated in a traffic accident where shocking and repulsive to our ‘ethical’ intelligence. Good looking victims of road accidents tended to get better attention. More awful was the indications that pressures for low BMI were becoming global, even in populations whose bodies genetic inheritance made this attainment naturally rare and harder to achieve through work (Samoa). And this was leading to a global explosion of eating disorders and body related dis ease.

A question: at what point and to what extent does the objects of our sexual desire become constructed? My own casual observations suggest that glamour quotients are constructed prior to the efflorescence of pubescent sexual desire. And that they follow pressures to be normative but may be directed away from norms by a number of factors. As this construction meets visceral pubescent desire, a crisis can emerge. One that is often not understood or appreciated by adults.

One thing that might happen is that early self expectations of beauty may not match post pubescent body development.

Whether the sexual drive has an inbuilt goal that includes visual and gender related cues is unknown. There are of course a huge cultural/political vested itnerests in this being inate/ genetic and ‘natural’. As body beauty seems to create a hierarchy of human value that is based in the genetic lottery of nature. The implied conclusion is that superiority/inferiority of oppression is either the same (crude level) or has a basis or justification in nature.

C. Wright Mills quoted by John Barker from Variant 30 p24

“In part they [celebrities] have stolen the show for that is their business; in part they have been given the show by the upper classes who have withdrawn and have other business to accomplish.”

The spotlight and the self-confidently nosey tone of investigation is hardly ever turned on the power elite, not unless they have chosen the spotlight, which is normally left to those in search of celebrity status. This is because, as Mills understood, a subservient media is part of the elite itself , and because intelligent elitists’, as Jo Freeman put it, will not seek visibility. Rather they will maintain a certain privacy through the command of legal and architectural resources.”

My conclusion at the end of the Eighties was that the classifying effect of glamour had become a vehicle for the mechanisms of oppression/ class, that is with regard to the ideology of superiority /inferiority. So systemic media will tend to amplify that which stresses any disunification of the population or perhaps that which undermines peoples sense of self esteem (the point of class oppression being to instill feelings of unworthyness).

Notes on my response to a talk by Viren Swami on the publication of his new books:

Swami, V. (2007). The Missing Arms of Vénus de Milo: Reflections on the Science of Physical Attractiveness. Brighton: The Book Guild Publishing.

Swami, V., & Furnham, A. (2007). The Psychology of Physical Attraction. London: Routledge.

Notes on 'Noise and Capitalism'

2010-02-01T17:55:00.006Z

'Noise and Capitalism' a compilation of texts with an introduction by Anthony Iles, Kritika 2009 (www.arteleku.net)

I am just reading from page 150. It is Howard Slater's contribution: 'Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! Notes Towards 'War at the Membrane''.

Howard reminds me of a surgeon who is a virtuoso with a scalpel. What he's dissecting is the subtle interconnections between us all and between us and the flux. And how our bumbling actions and feelings of inadequacy or worse cover up a veritable shimmering multitude of fascinating effects and power circuits. Echoing Althusser he speaks of 'micro interpellations' that make us who we are in a dynamic play of message and organism.

We are all 'points of circulation' in social commune-ing. Sense data flows constantly through us effecting our being in all and every way - from nature, capitalism and from our people (and the Others...) we don't really notice what's happening a lot of the time and we need to take time out to pay attention. This is a job the artist is often intuitive focused on - redesigning the circuitry of our perceptions.

With regard to the incursions of system mediated data he speaks of the 'endocolonisation' of our interiors and the struggle we have with this on the level of affect. I am reminded of a story my scientist brother told me at our mid winter gathering of some genetic research that followed the effects of famine on the genetic material of future generations distant from the direct experience. It didn't change the genetic code but it left a pattern on it that was transmitted through the generations. Trauma can have effects this deep we can already observe. Slater speculates that the endocolonisation can determine self & desire in conditions that are more mundane. To me it suggests the way that oppression and internalised oppression reproduces itself when there is no apparent apparatus of terror or repression.

This doesn't mean that human 'therapeutic' and expressive practices might not be able to remove such deep stains on our family character. But we have to hit on the right practice that go as deep and grapples with the associated affects. Could revolutionary fervor and action be a potent source of such healing?

"If they are having such an impact then they can be said to be creative of our very 'will', they are direct inputs in the bio-production of our subjectivity."

"Sense perceptions cannot be autonomous from the values of the society in which they are embedded."

But the 'society' is our experience at any moment, in which we have some choice. And even capitalist sensations, like the film Avatar, can be set against a resistant background and discursive company of our own making. It is probably why we like dissing media entertainments so thoroughly... just in case they are getting under our skins.

"In the war at the membrane the sense perceptions need to come into antagonism with their valorisation". Howard is for choosing noise music rather than easy listening, reading this book rather than the Metro.

The mind cage is not just mental but is in the practices of our reception of state wisdom, reception of the various degrees of knowledge which has nearly always had the reflexive knowledge of its moment of discovery, the knowledge of its construction, murdered and buried under the patio on which the seminar is conducted. That seemingly innocent but already corrupted universal desire to know - most of our families aspired to to be educated above all else. That deep desire for knowing that looks around for tasty facts to nibble or gobble , bite, snap, swallow whole and digest or knot.

Slater suggests abandoning meaning as a strategy; as can be necessary in listening to noise music... Meaning rushes in on our perception like leaden masks to fall and stun our vital freedom to live out of the barracks. Noise denying meaning gives us a mental space. Whilst undirected to perceptual meaning and we are free to shrug, shiver, maneouvre, shake, gasp, jitter, twitch and cry out. With luck such viscerality levering apart the bars of the rusting mind cage - a thought; a completely new thought, slips out into the light.

It is also a matter of abandoning identity... he talks (hopefully) of a public abreaction... Quoting an anonymous pamphlet entitle 'Call':

" We do not perceive humans as isolated from each other... we see them as bound by multiple attachments that they (have) learned to deny." (one of the most basic mechanisms of oppression after all!) We must help each other in the war of the membrane by finding ways of unblocking the affective circulation channels. Non judgemental attention - listening without interruption are powerful tools that your do not have to have a professional training to use. Back to HS:

"Emotional intensities to be experienced in common" The "sensual re-appropriation of alienation is our having to stake a claim on the 'worst of ourselves'" (the product of past aeons of alienation/ oppression) "Such abreaction is embarassing in that it reveals and/or embraces a sense of alienatedness, it reveals us as just as much imprisoned as 'free cultural agents' "

HS considers the possibilities of noise and 'sound poetry' as a means to this crucial expression - including silence. and looks forward to a time when we 'abreact en masse' and sift through the resulting affects to 'take control of our own becomings'.

Going back to a previous text by HS 'Burdened by the Absence of the Billions' for a moment...

For the left to engage afresh with the problem of the system. We see the problem but cannot grasp solutions or ways out and we cannot really break that diffuse power that holds us still. To get our directions we might have to jump out of our revolutionary machismo and embarassment for a year or two.

"the unspoken elements of unconscious life; the transference, projections and sublimations associated with group life, the persistence of those affects that circulate between us, the clash between these mute feelings in search of words and those 'expressed values' too full of the trickery of ideological languages."

"our frailties, our emotional suseptabilities, our sufferings, our blocks, our confusions, our fantasies, our feelings of alienation etc.... seen as ... indications of our endocolonisation by capitalist valorisation imperatives and not of our unworthiness to the cause."

"Affectivity is at stake, the capacity to feel and be impassioned into revolt, to have feeling

destabilise our selves enough to risk the making of an ‘unnatural' difference..."

The limits of theory, of our best thinking, include affective frontiers. Gutterspeak is often more articulate...

Notes on 'Dancing in the Street'

2009-10-30T18:37:00.005Z

Notes and thoughts on:

Barbara Ehrenreich, 'Dancing in the Streets: a history of collective joy', 2007

For me this book continues to explain how class oppression works culturally after my efforts to bring arguments together in 'Conspiracy of Good Taste' (1993). I had noticed that the new ruling class of the last 4 or 500 years had claimed the head or intellect as their identity with book knowledge as its main tool. The lower classes did not have true intelligence and were all brute and smelly bodies good for manual work. Of course the ruling class had emulated the old courtly manners and then the power of aspiration had drawn all their minions (the middle or managing classes) to take on these manners. In the last century the power of mass media and education had everyone to aspired to have any human 'dignity' take on these manners. One of the greatest of which was the ability to sit still. (footnote on aspiration: Wallpaper magazine anecdote)

her book is well timed in its support of the disco aspect of my recent Agit Disco project in which questions the relation of music and politics.

Barbara Ehrenreich shows how the repression of movement has long been tied up with the subjugation of the crowd. We are all reminded that the ifrst self disciplien required at school is the ability to inhibit bodily movement and to sit still for hours. She argues in great detail how moving together as a group is also a profound motor of human connection/ communitas/ collectivity/ and commune ity. Firstly she looks at how religious ritual may have functioned in this way. She goes back to the repression of Dionysian rituals and of early Christianity, which she describes as being a danced religion, by the Romans. Later of course as the Christian church develops its own hierarchy and power elite the dancing in the churches is repressed by the church authorities. This culminates in the edicts of Calvin from which emerges the well-timed 'Protestant work ethic'.

She indicates how separation and physical passification may lead to all kinds of ills - in particular depression. She describes the limitations of Freud who could only imagine a love between two persons and had not experienced or concieved of group bonding, much less anything approaching collective ecstacy.(p14)

Dancing together with a lack of restraint is one of the most important things we can do together as humans. I was struck at the Cardew book launch event at Theed Hall, after all that had gone before, the audience was so still, quiet and passive.

She argues strongly that rock and roll was the greatest break from the escalating success of this separation, especially in the Sixties (she is from theat generation!). She does not seem to be aware of the rave cultures Second Summer of Love two decades later.

Perhaps she is wrong to separate dance from all the other sensory expressions... and in fact all direct means of communication.

There is no reference to oral culture or more particularly to oppression and its relation to the repression of emotional expression. Can ecstatic ritual embody release of painful emotion? It seems to involve the kind of shaking and or wailing that might be related to primal pain (early hurts). Certainly oppression aims at isolation and division and so a ritual of reconnection would bring up the pain of separation (most forcibly perhaps infant separations) and lead to an expanded sense of freedom.

The weakness of her argument that depression is attributable to lack of dance /ecstatic ritual is that many other possible causes are not considered. Many of the forces of modernisation could just as easily be argued to contribute.

Can class questions be collapsed into the question of hierarchy? She argues that the suppression of ecstatic ritual and communal dance happens with any heirarchial society.(p.251). A pre modern /rural society with its irregular work patterns and connection with nature is surely less liable to alienation. On the other hand the formation of urban societies with modernity gives rise to masses of people in close proximity. Technology give a greater possiblity of co-ordination of mobile action - although the forces of control are using equal and opposite technologies.

The book is persuasive that the lack of communal dancing, singing, ecstatic ritual, carnival, feasting, costuming et al in consumer society, dramatically weakens collective bonds. She is unsure if countering this constitutes a revolutionary strategy - at least on its own...

Is it possible that effects of the Rave dance scene of the late Eighties will be evident as those who took part in it, and, let us assume, gained a profound reconnection to the collective body, as they come to positions of greater social influence? This should be happening around about now! Are the progressive political leaders of the future being formed in the anti-globalisation carnivals of the present?

Strong points she makes:

1. Our capacity for collective joy and union is encoded within us possibly as deep as our capacity for sexual joy and union. Demonstrated by its constant return. p.260

2. This desire can be manipulated or repressed by power. It seems to pose a threat to power but it is uncertain how this becomes a political reality.(see Schell.)

3. Danced ritual as a "biotechnology" in the processes of formation of larger groups (p 254) This is our desire ('generosity and wit') to reach out beyond 'kith and kin' to form larger collectives with 'affective ties' (p.253) "Ecstatic rituals build group cohesion" p.252. "There is no apparent limit to the number of people that can celebrate together" p.251

4. A basic pattern by which repression occurs p. 251 "The elite withdraws from the festivities" "Festivities continue for a while" but they then present a real or imagined challenge to power and are repressed.

The antipathy of collective celebrative activity to the modern world relates to the treatment of the Ecuadorian Volleyball players in Kennington Park by the local powers. (see Participant study of the management of an enclosed common in London 2006 unpublished)

refs

Michael Albert Parecon Verso 2003

Those 'without culture' are those whose culture is simply unresourced, unarchived and not represented as knowledge in the rituals of legitimation

2009-08-04T17:26:00.006+01:00

notes on Archive from 1996 (with a few 2009 additions )

The ARCHIVE as field, the production of knowledge and the accumulation of cultural capital.

The archive is a consignment of knowledge, activated as 'res publica'. The archives are the pile foundations of the edifice of knowledge. The base of discourse builds a consensus which becomes our collective world view - as Knowledge.

As Derrida points out the 'consignment' of data to archive is, literally, a 'gathering together of signs' which by its exclusions and emphases forwards the cultural ground of a particular epistemology. I hope to demonstrate that Simon's Evans' private collection of materials from Kents Gypsy and traveller cultures and Exploding Cinema's forum of action exist as 'archive' in neonate form but have difficulty becoming 'res publica' with the appropriate architectural prestige and usage by a network of scholars.

"The meaning of 'archive', its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognised authority, it is at their home... that the official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents' guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law"(Derrida 1995).

The written document or other numinous artifact kept within the public and intellectually integrated archive allow a new dimension of stability, objectivity and developmental progression to accrue to discourse which an oral culture cannot not hope to achieve. The printed book allowed a massive expansion of this power.

The museum or archive, functions as a ritual structure through the use of architectural vocabularies, dispositions of collections and the routing and guidance of public access (Swallow 1996). The sum total of such designs will, of course, tend to affirm the status quo. It will rarely be a place of uncertainty as its central function is quite the opposite. Nor will it often invite debate and challenge to prevailing orthodoxies.

One aspect of this mediation of power is in the selection of the collections and archives that are donated or purchased. The collection is then indexed and or catalogued. In this process alone much is often hidden. Search for collective in the National Art Library and you won't find the Exploding Galaxy, a performance commune from 1966. However I know they have the document 'Planted' as I sold it to them in the Eighties. Further refinement is then achieved by the type and timing of displays, conference presenting papers on thematic archive explorations, summary descriptions, contextualisation and evaluation papers. Museum and other journals. All these mechanisms surround the archive on its path from its emergence in temporary collective 'Xplosions' or slowly accrued private collections, to collections of collections and their building-up into an architecturally framed 'palaces' of Knowledge and the triumphant world-view that this expensive process entails.

This is a generalised theory and some claim the museum may be changing a little; at least, to a degree, in the North of England. David Fleming, an Assistant Director of Tyne & Wear Museums Service, argued that museums are unpopular with working class people only when they do not deal in social history that they can relate to their daily experience. He even went so far as to claim: "The days of middle class curators creating museums in their own image, dominated by their middle class outlook, are gone"(Fleming 1991).

However, Simon Evans reported that the local museum of Kentish life was not interested in his archive as they were soley orientated towards tourists and entertainment rather than contributing to deeper levels of learning, debate and knowledge. We should remember that archives of Kentish folk culture are rare so Simons collection should have evinced a special value. This is not an isolated experience, as illustrated by the recent prolonged series of similar exclusions related by Emmanuel Cooper.('People's Art: working class art from 1750 to the present day', Mainstream, Edinburgh 1994) In the face of the lack of interest from the Kent 'archons' Simon's approach to activating his archive as knowledge has been to make occasional radio programmes commissioned by Radio 3: This year he did one that was field recorded early on Mayday morning, then edited, and broadcast that same evening. He is currently preparing a book on seasonal rituals (1996!).

The Exploding Shows could be seen through Bourgeoise spectacles as a exercise in kitsch. A sort of Ragged Special School for 'les enfants terrible'. But it may equally be seen to focus what would otherwise be unseen and unknown. It also nurtures those artists who are excluded for many reasons. Classism ensures that many working class artists will be among this number.

Apart from the photocopied programmes, which record the films shown by title and maker, the Xploding Cinema Collective also encourage artist's networks and independent festivals (eg 'Volcano' forthcoming November 1996). They are currently launching their first compilation tape amidst controversy as to whether this will produce a selective history which will misrepresent the diversity of the live event.

Working class cultural capital could be seen to exist in dispersed forms but capital is not activated as power unless it is concentrated. One of the mechanisms which concentrates cultural capital is the archive. Unless the distillations of the archives are available a complex culture cannot be reflexive, cannot come into full consciousness of itself and so cannot adapt intelligently.

This means that an archive is not enough. It has to be activated by research, interpetation, discursive rituals and publication.

The dominant culture, the heritage of the Enlightenment, is typified by a reason so cold and calculating that it becomes a distraction from or even justification of oppression. Working class culture is warm and somatic but denied an inclusive and integrated realisation of its intelligence as power.

Thoughts on the relation between APG (Placements period 1968 - 1975) and the subsequent Working Press (my period as editor 1986 - 1996)

2009-07-31T14:33:00.021+01:00

These thoughts mainly came out of reading Howard Slater's THE ART OF GOVERNANCE 2000 in preparation for the discussion "Industry and the Arts must walk hand in hand" at Flat Time House, Peckham, London, July 2009

The Incidental Person failed to take off because it posed a challenge to the Arts Council as an institution of cultural control. But the Incidental Person Placements got a far as they did because it was not a radical challenge, or not apparently one. Was it a Trojan Horse? Possibly... if you read between the lines.

As defined the IP was a professional individual who had to enter an firm or institution at a managerial level. It would never been contemplated at all if what was being proposed was a firebrand to infuse the shop floor with ideas of social revolution! Or as Anthony Davies pointed out we compare the interventionist strategies of Cinema Action, who entered factories and worked with the workforce, with those of the IP Placements... we see how twee is their challenge.

There was no contemplation of the class nature of culture in John's mind as far as I could tell whenever I had the chance to challenge him on this. At the same time unwritten factors like the network of artists who supported the idea and were fed into the placements were often radical left and or working class and aware of it, like Ian Breakwell. Barbara's own back ground is not what it appears.

HS quotes John Latham as saying artists should:

'take determined control of their social function'

'work with a total context of people'

'bypass administrative and curatorial control'

'transform exhibitions into zones of social research'

I remembered meeting John Latham at various times throughout the Seventies and into the Eighties, when I more spoke to Barbara and we all lived in SE London. The Seventies conversations with John were often stratospheric and often his rhetoric didn't quite answer my questions but nevertheless stretched my mind in following what he was saying and he in turn had good attention for what I had to say.

"The overtoned echo of the APG is such that its most socially effective work seems to be either submerged from the record in the desiring-production of a placements micro-events or lies in what Sir Roy Shaw, the then General Secretary of the Arts Council, dubbed as a 'spoof work': the exposure of a state controlled culture." HS

I agree with Howard Slater's conclusions and it made me think that Working Press 1986 - 1996 was a strategy that responded the APG in some part, especially in being intended as a challenge to the Arts Council (state culture system) as an attempted re-alignment of the concept /identity of artists in a way that produces a indigestible contradiciton within the system. It also aimed to do useful experimental work in finding our about what 'working class' people who become artists end up thinking and doing simply by inviting them to (self-)publish a book under the Working Press imprint. In fact it followed the four injunctions of JL. I'm not saying that I was following John's line any more than I'd claim that those injunctions were not part of the prevailing oppositional culture of the time.

Several ideas came together with the Working Press project (which was started with the artist Graham Harwood).

I thought the system was vulnerable to small groups aligning themselves as identity groups (demonstrated by Black artists) because of the Equal Opps legacy of the Sixties and Seventies. But that class identity was almost impossible for the system to absorb without radical challenge.
The Arts Council represented a unequal distribution of resources to the arts in proportion to the sources of finance (working peoples taxes). Identity politics was a good way of challenging this. The oppressed had to make demands from their own mouths.
The identities of artist and working class were mutually exclusive in the semiotics of class identity. Artists were assumed to be 'middle class' by virtue of being artists. Artists from working class 'backgrounds' were also often rejected by their communities. Working Class communities did not have their own artists, or for that matter their own culture, beyond the vulgar or the community arts.
To chalenge the narrow definition of 'peoples art' (Emmanuel Cooper) that saw it as the naive, amateur, folk, outsider but excluded those people who had chosen to go to art college in the course of following their enthusiasms to make stuff.
Publishing offered delineated freedoms. ISBNs bought over the counter no questions asked. Alternative distribution available. Even a network of alternative & radical bookshops, and bookfairs. (though little access to the reviewing mass media by then). You could publish what ever ideas you liked. This all meant access to a fairly wide discursive field. A 1000 book edition would cost around £2000 to print.
Artists who had grown up in working class situations might be having thoughts due to that, might be producing work that bore that influence, might have different ideas about art, might, even, have glimmerings of what a working class intellectually autonomous culture might be like.
Promoting artists 'with working class voices' in the way that a publication can within the Art field.
Encouraging artists with such background to take themselves seriously and have their work and thinking validated by the invitation to publish. And to form a network of working class artists on this basis.
To connect working class visual culture assertion across generations (e.g. with John Gorman...)

WP avoided the professional claims of APG but it never got to the point of contending hegemonic space with ACGB (as ACE was then). I hoped this would happen out of a group agreement on radical strategy that never occured. Were we too scared to risk sacrificing our careers in the way that John and Barbara had done?

A bold confrontation with ACE would have required a Ghandian faith and vision from the artists. It wasn't a strategy I could argue or lead well enough! It was enough for most people to get support to get stuff out themselves and perhaps to contribute to the last aim of developing ad hoc questionings about what relations could exist between working class and art or culture.

Like the IP WP had an open agenda on content - there was no editorial control of what invited artists self-published.

The final illustration of the connection between WP and APG was that Barbara Steveni herself was going to do a WP book about her life. This was based on my admiration for the way that she used her female charms to 'get through doors' and into seemingly impregnable institutions, government departments and corporate boardrooms with determination, resolve and clear radical thinking. What she had in mind I'm not sure as the book never materialised.

The other point is that the whole set up of the ongoing historification of APG is supported by John's art historical achievements. I was going to say that WP doesn't have that sort of mast to hang its flags on but maybe the achievements of Harwood and Co may be such a vehicle. You never know.

PS I has been brought to my attention that the copy of Howard Slater's ART OF GOVERNANCE paper that was circulated prior to the event, and that I read, was one that had some passages excised. This is a classic mechanism in the recuperative process that are embedded in high cultures management practices. I'm not even suggesting its conscious. Anyway please refer to the unexpurgated version on Infopool that I have linked to.

Slumdog Millionnaire? aye Danny now you are one

2009-03-06T21:03:00.004Z

To understand the core intent of this film you have to keep in mind Danny Boyle background and where he is coming from. You also have to take into account the inevitable content control of high finance movies that demands glamour and slush.

With this in mind the most radical interpretation of the film is that the really worthwhile statement that this films inserts into a popular discourse is that the most worthwhile knowledge is not of the encyclopedic pub quiz kind but rather knowledge that is formed out of the experience of oppression.

Because of academia's formation from Humanism as a training for state cadres it has always spurned knowledge gained through the fire of suffering and pain. And so it is we cannot and will never solve war, & punishment and all the problems that beset humanity thru that path because that way to knowledge does not allow one to enter or study this type of experience. There are partial exceptions but the univer-city rites of seminar and lecture do not allow for anything but mild brushes with emotionally strong material or in depth human engagement.

(Exceptions of course are highly defended usually by being professionalised, like pyschoanalysis. And remarkable individuals will always transcend the system.)

Agit Disco is not just 'Protest Music'

2008-02-08T20:46:00.006Z

John Sinclair, ex-manager of MC5 holding Agit Disco 1

There are a few approaches to classifying political musics:
1. Musical genres. This goes from major headings like rock and country to sub-genres, oddities and global cultures whose music is barely published. Some, like 'dub jazz', very much of their time and now forgotten. I assume all genres have their political musics and radical performers.
2. Liberation groups. Every oppressed group has its songs of struggle and celebration. Sometimes not heard outside of the political circles of that group and its close allies.
3. Issues. From anti war to anti drugs to protests at environmental abuses. The area often called protest song.

Now this about covers it all but it could have a fragmenting effect if such classification was taken into Agit Disco. How political music fits into any one of our lives is perhaps more important. Any persons listening goes across and mixes genres, groups and themes and of course can be inflected by the immediate pressures of time and place. Songs that are potent in one place or decade may not be in another. Our biography is the moving context. Nearly everyone has a collection to mark the trail of their experience of music through their lives whether it is their 'record collection' or their digital play lists. Add to this our memory of significant live 'hearings'.

Classification has its uses not just as a way of organising material or disciplining search energies. But we must return from any use of classification, with its tendency to develop expertise, to the chaotic and intuitive mixtures that are grassroot personal selections. How can those personal choices be shared and vie with each other to produce cross cultural patterns and movement.

The Agit Disco is a personal selection that can be proposed or blasted out in public spaces and dance floors or swapped as home-made CDRs. To get a reaction. To agitate the minds of those who listen and are moved.

Agit Disco is an open invitation to create CDs of the songs that have been most politically powerfull in your life. Or at least disseminate (preferably annotated) playlists. Please do leave them as comments!

1. The Guns of Brixton - Nouvelle Vogue
2. Invisible Sun - The Police
3. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gil Scott Heron
4. Ball Of Confusion - The Temptations
5. Fight The Power - Public Enemy
6. Television: The Drug Of A Nation - Disposable Hereos Of Hiphoprisy
7. The Update - Beasty Boys
8. The Guns Of Brixton - The Clash
9. To Hell With Poverty! - Gang Of Four
10. Taxman - Beatles
11. Monk Time - Monks
12. If There Was No Government - Crass
13. Masters Of War - Bob Dylan
14. I'm The Decider - Paul Hipp
15. Working Class Hero - Marianne Faithfull
16. We'll Never Turn Back - Mavis Staples
selection by DJ Krautpleaser 3-2-08

Agit Disco a proposal - draft

2008-01-10T20:07:00.001Z

Introduction

When 'folk' music was created by the middle class collectors and publishers of working class music in the C19th one part of the bowdlerising process was the leaving out of the more political songs, as well as overtly sexual content. As the tradition became commercialised through the gramaphone, radio and mass media the political songs still hung on in there. But at the same time the bowdlerising tendencies of the middle class managers of the media and the culture are still there to lessen the radical impact of popular song.

The commercial pressure to supply a strong market has to contend with product that might upset the basis of the conditions on which that market depends. One way that the political instincts of working class tunesters is undercut is by the simple practice of dilution and sifting to the periphery. The harmless pop pap is bolstered and promoted out of all proportion to its value as art or anything at all. Its production values can be lushed up with loadsamoney to hide the inner vacuity. This deluge of light entertainment then waters down the political message of music until it is practically colourless. But deeply coloured stuff still bursts through occasionally. You probably have your own memories of stuff that grabbed you attention.

One of the first moments in which pop burst out of its commodity bubble in my life was when The Who first played 'My Generation' on Elkan Allan's 'Ready, Steady, Go!' TV show in 1965. The rising and visceral sense of self esteem I felt in my suburban living room as Roger Daltry belted out the immortal lines 'Why doncha all f...f...f... fade away' probably cannot be appreciated in the current era when saying fuck a lot on TV can the signature of a celebrity chef's endearing charisma. Was this a political song?

Or was it much earlier c 1958 when George Reptowski in Herne Hill played me the Kalin Twins hit 'When', but the flip side which was 'Three o'clock thrill' (with a girl named Gill). He brought my attention to the chorus which was "Oh Yeh! Do you wanna bunk up?!" Had the media establishment not noticed?! Pretty exciting and intriguing stuff for a ten year old at the tail-end of the Fifties - not just because of the mention of sex but because of what it told me about the media.

What would be the proportion of songs political in an unmediated cultural output? It would undoubtedly relate to the political needs of a moment. But as the enclosures of oppression bite so does the cultural repression that is part of it. So we can assume that by its nature political song has always been under some kinds of restraint and restriction.

One of the most widespread and even acceptable forms of political song is that which protests against war. My memorable moment here was hearing Country Joe and the Fish's "Fixin to Die Rag" - it was the jaunty, gleeful irony which infused the song that contradicted the gloom of
Vietnam and galvanised my youthful spirits. The more recent insanity of the Iraq wars has produced plenty of rockin protests - but nothing has stuck in my imagination quite like 'Fixin to Die'. I'd like to hear the music that has raised the spirits or focuses the anger of the current crop to anti-war protestors. There are plenty of other issues that are expressed in musical forms from anti-drugs to global warming to anti-copyright and sampling.

The next big moment that comes to mind is the Sex Pistols getting to number one with 'Anarchy in the UK' in spite of Aunty BBC banning it from the airwaves! The fact that that many people were voting with their pocket money to blast out the immortal lines "God Save the Queen. And her fascist regime" showed how rock could still rattle the complacency of the moral majority.

What constitutes a political song may be more difficult to classify in a tidy way. My own attempt to classify the main oppressed groups (see blog below) lists 21 categories of superiority/inferiority power relations that must all have produced a gamut of liberation songs. And some of these categories have multiple sub-sections. Under the broad heading racism could be the wealth of political song from the struggles against Apartheid in South Africa.

This music was a main staff of resistance and survival. Gender politics is an another area in which it is not easy to identify the exact boundaries of 'political' or liberation song. Some very commercially acceptable and successful songs, like those by Madonna, have addressed the supposed submission and silence of the oppressive stereotype of women.

Every genre of music has its political contents, or perhaps I should say dis-contents. And much of this material is not in the top 100 of the genre but in the local or underground networks.

After thinking about this category for a while it suddenly seems that the world is full of political music and we just don't notice it. An agit disco would distill the politics out from the weak solution of popular musics. By counterpointing themes and problemmatising genres and bringing the more repressed and uncommon examples to the surface we might respark this potentially inflammatory material.

So political song sometimes bursts through into the charts but more often is flowering in more local or underground contexts. The more I look at my life the more the music sounds 'political' in some way or other. I'll be writing more about this in the following weeks looking at particular genres and other corners of political musics I've come across.

Radical Toasting for today?

2008-01-01T21:48:00.000Z

Researching the precursors of the musichall the 'Free and Easies' of the early C19th, events in which the audience took turns, I came across a reference to 'radical toasting'. Instead of the conventional "To the Queen" etc you might have "To the middle classes, may they rot in the garbage their own excessive consumption" probably something funnier, more ironic, witty or current. I immediately imagined that this would have been an important working class cultural idiom. Perhaps one that was part of the roots of West Indian 'toasting' to a rhythm, which of course led on to rap.

The thing is that the toasts were a call for a response. If the toast was taken up, the punch line repeated and the whole room took a sup of their ale, it would have demonstrated an agreement on the issue. Another issue would not get the response of "I'll drink to that!" - an expression that is still in circulation. So toasting would have had a democratic function in showing what issues were on top for people and the fervor of agreement.

Toasting also demanded a shorter and more electric form than garrulous speechifying where a street corner orator could get carried away and perhaps be too earnestly polemical. The more prolonged debates were left to a group around a table, or in markets and other public spaces. It was also a communal simultaneous gustation which carries a profound visceral metaphor.

I'd like to see the ritual revived outside of the 'open to all comers' rapping contests that occupy the specialist rap venues. We haven't had a French revolution to energise our spirits but maybe the ennui and powerlessness of our contemporary situation can produce a toasting style all of its own.

Bring back upside down toasting!

Electric Taxis in London?

2007-12-18T15:45:00.000Z

Speaking as a worker in the West End the next step for London street pollution is clearly zero emission taxis.

For this London would need a network of battery exchange stations so that electric taxis could have the range and lack of wait to recharge that cabbies would require to do their job. Such a network, and the research to have such quick change battery packs, would also stimulate other electric transport to follow suite and adapt to accommodate this standard. This could be a further source of income.

Speaking as someone who could like to choose and electric car but who does not have off street parking, I can see that such removable battery dollies might also allow batteries to be easily moved across pavements to be charged up in front porches and so forth.

The electric vehicle culture has reached a critical point in the west end of London especially where electric cars and vans are becoming a common sight. However to build on this se need some daring central planning, research and standard setting.

It would cost c £20000 to convert a taxi and London would need about 200 battery exchange points to make this viable. It would be exciting if some of these used solar or wind energy to recharge the incoming battery packs.

Not a taxi - but could be... ?

Bureaucratic problems inhibiting domestic solar energy

2007-12-14T14:04:00.000Z

Considering the urgent need for an acceleration of solar collection from domestic south facing roofs there are some stupid hurdles facing even the enthusiasts trying to move in this direction.

Our new condensing combination boiler will be 90% efficient rather than 60% and so should save 30% fuel. Might save us £100 pa. It will cost at least c£1500 to buy and instal. Finding a combination boiler that works with the solar pre-feed was not easy. Most makes seem not to allow their combi boilers to be fed water at above 35 degrees which makes them useless for a solar system! Earlier simple models did allow this (our Gloworm Swiftflow) but 'improvements' have been added into the new more efficient designs which have not been certified for higher temperatures.

As I would think that at least half of all UK homes have a combi this is a serious error of forward planning. I only found Alpha saying that their condensing combi boilers could have a solar pre-heated feed. Ideal, Vailant, Worcester and Gloworm said that all their combis were currently unsuitable.

Our Solar UK hi-tec hot water system cost £3500 installed and should save about 50- 60% of hot water heating fuel in summer and about 25 - 30% in the winter. (We have a SE facing roof). We should have got a £400 grant but Croydon are demanding a formal grant application - bureaucracies working against each other in a stupid way. How many people are going to get it together to make a grant application which needs a scale drawing as well as a £70 fee?

I find the satisfaction of watching the dial show how much solar energy is coming in compelling and makes a real aesthetic connection the the sun and weather. (Many modern energy technologies have reduced and flattened the richness and connectedness of our experience in exchange for efficiency and time saving) But I recognise that until there is some joined up legislation, its going to be an area for enthusiasts rather than mass action.

SolarUK puts finishing touches to the Laser2 vacuum tube collectors...

The grants for loft insulation, the most urgent UK need unmet after decades of half hearted legislation, seem to focus of systems suitable for closed attics. If you use the attic for storage and need a more complex installation - forget it. Apart from that if you want to use green insulation materials like hemp or wool or recycled plastic bottle it takes a committed level of research to compare the products...

We need to get all south facing roofs in Britain collecting solar energy within the next ten years and all lofts insulated ASAP. But if there's no big profits in it nothing happens except for massive wind farms and new nuclear power stations.

Link to photos of my recent solar hot water installation

OPRESSION what it is and how to end it - a wiki proposal

2007-11-28T20:54:00.001Z

This project has migrated to a daughter wiki thanks to Gordo

see

http://www.sense-think-act.org/lfb/

Rebel Poets Reloaded in Variant 30 by Tom Jennings

2007-11-28T14:03:00.001Z

Agit Disco - genre discussion 1

His thesis is that rap is an active lower class cultural form with global reach, that is not entirely recuperated by commerce and oppressive ideology: It is a profoundly positive take on how close 'we' are to be able to turn liberal globalisation against itself in that rap seems to be able to speak on class and other issues with universal meanings.

Detailing the way that more than 20 individual rappers take strategies to avoid the cras artistic debilitation of the higher reaches of commercialism and find ways to stay true and keep thinking radically. And even how some of those who've given way to the commodity lure still will harbour those who want to stay out there.

It is interesting and encouraging to hear a good argument that recuperation and hegemony is never total. And that the commercial scene can never afford to drive talented people underground too an extent that would threaten their own commercial credibility.

The idea that there has never been so much protest song/poetry is heartening.

That guides of this kind are essential so the widest working class audiences can find these artists amongst all the pop and media pap. There is a need to condense what is important to everyone even if they have not interest in rap and so not drawn to read the article.

Great quotes:

"Implicitly recognising that individual advancement neither resolves class contradictions nor fulfils hip-hop’s emancipatory potential leaves the set oscillating between honouring the Black traditions which nourish struggle, and reasserting underclass self-confidence in developing agendas expressed in their terms. With intricate wordplay literate in urban provenance, Black Arts and contemporary reference Nas echoes Rakim’s cool philosophical cadence and 2-Pac’s passionate arrogance grounded in Panther politics. Beyond their mystical paranoia, though, he senses that the project is constitutionally incapable of breaking on through – despite the muscular, sensuous beats and brooding intelligence here representing living disproof of the title"

"Leavening the twin sorceries of the griot’s and postmodern entertainer’s charismas with revolutionary understanding allows aspirations to realise American Dreams to be acknowledged, but their baleful global payoff is too painfully centre-stage to succumb to fantasy. The alienated hubris of celebrity, fooling artists (and politicos, in their sphere) into forgetting that the context and manner of their rise to prominence inherently contradict lower-class collectivity – inevitably yielding embarrassing and damaging errors of judgement – is no option."

http://www.variant.randomstate.org/30texts/TJ30.html