The supposed strategic advice is based on the idea that, if we act in certain ways, the media and police will react in particular ways. But the media has a bunch of structures around which they build stories, and they will slot the actual events into these structures as they see fit; so, whatever the the most militant or photogenic action of the day happens to be gets wedged into the “outrage” slot, if the script calls for an outrage, and whether that particular outrage is property damage or something else is basically irrelevant. As reclaimuc put it on Twitter, “the media will always be terrible, no matter what we do.” This is even more true of the idea that property damage “provokes” the police, which really badly misunderstands the way in which public order policing works. Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do).

In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

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3. Britain’s stu­pidest public in­tel­lec­tual (with bonus St Au­gus­tine content) The Guardian last week saw some particularly high-quality entries in the competition to write the stupidest thing possible about religion. Tobias Jones is terrified of “totalitarian” Richard Dawkins, who is apparently poised to carry out a genocide of religious believers. A. C. Grayling fights back, accusing homophobic protestors of “an...

I was happy to see this successful response, because the response from the University administration had been (predictably) useless, and the response from Student Government (perhaps not quite as predictably), also awful.

The ASUC passed a deeply stupid bill that, didn’t condemn, or even mention, the actual racist bake sale, but:

would provide guidelines for respectful conduct by campus organizations. Among other provisions, the bill “condemns the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”

This is so wrongheaded I’m not sure where to start. To say that their bake sale is “discriminatory” is not a criticism, on the contrary, it accepts the premise of their faux-naïf argument. Racist former UC Regent Ward Connerly, who showed up to support the bake sale, made this clear:

“This bake sale is racist,” he said. “It’s only the way to call attention to the problem [of affirmative action].”

By complaining about the formal discrimination at the bake sale, the ASUC gives the College Republicans the opportunity to nod solemnly and say, “but don’t you see, isn’t affirmative action even more discriminatory?” Worse, the ASUC ‘s bill commits them to agreeing with this, and condemns the ASUC’s own event in support of affirmative action because, of course, affirmative action is formally discriminatory; what justifies this formal discrimination is the context it takes place in. The problem with the bake sale isn’t that it discriminates on the basis of race (who really cares about 50 cents difference in the price of a cupcake?). The problem is that the attempt to present this trivial discrimination as in any way relevant to affirmative action, which attempts to redress a long history of the most appalling discrimination. To think the two are in any way comparable is incredibly stupid; to pretend to be that stupid for publicity is racist.

In other news, Wendy Brown decided to adopt a lulz-based anti-racist strategy, of which I also approve:

The College Republicans started selling baked goods at 10am PT this morning. Their first customer was UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown, who tried to buy all the baked goods but wasn’t allowed. “I thought the Republicans were free enterprise, but they won’t let me buy all the cupcakes.”

(Picture from thenoobyorker)

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One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

It’s no accident that the description of contemporary racism in terms of past racism appeals to progressives, because the structure of the argument is itself progressive; that is, it suggests that there is a natural tendency for things to get better, and things which are bad are bad because they are outdated. This view presents racism as an atavism, and, in doing so, actually downplays the importance and persistence of racialized inequality; racism, it suggests, should have ceased to exist some time back in the 50s, but mysteriously has failed to do so.

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I say “ethically” rather than “politically,” because centering your analysis around anti-gentrification leads to moralism and bad politics. I was reminded indirectly of this today reading an article in the SFBG about Tesco opening stores in poor areas of San Francisco that don’t accept payment from the WIC program. This is a legitimate thing to complain about, but the article not only makes a bizarre attempt to defend WIC as different from “welfare,” it doesn’t mention the larger scandal that the US, disgustingly, provides food aid to the poor in the form of dehumanizing vouchers, rather than money. See also the title of this post,  “Are Bike Lanes Expressways to Gentrification” which is a good entry in the annals of “headlines to which the answer is obviously ‘no.’” The post itself is good, though, seeing bike lanes as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the fact that race and class effect municipal spending priorities and planning decisions. Indeed, the post gets rather closer to the heart of the issue, which is that gentrification is itself a symptom, pointing out that “there must be serious consideration of alternative housing models that reduce the displacement of low-income communities” and suggesting “commons-based housing models such as limited equity cooperative housing and community land trusts.”

The problem with anti-gentrification campaigns is that if they limit themselves to campaigning against gentrification, they are necessarily defensive. Such defensive campaigns are often necessary, of course, and many on-the-ground anti-gentrification campaigns do have broader visions of alternative housing models, but the limitations of just opposing gentrification often seems to get forgotten in internet discussions. Anti-gentrification supports the status quo, which is no doubt better than being kicked out of your house, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the status quo is fucking terrible. Anti-gentrification campaigns are campaigns for the right of poor people to pay slumlords exorbitant rents to live in neighborhoods with no resources. What we should be campaigning for is for public provision of cheap, good quality housing. Then the hipsters can do what they like.

I was also recently reminded of an example of the sort of housing project we need more of, the ASH coop in Cambridge

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As representative of the general form of wealth—money—capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital—money as self-reproductive. (Grundrisse)

This is, rather unexpectedly, one of the main themes of recent computer game Portal 2. The first game placed the player in the role of Chell, who finds herself at the mercy of an insane computer that insists on running her through a series of scientific tests long after the scientists at the facility have disappeared. The second game pushes this undead persistence of capitalism further, beginning with Chell awakening an indeterminate amount of time later, after an indeterminate catastrophe has left the testing facility ruined and overgrown. It turns out this does not effect the testing, however, as recorded announcements inform you of “emergency testing protocols,” put in place to ensure smooth corporate functioning in the case of, as the announcements make clear, increasingly unlikely disasters, including massive space debris and the takeover of the Earth by “some manner of animal king, sentient cloud, or other governing body that either is incapable of or refuses to listen to reason.” The imperturbability of the company in the face of disaster is reminiscent of apocalypse insurance, real-world financial products which guarantee a payout in case of some particular catastrophic event, such as the collapse of the financial markets; always assuming, of course, that the financial markets have continued to function past the apocalypse.

The series of recorded announcements and informational graphics through which the game shows you this capitalist hubris, and indeed explains most of its plot, is an example of the incredibly careful way the game is crafted. The details of the setting, from way plants colonize the previously pristine setting of the first game, to the period details through which the game communicates the age of the abandoned company properties through which you  end up traveling, are all pitch perfect. More subtly, perhaps, the way the game plays exhibits the same attention to detail. The game is largely pedagogical, carefully introducing gameplay elements (the portals of the title, deadly lasers, various gels which alter the properties of the surfaces on which they land) in such a way that you are gradually encouraged to figure out first, what these things are, and then, how to use them to solve increasingly complicated problems.

The smoothness with which the game leads players through these gaming challenges perhaps means that an interesting point that the game makes about the concept of “game” may pass unnoticed. For much of the game, the player guides Chell through series of “testing chambers”; in each of these, Chell is presented with a nominal goal – to open a door, or get  a platform to rise, or project herself across a vertiginous gap. But these are never her actual goals; her actual goal is to escape the testing facility entirely. Meanwhile, the player has a whole other set of goals; perhaps to “beat” the game, but also to explore it. In this counterplay of different motivations there’s a reminder of the strangely abstract character of “interest” in game theory. People often criticize rational choice theory for imaging human beings as purely selfish, but “utility maximization” isn’t even selfish in any kind of moral sense, because the utility to be maximized is completely separate from any specific content; it’s a purely formal, and limitless, drive.

With these themes – neoliberalism, the perversions of scientistic approaches to human behavior, game theory – Portal 2 comes across as a video-game adaptation of the work of Adam Curtis. One big advantage of the video game form, however, is its ability to literalize Curtis’s metaphors. While Curtis engages in a kind of archeology, unearthing the layers of political consequences built up on earlier ideoligical inventions, Portal 2 has Chell fall down a giant tunnel. She finds herself in the earliest established parts of the Aperture Science corporation, up through which she has to climb to reach the neoliberal present. In the process, the player gets to see the development of corporate forms over the past 50 years. The parts of the facility built in the 50s represent a heroically modernist vision; the test subjects involved in the grand progress of science are astronauts and athletes, chosen for, in the strikingly Randian phrase, “the way they have bent the world to their will.”

Traveling through the remains of the development of the company, the player discovers the demographics of the test subjects changing, first to waged employees, and later to temporary workers, lured in off the streets with the promise of six dollars for each test completed. In the short comic that was released alongside the game, we discover that Chell herself became a test subject after filling in a recruitment questionnaire asking, “would anyone file a police report if you went missing?” (An announcement in the game informs us that “All safety devices have been disabled. Aperture Science respects your right to have questions or concerns about this policy” – a fine depiction of democracy under neoliberalism). The conditions of neoliberal employment are also shown in the attitude of GLaDOS, the deranged computer in charge of the facility, to Chell. GLaDOS mounts a sustained psychic assault against Chell, finding inventive ways to call her fat, and expressing a great deal of concern over the supposed fact that she is an orphan (which, GLaDOS caringly insists, is terrible). The combination of disposability and intimate psychic involvement is what Nina Power describes as immaterial capitalism’s insistence that we each be an advert for ourselves (it’s perhaps significant here, too, that both GLaDOS, the personification of capital, and Chell, the personification of the proletariat, are female).

The move from the 50s to neoliberalism is neatly prefigured in the opening sequence of the game. Chell wakes up in what appears to be a motel room, a classic signifier of American popular modernism. As tremors cause the room to shift and break down, we see that it is in fact merely one among a vast series of towers of shipping containers, each of which contains a test subject in “long term relaxation.” Another literalization of a metaphor, this time of Ed Schultz’s description of towers of empty containers as “a monument to the unemployed in America.” In the debris of the now deserted corporate headquarters, we can see hints of capitalism and its attitude to the living labor that produces and reproduces it. As GLaDos says, explaining why she is unconcerned about the waste involved in destroying countless Aperture Science Weighted Cubes throughout the game, “they are sentient of course. We just have a lot of them.”

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This does, though, raise a problem with the documentary, and indeed with Curtis’s work more generally. I think he’s doing this kind of Foucaldian tracing of discourses, but I’m basically guessing, because he’s not very explicit about what he is doing. There are various things about the way the program is put together that imply certain things about the epistemology, although they’re also rather contradictory. Curtis’s signature method, the construction of a documentary largely from archive footage some distantly, some closely related to the point being made, emphasizes the intellectual configuration being constructed is partial. In particular, building the program around juxtaposition tends to push against interpreting the relationships between the elements as causal, which of course is emphasized by the jumps in time throughout the program.

However  the soundtrack pushes in the other direction. The ominous music that frequently plays under apparently innocuous scenes keys us to expect bad consequences, and so imbues the program with a teleology, in which the negative consequences are already present in potential form at the origin of an idea. This is what Nietzsche calls “a perverse type of genealogical hypothesis of a genuinely English style” in which everything is explained by reference to an essence lying in its origins, rather than by appealing to something  “first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental, something additional” (On the Genealogy of Morals).

It’s the punctual and incidental aspects, not the teleological, that I think make the program worth our engagement. I do, though, have one concern about the intellectual collection that Curtis assembles, as I think he may be missing some distinctions in the way various concepts change over time. Specifically, he may subsume too much under the idea of the “machine.” Isn’t there quite a difference between the mechanism of industrial machinery, the circuits of electrified machines, and the information flows of networked machines and genes? And this difference would correspond to a distinction between the cybernetic systems with which Curtis begins, and the bioinformatic ones with which he ends (I think this might understood in terms of  a move from Parson’s cybernetic systems theory to Luhmann’s autopoesis, though I don’t know enough about Luhmann to be sure).

Curtis emphasizes the role of feedback in cybernetics, but he doesn’t mention that this was interpreted as making cybernetics the science of control, something which was very much of a piece with the technocratic interventionism of 1950s politics. The association of feedback systems with a form of self-regulation that eludes control comes later; at one point, Curtis briefly mentioned the move from mainframes to networked personal computers, which is  a mark of this change, from self-regulating systems which are centralized and basically comprehensible, and so controllable, to systems which are self-regulating because they are so complex they elude our grasp. In this, the failure of ecological systems theories would be a further step in the development of our contemporary homeostatic “common sense,” and not, as Curtis seems to suggest, a scientific refutation of it. (“Black ecology” would then be a further development of the same theme.)

This does not mean that Curtis’s argument is wrong, just that it could be enriched by making some further distinctions. In particular, I think this move from understanding systems in terms of control to understanding them in terms of complexity helps to think about the political implications of the story Curtis is telling. The problem Curtis identifies have, I think, a lot in common with Jodi’s criticisms of left enmeshment in communicative capitalism. It’s important, then, to recognize how close those of us on the anti-hierarchical left are to some of the ideas Curtis identifies as problematic (how could we not be, as they are ideas which really do structure much of our time), as well as ways we have of interpreting and using these ideas differently.

(The title of this post is from the poem which gave Curtis his title, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan.)

I crossposted this to An und für sich, where there’s some discussion and criticism of Curtis.

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Maybe the most high-profile example of this is the character of Ziva David on NCIS. Ziva, a former Mossad agent turned NCIS investigator, is an appealing character. She’s competent, smart, and funny, as well as being somewhat psychologically  damaged in the sort of way that makes for endearing TV characters (it also doesn’t hurt that the character is played by Cote de Pablo, who is very pretty although not even slightly Israeli).

But she also functions as a strange metonym for Israel. Her Mossad background is, particularly in her early appearances, brought up through references to her skills as an assassin and torturer, that is, through her extra-legal ruthlessness. The show is both horrified by and enamored with this ruthlessness – Ziva is continually reminded by other characters that her methods are not acceptable in America, with a mixture of pride, awe, and regret. Ziva, and thus Israel, is presented here as sublime in Burke’s sense, as inspiring a kind of fear that leads to admiration. The racist uses to which Burke puts this concept of the sublime (the natural sublimity of Blacks is adduced as a justification for slavery) perhaps points towards the racism underlying Israel’s simultaneous exclusion from and inclusion in Western “civilization” which Schalit notes in right-wing American attachments to Israel.

Israel, in the person of Ziva, functions as a kind of screen onto which Americans can project the terrible things America actually does abroad, but which it is ideologically committed to claiming not to do. I wonder if the approval of the assassination of bin Laden is a visible sign that US ideology has changes such that this disavowal is no longer necessary.

(There’s also something to be said about the fact that the role of fantasy-Israel is played by a female character, particularly as the other way in which Ziva’s Israeli-ness is figured is through her willingness to flout American gender roles, with her “just butch enough” clothing, her unabashed attitude to sex, and her occasional hints at bisexuality. This may be of a piece with the role female IDF soldiers play in the spurious “feminism” of American islamaphobes).

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However, the resurgence of the mythology of the petit bourgeoisie may also reflect a certain truth, albeit in a distorted form. I’m thinking of Agamben’s claim in The Coming Community that we are all part of a planetary petty bourgeoisie. There’s a strange way in which today’s capitalism is repeating in reverse the early capitalism in which although workers are, in reality, wholly dependent on capitalism, they are formally – legally and ideologically – treated as independent contractors. This spurious reconfiguration of the worker as entrepreneur unites informal workers in the third world and precarious workers in the first (although how much this particular similarity reveals and how much it obscures is a question, but not one that Agamben asks).

It also unites us all with Paris Hilton. I’ve previously praised her for her antipathy to productive – and hence capitalistic and exploitative – consumption, but, while I think the criticism of productivism still stands, I’m less convinced of its applicability to Paris. In an intriguing twist on the Fordist relation between production and mass consumption, Hilton’s individual “unproductive” consumption is in fact an investment in her personal brand. And the more unproductive the better, as $300,000 dog houses make for the best headlines. So, formally speaking, Paris Hilton is self-employed as a professional consumer; like everyone else, a petit bourgeois formally subsumed within capitalism.

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The coverage was almost entirely predictable. It was predictable because it was in important respects stage managed by the police…. The state seeks to manipulate the media in order to protect the status quo from serious challenge. (Dan Hind, VersoBooks.com)

I do think this focus on police infiltrators risks overemphasizing the agency of the state, and concomitantly underemphasizing the possibilities for resistance. First, it overemphasizes the ability of the police to produce “the extra-parliamentary left they want.” Mark Kennedy was undercover for years, but as far as we know didn’t manage to persuade anyone to be violent; can a couple of undercover agents joining a breakaway march of between 500 and a couple of thousand people really have had that much influence on what these demonstrators did?

Second, and maybe more importantly, the model of an active state “stage managing” a supine media misunderstands what’s wrong with the media. It’s a mistake to think that the media needs actual violent demonstrators to run with their “violent demonstrators” story. Just as a matter of maths, there will always be something on a demonstration that counts as “most violent,” even if its just someone dropping litter, and that will always be reported as “violent demonstrators.”

Third, images of violent confrontation are much more polysemic than this argument allows. Sure, they can be used to support a narrative that protesters are violent thugs who don’t need to be listened to, but they also send a message that police have lost control (which can itself be bad – leading to calls for more police powers – and good – encouraging further militant protest), and make visible, to those who are angry but haven’t acted, that they are not alone in their anger. And it’s this third point especially that leads me to agree with Dan’s conclusion:

If we want to do something about this, then we have to become more communicative. We need to start talking about our experiences and try to explain to others how far removed from reality media coverage can be. And we need to start the conversation about political economy that the country needs and that the political class is hellbent on avoiding.

Part of that conversation should touch on reform of the systems of communication on which we rely and which, as at the weekend, so regularly betray our trust. March 26th matters for many reasons. For one thing it reveals to those who were there the gap between reality and the news agenda. It is up to us now to explore that gap and to take steps to close it.

This is true, and it’s at least as true for those involved in black blocs and occupations as for those who remained on the permitted march.

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On a slightly more general level, the moral defense of teachers is appealing because it fits with the model of education as salvation which is so popular in America (and increasingly so in the UK). This also probably means that it ends up reinforcing this model, which is unfortunate, because the model is damagingly individualist, in two ways. First, there’s the focus on the heroic teacher, the teacher who due to their personal talent is capable of radically changing students’ lives. As far as I know, no-one has yet discovered a way of measuring teaching effectiveness according to which the quality of teachers makes much difference to students’ educational outcomes. This is not to say that teachers shouldn’t try to be as good as they can, just that this probably won’t produce “exceptional” teachers, just broadly comptetent, reasonably conscientious ones, and that’s perfectly fine. The mythology of exceptional teachers distracts attention from making structural changes to schools, or even better outside of schools, that would make a real improvement to children’s education.

In any case, by definition not every teacher can be exceptional, which gets to the other problem with the salvationist model of education, in which education is supposed to provide the primary means of improving society. The problem with this is that the kind of benefits education is usually supposed to provide are positional goods, valuable because of their scarcity; if this is the case, the benefits of education can’t be provided to everyone. For instance, neoliberal education reformer Geoffrey Canada talks about his goal to have every child in Harlem graduate high school and go to college, which is fine, but it doesn’t actually do anything to improve society in the long run; you just have college educated people doing the same shit jobs they would previously done without a high school diploma, and the extrinsic benefits of a degree now go only to those who can get postgraduate professional qualifications, or have the right contacts (not coincidentally, usually the same people who would have been getting college degrees in the past). The problem again is individualism, taking a solution that works for individuals (more qualifications so you can out-compete others in the job market), and imagining that you can solve social problems by just generalizing this individual solution.

I’m not sure how these concerns could be articulated in the fight to defend teachers’, and other public sector, unions right now in Wisconsin, and maybe the right thing to do at the moment is just to work with the message that resonates most. Certainly, I don’t think the time is yet right for my preferred slogan: “Mediocre teachers say: sod your kids, pay us more.” But I do think it’s important to get towards a point where this slogan, or something with the same underlying message, could rally a movement. I’m increasingly opposed in principle to discourses of “excellence,” and I think the right to be mediocre is a key right the left should defend.

The ideology of excellence repeats Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, that monarchy is the best constitution, if we are in the happy situation of finding a monarch who really is excellent, obviously and objectively better than everyone else. This is based on Aristotle’s implicit aristocratism: in all of the “good” constitutions, the best are the rulers, whether that is the best individual (monarchy), the group of the best (aristocracy), or the “better nature” or every individual (polity). In contrast, all the deviant constitutions are democratic in Rancière’s sense, in that they involve the rule of people who have no qualifications for rule. We might then call democracy the rule of the mediocre, the rule of everyone who is just barely competent. However, we shouldn’t be satisfied with just political democracy, but should extend this argument to economics, too. No-one’s job prospects should be held hostage to some spurious standard of “excellence.”

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