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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2. Why do Amer­ican leg­is­la­tors hate democ­racy? As 4chan takes the lulz to the streets, hilarity is already firmly ensconced in US corridors of power. In response to a symbollic anti-recruitment resolution from the Berkeley City Council, some tool from South Carolina has proposed legislation in the senate (the “Semper Fi Act 2008″; I’m not sure whether...
3. Fourier on Janice Bat­tersby Leanne Battersby’s recent storyline in Coronation Street has been excellent. It’s done a very good job of criticizing the material conditions of prostitution without basing that on a stigmatization of prostitutes. The economic criticism of prostitution is too often expressed as horror that economic conditions force women so low; but...

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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2. Are they aware of pol­i­tics? As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for...
3. Are the liberal arts free enough? By formal disciplinary classification, I’m a political scientist, so I was at this year’s American Political Science Association meeting. As well as attending a number of panels on political theory, and giggling at what the “science” side of the discipline is studying, I went to a number of panels about...

This defensive stance was also in evidence in a paper by Wendy Brown on the importance of the liberal arts. Brown developed in detail the argument that the liberal arts are important because they develop skills and attitudes that are required of citizens in a liberal democracy; the attack on liberal arts education is, then, linked not just to the neoliberalization of the university, but to the neoliberalization of society more generally. Though this argument is quite common didn’t prevent it from striking me as odd. Perhaps this is because I grew up in England, where the language of “liberal arts” is not so common (and the education system from 16, if not earlier, is directed towards a level of specialization which is hard to square with the generality of liberal arts). More importantly, though, it seems to me that this way of thinking about the liberal arts is, for a supposed defense of a pre-neoliberal university, actually highly amenable to the neoliberalization of the university.

The problem is that it is, at bottom, a prudential justification of the liberal arts. Rather than defending the value of education itself, it proposes the utility of education to a particular sort of society, a liberal democracy built around an idea of a certain kind of engaged citizenry. But what happens when that sort of society no longer exists? The same structure of prudential argument can be maintained, with only minor alterations to the putative goals: now, rather than citizenship, we talk of “critical thinking” or “transferable skills.” In the absence of a viable liberal democracy of the sort which the  liberal arts were supposedly preparing citizens for, this attempt to defend liberal arts education  can’t really get off the ground; all it does is prepare the ground for the “pragmatic” move of “reformers,” eager to show their acceptance of the principle of liberal arts education, while modifying it in, they assure us, the only way in which it can be retained, which in practice means a neoliberal reorganization.

The interesting thing about neoliberalism is that it is so all-encompassing a political logic that it pushes us of necessity towards radicalism. Because neoliberalism puts utility maximization at the center of its construction of subjectivity, it is poised to capture any kind of means-end reasoning. The only way to defend education from marketization, then, is to maintain and defend its uselessness, to defend it from reduction to any external purpose.

Related posts:

1. The melan­choly of post-​Marxism In the excellent “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Wendy Brown writes: Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all...
2. For a new economism I was reading Brown’s Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy last week in order to teach it, and it occurred to me while doing so that many of my students were born not long before Clinton was elected; in other words, they have lived their entire lives in a...
3. Are they aware of pol­i­tics? As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for...

Even as emotionally invested as I am in Radio 1, though, the reactionaryness of the coalition is obviously more worrying, although it does occur to me that there is a way in which New Labour was more neoliberal than the coalition are. It’s an often-remarked paradox that the transition to  neoliberalism under Thatcher didn’t involve a movement of power away from the state, but rather a centralization of power in order to allow for the dismantling of local state structures and the imposition of market mechanisms. The marketization of society, that is, required that the state increase its separate and sovereign political character. But the state under New Labour was anything but a unified sovereign; it frequently seemed to have no idea what it was doing at all. Think of higher education policy, in which the government was obsessed with the idea that everyone should attend university, while seeming to give no thought to what the distinctive value of university education might be (thus the policy managed to be both elitist and philistine at the same time).

This kind of incoherence isn’t a mistake or a weakness, though (it’s not that the state under New Labour acted less than before, but that it acted less coherently and autonomously); it’s an extension of neoliberalization to the state itself. The new government does seem more ideologically coherent, however, and I’m not sure how this will end up manifesting itself. Where next for the state in neoliberalism? A recentralization to impose a new mode of neoliberal accumulation (but the coalition seems to have no more idea than anyone else what this would be)? Or a neoliberalism that finally really does try and do without the state, rather than reconfiguring or redeploying it (an idea which is both terrifying and insane)?

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1. Pop­ulist fan­tasies So, I understand New Labour putting forward reactionary proposals; they’ve always been functionaries of a particular form of neoliberalism. What I don’t understand is their basic lack of any political sense. The intriguing thing is that every stupid thing the government does is presented as if it were a canny...
2. Lib­er­alism: threat or menace? Why shouldn’t we call out Lib Dem “betrayal”? Because they haven’t betrayed anyone. To think that they have reinforces the mistaken belief that, when they describe themselves as “progressive,” they mean “left.” But Lib Dem progressivism isn’t just a fluffy sort of not quite socialism, it’s a specifically liberal version...
3. Labour MP: em­ploy­ment is pun­ish­ment Well, that’s not what John Denham is actually saying. He doesn’t need to say it or even think it, as it’s the implicit New Labour model behind this bold policy initiative: Unemployed people convicted of crimes should receive tougher sentences than those with full-time jobs or caring responsibilities, a leading...

In most classes I’ve taught, I’ve at some point asked students about the distinction between politics and economics; the first time I did so, I was expecting to challenge them with some Marxist arguments about the interrelation of the two. But I don’t think any of my students have ever thought there was a distinction between politics and economics; they all accept what Friedman thought was controversial in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, the neoliberal presentation of politics as simply another domain of the economic. Perhaps the correct response to this is a Žižekian one of overidentification, in which rather than treating the role of money in politics as an object of cynicism, we take it entirely seriously; abandoning left-wing illusions about a potential political control over the economic, and embrace a through-and-through economism.

This is also one of the places where Hardt and Negri are particularly useful. They are certainly not nostalgic for liberal democracy; instead, they see neoliberalism as reconfiguring the political and the economic in a way that calls for a new communist approach to the economy. However, I fear Hardt and Negri are too optimistic about the nature of this reconfiguration, as they see post-Fordism as rendering the economic directly political and, moreover, in an immediately communist way. The advantage of the Žižekian approach would be that it reveals neoliberalism’s obscene underside, its continued reliance on a kind of undead liberal politics. The challenge for the left is to figure out how to exorcise this specter of politics, and thereby insert itself into the economics of neoliberalism

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2. In a May that began with demon­stra­tions for open borders and against the war… Adam asks, “what happened to Hardt and Negri?” An interesting question; the current lack of interest in them is rather surprising, given that Empire was and is pretty much entirely correct. I was reminded of this by a post on ads without products, in which: When it gets to the...
3. Are the liberal arts free enough? By formal disciplinary classification, I’m a political scientist, so I was at this year’s American Political Science Association meeting. As well as attending a number of panels on political theory, and giggling at what the “science” side of the discipline is studying, I went to a number of panels about...

This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

The limitations of this lack of understanding of power were starkly illustrated in an event in last week’s walkout at Berkeley. Some participants in the action suggested the possibility of using the pre-planned General Assembly as the starting point for an occupation. Unfortunately, this suggestion was shot down by the facilitators of the General Assembly, who had already decided on their own structure for the meeting, and weren’t about to have this disrupted by a debate on the possibility of an immediate occupation. What was so frustrating (both in the sense of being annoying, and in the sense of working to frustrate the attempted occupation) is that the moderators resolutely refused to make explicit and take responsibility for the power they were exercising. This made it very difficult to contest their power, as they were able to present all their decisions as necessarily already democratically pre-authorized.

Nonetheless, a similar reticence about power was also in evidence among those proposing the occupation. The one thing I would disagree with in the IndyMedia account linked above is the description of those proposing the occupation as the “occupation committee,” which implies a level of organization and explicit self-presentation that was regrettably absent. With one honorable exception, the pro-occupation people didn’t really present themselves explicitly as a collective making a demand or proposal to the group; there was, again, an unwillingness to take responsibility for an attempt to wield power. In the hurry of the moment, and against the backdrop of the interplay of the moderators pseudo-democracy with the genuine democratic energy of the assembly, this failure of the pro-occupiers is, I think, understandable (I should myself take responsibility for failing to understand this, and act on it, at the time; it’s taken me this long to develop this understanding of what was happening). However, it will be important to avoid this mistake in the future.

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3. No on 90 California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for...

The problem with this argument is the incredible poverty of its understanding of politics. The suggestion seems to be that the only possible meaning of an action can be purely symbolic, an entry in a process of debate. The horizon of any conceivable action is “awaring” people. What this misses is that the staff, student, and faculty walkout might be a political action, an attempt to exercise power, or at least make a threat of exercising power. The very idea of politics has gone missing.

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1. Too much Alinsky, not enough Lenin Saul Alinsky apparently used to ask new recruits to his organizing efforts, “what are you organizing for?” And they would respond by saying that their goal was to help the poor, or get housing for the homeless, or whatever it might be. Alinsky would shoot down all these concrete goals,...
2. Where do we go when there’s no more pol­i­tics? You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over. — William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101 Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right,...
3. De­fending the right to medi­oc­rity As many of the people involved in the inspiring protests in Wisconsin are teachers, and as teachers’ unions are the right-wing’s favorite target for union-bashing, the protests have inevitably brought attention to the increasingly toxic American discussion of education. A number of protesters and spokespeople have made arguments rooted in...

I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez, maybe 2 hours, maybe 3 hours…. The point is…I paid no attention to style. That’s for later.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve read or heard advice like this, but I’ve never understood it. What does it mean to write without paying attention to style? What is writing without style? Isn’t writing the process of taking something that doesn’t quite exist, the content of ones thoughts, and making it exist by supplying it with a form? So to write without paying attention to style would be to not write at all.

Graham Harman’s written quite a bit about the importance of style, as a matter of essence rather than mere decoration; so it’s odd to see him suggesting the virtues (indeed, the possibility) of writing without attention to style. I wonder what he means by it.

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1. Picture-​thinking A happy coincidence that Infinite Thought should tag me with this meme when I’ve just finished grading a stack of papers and so been thinking a bit about what I’m doing when I’m teaching. This semester I’ve been teaching an introductory writing course, which is apparently a fixture of American...
2. Ig­no­rant school­mas­ters According to OFSTED, At GCSE, the sheer volume of poetry, with the focus on technical analysis, coupled with “overly didactic teaching methods”, is putting pupils off. I wish I’d been taught technical analysis of poetry when I was doing GCSEs; indeed, a bit of excess didacticism would have made a...
3. Bour­geois equality It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me,...

The chancellor had advised me, back in 1968, to do something about my name and appearance if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Hitler innovator…. We finally agreed that I should invent an extra initial and call myself J. A. K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit.

The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of myself. He strongly suggested that I gain weight. He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler…. I had the advantage of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed—an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness.

Which makes me wonder, how should I shape my physical appearance to be appropriate to the kind of academic career I want? Or, have I already, by my sartorial choices, sealed my academic destiny? A troubling thought.

Which brings me to this article discouraging people from doing PhDs (via). There’s something of a cottage industry in this kind of article, and they’ve always annoyed me for some reason. There are, I think, two interrelated problems. One is the academic exceptionalism, the suggestion that academic work is completely different from other sorts of work; to say that academic work is uniquely awful is still a way of maintaining that academic work is special. The second problem follows from this attempt to exempt academia from the rules that shape the rest of the world, because it suggests that you can avoid the problems of academia simply by avoiding academia. But, really, that’s bullshit. Of course academia is unique, like everything; but competition, insecurity, and exploitation are hardly unknown outside of academic work. Maintaining the fantasy that one could simply opt out of the problems of academic work encourages people not to struggle to improve the situation within universities, something that’s particularly unpleasant when the person making the complaints is a tenured professor, someone with at least a small level of power.

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1. Virtual life Good post by Moll on how the Internet has and hasn’t changed our lives. She’s particularly bang-on about Second Life. The odd thing about Second Life is how much effort has been put in to reproducing real life, but worse in every respect. Moving through physical space (but through the...
2. Support from an un­ex­pected source Adam points to the annoying habit among people doing academic work of moralizing about the “relevance” or accessibility of their work, and, I think, gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the way this usually proceeds. By positioning themselves in opposition to academic “irrelevance” the speaker can make a...
3. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...

Aside from that, I’ve been:

• Worrying about Britney Spears. Everything I saw about the VMA performances was talking about if Britney is fat or not (she isn’t), which misses the more serious point. Britney Spears the supposedly “real person” seems to be having a bit of a tough time, but it’s not like any of us know her, so any sympathy is pretty abstract. More worryingly, the VMA performace was so uninspired in terms of coreography, design, costume; it suggests a serious crises in the Britney Spears machine. Further evidence: she has an album coming out soon, and her website is still totally insane.
• Studying for an exam in contemporary political theory, which has persuaded me of the deep wrongness of political philosophy. Attempting to come up with a philosophical explanation of why certain political disagreements are invalid is not politically useful. See also this post in which Brian Leiter quotes the excellent Raymond Geuss on Rawls, and a number of people miss the point spectacularly in the comments.
• Posting stuff on Twitter. Those of you who read this site via RSS may not have seen the twitter posts in the top right. You can read those via RSS too, if this blog isn’t trivial enough for you.
• Inventing a song about Max Shachtman to the tune of awful Beatles record “Taxman.” My favorite couplet so far involves rhyming “Fourth International schism” with “bureaucratic collectivism.”

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1. Britney Spears ful­fills my fan­tasies Once upon a time, I suggested adopting Britney’s image as a kind of collective anonymous identity for protests, rather like a more stylish version of the white overalls. In her last video, Britney herself adopted the idea, although admittedly in the struggle against the paparazzi, rather than against global capitalism....
2. How La­canian A wholly splendid article by Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty, including a defense of internationalism which culminates in: The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in...
3. “Crazy as a motherfucker” A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness? She sort...