Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (part 1, part 2, part 3) is pretty excellent. It puts forward an ambitious and interesting thesis, which I think deserves more engagement from the anti-authoritarian left than this rather defensive response at New Left Project. To try and compress Curtis’s already over compressed argument into one thesis, he identifies the idea of a self-regulating homeostasis as a widely accepted common sense of our times, and one which makes it difficult for us to think about changing the world, either about what such a change would mean or what the role of power would be in accomplishing such a change. That New Left Project response is right to point out other traditions which influence the anti-authoritarian left and have more to say about power and radical change, but this doesn’t negate what I think Curtis is trying to do. The ideological assemblage he puts together has a certain coherence, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be exhaustive, I don’t think he’s denying that there are other elements which could be assembled in other ways.
This does, though, raise a problem with the documentary, and indeed with Curtis’s work more generally. Read more↴
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 praise of teachers, focusing on their hard work and dedication to students. While this looks like an argument that would have popular appeal, I think in the long term this kind of argument has had perverse and damaging effects. The more that teachers defend their profession with descriptions of noble self-sacrifice, the more people seem to believe that teachers’ self-sacrifice is a necessary condition of quality of children’s education; and then, of course, the way to improve education is to increase the suffering of teachers. This is, I think, part of the explanation of why, whenever politicians praise teachers, what they are actually saying is “let’s fire all the teachers and pay them less.”
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. Read more↴
I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the emotional charge of the films as merely manipulative misses the way in which they allegorize quite real aspects of contemporary life in ways which are both insightful and genuinely affecting (which doesn’t mean they aren’t ideological). Lenin damns the films for “reminding you that your alienated, commodified relationships are perfectly normal, human, desirable and moreover actually protected as human rights in the advanced capitalist states,” but under capitalism human beings really are commodities, and to explore the emotional terrain of that condition is not mystificatory or necessarily reactionary. Read more↴
A few months ago Roger Ebert poked video game players with a stick, arguing that computer games could not possibly be art. His argument was stupid, as he himself has since realized, because he quite literally did not know what he was talking about: he had not played any of the games he was discussing, and so hadn’t had the kind of experience necessary to form a judgment on them. Dismissing computer games on the basis of video clips is, at best, like dismissing cinema on the basis of reading screenplays; the entire dimension in which the medium’s distinctive aesthetic effects work is absent. Ebert’s ignorance of computer games explains why he produces such a weak argument; this gives him an alibi which the editors of n+1 don’t have. Read more↴
Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea? Is such insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? And does such narcissism not underlie the predominant attitude of academic Leftists who expect a theoretician to tell them what to do?—they desperately want to commit themselves, but not knowing how to do so effectively, they await the answer from a theoretician. Such an attitude is, of course, in itself false, as if a theory will provide the magic formula, capable of resolving the practical deadlock (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 88).
There were a number of excellent papers at the Waiting for the Political Moment conference in Rotterdam last month, among which were keynotes from Benjamin Noys (which he’s put on line) and Jodi Dean (some of the key arguments of which are in this blog post). These two papers are interestingly read together, I think. Jodi argues that our concern about complexity and the difficulty of knowing enough functions as a kind of theoretical alibi for political inactivity: Read more↴
Reading an excellent article from Nina on the possibility of a more just educational system, which makes a determined attempt to enlist Rancière in this project. As it happens I’ve been reading a chunk of Rancière for my dissertation of late, which has sharpened my skepticism towards him, and I’m more convinced than ever that Rancière is of no use in thinking about liberatory education. Maybe this is a result of differences between francophone and anglophone intellectual cultures, but the “mastery” Rancière attacks seems absurdly anachronistic, a model of education swept away at least by the late 60s (indeed, rejected by progressive educators since the 20s). Not to belittle the importance of these reforming projects, but not only is Rancière’s advocacy of an exploratory and democratic education, as against a directive and hierarchical one, rather pushing at an open door, it’s pushing at an open door that has proved to be a plausible entry point for neoliberalism. Indeed it’s worse than that: Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster is, it seems to me, the perfect figure of neoliberal authoritarianism. Read more↴
