Pwned
I suppose it was inevitable that the claim everyone would focus on in k-punk’s recent post on class and confidence would be the one that the UK class system induces feelings of shame, embarrassment and inadequacy in those it designates as inferior. It’s a polarising sort of claim: there is a constituency, let us for convenience call them “the British”, to whom it appears simply obviously true, and then there is the group I will call, without particular regard for the empirical nationality of its constituents, “the Americans”, whose attitude is perhaps best summed up by the inimitable Patrick Mullins’s epistle to the disadvantaged: “Go improve yourself!”. Or, as one of our own politicians once memorably put it: get on yer bike!
In The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart’s survey of working class literacy in the 1950s, special attention is paid to the figure of the “scholarship boy” lifted – as the language of the time had it – out of his class through the improving offices of a grammar school education. In Hoggart’s view, such selective elevation deprived the working class of those who would have become its organic intellectuals, while at the same time depriving the scholarship boy himself of the resources of working class confidence that were his birthright, plunging him into a social and intellectual milieu for which nothing in his home life could have prepared him. Such an interloper would forever be haunted by feelings of shame, inferiority and a restless social anxiety, unable to settle either in the working class environs of his upbringing or in the professional or academic world into which his formal education – but, alas, only his formal education – had inducted him.
There is much that is fanciful or reactionary in Hoggart’s account, even if one allows that at the time he was writing there was indeed a “strong” working class, in some manner collectively aware of its own strength, that had yet to fall beneath the hammer-blows of Thatcherite and subsequent neo-liberal class warfare. It is, for the most part, not the organised political strength of the labour movement that Hoggart regards as the lost spiritual sustenance of the scholarship boy, but the maternal-communal warmth of the working class hearth and home, emotionally indulgent and easy-going, that must be sacrificed for the sake of academic credibility and the cultivation of an appropriately acidic conversational manner:
He cannot go back; with one part of himself he does not want to go back to a homeliness which was often narrow: with another part he longs for the membership he has lost, “he pines for some Nameless Eden where he never was”. The nostalgia is the stronger and the more ambiguous because he is really “in quest of his own absconded self yet scared to find it”. He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of ihs own and their situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother. And this is only one of his temptations to self-dramatization.
If the “father and mother” are persistently infantilized in Hoggart’s account they are also the objects of an infantile fantasy: note the grammatical ambiguity of that phrase, “the…pleasures of his father and mother”. The obvious conclusion would seem to be that it is in the mother, the alma mater, that confidence confides; and yet the passage above refers to an “ambiguous” nostalgia, a quest for an “absconded self” that is not, perhaps, to be found where it is sought. There is something else going on here, which the “temptation to self-dramatization” obscures.
As IT observes, the anxiety and insecurity that hobble her students’ efforts to persuade themselves that they understand Heidegger come into full effect at a particular moment: these students are “pwned” by insecurity at just the point where the “capacities and talents that are already there” should be brought most fully into play. As the video-game language suggests, watching this happen is not unlike watching people being picked off by an invisible sniper with a laser-guided rifle aimed at their Achilles tendons. The expression “lack of confidence” does not really capture the rapidity or severity of the malaise to which people succumb: what may formerly have been a persistent “background noise” of inferiority suddenly becomes a crashing roar, in a self-amplifying cascade of affective automatism.
This leads me to think that some additional mechanism is involved, that the moment of collapse is – again, reaching for the sniper rifle - triggered, and is caused less by the failure by schools to instill the proper level of self-belief and more by their success – or that of society at large – in installing something else. Here I must confront Daniel’s skepticism concerning the social production of affect, which he seems to regard as spontaneously and indifferently woven by the subject of fantasy out of whatever experiential material happens to come to hand. In the first instance, I wonder how it is that corporations ever get to see a return on the millions of dollars they put into advertising if it is literally absurd to suggest that the affective lives of individuals can be prompted, moulded, manipulated and operationalised by outside forces. (Clearly there is something a bit rum about fantasizing that my emotional life is constantly being manipulated by evil corporations, but that is because in the fantasy I am aware of the manipulation but can do nothing about it).
Let us consider the nature of insult. I insult you; you take offense. If I have insulted you effectively, you will take offense in spite of your determination to rise above my petty jibes: the insult is effective to the extent that it causes its target to feel offended in spite of himself. Later you will curse yourself for responding so hastily and angrily to what were, after all, only words. You will, if you are exceptionally disciplined, own that your response was unworthy, that you should not have allowed yourself to become besides yourself with fury. I will then insult you again, making artful use of the humiliation I have already inflicted, and if my aim is true you will again fly into a rage. I enjoy a power over you that you do not wish to grant me, and would withhold from me if you could.
Now, from my perspective as a skilled verbal abuser, my words do indeed appear to have a causal power: I can make you feel bad, I can provoke a reaction and deprive you of your equanimity. Of course I can only do this because I know what will make you feel bad, because I have some knowledge of your vulnerabilities, your affective triggers (yo momma!). The early stages of verbal combat often involve a search for those triggers, a series of more or less effective sallies. So this causal power does not operate on an inert object, but on a psychic system that cathects and binds stimuli precisely in order to avoid being thrown out of equilibrium. If I keep plugging away with the same old taunts, you may eventually become immune to them; but you may do this by internalising the gibe, accepting its essential verity, making it a persistent feature of your inner mapping of the world – in a word, “ontologising” it. The insult loses its immediate power to wound because it tells you nothing you don’t already “know”; but the attendant humiliation is now permanent, a part of who you “are”.
Is the abrupt psychic “takedown” of students overwhelmed by the challenges of university the reactivation of some deeply embedded conviction of inferiority? I’m not sure; my own hypothesis is that it has more to do with a fear of becoming separated from the group, marked out as different. The intense specialization and accreditation of knowledge that take place in a degree course mean that for perhaps the first time the student begins to know and be recognised for knowing something that is not common knowledge – the Big Other is well-acquainted with the contents of the National Curriculum, but knows comparatively little about Husserl. Being marked out as different in school is not a happy fate, and I suspect that the intense conformism of adolescent peer culture, combined with the homogenisation of education in the service of the mighty League Table, may have left many students with a profound anxiety about stepping out of the charmed circle of shared affect and common opinion.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Perhaps what also makes it difficult for students to break out of common opinion is also the clash between a system at many schools and now steadily being imposed on universities implies a gaining of ‘key skills’ ticking certain boxes so to speak achieves X mark. This then clashes with the more traditional hystericising injunction to ‘be original’ ie (in my version) contribute to the existing critical conversation without guarantees. I think I probably make it ‘worse’ in my own teaching but not having a line, as many colleagues seem to have, except construct a convincing argument, well referenced, written, and engaging with the text(s).
It seems that certain schools prepare students better for university by encouraging/developing a kind of conformism of originality/competetion. I was lucky enough to have a teacher at my (piss poor) comprehensive who taught history by offering us a range of opinions and then making us work to develop our own critical skills.
Of course the advantage of the hystericising approach is that it supposes anyone can engage, that there is (fundamentally) no Other of the Other.
July 18th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Bourdieu has some interesting, if terribly depressing, things to say about “originality”, IIRC. I think that the competitive ethos of private schooling does prepare people in a certain way for the “hystericising” seminar room, although at the cost of often turning discussion into an exercise in, ahem, futile point-scoring.
Insofar as the comprehensives promote an egalitarian, “we’re all in this together” sort of model of social co-operation, they perhaps neglect to develop pupils’ ability to make that move into that area “without guarantees” – the zone where you’re not sure if the others are with you or not, where you might be going right out on a limb. I don’t know – I’m just distrustful of communal values, especially when it comes to thinking, and my own fantasy projection of the comprehensive is of an environment dominated by those values (as the official discourse on the aim, purpose and ideal constitution of the comprehensive certainly is: to listen to some people talk – especially in the Grauniad’s education pages – it’s as if the primary mission of the comprehensive were to restore a communal integrity sundered by the violence of selection at age 11). I can’t speak to actual classroom practice, which I imagine is very various…
July 18th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
If all comprehensives were like mine it would be disastrous, but then the whole ethos in my area was a virulent dislike of education/the communal coupled with a feral school environment. The values weren’t communal so much as a ‘community’ (riven by bullying) of petty ‘resistance’ that I wouldn’t valorise in a BCCCS way. I don’t have such a problem with the communal only with what sort of community/communal environment is being created.
What I hear from teachers is not encouraging – now a new ‘target’ is to secure ‘economic well being’ starting at age 7, obviously not referring to progressive taxation or income redistribution but the usual idea that school will be a magic panacea for social inequalities. Also much teaching seems to involve ‘management’ of social disadvantage – of course this has a sinister Foucauldian ring (and actuality to an extent). It should be said that for teachers themselves this is not easy either – hence those teachers I have known have often been on anti-depressants/in therapy etc.
While school is a site of ideological reproduction the irony is that now schools are expected to carry all the ideological weight as other communal/social sites have been ‘vaporised’ by free market values. That’s why, I think, this discourse of integration has arisen. It forms a kind of structural fantasy. The ‘obscene underside’ is that it is middle class parents are abandoning the system as quickly as possible for grant maintained/ select entry / faith / grammar / etc schools supplemented with private tuition / classes. I can see why parents do this of course. However, the ‘failure’ of integration is then often hived off in racist fashion onto ‘immigrants’/Islam, etc.
I think also the early Bourdieu on the ‘habitus’ offers us a way to think how ’structural’ effects are embodied in the subject (including affects).
ps I always found Hoggart’s comments on milk bars hilarious
July 18th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
From an interview with Alan Garner:
AG: … At the time I was writing those first two books, I was coldly and angrily aware that I had been educated to articulate precisely the cost of my awareness.
I had been educated into a world that I embraced, because it was exciting and fulfilling. But it was the world of the high table, and it was ultimately arid. I could see myself heading in that direction, and denying a part of myself. And yet I could not go back genuinely and say, I’ve changed my mind. You can never go back. When I wrote those books I was emotionally severed from my family. I could not communicate in the way that I had communicated with them as a child. It was not until my forties and towards the end of my father’s life that he took me seriously, and would actually have a conversation with me about things that mattered to both of us. He thought that any inquiry I made was some form of intellectual attack. Because I was so alien, he could not see that what he had between his ears was of genuine value to me. I was a cuckoo in the nest. So, yes, that is the nature of the poignancy in the book. It is an attempt to reconcile what was, at that time, irreconcilable.
RT: In a sense we’re talking here about the loss of innocence, aren’t we?
AG: Yes.
RT: And there are times when one wonders whether the price one pays has been worth it.
AG: Oh, yes.
RT: And since one has little choice, one has to hope that it is.
AG: Well, that is what saves you in the end. You have to put it all aside and say one has no choice. The choice has been made before the awareness.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~xenophon/articles.html
– Garner came from a rural working-class background, was selected for Manchester Grammar School and went on to read classics at Magdalen. He left before taking his degree and worked as a general labourer or signed on the dole while writing his first books.
July 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Re: American vs. British
One system relies on people believing they live in a class free system, while the other system relies on people believing they don’t live in a class free system.
Re: Student anxiety
Perhaps the profound anxiety students feel as they acquire knowledge, is due to a growing sense of expectation and responsibility, as they face the prospect of relying upon this knowledge for their livelihood.
July 18th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“Here I must confront Daniel’s skepticism concerning the social production of affect, which he seems to regard as spontaneously and indifferently woven by the subject of fantasy out of whatever experiential material happens to come to hand”
This is not really my claim.
My claim is rather that the fantasy that there is one particular affect, or lack thereof, inherent to the working class, or to the ruling class, has no necessary relation to social or class background.
I do not think (or at least, remained unconvinced) that we can say there is such a thing as “working class” or “ruling class” affects. I contend that there is no affect necessarily inhering to any social or class background.
The film Paris is Burning, I think, provides a good indication of this.
I think that ultimately, the ontological ground for the social production of affect is one of contingency.
July 18th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Sure it’s contingent rather than necessary, as all but a very few things are; but it’s an organised contingency..
July 18th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Furthermore:
“Such an interloper would forever be haunted by feelings of shame, inferiority and a restless social anxiety, unable to settle either in the working class environs of his upbringing or in the professional or academic world into which his formal education – but, alas, only his formal education – had inducted him.”
… Is there any subject who in fact is not an interloper?
After all, is not the essential fact of subjectivity as such the fact that, as Rilke put it, “we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”
Why should this existential predicament not cross class lines? Why should, in an existential sense, one class not belong more than an another?
July 18th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
If we are saying, in a Meillasouxian way, that contingency is the absolute ground of all of knowledge (and that there is no necessity whatsoever) how then are deducing, on the basis of our knowledge, that this contingent ground must itself necessarily be organized.
What are we, Hegel?
July 18th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Also, and quickly: agree absolutely with Ben about the “discourse of integration” and the ideological determination of the school as the site of social healing; already familiar with Alan Garner (and the very, very good site about him to which Warzsawa links), but thanks for reminding me; the British system relies on people believing they live in a class-filled society, in which class not only permeates everything but actually saturates the social field.
The model of class I prefer is derived from Judith Butler: structure is instantiated through iteration, there is no instance of structure that is not already marked by doubling, repetition, the contingency of inscription in particular times and places, and so on…
July 18th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
“thanks for reminding me; the British system relies on people believing they live in a class-filled society, in which class not only permeates everything but actually saturates the social field.”
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Are people actually in a class-filled society? Or do they just believe that they do.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
I don’t see any reason not to leave necessity out of this altogether.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
I don’t understand what you’re saying here
Well you for one seem to persistently mistake the claim that the social field is permeated by class for the claim that it is saturated by it; to mistake observations about individuation for identitarian assertions, and so on. Needless to say, the effect of this misprision, which is a defining feature of the discourse on/of class in both the UK and the US, is to make any sensible discussion of the matter impossible…
July 18th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
“mistake observations about individuation for identitarian assertions”
Correction: I mistake observations about individuation for ontological assertions when in fact they are ontological assertions.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
And I notice you didn’t respond to my interloper point.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
And finally I add: Have you noticed that this entire discussion thus far has remained in the precincts of democratic materialism, to wit, “there is nothing but bodies and language…”
July 18th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
DM’s claims that one can’t “say there is such a thing as ‘working class’ or ‘ruling class’ affects,” and that “there is no affect necessarily inhering to any social or class background” are true. However, to assert that certain affects do not “necessarily” inhere to structural class position is not to say that, generally speaking, certain generally occurring affective positions (that are not always and only tied to class) do not tend to accumulate at one end of the class spectrum or the other. Although we cannot rightly assert that soldiers returning to civilian life “necessarily” experience such negative affects as asociality, post-traumatic stress, or guilt, can’t we say at least that such affects are far more likely to afflict a returning soldier than a person who has never been to war, and that those feelings are not the product of individually generated fantasy but, according to the structures of war, objectively identifiable? Can’t we also say that those who’ve been sexually abused as children carry around negative feelings that socially disadvantage them as adults generally, but not in all cases? The fact that class is, in addition to a subjective position, a structural/economic one, does not invalidate what we would assume as self evident for other social categories.
July 19th, 2007 at 9:32 am
One point about class in Britain. Tom Nairn (cf The Break-Up of Britain and The Enchanted Glass) has persistently made the point that there is a ‘class discourse’ in Britain that has little to do with actual class analysis. This relates to the Narin-Anderson thesis claims about the absence of classical sociology in ‘UKania’ (as Nairn likes to call it). Althougth he doesn’t put it like this we could say ‘class’ functions as an ideological discourse. In this way we live in a social formation ’structured’ (see below) by class but also by one saturated by ‘class’ as an ideology.
One other point. The ’structure’ of class for Marx is a structure of class struggle. A purely structural account risks falling into functionalism. Only having read extracts in English and accounts of it but I understand Badiou’s Theory of the Subject as the attempt to dialectise ’structure’ through the placement of force.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Yes, I’m feeling a fairly strong pull towards Theory of the Subject myself (haven’t read it yet, but IT’s quoted bits here and there that sound very promising).
The permeating/saturating distinction I introduced on the fly, to see if it would cut any cheese (as it were). Saturation is an effect of ideology, understood along the lines proposed by Stavrakakis, where you get an imaginary totalisation of some field (“the symbolic”, say) which is in fact irremediably riven and conflictual. The ideological discourse on/of class, which is identitarian, ethnicising, and posits stable relationships between identities as the ground of the class structure, produces a sort of mirage of structure in which every term has a stable mapping to something within its register of identities (I’m going to be very pretentious here and call this a “sheaf”). But this mirage is not merely an illusion: it’s an effect of the real relations of force that make up class struggle, and a vector for the perpetuation of that struggle (an effect that becomes a cause in its turn).
Here I think is where the disagreement with DM lies: I think we both agree (and I can’t see k-punk strongly disagreeing) that the discourse on/of class is ideological in more or less that sort of way, but DM I think regards the mirage of structure as a mere epiphenomenon occluding the real structure (as in Althusser’s distinction between ideology and science), whereas I think it merges with the real structure – Zizek’s phrase “the reality of the virtual” comes to mind – as a kind of supplement, one of the means (if not the only means) by which the real structure comes to be instantiated and reproduced. There just is no independent category of “the economic” in which class “really” happens; class also “really” happens in and through the discourse on/of class.
DM chose to regard IT and k-punk’s posts on class and confidence as heedlessly reproducing that discourse, and falling into the essential “nullity” of its terms; but its terms are not null (they participate in the real structure, even if the real structure is not in fact a mapping over those terms) and, well, I would beware of assuming that either writer is so hopelessly unaware of what is going on in their own writing – and beware doubly of setting oneself up as the postman delivering the letter of the truth to their door…
July 19th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Ypi’ve lost me again, Dominic. Real structure, mirage of structures… what?
My disagreement with K-punk (and you, insofar as you fail to see this point) is that he quite precisely thinks that class is not ideological, but ontological!
He says so openly: “Social confidence is not based on achievements but on intrinsic ontological status.”
His efforts at “denaturalizing” class are totally backfiring. He is denaturalizing the idea that one must belongs to a given class from birth, but then recuperating it his very next move. He writes: “Naturally, ‘being projected out of your class’ means that you only retrospectively aware of your previous position – now you belong nowhere, you are permanently exiled from your class of origin”
In other words, it is either your class of origin, or no class at all. And this choice is false. The truth is that in fact “you” were never either; you were never working class to begin with: this is only a retrospective fantasy that you have now invented for yourself.
What is going on here is a desire to be “more others than the others” which is aping the language of class, and telling a narcissistic story through that narrative. It is all about me: “For me, I’m working class” K-punk quotes Kim. dammit. “For me” – and who else? The Big Other of course. But the Big Other doesn’t exist!
Class is ceasing to be a category of economic, political economic analysis, and is being turned into an identity. And despite what you’re claiming, the fantasy at the heart of this identity is not being traversed. It is being maintained, because it is being maintained that this specifically class identity which I have adopted for myself… was imposed on me. This was not imposed; it was chosen: and from a Lacanian perspective it is absolutely vital to hold the line on this point. The neo-liberal, ideological discourse of class is being extended here, and if there is a great virtue which has emerged from this discussion, it is that we are now getting a much clearer picture of how precisely that works.
July 19th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
But that’s the basic misprision, Daniel: you think that Mark thinks that class is ontological, whereas what he’s saying is that subjects experience it as ontological.
To be confident is to confide in something unshakeable, something that is posited as just being incontestably, what it is. On this something, whatever it is, you may depend; it may be a purely imaginary object, in fact it’s hard to imagine what other sort of object it could possibly be (although money in the bank certainly helps – but that’s also a sort of imaginary object…). That’s the structure of confidence, qua affect: the confident individual’s confidence rests on an ontological assertion that he makes, or accepts as true, about himself, which supports the value structure of his personality. (You may raise, at your leisure, all the Lacanian quibbles you like about the real existence, or otherwise, of individuals and personalities; I’m perfectly happy to see them as decentred effects of more primary psychic processes, but don’t actually think that’s hugely relevant to the discussion).
IT says that private schools make and reinforce an ontological assertion of the kind “me, I’m special”, giving rise to individuals whose sense of self-worth (and attendant value structure) depends on their “just being” something special. It’s a rather brittle sort of self-confidence, because nothing other than this (intrinsically rather absurd and insupportable) assertion supports it, and when it is attacked or undermined people tend to go into this insanely defensive thrashing and flailing overdrive to try to get it back.
Increasingly other institutions, such as state primary schools, attempt to do the same thing; it doesn’t work, firstly because to be believable an assertion of that kind has to be supported by all sorts of material circumstances that render it plausible, and secondly because they don’t hqmmer the lesson home by ruthlessly attacking and denigrating all other sources of self-worth, such as pride in the active use of one’s own intelligence…
July 19th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
What is confidence? It is faith in something, transitive faith. Self-confidence is faith in oneself; but this is problematic, because in the place where the “self” in which self-confidence trusts should appear, nothing nearly reliable enough can be induced to materialize. Self-confidence is belief in a fiction: the fiction of a self that exists all the way down, an ontologically stable self that just is what it is.
How do people come to believe in fictions? Through persuasion and indoctrination, through habit and material practice, through being shown, repeatedly, that a particular fiction has traction in the world, that the Big Other believes it too. This happens in school and out of it; particularly in the exercise and assumption of privilege, which creates a “bubble” for the fictional self to live in, a reserved space that affirms its existence by belonging to it and it alone.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I have a few basic questions which I think need to be raised before we can find any kind of explanation to the problems of class, confidence and education. Apologies if I’ve misread the arguments so far, there’s been a lot of threads to follow:
1) I am uncomfortable with the way there seems to be a lot of speaking on behalf of others, and a lot of commonsense arguments about the value of education from people who are highly educated. I don’t believe in any kind of noble savage nonsense, but I think there’s a danger that we can be drawn into assuming that people who haven’t made it through Husserl are somehow failures! One thing I got from Bourdieu is that one must always question our positionas speakers. Are we just projecting the values of an educated milieu?: The best thing that the workers can have is a good education…This idea about knowing what’s best for the masses- being the heroes who are selflessly working for their betterment- seems like the bad faith of socialist intellectuals which Lyotard exposed so well in the Libidinal Economy.
2) Are the experiential accounts of working class educational experiencesa little disingenuous? I do not doubt that working class people experience doubt in educational instititions which cater for the rich and comfortable, but there’s also another economy- they get to feel more exhulted with their academic achievements. This doesn’t mean that they feel superior to the class that they’ve behind (although there is a danger of narcissism, or of using their background as an ‘excuse’), but that their relative achievements are valued more. Whereas, as K Punk originally noted, those students from wealthy or academic backgrounds will not get the same sense of achievement at getting a degree from a top university. I realise this is a contentious point.
3) I’m not sure if we can identify lack of confidence as the central problem which is holding back these working class students. That might appear to be the case from the perspective of a lecturer, but perhaps these students are not always mistaken. That they have calculated the pros and cons of what their university education offers them, and they’ve decided to quit. If we accept that economic and cultural capital is what is ultimately determining their position as students, then we could do them the honour of believing that sometimes they might know what is best for them. In their real (cultural-economic) situation, perhaps higher education is not so vital. This might be heartbreaking for their lecturers, who know that these students could do more if they only ‘believed’ in themselves. Perhaps this is something which the lecturer needs to believe too.
4) Imagine if we could wave a magic wand and get rid of the confidence problem in working class students overnight. Whilst this would be a good thing, I’m not too sure that it’s not already the case. Perhaps it’s not that they lack confidence per se, but that they have different goals from a lliberal humanties education. Again, I would say that their particular cultural-economic circumstances would determine which types of degree course they study. Which is why students from poorer families are more likely to study business studies, and why people from privileged backgrounds are likely to study the arts and humanities. I would prefer it if everyone studied the latter but this is partly my own bias.
5) For me, two obvious theoretical works which should be considered in these discussions (if they haven’t been already) would be Deleuze’s Postscript to the Societies of Control and Rancierre’s work on the axiom of equality and how it applies to learning and intelligence. With Deleuze, we are reminded as to what it might mean to be in favour of education at all costs. (perhaps he would have advocated ‘vacoules of non-education’, because constant training and learning functions as a form of social control.) With Rancierre, we get to think about what it might mean for everyone to be equally intelligent: knowing Heidegger or Husserl doesn’t make you more intelligent than someone else, this is merely where your drive to learn has taken you. Also, there’s Rancierre’s historical study of those workers who stayed up all night to learn: if we are serious about political activism, then there might be some kind of possibility for guerrilla study groups- which in some way, what I think the Kino Fist project is.
6) After reading Nietzsche and Badiou, I’m not sure that I want to found a politics which is based out of compassion or pity for the suffering of the uneducateds. Isn’t there a way we can conceive of the workers as not being pitiable without falling into the neoliberal trap of thinking that they’ve got what they deserve? This may be solved through recourse to Badiou’s figure of the worker, Marx’s concept of the proletariat as the active class, and Deleuze’s idea of becoming.
7) A related point. I can tolerate the idea that we are living in a world which is riddled with inequality, which requires a politics to address this in equality, but I don’t think its either empirically correct nor tactically useful to imagine we are living in a world full of workers who feel ashamed and inferior because of a lack of good education. Or especially alienated because they do have one. Similarly, I can’t see much value in confessions of resentment unless it’s to show how misplaced this resentment is. Why should one feel bad about not being ‘like them’? Spinoza writes in the Ethics that there is no value to moral indignation.
8) This is where I think Badiou’s four types of truth procedure might come in. What I like about these strange conditions for philosophy is that, with a little tweaking, they might be applicable to anyone. Anyone can fall in love, regardless of class. Anyone can become political, without having to found a party. Anyone can make art, literally, and in terms of being a producer. Anyone can be a scientist? Alright, that one’s a bit difficult!
But the point is, these conditions must always already be a possibility for everyone, and these procedures must always already be taking place. Once one is committed to a truth procedure, one is subject to ‘unequalled intensities of existence’. (Badiou)
Excuse me if my ideas are naive and long-winded, it’s not everyday I feel compelled to join in the blogosphere-
July 19th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
and apologies for bad grammar and missing words and stuff!
July 19th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I didn’t know Ranciere had written on equality and intelligence; I must check that out. For my part, I assume that if a <= b and b <= a, then a==b; in other words that if in some respects I am less intelligent than you, and in some respects you are less intelligent than me, then we may face each other as equals (without, for all that, being identical). Inequalities arise when instead of a generic intelligence (which encompasses every possible respect in which one person may be more or less intelligent than another) we try to measure specific intelligences, intelligences bounded by particular predicates or goals.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Exactly! Thanks for the formalisation of the axiom of equality as it applies to education- I knew it was quite a simple logical idea but I’d forgotten the argument- as for Ranciere’s writing on education, I’d kind of inferred it from an old Hallward aritcle in which he cites Ranciere to reinforce his point about the axiom of equality- but there is that great paper by Ranciere, ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ which is available online- it’s at a bit of a tangent from this discussion because it’s more to do with how anyone, from any educational background, can teach any subject: the teacher simply facilitates student learning.
July 19th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
“But that’s the basic misprision, Daniel”
If you still believe this – unshakably, incontestably – I will never convince you. I can only encourage you to carefully read his texts again, and see for yourself, or not, as the case may be. And I notice that you still haven’t responded to my interloper comment. Or my democratic materialism comment.
I think all of NFTUG’s points are germane, especially his first point, and his third.
We should ask ourselves: what is it that Left intellectuals may feel personally compelled to believe about the working class, and the distribution of affects of people passing through education, without necessarily having any theoretical warrant for doing so?
July 19th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Had we but world enough and time, I’d do you a whole post about the “interloper” thing. I did once quite nearly write a thesis on it, you know.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Deleted at author’s request
July 19th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
By the powers vested in me by the Masonic Lacanians, I hearby grant thee Infinite Thought thy theoretical warrant…
I didn’t want to imply that lecturers shouldn’t do their upmost to encourage their students- that’s their job. But it’s just that I don’t think that student confidence can be extricated from their psycho-socio-economic background. The reason why one student might feel more or less confident than another is a result of these three conditions (at least). It might be that a working class student has less confidence than another better off one, but the reasons why they have less confidence will be because of real deprivations they have suffered, like the ones that Bernstian and Hoggart talk about. Some of them might be able to break free from this trap, but those that don’t shouldn’t be considered failures of the system. They’ll have other values which will make their lives worthwhile.
The danger with thinking that these working class students just need confidence is that it could mask the configuration of material deprivations that they suffer. I think of Susan Sontag’s wonderful book, ‘Illness as Metaphor’, her way of dealing with breast cancer, in which she describes the frustration she felt with the doctors who wanted her to think postively- ‘you’ve got to fight it!’ But she thought that her recovery from breast cancer would not be a result of her own willpower- it would be because of the treatment she received by the doctors, and that these doctors shouldn’t imply that if their treatment screws up, then it’s in some way the fault of her not trying hard enough.
If my thoughts about student confidence meant that I was endorsing the unequal state of education, then I’ll be glad to see my arguments demolished. I don’t know want to put myself in a position in which I can directly claim to know what is best for these working class students, and maybe they might know some things which we don’t.
July 19th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
“Or perhaps ‘they might know what is best for them’.
Spoken like centuries of true gentlemen.”
Of course. Because, IT, naturally, knows perfectly well what is best for them, any suggestion that this might not necessarily be so is obviously one which places anyone making it on the side of the Oppressing Class.
Academia, and academic ability is good. Anything else, is the mark of an ontologically-inculcated inferiority complex, which it is her, apparently political, goal to correct.
I will say this: All this speaking on the behalf of victims, and this insinuation that you are going to personally save “working class kids” from their upbringings through the sheer force of your belief in your own virtuous role (which interestingly, you seem to hold as maintaining somewhere completely apart from any structure at all) is starting to make me feel ill.
The element of privilege here (theoretical, moral, etc) is residing completely with those who are claiming that, on the back of their own personal, heartfelt identification with the working class, they are entitled to speak for them, describe their inner lives, and say what they want, and so on. They themselves have no agency, they are simply oppressed: they rely for their agency upon us left-wing intellectuals, and we will save them. It would be immoral not to.
Formally-speaking, this discourse is identical to the neo-liberal ideology which accords to civilized noble nations the right to intervene militarily in any country of their choice in order to remove the scourge of dictatorship and oppression. In this case, the intervention will be made psychologically, since the oppression is psychic, yet the basic structure holds. Human rights have been abused, we will correct this abuse, because we are noble. We stand for generic capacity, and reason as such, and from this privileged position of knowledge, we can see that working class children are being (psychologically) beaten.
Frankly, I think this position is delusional, and throughly self-important. I think psychoanalysis may have a few things to say about it. And I also think that it does nothing so much as succeed in reproducing the fundamental premises and structures of class-bound, neo-liberal discourse. This position accords to anybody that holds it the status of a intellectual redeemer, and suggests that they are capably of wielding their redeeming capacities through the teaching space of a neo-liberal university, simply because they strongly believe in the essential nobility of knowledge as such.
This is why you need a theoretical warrant: To avoid backing yourself up into grand positions like this one, and getting yourself caught in the jaws of neo-liberalism as a result. Your post today, for instance, in which you haughtily condemn the Russell Group for suggesting that working class lack the confidence to pursue academic success: this is exactly your argument. Can you not see this? You say that they blame the students, whereas you blame the structures, but the fact is, they do not blame the students anymore than you do, and moreover, insofar as structures are always ideological as well as material, blaming the structures is precisely the way to keep them in place.
I’m going to absent myself from this discussion at this point. I’ve had enough of fighting against Evil; I want to fight for a Good. You will never change anything with a politics of blame, nor with a politics of victimhood, nor through any operation that seeks to draw a meta-ontological line down the bodies of children. Seen in the light of a subjective universality affirmed beyond all and every communitarian qualifier, including all and every class qualifier, it seems to me that this discourse is entirely renegade.
I leave you with this precept: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become one.
July 19th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
But here’s another one: ‘Honest’ towards ourselves and whoevever ‘else’ is a friend to us; ‘brave’ towards the enemy; ‘magnanimous towards the defeated; ‘polite’ always: these are Friedrich Nietzsche’s four cardinal virtues about blogosphere conduct!
July 20th, 2007 at 8:09 am
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July 20th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Alright, the monsters thing was a bit ridiculous, and apologize for that. But listen, here are the facts: what is happening is that you are being blinded by your own desire to save particular kinds of souls (and to personally resolve class contradictions) as to the power of your discourse, and your own structural position.
You need to appreciate that the university, qua instrument of the State, dedicated to an ideology of understanding, is a tool for maintaining class contradictions, not for resolving them. In the State and Revolution, Lenin makes this point perfectly clearly. You cannot resolve class contradictions through any State apparatus, by passing through the established channels of any State apparatus, by remaining with the ideological precincts of the State. Despite the views of the Second International, the State simply cannot be used in that way, and the ideology of understanding is a State ideology par excellence. “The anayltic-hermeneutic doublet,” notes Badiou is the straightjacket of academic philosophy.” At present time, you remain within that straightjacket.
To wit, you want to convince students that they’ve understood the question. According to you, and your own understanding, they have, and you want them to know that they have, and this is all well and good. Only the truth is that, seen in the light of the heat death of the universe, the question is not really one of understanding at all. An understanding animal is of no more interest than any other kind, and philosophy is not itself a truth condition. It just simply doesn’t matter whether or not your students understand something, and academic success doesn’t matter either, and the only reason why you think it does is because of your own libidininal investments, and your own ultimate attachment to the the idea that the academy has a certain status. This is to say, your own ultimate attachment to the idea of status. K-punk, for his part, makes this perfectly clear: “The working class believe that status has to be earned.” For my part, I would rather say that status means nothing, and it absolutely false to maintain that it does.
In the end, what are you saying? That there should be greater class mobility within the existing neo-liberal framework, that students from working class backgrounds should be able to become lecturers too. Certainly, from a managerialist-pragmatic perspective, more class mobility is better than less. But nevertheless, in either case a stratified class system is preserved and maintained as an unshakable ontological fact, and the horizon of all possible politics, and meanwhile the real proleteriat (the worker who has precisely nothing, not even a present lack of confidence) is being excluded from your project.
In necrotically obsessing over class, and again, suggesting that the class system produces fundamentally different kinds of bodies – the one valued as good, and the other valued as bad – you are tacitly endorsing the class system. You just want it to be a bit nicer, a bit more egalitarian. Your discourse is, at the end of the day, basically liberal, but it is claiming to be radical. What, after all, are you saying, but that more people from working class background should be able to become bourgeois as well?
You need to look more carefully at what education, including university education, does. It is not simply a neutral order of knowledge, and cannot be: it is transmitted through and by means of certain structures (essays, marking, examination, etc) and those structures determine how it is felt, and viewed. The academic discourse of philosophical knowledge is a discourse of power, just like any other. In attempting to inculcate what, at the end of the day, can only be a certain circumscribed form of understanding (perhaps equivalent to the Marx’s famous “interpreted the world in various ways”) you cannot but be acting as the conduit for a certain form of power, and thus as the agent for a certain kind of recuperation back into the biopolitical machine. This is indeed your role, and no doubt it is better to do it well, rather than badly. Nevertheless, in the Badiouian sense of the term, there is no properly political dimension to this whatsoever.
July 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
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July 20th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Deleted at author’s request
July 20th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
and those structures determine how it is felt
Impossible, surely!
July 20th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I swear to god there’s a connection between feminine jouissance and leaving italics tags unclosed.
July 20th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
“Impossible, surely!”
You still don’t get it. I have never denied this. What I am denying is the idea that you can draw a binary affective line across classes, in the way you are all trying to do. Such an ambition is crudely reductive, and driven by envy and/or guilt. The model simply doesn’t work. Class power, such as it is, is never exercized directly, but rather only indirectly, through the State. Affect is a mode of power, and not a mode of class, and class is itself, moreover, a formal category, and not an existential identity in its own right. One cannot be working class, or middle class, or ruling class for that matter, and it is an ideological illusion to maintain otherwise. There is no ruling class affect, there is no working class affect – despite your guilty desire to maintain that there is.
And what you were saying earlier about futile point-scoring?
July 20th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
“One blithering posh idiot, a philosophy and literature student, at the university for Oxbridge rejects I attended once said, ‘I don’t even like reading’. You prick, I thought, you arrogant, undeserving, pompous little prick. I can think of dozens of people who’d love and excel at learning this material, but they’re not here and you are.”
Yeh, yeh, yeh…
And then this:
“To be perfectly honest, if I could afford it, I probably wouldn’t teach at all – I’m rather fond of the fantasy of somehow being exempt from all form of ideological replication – but I can’t, so I do.”
So you’d like to be a ‘blithering posh idiot’, and yet do it with understatement so it looks more bourgeois and you act a little more like Diana Dors than Kristin Scott Thomas.
“If I get angry about certain unequal tendencies I observe you can just put it down to my unfotunate economic role in the structure and some personal pathologies of my own.”
That’s so sad, but probably true. Perhaps you should ‘get on yer bike’?
July 20th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Nobody thinks class is an existential identity. Really, literally, nobody…
July 20th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
And you certainly have denied that structures determine affects, or at least rhetorically refused to understand what anyone could possibly have meant by asserting that it does. A structure, produce an affect? How’s that work, then?
July 20th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
“Nobody thinks class is an existential identity.”
K-punk: “The working class, meanwhile, tend to be more existentialist, believing that status has to be earned, and continually earned.”
Why do I bother?
July 20th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
That’s a matter of attitude: “being existentialist” here means nothing more or less than having a particular sort of attitude about yourself. It doesn’t mean that you are, existentially speaking, one thing or another (what, existentially speaking, is “being existentialist”?), or even that you sign up to some explicitly existentialist philosophical propositions about yourself, although sometimes people do go via that route (I am currently being haunted by the spectre of Colin Wilson…). I can’t imagine how you have got to the point of so thoroughly misunderstanding this.
July 20th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Here is the operation. In the sham jouissance of your guilty subjectivity, exactly according to the Nietzschean logic of ressentiment, you think to yourself, “There must be a subject who doesn’t feel guilty.” You then name this subject the Ruling Class, people who went to private school, whatever. The problem is, there is no material, structural need whatsoever for such a guiltless, undeserving subject to exist. There is nothing which needs explanation that can only find explanation through the positing of such a subject. And there is no real possibility that such a subject even could exist, since life is basically suffering (“the obscene torture of the cogito”) no matter which way you look at it, and no matter how good your education has been.
The only real problem which is being addressed here is the problem of your own particular jouissance. It is for this reason that you synthesize this imago in your mind, allowing you to morally condemnn the Big Other, now happily renamed the Master Class, on supposedly political grounds. This was k-punk’s original operation, and insofar as you endorse it, it is yours as well.
Finally, let me add this. I know full well that I myself have enacted similar psychological operations to this in the past, and highly obnoxiously, as it happens. So everything I am saying to your is partly a self-critique as well, and though, through the manifest weaknesses of my pugilistic style, it may seem as if I am judging you, this is not my intention.
July 20th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
As for your attitude/identity sophistry, this is beginning to grate.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Well, if I assert that you’re being a little bit silly, am I making an ontological statement? Am I predicating moderate silliness as an essential attribute of your existence? I really don’t think I am…
July 21st, 2007 at 12:15 am
Well, in any case, I’m done.
It’s been a gas.
So long!
July 21st, 2007 at 12:49 am
What’s going on, you were just starting to win people over?
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Genuine brilliance or anate madness?
I’m at peace with my lust
I can kill ’cause in God I trust yeah
It’s evolution baby
Admire me admire my home
Admire my song here’s my coat
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
This land is mine, this land is free
I’ll do what I want but irresponsibly
It’s evolution, baby