500 eclectic words a day

On the Politics of the Transgender Individual

2008-01-01T23:53:00.001Z

Transgender individuals are now very much part of our society. The sexual liberation of the late twentieth century, starting in the 1960s has finally led to a situation in which whilst these people are often not socially accepted, they are accepted as an inevitable stratum of our society. Whilst these people exist, one must question what their existence means for the politics of identity. This new politics, brought about by the positivity of their own existence, is different to all previous gender politics, but has wide-ranging effects on the field of gender politics as a whole. To assert that one is changing from one identity to another has a role not only of defining what each of these identities is, but also of asserting that there is a level of truth inherent in that definition. When we are dealing with identities such as gender, which have been under the academic microscope and have as a result undergone radical changes in terms of societal understanding of the terms over the last decades and centuries, the production of a truthful definition of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” becomes extremely problematic.

Beyond this, the issue of transgender raises issues of how we are to deal with identity. The idea of transgender suggests an ethic that any individual’s identity should be completely fluid and changeable, and this simply does not account for reality. For example, if I decide that I want to be Mongolian, and demand of everyone that they treat me as if I were Mongolian, that would still not make me Mongolian. The only reason why one would want to change one’s identity from one stratum to another is because there is some kind of inequality between the two, and of course by ossifying each of these strata (through moving from one to the other) then this creates an outburst of positivity towards the inequalities between this strata, and goes against any ethic that supports wiping out inequalities within society.

In essence, the idea of the transgender individual is a bourgeois one. It states the right of the individual to take into his or her (boom boom) hands a complex and contentious issue of gender as identity of the individual and within society as a whole. It allows for outbursts of ethical positivity that simply serve to obfuscate reality, it allows for the ossification in the most conservative terms of identities that feminism in particular has fought so hard to maintain the dynamism of. The notion to the transgender individual of man or woman is one related to Platonic form, rather than being in the realms of Heraclitean flux. It is the position of those who submit to the view that identity defines the individual rather than simply facilitating his or her existence in reality. As such, in the terms by which the transgender individual defines him or herself, he or she doesn’t find truth in his or her new identity, but rather indeterminate falsehood.

On Carrot Cake

2007-09-13T16:31:00.001+01:00

I shall start by saying that I may be a little bit biased on the matter of carrot cakes. As a young child I was subjected to the experience of profuse vomiting at the hands of a slice of rather posh carrot cake, bought for me in a café in Regents Park, although this is not the issue that I wish to address here. Carrot cake, for some reason, remains a popular choice of confection among the middle-class masses, and yet I am at a loss as to why anyone would put carrot in a cake. I am told by my peers that it tastes really good, and doesn’t taste of carrot at all. “Aha”, I think, so it’s a good thing that the cake doesn’t taste of carrot? Then why use it as an ingredient in the first place? What tastes good in this sort of cake is the cinnamon, and any other spice that one wishes to add, and I can assure you that there are plenty of cakes that taste of cinnamon without the necessity of offensive root vegetables ruining the experience. I expect that these recipes are rather old, traditional even, but we live in a day and age when we have plenty more pleasant sources of sugar and carbohydrate: ones that far better suit the cake genre, and by that I don’t mean parsnips or courgettes.

Further to this criticism, it is apparent that there are very few people who would actually describe carrot cake as their favourite cake. Whilst they would be happy enough to eat it, and may even enjoy it, the fact that there is always this other thing that they’d prefer should probably lead us to the conclusion that it’s not actually that good, and we can lay the blame at the feet (or should that be roots) of the carrots. Whether it be as a response to government campaigns for “five a day”, or because one’s grandmother used to cook it that way, we must not endorse the insertion of vegetables in the name of second-class pleasures.

We should never be content with archaism and tradition, especially when it impinges so horrifically on the experience of cake. An experience that should be decadent and joyful, without the guilt associated with a healthy diet, or that associated with what our current systems of production do to the environment. The point at which a food becomes so embedded with either of these ethical stand-points it ceases to be of any pleasure whatsoever, even for the masochist who would claim to “like” carrot cake in the first place. So please, if the possibility of making a carrot cake crosses your mind, say “no”, prevent children vomiting everywhere, and make something that everyone will enjoy. Also, maybe you can save your carrots for cooking something that actually suits them.

Waiting at Bus Stops

2007-08-29T23:14:00.000+01:00

There is a most disgusting element of the human condition that presents itself at every moment throughout our crowded country. Comparable only with Schopenhauer’s “Will” and Freud’s “death-drive” is the compulsion, when waiting at the bus stop, to look in the direction that the bus comes from. We all do it, and even when absolutely conscious of the idiocy of this action one finds it almost impossible to stop. Whilst I understand that looking for the bus is completely harmless, it has no benefit at all. When it arrives you’ll know about it, and you don’t need advanced warning. Similarly, straining one’s eyes and saying to the old man next to you “is that a 390” is completely pointless. If it is your bus then you’ll know about it. They tend to have large signs saying the number on the front and the side, perfectly visible from five metres away. Even in the case of request stops, buses make plenty of noise that should alert any awake customer to stick his or her arm out.

The introduction of electronic boards, telling you how many minutes away your bus is represents an institutionalisation of this issue. Clearly transport companies are willing to throw money at the bizarre desires. Furthermore, these boards allow for the comparison of advertised times and the times when the buses actually come. After they have been displaying “due” for more than a minute and a half, the passengers become disgruntled and feel hard done by. The gaze solidifies as if looking hard will somehow make the bus appear. Of course, this feeling didn’t really exist before the introduction of the boards, and it is simply through the collective demands of the passengers to know when the bus is coming that they are ultimately dissatisfied.

The pleasure that one gains when the bus finally arrives very rarely matches the feeling of anticipation, or the will to make it arrive before it comes. The prospect of sitting on a bus for half an hour is not much different from sitting at the bus station for ten minutes, but for some reason it is treated as massively preferable. It is interesting that the demand for the bus to come has led to a technological innovation that rather than solving the problems aids people’s dissatisfaction. That being said, if one were to go around London removing all of the electronic boards on bus stops there would be a huge outcry, regardless of the fact that it would not affect people’s journey times. Ultimately this is a symptom of a society in which everyone feels the need to rush. The demand for the bus to come is in fact a demand not to be left waiting. It is still intriguing though, in a world in which people are constantly complaining about being rushed off their feet, that people spend the little bits of time that the transport system gives them feeling thoroughly annoyed.

Careers Fair

2007-06-27T20:02:00.000+01:00

I had a realisation a couple of days ago that within a week I’m going to be unemployed. Part of me thought “Great, free money from the government”, but I know that if I want to do anything that I really want (and have enough money for books), I’ll need to get a job. Thankfully the careers service here at Cambridge is pretty good, but I had the most horrific experience this afternoon when I went to the careers fair for graduands who are yet to sort out a job. The cue went past quickly, and was full of people dressed rather smarter than myself. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, so had gone in my usual casual fleece, jeans, and boots. As I reached the top of the stairs of the university I saw a great sight, comparable only with Caravaggio’s Birth of Venus; it was the free booze table. Picking up a bottle of Stella, I walked into the first room, and the fun began.

Every stand was manned by another smartly dressed smiley person. They all had the same rather blank expression, obfuscated in the women’s cases by a general surplus of make-up. As I approached each, they first vied for my attention, and then as I went to speak to them they patronised me. I couldn’t tell whether it was to do with me looking like a tramp, the bottle of booze in my hand, or the little red star pinned to my jumper. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to help my chances of getting a job. This was made worse by the torrent of public school boys rushing up to stands, introducing themselves confidently, and explaining in a rather old-boyish fashion why they were particularly interested in each company. Having not much idea what I was doing, I quickly picked up some of the lingo: ‘HR’ stands for ‘human resources’. This is something like Marx’s theory of labour value and should probably be renamed IR or AR for in- or anti-human resources; ‘Consultancy’ means doing dirty work; ‘Restructuring’ means ‘laying off workers’; and ‘Chartered Accountancy’ means protectionism. They don’t want people to know this, so they give out gifts. One company even gave out Green and Black’s chocolate. How ironic that those who destroy lives demonstrate themselves to be a ‘nice company’ by buying fair trade chocolate. I’ve never heard of fair trade accountancy.

Having failed to convince a couple of people that keeping workers happy just added to their alienation, rather than adding to their enfranchisement, I decided to go (having consumed 10 bottles of beer). I certainly hadn’t found a career for myself, and have decided that I’ll leave the financial sector to those over-confident public schoolboys. I hope that if they read this, they’ll realise that it’s not some game in which the person who spews the most bullshit wins the biggest prize, but that the money that they are dealing with is not disconnected from not only workers but people. If only we could put the ‘H’ back in ‘HR’.

Brown's Last Budget

2007-03-24T17:11:00.000Z

This week saw Gordon Brown, the next New Labour Prime Minister, presenting his final budget. This has been rather a large source of controversy in the news, given that it’s probably the most radical budget he’s presented in all his years as Chancellor. Its ‘final flourish’ as Radio Four put it, was the reduction of the income tax base-rate of two pence. The entire budget speech was built around the construction of Brown as a virtuous generous man, there to help ‘the people’. He focussed on pensioners, as well as children and families in poverty. He became, for that moment, the epitome of Victorian philanthropy magnified to a national scale, thinking that the romantic nature of such a construction could win him hearts and minds.

The myth floating around all the newspapers is that having expendable cash is the same as being better off. Being taxed is painted as being bad. No-one points out that taxation, or at least progressive taxation such as income tax., is actually good for the poorer people in society. This problematic change in income tax was compounded by other changes that benefited the middle classes while undermining the economic position of poorer working people: the first of these is the minimum income tax doubling from ten pence in the pound, to twenty pence; the second being the increase in minimum value for inheritance tax. Looking more closely at the budget, what we see is a New Labour challenge to the Tories on winning middle class votes papered over by the very middle class notion of giving to those who are worse off.

The Tories were left speechless, not by the shocking radicalism, but by the fact that Brown had appropriated a load of their policy. The most interesting thing about this budget is that whilst it actually damages the economic and social positions of a huge number of people in Britain, the aspirations to become middle class are so strong that even people who are not helped by the changes accept them as if they were part of the middle class who are making gains. This is confirmed by the reports and comment pieces in The Daily Telegraph, who make an issue of pointing out how many people are set to lose from the new budget, even though those losing are not traditional Telegraph readers.

Of course, whatever the budget would have said there would have been criticisms, but the fact that the country’s finances have been used as a propaganda tool at the expense of living conditions of millions of people, the fact that the rhetoric behind the changes is so disingenuous, means that we can only be too wary of where Brown wishes to take the labour party once he becomes leader, and how much elections have become about buying voters, or at least giving them the impression that they’re being bought even if that’s not reflected in the material reality.

Anachronism and Cultural History

2007-02-09T02:13:00.000Z

I had a little run in with one of my seminar leaders today about the fact that a short bit of writing I’d done for her was a little too rude. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. As far as I was concerned though, it was just the outpouring of a certain amount of anger that had been brewing for quite some time. The issue at stake was the idea that in cultural history there is inherent value in the association of two things that happened simultaneously, or that historical causation is always more valuable than comparisons to other ideas or events in understanding each cultural object. The question at stake was the idea of the sublime in describing late 18th and early 19th century artworks. My argument was simply that just because this concept was popular at the time of the creation of these works, it did not make itself necessarily provide the only means of understanding them.

It was here that I felt the need to introduce the anthropological concepts of the etic and emic (that is concepts that one imposes to explain an Other, and concepts one takes from an Other to explain that Other, respectively). It is all too often that we seem to fail to identify an era that is historically removes as an Other. Instead, the fact that it becomes part of a lineage that leads directly to our standpoint we regard it as either an thing-in-itself or as something that has so much in common with our own society that there is no need to define it as an Other. When we do define it as an Other then it tends to be so that we can attempt some kind of internal (emic) analysis (for example explaining Bach’s composition with reference to Kant and Burke). This is problematic, not least in the case of artworks because it aims to historicise them, and treat them anaesthetically, but also in the case of all other cultural objects in that it denies us the right of any interpretation, almost as if they are closed and complete.

This really is something worth getting angry about if anything is. Whilst I’m hardly in awe of either the philosophy or the art from this era, this approach does provide a good example of something to fight against. If in studying it one aims to find a real nexus, rather than in hindsight drawing together a number of cultural strands hoping that this leads to some magnificent overarching (and somehow useful) understanding of the generality of an era. Such a methodology is only really useful in a history of the creation of cultural objects and the impetus behind this creation. Rather than dealing with them as objects they become processes or ephemera. If this is truly the case then we’d probably be stuck with Wittgenstein’s old dictum of “what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”. I reject any such condemnation to silence if the alternative is anachronistic analogy, which I firmly believe when dealing with history we must embrace.

On 'Guitar Hero'

2007-02-07T23:41:00.000Z

I was privileged as a child to have my parents able to afford and willing to pay for music lessons. For many years I played a variety of instruments. It was with this in mind, that I felt particularly strange as I drunkenly started playing a game called ‘Guitar Hero’ against a few friends. To play this game one holds a controller that resembles a small electric guitar, and has to co-ordinate both hands pressing buttons and flicking switches in line with music and signs displayed on a TV screen. The whole outfit will cost you rather a lot of money (rather more than an entry level real musical instrument). This is apparently what young people today like to spend their time doing. Ultimately it may be relatively fun, but I can’t understand how it can ever be as fulfilling as learning to play a musical instrument (a task which has no endpoint, as one can always improve).

The buttons on the fake guitar don’t correspond to actual pitches, but rather to the shape of the melody. Playing against two cellists was rather interesting, as one said to the other “Do you change position to get the fifth button or do you do it by extension?” It is obvious that this game equips the player with a number of skills that are associated with playing an instrument, and yet in another way it is very limiting. When practicing a piece of music up to concert-standard, one first plays it slowly, focussing on detail and finally learns to play at full speed, with all the detail remaining. In the course of this game there is no option to play slowly, one must play the entire piece at full speed and is penalised at the end for any errors. There is no chance to practice details carefully, and to try again one has to return to the beginning of the piece. This is of course an entirely inefficient means of becoming proficient at completing the task successfully, but it is this difficulty that is apparently relished almost equally to the satisfaction of completing each song.

Whilst there are many problems with this game, and I firmly believe that most young people would be better off with learning to play a real instrument, it does expose something fundamentally wrong with the branch of musicology concerned with performance. By playing the game, the player becomes the performer, and is as such engaged with creating music. It becomes entirely irrelevant that 99% of the time these people have no analytic understanding of the notes (what they are, or why they’re there), as not even the interface of the model of the guitar gives any sort of clue. The game shows that there is no ‘understanding’ inherent in performance, and to an extent we are probably incorrect to refer to it so often as ‘interpretation’. There is no interpretation involved and yet the player is integrally engaged in the production of the end product.

BNP Ballerina

2007-01-12T18:47:00.001Z

Today BBC News reported on a demonstration outside The Coliseum, where the English National Ballet is currently performing Giselle. The demonstration focussed on the Prima Ballerina, Simone Clarke, who was recently revealed in The Guardian to be a member of the extreme right-wing British National Party. Whilst a critique of the BNP is absolutely necessary, not least when they are gaining huge support in contentious councils such as Dagenham and Bradford, this sort of action seems completely inappropriate, and no doubt will damage the credibility of the anti-fascist movement by making Clarke into a victim, and by attacking her as a person rather than attacking her beliefs and political actions.

Throughout history there have been huge numbers of artistic practitioners with less than desirable political viewpoints. If we were to boycott their work then we would lose some of the greatest elements of our culture. Would Unite Against Fascism go into HMV and put stickers on every CD with Herbert Von Karajan conducting on it? Will they campaign against the performances of Strauss’ music dramas? Should we ban Karl Bohm’s recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde? Of course such actions would be totally ridiculous, and would not prove any point. The demands of this new campaign are rather too close to absolute censorship on the basis of political opinion, something that the left should be very wary of given the reality of McCarthyism only fifty years ago.

There was a demand by one member of the demonstration that she should be sacked because she was being paid with public money. We need to be very clear on the problems with such an assertion. Clarke’s membership of the BNP has no relevance on her performance in Giselle, and people should not be penalised simply because their salary comes through the state rather than through private enterprise. One does not gain the power of free-speech by avoiding the public sector. UAF’s action is opportunist in the worst sense in that it undermines her simply because she is a public figure, no doubt they’d refuse not refuse treatment from a doctor in an NHS hospital on the basis of his or her political beliefs.

There is little defence for being involved with the BNP. It is one of the most poisonous and dangerous elements in our society, but if our argument against them is going to be strong then we must challenge them where we believe their beliefs and actions to be wrong and dangerous. Denial of free speech will not win the debate. I’m sure that Simone Clarke is a thoroughly unpleasant individual, but we should challenge her as a fascist and not as a person. We have no right to criticise her simply because her product is art or because she is employed by the government, instead, our right is a result of us co-existing in a society with her.

Budget Meetings and Masculinity

2006-11-10T21:50:00.000Z

Budget Meetings are never friendly environments, with the exception of the times at which the budget balances. In the case of the Robinson College Students’ Association (RCSA) last weekend, it didn’t balance. Six hours on it still didn’t balance. People at the meeting refused to acknowledge that we simply couldn’t give money that didn’t exist. Deals between societies were forged, and no-one wanted to give. What is a society to provide some kind of sense of community to the students became a means by which oppositions could be drawn. Of course such oppositions were reliant on the greedy, self-serving attitudes of individual students, but such attitudes were present with both great strength and number. It struck me that a lot of money seems to go to a small minority of the students. The College gives money to the RCSA on a per-student basis. We actually have a rather large budget of about sixty thousand pounds, to be spent on provisions for members. What is shocking, is the fact that certain societies seem intent, year after year, on demanding more money per member of that the society, than the RCSA gets per student. Given that most students are part of more than one society, and use resources from the non-society section, such requests seem completely unfair.

The other problematic element of students at the budget meeting was the sporty boys. There are a set of guys in college who are members of lots of sports societies, and co-operate to get their requests through, to the detriment of all other societies. Its not quite as simple as this though. The sports scene seems to go along with a rather sexist attitude. The fact that people appeared to feel that they were emasculating themselves by letting certain societies take money in the budget; that voting in favour of the art, music, and theatre societies was in some way a challenge to their manhood. I thought I’d left this dichotomy of art and sport at school. It strikes me as extremely interesting that dominant groups express what are essentially lowest common denominator interests so explicitly in a meeting like this. That intellectualism (through the arts) is challenged by the same male dominance against expression that has curtailed the art world since its inception.

It is possibly most scary that such demands are prevalent in places of learning. The constant association of art with the dominated in Western socialisation must be addressed. It is of course pertinent that it takes the demands of money within a formal structure of a budget meeting to bring forth these more general feelings that more usually lurk as a societal undercurrent. It is an economic imperative drummed into children, and now, apparently university students. It is a demand against expression, against dissent, and against protest, setting them in opposition banality, idiocy, and dutiful submission of hegemonic domination. We must oppose any such policies, and fight to emancipate masculinity, in the name of humanity.

On 'No 2 ID'

2006-11-09T19:09:00.000Z

The “No 2 ID’ Campaign has been extremely popular amongst activists across the entire political spectrum. From conservative libertarians who believe that the state has no right to track us or to demand we account for ourselves whenever questioned by authorities, to leftists who believe that such a constriction would undermine their right to dissent. It appears to be this single issue that unites the British population in opposition to the government, and yet it seems to me to be some kind of diversion from the real issue. All of these people have to simply accept that the election of a government is a means by which individuals within our community become accountable to one another. Of course such a conception of governance is undermined by the tendency of elected governments to present themselves (and to be presented in the media) as monolithic.

Democratically elected governments should not be characterised as ‘the powers that be’. They are accountable to the population that elects them, but of course as Marx so eloquently put it, ‘every five years, one votes for those who will misrepresent you’. The British Government has never been without the power-hungry, those who value business, investment, imperial power, etc. over the rights and needs of the population. This on the other hand, is no good reason to argue against the need for ID cards. The government do have information about people, and it is important for effective governance. Yes, we must be wary given the history of governments using such information to use their electorate, but the issue is not really one of civil liberties. It is a far smaller issue than what it is made out to be. The government could just as easily demand that we all carried passports with us, and I doubt that there would be such a fuss kicked up. The ‘No to ID’ campaign seems to be populated with Luddites across the board, who for some reason equate civil rights in general with the right to be anonymous; no doubt that they would be the first to complain were criminals allowed to remain anonymous too.

Whilst I agree that the new ID cards will probably be very costly to the country, and probably not be worth the same as what the government pay for them, I feel that a political objection is somewhat out of place. One cannot vote in elections, leave or enter the country, or have healthcare without identifying oneself. In general such laws seem rather logical, or at least I find very few arguments that can convince me that one should have the right not to be identified in such circumstances. We must fight against our government becoming totalitarian, but this campaign is simply a means to subvert the issue. It refuses to hold the government to account, instead describing itself in an uncompromising diametrical opposition, which is of no use to anyone who wants to affect real political change.

On Fireworks

2006-11-08T16:32:00.000Z

This somehow got deleted before.

Fireworks are have always intrigued me. For some reason I really enjoy standing in the freezing cold watching lumps of burning metal flying through the sky. What I don’t really understand is why I, or anyone else for that matter, like them so much. They are extremely expensive, and literally just go up in smoke. They don’t last for a very long time, and every time you see them, they’re pretty similar. Further to this, they don’t seem to have any real meaning, or at least there is no intention of creating meaning in the displays. They are just an ornament, and yet they have been so captivating to people over the course of history that it is near impossible to label them as a fetish. People still put down their work and travel out in the early evening to watch some lights and listen to loud popping and banging noises.

I suspect that the element that people enjoy is more the ritual of it, the getting on warm clothes, a sense of community (albeit a pretty weird one), and of watching something out of the ordinary. I certainly wouldn’t sit around for half an hour watching fireworks on TV. I rarely think that fireworks are boring – probably to do with the almost-awkwardness of them; the fact that there are all of these shapes and lights in our reality that shouldn’t really be there. Phantasmagoria in the nineteenth century was making a point of the fact that humans were able to create these illusions, but there seems something more to fireworks. They do strangely become part of our reality, the celebration and gathering almost primitive, and possibly evoking a pre-modern tendency. Maybe this evocation of something that presents itself so much outside of our system, and yet also inexplicably within it allows us an intersubjective understanding of our own position.

There is also a sense of release in being able to stand and watch without the need for comprehension, and without the need of interpretation for some time, but still have one’s senses stimulated. I suspect that in this way fireworks are actually a bit like watching snooker. Colours fly around the place, and occasionally something surprising happens. The same boring people who watch snooker on TV would probably watch fireworks on it too. There, is of course some level of signification associated with November 5th. We celebrate the fact that we still have a monarchy, and that our government still feels that it is appropriate to oppress people on the basis of their beliefs, most recently in the anti-terrorism legislation, but previously in the oppression of Catholics in the early Seventeenth Century. We celebrate the fact that our government will carry on oppressing minorities, and that legislation originating in people on the streets must still be passed through a conservative unelected house. Maybe we shouldn’t want our release from society, or maybe it can allow us to reflect effectively on the problems that we must challenge. Either way, there is something both fake (its ephemerality) and authentic (its reality) about the community spirit of a firework display.

The Globalisation of the Proletariat

2006-10-31T00:06:00.000Z

Whilst on the demonstration against top-up fees in London yesterday I ran into an old comrade and we had an argument about Marxism, activism, and agitation. He presented to me that the world of academia is not the place to make political points, and that agitation amongst the people is the way for Marxists to act. This point of view is popular amongst certain Trotskyist organisations and throws up a number of important questions. It is clear that left-wing politics is very rarely advanced in the academy in Britain, and there is a feeling amongst many activist that academic Marxism is a lost cause, or at least closer to masturbation than to changing the world. There are more popular academic movements in America and Germany, but this, since Adorno’s refusal to support the 1968 struggle has remained rather divorced from activism. We cannot simply ignore the advances that academic Marxism – the cultural analysis, literary and critical theory, but it is very much a western project, separated by a huge gulf from the social and economic conditions of the proletariat.

In terms of economic analysis, many Marxists have failed to keep up with the changes of the last twenty years. Whilst being critical of the role of globalisation, many refuse to accept that Marx’s revolutionary class have essentially be exported. Even the bottom-rung workers in Britain are hard to fit into Marx’s models. Take for example call centre workers. Many call centres are now based in India, but those that remain are filled with people whose existence is subsidised by a welfare state that can only exist in the form that it does as a result of exploitation on an international scale. The same can be said of thousands of farmers, who live on subsidies. To analyse these people as being the class to agitate amongst is to make a mistake. They almost without question accept sweeteners from the government in return for not making trouble. The Third World proletariat receive nothing. They are Marx’s revolutionary class on a global scale.

Of course we cannot simply stop agitating in Britain. We must carry on building a movement, both of activists and intellectuals (and hopefully these will be unified). We cannot be under any illusions that those at the bottom of the ladder in Britain are anything like the exploited in the poorest countries in the world; those who produce enough to eat, but who are forced to sell it and starve. They are the class in constant crisis, finding themselves as always antithetical to global economics. They are the ones we must educate, and they are the hope for revolution (although the demands for revolution in Africa and South America have been traditionally overthrown by the American military). To agitate in Britain is only as useful as bringing small reforms, and educating. We can support workers but they will never be a revolutionary class under present conditions. The government will always pay off those in the struggle, and revolution will only happen initially in countries in which this cannot happen.

Treating Children as Children

2006-10-30T08:47:00.000Z

Why is it that even the most intelligent and articulate people act like idiots in the presence of young children? Every time I see a grown adult walking up to a baby and saying “gaa gaa goo goo” I want to shout, “Isn’t that what the baby is supposed to do? How will it ever learn if you don’t speak to it in a normal way?” It’s unlikely that a baby will understand many words, but it’s completely certain that it won’t understand a nonsense collection of syllables. How is it supposed to learn, to become socialised, or to understand anything when it has language needlessly concealed from it. Such as pattern does not only occur in the case of babies. It is carried through to children of almost all ages, with various topics being deemed inappropriate, and adults often choosing to use simpler, but less accurate, words.

Any child can learn how to ask ‘why’ or ‘what does that mean’ relatively early on, so the use of difficult terms and concepts really shouldn’t be a problem. If they are problematic for a child, then that is almost certainly a good thing. One must accept that nearly everything in our world is difficult, and if a child displays evidence of this difficulty, then it is clear that it is engaging with the object. And yet the problem is not confined to language. The entire institution of primary school is thoroughly patronising. Children are convinced by the powers that be that being forced to stand outside with running around aimlessly being the only form of entertainment is ‘fun’. They are treated in almost a sub-human way, having little control over their activities, or the content of the work that they do. Most explanations given to children at primary school are direct equivalents to ‘gaa gaa goo goo’. It is with this means that children in today’s society are totally disenfranchised.

I do understand that there’s a problem with suggesting that the entirety of primary education in cynical and divisive, yet I’m quite convinced that it is one of the major forces that leaves younger members of society feel as if they have no power. One can only really have a say if one has the capability to speak out. One can only effect change if one is allowed to speak on the same terms as those who have power. Whilst I am not suggesting that children should have lots of power, it is clear that they are forcibly held at this stage between being ignored and having all of their actions enforced upon them, If only people spoke to them like adults, and didn’t make them waste their days with colouring in, and other meaningless tasks, they wouldn’t be treated like idiots, and as a result they might not act like idiots. Children are indubitably the future, but we run the risk of forgetting that they are an element of the present too, and that a little eloquence in members of our society is much desired.

Insiders/Outsiders and the Klezmer Revival

2006-10-28T02:40:00.000+01:00

Today’s seminar on Klezmer (Jewish music from Eastern Europe) proved particularly interesting, not for its content, but for the effect it provoked in me. Abi Wood, a lecturer from SOAS came in to give a rather broad session on the topic. Her means of teaching for the first hour was through a dance workshop. She seemed to believe that such dance held some kind of cognitive content, and that in the act of dancing, us students would take on some kind of privileged understanding of the music, that we could be culturally encapsulated by it. I refused to dance, refuting the fact that the cognitive content was held in the dance. Rather, I believe that what she wanted to say could simply be explained, without what I felt was a very culturally problematic display of the revival spirit. The dance workshop played on undermining norms, on exposing the fragility of our culture, and playing on the weakness. It certainly didn’t say anything that couldn’t be written in words (in half the time, might I add). An attack such as this on our culture does not delegitimise it, but it shows it as a relative culture, and suggests that Klezmer culture is of either equal or greater worth. There is no consideration for historical trends or the reasons why our culture is dominant. All music was viewed as so autonomous that it could negate its historical placement.

The session had a particular pertinence for me. While most contemporary anthropology has undermined the idea of the existence of insiders/outsiders, it has remained in the parlance of ethnomusicologists. If there is any insider to the Western Klezmer revival, it is me. I was brought up surrounded by the music and the politics, and I am assured by my brain that I don’t have any special access to mysterious cognitive content. There is no formal difference between the insider based in the political background of the Klezmer revival, than the socio-cultural insider of the Old World Klezmorim. My understanding of the music is a Western understanding, but my understanding of the consequences of its existence are rather more nuanced as a result of my personal experience as a Western Jew.

The attempt to explain away Klezmer’s musical inadequacy by showing it as ‘functional’ or an element of society is problematic. What was interesting is that my criticisms of the music came not from the political identity of my socialisation (that which defends Klezmer), but from the fact that I have studied music. When Abi suggested that the harmony of a Doina wasn’t functional, I pointed out that one could easily analyse it with traditional tools such as Schenker (a means by which a piece of music is reduced to a skeleton). She accepted my point but didn’t wish to debate. If the description of an insider only points to their inability to criticise an element of society, then we must understand that it says far more about the individual/collective, than it does about the object they criticise. My acquired knowledge and experience of the Klezmer revival has luckily remained only as an element of my outlook, and if we are to defend critique, then we must undermine the mythology of both ‘insiders’ and the acts associated with them.

The Problem with Sundays

2006-10-26T23:59:00.000+01:00

There are many elements of our society that are screwed up as a result of a Christian tradition, and while I am aware that Christian bashing is an easy (and thus lazy) way to fill this blog, I currently am particularly annoyed about Sundays. I can’t understand why, when we live in a society that is essentially running all day and all night, shops have completely limited opening hours on a Sunday. I can’t understand why this day is any different for any other, and why the government has an interest in me not being able to buy teabags after four in the afternoon. I have heard the argument from Christians that it is some kind of day of rest, but it occurs to me that these people who find themselves so able to interpret the word of God, are unable to understand the principle of shift-work. The idea of any sort of day of rest is completely outmoded. Do these people expect global markets to stop, political action to cease, and families just to sit uncritically in front of old movies on TV if they manage to get tea in the first place.

I expect that an element of my criticism is the result of my upbringing. Jewish communists don’t tend to go in for the Sunday lunch spiel, yet I often hear a random northerner or four talking about ‘getting Nan over and having a roast’. This whole lethargic attitude seems a little bit silly. I can’t understand why one would want to spend one’s time of rest with a load of people who wish to fill themselves with what appears to be overcooked food and then reminisce about ‘the old days’. This is not culture; it is regression from culture. It is a rejection of the current system and certainly not one that our government should sanction. Whilst I generally accept that a level of government intervention is a good thing, I don’t think that we should have this dominant peasant-like practice imposed on us.

And yet it is not only our shops that have these crazy rules applied to them. Here in Cambridge almost all of the libraries (except for the often ill-stocked college ones) are closed on Sundays. If you feel the need to do some extra research for an essay, or to try and find a journal then you have to wait. I expect I will be criticised as a member of a generation who have everything at their fingertips. I am convinced, unlike many members of the older generation, that this is not a bad thing. We shouldn’t criticise technology that facilitates work, and we shouldn’t preserve these practices in the name of tradition, especially when they are actually getting in the way of work and people’s lives. I value libraries and teabags over bad food and old Northern people. Maybe you think I’m wrong, but should the government really be disagreeing with me?

On Su Doku

2006-10-26T00:01:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, there began a trend for a game named Su Doku, in The Times. At the time I didn't think much of it; it was simply a little number puzzle. Within a matter of weeks, all of the daily newspapers were printing similar puzzles. It seemed that people were buying papers simply so they could do the Su Doku in there. In more recent years there have been whole books of puzzles published, and even a TV show in which contestants play in real time. There has even been a course made by Carol Vordaman (of Countdown fame). And yet, with all its popularity, I really can't understand the attraction of these little number-filled grids. It is completely obvious that a computer could complete the puzzles in the blink of an eye, and yet many people see to get some kind of pleasure out of the fact that they find what is a pretty simple task quite difficult.

If as I walked into the common room, I saw a few people sitting around trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, I’d be forced to ask “do you all think you’re about eight years old?” For some reason unbeknownst to me, partaking in Su Doku is a socially acceptable form of popular idiocy (as opposed to socially unacceptable forms like reading The Sun). It used to be the case that people would do the crossword, and yet they lie in the common room blank. Last year people were so keen that we saw a number of people getting to the common room early in the morning just to rip out the Su Doku to take to lectures with them. It is hard to imagine anyone doing this with a part of the paper that is actually engaging and interesting. This begs the question of why intelligent people feel the need to regress to a predictable boring game with their free time? Mainly it is the result of the idea that doing boring tasks is in some way relaxing.

Even more concerning is the fact that the game is actually the same every day. Ok, the numbers move around a bit, but in playing it one goes through exactly the same methodical and intellectual processes as when doing it the day before. To put a number six in the corner square doesn’t have any meaning external to the game, and you don’t leave the game remembering where various numbers are, and which ones were significant during the course of completing it. I don’t think that many people look at complete grids for their beauty, or any other sort of appeal for that matter. People really need to realise that once you’ve done one Su Doku, you’ve done them all, and you’ve already wasted enough time doing it. If you are bored on your lunch-break then read the newspaper, do a crossword, or write a poem. Don’t pretend to be an inadequate machine.

Hospital Chaplain Redundancies

2006-10-24T12:21:00.000+01:00

Well, it’s been a good few months since I’ve written my blog properly, but I’ve decided that it’s going to make a proper return and I’ll write it every day for the rest of term. Last night listening to the radio I was glad to hear that three hospital chaplains were being laid off (leaving a single chaplain to look after the ‘spiritual health’ of the patients of four hospitals). This money-saving measure means that the trust will be able to employ four nurses urgently needed on the wards. Whilst there is a huge problem with Private Finance Initiative (PFI), in that a tendency towards the efficiency of a market economy is not useful to a system in which the government doles out money on a ‘per-patient’ basis, this sort of change is only too welcome. We must remain critical of PFI and the fact that increase in profits for privately owned hospital trusts is inversely proportional to the amount of money that they put into healthcare after the point at which they treat patients at government standards. With the government keeping such standards relatively low as a sweetener for companies, such a collusion becomes a problem for the patients.

There are not many things I like about capitalism, but when it forces through changes that really should have been made a few hundred years ago I can’t really complain. Of course there would be none of this outrage if the hospital had laid off witch-doctors or homeopaths (or any other types of quack for that matter), but when Christianity is involved there is an uproar from these mad old Tories, who are convinced that belief got them through there cancer, and is far more effective than a load of radio- and chemo-therapy. Why such people are allowed to speak on Radio Four, I am not sure, but for some reason someone in the media still believes that their lunatic voices should be heard. All I know is that I’d far rather be treated by a nurse than a vicar (although this may just be my taste in kinky outfits). I’d rather have medicine than false hope, and I think that tax-payers money is better spent on making people better than condoning and prolonging their idiocy.

The market is a brilliant means of exposing what is expendable, and as such reflects the underlying hegemonic values of society, so couched in economics that they often aren’t visible. That being said, we must fight to preserve certain elements that the market sees as expendable, such as high-quality broad education, good social-services, and responsive health-care. It is a shame that the free market cannot respond adequately to these ethical demands, and that the removal of ridiculous positions such as chaplains is tied to the loss in health-care quality. The solution, of course is to challenge the system. There is no point trying to sustain Keynesian policy, when the government wants a free-market too.

A Facebook Rebellion

2006-09-14T02:52:00.000+01:00

There was a popular outrage last week as Facebook (a networking website aimed at students) changed its format, such that people’s use of the site could be tracked by other users using the new ‘feeds’ system. This, according to many users, was a violation of privacy, and became the basis of one of the largest online campaigns in recent history. Within a matter of hours, huge groups were organised to protest the change, The largest of which made it well over the half a million mark. It seemed that students globally were more riled by this small change than by any other issue. News of the campaign even made it onto the front page of the CNN website. What is of key importance to this campaign is that, depressingly, the move by any individual to oppose the changes seems to have been entirely self-interested, and I would like to conjecture that the fact that a group such as this can gain widespread support, whilst groups with popular political angles (such as groups defending human rights) have trouble is a reflection of thee understanding of what it means to be democratic within my generation.

In my mind, it is wrong to act within a democratic system simply as a matter of self-interest. I am aware that I will probably come under the criticism “wait until you have to pay taxes”, but I would like to remind readers of the effects that self-interested approaches to democracy have had in the past. It is with an absolute disregard to others, and for the promotion of personal economic gain that various systems of slavery have been allowed to subsist globally, It is with self-interest at heart that we now have an economic system that allows the oppression of the majority of society, whilst letting them believe that they are ultimately enfranchised. What kind of a democracy is that?

My argument is not simply that my generation has failed to be politically active, but rather that it has in general become so indifferent to the system whereby it lives, that it no longer needs to find fault, or to strive for progress from where society currently stands. The movement on Facebook is not a political or democratic one. It is merely a plea by each reified individual to remain recognised as that individual, that is, to further reify the system that they are fully assimilated into. I would go as far as to say that I struggle to define it as a movement in its means, rather it only became a movement at the point at which it effected the change that it demanded. If only we could convince my generation to care about society as a whole (to consider society in a truly political way, and to act ‘democratically’ on that basis) a fraction of the amount that they cared about the protection of their own rights, the world may be heading to a future in which discourse begins to have meaning again, and people as collectives could begin to effect real change, rather than the false goals such as “protection of privacy”.

Undermining Religious Imagery

2006-09-06T04:09:00.000+01:00

Arnold Brown, a comedian, once said ‘It’s a shame they killed Jesus. They should have just roughed him up a bit. That way the Christians could hardly say “He got a bloody nose for our sins”’. I was thinking today what would have happened if Jesus would have died another way, and what this would have meant for Christian imagery. Imagine if the Romans had used a firing squad (not that guns had been invented). Today we’d have hundreds of millions of people with little models of guns hanging around their necks. Each alter in a church would be adorned by a gun, and in the bible belt in America, bearded rednecks would teach their children the use of the gun in prayer and in social interaction. What if he’d died in some less exciting way, if he’d been run over by a bus, would we see churches around the world clamouring to get a piece of the blood-spattered windscreen as a relic. Imagine Jesus being resurrected with a tyre-track across his chest.

My point is simply this: that much religious imagery, that is so respected by so many is absolutely arbitrary and inconsequential to the basis of the religious belief. Maybe if the Romans had been a little more creative with their methods of execution it would be easier to see religion as the sham that it is. We must make sure, as a society, if someone is projected forth as a Messiah, or a saviour, that in their death we can find a moment of comedy so that ridiculous beliefs can be more easily undermined in years to come. We could run him (or her) over with a “holy” steamroller, or suffocate him/her with an octopus. Anything but crucifixion. Unfortunately Pontius Pilate was not the creative type, and as a result he gave an unfortunate credence to his victim.

The possibilities of comedic deaths are endless, and it seems that in today’s world the most likely root for a Messiah would be to get themselves bumped off by the American State (especially if he/she pops up in Israel declaring him/herself to be some kind of leader). I am reliably informed that the Israeli “Defence” Force are continuing the work of Herod in killing plenty of Palestinian children. You’d probably have quite a lot of trouble getting your donkey over the security wall on your way from Nazareth to Bethlehem, I wonder if there would be a holy uzi, or a cluster bomb that the people could pray to. Of course the best possibility, if there were a second coming, would be to hang him. That way Christians would be forced for eternity to wear nooses round their necks, making our jobs so much easier when the revolution comes.

On Chivalry

2006-09-05T02:15:00.000+01:00

It is the case at the moment that many people within our society believe that value is based in tradition. These people we can label as conservatives. There is another more interesting, and less easy to label group, of people who believe that value, whilst not deriving from tradition, can be ascribed to things that are traditional and/or old-fashioned. It is with an attack on the politics behind these people’s ideas in mind that I would like to discuss the idea of chivalry. Chivalry takes many forms in contemporary British society, ranging from the broadest idea of respecting a woman on the basis that she is a woman, to enforcing a set of rules upon oneself and others in the name of ‘respect’. Such rules range from not swearing in front of women, to opening doors for them and commenting that you are doing so because they are female.

It is clear that many of the people who value chivalry are women, and yet it is ultimately clear that these women are denying the nature of chivalrous action. There is a two layered effect involved in chivalry. Whilst the experience of ‘respect’ may feel good for whatever reason, it is underpinned by a politic that is, rather than respectful, damaging to women. This is a politic that says that women should be disenfranchised through a process of reducing to them to the fact that they are female. Modern day chivalry, whilst not necessarily practiced by conservatives, implies the return to the ideas that feminism has been attempting to wipe out throughout the twentieth century. It is within the context of this underlying unstated demand that one should be very wary of chivalry.

This is not to say that there should be a concerted effort to wipe out politeness. Whilst I feel that much of what we term as politeness is over the top, this is not what I have a major problem with. I simply feel that if you have thee urge to be polite or kind, then this should be expressed universally, rather than becoming an element of a cultural system that undermines the power of half of the people it effects. Take, for example, the idea of not swearing in front of women. This first came about as a way not to ‘corrupt’ them, and yet it occurs to me that swearing is necessary to many situations, that I do not see a good reason to exclude women from. Women, in general, have no trouble opening doors, and thus if you feel the need to open doors for others, then do it because you believe it to be a kind thing to do. In terms of changing how things are, we must not only be explicit about the implications of chivalric actions, but we must undermine the idea that such a system is attractive. It is in the realms of relationships the women have traditionally been most disenfranchised, and yet it seems that it is also in this sphere that such disenfranchisement has become most difficult to challenge.

On Oxbridge Admissions

2006-08-25T03:45:00.000+01:00

Around this time of year there is always discussion of Oxbridge admission. The process is very strange in itself, and certainly merits a level of discussion. I will talk about Cambridge as that is what I am familiar with, but I believe that some of the same issues apply to Oxford. The nature of the admissions system often makes it feel idiosyncratic at best, and random at worst. Furthermore, the admissions system has a lot to answer for, with under-representation of certain ethnic groups, people from particular economic backgrounds, and people who went to state and comprehensive schools being a prominent element of the demography of the university. The interview system is a rather difficult one. It tends to favour those who have either had training (which generally happens more often in private schools than state schools), those people who have a large amount of confidence in their academic work and opinions (also more likely in private schools) and people who conform to the social expectations of the interviewer, whether this be accent, looks, body language etc.

Whilst there are all of these problems that aren’t easily challenged, there are various initiatives to attempt to solve some of these problems. The two most significant initiatives are the university’s ‘Special Access Scheme’, and the work that CUSU does on access. I am not entirely sure as to why the access work is done almost completely by the student union and not the university. Whilst I understand the importance of having students involved in access, it does seem slightly strange that the university authorities are clearly not concerned about these issues to make provision for dealing with them. The fact that there is no authoritative position has in fact left a strange vacuum of knowledge, which has become filled with a mixture of useful information, rumours, myths, and half-truths.

Of all the resources that have been produced to the matter of Oxbridge Admissions, the worst by far is a book by Elfi Pallis. The book is packed to bursting point with falsehoods, and yet this is not my main problem with the book. The book presents the idea that it is perfectly possible for one to learn how to present oneself to get into Oxbridge, as if there are a set of criteria abstract of academic potential. Whilst it is the case that such a set of criteria may exist, it is certainly on the periphery, and this book refuses to challenge the issues that such a set of prejudicial criteria may presents. Yes, it would be a good thing if Oxbridge could have a more comprehensive intake, but this book is not the way to achieve this. In order to solve the problems of access one must re-assess the criteria that the admissions process tests. This must be a long term aim for the university, not to be relegated to student union work, and not to be fought against by a certain author who considers herself to be left-wing.

On Assimilation

2006-08-24T04:29:00.000+01:00

The idea of assimilation is one that has always been associated with Diaspora communities. Often Diasporas’ identities are defined by their relationships to this idea. This of course leads to a complex of political implications that I would like to look at today. I will look mainly at the effects on the Jewish Diaspora as that is what I am best associated with, but I am certain that the social effects of assimilation on Jews has been mirrored in other communities throughout history. It always struck me as rather odd when Diaspora Jews talked about their own assimilation, as if this was something to be strived for. The concept is in fact rather old, but had its greatest effects in the nineteenth century. This was due to the fact that it was at this time that not only had a new culture (that of the bourgeoisie) been thoroughly established, but such a culture allowed for the philosophical and sociological discussion of what it meant to be Jewish within that society. This is not to say that assimilation did not happen in pre-capitalist society; I’m sure it did. Rather, that the assimilation into the bourgeois enlightenment culture of the nineteenth century was an entirely new phenomenon, or at least a phenomenon that’s basis had change basis had changed so radically that it was unrecognisable.

There were laws throughout Europe until the early nineteenth century governing the jobs the Jews could partake in, and of course when these laws were repealed the feeling amongst the Jews was one of emancipation. They were finally allowed to enter into society on their own terms, but the result was actually rather contradictory to this. Rather than to enter into society as Jews, the idea of assimilation is one of dissolving oneself into a pre-existing society. To an extent the emancipation was an emancipation from real social and economic limitations, but just as great an effect is seen in the emancipation from the identity of what it meant to be Jewish. Whilst what it meant to be Jewish changed at the point at which the laws were repealed, there remained a dialectic between bourgeois society and Jew that meant that if Jews were not to take on an attitude of assimilation, they would be left in an irrational position. They felt the need to escape the past into a society that negatively painted the past they wished to escape from.

Assimilation, for all intents and purposes, became an epithet not for a rigidly cultural change, but rather for an economic change that in turn demanded a change of ideology or opinion. If one was economically assimilated then it would follow that one would escape one’s own previous identity. Such a change is problematic though. Labels remain in the purely social sphere, and assimilation in this sense is not compatible with what is considered to be any kind of community. Jews remained a paradox of the nineteenth century, both as the most progressive within the system of capitalism, and the most undermined by the systems it produced (later leading to fascism).

Language Learning and the National Curriculum

2006-08-22T20:14:00.000+01:00

Two years ago our government made a major change to the national curriculum for secondary schools. They decided that a GCSE in a foreign language should no longer be compulsory. This means that it is possible to go through the entire education system and study a foreign language for only a few hours a week between the ages of eleven and fourteen. Language learning has never been Britain’s forte, and of course since the GCSE stopped being compulsory; the number of students taking the qualification has sharply dropped. In almost every country in Europe languages are taught in school from the age of seven or younger, and it is often shocking when one visits a foreign country one becomes aware how much better the language skills are there compared to Britain’s younger generation. Whilst it is true that some of the top universities in the country require students to have at least one foreign language, this does not seem to be enough to compel the vast majority of students to continue with what are both maybe the most difficult and the most rewarding of subjects.

The real problem with how languages are treated by the education system is the fact that they are treated as academic subjects, simply existing to fulfil the requirements of a qualification. Nowhere in the British education system is language learning treated as a ‘life-skill’ or even as vaguely useful. It is insisted upon that a foreign language is useful only in itself, and it is with this in mind that it becomes rather unsurprising that young people are not interested in taking the study of it further than is deemed necessary. There is an underlying assumption that students will simply understand the use of the content of their education. And yet it is this very assumption of use that is ultimately undermined by the practice of examination and the associated definition of some kind of end-point within the process of learning.

The change in the curriculum relating to language learning is deplorable in itself but I feel that it is representative of a far more cynical move in education towards a system that disenfranchises the learner from every bit of knowledge imparted to them. That is not to say that education is and should be an education for social use (there is plenty of value in education that is not necessarily socially useful), but rather that I feel that it is politically necessary for education in all of its forms to in some way emancipate the learner. Whilst it is in no way straight-forward to link the change in curriculum to a refusal of social and mental emancipation and enfranchisement, it is perfectly obvious that the removal of languages from the curriculum does limit these aspects of life. Whether this is as sinister as I feel it is must be left open for discussion, but I feel it is important that we not let these changes go by unnoticed and uncriticised.

Aldus Manutius

2006-08-21T18:46:00.000+01:00

I do not have many heroes, and in fact I find the whole idea of focussing one’s life on another person rather spurious. That being said, I feel that there are a number of people who have been hugely influential to our world, and yet often they are people who are not really recognised for their achievements. The man I want to focus on today is Aldus Manutius the Elder. Chances are you haven’t heard of him, and I, in fact, only came across his name by chance. Manutius was a fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian printer, based in Venice. And, whilst Venice was the world centre for printing at the time (soon after the advent of the printing press: Possibly the world’s second most important invention ever, after the wheel), Manutius is important for a reason other than his printing. He is the man who invented the semi-colon, alongside being hugely influential in developing the italic typeface.

Whilst Manutius actually created the italic typeface so that books could be produced in a smaller ‘pocket-sized’ format, one cannot doubt the influence that such an invention has had on literature since that time. That being said, I actually find the invention of the semi-colon far more exciting. Many anthropologists have worked on language – on the fact that it appears to have existed wherever humans have existed, and the fact that it has evolved at the point at which new meanings are needed. There is an oft-cited example of the number of words in the Inuit language for different types of snow. But the invention of the semi-colon is something very different. Rather than evolving on the basis of meaning or content, it is actually an evolution of form. The semi-colon does not have any expressible content; rather it allows the content of our language to be expressed in a new way. The ability to consider the necessity for such a tool as the semi-colon is absolutely mind-blowing.

Ok, so I might be a bit of a geek with my fetishisation of a dead Italian bloke, but one cannot deny the importance of his inventions to the world. It is true that people in general do not know how to use semi-colons these days; I find that a real shame (for those of you who don’t know how to use them, this is a good example of how). They are a precise and succinct way of putting across an argument. It seems that these days the form of one’s rhetoric is often relegated in its importance relative to the perceived pre-eminence of the concepts represented by words. Manutius provides us with a great example of how our language has and should evolve opportunistically, and it is with an urge for simplicity and comprehensibility that I wish to paint him as a hero. It is difficult to conceptualise the direction that our language will go in. Maybe we will be condemned to the current vogue for buzzwords, but this imagination is only one for content. I expect it will be a very long time before someone with the foresight of Manutius comes along, and picks us all up on the problematic formal structures that still plague us.

The Jewish Museum

2006-08-20T23:43:00.000+01:00

I have been in Berlin this week (hence the lack of posts). I saw lots of interesting things, and had the chance to think about a lot that I will be writing about for the next couple of weeks. On our second day in Berlin we (my mother and I) went to the Jewish Museum. Set in a building by Daniel Libeskind, that was widely acclaimed when it was first built, the museum houses an exhibit that traces the German Jewish community from a thousand years ago through to the present day. Unfortunately, in what could be one of the most important museums in the world, one is left feeling as though the politics of the place are rather crass.

I personally had a real problem with the building. Rather than addressing the issues of Judaism (and particularly the violence of the holocaust) in the way that it purports to, it actually just demonstrates a feeling of abstract violence. A violence that is brutal in its randomness, and I found this very difficult to reconcile with the aims of the exhibition. Often the building was extremely distracting from the cognitive content of what we were seeing.

A whole floor of the museum is dedicated to the holocaust, and yet this is the element of the museum that seems most incomplete. On exiting the exhibition I realised that Fascism had not even been mentioned, and in fact nor had any politics surrounding the genocide. It was just treated as something abstract that had happened, strangely divorced from the continuity that we term as society. There was also a lack of discussion of an intellectual response (whether Jewish or not) to the holocaust. There was the cursory mention of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, but no discussion of the fact that the Nazis had aimed there genocide not only on an ethnic but on a political basis. There was also no mention of the other ethnic and social groups that were targeted by the Nazis.

Alongside the exhibition was a sculpture of towers representing what it is like to be a Diasporan Jew. An attempt to represent a lack of comfort, and of isolation, but I believe that the sculpture entirely missed the point of Diaspora. It refutes any conception of identity with its insistence of the feeling of isolation, and in turn refuted community. It seemed to miss the point not only of what being Jewish means to people, but also why being Jewish has always been necessarily problematic due to a conflict of identity and assimilation (which may even be related to the dialectic of individual and collective). This sculpture was anti-dialectical in the most un-Jewish way. It seems to me that to have such a prominent museum is a great opportunity, and yet the opportunity is missed by the insistence on low-level historical formation and the depoliticisation of any idea that is represented, both inside and outside the building.

Playing The Lottery

2006-08-13T22:07:00.000+01:00

Playing the lottery always seemed like a really bad idea to me. Firstly the odds are terrible, at somewhere around fourteen million to one, and secondly, the government pays for what should be paid for in tax money with lottery money. This is of course a major ethical concern for any economic centrists, and it is widely accepted that the lottery is actually a rather cynical right-wing phenomenon, but that is not the issue that I want to discuss. I would like to look more at the odds that one can get, and whether it is actually worth investing in.

The odds are indubitably terrible, and one can simply not expect to make one’s money back by investing in lottery tickets. But that is a result of what we term “explicit odds”. If one is to apply the concept of ‘implied odds’ to the lottery, then the result is rather different. The best way to describe implicit odds is with a game of poker. Imagine a hand in which you hold the 4 and 6 of clubs, and there is the ace of clubs, the king of diamonds and the ten of clubs, and the seven of spades on the table. Your opponent bets at you, and chances are you’re completely beat. It is extremely likely that he has you beat. He probably has a pair of kings or aces, and the chance of you winning from this position are only about twenty-five percent, but there is a very compelling argument that you should call a smallish bet in this position. Whilst if you bet like this all the time, you will lose overall, the point is that if you do hit your flush, your winnings will be so great that the risk doesn’t matter. It is ultimately not important whether you make your odds-worth of money back (you’d need to make four times your outlay for this), rather your winnings can be judged n some kind of utility value using this system.

If such a system is applied to the lottery then we can see that the implied odds of a one pound bet are indeed very good. This does not mean that you should sink all your money into the lottery, but rather that a certain level of investment in it would be the correct approach. Deciding this level is not actually a completely mathematical decision, rather it is one that must be based on assessments of losses and possible gains relative to one’s life. A jackpot win would transform almost anyone’s life, as would an investment of two hundred pounds a week. I suspect that the correct figure of investment for most people is pretty low, but that doesn’t mean that it’s negligible. I’m sure some student economist will read this and find a problem with this argument, but it’s at least something interesting to consider, and a possible way to show that a good bet is not always one that will show a consistent profit (of course this is a rather extreme example).

Bad Boys and Grumpiness

2006-08-12T23:49:00.000+01:00

This blog post arises from a discussion I was having with Reuben and Mike the other night. Of the questions asked by teenagers about relationships, one of the most common is “why do girls always go for bad boys/guys”. Is it the thrill, the adventure etc. Firstly in analysing this question, we must realise that the girls in question are often solidly middle-class and the boys are working class, or at least embrace a culture that has been associated with working class youths in the last few years. Maybe one could conjecture that this exploration, rather than one of action (that is, of doing something bad or wrong) is in fact an exploration of culture (the defining oneself in association with one’s identified other). Whatever the reason, it is clear that many young men who would not describe themselves as ‘bad boys’ see this as a problem.

The bad boy culture is something I’ve always found it particularly difficult to comprehend. I cannot even imagine myself committing violence towards another person, rather if I have an issue that I feel needs resolving, I will either argue it out or simply become grumpy for a while. I am grumpy for rather a lot of the time, and I feel it is key to my analysis that ‘bad boys’ do not take on this grumpiness. How often do you see a guy in the street frowning as he beats another person up. On the contrary, such an action is generally accompanied by some kind of arrogant glare. Whilst I may be generalising a little, I do believe that my grumpiness, and another person’s violent outbursts originate from the same type of cause.

It is actually a scar on our culture that dealing with one’s problems in a violent matter is rewarded in a sense, whilst grumpiness is looked down on. It is not as simple to say that these girls do not make a decision about who they find attractive. It is very clear that the decision, rather than being a personal one, is entirely cultural. Such a culture becomes troublesome for the girls who get into relationships with violent men, for the men who it encourages to be violent, and for everyone else who has to peacefully coexist with them. The only means by which we can alter the status quo is by demanding a change in consciousness, a demand that people be grumpy, or that they argue about issues rather than about the people from whom the issues emanate. As a young man it is all to easy to slip into ‘ad hominem’ gestures which then for some unknown reason gain respect. Maybe the grumpy deserve a little more respect. Maybe grumpiness will one day be viewed as a virtue, and those who argue on the streets with logic rather than fists will be those whose culture really deserves exploration.

Terrorism, and the Need for Cynicism

2006-08-10T23:45:00.000+01:00

This evening, sitting with my family in a restaurant, eating a rather hot vegetable Jalfrezi, I was pleased to hear a man a few tables away berating regarding their position on the current state of affairs in the middle east. He went on to talk about how he was completely unconvinced by the news stories today that told us that a terror attack had been foiled. It wasn’t only him though. No-one I know seems to believe that the arrests are for the purpose we are told. The government has been in crisis in the past few weeks, and if we’ve learnt anything from the last few years, it’s that terrorism is the way to instil fear, and a rather sinister sense of solidarity with leadership amongst the populace. The current arrests seem rather too convenient, and whilst there is a real problem of terrorism, the way it is reported is very strange.

Listening to the news at one o’clock on radio four, the reports on the current situation at Heathrow and High Wycombe seemed unending. It was only at 1:25 that the newscaster announced “there has been a suicide bomb in Iraq and thirty-five people are dead”. This I can believe. This is not the sort of convenient alert that the media in Britain like to portray, rather this is part of a conflict that looks as though it will rapidly escalate into a full scale civil war. Oh how the government would like to convince us that we are at war, that there is an enemy we can unite against.

No doubt that the men who were arrested today will be tried in their time. Many expect that they will be imprisoned for as long as possible before they are even brought to trial. That’s of course what the new legislation on terrorism is for. Whilst terrorism does exist, and is something that the government must deal with, we must firstly be extremely wary of the opportunism that Blairites display in the media, and secondly be wary of the fact that our government has had no qualms about lying to us in the past. yes, overting a tragedy should probably be in the public domain, but when it not only challenges human rights, but is used to cover up further atrocities throughout the globe it simply cannot be tolerated.

We must be clear that the current war on terror is not an indiscriminate war on terrorism, rather the terrorism it targets is the terrorism it is convenient to target. The war on terror is far more a media entity than it is a reality, something for us to latch on to when government sponsored terrorism gets a little too out of hand. Let me ask you this: When was the last time you heard anything about Gaza?

NUS Extra Cards

2006-08-09T18:24:00.000+01:00

Sorry for CUSU people who have already seen my argument on this in another version. There is no doubt about the fact that students were sold out at the NUS national conference, with the acceptance of the new ‘NUS Extra’ cards. These cards, hailing from the work of Joe Rukin and NUSSL would get rid of the discounts that students got on a normal NUS card and would force students to buy a different card for £10 if they still want discounts. The ten pounds would then be split: six pounds would go to NUS (to make up the current deficit) and four pound would go to the union that sold the card (as a kind of sweetener). The ploy from certain members of the NUS exec was to make it look like people won all round. The NUS would get their money, the local unions would have a bit of extra cash, and the students would make their money back through the discounts. Unfortunately my analysis of how the new cards would work is somewhat more sinister.

The plan was for NUS to produce two types of card, a members pay subscriptions through their unions and they couldn’t be left without cards if they didn’t want to pay the extra ten pounds. We were told that a trial of the new system had been succesful in the North-West. We weren’t told that some university unions (such as Lancaster) refused to distribute the free cards and told students that they would have to pay for any sort of NUS ID. Of course NUS proclaimed the trial as a great success, regardless of these problems.

What we must realise is that this is a challenge to the diversity of our union. It will be the unions of the poorest institutions that try and sell the Extra cards the hardest (and are less likely to tell students about the alternative ‘democracy cards’). It will also be the students in these institutions who will be unlikely to get value out of an extra card. I was told at regional conference that the discounts will be about 10% so you must spend £100 to even get your money back. That’s a lot of money for most students.

It came up last week that this new NUS policy may stop us having CUSU cards and I have been arguing since that we must not be complicit with NUS action simply because they passed at NUS conference. We shouldn’t take blood-money for those at the top of NUS exploiting its membership. We should be clear that an opposition of this policy is to stand in solidarity with other students around the country. Money for students unions should come through the government, and if that is not enough, then that is another issue for us to fight, but we shouldn’t concede and become more like a business and less like a union.

Drugs Trial Victims

2006-08-01T01:07:00.000+01:00

The news this week has included discussion of a number of men who took part in a medical trial that went wrong. Soon after being injected with the drug, the men became so ill that they were forced to be in intensive care for a number of weeks. It has now transpired that these people are incredibly likely to have cancer. As a result of this news, the men involved are taking legal action and are demanding compensation from the corporation who organised the drug trial. This, to me, seems absurd. Whilst the trial has wrecked their lives, they were well aware of the risks that they were taking, and were paid adequately for those risks. Each of the men was paid two thousand pounds for their initial participation, which would have taken a few days. Very few jobs pay this well, so it is extremely clear that they were being paid, not only for their inconvenience, but for the risks that they were taking.

People often seem to have trouble dealing with the consequences of their actions, but it is ridiculous when the legal system aids them in doing so. Of course, it is not common within our society for someone to be paid for incurring risks, but it does happen. Take, for example, a tight-rope walker, who in the course of a show falls off the high-wire and breaks his back. He was probably reasonably well paid for his act, but injury is a possible consequence of his work and he has little right to complain. If there wasn’t a chance of injury then the whole tight-rope thing wouldn’t be nearly as exciting, and people probably wouldn’t watch. In the same vain, the point of drug trials is to find out which drugs cannot be used on humans. If we could work this out without drug trials then there would be little need for them, but the fact that this isn’t possible makes them a necessity. The fact we can’t know also means that in the course of drug trials we will inevitably find drugs that will not work for humans. Yes, this is an extreme case, but it is again merely an element of the jobs that these men were undertaking.

I do sympathise, that these people may be devastated by the fact that their lives are unlikely to be very long, but I don’t see this as a reason to pander to their demands. If they had died immediately as a result of the trial, then none of this would have happened. The drugs company probably would have made an apology to the families, but that would be the end of it. We must simply accept that life has become a commodity in our society whether we like it or not, and it seems to me that the compensation for these men has already been paid in their fee for taking these tests.

An Email From My Zionist Uncle

2006-07-29T01:16:00.000+01:00

I am sorry to be blogging so much on the current conflict in the Middle East, but it is on my mind, and is something I have been thinking about quite a lot. Last night I received an email from my uncle. It read “How True!!!!” and displayed the below picture:

He had sent it to a list of about twenty people, and given the nature of the cartoon I felt the need to respond to the entire list, regardless of the fact that I didn’t know any of them. My email read:

Dear All,

I feel somewhat uncomfortable writing this email, knowing none of you, but I feel that some serious analytic response is needed to this disgusting propaganda that my uncle feels the urge to send around. The argument that the current conflicts are the result of some kind of ploy by a media savvy Palestinian military are false. Do you really believe that all those civilians have been killed in Gaza because the Palestinian military think that it will gain them representation in the Western Press. The cartoon adds to the false impression that the Israeli military is merely a 'defence force'. It is not. It is an imperialist, aggressive invading force. Maybe a more pertinent analysis of the cartoon would be the that the Israeli soldier in that situation has no qualms about shooting. They have done it before (48, 67, 82 etc) and no doubt they will do it again. They are probably shooting (or bombing as it were) civilians as I am writing this email. Let us be in no doubt, the Israeli tactics for the current conflict are to paralyse the civilian populations of Lebanon and Gaza so they lose faith in their leaders (Hezbollah and Hamas respectively). These are NOT attacks on the leadership. I am not in any way defending Hezbollah and Hamas as political forces, apart from the fact that they were democratically elected, but rather, I am trying to show that the reason why there are so many civilian casualties on the sides of Lebanon and Gaza is because THAT IS WHO ISRAEL ARE AIMING THEIR BOMBS AND SHELLS AT. Maybe this is too difficult a concept for the likes of my uncle to understand, but I would like to make my opinion clear. The below picture is not 'true' and does not 'explain it all'.

I am sorry to have had to have sent this to a list of people with whom I am not acquainted, but I hope you can understand that I feel it was necessary.

Yours,

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg
Robinson College, Cambridge

I feel that such a response is adequate, but this morning awoke to two emails. One was rather receptive of my opinions. The author was clearly a Zionist, but he was also completely ashamed of Israel’s recent actions. The other response was less pleasant. A few quotes shall suffice to sum up its position “I see from your email that you are at Cambridge University which suggests you have half a brain. The drivel you wrote suggests that the missing other half is entrenched firmly with radical Islam which wants to annihilate the Jewish people”, “You are part of that limp-wristed tradition of lefties who wanted to appease Hitler”, “don't criticise your uncle Barry, he's much more of a mensch than you will ever be.”

It scares me that this sort of propaganda is around, and furthermore that it is distributed in such a fashion. We must do our best to challenge it wherever possible, regardless of the abuse that is thrown at us for saying what we believe is right.

On Deportation

2006-07-27T23:55:00.000+01:00

This week has seen another New Labour Home Secretary telling the public that he will be coming down even further on immigrants, and will be increasing the pressure for deportations. The major criticism on this point has come from David Cameron, rather than criticising the politics of the suggesting, actually saying that New Labour will not get the praxis correct. There has been very little suggestion that such policy is politically dubious, and it seems that there has been relatively little thought for the deportees, who in general live in abject poverty, and would not put themselves in that position without a very good reason. British legislation on this matter is particularly difficult. To start with, it is very difficult to claim asylum, especially if you are in the common position of having no papers, or not being able to convince the British State (who have an interest in you not being in Britain) that you were abused or oppressed to the point that you couldn’t stay in your own country. A further complication is that people, when they are deported, are deported to the country that they were last known to be in, even if it was just a place where the person just stopped over on the way to Britain.

I remember when I was at secondary school, and a boy in my year along with his family was threatened with deportation. They had fled the People’s Republic of Congo (where politics have in general been disgusting since Patrice Lumumba was deposed in 1961). His father was a carpenter and had been threatened and abused because he used his skills to create huge socialist bill-boards. The family had been in Britain for over six years. The Home Office sent them letters just before Christmas. In fact, the Home Office has a habit of sending letters at times like this, when people can’t get support from schools etc. Thankfully, after a long hard-fought campaign, the boy and his family were allowed to stay in Britain. But for every person who wins their battle, many lose. Britain seems to have a very loose definition of what is a safe country for people to return to. All that seems to matter is that the state saves a little bit of cash.

This being said, anti-deportation campaigns are amongst the more successful of radical campaigns these days. Every now and again an email goes round asking people to fax the home office, and it seems that often these have a relatively positive effect. Of course it is completely unfair that people are put through this just so they can get on with their life. British people, it seems, are all too willing to wield their privilege as a weapon against those they define as Other. Short term help is possible (and necessary), but we must really provide a serious political alternative to the hard-line opinions that the major political parties are currently proposing.

The Israeli Attack on the UN

2006-07-26T23:56:00.000+01:00

Let us be brutally honest to start with. No-one is very shocked when Israel kills swathes of Arabs in the name of defence. Its army is named the Israeli Defence Force, and yet it continually makes violent incursions into neighbouring countries. The current incursions are in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Of course this all changes when the people attacked are not indigenous peoples, but are those brought in by the UN to keep the peace. The greatest outrage of the last 24 hours is the media reaction to the murder, by the Israeli army, of four UN representatives, who were observing the military action. The powers that be in Israel demand that the attack was in no way deliberate. They claim that it was some kind of mistake that this UN base was shelled for twelve hours and then was hit with a precision bomb. It was also apparently a mistake that the Israeli generals ignored ten emergency calls from the UN representatives. This all seems rather too convenient for me to believe.

Israel does not want to UN to be watching their atrocities in Lebanon. Israel does not want the world to know what is happening in Gaza. This act of aggression has effects on both of these. Whilst it may be argued that this murder will encourage the UN to focus more on these events, but it also shows a very clear message that Israel are not afraid of going beyond what the UN would like to limit them to, in terms of military violence. Of course, in the wider scheme of things these deaths are inconsequential. They don’t compare to the number of people who have already died in the conflict, or the number who will eventually die as a result of the violence.

Israel has a habit and a history of wiping people off the map, and maybe the good that could come out of this would be a public exposé of the brutal order of the Israeli army. Unfortunately, for the moment, the attack hasn’t undermined their public image. America are still planning on sending them weapons over the coming week, and the headlines on the BBC still discuss the relatively minimal number of Israeli fatalities within Lebanon whilst they are trying to overrun cities. We must be clear in our analysis that there is not real strategy behind these incursions. There are no plans of what to do with the ruined cities of Southern Lebanon, and of course it is only with the UN out of the way that Israel is able to commit further atrocities in the name of defence. One must ask if the murder of the UN observers was an act of defence too, and whether it could ever be justified as such.

On Zugzwang

2006-07-25T23:54:00.000+01:00

Well it seems that it’s back to the old late night posting of last term. Hopefully this will keep the blog a little more regular than it’s been over the last few months. Tonight’s topic is Zugzwang. This is a term I first learnt about when playing chess when I was a kid, and I’ve always found it quite interesting. It refers to a position in which one is forced to make a move that is to one’s own detriment, simply because no other moves are possible. In chess this classically occurs in the end-game, when there are relatively few pieces on the table, each with a very limited number of moves. What we can see from the idea of Zugzwang is that chess is ultimately a game of strategy rather than one of tactics. It is one of intention towards an objective rather than the short-term battle of material gain. What happens then, when we try and apply Zugzwang to reality.

Of course such an application doesn’t come easily. There is, in my mind, no purpose or objective to life. One does not live in order to capture the king (although this would be rather amusing), rather, one just lives. That being said, it is clear that one may have a number of objectives at anyone time. It is also the case that anyone with a serious materialist understanding (or critique as it may be) of the world, or reality, must observe our existence as a set of choices. But what if we are presented with a situation in which, whilst our objective is still attainable, we must choose between acts that are at least in the short term detrimental to our objective. Do we have a means to choose? In chess the answer to this question is easy. One must play the least worst move, but reality is different. The foresight one is given at a chess board is guarded. Over and over we are thrown into an unknown. We are forced away from strategy and into tactics.

What is actually interesting here is that I believe we are able to successfully analyse a huge proportion of human action in terms of strategy, but relatively little in terms of tactics. It strikes me that this is the inverse of most animals, and is the result of civilisation, but unfortunately it has consequences for those of us that are plunged into a society that is pervaded by what we understand to be wrong. There is no human tactic for critique. We should, just like in the chess game, keep our eye on the target. The most interesting aspect of Zugzwang is the fact that the object is the exact opposite from what we are forced to do. I believe that it is ultimately possible to act within a system whilst understanding a way to destroy it. Of course this is just as hard as turning from Zugzwang to winning a game.

A Demonstration Last Saturday

2006-07-24T21:46:00.000+01:00

As an experienced activist, I don’t normally expect protests to give me a new experience, and yet the demonstration against Israel’s military action in Lebanon and Gaza last Saturday was certainly new, and unfortunately it did not feel very comfortable. There were the usual band of leftists, somewhat depleted due to the demonstration being called at only four days notice. But alongside these familiar faces were quite a significant number of Lebanese people who live in the UK. It became clear early on that these people were generally unpoliticised, and it seemed like a good opportunity to nuance their opinions on the current situation. Unfortunately this was not easy given some of the slogans that were floating around. Islamists were out in force, defending the plight of the right-wing religious Hezbollah, and all too often the issue did not seem to be one of a state killing civilians and disrupting a nation, but rather a support for one of two nationalist powers.

There were of course good elements of the demonstration. I was marching with the Jewish Socialists’ group, and various groups around the European Jews for Justice for Palestinians, both of whom have great critiques of the situation. The real problems came with the speeches. They were almost all (with the exceptions of the aforementioned groups) completely uncritical of Hamas and Hezbollah. Very few made the links between the nationalism and the religious fundamentalism that link the politics of Israel and of these groups. George Galloway spoke to rapturous applause but the content of his speech was diabolical. He proclaimed the greatness of Hezbollah and their leader. He reproached the Israeli people rather than the Israeli state and the military (regardless of the fact that there was a demonstration in Tel-Aviv that matched the size of the one in London). Azam Tamimi went on to proclaim that ‘All Israelis are thieves.’

We must be clear that we oppose the military action in Gaza and Lebanon, that we understand the politics behind it to be reactionary and opportunist, but it is important that we direct the campaigns against such actions so as the resistance doesn’t become comparable to what we criticise. It is impossible to criticise the terroristic approach that the Israeli government and military state take towards international affairs if we are willing to stand and proclaim our support for other terrorists and nationalists. What we have to understand is that the impulse for this support of Hamas and Hezbollah is ultimately incompatible with a leftist aim. It is, on the contrary, the result of either an Islamist or an Arabist consciousness. It is not rational, and its political ends are not one of freedom, but rather, either religious despotism or the most reactionary type of national liberation. Yes, it is important to offer our support, and to be present at demonstrations such as the one that happened on Saturday, but it is just as important, if not more so, to be critical and to feel that discomfort with the political ends of those marching alongside us.

On Inconvenient Spectacles

2006-07-21T23:30:00.000+01:00

For those of us who don’t want to have to take our glasses off every other minute, it seems that fashion has something against us. The latest fashion, or fad it may seem, amongst spectacle designers is the square frame. Now this would be just about bearable if it was possible to get frames other than those that are deemed fashionable, but sadly this is not the case. My real gripe with these square frames is that the bottom of the glasses cuts directly through the line that one would naturally use to read. The only solution to this problem is to either take the glasses off when you read (not so easy when you spend about eight to ten hours a day reading), or to move them down your nose.

There is, of course, as solution, and this is to produce glasses that are a more sensible shape. Glasses that have deep lenses that one can read through even if they aren’t actually reading glasses. This is what I wear, but when my father stood on my glasses a week ago, I began to discover that they are near-impossible to track down. I am actually writing this sitting in an optician’s shop in Chancery Lane, which is apparently the only place in London that stocks the things.

The aspect of this problem that I find particularly shocking is the fact that with the number of people who wear distance vision specs and who do a lot of reading for their work, it seems that no-one else is complaining about this issue. I know that it’s hardly important in the grand scheme of things, but in a society whose economic system is often described as tending towards efficiency, it seems like a needless problem and one that simply shouldn’t exist. Of course there is a further explanation for this. To say that capitalism tends towards efficiency is rather a misnomer. What it actually tends towards is the accumulation of huge piles (albeit virtual piles these days) of cash, and when we say they tend towards efficiency, what we are actually saying is that the growth of these piles of cash within a ‘perfect system’ is exponential.

If we understand that the products of a capitalist society are designed for the utility of the producer (that is to bring in money) rather than for the utility of the consumer (to actually be useful in a real life situation) then we can start to analyse why the shape of glasses these days happens to be so annoying. It seems that square frames sell. I myself had some for a while. No-one seems to know why the sell, what exactly it is about little rectangles that people find attractive, but they do. And once they are off the shelf, the producers can wash their hands of them, leaving the consumer with frustration, resentment, but worse of all, nowhere else to go. Returning to an optician buying a pair of spectacles that are just as infuriating as your last is certainly not a fun experience.

On Positive Discrimination

2006-07-01T02:35:00.000+01:00

The politics of ‘positive discrimination’ are certainly not as simple as they at first seem. At first the idea seemed like a rather radical one, and yet in more recent years it has become almost outrightly rejected by the left. Often radicals are rather too caught up in the fluffy terms of equality, which being all well and good when considering the future, or at least what we intend the future to be like, is absolutely useless for any serious analysis of the present. Any analysis that suggest that equality exists is any element of a capitalist society is a priori wrong. Capitalism thrives on inequality, and if there was no such thing as inequality then we could simply return to Marx’s ‘primitive communism’. The problem that we must understand is that the inequalities of capitalism, whilst capitulating themselves as social ‘differences’, often manifested as race, gender, or sexuality, are essentially material inequalities, and such inequalities if our society is to tend towards equality must too be challenged on a material level.

The job of the leftist is to legitimise and to perpetrate the challenge too the current inequalities and one of the most powerful tools in this task is an element of discrimination. If we are to fulfil the old feminist motto of ‘equal but different’ then our current analysis must read ‘unequal and different, but unequal not as a result of those differences’ (not quite as catchy, I know). When we discuss positive discrimination we are almost exclusively referring to equality of opportunity, and whilst this does not connote something of systematised material value, it is indubitably of material value within a system. Keynesianism has produced a means by which this problem may be challenged on the most basic level, but still we are left with the majority of children in what often seem like inadequate educational institutions and the ill in hospitals that simply do not fulfil their needs.

Positive discrimination, if we are to accept it, must be inherently materialistic in its nature. Through the structure of organised social life, the discrimination inherent in a destructured economic life can be ‘righted’. We must be under no illusions that capitalism is discriminatory, and it is discriminatory to the many. Whilst without a radical reform of the entire economic system (a reasonable demand I believe) it is ultimately impossible to demand an effective equality, the best we can do is to centralise and to concentrate our resources on addressing the imbalance of the status quo. Whilst this is all well and good, it does little to argue for positive discrimination towards sets of people in cases where the economic factors are not obvious. What must be remembered is that whilst economic structures are not necessarily on the surface, they do tend to exist. We must be careful not to berate positive discrimination when our real problem is generalisation. If generalisation is the problem then it must be attacked, but for anyone who regards themselves to be radical, an attack on a measure which increases a tendency towards equality seems problematical.

The Problem with Orwell

2006-06-28T23:12:00.000+01:00

It was rather odd watching television at 10pm this evening having the choice of watching ‘Room 101’ or ‘Big Brother’. One can hardly deny the pre-eminence of the imagery of Orwell’s novel in today’s society, most notably in the media. The issue that I would like to take up in today’s blog, is the fact that nineteen eighty-four has, since its first publication, been treated as left-wing. I take issue with both the analysis that the text provides as well as the practical consequences that it appears to present as conclusions regarding the integration of the individual into the system that it paints.

Reality is far subtler than the society of big brother, or rather to make my point more pertinent, it is not the public presentation of big brother that makes such a figure powerful, rather such power must be derived from material structures rather than merely structures of ideas. For Orwell, power is completely ideological. If one dominates in the realm of the idea, then it follows for Orwell that one dominates in the social and material world. This, according to traditional Marxist thinking is completely back to front, and whilst my post-structuralist friends would disagree with any sort of definition of reality as a totality, I feel that this distinction creates practical differences between the Marxist and the Orwellian. The only solution to a current societal crisis is the structural reform of social and economic conditions. The current conditions are such that they in fact interfere with ones ability to perceive these very conditions, so it is straightforward that a challenge to the perception of conditions rather than to the conditions themselves would leave society in crisis.

If we see Orwell’s text as some kind of contorted allegory, then the only moral that we can draw from it is along the lines of ‘don’t rebel or you will be crushed by the system’. Such a moral is predicated on the ability to absolutely abstract and remove oneself from the governing hegemony. It is in this sense that Orwell’s text becomes somewhat acceptable to the current system. I understand that it is rather too easy to sound like a mad conspiracy theorist, but I am absolutely convinced by my conviction that the sole interest of capitalism is to keep the correct people disenfranchised. The problem with capitalism is that rather than being defined, as Big Brother, or ‘minitrue’ is, it is ultimately pervasive. It cannot be pinned down to one person, one action, or one set of opinions. That is the problem we struggle with when we try and oppose it, and it is the lack of the occurrence of this problem in Orwell’s text that makes us unable to see it as compatible with leftist opinions. We can only change ideological conditions through changing material conditions, and if we do simply attempt to change ideology regardless of material we will be stuck with Orwell’s defeatist conclusions. Of course my repulsion is somewhat connected to the course of history, and I doubt I would be quite so critical if Orwell had not spent time giving names of British communists to MI5 after 1945.

The Problem with Hand-Dryers

2006-06-27T23:44:00.000+01:00

Those little boxes in public lavatories. The ones that expel the warm air whilst people rub their hands beneath them. What exactly is the point of their existence? I am told by many people that they are ‘hand-dryers’ and yet I am absolutely convinced that they are completely inappropriate for use if one wishes to dry ones hands. I did actually test out this hypothesis in the toilets of the British Library yesterday. The results of my test were actually quite convincing. I felt rather stupid standing there for three and half minutes with my hands underneath a fan, but after all the rubbing they were still wet. So, we now have proof that hand-dryers do not deserve their title. It is intriguing to me that no-one seems to have done a test like mine before, and realising that these little white boxes are useful, proposed some kind of alternative design for this problem. For me having wet hands isn’t exactly a problem. They seem to get dry pretty quickly outside, or just wiping them on my clothes.

I expect that people have spent their lives designing and producing hand-dryers and yet their efforts have remained pretty much useless. I am not really in a position myself to suggest some kind of alternative design for these machines, but it does make you wonder if there are other machines that we take for granted as elements of our every day lives that do not work. Why is it if these machines don’t work, do every local authority or public building put them in every new set of public lavatories that they create? Why has no-one up to now pointed out that they are a complete waste of money? And why do people who wash their hands still make such an effort to dry them under these machines after what must be in each case, a lifetime of trying to dry their hands like this but simply failing.

People, it seems, are rather persistent not only in their routines as elements of their own personalities, but in the routines that are suggested to them by their surroundings, and I would like to conjecture that this is an example of this phenomenon. I would personally like to start a campaign against all of the stupid things that we do time and time again simply because we feel that they are things to do rather than because they actually achieve anything. I’m sure there are many aspects of our lives like this, and I intend on starting a search for them and revealing them one by one, and maybe one day we will have a website that points to all of these stupidities, so together we are able to eliminate them from our lives, and simply become more effective and more efficient in the way we currently live, not to mention in the ways we wish to live in the future.

A Communist Lifestyle

2006-06-26T22:00:00.000+01:00

I’m back from Cambridge now, so the blog will be updated more regularly once again (I hope to update twice a day for a while simply to make up for all of the days I’ve missed). I’ve actually been away partying and celebrating the end of the year. This is done in rather a lot of style in Cambridge, with entertainments ranging from garden parties with politicos, to the most lavish may balls, with private firework displays, flowing champagne, and all sorts of music. Whilst over the week, my activities varied, what remained constant was the number of people saying to me ‘I wouldn’t expect to see you here, aren’t you a communist/socialist’. Now, I am under no delusion that getting drunk and generally having a good time is useful for communist ends, and I am also convinced that to and extent the personal is the political. That being said, I simply do not follow that an act being any more luxuriant than another makes it any less more anti-communist.

We must accept, as revolutionaries, that the nature of our world is such that every element of it is pregnant with the system we wish to destroy. This is not only the reality of finance capital, but the reality of language and consciousness too. There must be no doubt that in taking part in the society we take part in positing its contents. This does not mean that all of our actions are necessarily in support of the society in which we live, rather that unless we are self-conscious about our revolutionary acts as revolutionary then they can very easily be camouflaged, or even just simply forgotten. It is simply impossible for every single act to be a revolutionary one (and in fact it is simply not desireable). The fact that I live in a capitalist society and am self-conscious about this fact is neither a positive or a negative: It just is.

It is impossible to live your life with every element of it being directed towards revolution within the status quo. If one were to just reject everything then one would also be impelled to reject oneself and simply commit suicide. As socialists we believe in progress and furthermore we must believe in the praxis of affecting that progress. Both towards revolution and the transition towards the society that our ethical beliefs convince us would be better for the people of the world. This does not mean that we cannot have ethical beliefs about our own society under capitalism, but rather that these beliefs are in some way distinct from the politics of revolution. I do understand that there is an issue with those of us who think of us as radicals, in fact buying into the society that we wish to undermine, but I feel that it is important to show that the pertinence of our ideas only exists at the point at which we understand every element of the capitalist society in which we live.

Animal Protesters

2006-06-17T21:43:00.000+01:00

As a leftist, albeit not a particularly organised one, I really object to ‘animal activists’ being associated with both my politics and myself. These people have successfully run the most violent and damaging political campaigns in Britain in recent years. So, what do these people actually want? Their message seems to be almost utilitarian. They believe that causing pain to animals is the greatest evil within society and that as a result all other elements of society can be sacrificed in order to put an end to it. This means that they have no qualms about their own violence, of ruining communities, and will use whatever means possible to promote their rather infantile campaigns.

Whilst I agree that it is probably wrong to harm animals needlessly, much of what they campaign against is the use of animal testing for medical experiments that simply can’t be done on humans because they are too dangerous. One must remember that very few (if any) of these campaigners are scientists themselves, and most have an extremely limited knowledge of the current state of medicine and research. Whilst I could talk for hours about the errors I see in the politics that these people present, a more pertinent issue seems to be that they are constantly associated with radicals and the left. Now let us be clear. These people are, for all means and purposes, Luddites. Often they do not understand that progress generally requires sacrifice. Whilst I do understand that their position is that if it is only humans we are progressing then the sacrifice should also be human, I think it’s really important to note that animals do not progress. Progress is inherently something that people in the left should fight for. Of course this is rather complicated by the fact that the type of progress is generally determined by the economic system of the status quo. What is perceived as progress by capitalism is a tendency towards efficiency, and the development of market lubricants. It is for this reason that one must be somewhat discriminating in what one regards as useful progress and what one regards as the type of progress which rather than affecting real change in fact make a lack of change (away from the status quo) easier.

Health care, in my opinion, does account for real change. Whilst there are huge problems with how it is currently run (privitised drug companies, and the introduction of foundation hospitals), there is no denying that the result of these animal tests are attempts to preserve those people who make up society. Whatever the impulse is for this change, there will be protests, and in some ways it is a coincidence that it has ended up primarily as a protest against animal cruelty. I just feel that ultimately we must be clear that these people are not only dangerous in their protests, but also dangerous in the politics that provide and impetus for their protests.

Trouble in CUSU

2006-06-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

I am very concerned about the state of CUSU for next year. The end of the year has not gone well. We haven’t had an executive committee meeting in almost three weeks, the training for the new executive never happened, the Sabbatical Officers-Elect don’t seem to turn up to much but are all rather too embroiled with their internal discussions and plans. Those of us on the part-time executive are simply left in the dark. Of course I understand that these people will have to spend a year working together, but it worries me that they have no experience of the democratic structures that will govern their jobs (with the exception of Harriet, the Women’s Officer-Elect who has been on Women’s exec). Nothing seems to be functioning correctly, and as a result people don’t know how to submit motions, they don’t feel involved, and representatives from colleges are becoming concerned that the union is not being effective.

I said all of this at a Council meeting earlier this evening. The meeting was inquorate and as a result did not have the usual structure. Once again we have seen the last Council of year being a joke, and important policy not being passed. A further difficulty is the fact that the report that was supposed to be submitted by the Returning Officer wasn’t submitted. The Elections Committee haven’t seen it and apparently no-one else has either. This is rather worrying, given the detailed critique of procedure I submitted alongside the electoral complaint that I made. I know that I am probably more pedantic than many on these matters, but I feel that the Returning Officer’s conduct has been completely inappropriate.

I am hoping that next year will be better. I hope that the new Sabbatical Officers start work, and get off on the right foot, but I can’t understand how they all have managed to miss so many meetings. Many of them are finalists and of course exams take priority, but it feels rather like the normal students are being treated with complete contempt. Whilst their wages are not particularly good, I would have expected them to have the energy and enthusiasm that the jobs really take (and that have been sadly lacking in many of the officers in the past year). My concerns as I voiced them at council were given a glib response. An inebriated Drew Livingston (Academic Affairs) told council how great it is that the new Executive have very little experience, and essentially defended disorganisation. Whilst many people feel that CUSU doesn’t do a lot, it would help to remind them that they are the single means by which students may defend themselves against the university, and they are in charge of a large number of welfare campaigns. We should not take it likely that those representatives that we have elected simply can’t be bothered to act on behalf of the students who elected them. I guess only time will tell us if next year can be a success, but at the moment it is not looking positive.

Politics and Student Unions

2006-06-14T10:35:00.000+01:00

As a very active member of both my College Student Union as well as my University Student Union, one of the greatest problems I am faced with is the 1994 Education Act. This act was put in place by a Tory government, and defines Student Unions as representative of all of the members they can represent as well as defining them as charities. I understand to an extent that being a charity may be useful if it allows students unions to have more money and not pay the level of tax that other organisations do, but it also politically limits us. Whilst student unions may still have policy on whatever the students want, they are limited to spend money on ‘students as students’. This definition is overly vague, but for the most part gives an excuse to the right-wing elements of the membership to shout down what they feel is overly political.

I also feel that it is quite problematic to have a law that demands that whilst students have a right to opt out, they are necessarily represented. This is in one way important (one wouldn’t want a union that was simply unrepresentative), but it does take away the democratic effect of opting out. Of course it is not ideal to have a student union that students do not want to be part of, but with the very nature of a student body that varies so much, it seems that there will always be a few who won’t want to be part of it. We should not sacrifice our politics simply to appease these people, and furthermore we shouldn’t let our politics be sacrificed by an outside force (such as government) just to create an inclusive environment. It is only at the point that our student unions are completely depoliticised that an inclusive environment will be satisfactory, and thus we must simply sacrifice either our politics or our inclusivity.

That being said, there is no getting away from the fact that Student Unions are political. They are not only protective pressure groups so concerned with asserting the position of their members, but rather they assert the views of their members too. Yes, it would be possible to have a union that simply made demands on the basis that its students existed as an element of the power structure of the university, but such an organisation would be thoroughly ineffective, exclusive, and might as well be an element of the very power structure that it wishes to criticise. As an independent and political organisation, a student union can involve many of its members in campaigns and issues that they care about. It gains credence and style, and simply demands to be taken more seriously. Student Unions will have pretty similar views on the key issues surrounding student welfare regardless of whether they are fully-fledged political organisations, or if they just nominally exist and are rather inactive. We must fight against those laws that try to depoliticise our message and we must fight against those who demand inclusivity over opinion.

A Worthwhile Degree?

2006-06-12T10:07:00.000+01:00

I know that I have already expressed my opinions on exams, but now seems to be crunch time for rather a lot of people. I have just got home from speaking with a third year and a fourth year. Both of whom feel that they need a 2.i for anything like the future that they intend on having. Whilst I don’t feel the need for a specific grade myself, I can understand their worries. In the current climate a 2.i has become rather like a Green Card, with many employers requiring new employees to have one. Of course not everyone can get the grade, and in a way, to make it easier to achieve would be to devalue it. That being said, the exam period is plagued by the sadness of people who simply underperform in those critical few hours. Further to this is the issue that there is absolutely no parity between a 2.i from one institution and another. Many people feel that if they had gone elsewhere aged eighteen, then they would not experience any of the trouble that trying to do well in Cambridge entails.

No-one talks about the people who overperform. I’m sure they exist in their plenty. Those people who didn’t do the work, were lucky with the questions, or got a sympathetic marker. No-one wants to accept that they may have been fortunate to get the mark they did. For those who are happy, they are simply told that they deserve it. For those people who underperform (and I suspect that it is many more than one would imagine), they are sent off with a degree that they feel is worthless, and which limits what they are able to do in future years. Whilst some people do perform poorly simply because they have failed to do the work, it seems wrong that these people are confused with the people who have worked successfully, and who have performed consistently, and simply fall by at the last minute. Such a measure for a degree that takes three years of one’s life is simply meaningless.

And so, one must ask, why it is the case that such an archaic and problematic examinations system is perpetuated. Why are our categories for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ degrees so broad (and thus in many ways lacking meaning) whilst being unforgiving. Why can’t we accept that for the most part it is extremely difficult to compare work in terms of ‘quality’ without invoking ideology. Why do many employers feel that a lucky ‘good’ degree from a poor institution is better than an unlucky ‘bad’ degree from a more complex course. The assumption that the degree is numerically identical to the grade one gets must be challenged. Degrees that cannot be compared should not be (regardless of the fact that many city firms consider this to be efficient), and exams should be reconsidered. Exams in my experience exist to trip people up. If one is capable then one either passes or fails. If one is incapable then one fails. There is unfortunately too large an overlap for the measurement to be useful.

The Right to Have Children?

2006-06-11T03:26:00.000+01:00

Every now and again a haggard looking woman appears on the news on TV ranting about the fact that she is infertile and the NHS won’t pay for yet another round of IVF. There is an obsession amongst these people to have children. They see it as their sole aim in life as having children, and if they fail in this then they don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They act like children who aren’t allowed a toy they want, and it is the obsessional element of their psyche that begins to define them. In my mind these are the last people that our government should be sponsoring to have children and to bring them up. I am cynical enough of the modern nuclear family at the best of times, but when these people who are so dysfunctional within themselves then it seems clear that handing them the responsibility of children will end in disastrous consequences.

My problem is not these women (they are clearly deranged and whilst their mental problems probably have a societal explanation, I am not qualified to attempt to explain it), rather I object to the fact that the demands of people are sympathised with so widely, and the reports on the news demand such sympathy from the listener. I could never imagine there being a report on the fact someone wasn’t allowed cosmetic surgery paid for by the taxpayer. No-one would sympathise with their sweaty-toddler style tantrum antics, and yet there is a feeling that because there is something primal about giving birth and having children that is simply a right. Of course this idea of it as a right is completely constructed since we have had the science to create children using IVF.

Society invests huge amounts of money in children, and we wouldn’t entrust the same amount of money in cosmetic surgery. Even if these people are told that they are not allowed to have children, it is hardly like a lack of children is looking like it will damage society. To go even further it is children brought up in the sort of systems that these adults use too try and get their way that would in fact probably be rather damaging. There is no good reason for having children to be a right, and the laws that encourage the NHS trusts to pay for it are simply wrong. Whilst I understand that the technology exists, and will be used in private medicine regardless of what happens in the public sector, I don’t see this as a convincing reason for spending our money on it. Both these people, and the cult that these people subscribe to are deranged and we must begin to be honest with ourselves about what kind of health-care spending is useful to society, and which protect the living rather than investing heavily in lives that when they do begin to exist will give rise to no noticeable positive effects on society (or at least certainly none that can be predicted).

On Tolerance

2006-06-10T00:00:00.000+01:00

I am a little inebriated tonight, having intended to write this post before having gone to formal hall, but having actually been to it I’m getting the impression that not only will this post be short but it may be somewhat incoherent, so I am sorry from the start if this doesn’t make a lot of sense. The issue of today’s post is that of ‘tolerance’. The conscept has rather come into fashion in the past few years, both in popular Christianity and in politics in general. It is something that defies real explanation, and as an ideologue it is something that I despise. In a conversation today, I was told that whilst I clearly have an ideology I present I should be ‘tolerant’ of other people’s ideologies. My response was clear and straightforward. Is it not impossible to be tolerant of other people’s ideologies if your own ideology is diametrically opposed to theirs? Of course it is not. If one’s ideology is simply that of tolerance and one is confounded by an ideology of intolerance, then in the process of being tolerant of such and opposition one is confronting an indissoluble paradox, and confronting it ultimately unsuccessfully.

I am tolerant to the extent that I will agree with people thatthey are individuals, simply so that their arguments within the boundaries of status quo politics, but to be tolerant towards their positions simply as a matter of course will inevitably lead to me contradicting myself. My aim is to convince others of my opinion as well as aiming at a realistic (or correct) representation of truth. If no-one believes me then I have a problem, and further to this, if they are proposing an ideology that contradicts mine then it is my prerogative to prove them wrong. Of course this is a problem for those liberal ideologies that model people as individuals, and truth on weight rather than relationship to reality (or understanding of that mediatory relationship that links reality to understanding). These ideologies must be challenged.

This is, of course, not a challenge to pluralism as related to people. but rather a challenge to pluralism as a means of ascertaining truth. Diversity is inevitable and certainly should not be looked down on, but on the other hand, there is a danger in equating diversity of self-consciousness with diversity in political or epistemological opinion. Opinion does not solely derive from one’s position of society (although I suspect that it will do in the future), rather the discourse of analysis is useful in determining both the nature of society and ones position within it. Pluralism and individuation must be separated by the simple fact that when individuation ceases it is inevitable that pluralism will become more academically powerful

On Celebrity

2006-06-09T00:00:00.000+01:00

The general feeling of the self-conscious intelligencia towards celebrities is one of antipathy. Those who are famous enough to claim ‘star’ status are in some way sell-outs, and are berated for the objectification of their own subject. That is the dishonesty of presenting themselves as static monoliths whilst their phenomenologies are indubitably that of dynamic subjective fragments. The other aspect of celebrity that is so berated by these same people is the buying into it, the investment and enjoyment of all of those commodities that appear to derive their value from the rather arbitrary status that is ascribed to these individuals, and further to this, the very fact that they accept this status without the cynicism that society would usually dictate in the media read both by those who are in power and those who decide who is in power.

I can completely understand the point of view that the fact that these images are so popular in society is a bad thing, but one can hardly deny its inevitability. In a society in which every experience is that of a commodity, and every person is pigeonholed by their status within a market system, it is going to happen at some point that the boundary between subject (or dynamic element of the system) and object (or static product of the system) is blurred. It is in celebrity that such a blurring is most evident. Whilst it is the case that people are treated as commodities every day of their lives, it is only in celebrity that this objectification is absolutely self-evident and the objectified object has a projected objective consciousness rather as well as an internalised and suppressed internal consciousness.

Rather than berating the people involved directly in celebrity, or those people who, as a reaction to the production of these commodities with ascribed value, buy into the system, it seems far more appropriate to show that the system itself is problematic. It must of course be undermined on a social basis and we must prove that there is ultimately a problem in the objectification of people (in that they lose their ability to express themselves and have the expression that themselves represent is externally rather than internally determined). The fact that there is no longer a problem for so many people to aspire to objectification rather than expression underlines the real threat that the system poses. It is not that it will objectify everyone (it already does that), but rather that it fetishises an element of this objectification to the point at which people submit to it. Objectivication is of no use to the individual or the collective. Instead it proposes the lack of both understanding and the inability to understand as a utopia, and if we are ever to challenge this premiss then we must do it now, rather than waiting to be subsumed into the system we are fighting.

A Royal Visit

2006-06-08T01:36:00.000+01:00

***Sorry this post is late. Blogger (my hosting service) went down for a few hours, so I was unable to post***

The Prince of Wales visited college today to come to a conference for the launch of hjis new campaign for the advancement of education in History and English in secondary schools. A noble cause one would think, that is until one examines the logistics of what a royal visit means. At eight-thirty this morning I was awoken by a rabble of policemen in the car-park outside my house. There were Cambridgeshire Constabulary, some from the met, some private security (I would assume something to do with the army) and of course the mandatory MI5 thugs, who walk around in sharp suits, looking both arrogant and stupid, as well as being conspicuously inconspicuous, I have to admit that if I was going to try and assassinate the Prince, then I would be making my best effort to do it in as public a sphere as possible. Probably somewhere in London with a machine gun, and so the security did seem rather over the top, would be a good option.

Of course the number of people in college happy to see him was minimal. A large majority of the largely socialist Porter population was unimpressed. It gave the ex-policeman Head Porter a chance to enforce formality in a way that only seems inappropriate in an environment like college in exam term. There was a lot of fuss made by many of the service staff in college, but the student population remained rather indifferent. In my youth I spent a lot of time arguing against the fact we have a monarchy. Ten years ago it all seemed rather undemocratic and something to shout about. Of course this was alongside a different atmosphere in activism. The Eighteenth of June Movement was strong. Anarchist movements were erupting around the Western world and ‘The Wombles’ were a ‘prominent threat’ to the city.

Now I am rather more reserved in my activism. I know that if it got to the point at which a monarch assumed control, there would be a revolution. If they refused laws that had been voted through Parliament, then I assume| the same sort of action would come about. Rather than my objection to the royal family being chiefly political, it has transferred to revolve around the praxis of a monarchy. I do still disagree with it in principle, but it’s no longer a reason for activism. On the other hand, I have really grown to despise the use of public taxpayers’ money to fund the prancing around of an inbred family of elevated toffs. We are told that it is better for Britain as they bring in tourism money, and yet I have never met a tourist who has come to Britain simply because we have a monarch. I have also been told that Prince Charles’ travel etc. is paid through his own assets, although this clearly is not subject to the same inheritance taxes as the rest of the population. We should fight for the use of our tax money for the population as a whole, rather than minute archaic minority.

Accusations of Impoliteness

2006-06-06T23:47:00.000+01:00

I am often accused of being impolite, and in the last week was described by someone I have only met once as having ‘no common decency’. Whilst I accept that much of the time these critiques of my character are correct, in a way I take them as a compliment. If the only problem that people can find with what I say is the means I express it, then what I say must be of great stature. I admit that I do often leave people somewhat displeased and angry as a result of my sentiments, but for me this is the nature of discourse, and much of the time it is better to actually expose the argument rather than to dance around it so carefully that one is not able to speak about the issue. Of course there are times when politeness is rather powerful as a tool of rhetoric, but this always seems rather disingenuous, in that people tend to agree with you due to the form of what you say rather than the content. I am not one of these people who agree with the idea that any argument is acceptable if it is presented in a polite manner, and furthermore I am rather more suspicious of politeness as it is often used as an excuse not to have an argument that the situation demands.

I understand that our modern conception of politeness is the result of many years of living and experimenting within a civilised society, but much of the time it exists in a rather similar form to a religious ritual, that is, that it exists as a codified paradigm of how we should act without having a codified reason for why we should act this way. Abstract imperatives are dangerous. A lack of reason is always suspicious. And the attempts to discredit an argument on these grounds is deceitful.

I think that it is really important that one is clear on the difference between discourse and rhetoric. Discourse is intentional to either truth or understanding (I believe that understanding is simply mediated truth, although I’m aware that many disagree with me). Rhetoric, on the other hand, plays a social function. Rather than tending to anything testable, it demands popular support, agreement or weight. In accusations of lacking common decency or such like, there is ultimately a flaw in that the accuser is attempting to undermine the argument by rebutting its rhetorical content rather than its content as discourse. Whilst thoughts and language are intimately linked (some theorists have argued that they essentially one and the same), I would argue that they are ultimately differentiated by the fact that within reception of an argument the receiver can necessarily react in contradictory ways to its form and its content. If you feel that the form of my arguments undermines their content, then please tell me. If on the other hand you feel that the content is troublesome but deviously challenge the form as an easy way out, then don’t expect anything but a cold reaction.

On Addiction

2006-06-05T23:51:00.000+01:00

Addiction is one of those very strange elements of the individual psyche that seems to plague our age. Within the last fifteen years we’ve been exposed to a huge set of neologisms such as ‘workaholic’ and ‘shopaholic’. With such an emphasis on addiction being dialectically present both in the media and in reality. Whilst it is the case that chemical reliance has always existed, it is in elements that do not require a physiological addiction that these publicised tendencies have focussed on, and thus we see a medicalisation of what is in fact a social function (or dysfunction). The idea of addiction, whilst being relatively straightforward, has an interesting relationship to capitalism. Capitalism demands a system in which people are not in control of their lives, in which they are self-consciously individuating themselves while existing within a hegemony in which any perception of individuation is inherently false.

Addiction is the explicit lack of self-control that capitalism demands, and whether it exists as a result of a ‘medical’ condition, or simply as a social condition, it is hard to deny that it generally exists as an element of the same system that drives the economy. It relies on an obsession with the self and its needs, an abolition of conscience, and the absolute negation of the self-control that the obsession with the self falsely implies that it demands. That being said, addiction is something that the media has a tendency look down on, and that there are government and media drives against. This would suggest that there is a more central and organised tendency against such behaviour. And yet, I feel it is important that we mustn’t forget that all too often it is the very same media that so fetishes objects that they become the subjects of the same addictions that the media is seen to combat.

The medicalisation of these issues make it all the more complex. In recent years the signature of a doctor has been seen to add more and more weight (both legal and other) to arguments. Children can only get help for acting ‘anti-socially’ if such a diagnosis is made by an educational psychologist, and high profile celebrities go to get their brains fixed at clinics such as The Priory. Whilst the medicalisation of addiction is clearly taking place, and the stigma attached to any such medicalisation is increasing in stature, we must remember that the rise of such addictions (and not simply the concepts of such addictions, but their actuality), is a result of our society. Yes, they are stigmatised, but this does not compare to those impulses that encourage them. The point at which the social effect of market forces is medicalised is the point at which we can no longer provide an ideological critique of it, and so whilst challenging the impulses of addiction, we should act not only scientifically but sociologically, and not only undermine addiction, but the impetus behind it.

Prescott and Animal Farm

2006-06-04T19:45:00.000+01:00

Exams are finished, and celebrations are ongoing. Generally it all went well with the inevitable ‘two good essays and a bit of a dodgy one’ scenario occurring in a few of my exams. The waether is much finer than it was a week ago, and so in my new relaxed state, and with me sitting in the back garden, my blog is making a return. Much of the news in the week away has centred around the Deputy Prime Minister, who lost his role as head of his department due to media pressure, put on due to photographs of him playing croquet whilst being in charge of the country were put on the front page of a number of national newspapers. As a result he’s given back the keys to his country mansion, but remains the incumbent Deputy.

Whilst a critique is necessary in situations like this, more often that not, I find myself having a little sympathy with these characters. A huge proportion of the media hype has regarded the animal-farm-esque class nature of Prescott’s action in which he is treated as a one-time ‘working class hero’ who looks like a pig metamorphosing into an element of an authoritarian ruling class who looks like a pig. To take the analogy with Orwell further, it is the point at which he is found partaking in activities associated with the ‘old guard’ that he becomes a pariah, rather than at the point at which there is a direct connection made between his ‘bourgeois’ actions and policies, in the same way that they are seen as going hand in hand in the Orwell, but the point at which there is a reification of social stature is the point at which the pigs are seen sitting around the table, rather than that moment at which the constitution is amended.

We must, of course, be under no illusion that the New Labour Party is a proletarian party. It is generally to be associated with a level of neo-liberalism. Furthermore, it would simply be incorrect to associate it with the aristocracy. The point that must be made though, is that the problem that many have with the aristocracy is not that they play croquet, but they imposed a system of government that not only allowed them to play croquet, but also stopped the great proportion of the populace from having that option. We should berate Prescott for the disgusting authoritarian policies that he has helped put in place, and it is when this comes into question that the issue of whether he was playing croquet simply dissolves. I am perfectly aware that the entire issue is surrounded by spin from both sides of the Blair/Brown divide, but my critique of the media remains the same as my critique of Orwell’s text: that if we are to take the economics behind politics seriously, then we must make connections and be certain that our attacks are political rather than personal, and dialectical rather than associative.

Closing Down for a Week

2006-05-27T23:58:00.000+01:00

Dear All,

Due to exams, I won't be updating the blog for a week. Speak to you all again next Sunday,

Jacob

On Christian Organisations

2006-05-27T00:00:00.000+01:00

Of those social institutions within student life, by far the strangest and most scary are those who describe themselves as Christian groups or unions. These groups are inherently fundamentalist, demanding that the bible is the divine word of god, and this ideology reflects not only on the actions of their members, but also on the interaction of their members with all other members of the student communities. These people are without exception socially lecherous, and absolutely convinced that their sole purpose in life is to save you from your life of sin, and convince you to be just as lecherous as themselves and to become part of their web of comrades who are so convinced that they are right about every element of social practice that they feel they must imbue their world-view upon everyone who has the misfortune to meet them.

The social constraints of these groups are strange too. They have a tendency to become all consuming in how their members interact. Every aspect of their lives and everyone they see is judged by whether it is coherent with the philosophy that their organisation that they may accept it, or whether it must be altered. The real problem with these people is that rather than having a rationale behind their beliefs but rather they just have fear. Every reason for their social situation is determined by the fact that they are forever looking onwards to some heavenly world in which there are no more sinners who they have to spend their time trying to convert. It is just about understandable for people to determine their situaton irrationally as a result of fear, but when fear becomes an integral element to your own ideology, and that ideology is so pervasive of every aspect of one’s being, then it must be a negative thing.

Over and over again these people do their best to convert me. They offer me free food, they put leaflets under my door, they send me emails, and they come up to me in the street and try and convince me of their views. It has become clear to me that these are generally boring little people with incredibly inconsequential lives. What they say is not what they believe abstract of their social life (or in any way abstractable), but rather it is identical to their social life. They become drones in the hive of the organisation, or rather more pertinently they drone in the hive of our reality, They are impossible to please with only those people who lack those most important aspects of life (genitalia and a drinking habit) being able to truly fulfil their vision of a perfect person. Even if they are right, these are not the sort of people who I’d like to end up having to hang around with for eternity thanks. I’d rather try my luck with a bit of sin and end up in hell.

On Schenkerian Analysis

2006-05-25T19:34:00.000+01:00

I have often felt myself to be opposed to Schenkerian analysis for philosophical and ideological reasons, and yet I remain intrigued by it. It is without doubt that with its position, it throws into question almost every question about the aesthetics of music that one would ever wish to pose. The mainstay of Schenkerian analysis is the amalgamation of not only the ‘how’ of a musical work, but the ‘why’. The issues that have been constructed and deconstructed over the last hundred years on the matter, have been almost exclusively normative. One has to remember that in Schenker’s original approach there is a huge amount of baggage. In Free Composition Schenker justifies his position on the basis that God exists and hence unity exists, resulting in the fact that all art that pertains to truth must inherently be directed towards this unity. The metaphysics of this argument are undoubtedly questionable. I do not buy into all the religious spiel, but one can’t help but notice that this sort of analysis ‘works’ for a certain type of music.

One of my problems with this sort of analysis is that it can ‘work’. At the point at which one has recognised the regression from the primary tone to the tonic, and have effectively outlined the relationship of all of the notes on various middlegrounds, and then commented on all of the possible parallelisms, then you are left with very little you can do in terms of attacking a piece with this type of analytic tool. On the other hand, I cannot imagine an artwork that fails to gain meaning at every moment, and I simply cannot accept an analysis that demands so much objectivity as to suggest that an artwork isn’t mediated in the first place.

Further to these initial problems, I always have a difficult time in explaining why artworks need analysing. The Schenkerian model does suggest that it’s so we can know how and why they were constructed in the way they are, but when the conclusion that comes, if the analysis fails, is that the music doesn’t fit with the analytic principles, or that the analytic principles are not adequate to deal with the music, then I suspect we are hitting a rather hefty brick wall. The main question is what sort of ‘thing’ is gained from analysis. If the process increases some kind of ‘understanding’ then in my mind this can only be a good thing (although, one must be sure that this is a value judgement rather than an objective definition of analysis). On the other hand, one can’t help but be cynical about any analysis that attempts to increasing understanding abstract of the very ephemerality that it wishes to analyse. Analyses in themselves must be malleable and hermeneutic in there nature, and if flawed metaphysics at the base of any analytic principle are refuting this, then the analysis is inherently wrong in its approach to the artwork, and this is in no way a value judgment but an philosophical statement and sentiment.

Nationalising Drugs Production

2006-05-24T23:58:00.000+01:00

Whilst the introduction of the welfare state in 1945 was hardly an extremely radical move, it remains as an element of government policy that I insist on asserting that we should defend. One of the most contradictory elements of our government is that they facilitate the patents of drugs, which are then bought by the NHS to look after the populace. If it happened to be the case that all drugs that are used for public health were patented nationally then thee healthcare of our nation would be far cheaper, and hence we would be able to spend more tax money on professionals to aid the efficiency of the service rather than paying extortionate of cash to private companies, which in themselves earn enough capital to keep the British health system working.

The problem is of course not this simple. Much of the profits that these corporations make are from impoverished third world nations, and it is these nations who are really screwed by the prices that can be charged once the formulas for these drugs have been patented. We did have a landmark court-case in the last year in which a large company were told that they were not allowed to keep the prices of an drug to treat HIV so high that they couldn’t be afforded by governments. Regardless of this ruling the company does its best to keep its prices as high as possible to gain as much money as possible. It is true that research into drugs is an expensive process, and that there is a belief that markets tend to efficiency, so this will be the cheapest way to create them, but within this model there is no acknowledgement of the fact that it is these same companies that confirm what is possible (often also based on what is economically efficient and saleable rather than what is socially useful.

The UN is in control of vast numbers off peacekeeping troops, and is apparently responsible for the well-being of the world’s people, and yet there is no sponsorship within their auspices of the production and regulation of lifesaving drugs. We must do our best to outline the hypocrisy of our government in supporting industry over the population in life or death matters. The production of drugs must be nationalised if we are to see any progress. If we value not only the people in our country but the people of the world, we must demand the communal ownership of all of those aspects of life that are beneficial abstract of their commodity value, and we must challenge at every moment that aspect of policy that treats people as commodities, or at least is happy to put a price on their head simply to make a few extra friends in the world of business.

People On Buses

2006-05-23T23:53:00.000+01:00

Having grown up in Central London, I have spent much of my time travelling around on buses. Buses in London are usually large double-decker creatures, often having graffiti carved into the windows and piles of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the seats. Apart from this, travelling on them is a relatively pleasant experience. Yet there is one aspect of travelling on these buses that has always puzzled me. Whenever people get on, they sit as far away from the other passengers as physically possible. Even if people get on in groups, there is almost certainly a concerted effort to keep their group far from anyone else travelling. This is taken even further when as passengers get on they take up all of the available sets of double seats before anyone goes to sit next to a stranger. This is generally regardless of the fact that by the point at which someone has to sit next to a stranger, many other people will have to endure the same at the next stop at which more people inevitably get on.

This wouldn’t be so much of an issue for me if people were generally busy on the bus, or at least if they had something else to think about. But time and time again, I see people who get on, sit on their own, stare blankly into space for another half an hour until the bus gets to their stop at which point they get off and get on with their lives. Whilst I appreciate that many people like some quiet time, especially at the end of a day’s work, I am convinced that most of those people sitting there are completely bored. Not one of them thinks ‘oh, how I could defeat this boredom with a nice little conversation’, instead they are set in their ways of instilled social ineptness.

I can just about understand why if there was no-one on the bus and someone arrived, and sat next to you, thus blocking your escape route, you might feel a little freaked out. It’s for this reason that I don’t advocate this sort of action. On the other hand, it would be so nice, and make bus journeys so much more pleasurable if people sat near each other, and had a chat or a friendly argument. It’s something that’s difficult to convince people to do, when everyone is so focussed on their own work compounded by their ‘personal’ stress (which is generally a reflection of others around them being stressed). Whilst there are continued moral panics about street crime and the danger of talking to those you don’t know, there are many people travelling on the buses who I’m sure would be glad to have some company and don’t appreciate their treatment, which is austere for no apparent reason.

Supporting Small Businesses

2006-05-22T23:57:00.000+01:00

It is a fashion these days amongst the self-defined left-wing elements of society, not to shop in supermarkets, and rather to buy local produce, or buy goods at small local businesses. We are told in the liberal media (The Independent and The Guardian) that this is the ethical thing to do. That supermarkets are springing up all over the place and are putting smaller companies out of business. Apparently this isn’t a good thing. Apparently we should pay more for the same good to keep up the prosperity of out-of-date practices. Whilst I am no fan of multinational corporations, I can see no advantage in advocating decentralisation as a solution to the impending unemployment crisis in the West (that has already hit large areas of France and Germany).

I am absolutely sure that if everyone grew their own food on their own little patch of grass then everyone would be rather busy all day. They wouldn’t need to work as they would be providing for themselves with all they need to subsist. I can’t see anyone qwho calls themselves a socialist defending this type of ‘primitive communism’, and so I find it further hard to believe that lefties are defending the livelihoods of the petty-bourgeoisie over the globalised bourgeois class. Yes, it is our duty to defend the rights of people in a society that inherently sells them out, but we must acknowledge that this element of society is a result of the economic system rather than the economic specifics.

It is true that many multinational corporations have particular trends of imposing terrible social conditions upon the third world, but they should be denigrated for this reason, rather than the fact that they undermine the extremely conservative call for localisation or the liberal call for decentralisation. It is the case that as a company becomes richer (and hence more powerful) it becomes both more able and more likely to exploit people. This does not mean that small local businesses don’t contribute to the same market that aids the exploitation of the majority.

This whole issue is rather complicated by the disappearance of the proletariat as a large body within our own country. With the upsurge in the service industries in our country, the petty-bourgeoisie have appropriated the consciousness of the traditional position of the working class. They do to an extent fulfil that economic role of having to work for their living, often long hours, and their earnings are not necessarily high compared to those employed in the public sectors. That being said, one cannot discuss their economic position abstract of their economic relationship to other sectors of society. They are not exploited, except by the combination of larger scale companies and a Keynesian economy that simultaneously limits and protects their position. These people are screwed over by the system, but it’s a system that they themselves buy into, and it shouldn't be the job of socialists to defend their right to remain part of a an exploitative system whilst encouraging social and economic stagnation.

On the Report on Underperformance in Exams

2006-05-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

Cambridge University recently produced a report through the Joint Committee on Academic Performance (JCAP) discussing the apparent underachievement of students from three ethnic groups within the University. The report was not made available in its complete version to students, and the same applies to the similar study funded by JCAP regarding the underachievement of women. I am of course rather cynical about why certain elements of the reports are kept private, but I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. The end of the report makes four recommendations to redress the balance:

1. Some students are in situations of severe financial hardship. Amongst these students are a number from single-parent families and larger families whose parents are less likely to be able to offer them financial help and support. Many of them have to work in the vacations to support themselves. Further ways of offering students, in the worst financial situations, additional funding could be explored.
2. Amongst some ethnic minority students, complex family obligations during the vacations can lead to little academic work being done during the vacation. Ways could be investigated of offering these students accommodation in Cambridge beyond the end of term or before the start of term, in order to give them the personal 'space' to supplement their term time studies.
3. For Muslim students especially, the prevalence of alcohol at social events can lead to a sense of being excluded from the social life of many College and University social and sporting events. The number of social events without alcohol could be increased. This would be especially effective during Fresher's[sic] week, as this was identified by respondents as a critical time for developing a sense of 'belonging' at Cambridge.
4. Halal food should be available in College canteens, to respond to the needs of Muslim students.

As you can probably tell, I feel that these measures are completely inappropriate. They dodge the real issue (although the first recommendation comes closest). Since the publication of the report in March, JCAP has closed down with the belief that it has nothing more to do, or to offer the university. This current report was two years in the making, and it is thoroughly shocking that all that two Cambridge academics could come up with was providing Halal food and more non-alcohol nights as fifty percent of their recommendations. I can tell you now that these suggestions will not solve the issue of underperformance. The report doesn’t tackle the problems of ethnicity, both in terms of the real experience and the perceived experience. The suggestion of provision of Halal food is proved wrong by the fact that religious Jews don’t underperform, and apart from anything else, surely it’s those students who spend the most time in the college bar are the same ones who don’t do so well in exams. I could be wrong on this last one, but I can assure you that my time in the bar has very rarely helped my understanding of musicology. For this problem to be sorted out we need a comprehensive sociological study. One that is not afraid to look at economic backgrounds and bias in teaching. If Cambridge think this report is in any way useful then they are sadly mistaken

Non-Identity Politics

2006-05-20T16:57:00.000+01:00

One of the key political fields in the last forty years has been the establishment of so-called ‘identity politics’. Most prominent is of course feminism, but the likes of queer theory are on the rise. The defining feature of each of these stances is that they define themselves as being in a dialectical interaction with the current hegemony, that is, that they define themselves as non-identical to ‘society’. Such a stance, of course, will have its failings, such as the fact that it, rather that defining itself as non-identical to society, truly defines society as non-identical to it (with ‘it’ being what is inherently known from the position that one seeks identity with). In this way identity politics fail to engage with society as a dynamic system, but rather presuppose that society remains static until the point at which those people who are not part of the hegemonic structure, powerfully challenge any such structure.

This idea of a static reality of society challenged by a power shift followed necessarily by a paradigm shift is rather problematic for those of us who hold a generally dialectical view of society, individuals, and any sort of dynamism related to their interactions. It is not simply the case that any challenge to the hegemonic structures must be ddialectical, but rather that a dialectical analysis is the only effective way to define those power relationships in the first place. The point of this argument is that many exponents of identity theories insist that this feeling of identity (or non-identity as it were), is inherent, and we must see this point to be false in that no understanding of interactions is inherent, rather they are ideological. Whilst it may be the case that elements of society, due to their interactions, are liable to be of a certain ideology, it doesn’t mean that such a perspective is necessarily exclusive.

The result of this dialectical analysis of the situation of identity politics is to make the point that such a political outlook has indubitably changed the face of social and political systems. Women for example are adequately defined within a dialectical system as the identity of every constituent woman and the group as a whole. This is not suggesting that identity politics acts as some kind of homogenising entity directed towards those without power, but in fact the dialectical opposite. It is the miscategorisation of groups as identities rather than non-identities that would create such an opinion. Identity politics purports to defend are a group and any such groups constituents, but the relevance of this is proven by the fact that neither an individual self-consciously a member of a group, or the group itself may be identical to the power structure that is society. An ‘identity’ is defined simultaneously through the association of oneself to a sector of society and the definition of that sector as not an element of society, resulting in an ideology that will inherently demand change.

Demanding a Comprehensive Education

2006-05-19T23:54:00.000+01:00

The welfare state has existed for just over sixty years, and has in general, been a success in all of them. Yet, whilst this is the case, in recent years it has been in put in constant danger both by competition from private companies and the take-over by private companies within the system. The area that concerns me most is education, specifically schools. Since schools have existed there has been a layer of elitist institution, aimed not at the academically elite, but the social elite (read ‘those who have enough money to afford it’). The danger that these schools pose after the change from the tripartite system in the seventies is both practical and ideological. The idea of a comprehensive education system, that is one that is defined by its inclusivity, is a political one. And whilst such a system is instituted by our government we must defend it as one of the few positive political ends that is to an extent maintained.

The problem comes with the fact that not only do private or ‘independent’ schools oppose the politics of the comprehensive system, but they actively damage the qualities of the education that is given at these institutions. It is when people are held away from a ‘comprehensive’ system that it ceases to be fully comprehensive. Let us not kid ourselves; the students who end up in private schools tend to be the most advantaged socially and economically advantaged, and often such an advantage is exactly what is seen to be lacking in comprehensive schools. That is not to say that the totality of education is directed at attaining that advantage, but rather that such an advantage can be useful in certain traditional elements of education. That being said, such an advantage is in some senses a loss. There is so much of a focus in the minds of the parents of this group (whilst they may not be homogenous as such, a large proportion of them can be seen to be), on a certain type of advantage, that they become blind to the advantages that a fully comprehensive education system can be offered to all students.

All too often we are told that the problem with a fully comprehensive system is that it inherently targets the middle-ground and does not provide adequately for those who are most and least academic. This is logically flawed. The reason that such an education system fails to address these is a problem with the lack of resources made available rather than the student make-up. Yes, it can be challenged in the short term by those who can afford to buy the resources for their children, but such a system is simply not practicable or ideologically sound for the majority. By sending their children away to private schools, those richer parents condemn students who have families with less money to failure in their cause for fighting for an adequate education, and it is for this reason that if we intend education to get better in our country, we should make private schools illegal.

The Social Effects of Big Brother

2006-05-18T23:53:00.000+01:00

It seems that the populace are in for another summer of banality as Big Brother once again kicked off on Channel Four. I know that there will be similar critiques all over the media for the next week, arguing that it is so incredibly dull and meaningless, but I would like to comment on something slightly different, that of the apparent mental state of anyone who would want to take part in the competition. To start with there are some immediate effects. One is locked away from books, from art, and from current affairs. Well that’s not quite true, but the limits to one’s perception of these is mediated by the other contestants, and of course they are all the sort of people who don’t mind limiting there perceptions to this mediated reality, so chances are they won’t be particularly useful about discussing anything that has academic or political use.

Further to this, one is overexposed to the opinions (or lack of opinions as it may be) of the other contestants. Without external impetus these opinions are sedimented in the minds of the contestant. They become polarised, and too abstract to use even within the limited social context of a completely controlled institution such as the big brother house. People argue for the sake of arguing rather than being at all flexible in there opinions and are in fact objectivised by the arguments of others, making the entire social situation far too simple in their minds compared to the reality.

Of course this is rather an oversimplification. A possibly even greater issue is not only the fact that these peoples opinions are so sedimented by their newfound social context, but rather that they are almost all drawn from sectors of society that are objectivised by social life and the economy without this being magnified by the competition. What we are left with is lifeless. The viewer sees the contestant as the dysfunctional robot that they, by their very nature, cannot be aware that they are. We see false or incorrect arguments at every moment which then result in actions that magnify these people’s lack of self awareness. The conflict inherent in the Big Brother scenario is not revolutionary or useful. It is a conflict of not ever being able to ascertain the information for how it is appropriate to act within any given framework.

Much of the media hype surrounding the Big Brother phenomenon focuses on the viewers, and yes to and extent they are to blame, just in the same way that those people who buy The Sun are to blame. It is clear though, that this problem is viewed by the media as unidirectional, that is, that it focuses on how the viewer affects the show (the fact that if there were no viewers the programme would simply not be viable). The problem must be bidirectional in that those sedimented relationships and magnification of unreal social functions are associated or dissociated with normalcy in a way that either association or dissociation will be unsatisfactory.

The Future of Politics - Our Generations Likely Contribution

2006-05-17T23:59:00.000+01:00

Today’s post is a present to Comrade Dave Smith for his 21st Birthday (he chose the title). Congratulations on going round the sun again Dave. For me there is a real problem with this question in that as time moves on, politics that were once abstract, or could at least be adequately abstracted for use in discourse. As time goes on, politics seems dictated more and more by circumstance and reaction. Less people are proposing temporally linear ideological plans, both in terms of the creating of ideas that can then spawn further ideas or actions, as well as actions that can do the same. Far too many people of our generation are tied up with the conservation of the status quo, or more to the point, are not adequately aware of the nature of society to challenge it.

We must be completely clear that any politic is intentional to the future, both in the fact that modernity must be defined as the totality of history, and in that any present that defines itself as intentional to the future also has elements that persist and hence have an interest in that future that the present has a transcendental power to define. The problem is that a society that limits the definition to these simple functions will not allow anything that penetrates or permeates the current hegemony. Any such a hegemony will inevitably want to protect itself and this has been shown most broadly in our age by the rise of the administered society. There is always some kind of impulse that lies outside of the hegemony, whether it be a ‘rogue’ ideology that has pulled in some kind of popular support, or some kind of demand based economic system that our market can’t avoid being pulled into for social rather than economic reasons.

The problem is that it is in an age like these that these seemingly random occurrences take prevalence over ideology. Ideology that was once totalistic is fragmented by the hegemonies fragmentation of the social reality. Critique is diminishing anywhere but academia and yet workers are less and less organised. Yes, there maybe some future in the fight for Latin America, but I can’t see that there will be any move from the neo-liberal neo-Keynesian policies of Britain and the neo-conservative policies in America to anything that is in any way reconcilable with acceptance of society as dynamic.

I suspect that semiotics will become more prevalent in explicitly political rhetoric but that is all I can say. It has to be clear that the options for our generation are far more closed than those of a generation before but if we don’t challenge these views we are pigeonholed into, then the next generation will find it even harder to escape from.

The Dialectics of Bureaucracy

2006-05-16T22:34:00.000+01:00

Having spent the day in an entirely impotent NUS Regional Conference, I feel rather in need of a pint, but that doesn’t appear to be on the cards, so instead I’m writing my blog to distract myself from the action that is so bureaucratised that any spark of radicalism becomes so laboured that at the point of enacting it one contributes more to the system that the radicalism opposes than to the disruption of the system. It is inherent in the idea of radicalism that what it opposes is sedimented and to an extent systematic. This is not to say that subversion tactics cannot be useful to radical acts, but rather that it in dangerous for radical acts not to be self-consciously radical, that is that they must be aware that their radicalism not only challenges that very issue that it is aimed at, but rather it challenges the entire system that underpins the concept of that issue.

Subversion is a very strange state if one has a static analysis. That is, that if one has a systemic view of society and one believes that its transformation may take place within the means by which society currently posits itself (by the system), then one must also accept that any transformation affects that system so basically that it will cease to be recognisable in its latter state. Subversion must be far more of a polar act than it is currently considered. It must create a system that negates itself as a system, that is, that it posits itself as the system whilst undermining those very means by which is posits itself. This is all rather technical, but is vitally important in considering what the status of bureaucratic language (or jargon) in our age.

Whilst there is a point in fighting for what Trotsky described as ‘transitional demands’ (Those demands that the status quo can technically fulfil, but which by the very nature of the system it never will, and thus the result is merely to undermine the system in its own context), for the purpose of alienating elements of the system from its purported totality, it is simply more fruitful to fight for those demands that do truly challenge the system. Time and again the sharp edges of a transitional demand are blunted by bureaucracy as the concepts behind it are appropriated by their antitheses into something that becomes mildly acceptable. Even then the subversive act is often rejected, but the blame becomes more random than systematic. I have seen this happening time and time again at the conference today, and everything is swept into this mythic middle-ground. The problem is that it isn’t actually a middle ground. It is dialectically opposed to subversion and thus, if we accept that neither pole is a ‘middle’ in an oppositional relationship, it is only within its own system that it is able to paint this as a middle ground, whilst in reality it quite clearly occupies a far more sinister political place.

The Supposed Rise of the Middle Class

2006-05-15T23:59:00.000+01:00

I really do object to the popularly held perception that class is no longer an issue. Only last week we heard in the media that a new opinion poll had announced that more people than ever in Britain are ‘middle-class’. There is an argument that always accompanies this that suggests that there is a general consolidation of the centre-ground of society and a wearing away of those extremes that we these days consider as having plagued the Nineteenth Century. The statistics are of course completely flawed. Yes, it may be the case that there is no longer a huge industrial working class in Britain, and that the number of people who qualify as ‘owners of the means of production’ has diminished simply due to the prevalence of economies of scale. That being said, there has clearly been an increase in the size of the global category defined as ‘non-middle class’ in the last few years.

It is highly erroneous to see class as merely a political phenomenon. It is inherently an economic one, and thus to see Britain as hermetic when doing such a survey is methodologically dangerous to say the least. A huge percentage of the British economy is dependent on (or at least not independent of) international economies or the international economy as a whole. The British economy, as defined as a class structure, is not under British jurisdiction, so to suggest that there is no longer a class issue simply because there are more middle class inside of Britain (regardless of what happens outside) is absolutely useless.

Further to this critique of the poll, it would just seem completely illogical to suggest that capitalism can exist such that the bourgeoisie and thee proletariat simply disintegrate into a mulch of depolarised and uncollectivised individuals. Whilst it is very much part of the rhetoric of the current hegemony to suggest that those who are oppressed aren’t really and any oppression that once happens now has just disappeared for no apparent reason. Yes, it is the case that the service industry has almost completely taken over in Britain, with the exception of the North and other uncultured places where people struggle to pronounce words correctly, where unemployment is still rife since the Thatcher government. Capitalism doesn’t just dissolve like that though. It is in the interest of the ruling class for the poor to remain poor, and in fact for them to maintain their dominance the poor must become poorer. It is a Keynsian myth that a governmental economic strategy, which doesn’t have an oppositional class understanding as its basis can give an adequate solution to the problems that capitalism poses. These problems are, of course, not only economic ones but social ones, but they are so tightly interlinked that any strategy that analyses out one or the other (especially magnified in a hermetic context) is going to be of severely limited use in understanding the dynamics that create our society nevermind our political system.

Two Versions of Clause Four

2006-05-14T23:58:00.000+01:00

Times when I agree with The Labour Party about social or political policy are few and far between, and when I do agree with them I tend to realise later on that there is some kind of problem with my analysis. There is of course a quicker route to discovering the inherent truth about the political nature of Labour, and that’s to look at the old and new versions of Clause Four. Now, just for some history, the original Clause Four was introduced to the party relatively soon after its conception in 1917 and read:

"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."

Yet in 1993 (and this is one of the first bits of political jostling that I actually remember, as my parents were angrily swearing for many weeks afterwards), Blair and his crew drafted a paper through the Fabian Society demanding a change of this policy. The new version read:

"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few. Where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe. And where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect."

What is really key to understanding the difference between these two statements is that the first is an economic demand leading to revolutionary social conclusions whereas the latter displays an idea of socialism as a possibility within the current capitalist society. Further to this is the idea that ‘tolerance and respect’ are useful social attitudes within a current society. Whilst it is true that socialists tend not to want people to be oppressed, one has to accept that this is inevitable within the current economic system and I am not a Leninist but I can honestly see that a completely unmethodological demand for an ideal state that embodies the very opposite of those means by which we must challenge capitalism is in any way useful.

Whilst it is true that Lenin demanded that we fight for more than Clause Four socialism, it does not mean that we shouldn’t have fought for the old Clause Four on the way. It is exactly the attitude that the Blairites took towards Clause Four that epitomises every facet of their social policy, that is that it is entirely disembodied from understanding world economics as a dynamic system.

The AUT Action

2006-05-13T17:59:00.000+01:00

Much of today’s media is covering a story about the action short of a strike that is being carried out by the university teaching unions AUT and NATFHE. The action exists such that members of these unions are encouraged not to set or mark exams in the institutions in which they work. Of course the outrage that this has caused is with regard to students who are taking their finals who are having exams cancelled and may not be able to get a final grade for their degree. The staunchest Blairite members of the NUS (National Union of Students) National Executive Committee have gone into talks to try and dissuade the AUT of their action. This is the divide and rule tactic of our current government.

We must keep at the forefront of our minds that the Vice-Chancellors of our universities refused to meet with the unions for seven months. I even saw Alison Richards, the VC of Cambridge, walking down King’s Parade yesterday looking very relaxed. I was of course tempted to accost her on the issue, but eventually decided not to. The AUT stood alongside the NUS in the demonstrations against the top-up fees for university education that our government have imposed. We were also promised that if the legislation for top-up fees went through then a third of each of the £3000 pound payments from students would go towards teaching, yet given the stagnation of lecturer’s wages, it is clear that this simply isn’t happening. It is in this context that we must support the action.

It is near impossible for academics to strike on research. They would simply damage their own RAE ratings, as well as the strike having to be a much longer-term action. There is just very little leverage compared to exam marking. It is completely indisputable that more money being spent on students’ education will benefit the quality of the education they receive, yet much of the trouble is to do with the structures with which universities are run. Universities are currently both publicly and privately funded. It is for this reason that the government don’t feel impelled to take full responsibility for the steadily lowering of lecturers’ wages, yet the education of citizens should be the responsibility of the government and it is an understanding of this that should be paramount to the NUS’s analysis, but which is sadly missing. Thankfully there are some responsible students’ unions that have policy in support of the action, such as my own (CUSU), yet it is a real shame that these arguments are not being carried out on a national level. We must be absolutely clear that the failure to set or mark students’ final exams has no affect at all on their education. They still have all of the teaching they would have had with their degree and are simply not examined. On the other hand, cutting wages of lecturers does affect education. I for one would rather be taught well and not examined than examined and not taught well.

Maths Education in England

2006-05-12T23:44:00.000+01:00

It is good to see some nice in depth discussion of yesterday’s post coming through. I will write explicitly on utilitarianism soon, but now for something completely different. The quality of maths teaching in the English education system is indubitably atrocious. Kids come out of school with the often with the most basic mathematical ability, and some even fail in achieving this. Children regularly arrive at primary school not knowing their times tables, and it is only at A level (an option taken by a tiny minority of students) that young people are introduced to calculus. It happens to be the case that elements such as times tables can only be learnt by solid and consistent practice (something which the national curriculum is in fact moving away from), but for many of the problems of maths teaching I believe result in the fact that students are not challenged by questions that they cannot necessarily answer at that moment.

Before I learnt how differentiation worked during my first year of A level I was never asked to consider how I could work out the area under a curve on a graph. Whilst it is a rather difficult question without calculus, I don’t buy into the stigma attached to asking difficult questions. We are told by the government that one of the major reasons for problems in the maths curriculum is the fact that children simply can not locate the relevance of much of what they learn in maths lessons. One must accept that most maths is very abstract and often not useful in itself, but rather that it is the process of engaging with mathematical problems that it important in encouraging children to think creatively and critically across the entire spectrum of subjects. Algebra is something that I see as particularly important, and in my mind it must be taught simultaneously with the most basic of maths. The way it is currently taught is that algebra is built on top of a set of ‘mathematical facts’ that aren’t in any way confirmed or understood up to the point at which algebra is introduced.

I am not generally a keen defender of the Soviet Union, but there is something to be said for their education system, in which children at the end of primary school were doing maths that is not even in the English curriculum until A level. Similar statistics can be stated about Greece and various other countries around the world. I understand that my views on this issue are particularly conservative, but there are some basic aspects of maths without which one simply cannot move on, and so it should be the job of our primary schools to secure this basis. It is then the job of the secondary school system to suggest to students in the broadest terms what can be looked at or understood mathematically, whilst providing an exposition of key basic methods. The current system in which one can leave without a thorough knowledge of numbers, and the means of treating them, is simply not adequate for a society of our kind.

On Difficulty

2006-05-11T23:51:00.000+01:00

I am sorry about the abstractness of today’s post but it’s on something that I’ve been thinking about in the context of critical theory in the last few days. The idea, concept, emotion, feeling, or whatever it is, of ‘difficulty’ is clearly one of the stranger yet more important things that humans experience. It is the moment at which one realises a non-identity with an object that one can start to understand oneself in a relationship to both the world and society, but it is, in my mind at least, the impression of difficulty that can actually elucidate this notion, that is to add some colour to the impression that one gets of what one is not.

Another interesting aspect of difficulty is the wide range of other objects that can create this feeling in people. To an extent there is nothing that doesn’t create such a feeling. Even oneself is found to be essentially difficult, although often this seems to be the case only at the point one comes into contact with, or engages in an interaction with another person or dynamic entity. Difficulty is extremely troublesome to pin down, and the further one tries to expose it, the further away it seems. It acts as a process yet the only trace that the process leaves is the embodiment of the process (or and identical process) itself. It is only with understanding one’s interactions with the world as purely a matter of dynamic (and ephemeral) actions and interactions that one can begin to accept the difficulty of difficulty, or rather the fact that it does not in any simple way embody a concept.

Of course all of this discussion has some ethical consequences. All too often nowadays we are presented with the idea of the simple or easy life as something that we should strive for. This image exists all over the media and I feel that it’s something we really need to challenge. If difficulty is the means by which we effectively and critically engage with the world, then the idea of us living a life without it is degenerate and something we should fight against. Difficulty is all too often explained as an opponent to pleasure in the media’s ever more utilitarian critique. Yes, to an extent utility is inherently undermined by difficulty, but in the same sense there is no concept of utility and certainly no access to it if it exists as an object if difficulty doesn’t exist in the first place. In the same sense, difficulty is not the opposite of efficiency. Inefficiency and difficulty are again regularly opposed and again this opposition is incorrect due to the fact that whilst elements of society can be made more efficient, our interactions with them remain difficult.

CUSU Welfare Elections Worries

2006-05-10T23:12:00.000+01:00

Once again we’ve had a set of by-elections in CUSU, and once again the candidates that I have backed have not got in. This suggests one of two things. Either I am completely out of touch with the Cambridge student body, or socialists are just really really bad at publicising themselves. Hustings this week were depressing. Neither of the candidates for the Welfare and Graduates positions bothered to mention Grads in their speeches, and there was a general air of unenthusiasm surrounding the proceedings.

One of the largest problems for me, as a member of Development and Planning Committee, is the fact that it seems that the candidate who was elected for the Welfare and Graduates sabbatical position was elected unconstitutionally. The Constitution, for a reason beyond my knowledge, demands that anyone standing for a sabbatical position has permission to stand prior to the submission of their nomination. I have been getting phone calls all day about the fact that it seems that the man who was elected simply hadn’t done this. As a result I can say that his election is absolutely unconstitutional. Whilst it is the case that he did get the ‘popular vote’ (there was a gap of a mere twenty-six votes between him and the next candidate), it seems that he has no respect for the CUSU constitution, and this worries me rather deeply. Further to this, I am aware that his excuse is that the election was not publicised to him at an early enough date. Responsibility for this lies eventually in the hands of the returning officer. If he had not received the information (although I am well aware that it has been available on the CUSU website for a few weeks now) then this is also unconstitutional. Regardless of any such unconstitutionality, I do not see this as an adequate reason to break the constitution once again.

I guess my feelings are also rather muddled on the issue due to the fact that in the course of the last week I have had reports from a number of people that I trust, saying that they have known the winning candidate to have been homophobic and/or racist. Whilst I cannot personally back up these claims, I do think they should at least be public. I do not endorse them, but regardless of whether he is truly racist or homophobic, I do find it worrying that we have elected someone to look after welfare who is viewed by students in this way. There were also issues of him saying that he already had the position on his ‘facebook’ before the election had even taken place (although I don’t know what elections committee have said about this). Sometimes I feel I am being a little pedantic, but I do feel I have a responsibility to defend the constitution whether I agree with it or not. I don’t know whether an unconstitutional election can have effects for the trustees, but it will be something I’m looking into. I am also rather concerned that the returning officer is yet to make results public with only seventy-two hours allowed between the end of the election and the end of the complaints procedure.

Holocaust Humour

2006-05-09T23:58:00.000+01:00

Once again I am writing my post rather too close to my midnight deadline and I am rather suffering from ‘slight’ inebriation, so I must apologise to those of you who have heard the details of this comment (Gwawr, Rob, and Reuben) before it’s even been posted. I also apologise for its brevity, but it seems that alcohol is not good for my mind My subject tonight is the rather contentious issue of Holocaust humour. This is something that has generally been looked down on both in the Jewish community and in the media in general. One merely has to remember the outrage in the ‘left’ press (read The Guardian) at Scott Capuro’s comment at the Edinburgh fringe festival a few years ago ‘Holocaust, schmolocaust, can’t they find something else to moan about’.

The problem is my feeling that people all too often are ‘offended’ by such humour merely because that is what is deemed to be the politically correct thing to do. As far as I can tell, there are no people in Britain who were fatal victims of the Holocaust, and there are very few people who were themselves victims. Of the people who I have seen outraged at these sorts of comments, none of them have been holocaust victims or survivors. In the same sense, there are also in fact very few people who are related closely to those who died in the holocaust. Many people who are related to Holocaust victims do not even remember them (it must be remembered that the genocide stopped over sixty years ago). As a result, we are left with this rather vigilant set of people who believe that the role for them to fulfil in society is to be ‘politically correct’, and that by doing so they are doing both a huge favour to both themselves and those around them.

I have attacked, in an earlier post, the idea of offence as a means of defence in a political argument. But even worse is the faux-offence taken at this sort of humour. It is in fact not offence at all (which must be defined as an immediate emotional reaction), but rather a political stance transmogrified into an emotional stance for effect. There is something inherently hegemonic about the outlawing of certain objects for satire. Anything in the public sphere is condemned to a comic treatment, yet one must simply accept that such a treatment is part of the integration of any such object into our own society. It is terribly dangerous to remove the Holocaust from this sort of integration. There was nothing particularly profound about the society in which it originated. In many ways such a society is rather close to our own. The Holocaust must serve as a reminder as what totalitarianism can do, and its removal from the social sphere of comedy can only be seen as the widening of a gap between the possibility of fascism in our own society and the actuality of fascism in 1930s Germany. Such a dichotomy is clearly ill-founded.

Blame and the Nuclear Family

2006-05-08T23:53:00.000+01:00

The modern nuclear family is disgusting in what it stands for. I refer to, not only its patriarchal origins and the transference of that ethos into the modern home, but also the nature of upbringing that it condemns most children to. Unlike many others, I do not possess the desire to have children. I have experience in my own life the responsibility of looking after pets, and I can honestly say that not only was I terrible at it, but I objected to having that kind of responsibility. Yet, further to the fact that I don’t think I would be particularly good at taking the simple responsibility of keeping a child fed and watered, I generally feel that it is completely irresponsible to endow the integration of a child into society on two people who by no means are qualified to do this. It seems, more often than not, that these days, parents are completely incapable. Whilst I do not really agree with the current government on what can be described as ‘moral’, there has certainly been a huge rise in what they describe as ‘violent crime’ amongst young people in the last few years.

I do accept absolutely that a rise in such acts is not necessarily a result of the family upbringing of children, what I can say is that as a result of such acts taking place, it is the means by which people are socialised that must be brought in to question. If young people are mindlessly acting violently towards eachother then there is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed. And if it happens to be the case that the modern nuclear family is incapable of addressing it then we are forced to look for some other means. Many people act as if their collective responsibility of society is identical to the tax they pay, and at the point at which the money leaves their bank accounts they renounce all responsibility both for praxis of socialisation and for the effects that a degenerated socialisation has.

The responsibility is left lingering somewhere between the generally unsupported public sector of schools and the unquestioned nuclear family. Independently it is clear that neither of these can have the required effects (although this is possibly just the impression that right-wing libertarians would like to give us). In my mind, the only way in which socialisation can be effective is through a process of self-conscious and internally responsible collectivisation. Whilst the dissolution of the nuclear family in the near future seems an impossibility, it seems clear to me that a critical understanding of its consequences and limits. This is the case with all elements of societal structure, yet family is one of the areas in which it seems all too often neglected.

On Radio Four

2006-05-07T23:54:00.000+01:00

Today’s post arises from a conversation I had with Sue Soame, who is the librarian at the music faculty, and the matter for discussion is Radio Four. I am absolutely convinced that this radio station I the last true bastion of culture in today’s society, and this is a result not only of the commission content and real content, but also because it is publically owned and thus has a very different relationship to the public from commercial broadcasters. Whilst there are other publically owned stations, they are often too specialised to invoke any sort of totalistic ideology. Take, for example, Radio Three. Whilst the ideology of this station is that one must understand one’s own artistic history, the history presented is all too often that of the dichotomy of ancient Italian or German masterpieces and some kind of modern high-brow-esque yet still popular world music and ‘Jazz’. In this way the ideology of Radio three seems muddled by the fact that it broadcasts what is in some way established in a vernacular and serves to remind us that we should stay faithful to that intellectual method that led us to these heights in the first place. There is an implication in these broadcasts that suggests that humans are not inherently progressive.

Radio Four does something very different. It insistently keeps one up to date with what is going on in the World, and whilst it does have it’s own ideology conveyed through its presented ideas on newsworthiness, it is constantly encouraging its listeners to engage with contemporary political (and often in the background philosophical) debates. Yes, of course there are times when it does not do this effectively, particularly notable are the oft-dire pastiches presented as ‘the afternoon play’ or the Otherness from everything else on the radio station presented in The Archers. On the other hand there are daily programmes such as ‘Women’s hour’ that can do nothing but be inherently political at every moment.

Yes, it may be the case that at some points Radio Four can be condemned for the same suggestion of conservatism that I paint Radio Three as having, but in a way this conservatism is dialectically linked to its radicalism. Similar to Adorno’s concept of the enlightenment, the conservatism associated with what can only be understood to be a liberal mode of thought, is the same conservatism that has led us to a vernacular of critique. It is that very element that we are critical of that allows our critique to exist or happen. Whilst it is clear that the likes of Radio Four are not profitable (there are no comparable commercial radio stations), it is truly fulfilling its brief as a public service. Commercial radio stations simply posit themselves. Radio three does the opposite by negating at every moment its influence on the current society. It is only Radio Four that bridges that gap and maintains that vernacular of an active critical culture that all too often feels outmoded and stuck in the Nineteenth Century.

On Embarrassment

2006-05-06T21:31:00.000+01:00

Embarrassment has to be the strangest of all of those feelings categorised as emotions. The real problem with embarrassment is that it is inherently an outward manifestation. It has a social relevance in a way that other emotions don’t. Whilst it may be the case that one is ‘happy’ when told a joke, but it is also possible to be ‘happy’ or the such like without any social impetus. Embarrassment is different and is, from what I can tell, the internalisation of a real-time social interaction. Further to this is the problem that I can’t really see the point of embarrassment. It appears to be a completely useless emotion or feeling, one that causes a feeling of either lack of control or internal contradiction, and either way it’s something I don’t want to know about.

There is an assumption in modern society that one should be in some way consistent. One should apologise for being inconsistent, or feel embarrassed if one acts in a way that is out of the ordinary. The problem is, that when you take an action that you are later regretful of, or embarrassed about, the emotion exists as a social object that you create to distance yourself from that earlier action and restore the myth of consistency that has been breached. My problem is that I don’t believe that consistency is something to be relished, on the contrary, it is to be embraced if we are to understand both what it is to be human and what it means to have social interactions (although actually these two concepts are one and the same). If the action was in some way accidental or not in your control, then it is not something to be embarrassed about, and if it was in your control then it is part of the very same ‘you’ that later invokes the embarrassment. In this sense the embarrassment is in fact publicly intentional to whatever faux pas may have happened.

Social norms are there for a reason, and that reason is to keep society where it is, and in a so-called stable state. In my mind this is a terrible reason and thus, if something happens that is not a social norm then it shouldn’t be challenged simply for this reason. Humans existing in time and society are inherently deviant. Those who attempt to deny this deviance, this critical interaction with society, must be labelled as conservatives. If it has got to the point at which conservatism is embodied in an emotion, then we seriously must be in a worrying state of affairs. Embarrassment should be something to be embarrassed about. We should defend our actions that we believe are right and criticise in hindsight those we feel are wrong, but I simply can see no value in attempting to distance oneself from one’s own interactions with the world.

On Wrapping Paper

2006-05-05T23:42:00.000+01:00

Once again I have left writing this blog until the last minute, and I get the feeling that this is a habit I should try to kill by getting it written in the morning. I went shopping today, in search of presents for a couple of friends who have birthdays this weekend. While I was out I did consider buying wrapping paper for these gifts, but suddenly it dawned on me how absolutely useless the idea of wrapping paper is. Instead, I decided to put the money I would have spent on a card and wrapping paper in with each of the presents for the two people. I just figure that they will find the two pounds a little more useful than some semi-picturesque torn-up scraps and a card with a pseudo-joke, I use the term ‘pseudo’ as they tend to have really terrible jokes on them, and furthermore the jokes tend to be completely irrelevant. I cannot understand the impulse behind thinking ‘Oh, it’s so and so’s birthday, I better get them a piece of paper with a picture inscribed, that if they haven’t seen before may make them chortle a little’. I certainly don’t think like that.

The thing that really gets me so much about wrapping paper is the expense and then the waste. I cannot ever remember looking at a gift that I have received and thinking to my self ‘when I received that I enjoyed unwrapping it so much, I just think about it all the time.’ People value gifts because of what they are, not how they are presented to them. Imagine the situation in which there is a large party at which a hundred gifts are given. Now lets assume that each gift comes with two pounds worth of associated wrapping paraphernalia. This will leave the receiver with having to throw away about two hundred pounds worth of paper. It can’t be reused or sold on, its value simply disappears from the system.

I was discussing this whole situation with Adam on the way back from my friend’s party this evening. His reaction was ‘haven’t you seen the Mastercard (although being a silly northerner he pronounced it ‘Masstercard’) Advert? There are some things that money just can’t buy’. I apologise to him, but I simply cannot agree with this sentiment. The very definition as a thing implies that it can be bought, and if it can’t be bought then what sort of a ‘thing’ is it, and why haven’t I ever come across anything like it? If your friends have a fetish for unwrapping, or if simply this is the sort of thing that excites them, then by all means wrap up their present. Even wrap it up two or three times for that extra excitement. If, on the other hand, you are only wrapping up the present for reasons of etiquette, then please reconsider. If everyone gave two pounds with a present then maybe the receiver would be able to spend it all on a single item they desire and it would truly be a gift from all of their friends.

The Difference Between 'Systemic' and 'Systematic' in Dialectical Epistemology

2006-05-04T23:54:00.000+01:00

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written on any Marxist epistemology, so here comes a mini feast of dialectics. A topic that has been a great concern to me over the last few months is that of the interaction of dialectics and critical praxis. Much of this argument, centred in Hegel and late Adorno is tied to the Hegelian conception of a system. Friedrich Schlegel wrote ‘It is equally fatal to spirit to have a system and not to have one. It will therefore simply have to decide to combine the two’, and to an extent Adorno agrees, but rather than combining the two, Adorno identifies the dialectical tension of a systemic and an asystemic model with human phenomenology. This seems to me a sensible approach, but we are plagued far too often by writers, who in their commentaries on Adorno and Hegel fail to see a key distinction: that of systemic and systematic.

To an extent such a distinction or dichotomy is less strongly fought against by Hegel who understands the system to be identical to the praxis of understanding the system, but as soon as Schlegel’s critique is levelled the ground moves away and a whole other side of the argument becomes possible. If it happens to be the case that reality exists as the tension of the systemic and the asystemic then one can systematically (if that’s how we’re to describe dialectics, but it is in itself dubious) ascertain understanding of a system that is non-identical to either of these poles.

It is at this point that a rather more dangerous division of theory and praxis may creep in. That is, that understanding and being of the reality/spirit (if we are to be phenomenologists) have entirely different structure and are hence non-identical. One is systemic and one is asystemic, but this does not mean that one is confined to a systemic or asystemic account of either, rather that one is forced by the very nature of phenomenology to build up a dialectical account of the non-identity of the poles through a completely dialectical method. Such a suggestion of course does have consequences for the dialectical approach. That is, that the dialectical approach in itself can only be understood to be neither systemic, nor asystemic. Nonetheless, this has no real affect on an argument that dialectical method by its very nature is systematic.

It is a real danger to undermine one’s method of understanding the lack of overarching totality by suggesting that such a lack also invalidates our claims to systematicity. If this was the case, then our original premiss would be neither true nor false. There would be no weight to any claim, and no allowance for the sedimentation of any concept in reality. A materialist dialectical system, at this fallacious point, is transformed into the opposite, an idealist dialectic, and whilst many Hegelians may defend this, there can be no weight behind any argument they make if this structure is ‘true’.

How Fair is 'Fair Trade'?

2006-05-03T22:32:00.000+01:00

Following listening to a programme on Radio Four yesterday evening, I thought I’d write today on the idea of ‘fair trade’. Now, fair trade has become more and more popular with both consumers and producers of products in the last few years, and it is always a favourite with the new breed of consumers who consider themselves ‘politically correct’ shoppers. A market has opened up for organic produce, anything that labels itself ‘natural’ now has a niche, and of course these same people are willing to pay more for the same product if it has the words ‘fair trade’ written on it. As a Marxist, I find the concept of ‘fair trade’ to be rather odd. Surely the reason why trade exists is because there is some kind of economic impetus behind it. If one can buy a product in one place for one price and sell it in another place for more, then there is a reason to trade. If on the other hand no such disparity exists then trade is absolutely unviable.

Who exactly decides what is a fair price to pay for workers and for the materials that are worked. I’m guessing that it’s probably someone in the West, of course decided by some international organisation that is so deeply rooted in the capitalist system that it has no conception of the fact that trade is inherently based on the idea that trade is the payment for labour of less than it is worth to the individual who is paid. There is nothing to be said about those wage labourers except for the fact that they must be sustained for the system to work. So, in this context it seems that fair trade is something that provides those who work in primary and secondary industries with something more than simple sustenance, but to say that they are paid fairly would surely imply that they are paid what the consumer spends, and this is simply not the case.

So, what are we to think of those companies who sell fair trade goods? The most public change has come in Starbucks Coffee chain, which now only sells fair trade coffee. This in itself is better than the situation was before in that it means some people in the third world can maybe live a slightly less impoverished life. That being said, one must not forget that it is exactly that type of globalised trade that multinational corporations such as Starbucks carry out, which fuels this system of keeping the poorest elements of the world’s population poor. Whilst it is impossible to analyse accurately the economic effects of Starbucks’ trade, whether it be ‘fair’ or not. I would argue that if we truly want a fair system then we must challenge the entirety of the current system of trade. We must also challenge left-wing principles, whether they be liberal-left or radical, being appropriated by the right as some kind of cynical sales tactic in the way that Starbucks are clearly doing.

On Silence

2006-05-02T20:48:00.000+01:00

I don’t like silence. I expect this is a result of having been brought up in the middle of a big city. We used to have a big train viaduct at the back of our garden, and London is always buzzing with traffic, people, sirens, and technology. In many parts of the country, it seems that silence is something to yearn for, something that for some reason has this ascribed value. Of course, there are times when silence is a useful thing, but in my mind these are times when one fills one’s brain with another type of noise, or at least a replacement for the noise. Take, for example, a library. Everyone is supposed to be quiet there, but this is simply so it is easier to fill one’s mind with something else: the text of the book or article that you’re reading.

The silence that is so admired is something different. It is an aide to clearing one’s head of thought, of some kind of ambient non-focus. This is what I really object to. There is this idea that if you are not considering the world, not processing cognitive input, and you secure some kind of peace from this fact, then that is a good thing. I just cannot understand how this is the case. I do wish upon myself this idea of being able to turn off. I am identical to my relationship to the external world (including other people) and surely it is the case that to cut off contact with a single aspect of this interaction would be to leave oneself with an entirely one-sided and uninformed relationship.

I cannot imagine anyone preaching that we should spend an hour a day in an empty white space, or that we should cut off our sense of smell for any length of time. You can imagine the adverts in the paper “Travel to the countryside and fill your head with the beautiful no-smell. Almost as good as not having a nose at all!” It’s hardly a likely image, is it? So why is it that people feel that their sense of hearing is in some way expendable. I can understand that in a way there is a pleasure to be derived from simply not engaging with the realities of the world, not engaging in society, and attempting to individuate oneself, but unfortunately this is not the type of pleasure that I would like to participate in. Such a pleasure is perverse, and the denial that our desires are inherently intercepted by the social reality is a simple denial of the truth that should not be encouraged. Maybe if people started demanding noise and accepted that an active engagement with others is something to be desired, rather than invoking the flaw that the individualist will always pick with such an engagement, then maybe we’d have a chance at moving away from that very individualism that plagues our society with desires that in all honestly, are perfectly useless.

Technology and Writing a Dissertation

2006-05-01T21:35:00.000+01:00

Having just finished writing my dissertation (it’s due in at 2pm tomorrow afternoon), I spent a while considering how much extremely modern technology has affected both its style and content. Longer ago it would have had to be handwritten, and of course this would all have to be written up into a neat copy that could be read by whoever was marking it. Rather more recently it would have had to have been typed by typewriter, and whilst this is much neater than handwriting, it still suffers from involving loads of tippex where mistakes are made. What this really must have meant was that it was impossible, or at least very difficult, to restructure an essay or dissertation once a large proportion of the text had been laid down. I am constantly restructuring my writing, and whilst I know it is a bad habit, I feel that often it makes my piece of work much better than it would have been if I’d have carried on with the original structure.

A further really useful piece of modern technology is JSTOR. This site has PDFs of loads of journals, which whilst available in the University Library (which stocks every single book), makes reading things in bed, so much more convenient. It also does all of your referencing for you. This means one can be really lazy, and not have to fish around in a great pile of scrappy pieces of paper to find where you wrote down a page number. It also allows a certain independence in study in that one can search through the titles of all the different journals to try and find articles on your subject rather than relying on supervisors and books to find relevant texts.

By far my favourite piece of technology (and it is a really simple one) is the word count on Microsoft Word. It is probably the one good thing that Bill Gates has done in his life. When writing to a word limit it is incredibly convenient to write well over and then cut bits of it as you go through or as they seem irrelevant regardless of where they are in the document. When you can cut to just under the word limit it is so much easier than having to produce an entirely new copy and then counting it afterwards. I know this hasn’t been a particularly argumentative post today, but it is certainly worth considering how much more complex and time consuming writing a dissertation would have been even fifty years ago. Imagine what it meant for PhD students, who are expected to produce approximately 80,000 words of text. It would seem, to the modern student, almost impossible to keep that volume of ideas and words in ones head. Many people would argue that this is really a loss, but I believe that in comparison to the size of the gain technology has made for academia, it is nothing.

On High Heels

2006-04-30T23:45:00.000+01:00

I have never really understood the point of high heels. They seem to be the most ridiculous item of apparel (with the exception of the top hat). The aspect that is particularly shocking is the frequency with which they’re worn. There are very few girls I know who can honestly say that they haven’t worn a pair of heels, and whilst many don’t wear them to anything but formal occasions, they still seem a bit ridiculous. I have to admit that I’ve never tried wearing a pair myself but they just look completely uncomfortable and inconvenient. Why would people put themselves through the pain of contorting their feet and the risk of their shoe breaking just to make themselves look a little taller? Why would they want to not be able to walk across cobbles or cattle grids?

The real irony is the fact that many women claim to be looking for a man who doesn’t care what they look like, and who they are. Why do they think that such men (should they exist) would care if their girlfriends are a couple of inches taller or have slightly longer looking legs? I am part of a strange clan of men (or at least I assume there are more of us) who find high heels completely unattractive. It has got nothing to do with how they look themselves or how they make the woman look, rather that I feel the idea that a woman can make herself more attractive by strapping a couple of spikes to her feet completely repulsive. I wouldn’t want to go out with a woman who would go through pain, or lack of comfort, just to get a bloke.

Something I am particularly allergic to is the oft-heard line “but these are some of my most comfortable shoes.” I can barely resist responding along the lines of “well then you are clearly even more stupid than I gave you credit for. Not only do you have completely ridiculous shoes, but rather you have an entire collection of them that you paid for with money you could have spent on books and other fun stuff. In what way is that attractive?” Of course such a tactic is liable to win you a few slaps rather than anything else, but I do feel that it is important to take a stand and explain to all of those ridiculously ‘fashion-conscious’ women that there is quite a lot more to be said for being ‘function conscious’. Whilst I can understand that a well-worn pair of black and greying white trainers are not particularly complimentary to certain traditional dress codes, it doesn’t mean that they make you any less attractive. Hopefully these ridiculous items of clothing will go out of fashion soon enough and women won’t feel that they need to wear them to engage in an interesting way with men that they’re interested in.

Environmentalism and British Politics

2006-04-29T23:52:00.000+01:00

Green issues have been in the news quite a lot this week, with many of the representatives of the major parties feeling that this will strongly influence the voting in the upcoming local council elections on 4th May. This has culminated in David Cameron taking part in a backfiring publicity stunt in which he cycled to work in Westminster (if would have worked had the media not cottoned on to the fact that he had all of his papers driven to him in a car. Whilst this is a good little anecdote about the lengths to which parties will go to score points with the public, I feel that there is a more pressing issue: That of the value that environmental issues are given by the public.

Very few people these days will happily admit that they don’t care about the environment. With the impending crisis (or at least we’re told it’s impending) of running out of oil, the issue has shot to the top of many people’s agendas, yet I feel this is completely inappropriate. There are hundreds of schemes for recycling waste, many of which involve shipping a huge volume of material to the Far East to be processed. Much of what we recycle is already in abundance, or at least would be if we spent the money that is used on recycling on primary industry. Worst of all, is this obsession with greenery that goes on around England. There are worryingly powerful localised groups that demand the protection of the greenbelt, yet I struggle to see what use the green belt is to anyone. Britain often feels crowded, not least in London, but much of this is to do with the fact that the city is simply not allowed to sprawl in a way that is economically most efficient.

Much of the cult of environmentalism seems to arise as a result of a class of people who feel that they need to take some kind of radical stance against the current government, or possibly even more broadly, against the current state of society. They need the affirmation that they are doing something good. Some of them feel utterly disenfranchised, or that any change that they suggest or fight for would be impotent. Others, and I fear this is a much greater proportion, feel that self-interest keeps them from demanding the society that they in fact idealise. Environmental issues are hence the consolation for that class of people who read the independent, usually intelligent and university educated, but on a nice round salary. As soon as it is spelt out like that one can see that this is in fact that fastest growing class in Britain today and thus when the politicians say they want to fight on ‘green’ issues, maybe they are suggesting that they do want to change society but just keep the current illegitimate systems. Maybe, on the other hand, they are cynically fishing for that larger, more liberally minded electorate who haven’t quite worked out that their material ends don’t match up with their ideology.

Anniversary of a Death

2006-04-28T22:26:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week it was the first anniversary of the death of Paul O’Grady. He was a student at my college and also someone who I always felt quite an allegiance to. He was a staunch atheist and a politico and not afraid to express his opinions. His death was a bit strange for me. He wasn’t a particularly close friend, but he was someone I saw around quite a lot, that is more than many others in the college “community”. He was the first person I knew of my own age to die, which whilst it doesn’t sound much, specifically with many of the death rates of the world, felt very different for me. I had experienced grandparents dying but it simply wasn’t the same.

I guess many of my feelings about his death are tied to how college treated it. They were very cagey about it and they held a memorial service a few weeks later. Lots of his friends were Christian and I know that it helped them in the grieving process, but I did feel that some of the speeches (especially that made by the chaplain) were somewhat inappropriate. There was this very English atmosphere of apologising and championing a person, and when that championing entails a direct negation of his opposition to religion then I don’t think that it’s something I can go along with and support. Thankfully I have my own memories of Paul and had discussed a few metaphysical issues at length. Further to this, I couldn’t care whether ‘God’ agrees with us or not.

I think that my feelings towards the college were confirmed when they told some of Paul’s friends that they would not put money forward for some kind of memorial. Whilst college is in debt, I honestly think that this is the sort of thing that could benefit the student body over having quite so many formals in Easter Term, or producing high quality Chapel term-cards to be distributed to every student (most of them, in a place of education, place them straight in the recycling bin where they belong). There is now a memorial and it was funded by the students association. It’s a tree in the garden of 2 Adams Road. I thought to myself that next year I will be one of very few people left in college who actually knew Paul. It’s not as if the memories disappear but they certainly disperse and are contextualised in very different ways as people move on and away. For me, in the last year, it hasn’t really felt as if I’ve moved on in any real way, but this is almost certainly a result of the fact that I am still doing exactly what I was doing twelve months ago. I know that for many of Paul’s friends, his death has really influenced their lives, yet that idea of collectivity of experience can only fade into the distance.

The Need for a Women’s Sabbatical Officer

2006-04-27T16:48:00.000+01:00

There is constant discussion of restructuring Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU) in Development and Planning Committee (DPC) meetings, and all to often such structural changes suggest that we shouldn’t have a Women’s Sabbatical Officer. We are one of the few Student Union’s in the country to have one and it was a very hard won right. Something that has occurred to me in the time I’ve been involved in CUSU is that the Women’s officer, although specifically directed at half of the student population, is the only sabbatical officer who draws together the various strands of CUSU work, ranging from campaigning to welfare and from politics to services. To an extent the important role that such a position holds is in fact to undermine these divisions. Much of any restructuring plan tends to be fixated on pigeonholing any roles into various camps, and as a politico I just feel that this is completely inappropriate given the nature of the role I believe Student Unions should play in society.

Unfortunately the governments of the last few years disagree with me rather radically on what Students’ Unions are for. The 1994 education act puts severe restrictions on what SUs can spend money on (or ask their sabbatical officers to do) and hence they are often reduced to a structure for services, or at least this seems to be the direction that CUSU has been going in for the last few years. The idea of having a sabbatical women’s officer is in fact one of the most important and radical elements of our union, and given we still have a graduation ceremony at which female students are not allowed to wear trousers (unless they give due notice), and Directors of Studies who are sometimes sexist in their admissions criteria, and an exam system that even the university accepts favours male student, it seems one of the most important.

It is my opinion that if we are to lose this post then we risk throwing in the towel with all of our autonomous liberation campaigns, which is something that given the current climate I don’t think is something that as an organisation that has the aim of protecting the students, we should do. Further to this, it is the view of the leadership of at least three of the autonomous campaigns that we should have a sabbatical Women’s Officer. We have policy that if we have enough money to employ a new sabbatical officer then that officer will be an LBGT sabb, and losing the Women’s officer would also signal the loss of this prospect. We would lose the opportunity to carry out as comprehensive casework as we currently are allowed. We would lose many of the practical capabilities of the Women’s Union, and we would sacrifice that most effective element of politics in which it is embedded in the services we provide for either a service or a politic. Either would be thoroughly inadequate.

Broken Mobile Phone

2006-04-26T14:36:00.000+01:00

Having had a lovely evening of whisky with Gwawr last night, my joy was cut short by my phone deciding to die on me this morning. Now, whilst I don’t make too many phone calls, I do use my phone a lot, often to receive calls as well as using it as my chronometer. I certainly couldn’t do without it for the “up to twenty-eight days” it’s going to take to get repaired. So, I went to my service provider, who I’m sure make plenty of money out of me and my contract and asked if I could have a courtesy phone while mine was being mended. The answer, somewhat unsurprisingly now I think about it was ‘No’. The best they could do was to sell me a spare handset for seventy pounds, but since I was in a situation they could do it for sixty quid (apparently this is what counts as a favour these days). Thankfully my mother had enough spare cash to lend me the money, but if she hadn’t I would have just had to go without a phone. Apparently sixty pounds is not much for a handset these days, but when that sort of money is demanded from a rather inflexible student budget it seems completely unfair.

The man in the shop serving me said “you can always sell it on ebay when you get your old phone back, you could even get some of your friends to put in bids to push the price up.” I was shocked and then thought to myself, actually yes, this is in character. The people who are stealing money from me because the phone they sold me has stopped working simply expect me to carry on the chain by trying to steal money from others so the buck is passed. Alongside all of this, the cheating shop manager, and the prospect of spending £60 I don’t have was the awful upbeat music piped in. I’m not being one to usually consider the emotional aims of music but I couldn’t help but despair as the music simply intensified the feeling of irony that the whole experience had imbued me with.

So, what have I got in the end? An inferior phone, sixty pounds less in the bank, even less confidence in my phone company, my old phone being sent off with the prospect of having to pay another £25 if they don’t consider the problem to be covered by the warranty (if it’s not I will have no qualms about turning up to Phones 4U with a Kalashnikov and a magazine of those old soviet bullets with the eccentric spin that not only kill but rip your flesh apart in the process). I can imagine the manager’s face now, or more I can imagine what would have been his face but now simply exists as a bloody void (the honest salesman must be one who’s face represents what lies within his head, but of course honest salesmen don’t exist). Blood spattered across contracts and a cry of “If I can’t text at it, it’s not my revolution”

Herceptin on the NHS

2006-04-25T13:23:00.000+01:00

Herceptin has been in the news rather a lot of late. A landmark case was won in which a local health trust was ordered by a judge to make this drug available on the NHS. Currently availability of such drugs is not decided centrally but is based on budgets within a locality leading to the so-called post-code lotteries. Herceptin offers new possibilities for cure for breast cancer patients but comes at a price of £22,000 a year. Day after day comment pages on newspapers and critics on current affairs programmes are filled with demands for the availability of such drugs, but there is simply no acceptance that such availability must come at a cost. There is a problem with today’s society and that is that people, whilst they self-interestedly vote to keep tax down, refuse to put a price on life.

The idea that life is expendable is not a particularly pleasant one, or in fact one I can ever imagine people approving of, but the outright denial that it exists as a commodity is simply a nonsense. Women on the radio who tell us “We paid our taxes, and therefore have the right to access this drug” are simply wrong. When they give their money over to the government we can hopefully assume that it is dealt with by some kind of feasibility expert. Whether or not this is actually the case or not is another issue, but the pretence that one simply buys healthcare from the NHS with tax money is a false model.

Imagine what would happen if these people were in charge of the tax money. Whilst they’re plight is sad, and the decision is difficult, I can honestly say that the irrationality they display hardly endears me to the idea of preserving their lives with tax money. There are limits to what a government can do, and that is not to say that we should not always fight for more, but one has become resigned to the fact that more is not always possible. In demanding Herceptin, these women are taking away from life-saving cures for others, so one can see that it is exactly the same impulse that keeps taxes low that makes these women demand what the government can never supply them.

Whilst I still think it is important to keep that health service nationalised (and I am against PFI too), I feel that the refusal to understand it as a commodity system in the media is having an extremely damaging effect. It is simply the case that one cannot pragmatically refute the economic reality with categorical imperatives. Imagine the situation of a court of law. There are two defendants and one of them has to die. If either of them stand up and argue that they should be allowed to live at the expense of the other then I can’t see their argument standing up, yet this is what is happening and people are inevitably being condemned to death because they don’t happen to be in that courtroom.

Exam Culture

2006-04-24T20:05:00.000+01:00

Cambridge is a very strange place around this time of year. Everyone has just got back from five weeks of holiday, and yet everyone is also as grumpy and depressed as ever. The silence is more penetrating than other times of the year. People stoop past the windows carrying bags of books and the canteen in college is busy. This is what exams, or at least the prospect of exams, does to people. What is most intriguing about this process of general business before the summer of hibernation is that it is exactly this point in the year at which people learn the least, or are least involved in active education. All of those interesting lecture courses stop, very few people produce any original material, and one simply doesn’t have time to read texts that are in the slightest bit irrelevant to the course, regardless of the fact that it is exactly these texts that aid us most in our learning.

We live in a society that has a cultic relationship to exams. I have done exams in the Summer/Easter term every year since I was in year nine, so this is my seventh year non-stop. There is a fetish to examine amongst those who are in control of the education system, and along with this goes a fetish for clarity of thought, concision, and efficiency. The problem is that I see all three of these elements as actually contradictory to what education should be about. Yes, to an extent there is a need to back up a conclusion with reasons in an extremely formal style, but what in fact makes a useful piece of work is one that is nuanced by intellectual thought that surrounds it, one that is to and extent interactive both in its construction and in its reception. Yes, it is useful to be concise, but when one in fact loses through concision all of those implicit references and levels of an argument that, whilst not serving as a true conclusion, invoke and evoke other texts and ideas rather than a representation of an argument as a hermetic thing-in-itself, then that is also clearly a loss.

Thirdly and finally is this issue of efficiency. In my mind there is no such thing as being an efficient worker if work is identified with thought. Thought, and hence work, is never ending, constantly existing as a coherence of concepts and understanding, and to be ‘efficient’ in the way exams demand is to at a single moment rebel against that dynamic structure. Whilst there is an immediate use in the crystallisation of the conceptual into the rhetorically formal, this use is clearly limited by the fact that any crystallisation in itself must become a dynamic structure, to be subverted or reacted against. Exams teach you to think in a specific way but more importantly they also teach you not to think in a specific way, and in some cases simply not to think at all. I guess that this practice is confirmed by Cambridge who shred every exam paper after it has been marked.

Football and the Proletariat

2006-04-23T23:53:00.000+01:00

Attending a football match, one is accosted by all sorts of thuggishness, ranging from pissing on any visible surface, abusing the players, and singing in parallel quartertones (anyone know what the opposite of dulcet is?) in the most hammed up regional accents that these retarded gorillas can put on. The problem is that this is clearly what they are not. Many pay well over thirty-five pounds to attend a match and in return they get a distant view of a muddy field, a sense of ‘manhood’ whether they happen to be male or female, and a collective unity so degenerate in its spirit that it is near unknown to twenty-first century humanity.

It is the same carnal fervour as portrayed in Stravinsky’s rite of spring, but instead of the bourgeoisie prancing around imitating the precivilised hunter-gatherers and tribes-people, they are imitating that very element of society that they are dialectically set against. Whilst there is extremely limited support of football from the old guard aristocrats, much of the money in the game comes from the nouveau riche heroes of the people such as Abramovich. There is a tendency for these thoroughly middle-class people to go out at the weekend feeling dissatisfied with the human contact that their own ruling status ascribes to society and they associate in a way that appears as completely alien to almost every aspect of their lives, and yet there is something strangely intoxicating about it.

People who would normally be bored stiff by mills and boon novels return to sports grounds every week to partake in the ritual of watching a game so similar it is indistinguishable from the one the week before. Further, many anoraks have season tickets (and given the prices and block cash needed to afford one of these, they are almost certainly not the proletariat they yearn to be). It strikes me that all of the potentialities involved in putting 22 men in a field can be played out relatively briefly, and yet these people every week neglect their intellects in order to focus on something much shorter than their usual attention span, convince that they are helping by shouting incomprehensible bollocks, and acting like louts.

What must be understood is that there is nothing proletarian about attending a football match, and that the collective spirit for that hour and a half of not wearing a suit in a week has nothing to do with knowledge, interest, or use. It is merely a fetish. Further, that activity of collectivisation is collectivisation of stupidity. It is not a playing out of a class structure. Wants some proof? Well just watch polo or rowing or royal ascot on the TV and you’ll see another bunch of widely middle class people imitating the paradigm of a class that they are not part of in search of some kind of self-identity. It is not useful or clever, so please don’t do it.

On Clutter

2006-04-22T20:07:00.000+01:00

There has been, over the last few years, a popular struggle, or if not that a struggle orchestrated by those most middle class elements of the media. This struggle has been the one against having clutter in our rooms and houses. We are bombarded by house and style magazines that display ‘flawless’ rooms, and home decoration programmes that wash huge empty walls with pastel colours. Yes, that’s what’s marketable, that’s what people want is what they tell us. Unfortunately for me, that is precisely not what I want. It’s not that I specifically object to pastel colours, but I do object to people having spaces they don’t use.

I was brought up by Jewish Communists with a penchant for ‘stuff’. I wouldn’t have it any other way. My house is full of books and pamphlets, old magazines (many of which have been produced by one or other of my parents). The walls are covered with propaganda. We have the South African Freedom Charter in our toilet, the living room is graced by a large work of art depicting a nuclear bomb, a postcard depicting the Mona Lisa wearing Mao’s clothes, and a picture of some ancient Jewish Peasants in Poland. The books stacked on shelves against the walls range from Das Kapital to Mein Kampf, and every surface is covered with artefacts or useful items. There is at least a weeks worth of newspapers in the corner and a pile of video-tapes never to be watched again.

One must admit that much of this ‘stuff’ is not so useful to my family. No-one will read a week-old Sunday supplement, Videos are often of their time. That being said, it is being surrounded by this sort of stuff that has made my family the way it is. Often I wonder how The Sun is the most read paper in Britain, why people can’t manage even the simplest of questions on The Weakest Link, and why people buy CDs upon CDs that sound the same as eachother. The most comprehensive answer is that these people (and they constitute a large proportion of the population) do not have enough clutter in their lives. If only people kept things that they don’t need at that moment, if only they didn’t see space as a thing to be enjoyed as a thing in itself, but rather as a thing to be enjoyed by filling it with all sorts of random crap that keep your interest and inform your viewpoint. I don’t think I’ve ever been informed by an empty wall. Whilst it might seem more comfortable to live in a house that feels spacious, I would always exchange space for the sort of things I like to have around me. I would also exchange space for the money it costs to buy space in the current housing market. Commodity fetishism of spaciousness is one of the great media evils and should be challenged at every moment with little models of Karl Marx and coffee tables covered with pamphlets.

Animal Charities

2006-04-21T13:24:00.000+01:00

Am I the only person who finds the dancing bears on the advert for the ‘World Society for the Protection of Animals’ (WSPA) funny? Ok, so I admit that it’s probably not so nice for the animals, and they’d probably be a little happier if they weren’t made to dance. On the other hand, many people are upset about the fact that they themselves are bad dancers, and it would seem far more sensible to employ the dancing bears as instructors for humans and they could earn themselves a nice bit of cash to retire on, rather than to have to rely on charitable donations of three pounds a month. Whilst that is simply a ridiculous fantasy, I would like to pick up on some of the issues of charity that are currently espoused.

There are regularly adverts across the media encouraging middle class people to pay a monthly sum towards charities that help animals, whether that is helping endangered species secure existence or domestic animals that have been abandoned or are injured. Whilst this is all well and good, I personally think that it’s a little disgusting that this is the priority of so many people. I am not a great believer in charity but surely if you budget to give a set amount a month, it would be more useful to help people who are truly in need than to maintain a panda for the sake of maintaining a panda (I am convinced that pandas are not socially useful).

Now, I do have a general issue with charities in that they are very much limited by what they can have political stances on, and I am of the opinion that real change in society can only come about through political change led to by real political pressure. Whilst there are some charities that do effect extremely positive changes, these tend to be inherently short term, and in general worryingly short-sighted. Yes, there are times when giving to a charity is the appropriate action to take, such as the monetary support given to those aiding people who’s lives had been ruined by the Tsunami. On the other hand, the problems of the modern world, whilst being characterised by poverty and lack of facilities, are in fact caused by something that cannot simply be remedied by attempting to remove the symptoms. Any such action is doomed to failure for simple economic reasons and as such, they will not be resolved until we effectively challenge the economic status quo rather than appeasing our government by convincing them that the free capital of the middle classes will undo the problems that policy has caused.

So, what can one conclude? Firstly, we should encourage bears to dance as it is only when they control their means of production that they can control their own emancipation. Further to this, giving money to animal charities actually redistributes money away from those charities and campaigns that really help people and should seriously not be encouraged.

On Shyness

2006-04-20T23:29:00.000+01:00

Being shy has its good points and its bad points. Often it is the thing that makes one feel most lonely, whilst on occasion it can have completely the opposite effect. I recently realised that out of all of the people I know, there is no-one who knows me better than I know them. It was quite a strange experience to realise that, because in doing so I realised that I must in fact be different from everyone else I know, in that they all know at least one person who knows more about them than that person. I expect that it happens to be the case with people in a good proportion of their relationships. To an extent it is a weird thing to consider, given that qualitative knowledge has a tendency not to be particularly quantifiable. Nonetheless, I think my original point still stands.

Most people I know are pretty screwed up. It is quite possible that this is a cause for them to be someone I know (or someone who knows me as the case may be), but nonetheless is disproportionate amount of screwed-up-ness I see in people I know is a result of their interactions with others, that is, that the fact that they’re screwed up is caused by their relationships with others. To an extent, by avoiding such meaningful relationships shyness stops people being screwed up. It does, on the other hand, stop you from being not screwed up too. It just means that you become nothing.

It has occurred to me that in being shy I am in fact limiting those bits of data about myself that anyone can have access to in that there isn’t actually that much to know about me if I don’t self-consciously socially engage then such data doesn’t really exist. I am much happier to paint myself through a reaction to major events, what I hear in the news and how people I know interact. In doing such, I have limited various aspects of my life. There is one person who refuses to speak to me anymore, but in my book one person in twenty years is not that many. I don’t have a huge number of friends, but am after many years contented with company over real engagement.

Often I think that problems are caused by people being too forward, by people wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and by people not having those inhibitions that some of us are granted. Whilst that feeling of being lonely and not being able to speak to people about it is truly awful and something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, to an extent I feel that a certain level of shyness is something that should be encouraged. It is only when people become aware of the decisions they make with their actions then maybe members of communities would be able to interact more easily.

On Portishead

2006-04-19T13:47:00.000+01:00

Having visited a small town called Portishead to visit a friend a few weeks ago I thought I should post my reflections on the place. It is one of the strangest places that I’ve ever been in that there seem to be a really large number of people living there with very few local amenities. The place, as a whole, exists as some kind of massive suburb to a suburb, or even more worryingly a suburb to itself. Further to this, like all of these random places around Bristol it seems, it is built most annoyingly on hills. Now, you would have thought that the idea would have gone through someone’s mind when they decided to build a settlement, that hills meant much more difficult building conditions, as well as it being much more annoying to get from A to B within the ‘town’. Unfortunately it seems that Bristolians were not this forward thinking (or intelligent). I feel at this point I must qualify this by also pointing out that the next town along is called ‘Pill’, and I find this to be unashamedly silly.

What would ever make someone want to live in a place like Portishead? I couldn’t see the attraction myself. The centre of town is a street with a few shops along it. There’s no nightlife at all, and seemingly nothing going on. Everyone I saw there was white (although I didn’t see a lot of people, and it’s entirely possible that this observation is seriously conditioned by living in one of the most multicultural boroughs of London). I think that the most worrying aspect of the place was that I couldn’t see any work places. I just assume that almost every single resident must commute somewhere to work every day. Why, I asked myself, have these people not organised some sort of social or cultural centre? Do these people not go out in the evening? And why are all the lights in everyone’s houses turned off by midnight?

The place did seem completely inhuman, and I am honestly thankful that my parents didn’t bring me up anywhere like that. Whilst all of the people I spoke to in Portishead seemed very nice, I couldn’t help but question how they maintained their sanity, or if more pertinently, maintaining normalcy in a place like that is in fact a sign of insanity. The whole concept of Portishead seemed to be designed so that people were able to have as little human contact as possible. There was no feeling of community spirit (something I don’t normally believe in, but honestly this place was completely dead). The highlight of my time there was visiting a random little cliff in the middle of the night. Admittedly it was quite pretty, if not a bit cold, and the company was fun, but if that is all there is to do in these places, then all I can do is recommend them to Iran as a place to test their new nuclear weapons. That being said, they may struggle to notice any change.

An Adventure with Jehovah's Witnesses

2006-04-18T12:36:00.000+01:00

So Easter Sunday rolled around and much to my surprise there was a knock on the door at quarter past ten. Expecting it to be the postman I opened it but was surprised to discover that it was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They told me that they had called the other day but I hadn’t been in. Now, I always savour the chance to have a nice little argument with someone about religion and having lived in a house that for many years had a sticker on the door that read ‘JEHOVA’S WITNESSES, YOU RING OUR BELL AND WE’LL WRING YOUR NECK’ I hadn’t had much experience with this band.

We got into a conversation about the bible; I was asked if I had read it and told them that I had. They asked me what I though of it. I couldn’t help but give my honest opinion, that is, that it’s a rather sketchy document and hardly the sort of thing I’d like to base my world-view on. I don’t think they really understood what I was saying because then they began to bombard me (and my father who was now standing behind me) with questions of what I thought about various moral imperatives from the bible. What did I think about ‘thou shalt not kill’? I could hardly say that I agree with it. I returned the question “Would you have fought against fascism in Spain or Germany in the ‘30s or ‘40s?” I didn’t get an answer. I would hope that anyone in a modern day society would have answered yes.

Then we moved onto a more interesting topic. I asked the old woman if she’d ever read any Marx. It turned out that she hadn’t and so I told her that I’d swap her a copy ofJewish Socialist Magazine for one of her magazines. She didn’t seem to impressed but nonetheless the swap ensued. The front of her magazine was all about attaining happiness for oneself. It was completely shocking that these people really believe that personal happiness is more important than solving the worlds problem. Further to this was their hugely fallacious belief that being happy is the result of some kind of personal decision. Well it might be for those of us who live in nice big houses and have a bit of money to spare, but maybe she should consider the fact that a third of the world’s population don’t have enough food, and another third are actually starving (Stats from Radio4 of course). If she thinks that it is in the interest of the world as a whole for those people who are most oppressed to make a personal choice to feel happy, then I cannot help but feel that she is sadly mistaken. People tend not to be happy for a reason, and as far as I’m concerned, reasons are good things to act upon. Yes, I know this may sound a little progressive for all those people who believe that society is static and that enlightenment should be achieved by abstracting ourselves from society rather than directly the opposite.

The Need for Current Affairs in Education

2006-04-17T19:59:00.000+01:00

It is a sad but apparent fact that young people know very little about current affairs. Only about a quarter of the people at my college read a newspaper each day (and this is at one of the top academic institutions in the country) and outside of that I would expect the figure is even lower for under-25s as a whole. I believe that to an extent this is a result of children and young people not being taught to engage with society through the media, and in general lacking the critical skills that interpreting any society requires. If this is the case then it is clearly a problem with our education system.

It is now government policy that children in key stages one and two should be spending an hour a day working on English, and there are also elements of other humanities subjects that are expected. Sure enough a good proportion of kids couldn’t give a fuck what’s said in lessons. When I ask myself what I ever learnt in an assembly I really struggle to think of anything. When I consider if I ever gained anything from those huge worthless books being read in front of the class while someone pointed at the words I already knew. Far too often in English lessons I felt that poems, novels, and stories were looked at as only internally accountable. History is too often taught as a set of ‘historical facts’ rather than as discourse. For me there is a relatively simple response to this. That is to have a twenty-minute news bulletin broadcast to all school students every day. This would improve vocabulary (something seriously lacking among young people these days, as you’ll realise pretty quickly walking around the rougher areas of London). I would argue that one of the reasons why your people appear so apathetic is because they don’t have the means to engage themselves with society.

What is the point of sending children to institutions to learn about literature, art, and societies of the past if they cannot understand it in the context of the world they live in? I can’t seem to find a reasonable answer. What is the point of sending children to school if they end up, after fourteen years without the skills to understand or debate those very issues that most affect their lives? Whilst if students are presented with a news bulletin in school each day there will always be calls of indoctrination, but I honestly believe that this is a sufferable ill if in the process of any such ‘indoctrination’ we are equipping people with the skills to see through any such indoctrination, that is, to become critical members of society. Whilst there will always be dissenting youth subcultures, they don’t always have to be as thoroughly mindless as the yobbishness that we currently see among dissident young people. It is only when the young people in society are truly engaging with, and undermining those elements of society that these days they seem happy to fall into being supporters with, will our education system have succeeded. And it is only when young people have a nuanced understanding of what society is and how it acts that they will be able to fulfil this criterion.

Topology in Leftist Rhetoric

2006-04-16T02:03:00.000+01:00

Here area few words on a subject I’m looking at turning into a substantial essay at some point. The issue in question is that of rhetoric in Marxist and other dialectical thinking tends to be topological, that is that it is all about shape. Ok, so there is a reality of a class structure, and there is monetary value, but as soon as we get into any kind of abstract discussion, we are plagued by attributing special values to ideas. These come in a wide variety of forms. They range from the most reified in ‘base and superstructure’ to the most abstract ‘progress’, and to an extent it is when they are most abstract that they seem to do the most damage. We are told about society ‘moving forward’ but what on earth is it moving forward relative to? Well given consciousness is an element of that society that’s ‘moving forward’ surely we can’t know, either that, or we must revise our model to be somewhat more comprehensive.

This type of idea is really problematic when we talk about dialectics (and I am talking about dialectical thinking . The traditional idea of dialectics is that of two opposing ideas resolving into a single idea and we are left with some kind of ‘dialectical tension’, but what does this all really mean. Once can imagine these two ideas as objects and some kind of stress that they must be to resolve into one another but none of this really gets to the root of what this type of rhetoric is truly about. We are of course, in this type of thinking forced into inadequate metaphors. Ideas, in general do not really tend to ‘oppose one another’ rather they are forced into conflict by their reification in the action of people or peoples within the course of history. In the same way, there’s not really a tension in the dialectic, but rather an element of each dialectic when historically placed that cannot be reconciled epistemologically with the reality of a modern society.

Unfortunately it seems to me that until this sort of rhetoric is dissolved we will still be under the traditional accusations levelled against Hegelian and neo-Hegelian thought, that is incomprehensible and more significantly (for the likes of Popper at least) unchallengeable outside of the means of its own systematic approach. To an extent if one is to understand the world through any kind of phenomenology then any criticism is going to be accountable to that same phenomenological method, but if that is the case then any challenge to the critics of Hegelian method must in fact criticise their methods rather than the conclusions that their methods arrive at. This 500 words is really too brief to go into much detail on this but it is certainly something I’ll be looking at more in the future. Check back soon for more!

Some Populist Musicology: Thoughts on a Reinterpretation of the Finale of Beethoven 9

2006-04-15T22:43:00.000+01:00

I was sent an article today about a rather shoddy looking book on Beethoven 9 and it reminded me that I really need to write down some thoughts I have about it. It is clearly an extremely complex piece of music, but I’d like to discuss some of the rhetoric associated with the vocal finale and the piece as a whole. The finale has long been associated with unity and freedom and all those collective ideals of the young bourgeois society around the time it was written. We are always told that this piece is a celebration of the new society and what it’s achieved, whilst Beethoven is painted as the supreme bourgeois craftsman. But what if this work is actually saying something very different? There is no denying that it is one of the most personal of his works and the fragmentation of the early movements, not least the ex nihilo opening seem to suggest something very different from the collectivism of the last movement.

The opening movements are all tightly constructed and are often revolutionary in their style and content; tightly motivically constructed but often obliterating traditional forms. It occurs to me when I listen to the work that the finale is somewhat out of place. The work is not a jolly celebration. It is an artwork that up to the point of that baritone proclaiming ‘O freunde’ is highly individuating in its effect. Yet when I listen to the work as an entirety it is exactly that finale that I find most difficult. Given its context in the work it gives rather an impression of irony rather than the unity and truth that its words purport. After an hour of extremely personal difficult music we are challenged by this pummelling liveliness of this community on stage, but what if what we are seeing is a gemeinschaftmusik (a music that represents the relationships of a community) undermined by the very idea of gesellschaft (that feeling of individuation in which one is exposed to the true class nature of society) that is embodied in the rest of the symphony?

So, what does this mean for the finale? For me, if this hermeneutic analysis is plausible (and it does seem to be for me) then the ‘message’ of the symphony, as many critics would have it, is the inverse of what is normally described. The symphony is one of individuation, exposition of the realities of class conflict and society as a whole and it is only through the exposure to the false emotion, the false jollity, and the false idea of community in the finale that Beethoven as an ideologue could effectively outline his conflict with the society at the time. For me this is truly exemplified at the point at which we see the ode to joy theme turned into German band music. For me Beethoven is expressing the ills of the society, the fact it is so alien to art, rather than the common interpretation that the society can inclusively be embodied only through art.

Good Friday, and Eating Jesus

2006-04-14T20:25:00.000+01:00

Well, today is Good Friday, the day each year that the Christian population commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. This is all rather foreign to me, having never been a Christian and generally believing that religion is the first sign of madness. Nonetheless I feel that it is important to provide some kind of social commentary on the day’s rituals. One of the strangest for me is the idea that Christians shouldn’t eat meat on Good Friday. Apparently this has something to do with respect for Jesus’ dead body in that mean may in some way represent it. Well, that seems fair enough to me, except for the fact that every time I’ve been to a service or a mass in church, a majority of the people there have ‘taken communion’, now communion is a very strange ritual in which all the Christians go up to the front of the church or chapel and are handed a piece of wafer and some wine by some old peadophile, and then they go and eat the wafer and drink the wine. So, you think, all well and good. That’s until you realise that the wafer represents the body of Christ, the wine represents the blood, and the paedophile probably slipped some roofies in there too, just for the kids.

So, why is it reasonable to ingest Jesus on every day except the one he died? It all seems really quite inhumane. At least once he was up on the cross he wasn’t feeling any pain and was just up there toasting nicely in the heat in a kind of gigantic Semitic kebab. Surely that would be more flavoursome, or any less reasonable than eating Jesus on any other day. This brings me onto another point. People are always going on about the commercialisation of Christmas. Well maybe they should look at Easter and see what’s really bad. Every year people are flogged chocolate eggs and chocolate bunnies. I mean how irrelevant is that. In what way did some rabbit contribute usefully to the death of Christ? If I had it my way we’d have a nice big chocolate Pontius Pilate and a nice big Chocolate Jesus set up in the middle of Trafalgar Square and then all the little children of London could eat a piece of their favourite historical hero (or non-historical in the case of Jesus).

I’ll leave you with the traditional Jewish question for this time of year. Why is this night different from all others? The answer is apparently that we should be sad because Jesus is dead (regardless of the fact that all the Christians know he’ll pop back up next week in possibly the most violent bout of rigor mortis ever recorded). We’re not allowed to eat him because he’s dead, so instead we’ll go and eat some baby chickens and baby rabbits. I always knew those Christians had a violent streak.

Deal or No Deal: Inspiring Idiocy

2006-04-13T19:57:00.000+01:00

For a few days now, I have watched the Channel 4 game show ‘deal or no deal’ yet every day it is a shock to me that a room full of people (who have voting rights, who run their own finances, and who are part of society) can act as if they have all just had a lobotomy on the NHS. The game is based in a number of ideas. Firstly there is simple probability that a ten year old should be capable of, then there is risk aversion theory – the idea that people will make decisions that least risk what they value, and thirdly is the aspect that the contestant goes in with nothing and comes out with cash. It seems that the combination of these aspects turns people into morons. It is simple enough to see what the odds have are. Lets say you have been offered £10,000 and there happen to be five boxes larger than that and ten smaller, but those larger are much larger. Do you take the money or play on?

Most people on the show seem to want to play on in this circumstance. Yes, your chances of improving are about three to one, and if you do improve you will increase your winnings by more than three times. On the other hand, it’s still a three to one bet. I wouldn’t put £10,000 on a three to one horse even if the winnings would be a million quid. I don’t think many people would, but I could be wrong. Unfortunately I can’t quite understand why this type of show causes people to lose their inhibitions and critical faculties.

Further to this is the mythologizing that goes on within the programme. There is a myth that the order in which the boxes are chosen effects your chances, and there is always someone or other chiming in with ‘I have a good feeling about this’ or ‘you’re lucky therefore you should do this’ or ‘I just looked at the number and it didn’t look nice’. Why is it that people can’t cope with the idea of not knowing? Regardless of what some haggered old woman says, the chance of the big money being in any of the boxes is equal. It doesn’t matter what order you pick the boxes in, you’re just as likely to win or lose. The thing that really gets to me is the audience. There is this applause and congratulation for successfully choosing an order of boxes that improves your chances. What exactly is to applaud? That they read the number out correctly? It is thoroughly ridiculous and degenerate that people cannot control themselves and have so little faith in maths and reason that we end up resorting to this, and to think that this is what’s on TV after a wonderful programme like Countdown. What is the world coming to?

A Response to Cambridge's Disgusting Fund-Raising

2006-04-12T22:23:00.000+01:00

The University of Cambridge are currently engaged in a fund-raising exercise to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the existence of the university. We are told by the university that this money will be used ‘to help secure Cambridge’s edge in excellence for the future’ (i.e. within the university). The target that they have set for this campaign is one billion pounds. We are told that the money will be coming from alumni as well as other private sources. Now, I feel that it would be really useful to put this figure of a billion pounds in context. We had a huge media panic about the fact that the NHS was £650m short on its budget this year; it is approximately eight times as much as Oxfam receive in donations each year. The difference is that Oxfam and the NHS do something socially useful. To an extent Cambridge does too, in its research, and yes a proportion of this money will be going towards education and leading to original research.

A further issue for me is simply the fact that Cambridge is already an extremely rich institution. Now, if you look at the books then they will say something different, but that is simply a matter of bureaucracy in that a huge proportion of the university’s money is tied up in colleges and the rich faculties (Law, IT, Economics etc), This money doesn’t go through a central account and is thus forgotten. Trinity College is the third largest landowner in Britain after the Queen and the Church of England. Why it needs another billion pounds is beyond me. Well actually that’s not quite the truth, I stood on a picket line with lecturers who are underpaid last term, but I can’t see that this money will be making its way to them.

I cannot think of an adequate solution. I did ask the Vice-Chancellor of the university about this during Students’ Question Time but got a glib response, so here is my suggestion. It is not possible to access this money but I feel that it is of the utmost importance that we let those in charge of spending it know that we think that it is despicable that they are not spending any of that volume of money on social change. The campaign will try and implement social change (unfortunately inevitably failing) without the money, whilst showing that such change would be simple with a tiny fraction of the money. The cause I have chosen is homelessness. This really is a problem in Cambridge and 0.01% of that money could solve it. Instead I am encouraging JCRs to campaign for their colleges to open up their chapels and halls for homeless people to sleep in. No, it won’t happen in a million years, but it will send a powerful message to the upper echelons of the university that some of us feel that they are both academically and ethically irresponsible and that spending that money on social change can ‘secure excellence’ far better than further separating the rich and the poor in today’s society.

Fashion and Art

2006-04-11T22:07:00.000+01:00

One has to take a decision in life between art and fashion. This is what I have to explain to my comrades once and again. It is an unfortunate situation in which you watch every element of a society that was once seen as critical, or at least had the potentiality of criticism being subsumed into that very society it would traditionally have placed itself apart from, or at least would have, if it were subsumed by the society, existed as some kind of subversive impulse. Once something becomes fashion it becomes impotent and merely adds weight to the rushing waves of the very society that it once criticised.

Fashion is inherently utilitarian, and utilitarianism in the context of a society that is inherently violent and oppressive, a society that perpetuates inequality and objectifies everyone within it, must be a bad thing. The largest problem of such a utilitarianism (and fashion in turn) is that it is absolutely indiscriminate towards the elements of society. Whilst it is true that certain elements of fashion are directed at certain elements of society, we must deal with the fact that it is exactly that element of art that refuses to collude with societal structures that allows it to embody a critical faculty. The utilitarianism of fashion is that which wishes to please in contradiction to the social situation. Any impulse that in this way disguises the abhorrent social structures of capitalism must be seen as colluding with it, and it is in this sense that the dichotomy between fashion and art is born.

It is unfortunately an indissoluble problem that any socialist must deal with: Do they penetrate the ethically dubious world of the proletarian through some kind of acceptance of these utilitarian impulses, or do they restrict their critique of society to the elements that by their very nature constantly alienate themselves from a class that can truly cause change. There is not, in the traditional sense, proletarian art and bourgeois art. There is art that accepts the nature of the system and challenges it on a shallow level, and there is art which can penetrate the society absolutely and expose its fissures but is unable to portray this information in anything but a set of historical reactions to itself as a hermetic thing-in-itself.

So, what is to be done? This all seems rather unpragmatic. The only solution seems to be to engage with the society, something that can only be done with an engagement with the society. To an extent this is inevitable as the society is supervenient on a set of cultural engagements. The only choice seems to be that of a cynical engagement with society, or those aspects of society that portray this indiscriminate utilitarian model. It is only through a critical or negative engagements with cultural objects that we can even hope to engage with them on the level that will increase our understanding of society. If we treat them positively then we merely contribute to the ‘thing’ of society and negate its concept. It is for this reason that it is of the utmost of importance that we treat fashions as portraying a falsehood and art, whilst allowing limited access to truth (through the fact it remains non-false) as also a suspicious cultural object. That is not to say we should treat them similarly, but that we should be aware of their social motives.

On the politics of offence

2006-04-11T00:54:00.000+01:00

I am often intensely annoyed, when mid-argument I am told that I am not allowed to say something because it might offend someone. Such occurrences are becoming ever more frequent with the current neo-liberal climate, paradoxically spurred on by those most illiberal elements of government policy. It is now reasonable rhetorical practice to defend religion against a barrage of discourse simply by stating that lots of people believe in it and as a result it has some value (rather than just weight). Well here comes the crunch. Reality is not, as some people would like to believe, democratic. Things aren’t so because you believe them to be, and the idea that you might be a little upset by the fact that someone’s argument suggests that your view of the world is a pile of shite is not enough to refute that argument.

This is not to say that offence doesn’t have its place. It is ultimately reasonable to say that it is offensive to take away someone’s platform. The left have consistently argued against offence it these terms, whether it has been based on race, gender, sexuality etc. On the other hand, we should not defend people’s right to be unopposed in their opinions. If we are to be true dialecticians then we must acknowledge the simple fact that any ideology is, by the very nature of it existing as an ideology, contingent on the fact that it opposes other ideologies. If this were not the case it would have neither identity nor unity. The liberal idea of freedom of expression has been appropriated by the right and it is our responsibility to become well attuned to its new use. There is no reason not to offend people if the offence consists of you telling them that they are wrong. There is, on the other hand an ideological reason why we shouldn’t tell people that they have no right to be wrong.

Yes, one may argue that religion may be damaging to society, and that it ruins life both through its indoctrination and its effects, but the only way that we can come to any reasonable synthesis or conclusion on the matter is to challenge it on an academic level. We must fight to take apart its discourse, and if we are refused we must claim at every moment that such a refusal of our right to deconstruct their principles is exactly the same refusal that they claim should be wiped out through the likes of the proposed legislation on religious hatred. If I were to be arguing my case and someone said something along the lines of ‘Marxist epistemology is wrong and gives a false view of the nature of consciousness’ and I turned round, sobbed for a while, and then told them that I was offended and threatened to phone the police, the chances are they’d think that they’d won the argument. It is our job to confirm to these people, regardless of whether it upsets their sensibilities, that they have lost the argument.

Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder – A discussion with Sofie Buckland

2006-04-09T17:48:00.000+01:00

Well today’s 500 come as a result of a discussion with Sofie Buckland (a member of the group Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) about Cuba and the state of socialism in South America. We have opposing views on the matter and I felt the need to write this to clarify my own position in relation to hers. Sofie believes that socialism doesn’t exist in South America and we should be fighting for it everywhere, not least in places such as Cuba and Venezuela. What she doesn’t understand is that whilst it would be lovely to have the perfect revolution in which every impulse to action is a result of a shared class-consciousness which at every moment can be abstracted and then reified from and into the social reality, this is simply not the case of how we should go about trying to achieve socialism.

The reality of the world today is far more complex than many crude Marxists would have us believe. It is not simply the case that capitalism is the antithesis of a communist future, or that the proletariat can be labelled as a self-conscious collective. It is not the case that anything in opposition to the ideal situation is bad/wrong. It seems to me, as a socialist, that we must try an affect change on a number of levels (although whether the separation of these levels is at best dubious). Yes, we should have an ideal, we should oppose the current system, and we should strive for revolution, but most of the time this should remain as a base to a critical, reforming, and effective superstructure.

In the case of Cuba, Sofie tells me that we should deride Castro in favour of ‘independent working-class politics’. There is no allowance made for the fact that the situation is polarised by the fact that there is a huge amount of international pressure from both the American government and multinational corporations. Her attitude (along with the rest of her organisation and various other groups) is that we should fight for a popular overthrow of Castro in favour of Trotskyist parties in Cuba. Whilst I agree on principle that this is what we should be doing in the long term, there is no acceptance on her part that such a revolutionary struggle is somewhat ill-placed. There is no understanding that the very fact that there are these external conditions is integral to any position that we, as socialists, can take to a resolution. Yes, we must be critical of Castro’s regime, but it is completely nonsensical to suggest that our criticism of it within the sphere of leftist theory comes anywhere close to our support of it in relation to the overarching political system in which it is set apart in a diametrical opposition to America. There is a time and a place for revolutionary struggle and much of the time we are going to have to accept that we are better placed to take on struggles of reform. It is part of the rhetoric of these groups to suggest that every action we take must be on the course to revolution whilst at every moment they neglect the current position of the people who the believe can only truly be satiated by such a revolutionary act.