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Prayers for Bobby

Mar 20, ’12 8:00 AM

If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have assumed it was obvious that a film about gay teen suicide could not also be morally inspiring. Yet this is precisely what Prayers for Bobby achieves. It tells the true story of a religious mother in small town America whose picture perfect life is shattered when she finds out that her teenage son Bobby is gay. Mary, played superbly by Sigourney Weaver, simply cannot accept her son’s sexuality and sets out to cure him of his ‘sickness’. This encompasses prayer groups, hard exercise and psychotherapy as Bobby, desperate to restore his once close relationship with Mary, throws himself into these treatments in a fruitless bid to restore his life to the normality he enjoyed prior to his inadvertent outing. Ultimately though he can’t do this and he finds himself drifting into the small gay world of his home town. This only deepens the divide between himself and Mary before he finally heads out into the local city to live with his sympathetic cousin for a couple of months. This opens up a new life for Bobby and, initially, he finds peace with himself through his first relationship.

As you may have guessed from the opening line of the review though, this peace does not last. Bobby finds himself caught between two worlds; his sexuality renders him a sinner to his conservative mother but his internalised sense of sin prevents him from embracing his sexuality. Ultimately the weight of this ambivalence proves too much to bear and he throws himself off a motorway bridge into the path of an oncoming truck. The rest of the film follows Mary’s struggle to come to terms with her guilt and, although the film up to this point is certainly compelling, it is what follows that makes Prayers for Bobby such an astonishing achievement. Her attempts to make sense of Bobby’s death lead her to question her fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and her submissive relationship to God. She finds a new purpose and meaning to her life as she comes to campaign against the very bigotry which drove such a wedge between herself and her son that he chose to end his life. The film ends with her making an impassioned speech at the seat of local government in favour of gay rights. You can watch it below. The clip may seem a bit cheesy but it really isn’t in the context of the film.

In the events following the film Mary became a highly visible spokeswoman for the Diablo Valley chapter of Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She also appeared frequently on television talk shows and campaigned for public schools to introduce counselling for gay teenagers. While the events of the film are certainly tragic I found this trajectory from intolerance to activism profoundly inspiring. It showcases the ineradicable human capacity for renewal and understanding, as well as the ever present possibility of solidarity in the face of ingrained intolerance. At a time of political and economic uncertainty, while gay rights are under renewed attack, it offers a potent antidote to circumstantial pessimism.

Much of the critical acclaim received by the film seems to have been directed at Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Mary. The stunning quality of her performance can be seen both in the sympathy which she engenders in the audience for the bigoted Mary and the sense of plausibility which she inspires in relation to Mary’s seemingly unlikely transition from bible thumping homophobe to prominent gay rights campaigner. However in many ways I felt she was over shadowed by Ryan Kelley’s earnest performance as Bobby. The simple humanity which he brought to the role stayed with me after the film. He offers a beautiful though tragic portrayal of a young boy trapped within circumstances he did not choose and ultimately unable to negotiate a path beyond them. While these are the two outstanding performance in the film there are any number of touching though low key performances throughout the cast.

Astonishingly Prayers for Bobby was actually produced as a TV movie. Could there be a more powerful retort to those who bemoan the contemporary state of American television? This film is a wonderful achievement, imbued throughout with pathos, which exhibits admirable insight into its topic area (sexuality, bigotry, exclusion) while also reaching beyond it and touching ineffably upon the most profound aspects of the moral experience of being human.

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It’s tough being a man these days…

Mar 14, ’12 8:00 AM

We first meet Detective Tommy Craven greeting his daughter at Boston station. He’s clearly a loving but overprotective father, a man subtly ill at ease with the modern world. His daughter chides him for ‘always’ being early, and on the way home answers his probing questions by suggesting he needs a relationship: he wears a ring yet we never discover what happened to his wife. He demurs, saying she’s ‘my girl’. The pair return home where she is violently sick and, cast in the role of father, he tries to rush her to hospital…only for her to be shot and killed the moment they set foot out of the house, thus setting in motion the mystery which drives the film.

It would be easy to dismiss this piece, all the more so given the critical acclaim received by the BBC television drama on which it was based. In fact, most critics have done just that, often making reference to the quality of the original in the process. However, such repudiations ironically foreground, though fail to acknowledge, what’s most interesting about the film. A large part of what makes it such a tempting target for critical ire is its casual regurgitation of overly familiar Hollywood clichés: the last honest man, the hardboiled and incorruptible detective, a father struggling on behalf of his children.

We’ve seen this story a million times before. Or have we? The obvious points of reference are films like Taken and television programs like 24. Yet unlike Bryan Mills or Jack Bauer, who never stumble or display weakness, Tommy Craven struggles from the point of his daughter’s death; we see that behind the icy exterior of a man who knows what do and how to do it there is weakness and doubt. Throughout the film he imagines conversations with his daughter and we see his resolve falter on more than one occasion. We also see him throw up through fear and grief, as a visceral representation of his weakness (vomit plays a strangely prominent role in the film).

In its final scene he stumbles, as if drunk, through the house of the malevolent CEO and what might have once been justice is now simply revenge. Despite being a military veteran and a police detective of 30 years with, we learn earlier in the film, an impeccable record (thus he is an unblemished upholder of the Law) he’s been pushed too far and seen too much to think that justice can be done. He doesn’t aim to bring the perpetrators to justice but simply to end them so he can die knowing he has done something.

He says to the CEO before he makes the kill shot, ‘deep down you know you deserve this’: a man who has dedicated his life to the law, in both the political and psychoanalytical sense of the term, ultimately finds himself appealing to the private conscience of his enemy as he extra-judicially executes him.

In Ransom, a similar film of the mid 90s, the multimillionaire father (also played by Mel Gibson) was reunited with his son after ultimately killing the corrupt cop who’d kidnapped him and demanded a ransom. Killing was involved, as a troubled father redeemed himself through action facilitated by sheer resolve and unwavering integrity. However, this killing was defensive and against a corrupt cop, thus recovering the law rather than undermining it. Most of all it led to his reconciliation with his son. His previously neglectful parenting was forgotten as his performative enaction of the role of father, which had previously eluded him, washed away all sins.

In contrast, Tommy Craven’s killing is offensive, involving a pre-emptive assault on the CEO’s house, against a man whose activities were sanctioned at the top levels of the federal government, Ultimately, the reconciliation it facilitates is fantasistic and confined to the afterlife. The film ends with his dead daughter embracing him and leading his spirit out of the hospital. The only point in which we see him as the protective father occurs at the start of the film (as he attempts to rush his sick daughter to hospital) and it quickly ends with her being blown apart with a shotgun.

For all its cinematic clichés, the Edge of Darkness represents something new and, well, dark. While once the redemption of the father played itself out through conservative fables of resolve, integrity and justice, now it ends in three murders and no redemption nor justice.

In the 1990s stories such as this worked to sustain the integrity of American masculinity in social conditions which seemed to perpetually undercut and disorientate it: the inadequate father eventually found redemption through rediscovering those qualities (strength, bravery, courage) which society had obscured. Now however those qualities don’t facilitate redemption; only revenge. They don’t fix what is broken. They simply allow one ultimate and final act: not to set things right, not for justice but simply because acting is better than doing nothing.

A narrative form which once rested on the sublimation of masculine rage through the reestablishment of the law has transmuted into a form which permits no sublimation. Now there is just rage and the expression which can be found for it prior to death.

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Review of Precious

Mar 5, ’12 8:00 AM

A word of warning: this is not an uplifting film. It is however one of the rare films worthy of the epithet “unmissable”. Set in 1987, it tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones (usually known simply as Precious): a 16 year old black girl who is obese, illiterate and pregnant for the second time by her father. She lives in Harlem with her physically and emotionally abusive mother, while her first child (‘Mongo’, short for ‘Mongoloid’, who has Down Syndrome) lives with her grandmother. We never see Precious’s father, aside from a solitary flashback to his rape of her – presumably one of many such occurrences  – while she is briefly unconscious after being knocked out by her mother, who lashed out in rage as a consequence of what she saw as Precious’s culinary inadequacies.  As I said, this is not an uplifting film.

We first meet Precious in her class room, as she slaps a student disrupting her maths class and fantasises about the future she hopes to share with her handsome maths teacher. This is soon shattered and she is called to the Principal’s office to discuss her second pregnancy. Though she is suspended from school, her Principal (prompted by the handsome maths teacher who says he sees promise in Precious) arranges for her to attend an alternative school. Her mother is, to say the least, scathing about these new educational prospects: “you’re a dummy, bitch. You will never know shit. Don’t nobody want you. Don’t nobody need you.” In spite of this, Precious goes on to the new school (“Each One Teach One”) which, along with the birth of her son, sets into motion the chain of events which will ultimately take her out of her mother’s house.

An undercurrent of fantasy pervades the film, as Precious periodically escapes from the grim particularity of her circumstances into fabulous dreams of recognition and happiness. However even in these fantasies, Precious can never entirely escape: nightmares about rape drift seamlessly into fantasies of celebrity and fame. Similarly at one point she looks into the mirror and sees a pretty slim white girl of a similar age and yet seeing herself in these terms gives her the confidence to go out and face the world. This ambiguity, as reality and fantasy never stand entirely apart, sums up the film as a whole: there’s simply too much to it for it to be neatly encapsulated in simple terms.

The film seems like this should feel manipulative, given the ambiguous mix of pity and admiration it provokes, however somehow it just doesn’t: this is a testament to the quality of Lee Daniels’ direction and the performance of Gabourey Sidibe as Precious. The quiet power and earnest defiance which she brings to the character leaves the audience rooting for her in the most genuine way, without ever reducing the film to the level of sentimental fable. [spoilers ahead: stop now if you want to avoid them] This avoidance of sentimentality continues right until the end, as Precious stands up to and overcomes her mother. I found this the most upsetting scene in the film by far, largely because it was so difficult to know what to ultimately make of it. As Precious walks confidently off into the distance, mother to two children, what are we to make of her mother? Neither contempt nor pity seem appropriate and yet we are left with these and much else besides. Then the credits roll… and the only thing I’m sure of is that I want to see the film again…

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Who is Barack Obama?

Jan 9, ’12 8:00 AM

I’m someone who is far from sympathetic to postmodernism, seeing it as, at best, mildly interesting observations couched in a silly insular language and, at worst, reactionary attitudes presenting themselves as radical intellectual chic. Yet I find it difficult to watch a video like the one below and not feel compelled to go running back to Baudrillard. News just in: the President swatted a fly! Isn’t that cool? Well, to be entirely honest, I think it is. Or at least I did when I first saw the video. Yet I also find it absurd that I had that reaction. Even more so the fact that this act (so fitting for a POTUS who chose the Secret Service codename Renegade)  was covered so widely in the media. So what’s going on?

In his book The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad Tariq Ali, the ‘urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist’, sheds some light on these questions. This short book, which has the air of an essay project which spiralled out of control once Ali got writing, has a twin focus: the underlying continuities which can be witnessed in Obama’s domestic and foreign policy, in relation to what went before, as well as the spirited and incisive attempts made by the administration - and its defenders – to present these continuities as anything but. Ali’s writing is, as always, thorough and pointed, continually substantiating his claims without losing the flow of his polemic. However he is at his most adept when it comes to picking apart the prevailing narratives about the President which abound in the contemporary United States:

“on Fox television and right-wing radio, where these venues’ shallow, coarse and swaggering rabble regularly present Obama as a ‘socialist’ who is soft on Islam, not sufficiently pro-Israel, and may not even have been born in the United States and therefore may even be an ‘illegal president’ but in any case certainly remains an out-of-control radical. If only. None of the right-wing hysteria bears any relation to reality.”

But we know all this, don’t we? Obama himself tore this idiocy apart with genuinely impressive comic timing (another example of how cool Renegade is) at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

If we reject this view, it still begs the question of who Obama is and how he fits into the current politics of the US. Ali also takes aim at the common liberal doxa of Obama as an (overly?) consensus-orientated politician, a good and intelligent man in a wicked and corrupt system:

“The portrayal of Obama as a good man in a bad world is no more convincing. The argument that compromises are sometimes essential to achieve limited progressive aims is correct. The problem is that Obama, while an extremely intelligent human being, is not a progressive leader by any stretch of the imagination. Wishing that he were is fine but does not bring about the required transformation.

In reality, Barack Obama is a skilful and gifted machine politician who rapidly rose to the top. Once that is understood there is little more about him that should surprise anyone: to talk of betrayal is foolish, for nothing has been betrayed but one’s own illusions.”

So if neither of these prevailing views are correct then who is Barack Obama? The difficulty of answering this question is why I presaged this post with a couple of sentences about postmodernism. We know Obama, intimately, yet we don’t. He’s written a genuinely engaging, multi-million selling memoir. He’s done talk show appearances (complete with all-too-human gaffes) in a way no other President has done. Yet the man is a chimera, an empty signifier onto which an entire country’s dreams and nightmares can be projected. It would be naive to think that Obama, as well as his team, are anything other than intimately aware of this fact. Nonetheless, the question remains: who is Barack Obama? I can’t answer that question. Nor can Tariq Ali. But he does compile some interesting quotes from former acquaintances of Obama when he was embedded in the brutal machine politics of Chicago. While not answering the question, they left me with the thought that the answer lies in the memories of those who knew the man behind the renegade in his earlier career:

“He’s a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.” – Adolph Reed, African American scholar and activist

“Barack leaned over and stuck his jagged, strained face into my space and told me in an eerie, dark voice that came from some secret place within the ugly side of him, ‘You embarrassed me on the Senate floor and if you ever do it again I will kick your ass!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You heard me, [expletive], and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can’t see it, I’ll kick your ass right now!’ – Rickie Hendon, African American politician during Obama’s time in the Illinois state senate.

“‘It’s amazing how he formed a black identity,’ Rush said, rising from his desk and starting, theatrically, to sashay across his office, mimicking Obama’s sinuous walk. ‘Barack’s walk is an adaptation of the strut that comes from the street. There’s a certain break at the knees as you walk and you get a certain roll going. Watch. You see?’ Rush laughed at his own imitation. ‘And he’s the first president of the United States to walk like that, I can guarantee you that! But lemme tell you, I never noticed that he walked like that back then.’” – former Black Panther Bobby Rush who beat Obama in a 2000 congressional primary.

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SI Top 10 #9 – Review of ‘The Aftermath of Feminism’ by Angela McRobbie

Dec 31, ’11 8:00 AM

Is feminism as a movement no longer indispensable? Is it redundant or too aggressive for contemporary society? In The Aftermath of Feminism Angela McRobbie argues that the contemporary social and cultural landscape (especially in the global North) could be called post-feminist, an era  marked by “anti-feminist sentiment”.

Through the book, McRobbie explores contemporary society of the United Kingdom and argues that we are currently witnessing a post-feminist condition; a condition that sees feminism taken for granted in the belief that gender equality has been achieved. McRobbie states that feminist values have indeed been incorporated into governmental policies and popular culture, but those values that have been incorporated stem from liberal feminism, which has eroded feminism(s) related to social criticism. McRobbie successfully highlights her argument through exploration of glossy magazines, popular television shows, films like “Bridget Jones’ diary” or the “Ten Years Younger” Channel 4 series, and offers an analysis of how obsession with femininity and middle-class whiteness in popular programmes undermines feminism as a whole.

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Review of ‘Dear Granny Smith’ by Roy Mayall

Oct 19, ’11 8:00 AM

Granny Smith’ is the name given by postmen to the isolated old ladies along their routes for whom the mail service is a lifeline. Dear Granny Smith takes the form of a letter to such women, attempting to explain what has changed in the Royal Mail and what has gone wrong. The pseudonymous author, Roy Mayall, is a long serving postman who is reaching the end of his career only to find that the institution within which he has spent his entire working life is one he no longer really recognises. It is a very short, pocket-sized book that can be read in a single sitting and it is profoundly charming in both its presentation and its content. The book is imbued with the passion of someone who is clearly committed to the Royal Mail and this adds pathos to what is a damning indictment of the changes that are being wrought upon this valued institution.

Postman Pat
Some of the examples of public service Mayall presents in the book seem almost unthinkable to those, such as myself, whose reached adolescence at the start of the New Labour era. One particularly striking story involves a colleague who once saved the life of an old woman (ie, a Granny Smith) on his route. He frequently used to knock on the door of this isolated widow to chat and see if she was OK. One day when she did not answer, he looked through the window and saw her collapsed on the kitchen floor. He knew her sister who lived up the road so he went and retrieved her keys then entered the woman’s house. She had fallen on the floor and had been unable to get up. The ambulance crew subsequently told him that he had saved her life. Not only would this not take place under contemporary conditions but for my generation the very idea that it might take place seems unthinkable. The notion of public service has atrophied to such an extent that the idea of a postman intervening in a life to this extent (being one of the few people who speak to an isolated widow, having the time to speak to her on his route, knowing where her sister lives, being willing and able to retrieve her house keys and thus save her life) has simply gone, as have more mundane instances of public service, such as post arriving by 9am and twice daily deliveries.

One of them most compelling aspects of the book is the author’s informed critique of the day-to-day absurdities associated with the Royal Mail’s modernisation agenda. He pointedly explains the newly introduced electric trolleys which are patently unfit for purpose and require both an entirely new fleet of vans (as they are too large for existing vehicles to transport) and an entirely new maintenance infrastructure (in contrast to the simplicity and efficiency of the old fashioned bike). So too the introduction of ‘starburst’ deliveries where a group of delivery staff attached to a single van service streets one-by-one in a manner akin to refuse collection. Such a service, which he calls ‘McMail’, replaces the long-term postmen with causal and unskilled labour and is sure to undermine any last vestige of the public service culture which he has so poignantly described earlier in the book.

Perhaps the most amusing technological ‘innovation’ is the introduction of brand new double-decker lorries which, given the extra time they take to fill up, frequently leave depots half-full. Could there be a more striking example of superficial efficiency savings which simply produce waste? The author’s account suggests that the problem stems from the imperialistic manner in which ideological modernisers push through such ‘savings’ with utter disregard for the sort of on-the-ground knowledge which would quickly suggest the manifold ways in which such heavy-handed impositions are often flawed. As well as his criticisms of its practical realities the author offers a scathing condemnation of the concept of modernisation more generally:

It’s an interesting word, that. Modernisation. Just roll it around the tongue once or twice. We have to be modern, don’t we? Who wouldn’t want to be modern? Actually, it’s just another euphemism, like ‘flexibility’ or ‘discretionary’. Modernisation means scaling back the service in order to serve the interests of the corporations. It means ‘profitability’ which means ‘cutting costs’ which means ‘cutting back on fixed expenditures’ which means – and I don’t have to employ inverted commas for this – lower standards and lower wages.

The book ends with a plea for the renewal of the Royal Mail as a public service. Mayall argues that the network is still fundamentally sound and that underlying problems could be resolved through a return to full public ownership, adequate investment and a shift in managerial culture. It needs managers who enjoy an appreciation of its history and values, as well as a concern for the public the institution is supposed to serve (eg, the Granny Smiths) as well as the corporate clients. He plausibly observes that ‘the tension here is between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business, and the Royal Mail as a public service’.  He suggests that the Royal Mail is, at heart, both, and that the poor state of industrial relations within the organisation is a consequence of that fundamental ambiguity. For the Royal Mail management the organisation represents the first, whereas to himself and the frontline workers it represents the second.

Given everything else Mayall has written in this moving book, it’s difficult not to feel disappointed at the earnest moderation of this conclusion. Why not defend the Royal Mail in unambiguous terms as a public service rather than presenting it in terms of both service and profit? The obvious reaction to this suggestion is to implore the necessity of economic viability, but the acceptance of this kind of technocratic language is a crucial element in the very process of modernisation which Roy Mayall so plausibly decries. The apparent acceptance of the brute reality of economic logic (eg, ‘the Royal Mail has to be profitable in order to function’) suppresses the political decisions underlying the purportedly obvious claims. Why should economic imperatives outweigh universal service obligations?  Why should public services be profitable? In a democratic society these are questions which ought to be decided through open and equitable procedures, but instead they are forced off stage through the repetitive siren song of ‘modernising’ ideologues who insist that the public sector should be subject to private sector discipline. While a coherent case can certainly be articulated in favour of this agenda, it should be made through political persuasion rather than the invocation of economic expertise.

The past three decades have witnessed a historically unprecedented depoliticisation of economic life, as a narrowly economic discourse of modernisation is used to present profoundly political agendas (for instance ‘slashing’ public services to produce ‘balanced’ budgets) as objective necessities. In each case empirical factors, such as the actual likelihood of a sovereign debt crisis, as well as political factors, such as the obvious possibility of increasing taxation, are left off stage without being subject to democratic consideration. This trend is exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s famous TINA formulation which is, in many ways, the motto of neoliberal modernisation: There Is No Alternative. The philosopher Mark Fisher recently argued that ‘nothing is inherently political; politicisation requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs’. A starting point for the exercise of this political agency is an impassioned opposition to the discourse, as well as the practice, of modernisation.  The former is a necessary condition of the latter, as the persuasive success of modernising rhetoric engenders support for measures which would otherwise be unpalatable to the majority within society. Rather than engaging with its on its own terms and playing the language game of profit and loss, we might reject its presuppositions out of hand and confidently assert the moral value of public service and social good.

Such a stance undoubtedly risks inviting accusations of naiveté and idealism (‘Surely the public sector should adopt the expertise and lessons of the private sector? Would it not be wasteful to do otherwise?’) but the apparent realism of this response hides its reactionary and ideological character. The acceptability of profit or loss within public sector organisations is predicated on political consensus rather than an unavoidable logic of organisational management. It’s often not profitable to run bus services outside of peak times or in rural areas. It’s often not profitable to maintain local post offices outside of urban areas. It’s often not profitable to run rehabilitation centres for drug and alcohol problems. Yet all these things possess a social value and, once we think along these lines, it often becomes clear that this social value has economic ramifications. Drug and alcohol treatment ultimately reduces court costs and hospitable admissions. The preservation of local infrastructure ensures the continued viability of local economies outside of urban centres.

The dichotomy between public service and profitability is false one which presuppose ‘profitability’ to be an entirely private phenomenon. It entails the logic of accounting which systematically excludes those externalities which ‘spill over’ and impact on actors outside of the economic transaction. This manifests itself negatively, as in the environmental impact of more individuals driving after unprofitable bus routes have been cancelled, as well as positively, as in the social cohesion and support provided by local post offices without accruing economic gain for any private actor. This inevitable exclusion of externalities means that the purported objectivity of this form of assessment is utterly fictitious because its unable to evaluate outcomes in a way which takes account of all their impacts. It might be possible to argue that this is suitable for the private sector, although the pervasiveness of environment externalities seems to me to a powerful objection to this view. However economic reasoning of this form is manifestly inappropriate for the public sector because it’s intrinsically unable to secure the place of the social goods which constitute the raison d’être of public services.

However an anecdote from the book illustrates this state of affairs better than abstract reasoning ever could. At the very end of Dear Granny Smith, Roy Mayall poignantly describes a staff meeting where the manager made clear that, given their economic centrality to a modernised business model, the new focus of the Royal Mail was on corporate customers. One of the older postmen asked about Granny Smith and was told, in no uncertain terms, ‘Granny Smith is not important. Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore’. This is why the discourse of modernising public services must be resisted. Unless, that is, we agree that Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore.

 

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Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative?

Aug 4, ’11 8:00 AM

Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher, Ropley: Zero Books 2010, £7.99, ISBN 978-184694-317-1, pp.81.

Mark Fisher is a leading light at Zero Books, publishers of a growing stable of short, topical essay-books such as Richard Seymour’s The Meaning of David Cameron and Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, soon to be supplemented by Laurie Penny’s Meat Market, Female flesh under capitalism. Written accessibly, without references, citations or index, they discuss in cultural studies style, films and tv more than books and journals. In the virtual democracy of the internet, ‘Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public’ (turned into consumers) ‘and the figure of the intellectual.’ Instead, ‘A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor… generating a bland conformity.’

‘Zero Books knows that another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass-media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zero is committed to the idea of publishing as the making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.’

This position statement gives a flavour, though interestingly for readers of PSE, Mark Fisher’s contribution is informed, as well as by his extensive reading and viewing, by teaching A-level philosophy in FE. However, his starting point is not the end of transcendence and the death of hope implied by his title, but is another term for postmodernism, which he finds ‘appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple’ (p.7) in meaning. No longer contesting modernism as it had developed, including in the form of actually existing socialist realism in relation to which he notes his title originated, it refers rather to the fact that ‘For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.’ (p.8) So that for Jameson and/or Zizek, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (p.2).

Confronted by such a reality, what is to be done? After ‘the consensual sentimentality of Live Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners’ Strike’ (p.66), which last ‘exposed the fault lines of class antagonism’ in the UK (p.7), Thatcher’s ‘succinct slogan of capitalist realism’ became ‘a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy’ (p.8). Even protest re-enacting 1968 was carnivalised, despite conditions for youth being ‘substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the 60s’ (p.14), so that today’s French students, for example, demand a return to the past rather than a new future. But against this naturalization of ‘business ontology in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business’ (p.17), certain realities cannot be repressed. Fisher focuses on three of them: incipient environmental catastrophe which ‘contradicts capitalism’s constitutive imperative towards growth’ (p.80), the epidemic of mental health problems, including dyslexia (which he suspects is post-lexia, another pathology of late capitalism, like ADHD) and bureaucracy, which, instead of disappearing, as promised by free-marketeers, has changed into a new decentralised form.

This is nowhere more apparent than in FE, which since 1993 has been ‘at the vanguard of changes that would be rolled out through the rest of the education system and public services – a kind of lab in which neoliberal “reforms” of education have been trialled’ (p.20). Here Fisher was met – rather like Tom Sharpe’s Wilt teaching ‘Meat 1’ – by the self-fulfilling prophecy of students’ ‘reflexive impotence’: ‘They know that things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.’ (p.21) In a society based on debt, you ‘Pay for your own exploitation… get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen…’ (p.26). As a result, ‘Depression is endemic.’ (p.21) or, rather, what Fisher calls ‘depressive hedonia… not so much an inability to get pleasure so much as an ability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.’ (p.22).

‘In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.’
Similarly,
‘Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians.’ (p.26) ‘What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, antimnemonic blip culture…’ (p.25)
‘a retreat into private “OedIpod” consumer bliss, a walling up against the social.’ (p.24)
Perhaps, describing the reactions of his students, Fisher misses some elements of realisation and resistance to running up the down-escalator of depreciating educational qualifications!

Trapped in the ubiquitous bureaucracy of the dispersed corporation, managers ‘mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass exams etc).’ (pp25-6) Meeting the meaningless targets of audit culture, they ‘perform self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in bureaucratic compliance’ (p.52). But after the Credit Crunch, we are all the walking Undead of a Zombie Capitalism that ‘without a credible and coherent alternative… will continue to rule the political-economic unconscious.’ (p.78)

Therefore,
‘We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous… the goal of a genuinely new left should not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will, revivifying – and modernizing – the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests.’ (p.77)
‘This is a struggle that can be won – but only if a new political subject coalesces.’ (p.79) It is the project of Zero Books, although it is not clear at what subject they are aiming. University students, such as those at Goldsmiths’ where Fisher now teaches, must be a large part of its constituency but their’s may prove a flash-in-the-pan resistance.

Something else that has happened since the book was written is the resistance of the medical profession to Coalition plans to privatise the NHS. Admittedly, this has ended in a compromise in which much damage continues to be done to a public service that was already thoroughly marketised under New Labour but it is a sorry contrast with education, where Gove is remorsely pushing through more marketisation that can only end in the privatisation of state schools, while Willetts is extending New Labour’s introduction of HE fees to substitute price for quality in the increasingly privatised competition of universities and colleges.

Something else too in the organised resistance of a few individuals to the corporate take over of the media that led to the exposure of Murdoch, while it is becoming clearer to more and more people that society has been taken over by the bankers, who in Greece the population at large are refusing to pay. Here, MPs seeking now to distance themselves from Blair/Cameron subservience to Murdoch, are already thoroughly discredited by their expenses scandal emulation of the bankers to whom they gave power. The story of how this all happened since 1979 is not hard to tell. As Mark Fisher concludes, ‘From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.’ (p.81)

Patrick Ainley

Forthcoming in the next issue of ‘Post-16 Educator’

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Review of Chavs and The Precariat

Jul 25, ’11 8:00 AM

Chavs and Goths

Among those who understand social classes as things it is acknowledged that they have changed. As Guy Standing explains this change, ‘globalisation has resulted in a fragmentation of national class structures’ (p.7). Whereas Owen Jones sees change imposed by a deliberate political strategy of successive Conservative/ Coalition and New Labour governments.

Insofar as this is still of academic concern, given the predominance of a ‘discursivity’ which denies the facticity of class, a sociological spectrum ranges from a world of rationally calculating economic individuals, through sliding scales of status to the eight occupational groups of the soon-to-be-abolished UK Office of Population and Census Statistics. The five A-Es of market researchers with their additional electorally crucial C1s and C2s are reduced in the conventional three upper-middle-working class pyramid, while Marx’s two basic classes have been recast globally as other intermediate classes and the peasantry have collapsed into a proletariat that is possibly now more numerous than ever.

However as Standing sees it, rather than remaining within the ranks of Marx’s proletariat, increasingly large numbers of people are being pushed into a new and insecure ‘precariat’. Drawn from different sections of society, this new, growing and mainly youthful class is also ‘dangerous’ because it may be hostile to the privileges it sees enjoyed by labourism’s dwindling core.

‘First used by French sociologists in the 1980s, to describe temporary or seasonal workers’, in Italy precariati implies ‘a precarious existence as a normal state of living’, though it is not Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. In Germany ‘the term has been used to describe not only temporary workers but also the jobless who have no hope of social integration (p.13). This is close to Marx’s lumpenproletariat, ‘that passively rotting social scum’ but it is not that either.

For Jones, it is the British working class that has been recast ‘From salt of the earth to scum of the earth.’ (p.72). ‘What the Tories are doing is placing the chav myth at the heart of British politics, so as to entrench the idea that there are entire communities around Britain crawling with feckless, delinquent, violent and sexually debauched no-hopers’ (p.80). This follows from ‘Thatcher’s ruinous class war’ in which ‘those working-class communities that suffered most were… herded into an “underclass” whose poverty was supposedly self-inflicted’ (p.67). However, where New Labour redefined poverty as social exclusion to focus on a minority blamed for their own ‘unemployability’, the Coalition (and Miliband?) are concerned with ‘the squeezed middle’, writing off the working-class majority.

Owen quotes polls showing half the population still describe themselves as working class, a constant figure since the 1960s (p.33) because ‘well over half the workforce’ (p.144), ‘more than 28 million’ are still ‘in blue-collar manual and white-collar routine clerical jobs’ (p.33). The demonization of this majority is ‘the flagrant triumphalism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them’ (p.269)

Sociologically this leaves out the middle class who are insufficiently differentiated from ‘the rich’. So when Owen writes, ‘the myth of the classless society gained ground just as society became more rigged in favour of the middle class’ (p.167) and ‘The result is a society run by the middle class for the middle class’ (p.182), typically of most class analysis, he leaves out the ruling class.

Owen concedes, ‘Most middle-class people cannot afford to go private, and want good properly funded local schools and hospitals’ (p.268) and he adds ‘middle-level occupations… are shrinking’ (p.152) as ‘More and more university graduates are forced to take relatively humble jobs’ (p.176). This indicates a polarising class structure going pear-shaped rather than the persistence of the old pyramid with the bottom half disguised as ‘chavs’. As Owen confirms, right to buy ‘drove a wedge through working-class Britain, creating a divide between homeowners and council tenants’ (p.61). It is the formerly unskilled, ‘rough’ and ‘unrespectable’ section of the manually working class that has been ‘demonized’ leaving a new ‘respectable’ middle-working/ working-middle class between the snobs and the yobs, as has been said. These ‘hard working families’ are the target of politicians’ blandishments as they scrabble desperately to run up a down escalator, contributing to the hysteria about education, for instance – another bubble about to burst, so that, as Owen rightly says, ‘at the centre of a new political agenda must be a total redefinition of aspiration’ (p.258).

Owen’s other answers are similar to Standing’s: ‘straddle the internal divisions within the working class that widened under Thatcherism’ (p.259) while ‘Another core demand must be for decent, skilled, secure, well-paid jobs’ (p.260) in a Green New Deal that, ‘As well as providing an array of new jobs, would give working-class people a stake in the environment by transforming it into a bread-and-butter issue’ (p.262). Similarly Standing: ‘In shifting from jobs, the right to work must be strengthened’ (p.163) but he ignores the profit motive which drives the dystopia of a self-regulating market system and thus abandons the Utopia of a world free from profit. Owen goes beyond Standing’s ‘mild Utopianism’ to recognise Utopia is now survival, a future for humanity or no future. There is literally no other way forward. This is the contemporary version of the choice between Socialism or Barbarism.

Both books make us think about the great class transformation that is taking place. Is this creating a new class, or once again reforming a new working class that will be different from the old one? The numerical (if not yet ideological) feminisation that constitutes such a large part of Standing’s precariat ensures that it will be different, while the redivision of knowledge as well as of labour also bids farewell to Leninist forms of political organisation that united ‘progressive intellectuals’ with manual workers and peasants. Rather than such vanguards, ‘The precariat,’ as Standing concludes (p.183), ‘is not victim, villain or hero – it is just a lot of us’. Or the lot of us!

Guy Standing

The Precariat, The New Dangerous Class

London Bloomsbury 2011

(£19.99 pbk; £57 hard cover)

ISBN 978-1849663519/ 9781849663519

pp.198

 

Owen Jones

CHAVS, The demonization of the working class

London: Verso 2011

(£14.99 pbk; £? hard cover)

ISBN 978-1-84467-696-5/

298 pp

Patrick Ainley is co-author with Martin Allen of Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education, London: Continuum 2010

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Review of ‘Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism’ by Sarah Sobieraj

Jul 18, ’11 8:00 AM

In her introduction to Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU Press, 2011), sociologist and Tufts University professor writes, ‘I thought this would be a book about how activist groups use presidential elections as moments of political opening, but as I spent time with activists engaged in campaign-related work I came to realize that first and foremost this is a story about activists and the news media’ (2). While it perhaps comes as no surprise to those familiar with Habermasian public sphere theory that collective attempts to transform or reform civil society become involved with the mass media, her findings may shock the technologically optimistic: Media-orientated activist strategies seeking to draw attention to a political message almost always fail.

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Review of ‘Exploring the networked worlds of popular music’ by Peter Webb

Jul 4, ’11 8:00 AM

The aim of this book is quite ambitious. Namely, developing a theoretical framework for the study of music-related subcultures that departs both from the position of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which conceived subcultures as class-based and symbolically ‘resistant’, and from a more recent ‘postmodern turn’ (Muggleton: 2000) that emphasise the flexibility and ephemerality of contemporary ‘tribes’ (Maffesoli: 1996). Criticising these perspectives, Webb tries to grasp both the changing nature of what he calls music ‘milieux’, and their very historical, social and cultural ‘substance’ (Hodkinson: 2002). Surprisingly, the author never mentions Hodkinson’s work on goth culture, as long as the two books show a similar tendency: a counter-postmodern stance that points to the concreteness of contemporary subcultures in relation to their increasingly global dimension and media-dependent relationality (Hodkinson: 2003).

Drawing on traditions as diverse as Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and globalisation studies (among others), Webb designs a methodology that enlightens the different but intertwined social forces that shape the structure of music milieux. As in the case of the neo-folk (Cap. 4), music subcultures still emerge as relatively coherent and enduring in terms of knowledge and systems of value. This is obviously nothing new in subcultural as well as cultural studies, but Webb’s theory put such cultural density in relation to different sets of structural influences, like subcultures’ groundedness in the local dimension and their place in the wider ‘field’ (Bourdieu: 1993) of music industry. At the same time, the individual becomes a key site of analysis. People can in fact inhabit different milieux at the same time, and their biography and social mobility will affect the ‘stock knowledge’ that they carry into such contexts.

Overall, this position has the merit of putting the milieu in relation to a complex range of social activities and contexts. From this perspective, the question of the ‘independence’ of cultural producers is addressed as well (Cap. 6). In fact, producers belonging to a given musical milieu may have a significant degree of independence from the field of music industry, but this autonomy is ‘relative’ because the music industry still affects their choices and the institutional rules of cultural production (see Cap. 7). The analysis of Webb, in fact, shows the extent to which emergent labels and producers in UK experienced very different forms of pressure and influence in dealing with major record companies.

If there is any weakness in the book, it is related to the artistic (and to some extent political) value that the author attributes to some music milieux. The book reflects a certain difficulty in subcultural studies about departing from the idea that such groups are necessarily deviant or ‘non-normative’ (Gelder: 2005) to some degree. In this respect, Webb clearly expresses a sympathy for non-mainstream music genres (like Bristol-based trip hop) and milieux that flirt with radical political ideas (like the neo-folk). However, his theoretical perspective does not answer the question of why such music milieux deserve more sociological attention than the ones supposedly less radical. Also, Webb’s aesthetic judgements do not go farther than general statements about the creativity of given genres or producers.

This does not mean that his methodology can not evolve toward a more elaborate reflection about the relationship between cultural/aesthetic values and people’s agency (a line of enquiry recently discussed in sociology of culture, see Born: 2010). Moreover, the book remains more than valuable for the ways in which it explores the complex forms of social interaction and organisation produced by people’s engagement with popular music and culture. An area of enquiry that, as pointed by Webb in the Introduction (p. 7), is still underestimated in ‘mainstream’ sociology, despite the substantial influence of popular media on people’s life-choices. The greatest merit of the book is to show quite clearly the extent to which other spheres of social life (like politics and work) may be affected by the allegedly less important social activities – as well as fantasies and pleasures – enabled by popular culture.

References

Born, G. 2010. ‘The social and the aesthetic: for a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’, Cultural Sociology, Vol. 4/2, 171-208.

Bourdieu, P. 1993. The field of cultural production (New York: Columbia University Press).

Gelder, K. 2005. ‘Introduction: the field of subcultural studies’. In K. Gelder (ed.), The subcultures reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), 1-18.

Hodkinson, P. 2002. Goth: identity, style, and subculture (Oxford: Berg).

— 2003. ‘ “Net.Goth”: Internet communication and (sub)cultural boundaries’, in D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The post-subcultures reader (Oxford: Berg), 285-298.

Maffesoli, M. 1996. The time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society (London: Sage).

Muggleton, D. 2000. Inside subculture: the postmodern meaning of style (Oxford: Berg).

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