CFP: Aesthetic Education workshop

My partner is co-organising the following interdisciplinary workshop at the University of York on the the contemporary legacy and relevance in a UK context of the Enlightenment tradition of ‘aesthetic education’ – that is, of the idea of the morally and culturally educative and enriching effects of aesthetic experiences for individuals, and their consequent socio-politcal ramifications.  Below is the CFP for postgraduate and early career researchers, so if you’re working on something relevant, please do submit:

Call for Postgraduate Papers

CONTEMPORARY AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE UK

Workshop

University of York

10 December 2012

 

Deadline: 15th September 2012

Email: mhab500@york.ac.uk

The purpose of this inter-disciplinary workshop is to explore the role of aesthetic education in the UK today. The presence of the concept of aesthetic education in the thinking of British cultural critics can be traced to the profound influence of Matthew Arnold, who inherits the notion from its German Enlightenment proponents – Schiller, Herder, and Winckelmann. The tradition holds that instruction in art and literature can bring about real changes in society. In the UK today, however, education in literature and the arts is being increasingly threatened by social change rather than facilitating those changes. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold prescribed culture as the antidote to a looming threat of ‘anarchy’ which lay chiefly, he suggested, in vulgar monetary concerns. In the fear of the neoliberalisation of the university driving the contemporary proliferation of neohumanist apologies for the arts and humanities, we hear the echoes of Arnold’s fear of vulgar monetarism. Another, contemporary inheritance of this tradition of aesthetic education is a rapidly expanding field of ‘therapeutic’ reading. Here, aesthetic education is not so much a politically decisive aspect of academic activity as a project of popular empowerment carried out at the level of public libraries, charitable education projects and health provision. These are just two of many lines of inheritance in the contemporary UK cultural situation of the Enlightenment tradition of aesthetic education.

The inter-disciplinary workshop will take place at the University of York on the afternoon of Monday 10th December 2012, where discussion will be led by Professor Philip Davis (English, Liverpool) and Dr Nick Jones (Philosophy, York). Two postgraduate speakers will be selected from submissions. We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and early career researchers working in all disciplines across the arts and humanities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The contemporary significance of Matthew Arnold’s cultural education

• Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit (2010) and other contemporary interventions

• Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Beauty and Art, 1750-2000 (2005) and the question of why we should care about Beauty in the twenty-first century

• Comparative contexts – Britain and elsewhere, e.g., Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a space of political non-domination

• The contemporary significance of morality and ethics for art and narrative

• The social mission of English literature and its twenty-first century legacy

• Therapeutic reading as cure for modern problems

Submissions should consist of an abstract of up to 300 words for a paper of 30 minutes in length, and be emailed as an attachment to Mildrid Bjerke at mhab500@york.ac.uk by 15th September.

Please direct any queries to Rafe McGregor at rdm503@york.ac.uk.

The workshop is being hosted by the Humanities Research Centre at York and has been funded by the Centre for Modern Studies.

The violent response against OWS is an act of class war

84-year-old woman pepper sprayed by police in Seattle.

As David Harvey persuasively argues in his 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the primary consequence of neoliberalisation in practice has not been – as has been the main theoretical justification for neoliberalisation – to foster and strengthen growth in the neoliberalised economies, but rather the consolidation of class power in the hands of elites.  While neoliberalism has created opportunities for massive accumulation of capital, this capital has been in the hands of an increasingly small minority, and this accumulation has been been bought at the cost of destroying the social infrastructure which would permit, or better force, ‘wealth-creation’ to yield a general increase in the standard of living and prevent widening inequality.  Ultimately, neoliberalism isn’t, Harvey argues, so much concerned with growth – although of course it is part of the neoliberal formula that economic growth becomes of absolutely paramount important in our economic considerations, trumping concern for maintaining livable conditions for the general populace – as with the redistibution of power upwards, compromising both real conditions of life and the democratic structures put in place to keep the people in control of those conditions.

The Occupy movement’s stand against this attempt by elites to consolidate their economic and political power has been met with brutal censure (see, e.g., here, here and here).  In light of a proper understanding of the class dynamics of neoliberalism, we must understand the significance of this violence – namely, that it is an act of class war, a violent assault by the disciplinary apparatuses of the ruling classes against the people.

OWS – with its ‘We are the 99%!’ slogan – is reminding us of the importance of learning again how to use this vocabulary.  Class needs to be on the agenda, because economically ingendered inequality is rotting the heart of human civilisation.

Disrupting solidarity within the university

One of the things that’s striking about the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’s white paper – which prompted yesterday’s student demonstration in London, seemingly destined not to attract any further media attention due to its lack of lovely, eye-catching, sensationalisable and demonisable ‘violence’ – is the way in which its policies actively try to disrupt solidarity within the university, specifically between students and academics.

(I won’t pretend to have read the entirety of the white paper, only the ‘executive summary’, which provides a general characterisation of the points made in the paper and a summary of how these will be translated into concrete policy.  Given that this is the authors’ own summary, I trust them not to have allowed brevity to distort the key points of the document, especially not to have made the document seem more politically incriminating – presumably the point of a summary would be, if anything, to distort the document in a more favourable direction.  Nonetheless, comments by those who have read the full document would be much appreciated.)

The white paper calls upon universities to put ‘students at the heart of the system’, with the threefold aims of (i) making HE more sustainably fundable, (ii) improving the ‘student experience’ and (iii) increasing social mobility.  To ride roughshod over the details and nuances of how these aims are to be achieved, the suggestion is to make the character and content of university teaching more responsive to students’ opinions, facilitated by further regulation by independent bodies in the private sector.  In this way, the government hopes to ‘deliver a more responsive higher education sector in which funding follows the decisions of learners and successful institutions are freed to thrive’ (p. 8; my emphasis).

Now, there are all sorts of critical remarks to be made about the three aims of the white paper – what it means for funding to be ‘sustainable’, whose responsibility it is to supply this funding, why funding should be correlated with ‘success’ and what this notion of ‘success’ means, what ‘the student experience‘ is and why it matters, how this notion fits into a more general valorisation of ‘experience’, how we’re to understand ‘social mobility’ and how it relates to class, etc. – and also about its explicit focus on teaching and the accompanying implicit subordination of research to teaching (at least, in cases where researchers can’t demonstrate concretely the ‘impact’ of their research); but, none of these is the issue I want to focus on here.

What I want to highlight is the way in which the white paper implicitly sets up an opposition between staff and students.  In the paper’s agenda of making teaching staff more accountable to students, teaching staff are placed under suspicion, the quality of their work put in question, and moreover students are put in the position of those potentially at risk of receiving teaching of a less than acceptable quality, those in need of guarding themselves against the potential failures of teaching staff and of assuring themselves of the quality of teaching through stricter mechanisms of accountability.  What is evident in this schema is that students are encouraged to see themselves as empowered against teaching staff, who in turn are supposed to be motivated to achieve ‘success’ by the threat of unpopularity in the eyes of their students, or rather by the threat of the consequent withdrawal of that ubiquitously sought holy grail, funding.

All of this serves to depersonalise the relationship between students and academic staff, putting mechanisms of regulation where attentiveness to the needs of other people with whom one cooperates in a shared activity should be.  It also serves to distort the fact that the real threats students face are the same as those faced by academics – namely, the privatisation, commercialisation, marketisation, corporatisation, or whatever you want to call it, of the university.

The white paper talks about making universities more accountable – an accountability it will enforce through a strict management* of the flows of capital into the university – to students and to private sector employers.  But what it tries to get away with all too easily is the suggestion that public universities aren’t sufficiently accountable to the public – something which is only true insofar as the state is insufficiently accountable to the public.  Now, this is most certainly true, but the solution is not to open up the universities to the ultimately disempowering ‘an-archy’ of the markets, but to make the state more democratic.  This is not even to mention the possibility, seemingly not even on the government’s radar, of making public institutions more independent, more local and autonomous in their internal functioning, whilst keeping them resolutely public – that is, the choice between centralised, top-down management and privatisation is a false choice, perhaps the false choice around which the whole ‘Big Society’ ideology is organised.

So, the message to take away – especially as increasing fees leave students expecting more from teaching staff** (somewhat irrationally, since it has always been quite explicit that the rising fees are only a redistribution of responsibility for funding and not any kind of increase in the amount of funding universities, or teaching staff for that matter, will receive) – is that students and staff musn’t allow themselves to be divided in this way, and must focus on their real, shared problem of fighting the loss of democratic control over the character of higher education in the UK, a loss of control effected by policies like those contained in the white paper.

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*  This notion of ‘strict management’ must be understood against the background of neoliberalism’s opposition to state management in one sense, although of course there is a kind of state control in play here which is no less involved.  Cf. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

**  I have only anecdotal evidence of this increase in expectations of teaching staff – especially in the amount of traditional, school-style classroom teaching, as opposed to seminar-style ‘facilitation’ – accompanying increasing fees.  Empirical studies welcome!

Critical pedagogy in RP

Just a little plug for the latest volume (170, Nov/Dec 2011) of Radical Philosophy, which has some really interesting pieces on the philosophy and politics of education.  (I’m a bit busy for any extended commentary on any of these texts right at the moment, but I might post up some thoughts over the weekend if I get a chance.)

Most interesting from the perspective of my interests is Matthew Charles‘s article on the philosophy for children ‘movement’ (although this phrase might be a bit of an overstatement at this point) and the political consequences and limitations of the form it has taken thus far.  Charles examines the organisations involved in teaching philosophy to children in the UK – The Philosophy Shop and SAPERE – considering the differences in their approaches and the shared limitations of their more or less implicit political framework.  These are important issues, as teaching philosophy in schools is potentially very valuable, but only if it can be extricated from the limitations of an exclusively liberal conception of education and what it would be for education to be ‘critical’.

Also in RP 170 is a collection of articles prompted by the publication by Continuum of Emiliano Battista’s English translation of Jacques Rancière’s first book, Althusser’s Lesson.  In this work, Rancière distances himself from his former teacher, Louis Althusser, the father of so-called ‘structuralist Marxism’, through a cutting critique of the latter, both his theoretical work and his pedagogical practice itself.

The collection includes a reprint of the English translation of a 1964 essay by Althusser entitled ‘Student Problems’ – introduced by Warren Montag – in which he criticises the contemporary student movement for attacking the traditional, liberal, unidirectional form of university pedagogy, grounded in an essential epistemic inequality between the teacher and the student, instead of ‘the true fortress of class interest in the university‘ (p. 13, original emphasis), i.e., the ‘ideological’ content of that pedagogy.  For the Rancière of Althusser’s Lesson, this insistence on pedagogical inequality and refusal of any transformation of the very form of the university is definitive of Althusserianism, its deep opportunism and servitude to the cause of order and the authority of the Communist Party leadership.

The essay is followed by three very interesting engagements with Rancière’s critique of Althusser, by Nathan Brown, Bruno Bosteels and Stéphane Douailler.

A final note: somewhere in one of these papers – I can’t now remember which one – reference is made to Radical Philosophy‘s founding statement, a document which bears re-reading at this juncture of crisis for philosophy in the university.  While I don’t straightforwardly agree with this document’s partisan stance against analytic philosophy, its concern regarding academic philosophy’s isolation from other disciplines and from ideas and activities critical of the wider political, social and cultural setting – a concern which continues in the CRMEP’s ongoing project on transdisciplinarity in the humanities – is still a crucial one for the future of philosophy today.

Occupied Europe

Neoliberalism and unemployment

With the closest thing to a general strike we’ve seen in Britain since the ’20s now planned for November, we must be hopeful that we’re approaching a critical point for the future of the historical conjuncture through which we’re living.  And with growing unemployment, some sort of shock is needed, a definitive disruption of the free progression of the government’s project of neoliberalisation – a radicalisation and acceleration of a programme that’s been ongoing in the UK now through at least three supposedly opposed governmental administrations.

But it’s important to remember, as we enter into this period of mass protest, that the demands that need to be made run counter to the very spirit of the neoliberal ideology we have to combat.  As Foucault emphasises in his lectures on the genealogy of neoliberalism from 1979:

The neo-liberal policy with regard to unemployment in particular is perfectly clear.  Whatever the rate of unemployment, in a situation of unemployment you absolutely must not intervene directly or in the first place on the unemployment, as if full employment should be a political idea and an economic principle to be saved at any cost. [...] [F]ull employment is not an objective and it may be that a reserve of unemployment is absolutely necessary for the economy. [...] [For the neo-liberal,] what is an unemployed person?  He is not someone suffering from an economic disability; he is not a social victim.  He is a worker in transit.  He is a worker in transit between an unprofitable activity and a more profitable activity.

(M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. M. Senellart, tr. G. Burchell, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 139)

We can’t, then, simply expect the government to bow to mass displays of disagreement and unrest; it will be necessary to force their hand.  This is why these mass strikes represent some progress over ‘mere’ protest.  Although we’re still within the logic of ‘demand’ – and hence implicitly maintaining the explicit inequality of legislative power between the government and the people – strike has the advantage over protest that it interferes with the normal functioning of the social situation, providing some real physical stimulus which the government must respond to.

Whether the strike will manage to gather much popular support remains to be seen.  Given the virulence with which neoliberalism has colonised our minds and our discourse over the last thirty years, one of the biggest challenges is reprogramming ourselves to be able to think differently.  Part of this colonisation has been the promulgation of a general suspicion of or resentment towards strikes.  It is one of the major theoretical and strategic questions for the left how this negative attitude might be broken.  Because we need these strikes to succeed, and that will be difficult unless they can function as a locus for a general galvanisation of ill will towards the neoliberal agenda of the powers that be.

CFP: Thinking Feeling, May 2012, Sussex

Here is a call for papers for an interesting conference coming up next year at the University of Sussex on the political significance of emotions.  Here’s the blurb as it appeared on Philos-L:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Thinking Feeling: Critical Theory, Culture, Feeling

18-19 May 2012, University of Sussex

‘Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic’ (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)

As the recent UK riots indicate, there is no escaping the fact that economics provokes, amongst other things, strong feelings. Whether we like it or not, a neoliberal language of economics now pervades and colours our inner ‘private’ emotional lives; the government’s emerging plans to compile a ‘happiness index’ is a clear example of how a rhetoric of ‘feeling’ can be co-opted by capital. More than ever, then, it is important we do not simply accept ‘feeling’ as a spontaneous or natural phenomenon, but instead subject it to genuinely critical scrutiny. Are some feelings static, essential and ahistorical, or can we trace their genealogies? Are feelings entirely subjective and individual, or are they actually objective and social? If they are social, whose feelings are they?

By placing contemporary cultural and literary theory (especially as it deals with ‘affect’) alongside the tradition of Critical Theory, this conference asks what might be at stake politically, aesthetically and even experientially in the recent turn towards a discourse of feeling. With its roots in Hegel, Marx and Freud, Critical Theory has always been concerned with the role of feeling, in all its senses. Meanwhile, literary theorists and practitioners as diverse as Georges Bataille, Raymond Williams and Eve Sedgwick have also focused on relations between culture, society and felt experience.

The conference will therefore set out to utilise these approaches for a critique of modern and contemporary culture. Contributors are encouraged to engage notions of feeling as they relate to particular cultural practices, objects or texts, and are also invited to use recent work on the emotions to rethink aspects of the Marxist theoretical tradition. We welcome proposals from all relevant fields, including philosophy, literary studies, visual
culture, music theory, art history, sociology, political economy, psychology, etc.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:

The intersection of emotion and economics in contemporary life, literature, film or art; the genealogy of feeling; feeling and revolutionary potential; the political economy of feeling; rhetoric and feeling; the commodification of emotion; culture and ‘modern’ moods (guilt, cynicism, ecstasy, indifference, anxiety, melancholia, depression, shame, boredom, paranoia, rage, paralysis, joy, (un)happiness, etc.)

Abstracts of 200-250 words should be sent to Dr Doug Haynes, University of Sussex: d.e.haynes@sussex.ac.uk (please mark the subject heading as ‘Thinking Feeling’)

Closing date: 31 December 2011

One surprisingly useful and mature reaction to the riots – and one thoroughly repugnant reaction

I was surprised (I know it’s patronising to say, but I’m sure, given his extremely self-aware and self-critical comments in this piece, that he would acknowledge that his public persona justifies this surprise) at Russell Brand’s response in The Guardian to the riots.  While I don’t agree with everything Brand says (obviously, but since this is the internet I feel the need to state it), he is absolutely right in his driving sentiment:

These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.

If we don’t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don’t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

Some comments on Brand’s piece by The Young Turks, here.

On the other hand, we have historian and ‘public intellectual’ David Starkey coming out with some thoroughly pernicious and reactionary remarks about the dangerous pervasiveness of ‘black culture’ among Britain’s youth:

That a highly educated person such as Starkey – and educated in the humanities, with all their supposedly ‘critical’ and ‘democratising’ potential* – can come out with there sorts of remarks is a testament to their expressly ideological character, but also to the incommensurability of the social experience of people like Starkey and our prime minister and the disenfranchised poor who took to the streets.  The ruling classes simply have very little understanding of the lives of many they claim to represent – and, given their ideological commitments, they’ll have a hard time obtaining such understanding.

Our rulers have no interest in helping us build community and unity in our nation, because these things are built on a basis of real equality and a sense of togetherness wholly alien to the majority of our insular political class.  We need cool heads and compassion if we’re to understand how to move forward.  (Never thought I’d write this sentence, but) we need more Russel Brands and fewer David Starkeys.

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* A caveat: An education in the humanities and social sciences can be an essential tool in gaining a critical consciousness of one’s social, economic, cultural and political environment.  There are no guarantees, however, and the humanities have a long history of involvement with a liberal ideology of ‘humanising’ moral self-cultivation which has nothing to do with anything critical or radical, not to mention the social sciences’ potential complicity with regimes of disciplinarity and control – as many working in the social sciences came themselves to realise in the late ’60s and early ’70s.  I talked a little about the critical potential of the humanities in this post on New College from back in June.

WE NEED clear heads, solidarity and community action to reclaim our streets – DON’T give a free reign to demonisation and police and state control!

There’s an e-petition circulating calling on the government to deny welfare support to those found to have been involved in the riots.  This is 100% the wrong reaction.

These riots are taking place against the political background of the neoliberal assault on community, unity and solidarity in British society.  Whether the rioters are engaging in an ill targeted protest against this assault or merely reflecting its erosion of mutual respect and solidarity within our communities, further such assaults on what remains of our already embattled welfare state will only further undermine the fabric of our society and ultimately lead to more events of this sort.

A positive approach is the only approach worth taking.  Don’t demonise the youth.  Don’t call for a strengthening of the state disciplinary apparatus.  Don’t let the riots be an apology for the ideology of the ruling elite.

This is the sort of response we need: a peaceful march through north London, organised by local community activists, ending in an assembly where people can express their views on recent events.

The organisers’ statement is as follows:

Statement 10/8/2011

A North London Unity Demonstration
Saturday 13th August
Assemble Gillet Square, Dalston, N16 at 1pm. March to Tottenham Green, N15

Our communities need a united response to both the riots and the causes of despair and frustration that can result in riots.

We demand:
• A CULTURE OF VALUING, NOT DEMONISING YOUTH AND UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE.
• SUPPORT FOR THOSE AFFECTED BY THE RIOTING, INCLUDING THE IMMEDIATE RE-HOUSING OF PEOPLE MADE HOMELESS AS WELL AS GRANTS FOR AFFECTED
SMALL BUSINESSES.
- COMMUNITY LED REGENERATION AND RESTORATION OF DAMAGED AREAS.
• REVERSAL OF ALL CUTS TO YOUTH SERVICES IN OUR BOROUGHS
• NO CUTS TO PUBLIC SERVICES! INSTEAD, INVESTMENT INTO AND REGENERATION OF OUR COMMUNITIES, INCLUDING HOUSING, JOBS, EDUCATION AND SPORTS
FACILITIES.
• AN INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY INQUIRY INTO POLICING METHODS IN OUR BOROUGHS. AND AN END TO STOP AND SEARCH.
• AVAILABILITY OF LEGAL SUPPORT FOR ALL THOSE PEOPLE ARRESTED BY POLICE – YOUNG PEOPLE FACE POTENTIAL SENTENCES THAT WILL AFFECT THEM, THEIR FAMILIES AND THEIR WIDER COMMUNITIES FOR YEARS TO COME.

We are responding to the events of the last few days, in particular the Tottenham protest over the killing of Mark Duggan and the riots that followed in Tottenham and Hackney.

By coming together and calling for unity we want to encourage all sections of our local communities, young and old,
black and white, residents and workers, to work together to find solutions to some of our long-standing problems.

We know there are all kinds of strong feelings and differing views. We do not claim to represent the whole community, but merely seek to promote unity in the communities in which we live.

Simply labelling rioters as opportunistic criminals does little to relieve tensions and provides a poor explanation for the worst riots in decades. While the shooting of Mark Duggan provided the trigger, against a background of oppressive policing, especially towards ethnic minorities, the root causes are deeper.

Our communities have been blighted by high levels of deprivation, poverty and lack of opportunity for decades. Inequality is growing and recent funding cuts to local services, particularly youth facilities, along with rising unemployment, and cuts to EMA and benefits have exacerbated the conditions in which sections of frustrated young people turned to rioting, which unfortunately has resulted in people losing their homes and small/family businesses losing their livelihoods.

Britain is a wealthy country, but the economic crisis created by greedy bankers and financial speculators is further impoverishing already poor areas like Tottenham and Hackney. The £390 billion of combined wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain should be redirected to fund the services we all need.

In the last few months we have seen mass local protests against cuts, student occupations to defend free education, half-a-million strong demonstration on March 26, and 800,000 public service workers out on strike on June 30th.

We need to build on these and other inspiring local and national struggles. Let’s work together for a decent society, based not on greed, inequality and poor conditions, but on justice, freedom, sharing and co-operation.

North London Unity Demonstration supported by the Haringey Alliance for Public Services, Hackney Alliance for Defending Public Serices, Day-Mer (Turkish and Kurdish Community Centre), NLCH (North London Community Centre), Day-Mer Youth, Alevi Cultural Centre, Fed-Bir, Kurdish Community Centre: Roj Women, Halkevi, Gik-Der (Refugee Workers Cultural Association). Britania Peace Council: Hundred Flowers Cultural Centre. TOHUM. Socialist Party, Youth Fight For Jobs, Right To Work, Red Pepper.

This is good stuff.  More of this, please, and less shooting ourselves in the foot with angry, revenge orientated, short termist thinking.

Darcus Howe on the riots

Writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe with incisive comments on the riots:

The BBC interviewer tries to plug the party line (so much for the BBC’s ‘neutrality’) and paint him as confused, but Howe’s having none of it.