Watch it here

Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the Carnival Against the Cuts is here.

Across the country, 5 February saw read-ins at dozens of libraries threatened with closure. I managed to film four of them in south London, along the way encountering Mary Warnock, Lucy Mangan, Blake Morrison, a lot of angry and articulate local residents, the duo Sly & Reggie, and the University of Strategic Optimism.

Watch it here.

The confusion begins with the slipperiness of the words being used—like when is a debt not a debt? It seems to depend on who owes it to whom, although you can also try calling it a graduate tax. As Rafael Behr recently put it, debt is ‘a curse and a blight, except when incurred by students to pay university tuition fees, in which context it is an opportunity and an engine of social mobility’. There is also confusion with regard to unexamined but fundamental concepts, like speaking of a market for education. Markets deal in commodities, but what exactly is being bought and sold in the case of education?

The first clue comes in this passage from Michel Serres, quoted recently by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group:

“To illustrate the importance of knowledge sharing, I would like to tell you a little lesson in economics: I have a block of butter, and you have three Euros. If we proceed to do a transaction, you will, in the end, have a block of butter, and I will have three Euros. We are dealing with a zero sum game: nothing happens from this exchange. But in the exchange of knowledge, during teaching, the game is not one of zero sum as more parties profit from the exchange: if you know a theorem and teach it to me, at the end of the exchange, we both know it. In this knowledge exchange there is no equilibrium at all, but a terrific growth which economics does not know. Teachings are the bearers of an unbelievable treasure – knowledge – which multiplies and is the treasure of all humanity.” (Michel Serres)

In other words, education is not a commodity like a bar of chocolate or a cafe latte, which is physically consumed till there’s nothing left. Nor is it like a motor car or a washing machine, which are durable but eventually break down and have to be replaced, since an education is never replaced but only added to, extended and renovated (‘life-long learning’ anyone?). Perhaps it’s a bit like a book in constituting a store of knowledge, but it isn’t a physical object and doesn’t create a second-hand market, although it seems to be something you can cash in on, because it’s supposed to guarantee you a better income. However, education also goes on domestically and informally, and you can also pass on bits of it for free without depriving yourself of what you’ve passed on. (The early rabbis thought of it as like the flame of a candle.) The teacher is someone who gets paid for doing this, but they’re not selling an object, they are performing what Adam Smith called a service.

Education is closer to live artforms like theatre, music, exhibitions and circuses, where the price of admission buys you the right to an experience, but not an object you can carry away with you except in your mind. Modern media have blurred the boundaries between different forms of cultural consumption, but there’s still a distinction between going to the cinema and watching a film privately at home on a DVD. Choosing a course of study, however, is not like deciding what to see by reading the critics or watching the trailers—the league tables are no more reliable a guide than the year’s ten best lists, and corporate styles of advertising have no demonstrable effect on recruitment. (Although this doesn’t stop universities engaging in expensive rebranding exercises. According to a report in the Sunday Times (2 Jan 2011), at least two universities paid consultants as much as £100K to redesign their logo and add or subtract a single word.)

If education is not a regular kind of commodity, it also means that the work of the teacher is of a different kind to that of someone whose output can be measured in terms of productivity. It’s more like that of doctor or nurse, where quality of attention matters just as much as quantity. In a famous passage in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that the labour of some of the most respectable as well as some of the most frivolous orders in society is in this respect the same: churchmen, lawyers, physicians and men of letters on the one hand, and on the other, buffoons, musicians, opera singers, dancers, etc. All of them, he says, fall into the category of ‘perishable services’, a type of activity which ‘does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after the labour is past.’ Discussing this passage, what this comes down to, says Marx, is that only labour that reproduces capital is economically productive: ‘a singer who sings like a bird’ (the kind of singer who like the young Mozart, sits with the servants) ‘is an unproductive worker. When she sells her song, she is a wage earner or merchant. But the same singer, employed by someone else to give concerts and bring in money, is a productive worker because she directly produces capital.’

Oddly, neither of these writers mentions teachers, but someone who does is Schiller. Coming between Smith and Marx, Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, drew a pertinent distinction between the work of the craftsman or artist and that of the teacher. When a craftsman, he said, works on his raw material he has no scruple in doing it violence. The artist has just as little scruple, but avoids showing it (which was true in Schiller’s day, though not in ours). But in pedagogy things are very different, because the material with which the educator works is not inert, but the same as the goal, namely, the human being. Do violence to the material you are working with and you can no longer achieve your aims, because your ends and your means are the same. (He adds that there’s another kind of person who has to operate by the same principle—the politician. Unfortunately this was probably a piece of wishful thinking even then. It’s certainly not true today, when our politicians lie through their teeth.)

Classic writers all of them, none could have remotely imagined the specious measures of productivity devised by neoliberal managerialists and policy makers who are utterly alienated from the experience of teaching or caring, but insist on quantifying their outputs. In Schiller’s terms, to treat the student managerially is a form of systemic violence which breaches the very principles of pedagogy. This managerialism isn’t new, but goes back to the first reform of higher education by Mrs Thatcher 25 years ago. Thatcherism devised a reform of higher education based on the advice of the accountants and business consultants Coopers and Lybrand. The idea was to place higher education institutions in direct competition through a ranked assessment system based on the inspection of courses, with the allocation of student numbers, and hence funding, as the reward (or punishment). To the question what is good and who does the ranking and the judging, the answer was built in to the system. What looked superficially like an extension of the peer review system which guided British higher education in the past, became a systemic process in the form of a categorized audit conducted by trained assessors. (On one occasion I was present at one of these inspections when someone else turned up on the last day, who was introduced to us as ‘being here in order to assess the assessors’.) Many of these features were pioneered in the polytechnics, which Thatcher subsequently turned into universities, such as using student numbers and staff/student ratios to determine the quantity of funding and thus ensure expansion in more popular courses according to the rule of the market. But what do you do in domains like education where market mechanisms do not come naturally, because you’re not dealing with a regular kind of commodity?

Managerialism is normative, bludgeoning people into compliance, and ‘better management’ is not only a euphemism for management according to market principles, but also more management (which by definition falls into the category of unproductive labour—it would be more productive to send them to work for the Inland Revenue.) The system relies on statistics about ‘course delivery’ in order to monitor ‘student satisfaction’. But what part of the experience of the student can possibly be expressed through answering the questionnaires through which such statistics are compiled? Nothing essential, because the process they’re passing through is not quantifiable in this way. (For example, I can imagine a situation where a good student can learn a great deal from a poor teacher, while a poor student will never learn very much even from the best teaching.) From my own students I have learnt that these questionnaires are mystifying: they do not know who they’re addressing, or what notice is taken of anything they say. The resulting statistics become a managerial tool which suppresses the lived experience of both student and teacher (not to mention the support staff). So of course what happens next is focus groups.

The student’s work is quantified by the teacher in a very particular way—the examination—but in the university context, the student needs the collective experience of the class plus the individual attention of the tutorial and their own private study. In each situation every student learns at their own rate, but the different modes reinforce each other. The dialogue between ‘teaching and learning’ is therefore very fluid and rather slippery. In fact, in managerial terms, education is a highly imperfect business. While from the point of view of the teacher, it is not a business at all—except for the Mr Gradgrinds of this world. Unfortunately these now include a large number of Vice Chancellors.

Pedagogy is not like the production of commodities, education is not like mass production, teachers are not like production-line workers, and students are not commodities, they are individuals. From the individual’s point of view, learning is not a matter of statistics about ‘learning outcomes’, but it’s affected by the amount and quality of attention you receive. To increase the numbers of students in higher education while proportionately reducing the funds to support them does not improve the efficiency of teaching, it impairs it, and experience shows this is what happens when teachers have to lecture more with less time to prepare their lectures; and then have less time to assess the students’ work and give feedback because there are more students for each lecturer to see, and staffing has not increased in proportion with the students.

But the costs of mismanagement are not just monetary costs. There is a deep contradiction here.
First, the entering student is defined as the customer, the same way as the patient in the post-Thatcherite health service. Then the accountants redefine the student as a product, to be fashioned according to the requirements of the end-user, or in simple old-fashioned language, the employer. This is a serious confusion of categories (what Oxford philosophers like Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake) and a highly damaging mischief, for how can the student be both customer and product at the same time? And if the student is indeed a customer then it only shows that customers have no real rights and they’re being short-changed. But our students are not our customers, they’re our students. They are not buying our services and we are not selling them. That is not the nature of the relationship—and the dialogue—which we have with them.

With Terry Eagleton, Paul O’Prey, Joe Kelleher, Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Ruby Hirsch.

The model I have in the back of my mind will not surprise those who know me—it has to be Patricio Guzmán’s historic documentary of the last year of Allende’s Popular Unity government, The Battle of Chile. This may sound like chutzpah but what makes it possible for a single person to attempt to emulate that film today is of course the decisive shift into digital film-making which has created, inter alia, the video blog. Indeed a huge amount of video has been pouring onto the Web to give a very different picture of the protest and resistance movement from the way it’s presented by the big mainstream media. If the result of this profusion is the difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees, it also facilitates the endeavour, since I am able, as I start out, to draw not only on moral and intellectual support from my colleagues at Roehampton, together with the support of the New Statesman’s committed journalism, but also a network of video activists ready to share footage.

One thing that’s already struck me, as I go and film public events, is that my camera is always only one of many. Not just that, but you can quickly see what other people have made of it, because the results are rapidly posted on the web. This is fascinating—the society of the spectacle being subjected to a prismatic reality check, which has the effect of placing any individual version in question (including of course my own). But it also means that there’s always footage of events you can’t go to, again providing alternative views, and I’m going to start making use of this to fill out the narrative. (And since a video blog on a weekly journal has to count as current affairs, I can freely pull in other stuff like television news stories, under the rubric of fair use.)

It remains to be seen whether the thinking part of my brain, which tries to theoretically comprehend the nature of documentary, will keep up with the desire of my fingers, as I sit editing at the computer, to respond to what my eyes and ears discover in the footage. I’m already having to adopt a novel work rhythm.  In the old days you would go out and shoot a film and then come back and edit. This was a reflective process.  I used to start by looking through the rushes to decide what sequence I would use to end the film, and then go back and work out how to get there. That’s obviously not going to work in this case. I have to go out and shoot, come back and edit very rapidly, post up the results, and then repeat the process every week or so. This, in other words, is a situation where to paraphrase another Brazilian, the critic José Carlos Avellar, the camera is an actor within the reality which it films, and that reality is the co-author of the film.

But you too reading this can also be a co-author: if you’ve any suggestions for events I ought to film, do please let me know. And by the way, I’m not waiting to put together the longer film either. I’ve already begun doing this, and I plan to show work-in-progress as I go along. So do please get in touch if you’d like to invite me along for a screening, academic or solidarity—or both. The whole idea, after all, is that what I manage to produce should be useful.

14 January 2011, Bank of England

Seems to me this incident should be understood symptomatically. Nutter No.1 seems to be someone ‘in need of help’, as another recipient of the original missive puts it, distressed at ‘not being able to do anything about it’. One of the list moderators communicates off-list to say that it seems the fellow has been living for a number of years in a shelter for the homeless in Boston. This is interesting, firstly because it shows that in a fully wired-up society, even the most marginalised citizens are able to get access to the internet, and second because of how this marginalised subject uses this access: isolated, alienated, dislocated, he tries to join a virtual community, but lacks the wherewithall, let’s say, to observe its norms (the posts which got him excluded had nothing to do with the list’s ostensive subject matter). Which isn’t surprising — he’s not using the internet for dialogue, but as a displaced or ersatz form of therapy but without a real interlocutor, just to make his voice heard, without knowing who he’s talking to.

Nutter No.2’s identity is also elusive but equally symptomatic. A little googling by one or two list members throws up a couple of different candidates, or perhaps the same one under different guises—a person’s internet identity is always fragmented and fragmentary—but here’s the rub: we’re speaking of an academic listserv, and whatever he is, he’s not an academic (otherwise it would be easy to track him down). This is not necessarily an obstacle in itself, but it becomes a problem if the subject perceives their relation to the group as a problematic one for this very reason. Their ambiguous positioning comes to be expressed, in a case like this, in a violation of decorum through an aggravated use of language, which includes certain symptomatic features of its own. One such is a stream of references to disparate authority figures—in common parlance, name-dropping—and assortment of abstruse and recondite facts, often thrown together by mere association, simultaneously intended to give the impression of encyclopaedic intellectual knowledge and to intimidate the critic. Another is the deliberate misspelling of the names of those he subjects to ad hominem attacks. If this suggests someone with ‘psychological problems’, perhaps these only express themselves in his forum postings. All the same, it’s as if, fuelled with resentment, he’s challenging the group to exclude him in order to affirm his outsider position. While for Nutter No.1, being excluded from the list must have been a painful experience.

We know that text-based screen-writing is a denuded medium, readily prone to misreading because of decontextualisation, but that this very difficulty has also generated new and creative uses of writing and language, from smileys to the abbreviated jargon of texting and Twitter, or the cryptic messages many people post on Facebook. Academics deal with this slipperiness by embracing the internet’s informality, but since tropes like irony and sarcasm are dangerous territory, at the same time as observing the decorum of their vocation and discipline. Context is everything. In other internet forums, like newspaper comments columns, the decorum is weaker, and nutters rather more common—people who use the space to vent and sound off, believing that this is their fundamental democratic right, however ‘extremist’ they may be, thus necessitating moderators to regularly remove the worst offenders.

The problem is that the internet transcends and displaces the speech genres of the real social world, the implicit code of utterance appropriate to the different kinds of social space in which it occurs—like the difference between the classroom, say, and the campus bar, where a completely different kind of speech is employed. Likewise the internet is not homogenous, there are also differences between different formats (between a blog like this, for instance and a ‘status update’ on Facebook) which can render the subject’s identity unstable, for either good or ill, precisely to the extent that internet screen-writing is unanchored from social reality.

By opening up imaginary and imaginative spaces for new modes of inter- and quasi-personal communication, so often under conditions where the speaker may not know who they’re addressing and who is responding, the web allows for both deception and empowerment. A dozen years ago, a young cousin of mine in North America, belonging to an observant family, confessed to me that he’d run up a huge internet bill (this was before broadband) by spending too much time on a lesbian chatroom. This year, on the other hand, on a visit to Italy for a workshop in phototherapy I learnt how the internet is being used in a community mental health programme in Lucca as one of a battery of therapeutic activities, from art and music to video, journalism, and an online multimedia magazine. (See this post and this video.) Here the therapeutic value is multiple: with digital media providing rapid positive reinforcement, it succours the re-insertion of the individual into a collective, because it’s cooperative, social and outward directed. The patients are able to go and investigate local issues in the safety of the group, at the same time as sharing a sense of common experience. And by giving them a voice in the local community it also involves a certain politics, like the experience in Argentina of a radio programme broadcast from a mental hospital in Buenos Aires and widely networked—the subject of a wonderful documentary, L22 Radio La Colifata, by Carlos Larrondo. This is the beneficent power of decentralised media, which Vertov and Brecht both argued for way back between the two world wars, now manifest on the web in a manner far beyond their dreams. This kind of public speech is a genuinely democratising force which directly poses awkward and difficult questions to authority.

For Spanish speakers, here’s the radio programme, and this is the documentary