Blue-collar eye-opener

A few months ago I vented a bit about hypocrisy. To be honest, I have often felt that one of the most common reactions to that rant must have been ‘so what’. Because what was I thinking? That academia was going to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of place? Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking. The question I asked then was ‘why is academia like this’; the question I am asking myself now is ‘why did I think that way about academia in the first place’. Heaps of thinking happening again in the brain connected to these fingers.

(from http://www.wiley-vch.de/books/tis/cover_big/0471714399.jpg)

So, why did I think academia was going to be a straightforward place? ‘Because life would ne easier if it was’ is not the right answer, though that is certainly true. The book I am reading at the moment, however, suggests that my working-class roots have something to do with this. Alfred Lubrano, the author of Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, explains that most institutional settings are based on middle- or upper-class values. “From an early age”, so Lubrano, “middle-class people learn how to get along, using diplomacy, nuance, and politics to grab what they need”. Working-class kids, in contrast, are socialised to “perform jobs in which they are closely supervised and are required to follow orders and instructions”. Nuance and subtlety don’t matter in that kind of setting, to the contrary, they are perceived as a bit fishy. ‘What’s the point of indirect speech or irony anyway? Just say what you need to say and get on with it’ is a kind of opinion that a middle-of-the-road working-class type would come out with in the face of middle-class diplomacy.

Hence the expected ‘so what’-reaction to my earlier piece: the middle-class postgrad would have never expected academia to be anything but a multi-layered, complex middle-class place. I sort of knew that it was that, too; at the time when I was so aggravated about what I perceived to be a deep-seated hypocrisy – which really ‘only’ was a middle-class habitus – I had been in academia for a while. But somehow I had lost my taste for it. I got bored with all the beating around the bush. At some point, probably due to talking to my granny so much who is proudly working-class, I had remembered the straight talk that I also knew and practised when I was younger, and I wanted to have it back. In other words, I remembered my roots and I realised that they weren’t all bad. They are pretty decent actually.

I can’t really ‘go back’, of course, and I don’t really want to either. EastEnders will never be my favourite programme – but not because I cringe at the lowly demeanour of what is depicted there, as some of my middle-class acquaintances do. I mean I do cringe at chavs and hen-parties as well (and don’t get me started on the British drinking culture…), but that’s just one side of the coin, isn’t it. There is another side to working-class life, however, that I cherish and that I will always endeavour to have in my life, and that is the “respectable, thrifty, hard-working and supportive imagined working-class community”, as Tim Edensor calls it. Also, if middle-classness means always biting your tongue and always controlling your emotions come what may – well, that won’t do for me at all!*

I see this in direct contrast to the institutional middle-class settings that I am familar with and that has its disproportional share of habitual snipers who, under the cover of humanist ideals, often treat each other abominably. – But of course I only see it that way because my class background already works at the level of perception. Not being middle-class, I obviously fail to see the point in all that strategising and subtle or not-so-subtle in-fighting. I think that’s a really great shortcoming of mine right there.

And now I’ll return to my assorted collection of screws and bolts which make a wonderful subject for blue-collar photography.

______________________________________________________

* Maddy (on Jonathan Creek) is a bit too bitchy for my taste but the way she flares up is wonderful, funny and shows a refreshing unconcernedness about other people’s opinions. Although Maddy, being a writer, is not really working-class, this unconcernedness  is still a defining characteristic I would say.

Preparing for the week ahead

Character and principles are not the hallmark of our time. The pricipled person especially is often thought to have serious issues, something not quite right about him or her, narrow-minded or something. ‘Character’ is something that one is, in which case it can be a good thing, rather than something one possesses, which is the original meaning of the word that little is said about today in the cultural mainstream.

Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that the true purpose of education was to unfold free citizens’ full potential. He was thinking of human potential to do and be good because for him, education was intricately linked with wisdom and virtue. Being human, for Humboldt, meant possessing all three of them, education, wisdom and virtue. Character and principles are at the heart of this holistic view of humanity which was to replace the suppressive approach of the state which represented a misrecognition of human needs and capabilities and, as a result, treated citizens as unfree machines.

Freedom is the first condition for education, which is why the cuts proposed by the CSR in Britain are so horrible. If fees are being increased at the same as teaching budgets are cut, then what we are looking at is the separating of the wheat from the chaff – of those whose financial background makes them free to purchase education as a commodity from those that cannot afford to go to university at all.

University education itself, however, is a mockery of the humanistic ideal. It does not produce character or principles because university education, the way it has developed ever since it joined the neoliberal movement, has no use for either. Where Humboldt looked at the trinity of education, wisdom and virtue as defining what it means to be human, we are today looking at education as a negligible ingredient in the holy trinity of simulacra, consumerism and the worship of profit. Universities are turning out machines again, not people, and this trend will accelerate in the next few years.

Leitstrahl für Aldebaran (Radio Beam for Aldebaran)

I mentioned this book last week; it is one of the lesser known science fiction novels written in the former GDR. My dad’s copy is a bit shabby already – or has lots of character and history, depending on how you look at these things – and I think it was that and the fact that the book was lying around in the lounge that intrigued me. When I initially picked it up I was wondering how, after years of living abroad, I would react to this kind of literature. I took to it really well, I think, considering how quickly I wolfed down this novel.

When I say ‘this kind of literature’, I mean socialist science fiction. It’s a peculiar genre: it’s very, very modernist, i.e. rationality always prevails. Our age is looked back on (quite funny really – Leitstrahl für Aldebaran was published in 1983) by the protagonists sometimes with compassion and understanding, much in the way that grandparents shake their heads about the folly of wee toddlers, or, on the other hand, with horror and disgust. Which is why I expected to feel quite put-off by this book, but I didn’t.

First of all, the plot was really intriguing. Leitstrahl für Aldebaran starts off aboard a star ship called Kundschafter, or Explorer, which, as the four protagonists find out by and by, has been gravely affected by a dangerous stellar anomaly that they have never encountered before. They were in anabiosis and only woke up when it was all over and now have to try and interpret the data that the ship, now greatly worse for wear, has collected to see what has happened. I liked this part; interpreting data and coming up with likely scenarios of what might have happened is basically my middle name right now, so I could relate.

The four protagonists work together as a team though each one of them has different skills and works to the maximum of their capabilities. This is socialist doctrine, of course, but it’s not exactly an alien notion; team work should function like that. An aspect of this that I really liked was the internal struggle of the person that awoke first from anabiosis, Toliman, who thereby automatically assumed the position of captain: he really struggles with the contradiction between being just one member in a team of four whilst also being the commanding officer. (Socialists have yet to work this one out.) Tuschel reveals his in-depth knowledge of social psychology in his description of Toliman’s struggle. On this point already I felt that the novel was doing more than I would have expected from one of its kind: it contributed something to my own understanding of contemporary society. A lot of socialist science fiction is plain propaganda, but this one here isn’t. So I kept on reading.

Due to what has happened whilst the Kundschafter was in the anomaly, the ship is forced to land on an unknown planet – very interesting stuff! Tuschel describes the planet nicely. The ship lands in the Großes Tal (Big Valley) which is named this way in distinction to the Kleines Tal (Small Valley). Not being explorers per se but sort of in an emergency situation, these are the names that the crew came up with – very practical. The Großes Tal is covered with a carpet of lush green grass of exactly the same height all over, and there isn’t one plant species to be found that is older than 3 months or so. What happened here? Where are the older specimens? The reader is intrigued and reads on. (I thought it was locusts but I was wrong.) It gets even better when a dinosaur kind of animal comes near the ship and eventually befriends the crew who name it – they’ve already proven that naming things isn’t their strong suit so this doesn’t come as a surprise – ‘das Biest’.

Being sort of stranded on the planet for some time gives a lot of room for the protagonists’ characters to develop before the reader’s eye. Toliman increasingly struggles to preserve his clout; everyone comes up with creative ideas about how to improve their situation (finding food, collecting solar energy etc.) but Toli is being conservative. The team begins to crumble. His partner Mira who is a cosmogonist starts turning away from him and eventually it becomes clear that something needs to be done to save the team: an exercise (it really is called that in the German version, too). Think team building exercise but more complicated; this one involves everyone bongo-drumming together.

This part was a bit strange but also beautiful. In the socialist world of the future that this novel is set in, no one really knows how and why drumming together creates strong social bonds but what they do know is that it works. So when things look awry, out come the drums! The most emotional and creative one in the team, Gemma the biologist, dictates the rhythm for the exercise; the point is that everyone submits to her rhythm somehow and that they together create a new rhythm. Gemma’s partner Rigel, the mechanic, falls in easily and together they form a comfortable rhythmic dyad. Then Toliman starts drumming – but with his own rhythm! Shock horror indeed, he can’t even let go for a minute! Mira, who is the last one to join in the drumming, tries her best to connect the two rhythms and thus save the collective but is stretching herself thin. Eventually, Gemma adapts the baseline a bit and all of a sudden Toli is part of the group too, yay! They drum on for a while and everything is good afterwards.

A bit of a different sort of climax than you find in most novels, huh.

I think it’s because of strange narrative events like this that I really liked this novel. And because of the Biest. Gemma tamed it and it let her ride on it! Ideologically, the novel was much less problematic than I had expected, but maybe that’s because it wasn’t a very ideological novel. I still chuckled a bit towards the end: the crew of the Kundschafter is finally rescued by the Kundschafter 2 who, hearing about some of the challenges that Toli & Co. had to overcome (which I didn’t mention here – good stuff), congratulate them on their bravery by saying “Communists overcome everything” (“Kommunisten bewältigen alles.”). Toli & Co. take this as a huge compliment which is precisely how it was meant.

Would I generally recommend this novel? Well yes, if you like science fiction or utopian novels I think you could like this one, too. I think you’d also like it if you have a knack for all things military and chains of command. Some imagination is required to go with the descriptions and ironicallya little bit of suspense of rationality too since a lot of the science questions are never actually answered satisfactorily. We never find out what the anomaly was, for example. But I think such oversights are acceptable in a novel that pleases with a Biest, some insightful social psychology, and a robust plot.

You wouldn’t want to read this if you have a huge problem with socialism, though, but you probably wouldn’t have made it down this line here if that was the case

The real meaning of Batman

© Copyright Karen Vernon. Licensed for reuse. Source at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/801493

Yesterday I came upon a book on Scotland’s military roads which I am now reading with great interest. A lot of these old roads built in the 18th century are still identifiable and have been incorporated into long-distance walks across Scotland, and I would really like to walk on one or two of them over the course of the summer.

Whilst I was reading I came upon a strange usage of the word ‘batman’. Here is the quote – the passage refers to surveying in anticipation of road building:

Each surveying party under an engineer officer comprised an NCO and six soldiers: One carried the Theodolite (?); two measured with the chain; two for the fore and back stations; the remaining one acted as Batman.

The remaining one did not act as a hero; the old meaning of batman interestingly is ‘personal servant’ to a commanding officer. I didn’t know that! A batman basically combined the duties of a valet (he looked after the officer’s uniform and shoes), of a runner, a chauffeur, and a bodyguard. That is pretty heroic actually! According to Wikipedia, J.R.R. Tolkien “took the relationship his characters Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins had with each other from his observations during his military service of the relationship between a batman and his officer”.

***

William Taylor (1976) The Military Roads in Scotland. Newton Abbott: David & Charles. p. 35

Heroic biographies

All heroic biographies, according to folklorist Jan de Vries, follow a similar pattern. Politics and mass media culture isn’t exactly full of heroes but we do have a few illustrious persons there, e.g. Gordon Brown, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela to name but a few.

I wonder who would fit the template for a heroic biography? And how entertaining it would be to make their biographies fit!!

Here are the ten stages of a heroic biography according to Jan de Vries:

1. the begetting of the hero under strange circumstances
2. birth of the hero under strange circumstances
3. youth of the hero which is when he is first threatened somehow and when his special qualities begin to shine through
4. his upbringing – is usually exceptional in some way
5. hero acquires invulnerability
6. hero fights a monster, usually a dragon or so; variations include simple temptation
7. hero woos a maiden who becomes his companion henceforth
8. hero undertakes an expedition to the Other World, or far away at least
9. hero has returned but is banished from the land of his youth
10. hero dies, not normally under special or strange circumstances

The archetypal hero according to de Vries is Jesus Christ, by the way. His biography follows the template very closely, or the template follows his biography rather, as do most saints’ biographies (with the little difference that they don’t woo a maiden).

How we became aspirationals

(A little excerpt from my the thesis chapter I am working on at the moment.)

Whilst a degree of paternalistic ‘one nation’ Conservatism marked the party throughout the 160 years or so since its inception under Peel in 1834, the last quarter of the twentieth century certainly saw very little of that. The Conservative Party, since the 1970s, became more clearly meritocratic in its rhetoric regarding social welfare, work and unemployment, and under Margaret Thatcher explicitly adopted the point of view “that charity began at home and that people, to a very large extent, were masters of their own fate” (Evans 2004: 138) which, according to Evans, has become a part of the Thatcher legacy. Margaret Thatcher’s view of society as competitive is widely accepted across occupation and income groups. “In the real world”, as Fraser Nelson mused, “the Thatcher revolution never stopped” (Nelson in Times).

Thatcherism is one part of the global neo-liberal revolution which has affected a general change in values towards more economicism, individualism and competition. In the Australian context, there has recently been much debate about aspirationals, or “the upwardly mobile lower-middle class, the up and coming” (Gabriel 2003: 147). Aspirationals are hard-working employees who used to support unionism, social welfare, equality etc., and with it the Australian Labor Party. Having achieved upward social mobility, i.e. what they had worked so hard for, they ceased being the ‘natural constituents’ of Labor; the party had ‘abandoned’ those who “had done well for themselves and progressed” (Goot & Watson 2007: 218).

Although the term ‘aspirationalism’ does not seem to be used in a British context, it is clear that this phenomenon exists and that it, in fact, goes some way towards accounting for what appeal the Conservative Party has for voters on the one hand and members on the other.

***

Evans, Eric J. (2004). Thatcher and Thatcherism. London: Routledge.

Nelson, Fraser (2010). It’s hard to see what is Tory about the Tories. Times 4 February 2010.

Gabriel, Michelle (2003). Aspirationalism: The Search for Respect in an Unequal Society. Retrieved from http://api-network.com/main/pdf/scholars/jas80_gabriel.pdf

Goot, Murray and Watson, Ian (2007). Are Aspirationals Different? In Denemark, D., Meagher, G., Wilson, S., Western, M., and Philips, T. (Eds), Australian Social Attitudes 2: Citizenship, Work and Aspirations. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Intellect Books

Intellect is a wee publishing house that specialises in creative media and popular culture, and it’s the only publisher I have come across recently that wants to publish ‘original thinking’. Original thinking is usually minority thinking too, and it can be difficult to get this kind of intellectual work published. So if the creative media and popular culture are your fields you should definitely check out their website!

The edited volume, Art and Theory after Socialism, caught my eye. Looking at socialism in terms of the world of ideas (as you can do too alongside Jeffrey Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory) the main position in the twentieth century was to assume that socialism was rational and everything else wasn’t. Things that weren’t rational were also not good in a moral sense (ergo: Conservatism = not socialism = irrational = immoral). The good socialist worker was a rational person. No monkey business there! Functionality prevailed for the good of society and in all spheres of social and cultural life. Rationality was therefore prevalent in art also; think International Style, for instance, or the Stalinist megalomaniac style that has left its imprint in many Eastern European cities. The prime example here is the former Stalinallee in Berlin.

But what happened with art and art theory when socialism collapsed? I guess this book offers a few answers. Existential fact would tell us that where possible artefacts that were created under socialism and that were representative of its main tenets were destroyed and then replaced with artefacts expressive of Capitalist (irrational) thought.

One can’t destroy an entire big street and that’s why the Stalinallee, or now Karl-Marx-Allee, survives in all its socialist glory. Does socialism survive with it? Hardly.

Lists, lists, and more lists

I seem to have developed a thing for lists; I hope it’s a passing fancy because life is much more chaotic than thinking in lists suggests. But whilst I’m still in the mood for lists – here is another one! Prospect Magazine on an on-going basis lists the 100 most important intellectuals, which is (I guess) my list of the day. Here’s the Top Ten, both of 2005 and 2008.

The 2005 List

1. Noam Chomsky

2. Umberto Eco

3. Richard Dawkins

4. Václav Havel

5. Christopher Hitchens

6. Paul Krugman

7. Jürgen Habermas

8. Amartya Sen

9. Jared Diamond

10. Salman Rushdie

I like the 2005 list – at least I’ve heard some of the names there, if not read a few of the books! Yes, the 2005 list makes me feel at home. This is the world that I inhabit, these are the people that I know I should know. Even if I haven’t read their work, I still sort of know who they are.

The 2008 list, in contrast, is all weird:

The 2008 List

The positions of people who appeared in the 2005 poll are given in brackets. New entries are marked with an asterisk.

1 Fethullah Gülen (*) – read Ehsan Masood’s essay on this unexpected winner here
2 Muhammad Yunus (*)
3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)
4 Orhan Pamuk (54)
5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)
6 Amr Khaled (*)
7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)
8 Tariq Ramadan (58)
9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)
10 Shirin Ebadi (12)

It has the addition of Charles Taylor further down (at 37, to be precise) in it which is good (a person whose work I know = I’m not stupid) but who are all these other guys? Just looking at the top ten makes me feel insecure. It makes me doubt what kind of planet I am living on. I only know Orhan Pamuk. One name. Who are the others? Should I go and find out? Or shouldn’t I already know who they are, wouldn’t I know if I inhabited the same world of which they are the leading intellectuals? Hm.

So the following questions arise (on top of the ones I’ve already posed): By which standards are these guys chosen? Is it publications? Contents? Scope? Or is it more political than that? How did I come to be disconnected from the world of thought to such an extent that I don’t even recognise these names? I read the newspapers, I read books – but do I read the wrong books? Is there a major topic that all these guys made a name for themselves with that I am maybe not interested in? (For a few years there I avoided anything to do with the Holocaust.) Hm.

This is definitely food for thought. Lists are not as clean-cut as I sometimes think they are. This one here confuses me tremendously.

Maybe it is also the last list that I am all all excited about at first glance.

From Communist to Conservative

Peter Eberlein, in his recent book on the nineteenth century theologian Bruno Bauer, explains that shifting from one end of the political spectrum to the other isn’t as strange as it’s made out to be. Bauer started off as a left-Hegelian and friend of Marx’ and later turned into a Conservative and anti-Semite.

[...] this shift, which many in the later generations underwent just as Bauer did, does not represent a coincidental change of political location. Rather, it has its root cause in the Hegelian identification of the rational as the factual; in other words, in the incapability of the intellectual to accept that which does not fit into his thinking – to accept contingency. The reaction has transpired – therefore it has to be possible to integrate it into the system somehow. Once it is integrated, it is comprehended and therefore necessary – and it is right and just. (p.148, my translation)

The shift from left-wing radical to right-wing anti-Semite revolves around Bauer’s understanding of history as a logical and necessarily rational construct. Extrapolating this onto young Conservatives today, would it be possible to say something very much like this about the young Thatcherites? About those who actually have a rational construct at hand that not only explains how the economy is supposed to work, but also how society should structure itself around the economy? Do these young neo-liberals set out the way Bauer did, as, in their own eyes, radical heralds of progress, as redeemers of the people, and later on, because they hold onto their rational models so tightly, they become rigid and orthodox?

Eberlein’s book describes the plight and misery, endured with arrogance, conceit and ultimately in isolation, of a man who was captive to his ideas and his ideas alone, who could not accept that there are things in life that cannot be understood and that therefore cannot be predicted, harnessed and controlled.

Bauer lived a loveless life. It appears to me that such is to be expected of someone who appreciates logical coherence over everything else.

(Hermann-Peter Eberlein (2009). Bruno Bauer. Vom Marx-Freund zum Antisemiten. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag.)

W.J.M.Mackenzie (1978). Political Identity

Strange book, this. For a start, it’s in the format of a pocket book which is unusual for this kind of subject matter. The tone, secondly, is a tad too colloquial. Mackenzie jests a lot about issues and people that no one knows about any more, and this in a genre (political science) where no one normally brings on the funnies.

But there are a few precious moments in this wee book. Talking about the genesis of the concept of identity, Mackenzie notes that there are similarities in the way Americans and Germans use it and how, in contrast, British and French writers use it. Erikson, in America, was the first to use the concept of identity the way we do today. More than others, German emigrants Marcuse and Fromm appropriated the concept from psychology and introduced it into the social sciences at large. Since the second World War, and due to the impact of German expat scholars, Mackenzie argues, American and Germany are deeply connected in a number of strands of social thought.

The French tradition is the other main European one in regards to the identity discourse (but this distinction holds in most other areas, as well). Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud are listed (on p.51) as exponents.

As the book is written from a British perspective, a clear message as to where the Brits stand in this cannot be distilled easily. Plus, Britian is not what got me exited about this book.

The two brilliant discoveries here, for me, are: 1. Germany and America share a lot of intellectual history, especially in the social sciences. 2. Speaking from a bookling’s perspective, as much as I enjoy the fact that German thinkers (booklings!) have made their learning felt all over the world, the fact that those who had the greatest impact in the French identity discourse were novelists and poets is infinitely more beautiful! It also throws an interesting light on the national identity discourses in all the societies Mackenzie discusses; in some countries, appreciation of belles lettres and learning make on a highly valued member of the polity, whereas in others writers have no such plush cushion of identity comfort (‘I’ll become a writer and everyone will love me for it’) to start off from.

Lesson learned: 1 – Book formats have changed over the decades. 2 – So has the tone of discussion. 3 – It’s good to be German.