Voting For, Against, and Despite on 23 June 2016

hen I vote to remain part of the European Union on 23 June 2016 it will not be out of a fear of change, nor for any imagined short-term benefit.

I'm a human being on a planet with over seven billion others, facing a host of challenges. I believe that those of us with the freedom to do so need to embrace and develop the most generous, imaginative political ideas.

I'll vote Remain hoping that the European project is informed by ideas other than self-interest, nationalism and neo-liberalism, even if its economics have been flawed.


If internationalist European structures are preserved, then they are open to improvement in the future, and MEPs we vote for can be involved in that process. If the structures collapse, it's much easier for opportunist power-grabbers to do what they want with everything from health and social care to energy and the environment. I want checks on such opportunism (and successive British governments have been ambiguous, at best, about those).

My vote will not be influenced by current economic arguments. It's ridiculous to suppose that economic circumstances should "naturally" serve someone well, just because they are a citizen of a particular country. Even if that were true, by what mechanisms, precisely, are poor Brits going to become much better off after Britain leaves European Union? The distribution of economic benefit depends on the will of those in power to steer things this way or that, and who among the Brexiters seems committed, specifically, to the wholesale redistribution of wealth among all citizens?

My vote will not be influenced by the pedlars of so-called sovereignty. National sovereignty (like economic growth) has never served everyone in Britain equally. What use a green and pleasant land in the Great-War mud; a new Jerusalem against lung-fulls of twentieth-century coal dust? British sovereignty today is a patronising trick, dressed up by all available means: from the culture of remembrance to Royal-Family tittle-tattle, and relentless nostalgia.


The qualities of Britishness that I value are those that make me sceptical of anyone whose desire for power seems stronger than their ideas. That would include most prominent Brexiters, and all those Remainers too guarded about their own political careers to say that Europe is a bigger idea than Britain.

We face critical, global circumstances: the systemic, diminishing availability of work; a planetary ecosystem under increasing strain; and the multiple crises of culture, democracy and basic resources that are prompting migration on a massive scale. All demand imagination, compassion and greater selflessness in our politics. Narrow-minded retreat would be shameful.

If we recognise that a secure future will require the emergence of some truly radical political thinking, we might ask what kind of culture will encourage it: one inspired by self-interest and nationalism, or a supra-national one? I think the latter.

I'll cast my vote in the direction the most promising, future-oriented cultural space I can discern, amid the campaign rhetoric and posturing.

The STEM-ification of Art (What Happened to Art Schools (2))

n 2013 Jose Ferreira, founder of Knewton, 'the world's leading adaptive learning company', posted a piece entitled 'Don't defund the humanities: they're crucial to the economy too'. The post draws on analysis of funding trends in U.S. education which, at that time, favoured STEM subjects (science technology, engineering, mathematics).[1]

Ferreira urges caution in relation to the STEM-ification of humanities subjects, arguing that the humanities should not be devalued just because they produce individuals with relatively hard to measure skills, such as 'communications skills, critical thinking skills, and multicultural proficiency'.

Ferreira at least attempts to explain what makes the humanities operationally valuable in society, but he also writes from a position in which certain power relations between corporations and citizens are taken as given. His post draws comment suggesting some enthusiasm for a status quo in which the majority of citizens are constrained by the self-serving machinations of powerful commercial and financial players; a status quo in which an ambitious student would necessarily expect their education to help them to a share in such power.

In his analysis, Ferreira cites a U.S. factoid: 'over 65% of [U.S.] elementary school students will end up in jobs that don't yet exist'. To extrapolate, conversely: student choices everywhere, at many levels, must be influenced by jobs markets that are bound to fluctuate between enrolment day and graduation day. Such fundamental uncertainty is problematic for any highly instrumental education policy.

Real-world uncertainty can also be convenient for advocates of humanities disciplines not focused on specfic vocational outcomes, but on endowing students with quailites deemed generally advantageous. It's often easier to show that humanities graduates can be broadly sucessful 'in many walks of life' than to show what their success has to do, specifically, with the discipline they studied at university: what is it about 'Shakespeare' that makes a 'good' civil servant? How does a Fine Art degree make a good lecturer?

Humanities graduates might succeed as much by learning to navigate the selectivist social fields around their disciplines as by the mastery of a specialist disciplinary knowledge ("knowledge" for the humanities being more varied in form and function than the scientific or technical knowledges associated with STEM subjects). Some advocates of the humanities are happy enough with this kind of settlement, especially, perhaps, if they achieved success themselves via a fuzzily-defined socio-disciplinary route.

But what if, today, societies are at a juncture where a greater number of STEM-trained people really are required to administer essential functions? Should we still defend the generalist humanities against encroaching STEM-ification?


I remain attached to the ideal of education for education's sake; or for the sake of increasing the number of educated people in society, whatever their socio-economic roles. Whatever the predictions for future social needs, changes in art education disturb me. This is partly for personal reasons, including a nostalgia for a time when art schools epitomised what today might be seen as a luxurious liberalism. I've commented on this personal/political overlap elsewhere in this blog.[2]

Notwithstanding the limitations of my own perspective, let's imagine that U.K. art education is altered in order to incentivise course applications in the present STEM-friendly culture, perhaps by universities marketing educational packages that appeal to current student choices (however these may be informed). In a decade or two, we could have a U.K. art education no longer loosely aligned with multiple purposes - as it has been for decades - but targetted at students seeking predefined roles in various artistically-inflected industries (music, film, television, games design, advertising) many of which, in their own ways, encourage the STEM-ification of art.

I note that this is a possible outcome; I speculate about whether or not it's to be desired.


In 2014, the U.K. government launched an initiative to encourage enrolment in STEM subjects in UK universities. Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan described the kinds of education required for Britain 'to succeed in the global economy' and for 'the British workforce of tomorrow [...] to have the skills and knowledge to compete [in the future]'. In her speech, Morgan presented the interests of the country as concurrent with those of the generation entering higher education in 2014 and beyond, arguing that STEM subjects would maximise their chances of finding rewarding roles in future society.[3][4][5]

Some of the comment following Morgan's speech exposed a tendency for advocates of the humanities to squeal in non-specific anguish at any hint of an instrumentalist education policy. However, the ability to counter such instrumentalism with a strong argument for the humanities seems almost as out of reach for some, today, as it was for literary critic F.R. Leavis in 1963.

Leavis was famously outraged by C.P. Snow's 1958 lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which Snow states (amongst other things) that the lives of the poor might be more radically improved by science and engineering than by modernist literature.[6] Leavis was condemned and mocked by the ascendant liberal left for his over-personalised response to Snow: Two Cultures: the Significance of C.P. Snow.[7] Having studied that text in detail, I find Leavis's attacks on Snow, with their incidental account of an emerging 'publicity created culture' around the arts, more coherent than his advocacy of literature.

I believe there remains today a tendency for advocates of the humanities to band together according to fellow-feeling, rather than strong argument, and thus to perpetuate the impression that those who find a social role in relation to artistic practices are a tribe apart, bound on terms that they cannot readily explain to the outsider or the sceptic.[8]


Often it seems that the science/humanities debate takes place in terms that are either so narrow as to be of little interest in wider society, or so obvious as to not matter very much. In the case of Nicky Morgan's arguments, it is obvious that many selectively-trained, computer-literate people will be required in order to carry out many of the tasks that future societies will depend upon: around energy supply, medical services, various aspects of infrastructure, and so on.

There remains, however, the important political question of the context in which such highly specialised work will be done. For instance, will future engineers and scientists serve in a realm which is largely privatised, or state-regulated? Will they be able to apprehend the common good and exercise judgement in its interests, or will they have to serve the interests of corporate masters whose ethics are vaguely yet unquestioningly bound up with the supposed natural morality of markets?

While ever debates around contemporary art are pursued within narrowly defined social fields, art will have difficulty in credibly claiming that its virtues, values and gains are aligned with the common good. Here art begins from an especially weak position. The outcome of artistic debates is less important, in an immediate material sense, than is the playing out of specialist knowledges in, say, a genetics laboratory, a large hospital, or a nuclear power plant. And society at large might justifiably have little interest in the intellectual culture around art if it is primarily dedicated to authenticating and legitimating art practices that few pursue and even fewer can make a living from.


I drafted this post in 2013, in response to a flurry of debate about independent (and perhaps temporary) art schools not affiliated with universities.[9] Here, it was suggested that the massive hike in U.K. student tuition fees in 2010 had focused minds on what art education, especially, is for. Fees of £9K and above do seem particularly onerous in return for any kind of course that a student might want to take up for its own sake, rather than for a job in an established (supposedly creative) industry.

STEM-ification may serve as a survival strategy for fine art in U.K. universities, especially those at a greater geographical and social distance from the metropolitan art world. STEM-ification is also about fitting in with a state-supported system which government has recently sought to change, in order to 'create a level playing field that will enable private providers to compete on equal terms with public universities'. (One government-sanctioned alternative to public universities in the U.K. is the mega university run by private equity firms[10]). In this context, enrolling on a short, unaccredited course in a private or temporary art school, to engage for a short time with artists and academics who are unconstrained by institutional dictat, might seem like a good idea to a free-thinker.

Whatever the arguments for the STEM-ification of art, it seems possible that fine art in universities has become stranded between some long-established disciplinary territories. Personally, I fear that the unique interplay of the aesthetic and the intellectual in art is too easy to downplay in the name of skimming fine art for aesthetic strategies, tactics and skills for use in other disciplines.

Meanwhile, aesthetic tactics are routinely used in the affirmative culture around neoliberal capitalism. This returns us to art's weak political position in the wider world, for the art market is part of the neoliberal game in which capital flows are bound to be privileged over the sharing of artistic culture. The art market has for decades imposed an anti-progressive orthodoxy on artistic practice, artists being encouraged to repeat themselves (to downplay their intelligence) for however long a signature artistic gesture holds its market value. Public institutions, including academies, are drawn in, protocols of evaluation becoming skewed as repetitious artists are actively authenticated for the canon: a quasi-intellectual process which, under scrutiny, seems antithetical to the idea of progressive knowledge gain definitive of an academic discipline.

In terms of upholding ideals, no-one but the broker comes out of such arrangements looking good.

It has long been routine, then, for artistic work to be resituated in contexts very different to those experienced by the young artist engaging with their discipline at art school. STEM-ification threatens resituating effects within the art school, but is, nevertheless, one aspect only of a longstanding political problematic that can be encapsulated in the following questions: Who says what art is for? How are artistic work and its outcomes to be capitalised, and by whom? And: Which ideals should guide us in addressing such questions?


I acknowledge that the social fields around many artistic practices are problematically exclusive. But I also hope that art education can introduce people to practices that constitute a thinking space for individuals in society; a space that is not sustained merely via its favourable relations with the most powerful economic and institutional forces. I believe that living among citizens who are able to think critically about such forces is almost as important to my quality of life as living among skilled clinicians, data processors, or engineers.


[1] Jose Fereira, 'Don’t Defund Humanities: They’re Crucial to the Economy, Too' http://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/stem-vs-humanities/
[2] What Happened to Art Schools? An Accidental Manifesto. This blog:
http://thismoaning.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/what-happened-to-art-schools-accidental.html
[3] 'Nicky Morgan speaks at launch of Your Life campaign'
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nicky-morgan-speaks-at-launch-of-your-life-campaign
[4] 'Education Secretary Nicky Morgan tells teenagers: Want to keep your options open? Then do science' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-nicky-morgan-tells-teenagers-if-you-want-a-job-drop-humanities-9852316.html
[5] 'Last week's poll: STEM vs humanities, and what education's for', The Engineer, 11 November 2014
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/poll/last-weeks-poll-stem-vs-humanities-and-what-educations-for/1019472.article
[6] C. P. Snow, Stefan Collini, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). (first publ. main text first given as the 1959 Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1959)
[7] F. R. Leavis, 'Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow: Being the Richmond Lecture, 1962 By F. R. Leavis', in Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.), pp. 27-50.
[8] Paul Smith - Move over, Stem: why the world needs humanities graduates http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/19/humanities-universities-global-stem
[9] David Batty, 'Alternative art schools: a threat to universities?'
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/21/alternative-art-schools-threaten-universities
[10] Stefan Collini, 'Sold Out'. Review of: Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, by Roger Brown, with Helen Carasso and The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, by Andrew McGettigan. London Review of Books 35.20 (2013): 3-12. 24 Oct. 2013 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out

The Domain That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Progressive Coalition)

n 8 May 2015, the day after the 2015 UK general election, I registered a domain name: 

progressivecoalition.uk                     

I searched for it first, as one must, and I was shocked to find that it was not already registered. Despite the fact that "progressive coalition" seems to be an obvious idea around which to oppose the political right in Britain, and despite the fact that several parties in the UK had recently been trying to do just that, no-one had wanted the name.

I wasn't too badly shocked, of course: for the previous three weeks, at least, I had witnessed the playing out of a political narrative whose outcome was made more certain by the lack of cooperation among the parties of opposition, none of whom could hope for total power.

Opposition to the right is fragmented, in the sense that it can no longer be focused through twentieth-century leftist aspirations, especially if carrying them into action relies on class tribalism that is no longer widespread or binding in society. Although that seems obvious, some on the left still speak as if it were not. 

The British left has identified nothing as coherent as Marxism on which to found its twenty-first-century political project, although the list of issues requiring action is dauntingly impressive: the iniquitous effects of neoliberalism; global warming; the short-termism of almost all energy policy; global social instability exacerbated by zealotry, militarism and the arms trade; big pharma calling the shots in health care; self-interested commerce calling the shots almost everywhere; etc.

In Britain in 2015 the left has missed an opportunity to do anything about any of that by failing to engage imaginatively with the possibilities of progressive coalition.


It's been hard to reconcile a Labour Party willing to take brickbats when defending the intellectual integrity of its maligned leader, with one willing to talk only about the most orthodox political strategies during its election campaign. Although this was no doubt deemed the safe option, sticking to narrow party messages in 2015 played like a reactive retreat from the very intelligence supposed to be the leader's hallmark; supposedly his saving grace in the ridiculous popularity stakes.

Similarly, when the same leader refused to discuss coalition with democratically-mandated Scottish Nationalist (and other) MPs it looked as if he was in denial about the state of opposition to the right in Britain. It looked as if he was in the grip of a very old-fashioned desire for the kind of absolute power that many voters believed to be out of his reach, and beyond his competence.

In formulating the campaign tactics that produced these effects, someone probably thought they knew best. For them, I have some questions:

What if, from around 2011, the Labour Party had campaigned vigorously for a pooling of national resources dedicated to the creation of a new politics: a politics for a consumerist society bedevilled by short-termism, facing uncertainty on many fronts (social, environmental, economic, strategic, etc)? What if it had done this not primarily as a means of reinventing itself but as the co-ordinating agent of a progressive coalition? Would the outcome have been worse, for those who oppose the right, than the outcome of the 2015 election?


It's hard to say. But it's relatively easy to see that clinging mindlessly to the ideal of absolute power weakens the hand of any political agent who lacks the means to acquire it. More to the point, absolute power is a shibboleth in today's perversely connected world. Those with financial heft have moved on, reshaping their hold on power via trickle-up economies, where an interconnectedness amounting to the surveillance of every socially-visible citizen constrains each to his or her primary role as a revenue stream for the aggregators of wealth.

Thus are the 'casual right' changing society, without straining to acquire absolute power, without elaborating an ideology.

In this new world, a "Labour Party" may no longer be the point. I don't mean that the people in the UK Labour Party have no purpose, but that agonising about how to remain true to an identity formulated solely for twentieth-century realities might be a waste of energy.

So, as the UK Labour Party embarks on its second phase of self-analysis in a decade, I hope it does so with a more radical eye to the future than the last time around (2010). I hope it actively entertains the idea of playing a lead role in a progressive coalition. There are many potential partners, with interest and expertise in different areas of concern. They want only for a place in such a coalition to make their contribution to a progressive politics for a post-neoliberal Britain.

Ask not how all progressive politics can be "Labour", but how Labour can be of most use to progressive politics.


I'm open to suggestions about what to do with the domain name. Coincidentally (given the UK's Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011) I registered it for five years.

www.progressivecoalition.uk
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A Joyous Summer in Neoliberal Britain

here we have to wait years to assess the "impact" of no-brand cigarette packets in Australia, but can't wait at all to see whether fracking for shale gas in the United States pollutes the water table.

Just to stress: that's CIGARETTES, about which everyone has personal choice anyway, and THE WATER TABLE, which, if screwed, will be screw a sizeable part of the population with it, whether or not they chose to go the way of fracking. Ideas about where the water will come from if the water table is polluted? Here, the wizened captains of industry are silent.[1]

Of course, they'll be dead, the short-term profits from fracking having been salted away offshore in their family accounts, and why would they care anyway about the children of the lumpen consumerati, the milch cows of trickle-up capitalism, of whom they know little and care less?

 For guidance in this weird logic, follow the money.[2]

The inventor of fracking, George Mitchell died at 94 in July 2013. According to his granddaughter, and others interviewed for BBC Radio 4's 'Last Word'  he was very concerned about the roll-out of possibly imperfect extraction technologies. [3]

In the UK, we've had a decade or two of whinging about wind turbines, often from folk who happen to be used to having a nice view, whose electricity and gas nevertheless originates in places where other people live with the filthy air and the shitty view resulting from energy production. That whinging has affected the complexion of debate; limited what's deemed possible. Perhaps communities who prefer their nice view (so to speak) should propose means of meeting their energy needs which don't impact on other communities... or initiate a wider move towards a post-industrial living, whatever that may mean.

Personally, I love the "natural" environment, to the extent that I find needless despoilment quite painful, but I also think that we're now in a balance-of-evils situation. If it's a choice between having wind farms in my favourite places and possibly damaging a basic resource (clean water), I'll go for the wind farms; thousands of them, please.

Fracking obviously seems easy to politicians habituated to short-termism, and an easy way to create  a bit of capital churn. This explains why other arguments for it - officially at least - are so weakly made.

[1] http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used 

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-fracking-industry-bosses-at-heart-of-coalition-8707589.html


[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lastword (Friday, 9 August 2013)
 

Death-Cult Britain: Thatcher, Nostalgia and Indulgences

fter recent heavy snow, Britain is again paralysed: this time by a Westminster wonkfest, a new Zombie Britain horror in which the political commentariat have risen en masse for an orgy of fat-chewing...

For some, Margaret Thatcher (recently deceased) legitimises a worldview in which power self-evidently belongs to a certain type of person: the commercial entrepreneur; the chauvinist; the monetarist. This iconification of Thatcher goes along with a denial that the energies unleashed by monetarism have been narrowly focused by those seeking to increase the socio-economic differential between themselves and "the rest".

Monetarism could never be universally beneficial.  A couple of decades on, the wave of privatisations begun under Thatcher looks like a masquerade; a cover for those already assured enough to play the markets to  own a little more of what everyone needs. The interests of a few new players may have been more closely aligned with those of the most ambitious capitalists, but how many citizens today part-own a gas company, an electricity company, a water company? How many have greater control over the capital entities which constrain their every move?

Much is made of Thatcher's shopkeeper roots, as if it were a given that society is best organised according to the logic of the bean counter. The shopkeeper's way has been supercharged via new communications technologies, which are ever-more closely interwoven with everyone's personal stake in the financial system. This plays out as an all-pervasive tyranny, in which the consumer-citizen is kept in perpetually reactive mode: poked, nudged and prompted at every possible juncture. Some may own houses who wouldn't have were it not for Thatcher. But the house - like the car, the iPad or the mobile phone - has been transformed into a capital device which ties its possessor in to paying never-endingly for all the things that make possessing it worthwhile. It's a reductive, banal and frustrating way to live.

In today's neo-liberal Britain neither the labour nor the intelligence of a citizen seem to be of value. People are "free" to work and think if they want to; but their most vital function is to provide a constant stream of cash payments to private agents, for things they can't do without (and some they can do without). Trickle-down capitalism has become trickle-up capitalism. Those with the greatest financial heft have inherited the freedom to prompt social changes, for profit, shielded by a mythos which infers an incontrovertible normalcy and - yes - morality, in the logic of markets.

This, in my view, is a significant part of the legacy of Thatcherism.

...Jagger to release blue butterflies from Hyde Park stage in memory of ex-PM...'Thatcher death premium' pushes ticket prices past two hundred pounds...Watts, Richards 'not bothered' about 'hijacking of counter-culture'...footwear website crashes as Elvis Costello attempts massive "tramping boots" order...I saw...in my dream news-stream...

Did Thatcherism 'make Britain great (again)'? Is it even a good idea to want to be great as Britain was, say, in the nineteeth century?

If Thatcherism is to be credited for the society we now enjoy in Britain, it must also bear some responsibility for the ongoing, stupefying struggles between citizen, state and markets. Britain today is part of a great global capital churn, in which the economically disempowered are churned up. And you become disempowered, in effect, just for not being interested enough in being an active capitalist. All other values are in abeyance.

Thatcherism led in time to the topsy-turvy era of financial crisis and serial recession. In this, the state has been cornered into upholding the freedom to privatise any and all economic gain, whilst subsidising the losses of the most voracious capitalists when their schemes fail. It's a wonderland in which "debt" is transformed into "credit" for anyone seeking to become a more active capitalist; yet the resources required by the state to keep society on an even keel are still called "debt" or "deficit", and deemed a national shame.

I believe it's foolish for any political faction to claim Thatcher's legacy as an unambiguous triumph, or to assume that Thatcher's favoured ideology marks a "year zero" after which every other way of being is forgotten. To date, the era of financial crisis has been one of stasis and delusion. But from it, hopefully, future changes will be impelled. It seems as though none of Britain's current political leaders want to speculate publicly about such changes. Like rival kids in a playground, they have to appear sure of themselves if they are to inspire their respective gangs. Their old gangs.

All the posturing is a little silly, and insulting to the intelligence of anyone not belonging to any particular gang; any free thinker. Democratic representation via the old political camps is in crisis anyway, to the extent that in 2010 coalition was the nearest-to-honest settlement available. At that time Britain was repeatedly told that this was a good thing: 'the end of yah-boo politics'. I wonder now if this was just to hide the gang leaders' embarrassment at not winning an election outright.

David Cameron's sudden valorisation of Thatcher's life and personal qualities, his espousal of an otherwise contentious British greatness, certainly suggests a mind easily overwhelmed by any opportunity to acquire outright power.

...Arthur Scargill to launch comeback via guest spot on new Chumbawamba release...Mark E. Smith unimpressed...

Whilst some monotonously trumpet the defeat of socialism, opposition to privately monetised power has become personalised, vicious and intellectually ad-hoc. Leftish vitriol aimed at Thatcher goes along with attempts to personify certain socio-economic values in Thatcher herself, and sanctify them via a Thatcher death cult. It also shows how impoverished the left's project is. It reveals a nostalgia for a time when all that was required to guarantee block votes was to invoke ironclad ideological constructs from the early twentieth century, and shout about the wronged worker and the privileges of the rich.

What a task Blair (Thatcherite-in-effect) and the ineffectual Brown have bequethed to their successors, by leaving so much unchallenged in the name of their own moment of power. Who will represent the citizen who is  interested less in the homilies and simplistic oppositions of the past, more in wanting to follow their times and make the complex present a more livable one?

...artist Jeremy Deller plans 'inflatable state funeral'...

Thatched out. Over and out.