The Rector of St Chav's

Here is Archbishop Tutu commenting wryly upon Africa and the Church:

‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’
(Steven Gish: Desmond Tutu: A Biography)

This sort of joke makes several thing explicit in a useful way. It’s clear, for example, that colonialism was really a form of theft, with the Church being fully complicit. And that the colonised for their part were naïve in allowing the swindle to happen. So there’s a critique here, arising out of indignation, that’s overt.

On the other hand, it’s equally clear that as an Anglican archbishop Tutu is part of the Church and its success is therefore his. So is he part of the problem? Although as an African he is a victim, what’s also strongly implied is that by stealing the land the colonising North may in fact have lost its soul whereas he and his compatriots are having their revenge: they have ‘colonised’ the Church. By wittily nesting the positive within the context of the negative Dr Tutu’s emotionally complex strategy allows the oppressed to become subjects again and thus (morally at least) to gain the upper hand.

*

And now here by contrast is Archbishop Rowan Williams making various interview points about the state of Britain’s finances. There has, apparently, been a bit of financial trouble up at St Chav’s. Several of the younger boys have lost their iPhones. The school tuck-shop, after a run in with what the school caretaker likes to call the school’s Collateralised Doughnut Obligations, has needed a sub from parents. In the meantime a number of pupils have made complaints that the Economics teacher keeps talking over their heads. They can’t understand a word of what he says. An air of unreality is hanging over St Chav’s…

Dr Williams dislikes unreality. What he wants is repentance good and strong:

‘There hasn’t been what I as a Christian would call repentance. We haven’t heard people say, “Well actually, you know, we got it wrong and the fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty. […] I’m talking about bankers but also about all of us. We should all, I think, look back and say, “Well we were hypnotised into that sense of unreality.”’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

Which is why there are now lines to be written. Why boys who lost their iPhones are writing, ‘I must look after my iPhone.’ Why boys who have taken iPhones are writing, ‘I must not steal people’s iPhones.’ Why Dr Williams himself is earnestly scribbling on the blackboard, ‘I must take playground duty much more seriously and look out for stolen iPhones.’ The school tuck-shop has given up CDOs. It now sells proper doughnuts filled with jam...

But alas the Economics master still seems to be in post. A horrid example of boffinry. An indefatigable presenter of unintelligible graphs who makes up strange equations and uses the school computer. In short, a nasty chap. This puts a damper on things. In the corridors boys keep finding their pockets empty and administering Chinese burns. Dr Williams has been getting quite upset. ‘There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year,’ he declares at one point during Assembly. He detects ‘a quite strong sense of diffused resentment’ in and around the school. But fortunately he has a solution for this as well. We should all ignore the Economics master, who is nothing but a bully and a windbag, and start reading Keynes instead:

‘We felt intimidated by expertise [… Experts] convinced the rest of us because I think we’ve most of us grown up with the idea that economics is an exact science and that suggests that we haven’t actually read Keynes in the first place because Keynes’s stress on uncertainty as something utterly unavoidable in economic activity beyond a certain level, that again seems to have vanished.’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

*

The differences here are striking.

Firstly what Dr Williams appears to want is actually to shut down in the name of ‘closure’ the very sort of opposition (‘they’ versus ‘we’) which Dr Tutu seeks to redeem and then keep open. The key is positionality. Thus Dr Tutu’s joke is radically ambivalent. As the individual he is he straddles the division between two personal pronouns, between two separate actors. Each of the elements associating him with either ‘they’ or ‘we’ prompts an interpretation which disturbs interpretation of the other. But when, by contrast, Dr Williams refers to what ‘a Christian would call repentance’ he conflates four different things which differ morally as they do in terms of deixis: regret (‘What a pity about those crooked deals he made us enter into’), blame (‘What about those crooked deals you made us enter into’), contrition (‘I’m sorry about those crooked deals I made you enter into’) and forgiveness leading to closure (‘That’s OK’). He seems to find no moral inequivalence between, say, Bernard Madoff and one of Madoff’s clients. And, though he would hardly have meant it as such, by saying, in effect, ‘We’re all to blame and now I want the whole class to stay behind after school,’ he merely varies the thesis used by prejudiced judges down the ages that rapists’ victims were asking for it: ‘We girls should try to dress more discreetly.’

Secondly, whereas Dr Tutu’s ‘we’ is a pronoun which owns up (‘I am a member too’) what Dr Williams does is to manipulate to his own advantage the difference between the ‘we’ of individuation and the ‘we’ of collective belonging. Again positionality is the key. Whilst, for example, Dr Williams emphasises that ‘we’ are all collectively to blame, he nonetheless permits himself an individuating ‘we’ whenever it really matters. Thus when he declares that treating economics as science suggests that ‘we’ haven’t read Keynes (And where exactly is our essay on J M Keynes, Master Romer?’) he applies a stricture to others that he seems not to apply to himself. That’s dishonest.

Whereas Dr Tutu simplifies a complex history to bring out certain essentials, Dr Williams merely fudges. Thus he claims to want a closer relationship between financial products and the creation of socially desirable goods and services, which he terms ‘wealth as wellbeing’. But instead of addressing those who created dodgy products in the first place he blames economists, who are already one step removed.

*

There was, of course, an opportunity (ducked by Dr Williams) to consider things rather more fully. For a start, it simply isn’t the case that everyone in Britain had somehow been ‘hypnotised’ by the unrealities of an economics modelled on the sciences any more than Dr Tutu was literally present at the snatching away of land and handing out of bibles. Neither was a bargain freely entered into. Both were about fraud, and powerlessness, and loss. That would be one possible point of entry. But instead Dr Williams merely paraphrases Thatcher's reference to people who:

‘live by illusions, the illusion that you can spend money you haven't earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors.’
(Margaret Thatcher: Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 1978)

Whereas modernising capitalism captured past experience (the skills of the artisan) and absorbed them into mechanised production, postfordist capitalism seems to be capturing future experience (how the world may be interpreted and re-formed) partly through the mediations of ICT; partly through the substitution of personal knowledge by various kinds of expert system; partly through the privatisation of an intellectual commons as new sorts of property; partly through the privileging of rule based behaviours over individual good sense, and partly through the institution of immaterial labour, of an often precarious workforce of information providers and creators whose links with one another are increasingly virtual and transindividual and thus lack the intersubjectivity of communities, workplaces, what used to be called solidarity. This is the wider context in which the financial crisis appears to have begun. It’s one in which what Marx called general intellect, within which Virno includes ‘formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and language games’ is being steadily substituted by a technology which now (in)forms and creates us more and more rather than vice versa. And since ‘solidarity’ is now in pawn to multinationals, political elites, to the enactors of globalization, ‘we’ need to redeem it through a new sort of subjectivity; through constituting in ‘our’ behaviours a new social subject; through our anger, directed and direct.

So that would be another point of entry. To view the credit crunch not simplistically, as a single issue, but as a symptom of something wider, of which the crisis in Britain’s parliamentary system (MPs’ expense, distaste for the major parties) is another. To look towards the context and the cause. And with a different aim. Not to stop being ‘hypnotised’, supposedly, by money and/or clever economics but to attempt to recover ourselves: ‘Sikhalela izwe lethu (We cry for our land) / Elathathwa ngabamhlophe (That was taken by the white people’); we cry for that latest part of our humanity, of our subjectivity, that is being taken from us by another colonising process.

Articulating Despair

Thoreau and Tondelli

*

‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. […] A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.’
(Thoreau: Walden)

Thoreau’s view is of a truth that is covered over, masked with falsehood, and which (as with Frisch’s technology) we exploit without engaging with. He views it from above:

‘The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.’
(Thoreau: Walden)

*

‘Why do you live if you’re not happy?’
[…]
‘Everyone is constrained to create a fiction for themselves in order to carry on living. There are those who think about their families, those who think about work, or about money, or about sex. But they’re all illusions.’
(P V Tondelli: Rimini)

The important thing here is that Rimini is actually radically false, whether viewed by Bauer, the young journalist stationed there from outside, or from within, and even though the ‘real’ is thoroughly complicit with the false. Hence this about a homosexual relationship that is likewise radically subaltern in how it is expressed:

‘Leo felt then the entirety of his own life separated by an abyss from the great events of living and of dying. As if he had always lived in a zone that was separate from society. As if his doing badly in the world, or being happy, his wandering, all this had taken place on some stage. Now the portrayal was ending. Fathers and mothers, the Church, the State, the officials in charge of personal data were re-establishing their grip, consigning everything to the nullifying dust of the archives. Everything except the insignificant pain of some extraneous young man.
[...]
‘But Thomas was dying. At twenty five years. And he, Leo, who was only four years older, found himself the widower of a companion so that it was as though he had never had one and about him there existed not even a word in any human lexicon that could define the one who had been for him not a husband, not a wife, not a lover, not only a companion but the essential part of a new and mutual fate.’
(P V Tondelli: Camere separate)

Keeping Cheerful

Ci ragiono e canto contains the splendid song Ho visto un re (words by or adapted by Dario Fo; music by Paolo Ciarchi, best known for Piccolo uomo and now, I believe, a noise artist, and/or Enzo Jannacci):

I saw a king
a king who wept, still seated in the saddle.
He wept so many tears, so many tears that
even the horse got wet. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.
The emperor had taken from him one fine castle
the crafty sod
out of thirty two of them he’d owned. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.

The song, of course, goes on. A king, a bishop, a rich man, an emperor and a cardinal have all of them been ‘half ruined’. (The bishop indeed is so upset that he bites the hand of his sacristan.) Fo then mentions the peasant. He’s been cheated out of his chicken, his turkey, his wife, his farmstead, his son who’s gone for military service, even his pig. So he’s been completely ruined.
But does the peasant weep? Not a bit of it. He laughs. Because it’s the duty of the poor to keep cheerful, to avoid upsetting wealthy folk.

*

Rowan Williams appeared to take a similar line in yesterday’s Times. Britain’s MPs have suffered enough. They’ve even sacked the Speaker, rather in the manner of the bishop biting the hand of his unfortunate sacristan. Enough humiliation. We must move on.

‘We must move on’ is painfully New Labour. Indeed there’s a thesis to be written (using Talmy’s Force Dynamics) on how New Labour likes to use ‘speed’ whenever it lacks direction, which is often. Here, though, it belies something else. Whilst Dr Williams purports to solicit restraint when attacking dodgy MPs, he actually seems more confident in making the perfectly valid point that public service is (or ought to be) about something more than rule based behaviour and that the something he has in mind includes (or ought to include) the institution of a higher morality of some sort.

And yet he misses the vital point, which is that the Great Expenses Fiasco with all its absurdities, its lying and its cheating is but a symptom of a very much greater corruption, that of representative democracy itself. So his thesis becomes a purely local one about cleaning up peculation, about how a regular audit by nanny (‘Turn out your pockets this minute, Master McNulty!’) won’t solve everything and not about more explicitly political issues, such as:

• how Parliament itself now fails miserably to represent the electoral will of this country. In 2005, for example, 22% of those eligible to vote supported the present government, despite its large majority. This was the worst result for any single party government since at least World War I
• how the Executive now retains almost total power within the parliamentary process, so that the views of the opposition can generally be ignored
• how the Whip systems, the Committee system and the craven acceptance of both of these by backbench MPs (who now function either as lobby fodder or as deracinated local ombudsmen or as both; hence the two homes) means that reams of fatuous and ill considered legislation are passed without scrutiny and, frequently, without comment
• how, in more general terms, principle has now become mere policy, consumables to be sold to a supposedly gullible public for whom New Labour has contempt; means have been severed from ends; political labels have become brands, power has been exiled into bureaucracy, and so on.

*

But if representative democracy is to mean anything, then it must be about something very like a sort of mutual inspiration: of the leaders by the people and of the people by their leaders. Whereas what we have is mutual contempt. We may or may not want to solve this. And if we do, it can’t be by keeping cheerful lest MPs should get upset.

Anger may embarrass many people, but it is the surest sign that our democracy isn’t yet dead.

We need to become angrier still. And angrier, of course, about still more. Not just about bent cabinet ministers, duck islands and moats.

Claiming the Rematch

'Revolution isn't showing life to people, but bringing them to life.'
(Guy Debord: For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art, 1961)

'Trained by millions of hours passed in front of the television these people reacted to each event in human existence, even one of tragedy and mourning, with the only behaviour necessary from the television watching public, with applause.

'But real life, that which like a death squad knocks on your door when you least expect it, grabs you from the comfort of the sofa in the living room, drags you out by your hair and then shoots you, by the side of the road, immediately claimed the rematch.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Taking Back Subjectivity

Operaismo, subjectivity and Marx's 'general intellect'.

'The problem is that operaismo needs to liberate the forces that have been chilled and frozen by the cognitive sciences just as, in a former age, it liberated the forces seized by neocapitalist and technicist ideologies. This is the problem if one means to have the general intellect as a subject.'
(Paolo Virno, from Gli operaisti)

After the Mass Society

C Wright Mills and post autonomism


In The Mass Society (from The Power Elite, 1956) C Wright Mills looks at 'public opinion' as the mythic seat of democratic power. This is what New Labour's Gordon Brown deceitfully invokes whenever he bleats about 'the British people', whose needs he always knows. Essentially it is 'an 18th Century idea' which 'parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy': a world of freely competing actors where price (not value) is formed by 'anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals' and opinion arises out of 'little circles of people talking with one another'. So that autonomy is assumed in both cases and autonomy of discussion in particular is important for the idea of how it legitimates, of how 'no one group monopolises the discussion or by itself determines the conditions that prevail.' So that 'the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted.'

According to the reusable metaphor which Wright Mills then goes on to create out of the birth of British industrialisation, the opinionated public thus conceived 'is the loom of classic 18th Century democracy' in which 'discussion is at once [both] the threads and the shuttle', tying things together as it were.

And yet, then as well as now, this description is implausible: merely 'a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximation of how [...] power works [...] The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal' which 'is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.'

Writing out of his own particular time and place, Wright Mills develops out of what he finds a notion of a 'society of masses' in a way that parallels the identification of the 'mass worker' by Italian operaisti. In the latter, not wholly brave new world of post miracular Italy the opinion-forming Estates had either broken down or become irremediably repressive, rather as the unions and the trade and craft distinctions had either come to break down or had become oppressive in the Republic founded on Work:

'Boss, you haven't fooled us
with your creations, with the unions
your plans have gone up in smoke,
it's us you're up against.

And the qualifications, the trade distinctions,
we want them all abolished.
The divisions are at an end.'

(Alfredo Bandelli: La ballata della FIAT)

Or as an Autonomist slogan put it not long after dear, democratic Doctor Kissinger's splendid 11 September coup against Allende: 'In Chile they've got the tanks, but we've got the unions.'

And so, speculating now, out of this particular time and place, long after we got what we asked for, which wasn't at all what we wanted (who was it, by the way, who described Berlusconi, friend of Tony Blair and client of David Mills / Mr Tessa Jowell, as the bastard child of Radio Alice?), we can recycle. Indeed Wright Mills' metaphorical observations seem to need updating only slightly. In the era of cognitive capitalism, of immaterial labour, of precarity, the loom has been dismantled, or possibly repossessed. Instead there are simply small transmitter/receivers bobbing on the surface of the boundless ocean, linked only by the thread of their capacity endlessly, repetitively, to transmit and to receive. This is Negri's multitude, but before it achieves self consciousness as a social subject. The movement of the ocean is titanic. Events go on 'elsewhere'. Until the crash. But until then, in the thin and airless little world of the post Fordist polity as a viable public space, presence is everything, so that whilst these devices may disperse and recombine, whilst they float upon it they do not partake of the ocean in any active way, so that the overall effect is (at best) one of empty, mutual advertisement, of our affectless reincarnation as mindless, self documenting emoticons. Cf, for example, the examples of the bishop who would put confirmations on Twitter, as though the act of being formally received into the Church were a sort of spiritual happy slapping, or of Gordon Brown, looking and behaving like a gloomily aspirant Celtic Tony Hancock, over on You Tube. But there are plenty of non Establishment examples of the same sort of thing.

And meanwhile actual or social disappearance, not now the effect either of a real historical iceberg or of a metaphorical one but just a process of slow or rapid withdrawal, of absence, is merely radio silence, over and out, of death amidst white noise.

And we are, most of us, for the most part, still living out that death.