There is a great link on Perverse Egalitarianism concerning women and the economy. Nicole rightly states: 'I'm insulted. It took them ten years to figure out that women would drop out of the work force for the same reason as men?!?!?'

From the NYT article she cites 'Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy':

...the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.



One of the main factors cited by feminists and egalitarianists everywhere in favour of the 'still some way to go' argument is the disparity between men and women's pay for the same job, and women's heavy presence in part-time and badly-paid jobs (regardless of whether they have children or not - which argument always assumes the primary burden of care lies with women anyway, which is evil).

Laura Kipnis, among others, has argued that this persistent pay disparity actually masks a greater economy horror story - that 'equity' can mean just being 'equally screwed over'. She points out in The Female Thing that men's wages stagnated or dropped during the same time that women's pay rose: 'In other words, women's wages are up to 80 percent of men's because male wages are down.' You see, it's even more depressing than you think!

Kino Fist 'Red Space' articles are now up.

Martin Gittins from Kosmograd on 'The Road to the Stars'.

Robert Barry on what happened to the future?

And IT on when the earth is colonised by capital, what use is the cosmos?

UPDATE: See also this Fortean Times article on Russia's missing cosmonauts, and Jeff tells us of 'White Sun of the Desert', a curious Western which cosmonauts traditionally watch before entering space.

The next Kino Fist, scheduled for September, will be on the theme of 'Apocalypse'. Films yet to be finalised, but if anyone would like to write on the general topic, let me know.

'Anyone who knew anything about Horkheimer would have known that he was capable of howling like a dog; according to witnesses, he was as likely to display this disconcerting talent in the streets of Manhattan as at Frankfurt Central Station. Such behaviour was of course inconceivable in Adorno.' - Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, p, 221.

Because I like making up games and their rules, and because I like alphabets, I have decided to start TWO new alphabet series to go along with the as-yet-unfinished photo/object series. One will be an alphabet of names, and the other will be an alphabet of anything-at-all. So if you want to read me on ANY name or topic of your choosing, send me an email (infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk) and I'll gradually fill in the blanks. Of course, it might be the case that no one wants to read me on anything at all, in which case I'll just fill them all in myself and no one will ever know, ha ha! I'll use first names in parenthesis alongside each request, but if you'd rather be anonymous let me know. I estimate it'll take me five months to get through both alphabets.

UPDATE: Filling up fast! Thanks all. Hopefully the blanks are obvious enough. More suggestions needed!

UPDATE 2: Blanks are filled in order of emails received. If there is crossover, the earliest suggestion will be taken.

UPDATE 3: Refinement of rules! Topics/names covered extensively on IT will be removed in favour of topics/names that IT is unlikely to have written about before. To that end, more obvious topics will remain until bold until such time as replacements are found. If no replacements are found, the topic/name will remain.

UPDATE 4: Further refinement of rules! Only one entry per alphabet per person. I will choose between them if offered multiple suggestions.

UPDATE 5: It's getting hard to tell what's left. Here is a list:

Concept: B, M, R,
Name: I, L, Y


Concept........................................Name

A Autonymy (Alex)..........................Antoine de Saint Exupéry (Christopher)
B ..........Thomas Bernhard (Ben)
C Coprophagia (Carl)..Martin Creed (Jon)
D Dialectic (Bat).........Theodore Dalrymple (Jay)
E Ekphrasis (Jon)...........Ethelred the Unready (China)
F First Love (Andrew)...Flintstone, Fred (Andrew)
G Goth bands of the nineties, Wilhelm Reich's influence on (Roger)..Jean-Luc Godard (Alberto)
H Historical enquires pertaining to the accurate assessment of the height [in feet and inches] of the Virgin Mary (Martin)....Hector (Hector)
I Independence (Hector)...........................................
J Jazz (Alberto)....Jonathan Meades (John)
K Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Owen)...Ernest Kahane (Marc)
L Love (Bobby)
M ......................Octave Mirbeau (Andy)
N Noddy and his relation to Marxism (David).......Vladimir Nabokov (Carl)
O Ogopogo (China).......José Ortega y Gasset (Bat)
P Participation (Mark).........................Perfect Pig (David)
Q Qualia (Karim)....................Raymond Queneau (Dominic)
R .................................Richard (Richard)
S Sentimentality (Marc)........................Britney Spears (Roger)
T Theopoiesis (Jay)......John Tyndall (Martin)
U Utopia (Angus).....Midge Ure (Owen)
V Very Cold Weather (Brian)....Vy (Jeff)
W Women Surrealists (Andy)....Scott Walker (Brian)
X xenodocheionology (Andrew)...Charles Francis Xavier (David)
Y You (Zane)
Z Zoos: animal prisons or breeding grounds for dissent? (Martin)....Louis Zukofsky (Karim)

There's been a bit of slippage in the self-imposed rules of the object photography, and I fear I've fallen foul of Marcuse's critique of identifying the thing with its function:

'The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing distinguished from its function, and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the functional noun, and in the many forms of syntactical abridgement) creates a basic vocabulary and syntax which stand in the way of differentiation,separation, and distinction. This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts. In its immediacy and directness, it impedes conceptual thinking; thus, it impedes thinking. For the concept does not identify the thing and its function.' - Marcuse, One Dimensional Man

Ono! I've managed to impede thinking. Again.

Anyway, this is a postcard of a nude woman reading a book. It manages to combine two of my representational interests, namely women reading and early pornography. She also has a lovely posterior. I bought the picture in Greenwich market. The gentleman who sold it to me told me that lots of people like to put old pictures of naked women in their toilets. I don't know how he knew that, and I don't know what the link between naked women and toilets is. Perhaps they are comforting in small, animally spaces.

From Roger:

'Britain's higher ed institutions have a much different history than America's - and even now, American higher education is a triumph of America's secret social democracy. Since WWII, the state has poured money into higher education, partly through the huge military industrial complex, to reap a number of benefits - one of which, of course, is to absorb unemployed youth, always one of the big drivers behind education. Big colleges and a huge jail system both address that problem. As James Galbraith points out in the Predatory State (which I'm reviewing, so I can handily quote it), higher education in the U.S. consumes 2.75 percent of the GDP, which is about a percentage over the European norm. European nations, including the U.K., scandalously underresource higher education. It is a bit inexplicable to me - huge increases in h.e. would take care of millions of unemployed youths, who would be unemployed still, but we can pretend they aren't and they get to have more fun, too. If you want to create a docile generation of consumers, and who doesn't, build more universities.

In the golden sixties and seventies, when the U.S. made a big effort to develop the kind of horrifying weapons and all the paraphernalia of warmongering at any price, money flowed like wine into the universities. There's a reason that the first encounter with LSD by most of the 'counter-culture' leaders - Keasy, Ginsburg, Robert Stone, Leary, etc., etc. - came under the aegis of one government grant or another - it was a very tiny tiny part of the money that went into every part of the academic system, from the humanities to psychology. The humanities was important in the cold war. You might not see why at first, but ... well, take something like anthropological field work among the Yanomami. That wouldn't seem of military importance, but when Napoleon Changnon first went there in the early sixties, he went there on a grant to collect blood. Why? Because the people in the AEC were getting a little freaked out by one of the results of testing nuclear weapons - everywhere they tested in the world, people had way elevated levels of an iodine isotope in their blood. The U.S. and Russia had accidentally performed the greatest experiment in history, since never before had there been a distribution of a radioactive isotope throughout the human race, once which nobody had before. Is that cool or what? A new chemical in the human system, with unknown potential effects. It was a big oopsy moment when this sunk in, and - contrary to myth - some people in the U.S. government were a little concerned that they may have given the world's population something that would make them chronically ill or even kill them. Call them softies, but that's the kind of responsible people they were. So that was why this young prof just off his PH.D dissertation was in the jungle of Venezuela, taking blood samples. Oh, and they turned out to have the isotope in their blood too. But you'd never know that from Changnon's writings, because he took advantage of the grant for his own purposes. All the academics did.'

Ian Birchall sent me this very good email in response to my last post:

'I saw this title on Lenin's Tomb, and followed the link, thinking "I was there". I have to say that Ms Millett's experiences bear little relation to mine in Britain. My memory of the 1970s is endless struggles against cuts imposed first by the Tories then even worse by Labour. What was happening was that an older world of academic "professionalism" was being replaced by a sort of proletarianisation. The older model of professionalism wasn’t very attractive - precious few new courses at all, and precious few syllabuses that went beyond 1914. At the first ATTI (forerunner of NATFHE/UCU) meeting I attended in about 1965 I mumbled something about trade unionism, and was promptly told “we are not a trade union – we do not engage in trade”.

The positive side of proletarianisation was a rise in trade-union consciousness – we had some good strikes from 1969 onwards. The management's main aim was to improve productivity through something called "staff-student ratios". Sorry we didn't "try harder" – but really success didn’t depend on us; from 1968 to 1975 there was an upturn in working-class struggle, and academics were carried along. When that wave was smashed, by Labour’s social contract and then Thatcherism, the ability of academics to resist was minimal, though some of us did keep on kicking.

I have every sympathy with your criticisms - when I see what is going on in higher education I am so glad to be out of it – it almost compensates for mental and physical decay. I have found intellectual work outside higher education far more rewarding than it ever was inside.

So if you really want to get sacked good luck to you – though I suspect the holidays are still better than in other jobs. Pick your issue and cause a scandal that can produce a campaign. The only problem is if you win. [I had a friend once who took a job on a building site for a few weeks before going on holiday. He was sacked and the whole site struck in support of him. So he missed his holiday.]'

Recently I read Kate Millett's 1977 lesbian memoir-of-sorts Sita, which I purchased for 50p at the National Trust second-hand bookshop at Felbrigg Hall. Mainly I bought it because it was 50p at the National Trust second-hand bookshop at Felbrigg Hall. Because I am a fan of incongruity I found this amusing, although I do not generally find National Trust properties in the least bit amusing. In fact, I hate them, with their pointless over-staffing, their passive-aggressive instructions 'this way, please! [don't touch anything, you filthy pleb]', their lavender-scented chachki shops and the hordes of identikit middle-class, miserable bastards that hold their car-parking membership rights closer to their heart than their own children (er, probably).

Anyway, what is most striking about this largely-forgotten memoir, as intense as all the highly-emotional sex is, is Ms Millett's relation to an academia that could not be more over. When Millett moves from New York to California to be with Sita, post one nervous breakdown or another, she decides she'd quite like to teach a course at the university. She does, and then she doesn't. She gets it cancelled a week before term starts and then decides she'd actually like to do it after all, so it goes back up and she starts teaching. Reading this, you think, on the one hand, 'how nice! How wonderful it would be to teach a course on anything you like, just one, how much work you could put into it' and, on the other, 'what the hell?! What about all the course outcomes she was supposed to write months in advance? The year it takes to get a new course approved? The authorisation required to approve the assessment for the course?'

It's amazing - most, if not all, of the reason Millett can have such a rich emotional life, to be such an individual is because she (or anyone else at the time, one assumes) didn't have to do all this bureaucratic stuff, to know all these pointless little rules about how someone does x or y. I realise, in a sense, that I have come too late to academia, that this creeping audit-culture and over-administration has been worming its way into Higher Education for years. It was probably happening when Millett wrote Sita too, though she was too busy being interesting to notice it.

Still - academics - good God, couldn't you have tried a bit harder to stop this? It is a horrible truth that the ability to be a 'good academic' is basically now synonymous with being 'a good administrator', and perhaps there is a symbiosis between the kinds of techniques suited to certain kinds of research and the flashy, polyvalent grant-getting-media-friendly model of the desirable academic. The conformism of the diligent reader meets the conformism of the business-minded university worker. Where once reading and thinking might have been oppositional in their very practice, now they are merely colonised by the following kinds of imperative: 'what kind of grant can I get for this project?' 'what names can we get to attend the tie-in conference?' 'will the Times run a by-line on this if we make it sexy enough?'

Ha! I am so going to get myself fired.

[A photo-essay by IT and Owen. Pictures taken by IT yesterday]

We left on the Woolwich Ferry, one of three free boats named after a local Labour leader. We wondered whether the alcohol ban on London transport extended to the ferry, not that we wanted a drink at this time. Words written in tar greeted us at the exit on the North Woolwich side.

Unfortunately the Teleport did not live up to its enticing description.

Silvertown, and the Royal Docks it was built to serve, begins as London's unofficial zone. Because it was officially outside of the city boundary it took in all the noxious heavy industry which was no longer acceptable in the capital.


'You took me behind/a disused railway line/and said 'I know a place where we can go, where we are not known'/and you gave me something that I won't forget too soon'

A grey scarf tied to the bridge over the disused railway speaks of a peculiar kind of loss.


'...the Henley Arms has not been geographically blessed' according to one pub review website.

The railway bridge surprises with its dogged persistence. One could stand up here and watch the non-trains go past forever.

A pagoda looms strangely by the side of the disused railway.

The sign was in better shape than the clinic.

The Silvertown rocket is not often mentioned in the official history of the British Space Programme.

Silvertown was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. Graham Sutherland's paintings of blitzed East End streets were based on studies made in the area. It never fully repopulated after the war.

We pondered for all while whether the bricks replaced windows, or whether newer bricks had replaced older ones. From a distance the warehouse looked almost transparent.

Rather unusually, the Tate & Lyle factory still produces Golden Syrup. The image on the tin of a dead lion surrounded by bees refers to a Biblical riddle: 'out of the strong came forth sweetness'. The factory was mostly rebuilt in the 1950s, after Tate and Lyle had narrowly escaped nationalisation. The company were enthusiastic anti-nationalisation campaigners, and in the late 1940s all packets of sugar featured 'Mr Cube', a talking sugarlump who cautioned about the dangers of socialism.

This was once the Tate Institute, a social centre built for workers in the Tate & Lyle complex: an example of how the sugar magnate pioneered the use of culture as a means of social control (see also: the Tate Gallery he founded several miles upriver at Pimlico). It's unclear what exactly the symbols on the second floor refer to. Rumours that the institute will be redesigned by Herzog and De Mueron as a daring brick and razorwire structure to be called 'Tate Silvertown' have proved to be unfounded.

Despite the best efforts of copious amounts of blue paint, 'Cundy's Tavern' closed earlier this year, apparently after the landlord illegally rented out the eleven rooms upstairs without a licence.

The Tate & Lyle Factory dominates the area both visually and olfactarily.

Simulacra pubs feature on the wall of the Brick Lane Music Hall, the only dedicated music hall left in the country.

I'm sure Derren Brown has used the Music Hall in one of his shows. Indeed he has: filling the hall with masks on sticks, he disturbs a man into thinking he's a ventriloquist's dummy.

'A hard punch right in the guts...imploded, savage inward raids into the heart's essence, an architectural imagination the size of Blake's. The church is the nearest thing to a mystic's revelation that London has.' (Ian Nairn, Nairn's London)

This lorry wears its GPS on its sleeve.

The Newsflash vans bring news to the informationally starved. They are stored just next door to the Music Hall.



Local re-enactments of scenes from Crash end in finely-tuned disaster.

Judging by the 0181 dialling code, Newham Council 'acquired' this site more than 10 years ago. Newham is one of the poorest boroughs in Britain, and has had at its disposal since the early 1980s a huge amount of derelict land - the Royal Docks encompass an area the size of central London. This land, when leased to property developers, has since become a conference centre, the University of East London, many luxury developments and soon, the Olympics site. This will 'bring prosperity to the area'.

You could call either of these countries if there was still a phone left in the box.


Georges Diner sits on the site of what will soon be Britain's biggest aquarium. It will be designed by the architect of the Mi6 Building and is to be named 'Biota!'

The 'Graving Dock' Tavern looks very grave indeed. A graving dock is a dry dock where the hulls of ships are repaired and maintained.

The '01' number indicates that these submersible pump specialists might well be retired by now.

This box on the lamppost is measuring something, though now I can't remember what it was. Air pollution, possibly.

A 2-bedroom flat in Barrier Point will set you back £359,000. 'The detailing is very poor' says Owen.


Of all the things we see today, this image is the one for me that most indicates the apocalyptic nature of the current conjuncture. The recent theft of metals from public places (churches, schools) is a desperate realisation of both economic and material finitude. A bronze sculpture by Lynn Chadwick was recently stolen from my workplace, 'almost certainly' to be melted down for scrap.

Despite their centrality and magnificence, the Millennium Mills are almost impossible to capture. Although you can't see it here, some bastard car company has plastered a giant ad on the back of the building.

The Thames Barrier Park. Doug once described this place as the closest thing to Corbusier's Ville Radieuse.

The cafe here is wonderful, all the more so for its total isolation and complete emptiness. You can sit and stare at the Thames Barrier in all its alien beauty.

An elderly couple sit on the wavy stone seats under this rectangular canopy.

They've been among us since 1974.


The site of the Silvertown explosion is wasteland, 90 years later.

I have no idea what this is.

A memorial to those who died in the Silvertown explosion.

'At 6.52, there was no chemical works'.

The green on this ragged factory was discussed, briefly.

Kierbeck are the largest independent fabricator of cut and bent prefabricated steel reinforcement supplying the UK construction industry.

I don't know what this little zebra strip does. It was attached to one of the concrete pillars supporting the DLR track.

Reinforcement EXPRESSED!


Iron Mountain specialise in off-site data protection. If everyone gets blown up in Canary Wharf, company records will all be safe here. One of my students once did a project on the company. She informed me that their data storage site here is the most surveilled area of land in the country. Given that we are the most surveilled country in the world, that would make this location very well-watched indeed.

SunChemical trucks overlook Lyle Park. Here we watch a group of young cadets being taught how to erect a tent, and three young boys play football in the background.

The varnish factory appears to be set in some kind of rural idyll. The stench is unbearable.

A picturesque for the 21st century.
#

This free-standing gate bears the legend 'Harland and Wolff'. These were originally the entrance gates to Harland & Wolff Ltd, ship builders, ship repairers and engineers, which opened in 1924 and closed in 1972.


The flag assures us that there are many business opportunities to be had in the area.

We speculate that someone tried to steal the wire fence. More 'nil scrap value' signs may be appearing presently.

The main reason for the closure of the London Docks was Containerisation, which made the large workforces of the docks obsolete. Instead, the boxes are collected by the automated port at Tilbury. Within Trinity Buoy Wharf is 'Container City', where the boxes that decimated the London working class become a fun and imaginative urban living solution for young creatives.

Nobody tells me what I can and can't photograph.

This luxury development abuts Robin Hood Gardens, which is scheduled for demolition and replacement with a 30 storey tower. Any similarities to East German Plattenbau are purely coincidental.

I think Foucault might have liked this picture in a kind of 'see, I told you so' kind of way.

"CONSUL", THE EDUCATED MONKEY

Again, like seemingly all of my objects, this one is broken. The maths monkey's left foot has come unhinged and is now basically useless as a calculating device. Not that I ever used him for that anyway.

I used to write a lot more about monkeys, didn't I? For a while naked mole rats, monkeys and pigs vied for my affections as favourite beast. The pigs won it, with their vast unblinking intransigence. One day I'll explain in great detail 'why pigs', but not now, not now. So what about the monkey? I bought him in a museum shop in Berlin, I think. There was an exhibition about robots. One of them gave me a pen. It was strangely exciting.

I like the educated monkey. He wears a suit, he does maths and his tail forms part of the simple mechanism. There's this video that reminds me of the educated monkey ('monkeys whose brains have evolved to such an unmanageable size that it's pretty much impossible for them to stay happy for any length of time'). Although I am not keen on biology, or living things as such, I enjoy thinking about our partaking in the animal kingdom, and how upsetting this is for (almost) everyone. I also like taxonomy, and the drive to taxonomise, which does seem like a strange way for any animal to spend its time.

regio
regnum
phylum
classis
ordo
familia
genus
species

Sam's book is out. It's also available as a pdf from the wonderful people at re.press, as part of their Open Access project. The appearance of Sam's book owes almost everything to Sigi Jöttkandt, who has worked tirelessly to ensure that Sam's work gets the recognition it deserves.

It'll be five years this August since Sam died. Simply - I miss him.

Sunday 2pm for c. 2.30 start, E:vent Gallery, Bethnal Green, £2 for films and magazine.

Short: 'Inter-Planetary Revolution' (1924)
Long: Aelita (1924)
.................................
Short: 'Ajapeegel' by Jeremy Millar (2008)
Long: Red Planet Mars (1952)

Now this one really is bad, but being an occasional fan of self-referentiality, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a picture of one of the lights I fixed up for the lightbox. The use of only one light explains the shadow on the left side...

Despite being a fully paid-up member of the 'external world...what's that?' club, I am nevertheless quite handy at building things, fixing things and hanging out in DIY warehouses. I even have powertools. In the past couple of months I have fixed a record player using a rubber band, unblocked a sink and put these 500w security lights together, which included cutting and stripping cable and wiring plugs. I'm like a poster-girl for proper feminism, ha ha ha. And I can't cook! Pass the jack-hammer and call me Rosie the Riveter...

I originally wanted proper work lights for the lightbox, but they use a voltage far too great for domestic electricity, and would have required a transformer which would have cost £70. So I bought these £8 security lights instead and put them on their 12 minute setting so I don't have to keep waving anything in front of them. They are clearly very much not designed for indoors usage and they get unbelievably hot, so I rest them against little wooden boxes I also designed for the task (this is thrilling, isn't it?).

On the topic of referentiality, I used to have a big thing for Nabokov's Pale Fire. I learned the first two lines by heart, but turns out Carl learned four.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

I probably would still like Nabokov if I could get round to reading it again. Because I am currently feeling, how shall I put, a bit fragile, I have returned to a certain kind of novel. That is to say, the oversexed-middle-aged-American-male-writer. It used to be Updike, now it is Roth. This has absolutely nothing to do with the light, I realise, but the whole object series has moved rather unevenly between thing and concept anyway. I've got to get some sleep: last night I dreamt I was trying to get to sleep in a dark cave which harboured a giant monster. One shouldn't dream of trying to get to sleep, it seems counter-productive. Nor of giant monsters, for that matter.

Stephen Bayley in yesterday's Observer writes:

'Academies must respect key stage testing, but do not have to follow the national curriculum. This ventilates both the style of teaching and the plan of the building. The way it was explained to me was: we don't do French language and history, we do 'Napoleon'. This way, pupils learn about motivational leadership and acquire French language and history at the same time.'

and:

'The cant expression is: education must be competence-based, not subject-based'

Ventilates? Motivational leadership with a smattering of French and history on the side? Why not just fit all students with USB ports in the back of their heads so they can download ideology directly to their cerebral cortex?

The contemporary rhetoric of 'competence', well analysed by Virno in particular, demonstrates that education well understands that its role must be purely formal, and must avoid engaging the subjective will of its pupil under any circumstance: keeping the communicative, linguistic and numerical capacities ticking over, but for God's sake, don't put anything in there - what if they start making comparisons between the past and the present? The present and the future? The 'competencies' they're supposed to possess and the structure of the job market?

It occurs to me that we may seriously and increasingly need to turn to well-organised extra-curricular forms of education, using Illich's basic model of the learning network. Reading groups, discussion groups, free history classes, I don't know - anything, anything. The isolated reader is a start, of course, but not enough: communication itself must be reclaimed from its repetitious exploitation in business-speak, call centres and rote conversation.

The future of education increasingly resembles the factory-line producing cans of nothing - 6,000 students on a single course called perhaps 'Studies Studies', sponsored by McDonalds, Blue Arrow and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They could then take their cut: top 'Studies Studies' students could work in the city, middle 'Studies Studies' students could do clerical agency work and lower-end 'Studies Studies' students could bear the brunt of customer ire in the fast-food joints of our miserable cities. Everyone will feel terrible, but never work out why, and the end of history will plough mindlessly on until there is no longer anything to say.

Good, radical stuff! Now there's a cover blurb...something to aspire to, I think

[warning, unusually long and rather blog-introverted post follows. Shorter, less navel-gazing posts in the (fibre-optic) pipeline, hopefully]

I recently re-read Illich's Deschooling Society, which is the very model of a short, focussed polemic, were one to be interested in such things (oh, and I am, how I am). Illich suggests, among other things, that the 'hidden curriculum' of schools instils in pupils the faulty belief that increased production will provide a better life. Hard to shake, this mind virus, the one that would rather see a factory producing cans of nothing, forever, than people frolicking in the fields. I've always been interested in arguments that the structure and segregation of subjects in the curriculum maps on to forms of alienation in working life (9am maths, 10am English....2pm sorting tins, 3pm packing tins). But it's clear that an increasing polyvalency in working life (social and physical capacities, affective and repetitive labour, the working day and the working night) might require more general kinds of courses - and, in fact, with cuts in smaller modules this is exactly where universities (not sure about schools) are heading: giant, compulsory courses that cover everything and nothing in 12 weeks. More specific topics, ones that aren't 'cross-listable' enough, are cut, despite their past success or inherent interest. But one must be cautious: it is overly paranoid to assume government and universities know what they're doing, of course, as if all academic qualifications are a mere cynical template for the requirements of the job market. In fact, it's quite clear that there's a massive gap between what universities are doing and what companies want - that's why businesses are always complaining that graduates are not up to scratch and universities are running around like headless bureaucrats sending each other on business secondments to see how offices 'really run'.

Illich has several fine ideas, one of which prefigures the internet (or at least a certain kind of use of the internet):

'I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another.'

If someone wanted to discuss an article, a book, a theorem or even simply a word, they could enter their interest and details onto a database and make matches. Illich conceives of these meetings taking place in coffee shops during lunch-breaks or after work, but it's clear that the internet goes further than this, by allowing the discussion to take place in the very domain in which the initial desire is announced. Blogs remove the need for meetings, although in the past four years I've in fact met a significant number of bloggers which was both unexpected when I started out and in every single case, a real joy. Of how many other encounters can one say that?


IT filtering comments in the days when she had them

I occasionally get asked why I don't have comments any more. It would be good, and in the past they were only really plagued by one or two irritating bastards (someone keen to constantly accuse me of 'immaturity' and the odd disturbing sex thing). But I suspect that, unlike perhaps Owen or Dominic, who have loyal commentators keen to discuss the details of post-war architecture or contemporary poetry, I get a relatively wide (well, wide for a blog that attempts to fuse philosophy, pigs and frivolity in a black-yet-light melange of excessive hyphen-use and oddly mixed metaphors) range of readers, keen to disagree with each other as much as me. I just couldn't keep up with it. There is also the woman thing, which I suppose must bother the unhappy occasional man in some unspecifiable way, but I don't know.

I originally planned to write sans bits, hence the generic (if terrible) blog name, but it became increasingly difficult to pretend that I wasn't actually a really existing person who also wrote really existing other things in the really existing world, so there seemed no point in not occasionally mentioning it, if it was relevant. I'm still ambivalent about women bloggers making a big song and dance about it, putting 'girl' or 'bitch' or 'woman' in their blog names, as if this was the most interesting thing about them, but, well, as long as they don't witter on about how much better chocolate is than thinking, I suppose it's fine.

There are have been a couple of interesting posts about attacks on blogs lately. Is a war being waged on them in America? Adam's post on arrogance is excellent, and gives an answer to the woman blogger question: 'The very act of stepping into the public square, the very demonstration of even the most minimal degree of self-assurance, is an unpardonable sin. We must all be humble agnostics - so it's no wonder that woman bloggers are subjected to greater harassment and vilification, given cultural expectations of female passivity.'



Perhaps it is this. Certainly, when I have fought with people about things I've written in the past the 'arrogance' claim has reared its head: I've been accused of trying to influence what people think (if only!), of speaking 'out of turn', that old thing. Who deserves to write? The vexed question of confidence and social position rears its head again and again in the blogmos - the debates about class last summer proved what an explosive topic that was - newspaper columnists sneer at the uppity little bloggers, but it's hard not to see this as a burgeoning sense of insecurity. There are many people out there who write well and didn't get the 'job' because of who their daddy was or who they went to school with. And they're doing it for free: bloggers are undercutting the labour of those whose very linguistic persona depends upon thinking that they are one of the only people who could do this job, that their little anecdotes and reflections are inherently more interesting than those of anyone else. I've said it many times before: bloggers are the anti-columnists.

There's a faintly related discussion at Keith Gessen's site about the literary 'underground' which says this:

'There are a couple of writers in every generation who go straight from being hot-shots at their college literary magazine to a staff job at the New Yorker or a book deal with Random House. Updike did this. Jonathan Safran Foer, in my generation, did it. Everyone else—and I really mean everyone else—has to go out into a world that doesn't give a shit.'

I suspect the stakes are much higher in the US, where a book placement in, say, Barnes & Noble means an extremely geographically diverse and a very large potential audience, and living on nothing but your own authenticity would be very much harder than here (for various reasons). Helen DeWitt (of Paperpools) in the comments wonders if blogs like mine, k-punk and Owen might constitute a kind of underground without the overheads of print, although we might not meet Gessen's criteria as 'they've published in a wide range of journals'. It's an interesting point and a critical one too, reminding me of something Carl once said, that he was surprised that we would want to be published in mainstream magazines. Why, he asked, weren't we setting up our own magazines and publishing ventures (hey, there's always Kino Fist...)? This would certainly seem to be more in keeping with the blog ethos, whereby you can write more or less without any of the classical restraints: word-length, tone of the publication, slander laws (well...). I think Carl is right, there is something weird about it, wanting to be asked to write for a world that might like something about your style, but wouldn't want to have much to do with the thrust of your meaning, or your politics, or your real desires. I can only say that perhaps I am a kind of coward, and that the sense of approval one gets from being asked to write for something is hard to give up on. I wonder though, if this is a terrible path to travel down, that there could never be enough approval in the world for something so fundamentally laced with insecurity (I'll never be able to write well again! This piece is shit! Why didn't I get asked! I could have done that better...or could I?). The radical gesture would be to refuse all writing that wasn't on our own terms: just the blog and the magazine. Of course, I'd be in danger of losing my teaching job if I didn't publish in academic journals, but perhaps this is something I should be facing up to anyway...


A demolished school, yesterday

Anyway, Illich. I spend a lot of time reading material that argues me out of a job, which is probably a bit perverse (do scientists sit around reading Irigaray? Do pig farmers spend their free time reading Vegetarian Society literature?). The Foucault-reading surgeon who once talked to me about the society of control while I sat in an arseless-gown awaiting surgery was probably an exception. I hope. Anyway, Illich makes this rather acute point:

'Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets.'

I think something like this is at the heart of all those student crushes - the lecturer knows something about a subject that I love, I must get closer to it! It is an eminently dangerous fantasy, this one, that there is a hidden kernel of knowledge that could be unlocked if only one had the right key. If blogs prove anything it might be this: that there is no secret. There are things one can learn about, given time and will, and there are people who have the skills to teach them, but there is no necessary relation of hierarchy (you could teach me how to make a box using dovetail joints and I could tell you how to make a roast dinner - well, I couldn't actually, but you get my point). The planning of educational institutions must begin, llich argues, not with the question, '"What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"' Ranciere takes this abolition of mastery even further when he argues (in The Ignorant Schoolmaster) that one can learn together something that one knows nothing about: '[Jacotot] proclaimed that one could teach what one didn't know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of any master explicator. And he indicated the way of that "universal teaching! - to learn something and to relate it to all the rest by this principle: all men have equal intelligence.' Gender pronouns aside, this is obviously right, and good, and true.

[This blog has taken on a rather personal tone lately. I'm not really sure why.]

I like my parents a lot. They're both perky and interesting and funny. Unlike most people, I don't even mind the idea of them having sex. In fact, I think it would be quite sweet for them to have lots of sex as they really do just get on, so getting it on would be only appropriate.

My parents are, in many ways, classic baby boomers. My Ma was the first in her family to go to university (a 2:2 in geography from Swansea), and resisted the expectation to return home afterwards to work on her own in Cardiff and Bristol. For some reason, she ended up working for companies that deal with cream, cheese and yoghurt, despite the fact that she is incredibly allergic to cows milk. My brother and I spent the summers working in the local cream factory whilst Ma worked in the office. The thought of the smell of all that cream churning in giant vats (jarred clotted cream prepared for export), the horrible hot stench of it...well, I can't think about it for too long. I was rather a good factory worker, though, far better than my brother, who used to routinely drop the thin glass jars we had to fill, cap, pack and label. The problem with production lines, even if they move you around every two hours, is the way the repetition of the external process induces second, interior repetition of thought. Say if a bad thought comes to mind - a jealous memory, a social guilt, a minor anxiety - you end up having the thought again and again, without change. The machine really does dream through you, but the dream is usually a nightmare.

Anyway, so Ma and Pa. They work very hard (my father is an NHS dentist who sees 40 patients a day. The private dentist in the town sees, on average, seven). They are not theoretical people, nor are they particularly political people. They don't really need to be because they are basically socially-minded and fair without having to read books about it - that's my job, hmm. One thing they are that I am not, though, is extremely pragmatic. They just love organising things, fixing things, doing projects and tasks and generally running around being active - my Pa's favourite mode of relaxation is to go cross-country running in the dark. He returns covered in scratches and cuts. It's a bit strange.

So, pragmatism. I'm eating dinner with them the other night. They get a call from the hospital - my Gran's there again. She got confused and pressed a fire alarm. Someone comes and she can't speak. It's probably another little mini-stroke. My parents are used to this by now: it's the kind of thing that happens a lot to them and their friends, these doddery, unhappy, isolated parents drifting on forever and ever. The conversation turns to age. I say something like 'Your generation is richer than any before or after it. You are much more successful than your parents' generation, and it's unlikely that our generation will ever be as well-off as you were.' My parents agree. 'Yes, we were very lucky'. They were, weren't they, these post-war pioneers: grants for study, jobs to pick from, houses they could afford to buy and probably most all, a sense that they were doing this all themselves, this strange combination of historical good fortune and existential determination.

They tell me they don't want to end up like their parents, nor do they want to ask my brother and I for any help when they get old. 'So what,' I say 'you've made a suicide pact?!' 'Don't call it suicide, that has the wrong connotations,' my Ma replies. 'Eh?' I say. I'm confused - they explain. 'We've discussed it with our friends. We don't want to give up on the good things, so we're all going to make living wills.' This sounds a bit like the thing people say, usually in black jest: 'oh, just switch off the machine!' But I'm impressed that they've gone so far. And so pragmatic. And so sure that death is whatever they think it is - a simple termination that bookends a hard-working life. I'm a bit rattled too though, as this sounds like it could be a kind of mini-Jonestown in Wiltshire, a revolutionary suicide of the rural middle classes. I wonder what Ballard would make of it.

'Are you sure?' I ask them. They really are. Not for them the nursing home, the slow and sorry curses and regrets of a prolonged dotage. They laugh at the fact that they now have free bus passes, though there aren't very many buses where they live to use them on. I don't want to ask them at what point the decision would be made, what diagnosis or prognosis would occasion such finality. It's not clear. All they know is that when quality slips into quantity, they want no more part of it. We drink more wine and watch Father Ted.