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.