Here is a really interesting analysis of the participants and supporters in the Occupy movement, by Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis, providing both sociological and historical context: Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City.
Woman’s Hour: talking about early fatherhood
My media experience has not quite added up to 15 minutes of fame so far – I was once on the front cover of the University of Reading student paper, and that rolled into the Reading Evening Post the next day (a scandal about geographers teaching sociology); and I was once quoted in a South African daily, and refuted by a government minister in the same story.
So given the chance, I jumped at the opportunity to be on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 this morning – in my capacity as ‘ordinary bloke with kids’, obviously, the accidental by-product of being a research subject in Tina Miller’s study of men becoming fathers.
If this was even half decent radio, it wasn’t because of me, but because Dean Beaumont from DaddyNatal and Tina were arguing; I have lots of other things to say on the topic, but generally, I think that there is a fine line between supporting fathers to be involved around childbirth, on the one hand, and assuming this must be an active role in order for it to have any value – the reason many men might find it so weird, including me, is because they might be unfamiliar with how to just ‘be there’ for another person, doing what they are told, all the while trying to remember it’s not primarily about them.
I’m wondering what to make of the fact that there is an inverse relationship between the size of the audience for this programme and the degree of professional expertise I can claim to have to talk authoritatively about this topic. I only did it for Cultural Studies’ purposes.
Touch Me I’m Sick
Entirely coincidentally, this week, the week that HMV went into administration, I have finally decided to get rid of my LPs and cassettes – the former unplayed since 2000, the latter briefly revived in a house move in 2009, but long forgotten before that. I already have duplicate CD versions of some of these, or CDs of greatest hits which do much the same thing; and I have ordered a dozen or so replacements on CD from one of those online sites that has hastened HMVs decline, on the principle that every household with two female children growing up in it needs to contain a copy of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, as well as London Calling (and I don’t feel that guilty about HMV, I feel I did my bit to help them over the Xmas period). Nevertheless, this has meant deciding that there is a whole bunch of music I don’t want to listen to anymore.
I’m not a great believer in the idea that music sounds better on vinyl, or even in the ritual of taking records out of sleeves and that sort of thing; I do think having a physical object as the repository for music is crucial to how I at least listen – browsing a list of titles isn’t the same as browsing a shelf of poorly organised things. But there is something to be said for the LP as an art object, over CDs – I’m keeping Fear of Music ‘cos it has a weird corrugation pattern on it. What I have been going through, deciding what to chuck, what to replace, and what few to keep, is a distinctive aesthetic, not necessarily as constrained as even I remember: mid-to-late-80s-white-boy-Indie, sandwiched between the fading of New Wave and the horrors of post-Nirvana grunge. When the whole world seemed very jangly.
In most cases, letting go has been fairly easy. I don’t have any great desire to return to Big Black’s Songs about Fucking, one of the least sexy records ever; or Dinosaur Jr; or Polvo. And I’ve decided that I no longer need to keep either of my sisters’ copies of David Bowie’s Changes One, or the family copy of The Beatles’ 1962-66 ‘red’ greatest hits.
But I’ve also rediscovered things I had forgotten about – at the risk of embarrassment, or not, things like Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, Talk Talk’s The Colour of Spring, Eartha Kitt, The Colorblind James Experience, Dionne Farris, The Aquanettas, Scrawl, who I saw almost get electrocuted in Columbus, Ohio in 1998, even The Triffids, whose career was ruined by Jason and Kylie’s wedding. I’ve also discovered to my surprise that I seem to have acquired every record ever made by the Throwing Muses up to the mid-90s.
I have been left wondering what principle I used to apply when buying some things on LP rather than cassette – some sense that certain things might be listened to on the move, perhaps, or maybe a sense that some albums you were meant to buy as LPs because they were proper and serious. I can’t remember when I bought my last record on vinyl, although I have a feeling it might have been a second-hand copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in Reading in about 2000. The first was Remember You’re a Womble. They’re both going out.
Neoliberalism as radical political economy
In the intellectual world I grew up in and to a large extent still inhabit, the phrase ‘political economy’ is often just another way of saying ‘Marxism’. I’m not sure if it’s ‘ironic’ that this tradition of work has come to be so focussed on the conceptual object ‘dubbed’ neoliberalism, which is theorised as the real world realization of ideas emanating from the post-WW2 revival of ‘political economy’ of a different sort. The status of neoliberal ideas as variants of political economy is often overlooked, primarily because of the investments in simple state/market dualisms that shape critical conceptualizations of neoliberalization.
One of the founding figures of contemporary political economy is James Buchanan, who died last week. Buchanan is one of the unsung heroes/villains of neoliberalism, if there is such a thing – above all through helping to invent public choice theory, a framework for applying certain sorts of economic ideas to the analysis of state actors, bureaucracies, and other organisations. More broadly, Buchanan illustrates the degree to which ideas about the rule of law, constitutionalism, rule-following, and the like provide a positive theory of the state and the public realm rather than simply a straightforward preference for the market over the state (like other thinkers associated with the canon of neoliberal ideas, perhaps with the exception of Richard Posner, Buchanan took the financial crisis of the last five years as largely confirming his own views). Buchanan is as good a place as any to start the task of understanding how states and markets have been reconfigured around new models of public value, rather than by a straightforward shift simply from good public values to bad private ones. Stephen Collier has elaborated on Buchanan’s importance as a ‘minor’ figure in the genealogy of neoliberal practice, in ways which suggest a need to rethink the conventional framework for the critical analysis of neoliberalism more generally.
Buchanan is famous for the line about thinking about ‘politics without romance‘, which rapidly devolved into a deeply cynical view of public actors as rent-seeking parasites. It’s interesting to read the appreciations of Buchanan in places like the FT, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg News, The Daily Telegraph over the last week – you can glean a sense of how public choice theory supports a certain sort of right-wing insurgent self-image, speaking in the name of democratic choice (as revealed preference) against the usurping inclinations of elites. It reminded me of the argument made by John Dryzek some time ago now, in which he argued that public choice theory did indeed share some important affinities with Frankfurt School-style critical theory.
Appreciating Buchanan’s work is important not least because, whisper it, belonging as it does to a tradition of thought that is embedded in particular understandings of democracy, it does address difficult issues of collective action, institutional design, and accountability that conventional left social theory struggles with, oscillating as it does between proto-anarchistic suspicion of ‘the state’ and nostalgia for stale social democratic settlements of the public good. Disentangling and differentiating accounts of ‘rationality’ might be an imperative to rethinking the democratic potentials of emergent forms of contemporary public action – and being able to tell the different in the political valence between Buchanan, say, and Mancur Olson, or Kenneth Arrow, or Amartya Sen, or Jon Elster, or Elinor Ostrom, seems an important task along this road (the differences turn on the degree to which theories are able to account for the rationalities of co-operation as something more than merely aggregation or secondary). Not all styles of rational choice theory are equally pathological, perhaps.
Is cultural activity really epistemological struggle?
I spent a few days in Liverpool over the Christmas break, and while there I tried to take advantage of being in a Capital of Culture, as was. The main attraction was an exhibition at the Bluecoat of prints by William Kentridge, The Universal Archive. This solo exhibition provided an interesting contrast to my last proper High Culture experience, back in Oct/Nov, during my trip to Bloemfontein. Bloem’ has great art gallery, it turns out, the Oliewenhuis. They had an exhibition People, Prints and Process, of various print-based art works produced by artists associated with the Caversham Centre with which Kentridge is closely involved. This exhibition contained one or two pieces by Kentridge, but alongside the work of lots of the artists using print as their medium. The prints in the show currently in Liverpool (it’s moving on soon I think) are actually slightly out of context, in a sense – they are of course rather static, but bring to mind the more animated works by Kentridge for which they often seem to serve as templates or testing grounds, or perhaps, traces (this exhibition didn’t have any of his films on show – not necessarily a bad thing – I always find it really difficult to watch arty film in a gallery space).
It was interesting to see these two exhibitions in close succession – in the exhibition at the Oliewenhuis, Kentridge is one almost a bunch of other South African artists, and the sense of print as a distinctively African medium was to the forefront – as well as how print is a vernacular, mass medium rooted in the textures of local life, as exemplified by the widespread use of linocut techniques. Whereas in the Universal Archive exhibition, Kentridge is presented as the internationally famous artist from South Africa.
I am not making a political point (and this is not my field of expertise), just reflecting on the experience of seeing the same bits of art in two different contexts – not just two different places (sunny and warm, cold and rainy), but seeing one or two of the same pieces sitting alongside works by other artists compared to making up part of a whole collection by the same artist. The difference, in fact, between the two sites, the two fields, enhances one’s appreciation, all around.
Symposium on Theory from the South
I picked this up via Craig Jeffrey, so thanks for the heads-up – here is a review symposium on the Comaroff’s Theory from the South, from The Salon, the on-line journal of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.
Be careful what you wish for…
Important new research on the perils of pop fame.
2012 in review
WordPress have very kindly provided an end of year summary of this year’s Pop Theory activity, and it turns out the most popular things to post about are neoliberalism, governmentality, affect theory, injustice, and, er, Derek Parfit, still. So I guess next year I should continue to grumble about the first three, worry about the fourth one a little more, and reflect a little more on why, or how, any of them matters.
New book by Matt Sparke
Introducing Globalization: ties, tensions and uneven integration is a new book by Matt Sparke, configured around the theme of interdependencies – you can access the Intro chapter for Xmas reading.
Local Politics: A University for Swindon?
Despite now being the home to one of the largest collections of scholarly books in the world, Swindon remains very much not-a-University town – there has been a long-standing civic ambition which goes back at least to the 1940s to get one. Recent years have seen initiatives to snag some bit of an expanding existing University, such as Bath, but these have come to naught. It does, though, now have a BPP University College, so that’s good. In a way. Maybe. Maybe not.
Swindon claims, not proudly, that it is the only major urban area in England and Wales without a University, or the biggest one, or some variation on this (though I think Milton Keynes might also qualify for this distinction, depending on what it is that this sort of claim is getting at – it’s about relatively low levels of participation in higher education in these places). Even Cirencester up the road is now set to be a proper University town.
Allan Cochrane and others at the OU have been researching the place of Universities in their localities and regions, looking at the changing rationales of economic growth and public engagement shaping this relationship. Swindon is interesting because here the story isn’t how established institutions now seek to engage with the places of which they are a part, but how and why local actors think it’s a good idea to have a local University in the first place. Via Twitter, I came across the latest round of discussions on this issue of the Borough Council earlier this month, including a consultancy report, A University for Swindon, which provides a profile of the current participation in HE of people living in Swindon. The report is shaped by the aim of establishing levels of potential demand for Higher Education in the town and round-abouts (ha!).
The report, and the wider strategizing over the last couple of years, indicates some of the assumptions about the potential benefits of having a higher education presence (of any sort, we’re not fussy), assumptions shared broadly across the political spectrum (as I think I have mentioned before, Swindon’s civic boosterism has a long history of attracting academic scrutiny of one sort of another, from Michael Harloe in the ’60s through to the 1980s localities debates. Phil Pinch even dubbed Swindon an archetypal ‘ordinary place’ twenty years or so ago. Trust me, it’s certainly a lot more ordinary than Johannesburg or Rio de Janeiro).
Anyway, the current strategy is an incremental one. A University Technical College (UCT) is set to open in 2014, with Oxford Brookes as its University sponsor and a locally-based ‘international high-tech’ company as its business sponsor. It will specialize in providing in engineering courses for 14-19 year olds. This is meant to be the first step towards realizing the dream of a University for the town, a dream which is seen as central to local economic development and growth, and which is strongly supported by Influence, the organization representing the business community in Swindon.
The report commissioned by the Council has some interesting stuff in it. For a start, Swindon has relatively low rates of participation in HE, and they are not improving. This, in fact, is central to the strategy for attracting or building an HE presence locally. There is an assumption that the skills base is central to future economic development, and that a University is one way of dealing with the supply side challenges facing the town. It turns out, and this is what first attracted my attention, that 15% of Swindonians in higher education study with the Open University, which is above the national average. The report takes this as proof of ‘latent demand’ for a local University, along with the fact that a third of all Swindonians enrolled in HE are at UWE in Bristol, Bath Spa, Oxford Brookes, or the University of Gloucester – all about an hours drive away, but none technically ‘local’ according to the way these things are officially defined. But the report is careful to point out that levels of participation in HE are not straightforwardly linked to the presence or absence of a local University: “The availability of local HE provision is just one factor influencing learning patterns, other factors include levels of attainment prior to 19; deprivation and aspirations.” Swindon does not score well at all in those other factors, which is the real story behind the report.
So there are interesting geographies revealed by this report – geographies of absence, and geographies of ambition, and imagined geographies too. In one section, for example, it is noted that “The impetus for a university stems in part from the knowledge that Swindon is one of the few major settlements in the country without an HE institution”. Then, with the help of a rather busy map, it is claimed that “Swindon lies in a swathe of country without a university which stretches from Stratford on Avon in the north to Weymouth in the south. Whilst this research has focused on demand from Swindon; this gap underlines the point that any new university would also be likely to attract students from nearby Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.” I’m not sure this ‘swathe’ actually adds up to a real region – it’s basically anywhere West of the M40 if you swing round Oxford on the A34, east of the M5 as long as you don’t stop at Bristol, Gloucester, or Cheltenham, and a large part of this empty swathe south of the M4 consists of Salisbury Plain. And I rather doubt whether rates of HE participation in Wiltshire towns like Marlborough or Salisbury will be significantly affected by any new University of Swindon (Swindon is in Wiltshire, but not necessarily of Wiltshire). And of course that statistic about the level of enrolment with the OU might not be best read as an index of the absence of alternatives either – but as further indication of the fact that local levels of HE participation are only tangentially related to local provision.
But keep your eye on Swindon – the future of non-elite higher education, shaped by assumptions about skills, the knowledge economy, and business partnerships might be slowly revealed here. Meanwhile, I have the sense of the town having all the component parts of a proper University without quite having composed them properly into one: loads of potential students, as well as already having all the books and even all the research money. What could be easier?
Pop Theory 