Right Randy Little Devils

Paul Krugman highlights a remarkable ideological intervention in US higher education by the disciples of hard right 'philosopher' and 'novelist' Ayn Rand. In her works Rand provided a pseudo-philosophical rationalisation and justification for the greedy selfishness of the very rich and as such she has always attracted a substantial following among the very rich and those who desire to be very rich. Now the adherents of her cult are paying for the inclusion of her work in the syllabuses of US higher education.
This is of course nothing new; ever since noted C.19th monopolist Joseph Wharton threw a gigantic sum of money at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881 to teach his ideology of monopoly and protectionism the 'western world' has been filling up with capitalist ideological apparatus called Business Schools (in the US idiom of higher education of course) each named for the relevant Patrick Bateman analogue that granted them financial life. The point is that 'the right' have to pay to get their ideological tracts into education because no one interested in education would use them willingly because such screeds are pedagogical rubbish. Consider the point that one short article by Althusser - on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses - perfectly explains the need of the right to construct such ideological institutions and how they function in and on society whilst nothing on the right explains anything at all.
It has long been the case that 'the left' has held dominion over large parts of education and the reasons for this are many and varied but the bankruptcy, either moral or intellectual or both, of the so-called intellectuals of 'the right' must be something to do with it.

Technorati Tags: Althusser, Ideology, Business Education

Student Project

Here is another of my students' documentary projects.

Media Aristocracy

One of the fascinating things about Bourdieu's Distinction (or here) is the variety of approaches to the study of the media it provides us with and the range of connexions it allows us to form. Bourdieu's concept of an aristocracy of culture marked by its distance from necessity is what concerns us in this post.
How one consumes and receives culture is one of the most important marks of distinction and therefore a key means for the accumulation of cultural capital. Anything which is not necessary (and we are ignoring the psychiatric self-actuation as a need - necessity here means shelter, heat, clean water, and sufficient nutrition) is distinguishing as it displays use of spare time and resources. So there is a very raw and powerful difference between being able to consume media culture and not having the time or resources to waste on such consumption.
The tale is not told with this bare fact however. Every segment of society has its own authorised culture and the unnecessary participation in that authorised culture is a means of creating status within that part of society. Although the genres are similar and the issues addressed and narrative forms used appear the same there is a very radical difference in social status between reading Skins & Teen Vogue one the one hand and Hollyoaks and More on the other (and it is a step higher to transfer to Sex and the City and Vogue proper). The former is the mark of the aristocracy of (female) teen media culture and the latter is far more plebeian. This is by no means the full extent of this scale and it is not the only scale - there are a huge range of different social fields of status competition - but it is a good example of the the media texts and forms we can connect with Bourdieu's ideas.


Technorati Tags: Bourdieu, Media, Culture

A Happy Night in Lardland

Viewing the first episode of the new series of Dr Who evokes even more intertextual echoes. Obvious points of reference were Gremlins, Alien, and Supernanny. Less obviously it seemed to me that there was a hint of Sur Mes Lèvres in the scene were The Doctor and Donna first encounter each other.

A Dark Night in Toyland

Dr Who returns to the BBC's Saturday night line up with a story about adipose that provokes the intertextual echo of a short story by Bob Shaw. Shaw's short story anthology Dark Night in Toyland, as with all of his works out of print, contains a creepy tale (entitled Cutting Down I think) of menacing adipose that I would be unsurprised to discover bore uncanny similarities to the plot of the forthcoming episode of Dr Who.

Funk-to-Funky

Ashes to Ashes and its equally remarkable sibling Life on Mars are most remarkable for the divergent political readings they provoke. There are two main readings that will be considered here; the media studies reading and the conservative nostalgia reading.
The media studies reading of both series is rather straight forward. Sam Tyler & Alex Drake are the synecdoche of us and of our struggle to overcome the bigotry and discrimination that used to be such a powerful part of our society. Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars share a hopeful (perhaps too hopeful) view on the state of present day Britain and on the direction that British society seems to be taking. The discourse of both shows is that even though the things of the past have some good points today is a better world to be in if you are a member of a non-hegemonic group (not white, not male, not straight etc).
This tension is rather neatly displayed by the appearance of Lord Scarman as a character in the last episode of the first series of Ashes to Ashes. The camaraderie of Gene's team in the face of the 'threat' posed by Lord Scarman is a positive thing but Alex, and we, know that Scarman's way is the only way for British society to take. That the police had to stop being an instrument of racial, homophobic, and state terror in order for British society to function at all. Lord Scarman was charged with the official investigation into the Brixton riots of 1981 (or see here) and many of his conclusions regarding the role of policing in the initiation of those riots were eventually incorporated into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 and into the practices of the Metropolitan Police. Lord Scarman and his report were a good thing and Gene's failure to recognise this is a key part of his backwards facing understanding of the world.
The conservative nostalgia reading of the two series is rather more complicated. It begins with a reading of Gene Hunt as a tonic to the so called political correctness of our age. In this reading Gene is the key figure and not Sam or Alex and his 'unreconstructed' views and behaviours are read as an affirmation of the bigotry and discrimination of the past. As though Gene were the heroic leader of a movement to 'call a spade a spade' and gloss over the ethnic slur this phrase came to contain. In this reading the BBC have either been conned into broadcasting this heroic illiberalism or have finally started to see sense (neither of these seem all that likely to me).
The next phase of this reading is a form of golden-ageism (i.e. looking back to a time that was better than today) because by some quirk both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes are set at moments of Conservative Party government in Britain. Life on Mars is set during the fag-end of the Heath government and Ashes to Ashes near the beginning of the Thatcher years. In each case viewers with Conservative political inclinations are provided the opportunity to escape to a time when the horrid Labour lot who currently form the government were safely out of office. 1973 is not as effective a setting as 1981 for this golden-age version of the conservative nostalgia reading because Heath never possessed the same cult of personality or the same degree of fanatical devotion that Thatcher did and because Heath was not involved in the transformation of British society during the 1980s that tends to fly under the eponym of Thatcherism regardless of whether it had anything to do with Thatcher and her government's policies or not.
Both parts of this reading can be seen in Matthew d'Ancona's review of Ashes to Ashes in The Spectator; he is politically Conservative and The Spectator has long played a central role in right wing politics in Britain as the house magazine of the Conservative Party (three of its editors in the 20th century went on to become Conservative cabinet ministers).

Stop Boris! It almost goes without saying

He can't keep his hair out of his eyes.
He can't keep his foot out of his mouth.
He can't keep his **** out of other women.
Just the person to be left in charge of a city as large, powerful, complicated and problematic as London!

This post might not seem to have much to do with reading the media but then hegemony (see the work of Gramsci and Stuart Hall for instance) would be a useful thing to start thinking about Boris with. As would any feminist perspective you could think of (Judith Butler's perhaps).
The approach that most interests me, however, is to consider Boris' participation in our culture of celebrity and what Baudrillard's theories of simulacra & of hyper-reality might tell us about this participation. For Baudrillard simulation - copying - was the key aspect of modern existence because nothing was real and everything was in fact a copy of that which had once been real. The result of this dominance of simulation was the coming into existence of simulacra; simulations that had utterly replaced their now distant and dim originals. Which in turn left us with no access to 'the real' whatsoever. Rather all we can know is the hyper-real; that mediated world of simulacra we can experience through the ubiquitous communication media of our time.
The explosion of the realm of celebrity in our current socio-media world is the perfect example of this. Once celebrity emerged from something else (beauty, notoriety, ability, luck, fortune, etc) and was a property of people. Now celebrity can be manufactured, allocated, and consumed - it is simulated from past models - and has replaced people possessing a particular property with simulacra infused with the simulation of celebrity during the manufacturing process. Celebrities are of course hyper-real as we only know them as media constructs and because of their ubiquity we really do know them. Consider the simularca called 'Jordan' and its counterpart 'Katie Price' and how hyper-real they both are.
Boris then is a simulacra in that he is a simulation of so many duffers and cads from 1950's British cinema (alchemically combined) and our understanding of him is hyper-real in that we know him through the media and only through the media. It may be time to take the red pill, or any other colour, rather than the blue.