Early writings

I wrote this before I started my MA at Kent. I had never read Deleuze, Althusser or Badiou and so, when Iain asked us to write down what we understand about ‘resistance’, this was it.

To define ‘what is resistance’, one must start from.. a starting point. A truism? Well where is this starting point located? Is the starting point located in one defining moment, an action or a perception of a point in time, which thrusts forward a reaction and movement? Or maybe a process, a continuous and longditudinal stretch in which manifestations of emotion, rationale and situations come together to form instances of resistant action? It seems, that even were a specific moment in time located as the initiiation of resistive process, would this not, in turn, be part of a process in itself? A starting point, in this case, would be hard to pin down; causative relations leading from one thing to the next and only being tied down for some instant clarification and point of reference. A singular point tied down and inspected in order to gleam some form of idea on how to act against this, the other. This is useful, no doubt, but is it not over-simplistic, a reduction of due process in order to react at an instant? The converse arguement at this stage, however, leading to a process of resistance acting in opposition, creative or otherwise, to the stimulus processes. Harder to analyse, a lenthy period, a structural explanation of event dynamics, but nevertheless containing identifiable relations, cause and effect. It seems that even the starting point for the project may harder to locate that at first thought.

 

Resistance may then be more ontological, more internal, then, dependent on the subject’s relations with surroundings, stimuli or modes of understanding. Would an application of ontological, innate ‘resistive nature’ then be manifested according to how and what an individual is presented with? A working class ‘strife’, then, being the natural result of an innate theory of being; a violent anti-facist’s protestations a manifestation of a natural desire for self-determinism and the ability to choose his own future? This is tempting. At the heart of the immediate connotation of resistance is a personal connection, particular and peculiar to the individual, even unifying at group level and uniting under banners. With the dangerous, or even enlightenting appreciation of emotion in the stimulus of resistance, to understand resistance, maybe we should first understand who wants to understand and why?

 

It is tempting to say, ‘no, it isn’t’. Surely there must be a definite answer? To write in a textbook or dictionary that a definition is contextual and dependent on the subject matter is, to put it mildly, awkward. Expectant of concrete answers, an individual demands the kernel of knowledge to be cracked from its shell. However, are the cracking proceedure and the shell in this case not important too? In other words, if the various faculties and experiences available to the individual are not the same, if they have not derrived from the same place or (to put it hesitantly) are relative, then perhaps the question must be modified. To put it differently, one’s conception of food, art or music, are certainly not the same. No doubt we all understand when somebody talks about Renoir in conversation, but defining art? This debate is old and essentially contested. The layman calls the contents of a gallery, or comic strip, or decorated wall art. An ‘expert’ may well relativise his/her opinion, but will no doubt have boundaries to the identification and delineation of the field. As a result, must we not form our opinion of reistance within the nature of our inquiry – and appreciate this for what it’s worth? The immediate rush towards transcended ontological appreciation must certainly be followed, however only through the grid of experience, senses, acquired knowledge and biological facets. It is through these that ideas, concepts and memes are created and structured and then, in order to gain an internally valid understanding of this, the episteme of inquiry must certainly be established first.

Reporting depth – a response

A response to Jack, Ian, “TV coverage of the Libyan crises is just a snapshot. We need to know more” in The Guardian, (Saturday 5 March 2011), p. 31

It always strikes me as interesting when a journalist comments on journalism. Introspection, honest introspection anyway, is not a quality that one is used to hearing on an everyday basis. Certainly politicians cannot do it whilst maintaining the authority of office – heaven forbid they show any sign of weakness or uncertainty. The employer is always right as well; it certainly wouldn’t be on to show weakness in front of the troops, lest they develop untoward ideas of toppling the officer class. So when Mr. Jack states “Who knew (not me) that [Libya’s] coastline was as long as the distance from London to Naples”, “or that the population in each [of its three regions] has a different history and identity and seldom thought to describe themselves as ‘Libyans’ until independence in 1951,” it comes across as refreshing. The admittance from a respected journalist that he didn’t know a string of facts about a country’s nature which hasn’t popped up in world events in over 20 years would not be mirrored elsewhere in society. Again, the politician surely knew all of these details, he or she would say in a self-aggrandising defence of his position in office. I will not dwell on how a constant show of bravado and capable confidence only serves to cement the inevitable downfall of an individual or class who spends so much time covering for the unjustified pretence of capability. Two things are important to address, however; the critique Mr. Jack levies at consumers and news producers in their lack of depth; and the large availability to acquire information if one is willing to make an effort.

Ontology is often a chicken and egg debate and this is certainly the case when analysing social receptivity to media and news sources. Is it natural that an individual tails off after the first two paragraphs of the news article, or are newspapers and news broadcasts produced so that news articles appear as attention-grabbing as possible, leaving ‘extraneous’ detail to the end for those who bother about the details? I will be the first to admit that it is rare for me to finish a half-page broadsheet article unless it particularly adheres to my field of interest, but this says nothing about the causality of why. Sales of the Daily Mail and the Sun certainly lend themselves to the argument that newspapers must make stories jump out at the reader with sharp headlines and a grabbing, strong narrative position. Then, when broadsheets are forced to compete for sales with tabloids who far out-rank them in terms of readership, it would come as little surprise if publishers follow suit in order to glean back lost or dwindling market share. This process inevitably leads to a causal spiral, where stories must be increasingly written to grab attention from a reader who becomes more and more used to a story that appears more relevant to them than not, or is written in language or with grammar that requires as little time and attention to read as possible. News editors are then, pushed by the commodification of their efforts in an attempt to please shareholders awaiting their quarterly reports, structurally mandated to write stories that jump out at the reader; that forego specific details for convincing argument that fits a target demographic’s perceptive narrative.

Or perhaps people are just lazy. Who has time to read about the coastal areas of a country where I’m certainly never going to take a holiday? It’s an understandable position; an individual wants to keep up to date with the world around him, from which he or she may very well feel continuously more and more alienated, but there’s a job to be done, kids to spend some time with – and then you still need to see your mates at the weekend. With this in mind, maybe newspapers and indeed the television news services are doing their job – i.e. providing clear and cogent news sources from which individuals can keep up to date. Whatever the case, although I see a clear, structural rationale for the first argument to hold greater weight, it is certain that this mode of reporting will not change for the foreseeable future. Murdoch is still standing strong and his domination over BSkyB will ensure the prominence of headline-grabbing articles in the papers and on television. However there are alternatives.

If there is one thing that the recent uprisings in several Arab states has shown us with respect to media, it is that mainstream news sources are not the only way to find out about the world. Al Jazeera is not easily accessible in the UK unless one is willing to sit in front of the computer to watch the news, however it is without a doubt the best source of international news in the English language. There are very good reasons as to why, when the English language TV station started up, several well-known and proficient newscasters up-rooted and left the BBC and Channel 4 for this insightful and critical news company. Offering both a website and TV channel, Al Jazeera offers a large repository of reports and commentary, written by journalists from all over the world. Critically, these journalists are produced by an independent group of editors, despite claims otherwise due to their funding obtained primarily from the Qatar government. As Glenn Greenwald states, Al Jazeera is “constantly demonised in the American media” and simply seems not to appear in the British press at all. The network has been kicked off the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons” and, during the war in Afghanistan, a cruise missile destroyed its Kabul office. Possibly simply because Al Jazeera has caused such a reaction against a powerful power-base not used to being questioned outside academia, or because the network’s regular deftness in publishing critical articles, complete with well-researched and – importantly – detailed articles deserves it note before Mr. Jack gives up on network news sources. Perhaps Mr. Jack is right to give up on reporting networks, however. There are many links between a news event and the article you see in front of you – witnesses, the reporter, background research of potentially uncertain quality, editors and editorial policy all have an input. If there was a way of accessing first-hand primary witnesses themselves, one could form an opinion about an event without obstruction or reporting bias.

Twitter has revolutionised the method by which the individual can engage with the environment surrounding him or her. During the revolution in Egypt, the hashtag #bahman25 could be used to read what citizens in Tahrir square were themselves reporting about events in real-time. Furthermore, not only could individuals read about events, but they could interact with the community as well; asking questions in tweets with the same hashtag would invariably be answered immediately with a large breadth of information and links for further information. When the internet went down, the same hashtag would be used to dispense telephone numbers and passwords to be used with 56k modems that had been set up to maintain a communication infrastructure. Being present at several of the London student protests, I was made aware of just how invaluable Twitter had become to protesters and police alike. Messages about the route of the march, location of potential and actual kettles and multifarious other, but related, issues torrented through certain hashtags.

It is important to note, when singing the praises of social networks and mediums such as Twitter and Facebook (the linking together of the two through dedicated clients only serving to increase their usefulness), however, that the information gained from them is of a tacitly different nature – and in no way supersedes good reporting. Reporters are individuals who often devote their lives to producing informative work that balances detail with a balanced framing and narrative. They do the work so that you don’t have to; they will live in the country, talk to the people and manifest their experience into, with any luck, a well constructed article that can be digested at leisure. Social networks function in providing a vast wealth of small bits of information that must be digested and processed by the consumer. The web of information that can be accessed is overwhelmingly larger and more varied than that which a single journalist can provide, however there is a substantive difference in the effort required to gain anything from the social net than that which is presented in pre-designed form. That said, Mr. Jack should not despair, for the information is indeed there to be accessed. With over 200 million people using Facebook actively over the world and 190 million users of Twitter, there is a growing profligacy of direct information transfer. As information networks begin to synchronise and transfer their services between each other (as can be seeing with the latest API integration services of WordPress, Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace), accessing the large web of information being produced by primary sources is becoming easier. Besides, when it comes to knowing about the world around oneself and interacting directly with it, a little hard work never hurt anyone.

Collections of atoms

I moved away from England with various motives. Tokyo would offer an escape from various messes I had gotten myself into, allow me to tie off a very loose, frayed end, and offer some financial security. English teaching in a city where English is highly demanded and appaulingly  taught would, I thought, be a guaranteed source of steady income. Not so of course, given the world deciding that very year to decline into recession. Predicted the worst since the Wall Street Crash of the late 1920’s, the reverberations were felt by societies and economic groups across the world – not merely in the West where proximity to neo-liberal US trade venturism hid the dangers of boom/bust economics behind a thick vail of security and deficit fear-mongering. Back I came.

It’s hard to keep up with the news when you are far away and transiently baseless. I had heard whilst I was away in November about the start of the student protests and occupations. The University of Kent’s student body, a regularly apathetic group, finally did themselves proud by gaining coverage in the national media about their Senate protest. I longed to join them. In fact, I longed to be back in the academic surroundings of the University I had just left. The ritual is comforting; get up; eat breakfast; go to Uni; see your friends; read about things you are interested in and write some more of that essay; post-writing-pint; and back to bed. Utilitarian values ignored and there’ll always be a little bit more money in the overdraft, right? Of course, in that ‘real’ world, the one that people inhabiting it seem to get so superior about, the realisation appears to sink in that not everyone lives like this. You have to go out and get a job. You have to make your own way in the world – because certainly no-one will do it for you! Rely on yourself and no-one else. “You are an atom,” the realisation says.

Except that realisation didn’t happen to me. It hasn’t to millions of UK citizens who haven’t decided to live like this. These statements, these ‘facts of life’ were determined and self-righteously announced by some people who decided that they are mantras that we all must live by, because they say so. The economy and clearing the deficit demands that we get jobs in science, economics and banking, it is said. Not the science that tries to understand what we’re living in – that quantum malarkey – but that productive stuff. Not that theoretical economics where armchair-dwellers postulate on rubbish like ‘fair distribution’, but that which makes us money. And money soon! for if we don’t have more soon, everything we know will become Chinese. It doesn’t matter where the money comes from, stupid. We’re not harming the environment because Africa will sell us their carbon credits! And it’s creating a carbon market so people can make money! What? Of course carbon traders still have the environment as their primary concern.

No, we haven’t chosen these facts. Some of us haven’t chosen to live life being told in contradiction that we are atoms, but function inside a web of economics which means that we all must make small sacrifices. No, I will not take it lying down that those who didn’t lose all the money must be the ones to pay it back. The disappearance or scaling back of the Arts Council, the Film Council, the EMA, tuition fees, tax credits, child allowance, housing benefit, job seekers allowance, Sure Start, forestries and woodlands, public sector jobs by the hundreds of thousands, 35% of under 25s being unemployed, 9% of the entire population being so – and rising – are ideological. They are changes implemented by a group of people who have had idealogical and economically supported values since they emerged screaming into the hospitals because they have never known anything different.

I’m sure, David, that it was a harsh atomistic life down in Eton (when Mum was giving you the pocket-money meaning you could concentrate on studying, rather than having to go out and support yourself.) I’m sure you were quite all alone, amongst the all of your friends going into junior consultancy jobs at the age of 21. Except you’ve missed the point, haven’t you? Those friends of yours, the ones that I have no doubt keep you up to date on the state of Britain’s business on a regular occasion in backrooms that the rest of us don’t have access to, they are the group of people who you developed from. A group. With you as a composite part of it and fulfilling your social role, like everyone else did in it too. Charles who was always the one with the ladies; George who always seemed a bit thick, but paid your tab that time when your credit card bounced; and Mike who drank a bit too much, but was an alright kind of guy. You would go out to the cinema to see that new B-movie that hadn’t had all that much press, so it was still cool. “It’s good”, you will have said, “that films like this get made. Not all Hollywood clones, but good independent films”. So the Film Council. Or when you went out for a walk in Burnham Beeches with your dog, enjoying the fact that you can still walk around beautiful and well-maintained forests for free. In Tokyo, you have to pay for parks, you may have heard. The Forestry Commission you had to thank for ensuring the lack of entrance fee.

These are just small examples. For you, with some money, you could choose to be an atom. But you weren’t really choosing that, merely your role in your group of friends. But now you’re choosing our roles too. The raising of the age difference between higher and lower job seeker’s allowance will stop under-30’s being able to move away from home and the raising of that of housing benefit will push them out of the cities. Away from their peer, work or education groups. Away from the things, the people and the institutions they care about. We don’t agree that no-one else will look after you. Friends are there to provide a web of knowledge, support and enjoyment that one cannot obtain from the workplace – however fulfilling that may or may not be. But you’re not merely structurally enforcing our places in the social sphere. With a shift to a private sector that isn’t being supported by a viscous and opaque banking sector, rising unemployment is dragging social mobility down to a pre-Blair level, despite nearly 40% of young people emerging into their 20s with undergraduate degrees – what should be a stimulus to their mobility. Furthermore, the lack of available jobs – 35% unemployment for people under 25 years of age – and employment that potential students face, coupled with a prospective £27,000 of student debt will single-handedly undo any good work that the previous government did with the goal of giving young people a choice. Universities will do fine whilst creaming the elite percentage of wealthy nations’ students to fill their books, but what of the people whose mandate you are acting on?

As it has been seen from the student demos, there are several increasingly large groups of people who no longer believe that individuals should be perceived as atomised units formed into a working framework and working merely in order to support it. The abstraction, it shall be realised more and more, is purely that. Not a tangible entity in itself, but a mechanism that initially started with the goal of acting as a tool for the participants, not the converse. It is when these groups start to form together – the TUC and NUS being prime examples of those beginning to do so – that those who have not been afforded the opportunity to choose for themselves their lives courses will be heard. At first, discourse will dominate. This is good, productive and socially acceptable. Protests have begun and, following in their footsteps, civil disobedience, police brutality and arrests. But this will not be the last resort and these groups will not merely go away. They will demand to be listened too – and I am looking forward to when they really start.