Fragment and scribbling on teaching and power

Teaching is embedded with a power differential. Not teaching as a vocation, but teaching as a relationship, an event, and occurence. The teacher finds themselves in a position of power over/with the student through the knowedge they carry and the student’s “need” for completion of the tasks. Teaching within a political process is similarly polarized. Many, aware of the authoritarian possibilities latent, fear this relation. Some try to abolish it from education. Others mechanistically embrace it, and believe through craftsmanship education can erase the problematic elements of hierarchies of knowledge and power. Freire sought to try and address these issues more gently, but how? Through abolishing education? Dissolving the teacher-student dialectic? Into equals?

Placing power at the core of education, we need to reframe these problematics. The problem is not simply power, but what kind of power between teacher and pupil, what are we contracting, how and for what? At the social level of analysis, teaching is part of the construction of power & will tend to reflect all the conflicting social psyches and forces within. It is not simply a matter of imposing progressive power and short-circuiting repressive power. The struggle in teaching as a political event is to act upon reality in a way that facilitates new growths of collective powers beyond the summation of the student and teacher.

Artists live miserable lives

“Politics is like being an artist. Have you ever seen how artists live? They have miserable lives”.

Ever since I was 15, I composed music. It started with a korg analogue synthesizer and a portable tape recorder. The problem with writing music on analogue equipment is you are forced into having massive studios or composing using simple loops that evolve slowly. It’s hard to have complexity when each note is a button, cable, or a fader. Computers gave analogue and digital synthesizers new life; whole compositions could be visualized, edited, and reproduced in endless variation. For the composer, a computer obliterated the need for a medium or vessel (the musician), and put every aspect of the piece under your direct control. Amplitude, pitch, timber, rhythm; all composed with direct input at every second and throughout.

With unlimited freedom and control, mental barriers rise from the creative ash. How do you lay out a song in a plane of pure openness? At different times I used different methods. I could start with a loop, which I would dissect, process, destroy, and reconstruct across time. Starting for simple melodies, variations are derived and woven together in a fabric, like an electronic fugue. At its core though, my method always had one constant. With each phrase, I would repeat and loop a section varying elements slowly until they fit. A note moved here, a different chord, a pause inserted there…slowly changing each element one at a time. Sometimes what I was writing was a song that been composed spontaneously in my mind, one that I had woken up with, but often that experimentation created new melodies and timbres I didn’t expect.

To any outsider listening, this sounds insane. The same loop potentially for minutes let alone hours is like bizarre torture. Often it is boring. Worse than boring, it can be intensely depressing and frustrating. Being unable to overcome creative barriers in composing can sour my mood for days, and make it impossible to do anything at all.

This society pushes us to be passive consumers in every facet of life, seeking out entertainment and consumption of mass culture from which we’re alienated. Our stories were created by professionals in an industry creating them for profit and market share. We have no idea how the band recorded that song, the director created the film, or the author built her novel. We’re alienated from the process and content. Yet our experience of art is one of pleasure, emotional release, and enjoyment.

For the musician or artist, creation involves boring mind-numbing discipline both in gaining the skills and in creation. Artists are people that feel satisfaction in that struggle, but it’s a different pleasure from that of people who just pick up a cd, a book, or a picture.

In politics, people are often frustrated at what is asked of them in developing their ideas, creating new projects, and finding a voice to build. There’s a desire expressed for things to “feel better” and sometimes crassly to entertain. We should learn from the artists; politics demands building muscle, learning languages, and practicing instruments. People don’t find it fun to listen to new saxophone players, and no one has toned muscles when they struggle to pick up weights at day 1 or day 5. The beauty and fulfillment we will find comes not from the packaging or parties, but from our creations and the journey and struggle we get there with.

That old-time patriarchy?

I likely am feverish, or am suffering from a disease in the water of California because I’m going to begin by quoting Hegel. Forgive me.

“The master relates himself to the bondsman mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the bondsman in thrall; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood. The master, however, is the power controlling this state of existence, for he has shown in the struggle that he holds it to be merely something negative. Since he is the power dominating existence, while this existence again is the power controlling the other [the bondsman], the master holds, par consequence, this other in subordination. In the same way the master relates himself to the thing mediately through the bondsman. The bondsman being a self-consciousness in the broad sense, also takes up a negative attitude to things and cancels them; but the thing is, at the same time, independent for him and, in consequence, he cannot, with all his negating, get so far as to annihilate it outright and be done with it; that is to say, he merely works on it. To the master, on the other hand, by means of this mediating process, belongs the immediate relation, in the sense of the pure negation of it, in other words he gets the enjoyment. What mere desire did not attain, he now succeeds in attaining, viz. to have done with the thing, and find satisfaction in enjoyment. Desire alone did not get the length of this, because of the independence of the thing. The master, however, who has interposed the bondsman between it and himself, thereby relates himself merely to the dependence of the thing, and enjoys it without qualification and without reserve. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the bondsman, who labours upon it.” -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

I’ve been thinking about Patriarchy, not as such, but in a specific form. Patriarchy that has been limited and beaten back by the feminist movement in the US and other places (as well as capitalist recompositions that dissolved the division of labor it was based upon, perhaps even to create a more repressive system). That is, the mode of patriarchy of mutual dependence for very survival.

Fragments and notes on the possibility of consciousness and revolution

These are scattered notes serving as a place holder, not hypotheses or completed thoughts.

Consciousness- This problem is generally framed in relation to marxist conceptions of the internal conflict and contradictions of capitalism itself. People position themselves along how much work they believe that internal contradiction to do, ranging from determinism to Kautskyist voluntarism (with faith in marxist scientism replacing faith in contradiction). Yet what if in fact the objective conflicts within capitalism are not enough to produce movement that abolishes class, power, and oppression? In other words, the capital-wage labor relation are not actually productive of or sufficiently corollary to the drive towards the transformation of society in anarchist communism? Certainly history indicates limitations to proletarian struggles, and some thinkers like Camatte and other ultralefts believe that the workers movement was effectively defeated in previous periods followed by class recompositions that altered the position of the proletariat within struggles. If we see anarchist communism as more than simply base economic demands, but the creation of a new order, new people, and new desires, then it should be asked whether merely innate or produced conflicts generate such?

Crisis- One thing that crisis in our times seems to create is not neat class conflict, but cross-class conflicts. It seems as though crisis is less directed along the lines of work relationships, than around spreading delegitimization of existing structures and systems. Power is crucial there to understand such, and indeed in society in general it seems as though factory work relations have become displaced by more general relationships of domination. Part of late capitalism appears to be the undermining of previous structuring of class neighborhoods and workplaces, and the replacement with flexible class organizations within broad spaces, caste-like relations, and false freedoms integrated into a system that challenges precarity, flexibility, and class mobility, into a system that flourishes outside the workplace as well as within. How do we make sense of events like Argentina 2001, Occupy, Greece, etc., where crisis and rupture increasingly seem to occur not simply around wage labor and value production, but directed by sections of the populace against systemic reproduction itself?

Levels- the intermediate level analysis seems systematically distoring because of it’s apparent effect of encouraging timeless analysis, and building block approaches. Rather than solidifying schematic views of organization, we need concepts that allow us to see the role of history, collective mood, and power in generating, excluding, and transforming fronts of rupture and resistance. Perhaps all the language of mass, intermediate, and political levels needs to be abandoned.

Things I’m reading in thinking about this stuff

Paul Mattick Spontaneity and Organization
Gilles Dauve The Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin
Rosa Luxembourg <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike”>The Mass Strike
Jacques Camatte On Organization

Where are we? Riots? Revolts? Revolutions?

I’m reposting two unrelated pieces that I think each have their own contributions to thinking about this stuff. With the rise of riots, the arab spring, and the indignants of spain, greece, israel, the US, etc., the significance and direction of resistance movements is pressing. I think the relevance of the defensive nature of these struggles is under analyzed.  I lack the time to write more about this, but think it’s notable.

The first piece is from Wu Ming.For those who don’t know, wu ming is a group of libertarian communist novelists in Italy who also write analysis sometimes. This piece is on the meaning of revolution, our present conjuncture, the arab/european/US revolts, etc. They critique the postmodernists like Hardt and Negri, as well as Zizek and Badiou. Much of it is about how to know whether we’re in a revolutionary moment, whether we can or not, and what distinguishes such.

The second piece is from Blaumachen, a greek libertarian communist group who posit these struggles as falling into ransitional and unstable disruptions in the working out of this crisis (however it will go). There’s things I disagree with, but the framing of the question seems important to me.

brainstorming about spontaneity and a complex adaptive systems metaframework

These are scattered notes to help me think through one aspect of the project I’m working on.

Connection between levels of organization, predictability of complex adaptive systems & understanding the impact of our actions. We can expect direct causation like do x action get reliable result y. At the same time our actions can have disproportionate and unpredictable effects. Additionally apparently marginal spontaneous acts can multiply. A good understanding of these relationships demonstrate the problem with the organization vs. spontaneity dichotomy.

These issues are connected to the notions leaps, ruptures, or leaps; meaning some kind of activity or movement that breaks with the normal means of settling disputes. Such events typically show complex interactions between organized actions of often disparate social actors, and seemingly spontaneous ruptures. Utilizing complex adaptive systems meta-framework for understanding the social logic of these situations gives us the ability to explain how it is that such things can arise, be so difficult to predict, and go well beyond the reach of the limited actions of organized bodies while interacting with them.

Professionals and Power

As a healthworker I’ve been reflecting on the role of power in institutionalized sites of power such as hospitals, schools, prisons, psychiatric facilities, etc. On the left there is a popular discourse about medicine that sets up a binary. Medicine is alienating, hierarchical, and evil. Herbs, holism, popular healing, etc., is liberating. If you look at the role of capitalism in mediating even alternatives within, this binary crumbles immediately. Still there’s a particular problem for us who want to seem liberatory participatory social practices in society.

Some things require specialized knowledge that bring with it inherent hierarchies of knowledge that give it’s bearer power over others (potentially). Obviously this is mediated and rendered pathological by institutionalization of power through the state and capital (e.g. look at the role of law in both empowering and controlling physicians, and the exclusive power they are given over the populace which corresponds to a form of “state power” in the domain of health). As libertarians, how do we conceive of such professions that are embedded with power? We should push the boundaries of non-professional journalists, teachers, healthcare providers and make as much popular practice as possible. But some degree of specialization is required. Specialization is not inherently evil or pathological, but it’s worth thinking about how we hold such professionals accountable to society as a whole, when society may not have the resources necessary to judge the specifics.

Consciousness and Emergence- beginning of a project

“A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.” -Melville

Over the past years I’ve had a running series of discussions with friends about two theoretical projects I’ve been chewing on. After being pressed to work out and spread that work, I’ve decided to embark on the likely long process of developing and publishing frameworks for how we understand political consciousness and a methodology for understanding and acting politically within society. I’d like to use this space to workout ideas through brainstorming, sharing the process with my friends who help me with this stuff, and track my own progress.

In my mind these two things were always connected (a meta-analytical framework or descriptive and prescriptive methodology for society & theories of the relationship between the attainment of conscious political conceptions and actions), but they were separate projects. This morning I realized that there is a logical ordering of the connection between the two. In my thinking about consciousness, it was built upon my awakening to the concept of emergence and adaptive systems. In broad outline, the text I want to write can start with laying out a metatheoretical framework of emergence as a tool for political thinking about society, our own actions, system structures, and understanding the trajectories of history/revolution/struggle. Building off this understanding, the question of political consciousness utilizes emergence to show the relationship between those ideas, actions, structure, system, and history (within a materialist framework bridging the physical and biological/social). That is, how conscious political conceptions emerge, relate to actions, and what efficacy they have in transformations of power.

This helps me work out in my mind how the arguments will flow, and what the text will aim at.

Gramsci and spontaneous ruptures

This is a place holder for me. In looking at Gramsci and his scant references to intermediate strata, I found this:

“…it is important to study how ppermanent collective wills are in fact formed and how these wills set themselves concrete goals that are both immediate and intermediate-in other words, how they set themselves a collective course of action. This has to do with processes of development that are more or less long; sudden, ‘synthetic’ explosions are rare. ‘Synthetic’ explosions do occur, but looking at them closely one sees that they are more destructive than constructive; they remove external and mechanical obstacles to autochthonous and spontaneous development-the Sicilian Vespers can be taken as an example ”. Prison Notebooks vol. 3 pg 346, trans. Buttigieg, JA. 2007. Columbia University Press.

 

new blog

I have a new blog. Don’t read this one! look over here

http://snappalos.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/consumer-medicine-what-sort-of-power-do-we-have/