Or rather the Technological University…What has become increasingly apparent is that the TU is formulated to be a subsidiary of the anarcho-capitalist dream, a trojan horse designed to undermine, and ultimately destroy, ideas of collegiality, community and democracy. The motivation, the function, of the TU is profit, hence the layers of administration to control academia, the imposition of monolithic “command structures”, the pseudo-‘business’ job titles – all designed to displace and replace competing concepts of rationality with one: univocal, over-arching apparently impervious to challenge. Part of the design is to colonise the notion of ‘progress’, as business-speak has colonised language per se in the past two decades: terms such as ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ are now taken to mean the discovery of new ways to exploit others, and ‘transparency’ is simply a method of concealing power, information and responsibility. ‘Progress’ in the shiny new world of the TU is concerned with ‘value’, yet ‘value’ istelf can only be calculated in terms of financial profit – the value of the Arts, of community, of democracy is subsumed in this colonisation.

The TU becomes a frontline in the anarcho-capitalist fantasy of “the zone” – an area where relationships are purely financial, there are no guarantees of continuing employment, no commitment to anything other than “what business wants”…and certainly no commitment to knoweldge for its own sake or for the ‘improvement’ of the human condition; the human condition is seen as one of a perpetual competition between individuals, the contract defines what is now called social capital. In short, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, “There is no such thing as society; there are only collections of individuals.”

The “traditional university” (as we might call it) is/was a site for the advancement of knoweldge, for the analysis of perspectives on human society and how these might be advanced to increase the sum of human happiness. In terms of the Arts, what are the various branches, other than perspectives, ways of seeing? What does a novel, poem, play, painting or film do, but posit an alternative to what exists? In the brave new world of the TU, this multiplicity is rejected (in a similar way to the marginalisation of the Artist in the nineteenth century, that apparently great age of “industrial capitalism”). Students, or as we are now told we must call them ‘learners’, must be instructed in the ‘principles’ of business as the foundation of all things. In Heideggerian terms, calculative thinking becomes the foundation of the TU; meditative thinking is consigned to the dustbin of history. ‘Progress’ and “financial success” merge, becoming one and the same, which in turn connects to the nostrum of “the individual” as the basic unit of society (although this nostrum is incompatible with the idea of society). Egocentric individualism, the neoliberal’s building block, is deliberately promoted as the only ‘adult’ attitude, anything else is dismissed as ‘unrealistic’, ‘puerile’.

By focusing on for-profit research, the TU deliberately marginalises the Arts – ultimately, they are to disappear or become the preserve of the wealthy – and becomes a function of busines, engaged only in those activities which business ‘wants’. Put another way, “the market” dictates the terms…but this is the problem: the market is being allowed (encouraged?) to control the discourse. The market becomes the ultimate arbiter. In the same way as the market has destroyed the NHS and the role(s) of the university in the UK, the TU is being positioned (by successive right-wing governments) to colonise education in Ireland. Which means we need to discuss concepts of value…

I’m starting this to start a discussion…about whatever it happens to be, but particularly if it happens to be about the human/technology interface…should we even call it that?

Hmm, off we go…again.

The whole VAR/professionalisation of football (soccer if your’re here) seems to invite consideration of the shift we’re seen gathering momentum over the past thirty-odd years, an integral part of Thatcherist (I refuse to call it ‘Thatcherism’ – she just applied Friedman) and post-Thatcherist capitalism: the instrumentlisation of vocation.

What we’ve seen is the introduction of/enforcing of “codes of conduct” into what were seen as vocational jobs, for example, nursing or teaching; jobs that were originally viewed as being work one went into because of social conscience, a feeling of obligation or duty to others. A desire, in the old cliché, to “give something back”. They weren’t particuarly well-paid, but they were (still are?) jobs which didn’t ivovle the separation of self from occupation. Thus, your job becomes an integral part of who you are, a fundamental expression of oneself – the highest form of self-expression as Marx has it, and an unending source of satisfaction (defined as the opportunity to help others…yeah, that’s it). Of course, this doesn’t ‘fit’ with capitalism: to be ‘satified’ one must consume, but that consumption must be fleeting – a result of false perception – and, therefore, perpetuate the cycle of consumption, initially of material goods, of products, but eventually extending to people, who cease to be people in the full, subjective sense – in that we acknowledge the similarities and differences between ourselves and others – and become simple objects to be used and discarded as necessary. All summed up by Thatcher’s remark to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, “There is no such thing as society, there are only collections of individuals” (I could be slightly out with that quote, but I don’t think so). That final admission of rampant, instrumental individuality, an individuality which has gathered momentum again in the past few years. Hence the rejection of refugees and asylum seekers…”Oh, I’ll donate a few quid – makes me feel better – but don’t come here.” Yeah, all very Hobbes in the Quad…

So, everything is fine until I get bored, or you lose your usefullness to me, at which point I’m afraid it’s time to move on…it’s only ‘natural’, “just the way things are”…

I’ll come back to individuality in a moment, but just to explain the professionalisation thing. Our vocational jobs have gradually been ‘professionalised’: in order to be recognised as a ‘profession’, it appears that a code of conduct is required. As far as I can see, the basis of any code of conduct is mistrust (distrust?). We’ll begin from the point that, if you’re not told to do X (and, furthermore, if a penalty isn’t imposed on you for the non-performance of X) then you will not do it. I can’t trust you to look after me, in some sense or other, in virtue of the fact that we are both human persons. There must be ‘accountability’, usually legal accountability, to ensure that you do your job properly.

Of course, once a code of conduct is introduced, and enforced, human relations are disrupted, fragmented. The code becomes something I assume, like a cloak, when I walk through the door of my place of work – it becomes something other to who I am. My main function is then to ensure that I obey the code, in colloquail language, “to protect my own back”. I will do X because I have to do X, because I get paid to do X…and there’s the shift to instrumentalism. I now do my ‘job’ for money, and that money enables me to live my life, but elsewhere – in the consumerist paradise of capitalist society.

This is a result of the businessification (I love wordpress – it hasn’t underlined that in red as “not a word, you fool”) of society, the idea that business ‘methods’ can be imported into any ‘realm’ of human society in order to make it work “more efficently”. You want the NHS to work ‘properly’? Appoint the guy who used to run Tesco – there’s no real difference between selling groceries and treating people. Hey, we can establish “internal markets”…and thirty or forty years later we can wonder, disingenuously, why the NHS is collapsing.

In teaching we’ve seen precisely the same thing. The demand has been/is for a way of “measuring outputs”. Of course, when you can’t measure what’s important, you make what you can measure important. Subjects X, Y and Z serve the needs of the business community (a digression: at the heart of our society lies an irresolvable contradiction, that of the individual vs community. Capitlaism prioritises the former, yet fetishes the latter…more of that later), but the humanities? What use do they have? Where’s the profitability (the only meaningful term in a business ‘system’)? Hence the talk of “social capital” and “the social entreprenuer” (which, fairly accurately translated, means how good is your ability to talk folks into doing what goes against their own interests)…a simple integration of the humanites into the discourse of business.

We’re constanty implored to ask ourselves “What does business want?”. The answer is simple: a docile workforce that will reproduce what already exists, accept the status quo as “the way of the world”, and contribute to profitability. To that end, we’ve become mired in the bureaucratic and the predictive…a paper trail that culminates in the guarantee that at the end of a module, students will either ‘know’ or “be able to do” X, Y and Z. A bizarre notion borne of the assumption of uniformity. Give us a few years, and the term ‘student’ will be replaced with ‘customer’ – requiring an even more draconian code of conduct. One object produces another. Only the money makes the alienation bearble…that and, of course, the holidays. Define ‘holiday’ in this context…

In all of this, the creative becomes untenable. Creativity, as Eisenstein argues, is born of conflict (he even bolds it!), a refusal to accept the existent, a dissatisfaction with the actual, a desire to change the perception of others – “Don’t see it like that, see it like this”. A shift from the actual to the ideal(istic), from self-interest to empathy. The capitalist system cannot accept, or deal with this; look at the 19th century sleight-of-hand that, by the middle of that century, has marginalised the artist (of whatever medium), forced them to the periphery. We’re a long way from Shelley’s “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The code of conduct in the vocational turns us into products to be consumed, destroying human connection. “You can expect me to do X for you, but only because I have to.” Oh, and if anything goes ‘wrong’, its the system, not me. There can be no blame because I have fulfilled my responsiblities as the system dictates. If, through some naive, misplaced sense of human duty (Bond? Affection?), I’ve attempted to go beyond what is required of me then I can be held to have transgressed against the code.

All very biblical but not, huh?

Coming soon: Revisions of Racism in Popularist Society…

The problem, as it should be initially, is how the hell to get this technology to work…to actually publish anything….

I’ll just start, then I can find out if this actually works.

I wanted to start this way back, when watching the Women’s World Cup last summer. There was a single distinguishing feature: very few fouls. Play was more open, tackling less dramatic. The games had less of an operatic feel to them. Players were actually playing…

I used to watch a lot of football when I was younger but, as professionalism, Sky and, therefore, money moved in, it became more tedious, more about gamesmanship (the ‘man’ there is deliberate) and obscene salaries. Gradually, continuing to watch became untenable, especially with the accompanying rise in tribalism – or rather a very peculiar form of ‘tribalism’, concocted along bourgeois lines. The “traditional supporters” were still there, although increasingly priced-out as the middle-class rushed in. With them, came a faux “working classness” which seemed to me, and still seems to me, to be based on intolerance and violence. I’m not suggesting some golden age of “jolly hockey sticks community here” but, as with all things Thatcherite, the joy, the “for its own sake” gradually bled away, replaced by a harsher, more calculating (hello Heidegger) attitude – an ‘attitude’ (more an ideological product) that has taken hold everywhere.

However, to stick with football. My query was: Is this simply that there isn’t the money ‘invested’ in “the women’s game” (and there isn’t), so the stakes are, in some sense, lower (I’ll talk about the development of the novel in a later post) OR is this because we’re seeing VAR for the first (real) time?

In a wider context, is this yet another case of the human person being afraid of being ‘caught’ by an panoptic technology and, therefore, behaving ‘correctly’ (defined for this purpose as “as they must when under surveillance” [Machiavelli notwithstanding])?

Watching the first few games, particularly I must admit, the first few Scotland games, another question arose: with the introduction of technology, was the human person, yet again, abdicating judgemental responsibility to technology? The old “Computer says No” gambit. When Scotland lost their opening games to referring decisions not seen by the human referee but apparently ‘seen’ by VAR, my partisan reaction was to reach the conclusion that poor refereeing decisions were a crucial “part of the game”, that football is about the human, not the technological.

Ok, I admit it was a “we was robbed” scenario…but we was robbed by technology, not poor human decision-making or poor human “I didn’t see that”-ness.

Given that I’ve spent far more time in the past thirty years thinking about technology’s (and its attendants) impact on me and the world around us (I was only watching the football because I was recovering from a spinal op…yeah, a technological advance that has benefited me immensely), I thought I’d start this blog. I wouldn’t imagine we can reach any definite conclusions…but we can surely discuss the hell out of the topic(s)…and use technology to do it.

I’m also (supremely) interested in the ways in which technology has been, and is, linked to professionalism (which is not something I would see as necessarily good in and of itself), which is, in turn, a “colonial tool” of business: witness the business invasion and colonisation of areas like sport, education (of which a lot, lot more in future posts) and healthcare. When business ‘methods’ rush in, with that entirely bogus claim that “one size will fit all”, vocation, compassion and humanity leg it…or, at best, become utterly beleaguered – seen as infantile in the face of “adult thinking” (calculative thinking). Even creativity has been colonised in the pat few years: it’s fast-becoming a term that means “the utilisation for profit”. Hardly surprising, as profit is the only term that can confer meaning in a capitalist society.