...both the name of two upcoming films, one of them German, about the "Third Wave Experiment" in fascism conducted by a high school teacher with his students in 1967, and a more general interest in behaviourist psychology experiments conducted in simulated "total institutions", not least prisons, (The Stanford Prison Experiment, BBC's critical re-examination of its legacy in the series The Experiment), or authoritarian power/knowledge regimes such as the laboratory (Milgram's experiments). There is also the repackaging of the tradition as entertainment, Big Brother specifically [and reality tv more generally]. Finally, and hardly least of all, the latter is followed by the phenomenon of Abu Ghraib prison, with Milgrim's old high school friend, Philip Zimbardo, who designed the Stanford Experiment, appearing for the defence in the trial of Sgt. Chip Frederick.
No doubt there are compelling reasons to be suspicious of the tacit endorsement by some German filmmakers of the conclusions reached by Milgram and Zimbardo (it will be recalled that "Die Welle" arrives on the scene after "Das Experiment"). The uniqueness of Germany's resurgent past is open to relativisation once it can be demonstrated that the reproduction of authoritarian structures in any setting can license unthinking obedience and callous indifference to human suffering. Small wonder then that Omer Bartov, in his Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Territories, feels compelled to highlight the shortcomings of Milgram's scientific "objectivity". Bartov reveals, with reference to Milgram's notes about his chosen subjects, a whole host of preconceptions which would have coloured his design of the experiment and the evaluation of any data subsequently collected. Indeed, they are appear to be little more than crude sterotypes about ethnicity and gender socialisation for the most part. This leads Bartov to conclude:
"I would argue that obedience to authority among those whose collaboration is most necessary, the educated professional elites, men and women of religion and faith...generals and professsors, comes from accepting the fundamental ideas that guide that authority and wishing them to help realise in practice; and that this becomes possible only if both the authority and those who obey it share the same prejudices, the same view of the world, the same fundamental perception of reality" (p191).
Bartov then moves onto further qualification by arguing that psychological, historical, sociological, ideological and political forces will manifest in different ways, depending upon their degrees of integration (and their later interpretation as such). Although he is not discussing this passage specifically, my earlier post on Randall Collins and his sociological concept of "forward panic", offers some clues as to the reservations he has towards Bartov. He claims, in essence, that Bartov does not adopt a sufficiently systematised approach that could explain the variation between micro and macro dynamics of violence. Collins is much closer to Goffman's thesis of "total institutions", such as the prison or the asylum, when he describes cases of violent bullying in Japan's private school system. His explanation is that such settings function in terms of high ritual density, so it is not surprising that the violence occurs on the edges of where this density can be maintained (e.g. attacks on new students or "outsiders", both of whom by definition lack solidarity ties).
So what I would like to investigate in the future is the extent to which Collins can be (mis)construed as offering an exculpatory argument for violent individuals operating in settings of high ritual density, such as Abu Ghraib. I very much doubt this was his intention, as he would otherwise appear an unusual bedfellow for the likes of Milgram or Zimbardo (which Bartov was more explicitly distancing himself from). This impression may only be confirmed or denied once his next volume on the macro level of violence is published, as this should logically necessitate more engagement with some of the other variables cited by Bartov.
Towards the end of the above clip, noted Kelly historian Ian Jones speculates on the possible Imperial response to a successful Kelly Gang's Glenrowan siege and subsequent declaration of a North East Victorian republic. Jones is the author of the excellent 'Ned Kelly: a Short Life', a book that combines the best of the biographical with the socio-political to a degree that no other Kelly book attains. Jones draws alot of the sociological elements of his work from the, unfortunately, now out of print, 'The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: the Geographical Dimensions of Social Banditry' by John Mcquilton, who characterizes the Kelly gang as fitting the 'social bandits' model as defined by Hobsbawn.
Both authors place the Kelly outbreak within the broader context of a rural colonial class system which produced enormous antagonism between wealthy large-scale landowners ('Squatters') and impoverished small landowners ('selectors'). Attempts by the State government to encourage greater equity and more of the rural working class to take up farming ( following the end of the Gold Rush ) largely resulted in further disparity in land and resources ownership, as the various land selection acts were easily circumvented by the squatters and used by them to acquire even more land holdings. Moreover, the interests of the wealthy tended to dominate the local power structures. Squatters, for example, often paid the police handsome rewards for cooperating with local Stock Protection Societies and the vigorous prosecution of their so called 'enemies'. The Kelly family was a particular target of squatter James Whitty and the constabulary, who deemed the Kellys as irredeemably criminal. Such persecution only mounted following the radical Victorian Premier Berry's attempt to break the upper classes control of the Upper House and the public services ( including, of course, the criminal justice system ) when he threatened to introduce mass sackings of, among others, the Victorian police forces, following the Upper Houses blocking of his governments supply. This threat of sacking resulted in an even closer relationship of interest between graziers and police, and also encouraged the radicalisation of police methods as they sought to further prove their effectiveness and worth to government. For the Kellys this meant an increase in special police attention.
Further rural stresses were produced by the onset of drought and an early form of modernity as the advent of the railway, for example, isolated those communities of the North East that were bypassed, and the introduction of new technologies, the costs of which were beyond the means of many poorer farmers who were desperate to make their small land holdings viable. Hence, the symbolic significance of the Kelly gang manufacturing their body armour out of the unproductive technology of plough share boards.
All of the above Jones and Mcquilton use to suggest that the actions of the Kelly gang, and the support of a large sympathiser network used by the gang to evade capture for some twenty months, was not just some simple act of lawlessness, but rather a "semi-political" form of social resistance. Jones, in fact, was the first author to argue that Ned and the gang eventually planned (however vague and naive) the formation of a republic for the discontented rural poor (and not just confined to Irish Australians) of North East Victoria. He argues that the famous Jerilderie Letter foreshadows such a concept:
It will pay the government to give those people who are suffering innocence justice and liberty if not I will be compelled to show some colonial strategem which will open the eyes of not only the Victorian police and inhabitants but also the whole British army. No doubt they will acknowledge their hounds were barking at the wrong stump, and that Fitzpatrick will be the cause of greater slaughter to the Union Jack than St. Patrick was to the snakes and toads in Ireland.
Furthermore, the whole Glenrowan siege itself, Jones maintains, can only be understood as the first vital step towards the realisation of this new republic: the planned killing of the trainload of police, and the capture of the senior police officers for use as hostages; the intention to bail up several local banks to help fund the new movement ; the use of fireworks to signal to the armed sympathisers the commencement of the uprising; Ned's leaving of the Ann Jones Inn to warn the supporters to leave once the failure of the siege was apparent, etc.
"In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined"
"Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.
"Rutgers, which has long had a top-ranked philosophy department, is one of a number of universities where the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is ballooning; there are 100 in this year’s graduating class, up from 50 in 2002, even as overall enrollment on the main campus has declined by 4 percent".
"At the City University of New York, where enrollment is up 18 percent over the past six years, there are 322 philosophy majors, a 51 percent increase since 2002.
"'If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy,' said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics. 'I think that subject is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.'
"Nationwide, there are more colleges offering undergraduate philosophy programs today than a decade ago (817, up from 765), according to the College Board. Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s."
"David E. Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, a professional organization with 11,000 members, said that in an era in which people change careers frequently, philosophy makes sense. 'It’s a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking,' he said.
"Mr. Schrader, an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware, said that the demand for philosophy courses had outpaced the resources at some colleges, where students are often turned away. Some are enrolling in online courses instead, he said, describing it as 'really very strange.'
"'The discipline as we see it from the time of Socrates starts with people face to face, putting their positions on the table,' he said.
"The Rutgers philosophy department is relatively large, with 27 professors, 60 graduate students, and more than 30 undergraduate offerings each semester. For those who cannot get enough of their Descartes in class, there is the Wednesday night philosophy club, where, last week, 11 students debated the metaphysics behind the movie 'The Matrix' for more than an hour.
"An undergraduate philosophy journal started this semester has drawn 36 submissions — about half from Rutgers students — on musings like 'Is the extinction of a species always a bad thing?'
"Barry Loewer, the department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders.
"As the approach has changed, philosophy has attracted students with little interest in contemplating the classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy. Some, like Ms. Onejeme, the pre-med-student-turned-philosopher, who is double majoring in political science, see it as a pre-law track because it emphasizes the verbal and logic skills prized by law schools — something the Rutgers department encourages by pointing out that their majors score high on the LSAT.
"Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology."
"What constitutes an instrumentalized classroom? Perhaps one of the most conspicuous signs of such a classroom is the subordination of the instructional materials to the survey paradigm. A feature of postsecondary education in the United States since the forties, a survey course, regardless of discipline, almost invariably means that a wide range of materials will be examined from an unspecified vantage point for the duration of the course. In literary departments, surveys typically function to introduce students to national, historical, or generic fields ('Survey in British Literature,' for example). The paradigm recommends itself for its efficiency. The survey course covers a lot of ground quickly, and it can be taught with an incredibly high student-to-teacher ratio. Moreover, it encourages precisely the sort of histrionics on the part of teachers that create the impression of pluralism and the 'free marketplace of ideas' for students—people who are regarded by their teachers as simultaneously empty vessels and indisputable authorities on 'what they like.' To be sure, students often enjoy such courses, but less because they are indeed successful than because their 'exposure' to a field of knowledge can be orchestrated so that the discovery of their 'ignorance' becomes indistinguishable from the pleasure their instructors take in being smarter than those who are, by their instructor’s own definition, incapable of seriously evaluating his or her intelligence. This, of course, does not distinguish survey courses from other large lecture courses.
"What gives the idealism latent in the survey paradigm its political charge is the fact that, in the name of providing a general exposure to a subject area that should open up students’ choices, it consolidates and gives institutional legitimacy to the epistemological assumptions students have been hailed with since elementary school—assumptions that are demonstrably narrow and thus incapable of promoting open choices. The assumptions animating idealism are restrictive because they contain as an implicit foundational claim the notion that the sphere of ideas is autonomous (i.e., separate from society and material history) and determinant in the last instance (i.e., ideas make the world go around). It is because ideas are assumed to make the world go around that partisans of survey courses believe that it is responsible to present the sphere of ideas as that which enables a historical period to cohere. It is not a compromise for the sake of pedagogical expediency that motivates this focus—after all, other sorts of courses and major requirements can be imagined—what motivates this focus is a belief in idealism as such. And while it is true that surveys often deal with history,they do so in a manner consistent with the tenets of idealism. This means two things: on the one hand, it means that history is reduced to what we refer to as intellectual history—a reduction that automatically privileges the experiences of those able to give their experiences intellectual expression, and that simultaneously excludes or renders impertinent all otherwise contemporaneous experiences. On the other hand—and this is perhaps the most decisively restrictive aspect of idealism—its approach to history requires that the discourses of intellectual expression be seen as instruments of an intelligence that manipulates them from an ontological elsewhere. In other words, cultural discourse is not only treated as merely historical in the sense of engaged in the day-to-day struggle for existence, but it is also seen as ultimately incapable of infecting the mind with matter. In effect, survey courses, even when they are historical at the level of content, are ahistorical at the level of pedagogical articulation because they proceed as though 'great ideas' engage other 'great ideas' in some timeless sphere where material history never enters. When this arrangement is mapped onto the typical format of an undergraduate lecture, where the mind of the teacher expresses itself in front of what is, on one level, a secretarial pool devoted to materializing his/her ideas (one thinks here of Saussure’s students), the problematic political effects of survey courses are made particularly clear.
"In learning to survey, students absorb a lesson about their relation to knowledge, a lesson that, not surprisingly, is fully coincident with capitalist ideology: those who are in a position to sense the truth of the idea that mind dominates matter learn not only that this idea has always been true, but that it must be true—for if it were not simply a matter of truth (a concept that ambiguously and therefore conveniently refers both to a place and a condition), then one would have to come to terms with the power relation within which this idea has been made to appear true. Idealism is designed to shield truth from power by making the former apply to a sphere of existence that maintains what power it has by denying that power affects this sphere in any way. This is how even the most radical critiques of capitalist patriarchy are instantly neutralized—they are treated as more “great ideas,” a fact that suggests yet another way surveys are inherently restrictive, namely, they are incapable of being effectively critical of the context in which they are offered. For if we agree that being effectively critical has something to do with empowering students to change their social relations, then a course that essentially reproduces the existing social relations within its own organizational dynamics not only cannot be critical, but actively contributes to a maintenance of the status quo. Such a result can hardly be construed as either neutral or open, and in this respect survey courses are indeed problematic even on their advocates’ own terms. To insist, as some proponents of survey courses no doubt will, that one can override the limits of the model through “creative” design, is to fall back into idealism. Specifically, such an insistence relies on the notion that one can simply escape the history embedded in the model, bypassing the domains of the term’s derivation, the relations implicit in the very concept of an overview, the tradition of its institutionalization, and so forth, merely by thinking about things differently. This is not to say that educators are purely passive bearers of what has preceded them, but if we are in some sense capable of historical agency, why should we waste our energies trying to revitalize a patently deficient paradigm? It is time to do something else."
"Survey and Discipline: Literary Pedagogy in the Context of Cultural Studies" John Mowitt
War on Want has published Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover, a cutting edge graphic novel about the corporations who are profiting from the conflict in Iraq.
The comic, created by Sean Michael Wilson (script writer) and Lee O' Connor (illustrator), show that amid the daily violence suffered by Iraqis, oil companies and the US and UK governments are taking advantage of the country’s weakness to secure long-term control over Iraq’s enormous oil reserves. In addition, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) are making a killing in Iraq, while remaining unaccountable for countless human rights abuses and deaths by mercenary soldiers. The comic paints the picture of one young Iraqi man’s efforts to understand and cope with this new reality – and do something about it!
Please no citation or reproduction of any original writings or images appearing on this blog without the permission of its authors.
"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
