The marvellous thing about this period of “unfinished business” is that we can re-approach the issues of ELT having refreshed ourselves by journies into critical theory unencumbered by emotions generated by the heat of battle. Of course arguments have continued to rage but with the distance of time we can see how little they have resolved themselves or indeed were likely to have resolved themselves. There are as as always, green shoots of optimism (perhaps more so than 2013) but in general everything in ELT is very much as it ever was.
With this in mind we would like to recommend to readers a short but powerful book by Mark Fisher, an ex-Further Education lecturer, which makes an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of our times, both in society in general and in education in particular. The book “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative” combines Fisher’s interest in the critical theory of the “Frankfurt School” with what we might describe has his personal sense of ennui in society in general and in education in particular.
The central thesis of the book is that we are living a totalitarianism never experienced before by human kind (for those that know something of the Frankfurt School” this will feel familiar territory). In short, the future has lost its futurity, we live in atemporal times. Some will remember Margaret Thatcher’s famous “TINA” (there is no alternative) but few if any will have thought through the profound consequences (not economically but pyschologically and culturally) of internalising this idea. Fisher sees the collapse of “really existing socialism” not as signalling the end of one particular alternative to capitalism but somehow achieving the status of signalling the end of any alternative to capitalism. In this he is exploring Francis Fukuyama’s famous but now widely derided thesis (developed at the very beginning of the period in which capitalist realism emerged) that we are at the “end of history”. For Fisher, Fukuyama articulates a certain fundamental truth; although not as Fukuyama argued, that the world was converging on some stable liberal utopia of free trade and perpetual peace but, on the contrary, the world of capitalist realism is characterised by the ‘normalization of crisis’. What Fukuyama was correct in articulating was a vision of the ideological self-image of the post-Cold War period which would come to predominate – an all powerful narrowing of the bounds of political possibility and a widespread sense that capitalism had not only defeated its major opponent, but that it had also, in doing so, destroyed forever the very possibility of serious challenge to its ascendency.
The cancellation of the future as Fisher puts it, also robs of us of the past. Without novelty and change the significance of the past evaporates into nothingness. Capitalist realism’s eternal present gives rise to a collective social and cultural malaise. The absence of future and past drains the present of all meaning. Contemporary individuals, for Fisher, inhabit a melancholy and sterile world devoid of hope. It is a truly unhealthy state of affairs in psychological terms causing profound anxieties and neuroses at both an individual and social level.
Though not contained in the book but pinpointed in a separate talk on “Capitalist Realism”, Fisher identifies the disappearance of musical genre as an illustrative example of this capitalist realism. Indeed, polls and user data report that music users under the age of 34 (millennials and “Generation Z”) are not thinking about styles or genres. According to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), 85% of young people listen to music via playlists everday. Moreover, Psychology Today reports that this group is concerned about the song (or artist) that is trending and narratives in the lyrics which appeals to them when they listen to music and rather than genres. They do not, therefore, create playlists based on traditional genres. In fact, much new music is operating outside of such definitions anyway. If we check out the wikipedia page on British Pop, we also see the disappearance of the importance of genres (Grime perhaps being the only significant genre in the last twenty years) in listening habits.
Indeed, the latest tendency is towards “contextualized playlisting.” Context awareness (think shopping malls and restaurants) provides “opportunities for an enhanced user experience”, customizating your playlists to fit the environment you find yourself in. This process can be applied to the generation of music playlists on mobile phones or on your home computer. Using a form of Artificial Intelligence, the contextual playlist (CX) creates the type of music which a person might “wish” (the computer is interpreting and generating your desires) to listen to influenced by factors such as: song choices of the past, holidays versus non-holiday, the time of day, the ambient temperature (inside or out) and other weather factors (rain, wind, snow, etc.), amount of ambient or background noise, the current amount of physical activity a person is doing (heart rate monitor), and their emotive state. In short, (and we are not here idealising genre) genre was an active construction of self through music while new music is about adapting to the environment and a computer generated idea of what your sellf may be. This really is an atemporal totality without alternatives.
Interestingly, Fisher sees the only way to combat this totality is through exploiting the cracks in the system, in that Capitalism might appear seemless and all encompassing but that it generates contradictions. Now the description of music above might help explain why young people are reluctant to join the organised left with its various genres within genres but Fisher identifies mental health and bureacracy as two possible sites for effective struggle.
Against the current assertion that ‘free-market’ consumerism is liberating for individuals, neoliberal capitalism, according to Fisher, ‘installs a perpetual anxiety – there is no security: your position and status are under constant review’ ( I am sure Teachers can think of the observed lesson or student feedback questionnaire at the end of each course) . In such conditions a whole range of mental health problems – especially depression – are reaching epidemic proportions. Since these explosive rates of depression and other forms of mental illness are largely socially and structurally generated they demand, as Fisher argues, radical social and political solutions. However, ‘the current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness’ and insists that these are treated simply in terms of biological-chemical imbalances within specific individuals. The ‘chemico-biologization of mental illness’, Fisher argues, is ‘commensurate with its depoliticization’. Mental illness is one area, therefore, in which capitalist realism might be effectively challenged by an organised left which is prepared to ‘repoliticize’ depression and mental distress.
Similarly and perhaps more interesting still, is Fishers proposition that the official ideology of “neoliberalism” (its opposition to bureacracy) ‘is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism’. Fisher points out that ‘new kinds of bureaucracy – “aims and objectives”, “outcomes”, “mission statements” – have multiplied, even as the neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence’ . In fact, these new forms of administration and regulation are, if anything, much more intensely bureaucratic and intrusive than anything which passed before, as we shall see.
As with mental health, Fisher draws on examples from the world of education. The bureaucratic measures that he specifies will be all too familiar to many working in ESOL ad EAP– endless implementation of new procedures designed to assess and ‘measure’ teaching and research ‘performance’, the grading of research ‘output’ as part of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ and countless other forms of ‘target’ fetishism, hoop-jumping and pointless quantitative assessment of often unquantifiable forms of labour. As Fisher argues, these new forms of bureaucracy are certainly not confined to Higher and Further Education – they are ubiquitous throughout much of the public sector (and beyond). These measures are, in a qualitative sense, far more oppressive and intrusive than earlier Fordist forms of bureaucracy, because those subject to these procedures are forced to become complicit with them – they demand, and are driven by perpetual ‘self-surveillance’ or internal policing on the part of individuals caught up in this system of administration and assessment.
An example of this is performance appraisal, where the worker must rate themselves for areas where they have done well and areas where they must improve (think teaching observations). It would simply not be satisfactory to “over-rate” your own performance or suggest there aren’t areas for improvement. This “confessional” approach to “improving performance” is an extreme form of individuation where we are not talking about our responsibilities and desires within the group (let’s organise to “improve” the neighbourhood) but our personal responsibilities for why things are not “optimum” (do I not talk to my neighbours enough/could I help Mrs Brown with the shopping?)
And this is where Fisher’s work draws the delicious irony that the collective pretence that accompanies this useless system of bureaucracy is reminiscent of the processes that characterised the most bureaucratic of states in the Eastern Bloc. Fisher suggests, that in those Stalinist states, all of those responsible for the administration of the system must have been aware that it was worthless and corrupt. Nevertheless, they were expected to pretend that they had not in fact noticed – to act as if the official ideological representation of the system was accurate. Fisher is arguing that an identical process is occuring within “neoliberalism” – everybody trapped in this regime of performance surveillance knows (and, moreover, everybody knows that everybody knows) that the bureaucratic duties they are required to carry out are entirely pointless, but they continue to act in the same way regardless. This insight is a very interesting development of Slavoj Zizek’s exposition of Lacan’s Big Other.
There are critisms to be made of the book, especially its sweeping generalisations, suspect chronology and reliance on ill-defined concepts (eg neoliberalism) but it is immensely thought provoking. Hopefully, books like this will help us identify our challenges better and pick our fights more effectively.
Marxist TEFL Group 