scouring the web

a cold clay bowl rests within a birch
overflowing, this exceptional receptacle
resolves in bounded space
that has no place
at intervals, beyond the tree or among it: there
odes owe to writing the class of letter
Victorieusement fui le suicide
that elsewhereness of writing's ploy
writing's dilettantish mistress not loving loves the turn else without these leave-takes

oh lend a place an inside,
where I leaving have a grace

On Education in the UK and Why I am supporting the strike on March 26th

Education is the UK is in crisis. Over the year-and-a-half period of my sixth-form life the Department of Education has enacted a systematic campaign of violence against this country's schools, colleges and universities. Teachers'  financial and career security has been put under risk amongst an increasingly claustrophobic culture of fear. Fixed pay scale points has been ceded to performance related pay has supervened, and teachers will be 15% worse off in real terms under this Government. Placing teachers' pay decisions under senior management opens up the payroll to bullying and control. Professionals and students are instructed that the transmission of ideas should become a political issue. A recent study by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) concluded, “the overall picture reveals no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes”[1]. We are party to the neo-liberal ploy of monetising every aspect of our once sacrosanct public services thereby defiling an area of life that must remain beyond the world of finance. The lot of the class of '14 has been to witness the failure of our hopes: the verdant prospect of reasonably priced higher education had morphed into a horrific concatenation of increasing student debt, overworked lecturers struggling to maintain tenure on threadbare salaries, and underpaid domestic staff  kept on their sub-living wage contracts only by lack of other work available. At college, haggard, overworked staff struggling to respond to the daily challenges of prescriptive classroom teaching supplemented by the  Sisyphean task of marking appears an unforgiving yet ubiquitous spectacle. Of course, no teacher is able to speak out beyond union involvement, but this is superfluous: in the tired looks and throwaway satirical remarks about Gove, a resentment towards an increasingly monolithic and repressive educational apparatus is all-too-obviously immanent.

In short, what we are witnessing under this current Tory government is a war on our fundamental ideal of affordable world-class education consigned to the past so as to future the programme of the centre-right ideologue. Trotsky wrote in 1922 through education “we form the concrete human beings of our epoch”. What we are forming in the UK is a polarised division of the clever and the lucky against the rest. The outcome is clear: by making education an increasingly unattractive career option for graduates the number of staff will decline. We will see harassed, overworked teachers unable to prepare adequately for their timetables of over-full classes. We will see a decline in the conditions of college facilities, events, and extra-curricular activities. Knowledge and enjoyment shall become increasingly the exclusive preserve of the “gifted and talented”, that wonderfully vague signification eliding the truth: the rich and the clever who are prepared to keep quiet about the depreciating conditions will preside, and all else confined to the dustbin of zero-hour contracts. With the withdrawal of EMA in 2010, a £30 a week subsidy for students from low income households that  2010,  this government's stance on the vulnerable became clear: to separate the student demographic and exclude the poor from access to education and the potential assertion to stronger economic positions. I now have a friend who is often unable to feed himself whilst at school. But we are all marginalised, forced into what at worst seem like thetic qualifications whilst the government demolish the pedagogic architecture of our once world-class state education system.

The department of Education is forestalling the potential of its citizens to accede to the same positions they did - rejecting not juwantst a generation but the future nation. As we tend towards  an American, finance-based model students remain powerless to formulate a response because all of the channels are -violently- foreclosed. We watch the staff who care for us and work for us pushed to the limits of capability as the form of education the government prescribes requires a precise model for the teacher to assume.  The only outlet is the occasional action organised by the NUS, an organisation notionally with students' interests at heart but substantially in the thrall of the Labour party. If we wish to accede to this increasingly calcified pedestal of traditional legitimisation we must be prepared to cast off of any hope of security or support. The alienation which Marx writes of (here a propos religion):

 “becomes the spirit of egoism, the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of division ... It has been tossed among various private interests and exiled from the community”[2].

Is this not exactly what we see happening to our education system? It is increasingly subjected to the laws of capital, the perverse degrading logic by which we find ourselves in a progressively more hostile pedagogic environment. Abiding by strict notions of what knowledge consists of is more valuable than intellectual or creative ability. We increasingly can't support each other in learning because we are fighting each other for respect and jobs. For example, Gove would like to remove careers advisers from schools[3] to further his programme of fear and obfuscation. The very idea of collective resistance is foreclosed under the workings of the ideological apparatus incessantly reminding us of the necessity to become useful: this hysterical discourse of ordering the impossible has become the endemic demand of the state institution within late capitalism[4].

The government has cut fast this year, culminating in the announcement by Danny Alexander that student debt would be partially privatised[5], shifting the graduate's lot from being debt-laden to toxic. To the financial system, progressively assuming the insidious role of arbiter of worth, we will be worse than nothing, subjects which exist only to owe to business.  In the current climate there is little assurance of employment awaiting. But still we are instructed not to disrupt the functioning of the superior discourse of Power.

Therefore, when the NUT staff strike on the 26th March I shall walk out of college too, as will hundreds of others, tired of the persecution, tired of pretending that this is acceptable, tired of false genuflection. The message is support for the teachers who seek to create a system where the academic discourse is open, and who desire to see students and teachers represented in mutual harmony rather than obscured behind  financial scrivening. Students' persecution by the state will be foremost in the consciousness of the thousands of students at my school, ready to be discussed and militantly defended at every campus they reach. What we require is a belief in the capability of the state to aid rather than control, to guide rather than force.


1: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/50328990.pdf
2: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/Education/EdC181213.pdf
3: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society p.277  (Anchor Books: 1967)
4: For the textbook discussion of this "the reproduction of the conditions of production" I refer the reader to Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
Whilst the concept is expounded is insufficiently developed there (or elsewhere by Althusser himself) it remains essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of education.
5:https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-chief-secretary-to-the-treasury-danny-alexander-investing-in-britains-future

Within Prospect's Figure

`So the Soul's motion does not end in bliss' - Katherine Philips

I
When it was still in season
to regard oneself as growing
not straight a dull cedars
guarded in the breeze, from singular frost
by a singular gardener who tends likewise
the shallow crocuses with remonstration -
almost as base as the tongue of frost
twixt four and five which grew them into pastels,
to forgive his sleep. Life is idolatrous. Or
ease him into forgetting.
More either, admirable what is not
that was a finer modulation to its essence.
The scene was a slowly collapsing festoonment as
a grey trunk to reveal night.

II
Whether from our own order, the furtive
abetting what is new amounts to the contortions of this life,
the crisp cut heads of autumnal radiance made slow.
In gasping outwards there is new growth.
You grown cold with the human wish, there can be, there must be
a returning as Phoebus intoxicated at night
and a fall that is not a redolent stump.
Which happens so we point skyward
sloven in outer retreats, the empty dance
of the native hermit's boyant nepenthe
his comic apperception of swell's fall
will drown again the self's entent.

III
Who was it that when the sense of closure,
knowed and returned its deeds, stalling on the threshold
bearing down his tender excoriations
to bring it apart again? The touch.

Blot

floundering the    not
cawing of     disjecta
coming from  the sea
coming to      the sea

touching the        lot
pawing spumes grey
again pouring    curd
curd of love       that

settling into     what
       mildewed page
erratum in a   taught
neutralised      gale?

this way I  seek plot
  sopping   splotches 
subtler as delirium in
your second's stead

a shifted    shingle 
remonstrance    ...
noon's     obsequy
and the sea turning

Arche-Aesthetics: from Heidegger to Derrida

“The rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings what opposes measure and boundary to its common outline”- Heidegger

Where can we begin in understanding a work of art? It is to this question Martin Heidegger turns in his 1937 essay, seeking to bring the concepts he had developed in Being and Time to the aesthetic enquiry. 

Heidegger argues that from the first perception of the work, its entry upon the phenomenological horizon, humans bring their understanding to bear upon it as projection. An understanding that, he argues, is mired in the classical opposition between form and content. Heidegger's task is to begin a hermeneutic investigation into the work of art which would be free of the conceptual trappings of other attempts by virtue of his awareness of his own enterprise, “compelled to follow a circle”, in its propounding of aesthetic virtue, avoiding being drawn into the traditional "transcendental" study which preceded him which would ultimately refer to some empty concept such as "beauty". To think art, to do justice to it in situ, there is called for the study of aesthetics within its own unique concepts, along its own Being (Deleuze similarly makes the primary quality of art its rupturing of established signification in the becoming of the problem). We can find this primary Art located between the "essence of the work" and the "essence of the artist", as relationship between subject and object, and tracing this should reveal the place "from which and by which [art] is". 

Dismissive of  formulations that aim to explain the art merely as re-presentation of lived experience, Art is for Heidegger not the showing of an already known fact or even the presentation of new fact but the clearing of possibility for truth. As thrown-beings, we exist within the place into which we are thrown: the singular characteristic of Art (or poetry) is its ability to open this "clearing” wherein things are already truthful in their relationship to one another. As ground for his investigation, he offers three theories about the work of art: as substance, as sense perception and as formal matter. Taking the latter, he examines van Gogh's a Pair of Shoes:

But not directly. First, in order to teach the thingliness of the art he provides equipment as the most understandable kind of thing, "that which takes matter and form as guide achieves spatial dominance". Using the "example" of a pair of peasant's shoes, the Van Gogh painting is used to illustrate or "facilitate the visual representation of them". Art has been used to illustrate how this equipmental-being could be put to use to explain how the thinking of thingliness has been granted in Van Gogh's painting. Art which would exist as the clearing, as the "possibility of truth" has been put to use as re-presentation of the visible. Failing to articulate even the prefatory without putting art's being-work to work itself, this clearing of the concepts of thingliness is from the start mired in the contradictory.

Continuing, the task of art is framed as being-work, to “liberate the free space of the open region and to establish it in its structure” through navigating the complexities of artist creation from materials in themselves, the objects used in creation come to bear in their “earth-ness”, that which has a tenancy to “come forth and shelter” and “juts” into the openness of the “world”. The artist cannot create ex nihilo in the pure openness of a dimensionless creativity (the worldly-element) but neither is art strictly limited to its formative conditions, of representation and historical development (the earthly). What Heidegger characterises as "strife" is the interplay between these two forces in the formation of the work, the "jutting".

A propos the phenomenological distinction between the being of matter “[denying] us any penetration” and the being of man operates in the distinction between the opening and this setting back, Heidegger opens the theological "the setting up ... is the splendour that the god comes to presence", possibly though the “Greek temple” which “fits together” “surrounding paths into a unity”. Of course here it is possible to begin a deconstructive attack upon the use of such a theological disjunction, but the careful phraseology confines the efficacy of such a project to a mere question of word-usage: Heidegger's point is the articulation of the transcendental rather than its authentic belief. When Heidegger here adopts a religious timbre it is to articulate the wholeness of Being in its full dimension; art can "clear" for this. (Of course Derrida, aware of many of Heidegger's inconsistencies, is still open to such a "weak-theology" attack).

Having set the parameters of the work of art hermeneutically Heidegger then comes to a similar answer; the being-work of art is making-true to a community or receiver of the work, which is temporally and culturally indeterminate from the creation, the strife of being: “the work-being of the work consists in the mediation of the strife between world and earth”. What we may see in Art, if it should “clear” our particular being is the existential tension between the openness of the world as possibility and the closure that matter demands. Repeating the hermetic operation, Heidegger builds on Nietzsche by marking out truth as an empty signifier referring only to correctness which would then mean, in a “curious tangle”, truth again, which will have to “stand and fall with [the] unconcealment of beings”. Therefore “Truth [has] an impulse toward a work grounded in its very essence”.

Finally, Heidegger gives us three characteristics of a work of art. One: the creativeness of the work's being transfixes the strife into the figure which sutures the earth and the world. Two: the creativeness of art is part of the created work so that “unconcealment has happened”. Three: the work of art has a willing un-closedness preparing the clearing for entry of the human being. Heidegger's reading is finally to be an attempt to remove his own initial posit of the thingliness of the art to authorise the final grandiose statement “The origin of the work of art, is art”. By subjecting art to his existential criteria Heidegger obfuscates the clarity of his own initial posit of art fundamentally as object. When he removes the “thingliness” posit he must also concede the central tenet of his argument; the strange ontological "clarity" of being under Heidegger's reading is not sufficient. 

Jacques Derrida, responds in Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing to Heidegger's essay. He provocatively opens with a definition - the French pointure meaning “1. an old synonym of prick. 2. A point, used to fix the page.” We might say that he brings the archaic form to bear with acuity upon Heidegger's text, which, along the failings I have outlined above he chastises as “ridiculous and lamentable”. 

The Origin of the Work of Art begun with "the matter/form couple and the concept of thing" which have "long dominated every theory of art and aesthetics". What this posit broaches is the question of whether this distinction is located within the being-work or being-product of a being. The case has been argued that it does not, that through being claimed by the silence or opening of the being-work of the work we can arrive at what Heidegger would describe in the Letter on Humanism as the "unusual character of the simple". We cannot however reach this unusual character as of yet, at least through the given reasoning. The example used in Origin is the peasant shoes, but these shoes are not "as" peasant shoes, they are rather as shoes-as-product rather than the simpleness of Being; everywhere the thing or product or work supervenes upon the clarity of Being. The Origin has been a study of "The Manifestation of the being-product" (Derrida), despite the vitriol with which the author attacks the "sphere of familiarity and connoisseurship" of the art industry. Heidegger was unable to break the cycle of interpretation to emerge at Being - perhaps this is unsuprisoing when we recall that the shoes were given without "pictorial or aesthetic reference" - that is, without having been "cleared" so as to exist in their openness. In trying to articulate the silent for-itself of art Heidegger has arrived at a "schema, in a barely displaced Kantian sense" (Derrida).

Derrida's criticism lead's us to an impasse where, refusing to accept the weight of traditional interpretations or pursue the uncomfortable progress of Heidegger's argument, we founder.

The comment in Origin that "everybody knows what belongs to shoes" can be used to enact a deconstructive reconfiguration of the argument at its own origin. Heidegger's use of a product has not enshrined it as paradigmatic or transcendental; he could have produced another example and the track which he takes is reproachable only in its specificity; the discourse would still have functioned: the peculiar phenomenological classifications of the world, the earth etc. would still have been reachable. Therefore the truth must be abandoned in this specific context but may be recovered as "further away from the matter-form couple, further away than even 'a distinction between the two'" or "à côté de ses pompes". The possibility of the origin is always problematic because through enunciating it we, as Heidegger does, must fix ourselves to a deterministic ontological terrain which would then determine it's eventual form of solution.

Praising instead Magritte's art, Derrida's arche-aesthetics would escape the phenomenological trap of remaining metaphysically bound by formulating itself around "seires and citationality" or the "affirmation of the loss of origin" remarked of in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. As in Philosophy of the Boudoir (above), the notion of belonging, as feet may "belong to a subject", ensures aesthetics remains attached to its historical metaphysical roots. Margrite, identifying the shoes with the partial object of psychoanalytic desire provides an alternate: we cannot take the object (Art) as belonging, even to a function of unconcealing, but rather as an articulation within a disjointed discursive economy. Even when this art must "make the expert speak", there should remain a preservation of this disconcerting sense of the absent arbiter of meaning. The "this is that predication" of the art scholar will no longer do. Therefore as we are thrown again not into being but into the questions of the possibility of our own perspective, we are able to reconstitute and thereby reinstate Heidegger. Even if "the step backwards from, a truth of adequation to a truth of unveiling, can leave one practically disarmed in the face of the ingenious, the precritical, the dogmatic" the opening upon our (ideological) selves has occured. Ironically Heidegger best articulated the ability of Art as being-work to make-speak though the form rather than the content of his essay: art in its silence has a being-work as making-speak, and the unbroken silence with which the art reflects our own projection reveals elements of our human strife to reach answers.

Sources:

1. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, trans Albert Hofstadter (London: Routledge, 1993)

2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)