Education and the State

"Today’s educational institutes teach people to live ‘on automatic’ from an early age, without ever asking the vital questions, they develop in them cruelty and a hatred of alternative ways of thinking. From the earliest age their liberties are forgotten."

Maria Alyokhina, August 2012

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This statement by Maria Alyokhina, who is better known as one of the members of Pussy Riot, two of whom are imprisoned by the Russian government at the moment, revives ideas of totalitarian state, brainwashing etc. The statement is taken from her closing remarks for the case. What I am particularly interested in here is her choice of the adjectives "cruelty" and also "hatred", and I want to do something quite simple in my analysis which is to examine these two words and whether their emotive use is justified or whether it is, maybe inspired by a particular dramatic context in which the band members are imprisoned, I should also make it known that I have no connection with and am not knowledgable about Russian education system and I am taking this statement only in as much as it insersects with my own interest in anarchism, questions of whether the systems upon which we depend for our existence are facing imminent collapse, I pose this as a genuine question relevant to present context and not as a definite or as an outcome which is inevitable. As usual I am here to learn and I take the position of the student sitting eagerly in front of a blackboard upon which is written both this statement and the questions it raises.

The dialectic opened by the statement is one that positions the Russian state, or if you extend this proposition all states, using education as a means by which the citizen automatically governs themself without any state intervention, recalling nightmare futurist states of the 1950's where the citizen has no control over his or her cogency and is controlled using a formal state apparatus from birth into the accepting, conforming state with no capacity for resistence to this mechanism, which for Maria takes the form of asking vital questions, specifically she states here the the target is alternative ways of thinking. The position of the citizen in this model is one who is not granted the capacity for cognitive distance from their circumstance and is therefore disallowed from all other positions except for one which supports the state and so on.

Of course we can see the construction here, it is all very well to argue this point, but it is to be viewed of course with a degree of suspicion when it is made from the perspective of the romantic heroine who is rebelling against the state and etc. In some sense of course she is going to argue this, that the citizen is brainwashed etc, because if the state were to be functioning validly then her own position of incarceration becomes validated. The very fact that she can make the statement is a degree of self-refute, what I mean is, if she were truly in a state which was brainwashing its citizens from birth not only could she not make the statement but she could also not exist.

And so for her statement about education to be valid here the arguement must also be an allowance for the citizen to rebel or resist this mechanism and to still also be contained within it. This is where education is the only possible tool of containment, we may propose that if the subject does not know freedom, they cannot by definition experience it properly.

But this is different to "hatred" or "cruelty" which are more active terms. When Maria uses these terms she activates the citizen against his or her own freedom, I claim, she turns the citizen against itself. What does this mean for the citizen who is here made an agent of his or her own imprisonment, not trapped by a state mechanism. This is truly, I claim, where we are today. We are not improsoned by any state apparatus or mechanism, but instead we are completely at liberty to imprison ouselves.

But turning to the last statement Maria makes, it is itself a contradictory statement, that "From the earliest age their liberties are forgotten". The implication here is that freedom is forgotten before it is truly learnt, obviously it is a farcical statement, it contains a contradition, which is a good indication that a statement is philosophical and not literal. So what does she mean here? With some slight adjustment, the statement is that we are in fact "taught to forget". And this is the functions of the education system, to teach you to forget.

This is a very nice way of putting it I think, it very much brings to mind Jameson and Baudrillard and what other postmodern theorists have been pointing at for some time. The functioning of the state and its mechanisms here is not a sort of Soviet-era erasure, in other words, "forget this person, he never existed" because in this model it was obviously what you were being told and why, in other words, you are allowed to know differently (althought this must be kept private) but one that from an early age begins to train the citizen in the, if you like, the act of forgetting. When forgetting becomes second nature to the citizen that is when the state has complete control. We can imagine different models for this, where time-spans for forgetting become shorter and shorter and the impact for an event to be forgotten can become larger, to the point where extremely large-scale events can be forgotten within a week and so on.

Returning to the earlier part of Maria's statement, the forgetting citizen is truly running on 'automatic' because in some senses they are capable of nothing else, they have only been trained in the method of forgetting. 'Automatic', as the term is used here, denotes a cognitive latency which renders the citizen incapable of critical distance. Here is where we run into a problem with these words "Cruelty" and "Hatred" again - if this were true, the citizen would be incapable of hatred or cruelty as they are too passive, a citizen who is too well-trained in forgetting is incapable of such an active position. (By the time they have worked up enough energy to hate something they have forgotten about it and so on). But I prefer not to suggest that she has used these words for no reason. I claim instead that this is, ok maybe it's a little poorly formulated but what I think she is suggesting here is not that "we are the alternative and you are not capable of seeing our point of view" but in fact a suggestion of sado-masochism or self-punishment that the citizen is under, neccessary for systematic governance.

Such a system is truly a system of terror precisely because it is no longer a case of a persecuted few who fight against the system but a system of self-inflicted control, where the citizen governs themselves against actions of resistence. We might see this as a logical progression of Focault's panopticon except that now we do not have other people watching us, we watch ourselves and we govern our own movements.

Maria legitimately asks, I claim, is this freedom or not?