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?

From 'The Coming Insurrection'

"There will be no social solution to the present situation. (...)There’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language."

 
'The Coming Insurrection' p. 15, full text here http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

This text was brought to Australia in October by the Berlin Schauspielhaus in their performance of the play An Enemy of the People. Each night 80-90% of Melbourne audience raised their hands in favour of this text, which is regularly referred to as an anarchist text.

I find this idea of anti-social alarming and provokative but also perhaps true. The social is a place of great love and also great terror - it is where we validate each other's existence, whether that existence be, in its real effect, affirmative, or not. Therefore the Social is a place where both the best and the most evil acts can take place. But I find, it is more often a place of ignorance, in that it grants permission to ignore that which is outside of it.

Also this is an interesting statement about language and common experience. I disagree with this fundamentally - I claim there are no common experiences. Therefore I rephrase it to a problem of language itself - that "there is no common language for experience". Our experience will always be subjective and individual, but its how we share those experiences - what forums we create - these are where community can form. For a chance for that community to build, however, a network must first be created. And then it is a question of who owns the network, who has influence over its architecture, what are its objectives (trivial? narcassistic? commercial?) and who governs it.

Finally, the word 'wealth' in that last phrase is worth contemplating. I do not read this as material wealth, such as that generated in Australia by the mining boom. I read it as inclusive of those immaterial things which make up wealth - love, storytelling, community, knowledge. The idea that we cannot share this wealth without a shared language is a conservative statement - of course, someone may love someone without being able to communicate, over long distances etc. Likewise, people can share the same language and not share any of these 'wealths' at all. How do we explain this category?

The answer is simple. I once had a 2 hour conversation with a Polish man who had no English, using only our hands and a note pad. Here, language was present, but it was a language of connection, fuelled by willpower, which overpowered the inability to talk. Community, love, knowledge - these things are themselves languages.

Sewing

Camera - Kevin Lo

Self-critique

Boal in Paris: "But in these Theatre of the Oppressed workshops there also appeared oppressions which were new to me: 'lonliness', the 'impossibility of communicating with others', 'fear of emptiness'. For someone like me, fleeing explicit dictatorships of a cruel and brutal nature, it was natural that these themes should at first seem superficial and scarcely worthy of attention. It was as if I was always asking, mechanically: 'But where are the cops?' Because I was used to working with concrete, visible oppressions.

Little by little, I changed my opinion. I discovered, for instance, that the percentage of suicides was much higher in countries like Sweden or Finland - where the essential needs of the citizen in matters of housing, health, food and social security are met - than in countries like ours, Third World countries. In Latin America, the major killer is hunger; in Europe, it is drug overdose. But, whatever form it comes in, death is still death. And, thinking about the suffering of a person who chooses to take his or her own life in order to put an end to the fear of emptiness or the pangs of lonliness, I decided to work with these new oppressions and to consider them as such"

(Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, 1995 p7-8)

Boal Friere Occupy

Augusto Boal is an important figure in theatre who will become increasingly relevant as decentralisation of theatre practice becomes standard. His work centres around the concepts outlined in his 1972 book Theatre of the Oppressed in which he puts forward a  criticism of theatre as a predominantly bourgeois activity controlled by powerful interests (by which I do not mean the mafia or some othe secret group which pulls the strings of puppets behind the scenes or whatever. I am referring here to the rule of accepted norms, for example whiteness, chauvenism, upper class power etc) and claims that theatre should be harnessed for other purposes, namely the overthrow of the powerful ('Oppressors') by the powerless ('Oppressed').

Boal bases his theatre work on the theoretical platform of Paolo Friere, whos ideas such as Educational Banking are designed to acheive fluency between power structures and are spelled out in his seminal and often referred to book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed', as well as his life's work which was aimed at mobilising the marginalised elements of South America in order to empower them and, more broadly, to operate against a structure of powerful/powerless that is based on wealth, class, race or other distinctions.

Boal's appropriation of Friere's ideas are half of his work, the other half of his work involves preparing people for what he refers to as an anti-cathartic overthrow of power. In some senses here, Friere is the idealist and Boal the realist. Where Friere's ideas can only exist in paradigm, Boal activates these ideas and in doing so must necessarily extend them into a provokation towards revolutionary action.

But my central problem with Boal is that by opposing the powerful and encouraging the oppressed to act against their oppressors he first of all becomes part of the system (an oppositional or negative that creates the positive) and secondly and more importantly, reinforces the class definitions on which oppression is supposedly based. By saying "You don't need to be oppressed by these people. Rise up and challenge them!" Boal tries to activate his 'spect-actor' to become an aggressive activist with the target of those "in power". The important thing, as always, is what comes after this revolution. You can imagine groups of oppressed overthrowing the system, and then looking around themselves and saying "what now?" and then they make a new system similar to the old one (in some ways this is why Occupy movement was so special, because it did not try to fill in the gap it left with a new system but it was simple attack). In some sense I think these ideas of Friere should remain as just ideas, and in other ways, I think there are different ends to the story which Friere began.

Where Boal unquestionably targets revolution, I think a softer, (more pathetic) but more ethical approach is one that tries to generate humanist art moments of genuine connection. What do I mean by this. Ok - normally you have theatre which says one thing and does a different thing. The typical example is a piece of theatre addressing the topic of Climate Change that in fact emits several tonnes of CO2 into the air from various factors involved in its production, thereby demonstrating the same level of hypocricy as an activist flying to various parts of the world to attend conferences, etc. Leonardo di Caprio was accused of this, Al Gore etc.The opposite is if you were to take the subject of the theatre and feed it back into the means of production, so for example you make a carbon-neutral show about Climate Change, or a protest show about protest. Theatre being an act in practice, these details become important. Yes, here I think Boal encounters a semantic problem. He is asking for one definition, that of oppressor/oppressed to be overthrown, and on the other hand, also asking that they do not themselves become oppressors. This, I claim, is hypocricy.

(From this angle it is also possible to view the collapse of spectator and actor as being one that suggests theatre-makers should 'practice what they preach', and that this is in fact the only way forward for theatre).

So where do we go from here. Having taken down Boal's premise, how might we rebuild it into a frame that suggests different possibilities?

My first claim here is that Friere's central platform can be extended to the statement that all people are oppressed, regardless of class, race, or , through their participation in the system. There is no such thing, I contend, as the oppressed and the oppressors, there are only oppressed which is everyone. In this sense I am siding with Beckett, Orwell or perhaps Joyce. The way this plays out in reality is that through understanding one's own oppression one can better understand the oppression of another and is therefore more likely to act to prevent it. It is the mechanism which is here the target, the structure itself, and not the individual on the other side of it. This, I claim, is what also made Occupy a significant movement, the target was not so much the individual but the definitive structure in which the individual is placed. The catch cry of 'We are the 99%' expresses itself using the capitalists own terms, as a percentage figure, a bottom line. 

Another consequence of the expression of all being oppressed (or if you like '100% oppressed') can be found through examination of what would be its logical opposition. 'Freedom' which is perhaps the first choice here is clearly an ideal - because all are oppressed, none can be free. The opposite or negative term for oppression becomes, I claim, namely something more relevant to contemporary existence of media-saturation and image culture - escapism or fantasy. I will discuss this more another time.

I might be accused of turning oppression into a romantic struggle here. Ok, I admit it, it seems a more authentic answer than the creation of these powerful, god-like rulers (the wealthy, the ruling class etc) who are of course also human beings and of course also have their own struggles. Ok, maybe their struggles seem stupid when you compare them to the struggles of someone suffering because they cannot find enough food for their child etc. An escalator not working or Pippa Middleton's new book not selling well may seem completely trivial next to the a child in the Gaza Strip that is fearing the next bomb dropping on his head. But I argue that it is precisely here that humanism plays its greatest connecting role. Linking these struggles together, ok I admit it's not popular, it would be much easier to argue the opposite, but it gives one access to the other. This is where authentic moments of connection exist, and where we might share our struggles through theatre.

The example here may seem stupid, but in some ways this is how theatre operates to build effective community. Maybe Pippa Middleton's suffering is the same as a child in the Gaza Strip. The question is - who are you to say? Making qualatitive judgements about these things from the outside is not possible. What is acceptable is not necessarily what is true and so on. The point is not the validation of one struggle or another, but the sharing of that struggle, and that is where learning can occur.

So what does this mean for theatre. It means that any truly revolutionary theate will have the sharing of oppressive struggle at its centre, and will exclude no-one from this as exclusion is the basis of oppression. It has at its target the learned division between human beings, being the basis of oppression it tries to eradicate this. It will not necessarily provide salvation to oppression but seek to identify its mechanisms and operations, believing in human will to itself step in and intervene once the context is fully revealed.

Finally, it will ask participants to imagine themselves in the three positions of oppression: oppressor, oppressed and witness, in order that they may fully experience not only the oppressive structure itself but their role within it.

Poem

While you sit on your fat arse and make plays, someone is suffering.
Stop making theatre. Go and help them.
Your theatre is pointless.
Quickly.
DO IT. NOW. CLOCK'S TICKING.
GO! NOW!!! BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!
THEY'RE FUCKEN DYING!!!! WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING THERE?!

GO!!!!!

NOW.

Three Objectives Emerged Sunday Workshop Report #1

Workshop report
Sunday October 28 2012

The workshop was great and I want to thank the participants.

Three objectives emerged.

Talking builds a dependence on... talking. Talking is a rug I will have to slowly pull out over the next few weeks as I continue the workshops. Ideally there is no talking, so I have to get to a point where there is no talking. I think this just means gradually reducing the talking over time. Its kind of that simple. So that's Objective #1.

The "prompts" I give are going to be very important to guide the workshop, and I think alot of my time is going to be dedicated to nutting these out. They also need to have the flexibility to adapt. Ideally, the prompts are all you need - it's obvious from the prompts what you're supposed to be doing, and they follow a logical sequence that builds on the history of the workshop towards a single destination. So designing these prompts into a logical sequence is probably Objective #2.

Objective #3 is about the end destination and what it is. I think yesterdays workshop got us to a point which was meditative because it explored a point after having made it - I showed the participants the answer, and they tried to execute it. In reality this works the other way around. So it's hard to take much from the workshop that feeds this endpoint. What brought me closer to this, if anything, was writing the series of questions that I posed to the participants before the workshop. They are in the images below.