Google trends gadget

I've been playing with Google trends after having a discussion with Tore Hoel about the TEL-MAP project. There's something fascinating about analytics generally. The fact that it gives a concrete representation of what we might suspect (or what might confound our expectations) has a causal effect on the way we think about things. It's another example of how in using computers we seem to be increasingly 'playing with reality' (to use Winnicott's phrase). I'll blog about this in more depth later... But the real-timeness of the interaction between the analytics, thought and action is impressive. And real-time feedback is getting faster and faster (note the second graph comparing 'websockets' with 'nodejs' - both driving forces behind the real-time web).

but...

Heidegger would probably worry about the 'enframing' by technology of human being-in-the-world at this point...

Does he have a point??? well... there's the longer post...!

Mind, Absence and the one-headed myth

Joan Riviere, the psychoanalyst of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott remarked on what might be called the "myth of the one-headed mind":

"There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple, unmixed with other human beings. Each personality is a world in himself, a company of many. That self... is a composite structure ... formed out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges between ourselves and others. These other persons are in fact therefore part of ourselves... we are members of another." (quoted in John Bowlby and Attachment Theory by Jeremy Holmes, p137)

This makes me worry about 'time' and systems thinking. Time is tied up with cybernetics: first-order cybernetics was about time-series (Wiener's book on cybernetics deals with the issue head-on in Chapter 1: "Newtonian vs Bergsonian time"). 2nd order cybernetics turned 1st order concerns onto the observer, but still assumed a 'processing model' with time as the implicit ontological foundation: the observer processes their observations in time, sequentially. But the essential abstraction of time, which is a human construct in itself is never critiqued. That is because it upsets everything. How can you have a difference without time? What's different? This here now? Or this here now? The 'time' of cybernetics is Bergson's idea of 'objective' time (clock time); Objective time is an abstract and rational slicing-up of phenomenological experience. Phenomenological time, on the other hand, is Bergson's 'Temps durée'. It's interesting to think about this, because Ian Kemp told me about it first (see yesterday's post), and that Stravinsky was particularly influenced by the difference between psychological and ontological time.

What I want to say here is that 'objective time' or clock time, is mistakenly believed to be 'one-headed' time. On the other hand, phenomenological time, duration, may be accepted to be many-headed, because it is in the flow of experience of engagement: Merleau-Ponty's expression "the flesh of the world" is an apt description of the relationship of duration with many heads in the world. But clock-time may not be one-headed at all. To me, Ulric Neisser's model of cognition suggests that clock time may be just as many-headed as duration. It only feels like a one-headed construction.

Once we see the one-headed myth for what it is, the idea of "one-headed time" looks shaky and this is a little frightening - because when that goes, so do all logical abstractions which presuppose the rule of logic over lived experience.

I've been thinking about David Chalmer's 'zombie' arguments for consciousness. It occurs to me that we may believe zombies to be logically possible, but we assume that this logic that we believe is a one-headed logic that occurs independently of the objects upon which it operates (i.e. zombies). However, what if the logic we use is not one-headed, but many headed, directly engaged with the environment? That means that the thought of the "logical existence of zombies" may only occur in a world without zombies; after all, this is the only world we know. The existence of a real zombie could conceivably change the logic; indeed, in a world with real zombies, our very conception of a "logical possibility" might be entirely different from what it is in a world without zombies. This is true for most abstractions: their value lies in their reduction of complexity in an apparently one-headed context. But in fact, they reduce complexity in a many-headed context, because the complexity reductions are reductions in communications that are made. This probably boils down to the 'logical possibility' of zombies being a function of a particular set of speech acts.

But a many-headed world-view challenges basic cybernetic principles. Clock time is many-headed; therefore, the processing that occurs in clock-time is dependent on the world being as it is. If the processing changes the world, that in turn changes the logic. Maybe we begin to see how many-headed thinking can pinpoint the essential ontological problems of theory-practice gaps.

But it's not all doom and gloom, is it? Many of those cybernetic abstractions are still useful. "Difference" and "variety" particularly so. But if time is not one-headed, we need to think how it is that difference and variety are useful where abstractions about time and processing are not valid.

My argument here is that the concept which comes to the rescue is 'symmetry'. A symmetry is defined by markers. The most obvious markers are 'being' and 'not being'. Within 'being' and 'not being' there is a field of possibilities. Some possibilities 'fit' better than others; those are said to have symmetry. But symmetry 'just is'; it does not presuppose processing. It is there from any moment. It may be that what cybernetics calls a 'difference' is the realisation of a new symmetry.

This concept of symmetry gets around a few tricky problems. First of all, symmetry might give us a different sort of mechanism for anticipation. Symmetries are 'just there', and because of that, what is 'in the future' is contained within the symmetry of the present. Also, 'absence' becomes a fundamental category of mind, as something which demarcates 'not being'. This makes me think that there's something in Bhaskar's 'Dialectic'; but the dialectic isn't a 'process'; it's a symmetry. Finally, clock time (objective time) and reason in being multi-headed, fundamentally relate to continually shifting inter-relations. In this way, time is not psychological at all; it is sociological.

I'm not yet sure all of this makes sense. But there's something here. And it's seems to becoming more relevant because increasingly our technologies are working in 'real time'. Now there's a Bergsonian phrase if ever there was one!!

A "thank-you" note to Professor Ian Kemp

There are a few teachers to whom I feel a deep gratitude. My music studies at Manchester, which have underpinned my thinking ever since, were so rewarding thanks to the input of Professor Ian Kemp, who sadly died on the 16th September. His intellectual generosity as a teacher - particularly when he would ask his students questions, valuing the answers they gave so much that he noted them down - was a prime example of a philosophy of teaching which I have believed ever since: you know you are teaching well when you learn more from your students than they do from you!

He was refreshingly sensible about music as about education. When I first met him it was on my first day in the University: "all we assume is that you like music". I last saw him when he gave a guest lecture at the final concert of the Lindsay string quartet, with whom he had given so many inspirational sessions when I had been a student - particularly on late Beethoven. He was going deaf: "I'm a little bad at hearing," he said in a slightly humourous way. Surrounded by the 'new breed' of music academic - professionalised, strategic, rather-too-clever - he drew attention to a particularly intricate passage of a Tippett quartet. "How could you explain that?"... and a few clever explanations were offered by the clever staff: "altered dominant chords, suspensions, etc".. "well, it could be," he said, "but maybe it's just a nice noise!". A nice noise indeed - a I felt a little sad that nobody else has the courage or the wisdom to say that - but that's where academia has got us now. Not that his own approach to music analysis lacked rigour - but it was always sensible. Somehow, the detail never got in the way of driving at the heart of the music: Schoenberg's harmonic analysis appealed to him, as did Meyer's rhythmic analysis. He was sympathetic to Schenker, although I suspect dubious about the Schenker 'specialists'.

Then there was Tippett. I never met Tippett personally, although I did attend a couple of events where he was present before I went to University. But Ian Kemp was in many ways more accessible, and brought out in Tippett more than just the music. It was through Ian that I engaged with Jung and psychoanalysis - so important to Tippett (thinking back, I wonder if he had undergone some sort of individuation process himself). He presented Tippett in the context of the musical cannon. Through Tippett I came to Beethoven, Berlioz (Kemp's other great love), Hindemith (another passion), Janacek and 16th century English keyboard music. And most importantly, it connected-up; it made sense. That was the most important thing: his musical knowledge was not 'specialised'; it was integral. That meant that when he recommended something, it meant something more than it at first appeared. I remember that at the end of my studies, he worried that we hadn't been taught anything about Verdi. That was enough for me to go off and study Verdi after graduating. And he was right on a number of other counts: Porgy and Bess was the greatest opera of the 20th century; minimalism was the only new thing in music in the last 30 years; much modernist music was deficient; and Shostakovich was much greater than I thought at the time. And it wasn't just music: the 17th century mask, the Bauhaus, Bergsonian time.. all of which became enthusiasms of mine.

The most lovely thing was that, as with all great professors, he wasn't afraid of being silly. For his farewell concert on his retirement, the music department came together to perform Peter and the Wolf, with Kemp being the narrator. He did it very well, whilst also pointing out "the best tune in the piece" (Peter's triumphant march home after killing the wolf).

My only regret is that I didn't write this a bit sooner.

Digital divides, Play and Object relations

My daughter, who is 11, belongs to a generation who do not know a world without the internet. Along with her classmates, much of her private social life is online. But, then again, so is her dad's! There is a lot of modelling practice going on, and many of her friends seem to be joining in too. But of course, there are those that don't.

There has been much discussion about digital natives/digital immigrants. If I prefer Dave White's version of "residents" and "visitors" it's because "living with dad" for my daughter means being continually exposed to the online world as 'normal' in a way where in many other cases, this simply isn't the case. But actually, what's rather unsatisfying about all these distinctions is their superficiality - their inability to express more deeply the biological, social and psychological mechanisms that lead to observable changes in behaviour.

The central issue is not to do with online behaviour: transforming immigrants to natives, or visitors to residents all-too-often has a justificatory ring about it as learning technologists chase their next round of funding. Instead, I think the issue is to do with human identity and the cultivation of personality, and that has a much deeper tradition of thought than skin-deep socio-technical distinctions.

The tradition belongs to psychoanalysis. In particular, those aspects of psychoanalysis which have focused on the developing child, their play, their relationships, the objects they play with and the emergence of self. In this territory we find work going back to Freud, and that of his daughter. Bowlby also saw himself going 'back to Freud' in that he wanted to re-establish psychoanalysis on the grounds of observable phenomena. For Bowlby, attachments were observable manifestations of the outer-world from which the inner-world might be theoretically explored. Winnicott, whose emphasis on objects and play is distinct from Bowlby's concerns, speculates about inner-world mechanisms which have an impact on outer-world behaviours. Then there are the larger-scale concerns about selfhood and individuation which occupy the thoughts of Jung, Fromm and, from the social perspective, Illich.

Computers for children are largely play-things. As with other play-things, child engagement with them is a process of the development of self. Children 'play with reality' with computers: their facebook pages and Skype messages explore differences between different identities. They discover the inter-relationship between online action and real behaviour in the playground. However, as we all know, play with the internet is not risk-free in the sense that play with Lego is. Unlike play in a group, play on the internet is deeply individualised. In playing with the internet, children are exposed to the individual risks of public action. It may be that the discovery of self in this way can be existentially challenging in ways which might be harmful.

The presence of risk in online play is something new. Although risk has always accompanied childrens' games to some extent (the childrens' games explored by the Opie's are not always risk-free), the risks are usually of cuts and bruises, not psychological trauma.

I am interested in the creation of environments for online play which manage risk by being genuinely convivial. These environments are not individualised, but collaborative: the interactions that individuals make with objects are always in the context of a shared creative space. I wonder if creating environments for risk-free play for children, we might increase the chances that adults themselves might find ways of harnessing their own creativity. The digital divide is a division of self: the self that can play, and the self that is burdened with risk.

Mind, Death and Vitalism

There are some obvious questions concerning consciousness. "What  is in the bee that drives it to the flower?"; "What is in the stem that leads it towards the sun?"; "What is in the spermatozoa that drives it towards the egg?"; "What is in the molecule which causes it to self-organise?"; "What is in the dissonance that drives towards resolution?"; and so on... Only children ask these sorts of questions: in a recent discussion about sex education with my daughter for example, the issue of the consciousness of a sperm arose!

My suspicion is that the imputation of causal mechanisms based of sequences of events to explain these things is inadequate. In the case of the bee, it leads to 'mentalism'; in the case of the stem and the sperm it leads to 'biologism'. In the molecule, is it 'physicalism'. The musical case is in fact the most interesting, because it is the one with the greatest number of possible explanations: 'culturalism', 'physicalism', 'biologism' being a few possibilities, about which arguments have raged. However, whilst criticising these reductions, I want to avoid the other pitfall which is 'vitalism' (although I much prefer the ambitious thinking of vitalists like Bergson over mentalists, biologists, etc).

At one level, the problem is cause. More deeply the problem is ethical and political. The very point of attempting a new answer to these fundamental questions is to find a new way of looking at the world which might, I might hope, lead to a world that I would want to live in. Rather than digging into the detail to begin with (only to discover an implicit world-view which is untenable), it's probably better to be clear about what the world that I want to live in looks like.

Fundamentally here, I am Catholic (although perhaps Marxist as far as many Catholics are in fact Marxists), and as such and being most concerned with education, I am Illichian. Illich's concern with human dignity was directly linked to his appeal for conviviality: human beings are not islands; their psychic wellbeing is entirely interdependent. And amongst Catholic writers, Illich's position is broadly supported: Maritain adopted Bergson's ideas to make a similar point, and Scheler, whose concern with 'personalism' particularly emphasised the collective within the individual as the route to individuation.

But the ethical and political point behind this rests on concerns about consciousness and perception. Aquinas's philosophy of mind is remarkable, and represents perhaps the most complete attempt to address early modern awareness of consciousness with an Aristotelian causal model. Once that model was thrown out with the enlightenment, the attempt really stopped.. until Bergson changed the way we thought about time. Maritain marries Bergson with Aquinas and Aristotelianism as a way of linking human experience with politics.

Death, I wonder, may the hidden mover in all of this. I'm tempted to answer each of the questions I asked at the beginning with 'death'. Is this 'explanatory principle' any more helpful than the one suggested by the vitalists? It is the converse of the vitalist position. Death demarcates what there is and what there can be. Whilst it is abstract from me being here, now, in this moment writing this, it is still 'there'. And from me here to that "there" is the range of possible action that I might 'consider' taking next. My 'consideration' is a process which determines the realisation of possibilities. We call this process "mind". The realisation of possibilities is something that occurs in each of the questions I mentioned. But it does not seem reasonable to suggest that the "realisation of possibilities" requires a 'mind', or at least a 'brain' as we understand it.

Vitalism presents a positivising force which brings order, but its positive nature brings philosophical problems  since the capacity to apprehend such a force is dependent on the action of such a force in the first place. With such circularity, vitalism presents a situation similar to Moliere's 'domitive principle' of opium.

A death-oriented approach is a negative approach. It is a prioritisation of what Bhaskar might call "determinate absence". I've really struggled with Bhaskar's work on absence, and I'm not sure he's completely right about dialectic and absence, which is his main thrust, BUT I now think that the boundary between what is there and what is not presents some new opportunities for thinking about the function of mind and the role of brain.

I wonder if it might be like the idea of 'potential difference' in electronics, or perhaps like the length of a vibrating string. A wheatstone bridge is rather like a vibrating string, in the sense that it presents a field for exploring proportions. My central thesis at the moment is that the function of mind is to explore proportions between what is and what is not. In other words, the death which sits behind each of my questions demarcates a symmetry.

Managerialism, Conviviality and Technology (A revised version)

The opponents of ‘managerialism’ do not necessarily oppose ‘management’: only anarchists might object to the idea that some sort of regulation or control of institutions is necessary. Managerialism is distinct from ‘management’ in the sense that managerialism is a particular ideology of management. It is an ideology which states that the regulatory functions of management are common and similar techniques can be effective whether applied to a telecommunications business, a university or a hospital. However, in its ‘strong’ form, managerialism asserts its position as the only effective ideology of management. In this way, managerialism presents what Bhaskar (1979) calls a TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) formation: in effect we are told, "either accept the tenets of the ideology of managerialism, or face economic and social collapse"

There are two questions here:

1.  How is the ideology of managerialism distinct from the more general principles of organisation and management?
2. How does the TINA formation of managerialism arise to make managerialism unassailable in the management of institutions?

Managerialism isn’t new. However, the extent to which it dominates most large-scale social institutions – particularly health and education – is. Orwell would have recognised this managerialism as having the same characteristics as his dystopian world presented in Nineteen Eighty-four (2008). Conversely, many academics and managers in education, or doctors in the health system recognise Orwell’s description in the increasing degree of ‘newspeak’ jargon within their institutions, tied often to increasing specialisation and demarcation within practice and discourse. At the same time, the increasing inability to critique the foundations of academic practice, government policy, and sometimes even research practice testifies to what looks suspiciously like ‘doublethink’. An example can be found in Alasdair MacIntyre's (2009) recent critique of the culture of modern research universities, where the concept of 'universe' - fundamental to university - becomes lost in a haze of specialised disciplines: in MacIntyre's view, "The contemporary research university is, therefore, by and large a place in which certain questions go unasked or rather, if they are asked, it is only by individuals and in settings such that as few as possible hear them being asked".

According to Orwell’s fictional author of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism", which explains to Winston Smith the functioning of the Party and the political organisation of the world in Nineteen Eighty-four, the machinations of the state, including newspeak, doublethink and the ever-present war with Eurasia or Eastasia was to ensure that the party member...

"is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate..."

Orwell’s ‘managerialism’ is the institutionalised creation of anxiety. This resonates I believe with the sociological analysis of modernity presented by Beck in his ‘Risk Society’ (1991). Beck considers that modern society manufactures and distributes ‘risk’, the individual experience of which is anxiety:

"The driving force in the class society can be summarized in the phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in motion by the risk society, on the other hand, is expressed in the statement: I am afraid! Instead of common interest through need, modern society represents common interest through anxiety"

In the large institutions of state, the risks have multiplied in ways that suggest that Beck is right. Not just increasing threats of litigation, but new anxieties concerning compliance with ever-emerging standards of practice, fulfilling ever-changing funding formulae, coping with increasingly detailed audit procedures, and so on. Every new such managerial intervention creates disruption in current practices and inevitably anxiety in individuals. Managerialism is the institutionalised creation of risks.

But managerialism is seen to be effective across a range of contexts. This is because it is individuals who become anxious, and managerialism’s risks are always ultimately threats to continued employment and career progression: “if I don’t comply with this new rule, I will lose my job”. Consequently, the individual reacts. But managerialism at its worst manipulates individual insecurities in cruel ways which only through the guile and cunning of clever higher-level risk management avoids the accusation of ‘victimisation’.

In order to understand the success of managerialism in its manipulation, it is important to understand the extent to which biology and psychology render the individual susceptible to this sort of manipulation. In essence, managerialism is a very successful manipulation of the outer-worlds of individuals which have deep and predictable consequences on their inner-worlds. Psychology and Sociology have a variety of different theoretical approaches which can help to unpick the mechanisms involved. Harré’s ‘Positioning Theory’ (1999), for example, would argue that the inner-world ‘storyline’ of an individual is partly constituted by the outer-world ‘positioning’ produced by the communications of others and normative social conditions. Looking deeper at the specific aspects of identity, Bowlby (1969) would focus on the attachment relationships between individuals and the systemic balance of control systems between the inner-world of the individual and the outer-world of meaningful attachments which are frequently undermined through the actions of managerialism. In a related way, Winnicott (1971) might focus on the relation between individual identity and practices, objects and play - also subject to continual managerial intervention. In essence, the continual disruption of the relationship between inner and outer worlds is an assault on the identity of individuals.

But focus on attachments, creativity and practice suggest that there might be an alternative to managerialism. Children with strong attachments in families, friends and schools usually thrive where those who have experienced family or social attachment problems struggle. A secure balance between inner and outer-worlds that is brought about through strong attachments to people, objects and practices gives rise to the capability to manage the risks that managerialism (and the modern world in general) presents. But by definition, an environment which at once supports rich capability and strong attachments is not an environment of isolated individuals beset by personal anxieties: where attachments and capabilities are strongest, society is at its most convivial. For Illich (1971), such situations are the epitome of dignified humanity.

But managerialism seeks to disrupt and sometimes sever individual attachments to one another. It has found ways of leveraging technology to help it to do this. It has found in the internet radical ways of rationalising and organising individualised risk, asserting ‘realities’ which are not ontologically grounded. It has exploited the resulting alienation to further its risk-produced manipulations. As Beck argues, the economy also appears to be organised in this way: as such, individuals seem helpless in the face of these forces. The mechanism of 'risk' is that they are deprived of ways of being together because their attachments are subject to managerialism's interference. Not least the individuals who work or study in modern higher education - particularly in the risk-laden environment of rising fees and economic uncertainty.

But technology has a surprising knack of upsetting the applecart. Enthusiastic technologists have always sought to fly beneath the radar of institutional systems. The teachers who in the 1980s enthused a generation of children by bringing their newly-acquired personal computers into the classroom saw this: for a moment, everything seemed possible. As Illich explains, every new technical innovation has had this sort of moment. To many teachers in the mid 1990s, the web represented the closest thing to realising Illich’s ‘learning webs’ that he thought would bring about ‘deschooling’. Even after managerialism had effectively colonised the web by the early 2000s with restrictions and firewalls, new ‘Web Services’ enabled the connecting of the functionalities of different systems together in ways which would once again create new possibilities for doing things that were once unimaginable: the resulting blogs, wikis and social networking sites characterise the web as we now know it. Of course, the cycle is that corporate managerialism consumes most of these ideas, using them to find new ways of producing risk for individuals in the form of the big global social network enterprises: the increasing global power of corporations like Google and Facebook only serve to shift the locus of risk-creation. But might there be a special case where this does not happen?

Managerialism relies on the anxiety of the individual. In a convivial environment, the capability of individuals to manage the anxieties that managerialism throws at it is increased. But a convivial environment means the capacity to form attachments, to play and create. The online text-based environments we currently know cannot support this. For all the talk of ‘friends’ on Facebook and other social media, online social engagement amounts to strategic manipulation of social connections through selective public communications. But the next wave of technology will have different affordances.

The speed of internet connections is increasingly allowing for rich interactive and real-time social engagements. Driven by new technical developments like HTML5 and WebSockets (http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/), new capabilities are emerging to create direct communication protocols between web pages without necessarily interfering with any high-level institutional barriers. The affordance of much richer real-time communications enables those communications to be served and managed not by corporate or institutional services, but by ordinary individuals: setting-up a real-time communications server will become as easy as setting up a blog.

The experiments of Konrad Lorenz (1973) in establishing 'relationships' between new-born geese and inanimate 'mother' figures suggests something in the regulatory biological wiring which connects outer-world to inner-world. As our technological sophistication makes it possible for rich real-time interactions online, the ability to ‘imprint’ or (as Bowlby would have it) ‘attach’ to people and objects through technology remains an important question. Given rich attachments and new kinds of online activity, the central question is whether convivial environments for play, creativity and identity-construction can be established online. If the technology can genuinely support environments for rich attachments, then the risk culture of managerialism is undermined: the collective that looks after each other is more immune to individual risk manipulation than the fragmented social landscape we all-too-often see around us. We might ask, in the face of convivial self-organisation, will managerialism cease to coerce behaviour through the creation of risks, or merely find new ways to disrupt attachments and assail identity? Our hope might be that instead of the coercing of behaviour, the coordination of social organisation might instead embrace the inherent value-pluralism of convivial society through the coordination of creative activity rather than the manufacture of risk.

References

Beck, U (1992) The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity Sage

Bhaskar, R (1979) A Possibility of Naturalism Sage

Bowlby, J (1969) Attachment. Attachment and Loss vol 1 Basic Books

Harré, R; Langenhov, L (1999) Positioning Theory: Moral contexts of intentional action Wiley-Blackwell

Illich, I (1971) Tools for Conviviality Marion Boyars

Lorenz, K (1973) Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Orwell, G (2008) Nineteen Eighty-Four Penguin

Macintyre, A (2009) God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition Continuum

Winnicott, D (1971) Playing with Reality Routledge

Managerialism and "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism"

Orwell knew about managerialism, giving this knowledge to the fictional author in 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein. The perpetual war manufactured by the Party between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia served the purpose of maintaining inequality. The war is:

"waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact"

Given my thinking about managerialism and Ulrich Beck, I think it is reasonable to suggest that the war is the party's way of continually generating risks, and it is the creation of risk which maintains economic inequality, and which in turn contributes to the conditions for the new creation of risks.

What then of Winston Smith? His first act of defiance is to write a diary. His crime, I think, may be to increase his capability to manage risk, to make himself immune to the risks that were produced by the party. Making communications is the way he does this, just as making communications is the way that all people seek to manage their capability to manage risks. Reading Goldstein's book and discovering his love for Julia are other aspects of this journey of forbidden self-discovery and communication-making. A party member lives a continually anxious life expecting "to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party"

All the mechanisms of the party serve to maintain this state of anxiety. The perpetual historical revisionism continually disrupts the individual's narrative. In the light of Harré's thinking about 'storylines', and what I've argued for in terms of the need to establish some sort of 'attachment' to stories as a mechanism of maintaining identity, it's interesting to see how with manipulations like 'crimestop' and 'doublethink' the Party robs individuals of their capacity to establish identities, let alone 'opinions'. In fact, what describes is the party putting the population into complex web of double-binds.

What is presented in 1984 might be seen as two visions of 'education'. On the one hand there is Smith's covert self-discovery; on the other, there is his re-education and re-integration into the Party. What's extraordinary is how one type of education seems to feed the other: the individual struggle for self-discovery makes them more vulnerable to assimilation into the party: the betrayal of Julia, which in a sense is a betrayal of self, being the key moment when the pendulum swings the other way.

Is our education system a journey of self-discovery or propaganda for integration into the 'party' of capitalism? Funding certainly tightens the screws: the anxiety is raised.. self-discovery is shown to have its price, and once locked-in to that enticing journey, do we eventually succumb to the inevitable conformity of capitalism? The risk machine of education is certainly being powered-up. And because our economic models are increasingly failing us, we feel that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.