'Our technocists and technocrats have their hearts in the right place, even if it is what they have in their minds which is given priority' Henri Lefebvre, Notes on the New Town.
In Notes on the New Town Lefebvre explains how a new boredom has arisen in the social communities he sees. Not the boredom of yesterday that had 'something soft and cosy about it', but 'the pure essence of boredom.' The concern of Lefebvre, his associates and followers, including the Situationists, went beyond simply being bored, for they were analysing and documenting what they saw as modernity imprinting itself on social products, its own fears replacing history itself. The products of capitalism were obscuring the harsh realities of capitalism. These concerns have not diminished, but a new key word has replaced that of capitalism — neoliberalism — as the ideological force responsible for exploiting to their full effect what many see as the problems inherent in capitalism. In Britain we have a prominent culture of educated fellows learning about how the world works, we have a system which allows the free dissemination of knowledge and ideas (the internet), we have a politicised intelligent youth and a coalition government who are attempting to reason with them, and push through their measures of fairness and progress. Why don't the people buy it? Do the politicians themselves buy it? Why do we continue to characterise politicians as sinister fiends who care for power and power alone?
Cameron and Clegg
The above Lefebvre quote resonates in world in which the responsible collectives which run the show—the economic gurus, the banker-gamblers, the politicians—come across as so reasonable. You may laugh but it's true! They speak with such conviction and look you right in the eye on Question Time; they explain their questionable use of MP's expenses and why they voted for the war in Iraq; they explain why they should be given, or should be giving, huge bonuses. And in response we say they are liars or stupid or power hungry. In short, we simplify their behaviour in the act of castigating them, by goading and teasing them in the press, by occasionally dismissing them. But they are not stupid, or evil, or completely self serving, or only concerned with the defence of power. So we are asking the wrong questions, and we are letting them off the proverbial hook.
Politicians are responsible, and as such they forget their hearts and follow their minds. Minds are accountable in a different way than hearts, they are said to abide by logic and reason, and thus are dependable. They work within models, they refer to statistics. In 1981, Northern Irish prisoners followed their hearts, Thatcher, her head. According to Lefebvre, it is the bourgeoisie's use of analysis and analytic reasoning which allows for a dismantling of things previously united — nature and man, being and thought, etc. We can see this dissemination in the way the market works — exploiting gaps, creating middle men. But simultaneously everything is unifying — relationships have become money relationships, everyday life is reduced to its functions, capitalism subsumes everything, power spreads and unifies. And all this occurs under various ideological motifs and gestures, deployed in accordance with what is considered to be the common good. Could this be the technological essence of being that Heidegger warned of? A type of being characterised by standing-reserve, by optimisation and calculus? Heidegger's mind led him to these complex ideas, did his heart lead him to Nazism? Anyway, we follow our minds, and remain responsible, accountable to the right persons, and thus, when considering politicians, it fails to matter whether they have their hearts in the right place, for all that matters is their actions, and the results of those actions. We can condemn them justly, for they followed their minds and look what happened.
But should our hearts be so disregarded? Policy makers have come to a point where everything is decided on the basis of its economic merit. The education system is the most recent example. The government has become, collectively, one mind disregarding its heart. For arts and humanities can be justifiably undermined for their supposed lack of economic contribution (a point contestable in itself). They come to this conclusion using all their inherited logic and reason, handed down to them as they climb the political ladders of Whitehall. It is this handing down which contributes to the method of reasoning that they endorse, this type of reasoning which first surfaced during their school years. Models are applied to society, predictions are made, rational argument decides the outcome. (It is ironic that the government are undertaking such extreme political economic measures while they bring out this happiness index, which works on the premise that GDP is not the be all end all of a society's quality of life.)
Economics is a projection, it deals with the future. Yet the unsustainablilty of the capitalist drive always leads the way. Our responsibility for future generations has become a much used catchphrase, excusing austerity and bolstering public image of reckless companies. Moreover society exists in the present and the people who inhabit that present are as relevant as the ones who will come to inhabit it. For all those whom have gone before us, and all those to come, we will readily accept the importance of the output of the arts and humanities. We figure the past, and note the great works of art and literature. We build upon the ideas that they had; we learn about them from their artifacts. And to the future, which remains perpetually abstract and yet we continue to manoeuvre so as to create it in its perfected utopian state, quality of life remains a key phrase, characterised by flourishing arts and humanities, enlightenment and other such silly hopes. So, is it for us, those feckless occupiers of the insignificant present who have to forfeit this privilege? For the good of the future, the agents of the present must be sacrificial? Need one mention the chances we can expect for a resurgence of the damaged arts and humanities for this imagined future?
But it is not, in reality, that we do not care for those in the present. We are just selective. We project great things for the future; we build it in all its glory, but we must, for us, forget about what will make it glorious. In the meantime, we must work. We must work for those whom we have selected for care — those in positions of power. For this is what filters down through the discourses of time to meet us now in the logical, reasonable minds of those who represent us. It is a pattern far too rigid to be undermined, says the voice in the head. Far too complicated — only chaos would remain if these delicate structures were left un-oiled. The Platonic hypothesis that wisdom and reason should rule, with these abilities beholden by definition by those who are in power who decide what it is to be wise and reasonable, simultaneously excludes the masses who are not only ignorant, in Plato's sense, but ignorant by definition, as those without power and the ability to define ignorance. So he who wields the budget, in that battered old red suitcase, goes forth toward the public, a barrier separating them, and announces his plans without a qualm, for reason has informed them and no one can question that.
At a time when certain educational paths are being discouraged, certain social divisions being widened, and when cross-party political consensus is rife, should we not be turning the tables? Questioning the education of the politicians? Naturally, everyone knows that a disproportionate amount of cabinet members were privately educated and went to Oxford or Cambridge, but we usually highlight this when talking about class and opportunity. What about the type of education they are receiving, the nature of the degrees politicians have done, the messages, the ideology, the logic, the reason? Is it constitutive to a broad reasoned debate of the type we hope to find in Parliament? Is it constitutive to the sort of agonist pluralist democracy that political thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe endorse? Maybe the positive discrimination which is always rearing its questionable head to get ethnic minorities and women into politics should instead be used to include people from a variety of educational backgrounds.
Recently, as they were handed half, or a third, of the blazing torch of power, the Liberal Democrats have unfortunately been unmasked as the neoLiberal Democrats and are, as such, perfectly at home in this coalition. For it is the principles which encourage the bloating of the private sector and the treatment of individuals as firms, ready to be invested in which are thriving now. We should not be surprised, if we follow Foucault's genealogy of Liberalism to its opportunistic roots embedded in Political Economy, as opposed to the much nicer idea of universal human rights and the like. Moreover, as Mouffe has shown, following various thinkers, liberal democracy is a paradox, if one considers them in their respective popular logics. And so is the Liberal Democrats, too, a paradox, for they tell us all the time — they're in power, yet they're not in power; they are progressive and fair, yet the policies they endorse say otherwise; they disagree with the rise in fees, so they abstain because they know it will pass anyway. The newly politicised youth will learn, with a fine example, the woes of neoliberalism, and maybe that is what the government is trying to curb, by attacking the humanities, for it is here where critique happens, and critique is a dangerous thing.
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