Gramsci and Derrida in New Cross

DERRIDA and GRAMSCI in NEW CROSS

Within the space of a year and a half, I have attended two graduation ceremonies at Goldsmiths College, in New Cross, South-East London. Both featured the same son, bagging a BA and then an MA.

It was “déjà vu”, in a nice way, as the people involved were much the same, from the officiating academics to the graduates – overwhelmingly, at the second February occasion, MA students like my son (MA results are announced pretty late in the calendar year). So I spent less time spectating the ceremony and admiring the hall (originally built for the Royal Naval School for officers’ children in the mid nineteenth century) and more time studying the Graduation Programme: especially the academic subject categories of the graduates: both exceedingly diverse and often bewildering  (“MSc Computer Games and Entertainment”? An easy butt for fogey-ish jeers).

At least most subject descriptions were more or less comprehensible. However, I got stuck on one: “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”. The sub-parts, “Socio”, “cultural” and “linguistics” I could fairly well understand. But the compound? That stumped me.

Later, I looked up the course on the Goldsmiths website. Aha:

“The MA develops your understanding of historical and contemporary debates in (socio)linguistics and discourse analysis and enhances your analytic and linguistic skills by introducing different approaches to the analysis of written and spoken language use from a range of everyday and institutional contexts.”

So, briefly and humbly ( and with the benefit of a bit more superficial research): the way social status and cultural backgrounds shape language, written and spoken; and, vice-versa, the way language usage shapes ( confirms, advances or hinders) social status and cultural cohesion and understanding.

( In certain academic spheres it is always safe to assert that, if factor A shapes B, B repays the compliment to A.)

Learning all this enlightened me retrospectively. For I had noticed that, whilst not all graduates chose to attend the ceremony, they were all listed in the Programme. Most subjects produced a patchy number of students on the day. The one exception was “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”, the attainers of which, so far as I could tell, had all pitched up.

I have a theory about why this should be so. It is that the degree ceremony is a pre-eminent occasion for fertile S-c L analysis, and no self-respecting S-c L graduate should miss it.

The ceremony was not just about the shaping power of language (always remembering the vice-versa). You could say that the oratory and flummery are designed to cement a certain self-confident cultural identity. But this would be a soft hit. A much more interesting take was suggested by the history and “discourse” of the morning’s recipient of an Honorary Goldsmiths Fellowship, Green Gartside.

I confess that I didn’t know of him. He founded a long-lasting New Romantic band, “Scritti Politti”. So said the Programme, which also noted that he is a “theorist” of some sort.

When he gave his acceptance speech, much more was revealed (including what I now take to be the clinching reason for the attendance of the S-c L cohort). Gartside is a proud auto-didact, who fell in with the European left-wing political and structuralist philosophers, especially Gramsci and Derrida. Gramsci’s “Scritti Polittici” ( Political Writings) gave the band its name, although the second Italian word was deliberately butchered in the interests of modish snappishness ( Discuss, MA class).

I am not a scholar of either Scritti Politti or Gartside, so I don’t know where Derrida fits in. Gartside did say that, being a lonely auto-didact, he didn’t know how to pronounce “Derrida”. So when he (pretentiously? Aptly? Playfully?) referenced him in a song, he pronounced the name “De-reed-a”. This solecism, he said, was greeted with rapture by Deridda-savvy critics: what an exquisite, playful, Deconstructionist move, worthy of the master himself! “Correct” pronunciation is a flexible fraud…

Fired up by this, I have taken to wondering (doubtless along with the S-c L graduates) about the deeper semantics of the degree ceremony. I was unable to make a lot of sense of the various robes and headgear sported by the University dignitaries, which seem to have raided from the props department of costume dramas set across many different centuries. Pride of place goes to the emerald green baggy Tudor cap worn by one academic.

More interesting are the modern compromises which some students make with the traditional graduation cap and gown, which, of course, derive from medieval Christian clerical dress. Especially ironic ( or should I say redolent with deep and interesting contradiction and/or accommodation) is the sight of women Muslim graduates wearing the mortarboard cap perched on top of an Islamic headscarf.

But the most striking of the “constructed” appearances was not academic at all. The three lord mayors of the local boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bromley were there in all their mayoral finery: robes and, especially, large chains of office. Bromley is Tory-controlled, a haven for grammar schools, and it mayor is white, middle aged man, as in days gone by most mayors were. The other two, by contrast, were a man of, seemingly, Afro-Caribbean descent and a woman of Asian descent.

“Chains”, in the past, would have indicated a far different status for Afro-Caribbeans.  What do mayoral chains, worn by such a man and woman represent now? An optimistic multicultural society?  Perhaps; but Gartside’s hero, Gramsci, would probably say, however, that the mayors were unwittingly illustrating “bourgeois hegemony”: the ability, in Gramsci’s Marxist analysis, of the ruling class to set the cultural norms of a society, and keep those norms biased in its favour; so that successive generations of the “oppressed” are signed up to the bourgeois social and economic narrative and bourgeois institutions.

On that reading, the mayoral chain still signifies a subtle bondage. As Gramsci’s influential forerunner might  have said: “Mayors of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.

February 2015

Spain: defiance and desolation

Spain: Desolation and Defiance

The Spanish Civil War gave rise to a canon of poetry and song which reflects a very special defiance, both during the struggle and in the aftermath of defeat (I write of the Republican perspective). There was a sense at the time and later that “Spain” was a battle to defend “progressive” values – a heady mixture of the Enlightenment, feminism, anarchism and communism. The battle was lost. That was a shock. Albert Camus summarised the widespread reaction:

“ It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

One response for survivors and supporters is to take consolation from memories of heroism and sacrifice, to find something indomitable. For example: the battle of Jarama, near Madrid, in February 1937 was essentially a bloody stalemate, but in which the Nationalists’ objective to seize a strategically vital road was thwarted. It was also the first major engagement of the International Brigade, which suffered very heavy casualties, especially the “Lincoln” battalion of the US contingent. That experience inspired Pete Seeger’s “Jarama Valley”, which is indeed a song of  pride and defiance :

“There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama

It’s a place that we all know so well

It was there that we gave of our manhood

Where so many of our brave comrades fell

We are proud of the Lincoln battalion

And the fight for Madrid that it made

There we fought like true sons of the people

As part of the Fifteenth Brigade

But, as Camus indicates, as well as the indomitable spirit there is also an abiding bleakness. A story I heard captures it. An acquaintance, a frequent and enquiring visitor to modern Spain, went into an unobtrusive bar on the Costa del Sol. He realized at once that he had trespassed. The place was a haunt of old Francoists and their successors. Not made welcome, he left very quickly, but not before he had noticed a certain poster. This was a Republican poster, bearing the  slogan of the iconic communist “La Pasionara” – “No Pasaran!” – “They [the Fascists] Shall not Pass!”.

Scrawled on the poster were the Spanish words: “We Passed”. That is the brute historical fact.

The “passing” of the Nationalists was not only brutal but merciless, and the source of memories far darker and despairing than those of “Jarama Valley”.  There are verses in Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” which, though not written with Spain specifically in mind ( by the time of the poem’s publication in 1952 Europe had endured other horrors), will resonate with anyone who has studied the story of Franco’s murderous repression, unleashed during the war and for many years after the Nationalist victory:

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

A crowd of ordinary decent folk

Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came:

What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

The uneasy mixture of defiance and utter bleakness continues to this day. We can be proud of those who stood by the Republic; but we also stand among the helpless “ordinary decent folk”, witnessing the pitiless triumph of the Worst.

February 2015

Conversations on the 43 Bus

CONVERSATIONS ON THE 43 BUS

There is new hazard now encountered on my North London bus journeys. “Hazard” is, in fact, too strong a word. I need a noun for an event which is neither dangerous nor alarming, but rather- disconcerting. A “disconcert”, perhaps. Pronounced not as if it were a kind of musical occasion but with the accent on the final syllable.

The bus disconcerts are occasioned by (so far) young men in their 20s, casually dressed. They look like final year or graduate Uni students. So far, pretty normal bus clientele. But (here the disconcert) suddenly they start talking to you. Theirs is not the discourse of an under-breath mutterer whose breaking into audible speech you dread; not are they Ancient Mariner sorts who “fix [you] with a glittering eye” and try to pull you into a challenging dialogue (that might come later, if you allow it). No: the technique they use, almost immediately on sitting down near you, or you sitting down near them, is to address some wholly disarming pleasantry to you.  So far I have had: “That’s a very nice leather bag, Sir” and “Hello Sir- did you enjoy the snow this morning?”.

When someone whom I think to be a complete stranger attempts to make small-talk on public transport, my initial reaction is one of panic (this doesn’t apply if the stranger is commenting on some more or less transitory misfortune common to everyone present, like an inordinate delay or another passenger’s boorish behavior). The panic takes the form of: Should I know this person?- is s/he a friend of one of my children? is it one of my children? (Yes that gaffe has happened recently, in the street…)

The next phase is one of awkwardness. How do I handle this conversation? For the young men evidently want to go on chatting. The “nice bag” guy asked where I got it. I said “Venice”. He (a North American) asked “Where’s that?”. I said “Italy”. He said (to my sinking heart) “My friend here”- indicating a hitherto silent young man sitting a couple of places away from him and right opposite me- “is Italian”. The latter smiled: “I know Venice of course. I am from Milano”. A new avenue of chat beckoned.

It was then that I noticed the badge on the second man’s lapel. It was dark blue. The only words I could make out were “Jesus Christ”, in larger letters than the other text.

At this point I gave up a silent prayer of thanks (to JC?) for the existence of smartphones, and suddenly had an urgent need to consult my texts/emails/websites.

They got off the bus at Highgate station, heading for more polite conversations – and conversions?

The snow-gambit man on the second journey was cut from the same cloth. He was eager to discuss how often it snowed in London (he said he was from a part of the US where it snowed a lot). Again, after a perfunctory but civil rely my smartphone absorbed me.

This man too had the badge. Research online later that the young men were Mormon missionaries. The badge’s full template goes:

The Church of

Jesus Christ

Of Latter-Day Saints

I have always had an image of Mormon missionaries as men in cheap dark suits (as Jehovah’s Witnesses are women in dubious hats). These young men were more stylish than that. They wouldn’t be out of place at an Indy gig. Wholesome in a modern metropolitan way.

Nonetheless: there is something creepy about people who are encouraged(?) or trained (?) to interact, almost by rote, with strangers. Spot a topic, either to with your “mark” (eg leather bag) or with the weather (good British subject) and set up a potential, but superficial, intimacy.

I do not know whether theses exchanges are just practice (on the bus, on the way to the work of conversion) or whether they are in earnest: probes to discover whether the chance traveller is open to a more glittering eye treatment. Either way, I am grateful for the phone’s glittering screen.

February 2015

1930s Spain and Syria/Iraq

THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN 30s SPAIN AND SYRIA/IRAQ

Comparisons are made between the “volunteers” who go to fight in Iraq and Syria (often for IS) and those who, in the 1930s, went to fight for the Republican government in the Spanish Civil War ( we tend to forget the less numerous European and American volunteers who joined the forces of Franco). Specifically, commentators criticise the laws brought in or proposed to curtail Middle Eastern armed adventurism on the grounds that they would have prevented people joining the International Brigade in  Spain (although apparently there was technically a law against that even then).