The illusion of choice, the choice of illusion

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Choice, as everyone knows, is the endlessly bleated mantra amongst the political class now (despite most polls showing that the public have no interest whatsoever in having a 'choice' of hospitals, schools, etc).

The emphasis on choice reveals the extent to which not so much a methodological individualist as a familial ontology has an unchallenged grip on the political imagination now. The family is a unit of such unimpeachable ethical probity that no one in party politics dare not to cheerlead for it, still less even think about questioning or - God forbid - criticizing it.

Hard to recall, but the assumption that education should be about 'parental choice' was once a contested and controversial doctrine. Its disappearance into the taken-for-granted background of the current administrative regime is further evidence that, while Thatcher fought the war, it is Blair who has won it. What Thatcher had to struggle to impose, Blair has normalized. But the idea that parents' interests, which tend by definition to be the acquisitive interests of their own clan, should be coincident with the social interest is a telling equivocation. That's because the whole category of the 'social interest' has disappeared - since it is straightforwardly assumed now that there is no such thing as society and that what passes for the social is simply an aggregation of families and individuals.

Needless to say, the ideology of choice is oddly self-refuting. If everyone had a choice, presumably no-one would choose to have their child in a 'failing' school. So choice in reality means choice for the middle classes and no choice for everyone else. Something borne out by the depressing statistics about working class access to higher education this week.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Good post.

Not entirely sure what it has to do with the family, tho. To me it seems to be the case that everyone is being forced into the role of consumer in every situation - a role where the "choices" available are dictated by the market. And clearly you're right - everyone in theory has the same choices but realistically many of them are only actually available to the middle or upper classes.

I can't see this changing even if the family is abolished - the class system will still have to be maintained under capitalism... labour will still have to be reproduced...

am I allowed to heatedly and irrationally say "welcome back!" ?
 

polystyle

Well-known member
john eden said:
To me it seems to be the case that everyone is being forced into the role of consumer in every situation - a role where the "choices" available are dictated by the market.

'forced' is so right .
As we all luv to criticize , here in the US , we are clogged with ... wait a minute , we interupt this ms. for a bray from sponsor ...
 
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bun-u

Trumpet Police
Yes I agree with what is said here.
Would also add that ‘choice’ is driven by marketing, which is perhaps driving this consumerist approach to public policy/service provision. It means that schools, hospitals, police forces, other councils services and even the voluntary sector have to peddle exaggerated lies about the quality of their services on top of their already skewed priorities resulting from having to meet Government targets. Ticking boxes and peddling lies is now the core business of the more ‘successful’ service providers who are crawling with marketeers and management consultants, rather than people who committed to getting services to where they are needed. So perhaps don’t be too wary of the “failing school” because they might just have more committed and better teachers than the heralded “beacon school”.
 

MBM

Well-known member
So the problem is not with choice per se but bad faith on the part of certain groups ("we offer you a choice we already know is not a real choice").

So what do we do about it? Esp. in regards to education. Ban private schooling? Assign pupils to schools at random? I'm not being flippant.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
John, don't see what's heated and irrational about courtesy. :) I should have thought it was just the opposite. In any case, I thank you.

The issue with the family is that the ideology of the Family has been used to destroy the concept of comprehensive education. Parents' wishes are, it is assumed, sacrosanct; the idea of a Society that may conflict with such wishes, and the idea of Education as an autonomous sphere (which could even, shock horror, critique ideologies) - well, such concepts have been rendered literally unthinkable in the current ideological configuration. (The point of ideology is to both make itself appear as 'unthought' - in other words, as a taken-for-granted background assumption - and to render alternatives to it as unthinkable.)

What to do? Private schools are in a sense a separate issue. I would of course abolish them forthwith.

But I think it is very important not to confuse what is going on in education with marketization. There is no market in education; simply removing an institution from State control is not in itself putting it into a market relation. What we have in education, in fact, is typical of what we have in Blairism: the worst of Nanny State interventionism combined with a corrupt business rhetoric that it is about producing mission statements and the like.

The relationship between marketization and capitalism is a complex one (worth a whole thread of its own AT LEAST), but, briefly, I keep faith with Braudel's notion that capitalism is essentially an ANTI-market. (How to make sense of its tendency to produce dominant near-monopolies such as Microsoft unless this is the case?) Paul Meme pointed out a while back that markets have preceded capitalism; indeed, capitalism has actually systematically destroyed real market activity and replaced it with regulated retail.

In terms of education, it is always a mistake to assume that a return to State control would be an improvement. The problem with education atm is that it has NEVER LEFT State control and is snarled up in the bureaucratic logjams that are ubiquitous whenever the State runs things (trust me, the Govt is a very bad employer). Surely the goal would be for working class ppl to gain autonomy over their own lives and services, without having their money expropriated by bourgeois lawyers who 'Know Better'. Of course, it's important to stress that this autonomy can only operate at the level of a class, not, as Mrs T had us believe, at the level of individuals and families.
 
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matt b

Indexing all opinion
>What we have in education, in fact, is typical of what we have in Blairism: the worst of Nanny State >interventionism combined with a corrupt business rhetoric that it is about producing mission statements >and the like.


spot on.



having school league tables in the daily star is a bit futile then
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
League tables do nothing to improve standards and promote learning; they are all about divisiveness.

On the face of it, it was superficially odd that keith Joseph pushed for the elimination of red tape in every other area of public life, but INTRODUCED it in education.

But as Paul Meme pointed out to me last week at the Dissensus meet, that was because the strategy with education was blatantly and explicitly ideological (i.e. to stop lefties like me contaminating the young) and not even ostensibly economic.

The irony is that it is by no means impossible to cut back spending and improve productivity - in education at least. Simply remove all the bureaucratic strata that have been imposed in the last thirty years (btw funny how the Golden Age of Education in the Right Wing Imaginary was when there was almost no bureaucracy in schools whatsoever) and you will immediately get more useful and productive work out of your existing staff.
 

Wrong

Well-known member
k-punk said:
But I think it is very important not to confuse what is going on in education with marketization. There is no market in education; simply removing an institution from State control is not in itself putting it into a market relation. What we have in education, in fact, is typical of what we have in Blairism: the worst of Nanny State interventionism combined with a corrupt business rhetoric that it is about producing mission statements and the like.

...

In terms of education, it is always a mistake to assume that a return to State control would be an improvement. The problem with education atm is that it has NEVER LEFT State control and is snarled up in the bureaucratic logjams that are ubiquitous whenever the State runs things (trust me, the Govt is a very bad employer). Surely the goal would be for working class ppl to gain autonomy over their own lives and services, without having their money expropriated by bourgeois lawyers who 'Know Better'. Of course, it's important to stress that this autonomy can only operate at the level of a class, not, as Mrs T had us believe, at the level of individuals and families.

I think this raises a fairly general problem with/for those groups trying present an alternative to Blairism. Traditional left types have tended to see Thatcher/New Labour as solely destructive, dismantling the welfare state, etc. Because of this, their 'alternative' is phrased defensively - keep the welfare state, don't privatise schools, and so on. But neo-liberalism isn't solely destructive - it doesn't just throw schools to the market, it applies a horrible kind of regulated corporatisation (for example those fucking Reg Vardy fundamentalist schools); likewise, it doesn't simply abolish benefits, it integrates them into capital (work-fare, compulsory 'training' delivered by corporations, etc.). This means that the Blairists can comfortably outflank the left by saying "we agree that we shouldn't dismantle the welfare state, _but_ we can't just keep it the same. Therefore, our agenda of reforms is the real progressive policy." To which the traditional left has nothing to say, so it keeps shouting the same slogans.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Absolutely.

And if you take any sort of stance against management, they will automatically interpellate you as an Old Left stick-in-the-mud who has yet to attune her or himself to economic 'reality'.

Again, this is part of rendering any real opposition to capitalism literally unthinkable. And why thought, theoretical labour, is so important in building such an opposition.

In a sense, though, the very fact that Anti-capital does not feature on the Master class radar gives it a strategic advantage, since it is by definition unexpected. Management are used to fighting off those who demand higher wages for lower productivity, but those who demand greater efficiency, more marketization, in the name of the proletariat, they are not so easily to deal with.

Pro-market communism? Ask the Chinese... :)
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
i'm still not getting how the family as a unit can be criticised in this context.
families are here to stay, like it or not, in one form or another (two-parent families, single-parent families, adoptive families) because it's really the only way to raise kids.
people need other people; kids especially.
some things aren't *worth* questioning or criticising because they are the way they are, simple as that - questioning and criticising the family is like questioning iand criticising gravity, y'know.
however i am in absolute, total agreement with the point about the consumerisation of state services and the damage this does.
take hackney for instance.
was only saying this yesterday, that if the gentrifying classes moving in (i class myself in this group, btw), especially those who send their kids to private school and have private healthcare, were made to pay equivalent tax into the state models available to other residents, they'd be raising standards for all and showing some level of responsibility toward the greater good, rather than just looking after their own interests, which disgusts me.
as far as i'm concerned private healthcare and education are the most iniquitous manifestations of aggressive middle-class protectionism imaginable and they should be abolished.
very limited choice is what's needed and for every school/hospital to be given the funding and other tools it needs to be able to succeed - then the public/private question will also be one that there's no point in asking.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
stelfox said:
i'm still not getting how the family as a unit can be criticised in this context.
families are here to stay, like it or not, in one form or another (two-parent families, single-parent families, adoptive families) because it's really the only way to raise kids.
people need other people; kids especially.
some things aren't *worth* questioning or criticising because they are the way they are, simple as that - questioning and criticising the family is like questioning iand criticising gravity, y'know.

Surely you can see that this is ideology in itself, this move - a particular, contingent social institution being equated with a force of nature - that is as pure a statement of ideology as you can get.

It is not as if it is on any level true either. As everything from single parent families to Fathers 4 Justice to endemic child abuse to homosexual couples indicates, the family is in decadent collapse. The truth is that the nuclear family has NEVER worked, it has always been dysfunctional even though capitalism entails it. Some would call this a contradiction in capitalism, lol.

How low the ground has sunk, though, that alternatives to the family are no longer even thinkable.... Wow...
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
ok mark, i admit i went to boarding school which is kind of an alternative but we don't like that, do we? now, i'm actually really, genuinely interested in seeing what alternatives you might propose because i cannot see any feasible options. obviously when i say family, i mean it in its broadest sense, too.

by the way, have you got a new haircut or something? i didn't even recognise you the other night, so apologies for not speaking properly!
 

jenks

thread death
"How low the ground has sunk, though, that alternatives to the family are no longer even thinkable.... Wow..."

what are these then? i'm not being facetious i would be interested to know. am i being dense if i ask who brings up the kids, are we talking huxleyite brave new world, what?
yes to all that stuff about private health care and private schools btw
 
k-punk said:
How low the ground has sunk, though, that alternatives to the family are no longer even thinkable.... Wow...

What are the alternatives? Are you sure they're better in any way?

Do you envisage snatching newborns away from their mothers and fitting them with VR goggles?
Putting them in barracks for infants?
Dashing their brains out against the nearest airtexed wall?
Making it law that they should be raised by gangs of ideologically-correct surrogate parents?


And how much of your personal experience with your own family is colouring your view? I bet your own mum and dad would be heartbroken to hear this. :(
 
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luka

Well-known member
yeah there is that nice bit in brave new world about the undesirability of families. that bit is fun. and that spartan style that you mentioned there, that's a good one, put the little fuckers in barracks, there's the feral hippy style, i know people raised like that, in communes where the kids run free and take acid from the age of 12,and participate i mass orgies with the adults, the kibbutz thing obviously that's another.

which alternative did you have in mind mark?
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Jesus, I mean, this was still a seriously discussed issue twenty years ago... When people still talked idealistically about things like Kibbutzim, communes etc...

You are kind of proving my point that the family HAS clearly become an unthought presupposition, a 'fact of life'. But this is at an ideological, not an empirical level. It is worth noting that the Oedipal (nuclear) family (mummy-daddy-me) is a VERY new phenomenon, historically speaking. Even during the 20C most children were reared in what were in effect extended family groupings. The situation now is oddly double, and we can get some appreciation of it by thinking about the apparently contradictory responses of the Right: the Family is normative, an immovable and invariant part of reality AND it is collapsing, falling apart, in disintegration. The truth is that, as ideology, the Family is invariant (ideology must always pose as invariant) but in fact it is disintegrating.

Yet what from their side has to be thought of as disintegration is also the opportunity for new structures to emerge. We have to start with the alternatives that are in already in operation. The problem atm is that any alternative structures are seen as negative 'failures' of the existing dysfunctional Family machine. But single mothers often share the care of their children, which is a move towards collectivization. But surely it is at least IMAGINABLE that human beings could be socialized outside the overheated oedipal burrow. After all, for most of human history, that is what has happened.

But there is a genuine sense in which alternatives to the Family are unimaginable now - because such alternatives presuppose the very communist society that the ideological structure of the Family blocks.

The point is both that the Family makes communism impossible (because its micro-ethnicity insists that I put MY family above other ppl's family - if not, what does a commitment to a family mean?) and that the collapse of the Family is an essential precondition of communism. Only when I can think of non-familial brothers and sisters as being at least as important as those with whom I share blood and family ties, only then can communism start.

Think about it: what is it about those outside your family that makes them less worthy of your attention and care than those within it? What defines the limits of your allegedly private space? Who, ultimately, is most important to you? The Family is there at the deepest level, dividing and conditioning us, keeping us locked into the Overlook hotel.
 

johneffay

Well-known member
k-punk said:
The situation now is oddly double, and we can get some appreciation of it by thinking about the apparently contradictory responses of the Right: the Family is normative, an immovable and invariant part of reality AND it is collapsing, falling apart, in disintegration.
On top of that, I'm constantly amused by Blair & co.'s insistence that the nuclear family is the best place in which to bring up a child and yet every parent should have access to daycare for their children in order to enable them to go out to work. If they really had a commitment to the nuclear family, they would fund parents to stay at home, rather than funding them to pay for childminders.

If you look at these things statistically, it seems as though the nuclear family (which, as you say, is a fairly recent development) has been something of a failure; particularly when compared to the sort of extended family models which used to be prevalent. Of course, there are a lot of other rather dark social features of familial life in years gone by; especially if you were female.

k-punk said:
The point is both that the Family makes communism impossible (because its micro-ethnicity insists that I put MY family above other ppl's family - if not, what does a commitment to a family mean?) and that the collapse of the Family is an essential precondition of communism. Only when I can think of non-familial brothers and sisters as being at least as important as those with whom I share blood and family ties, only then can communism start.
I think this may well be right, but it strikes me that it would make communism impossible altogether. Whilst familial ties may be weaker these days, I cannot see how you could eradicate them. I also worry that a policy of eradication would actually serve to make them stronger.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
I don't think eradication is the way forward.

I mean, speaking from my own case, readers of k-punk will be well aware that I spent Christmas with my parents, so if I were advocating total extirpation of all familial links I would be blatantly inconsistent, if not to say hypocritical.

But a kind of overcoming has been necessary. Or better: an unplugging, in Zizek's terms.

Zizek puts it very well in his gloss on Christ's injuction that we 'should hate our fathers and mothers'. It is important to understand, he says, that this is very clearly a structural point: hate your father and mother INSOFAR AS they occupy a certain social role. So, as Zizek says, and this rings very true in my own case, that often ppl can only get along with their mother and father when they no longer relate to them as parents. Zizek is quick to qualify this by saying that it is not as if we can then access a real, authentic person behind the false veil of the social. It is not a matter of that. Very much to the contrary in fact. You are only free to be a non-person, a zone of dehumanized potentiality when you have, with Artaud, 'no pappamummy'.

But most of my hostility to the family is not inspired by my own experiences. I grew up in what would be regarded as a happy family, with two stable parents, but it is not as if this protected me from mental illness. The Oed-I-Pod damages to precisely the extent that it protects; at best, it's a neurosis factory - at worst, very Hell....

It is no accident that countries are referred to as motherlands and fatherlands. But if this is the language of fascism, then we have to think what this says about the nation-in-miniature that is the family. Certain men, and not only men I suppose, although I have incomparably more experience of dealing with the victims of male rather than female abuse, use their perverse commitment to the Family (does anyone doubt, for instance, that Jack Torrance in some sense 'loves' Danny?) precisely as a licence for abuse. It's because I love her that I abuse her....

It's not only because it recognizes this that The Shining is a hyper-acute analysis of the Horrors of the Family. It's also because it moves beyond Larkin's banal truism ('they fuck you up your mum and dad/ they don't mean to, but they do') to get to the cold machinic revelation that it is not yr parents who fuck you up, it is the structure that fucks everyone up, that ensures that everyone within it is always-already abused and (at least potentially) abuser. The Overlook's corridors extend in time as well as space....

The family has never been biological (in part, because nothing is, in the sense of pre-culturally determined). There are no biological fathers. As Sadie used to say, until DNA, the father relationship was completely speculative. How does God know that he's the father? lol. To be a father is to be in a position in a structure.

What's fascinating over the last twenty years has been the disappearance of any collective feminist structural pressure on the family and its replacement by issues of childcare, now understood as a supposedly non-political, merely political matter. The broader issues of childcare - why should it be undertaken by two neurotics in isolation? How else could it be done? Must everything be geared up towards adults working as much as possible? - have been swept aside, made unthinkable.
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
ok, I've only skimmed this because I have a lot on tonight, but I think there is some good stuff here. Some fundamentals, for me, about the family:

1) Communes/radical alternatives etc. Of course these should be explored as an alternative to the nuclear family. But you then run the risk of trying to set up utopian projects within capitalism. It's doomed to failure for all sorts of reasons and a good few people I know who grew up in situations like that are/were quite fucked up about it. One of them even did an academic study on the subject and found to her horror that loads of other people were fucked up by it too.

Possibly this needs another thread but what I would say is that just because something doesn't work now, doesn't mean it never will. As Mark says, it's a recent phenomenon, this family stuff. However what all this does mean is that attacking the family may not tactically be the best place to start.

2) The nuclear family is a lie anyway. Loads of people get brought up by their grandparents or aunts/uncles, by single mothers, shift between parents throughout the week, have gay parents, have one parent, effectively have no parents, whatever. None of this is new either.

3) Bringing up a kid between the two of you when you're trying to scrape enough cash together to keep your heads above water and remain civil, exited about life, engaged, etc can be really oppressive. The nuclear family is like an incubator for neuroses. Questioning its existence doesn't mean anyone has a licence to act irresponsibly towards their kids in the name of 'revolution', or even that they don't love their kids - quite the reverse.
 
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