Archive for the ‘ventriloquism’ Category
Common Purpose: real power
Audacious powerplay
Common Purpose is a registered charity, founded by people involved in the creation of Demos, which exists to identify and train current and future leaders in business, politics, national and local government and wider civil society to form opinion and influence policy making. It has advocates in institutions all over the place, from teachers in schools to politicians in central government. The charity’s head, Julia Middleton, wrote a book on its aims called Beyond Authority, which is the basis of CP’s slogan: “People who lead beyond their authority can produce change beyond their direct circle of control.” Middleton’s book’s title hints at a move away from oligarchic authority, but the CP slogan suggests an audacious powerplay rather than a rejection of authority.
Note that Middleton’s book is not called Beyond Power. The CP site says that the leaders it is fostering should learn to “understand how power works in different worlds: find out where real power is and spot relationships between players”. Surely, if you’re spotting where the ‘real power’ is, you’ve already assumed a privileged vantage point. Does that privileged position not relocate the source of the ‘real power’ and place it in the hands of the trained observer/leader who understands the wider context?
Ideas futures
Also, have a look at The Tomorrow Project (tagline: “Using the future to understand the present”), a companion website to CP, which provides information on, for example, globalisation and climate change. Demos regard “futures thinking” as vital and cite a quote on scenario planning, the technical basis of “futures thinking” in its favour: “Scenario planning ensures that you are not always right about the future, but - better - that you are almost never wrong.” If you thought we’d seen the last of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s policy analysis market (see here for another internet view), think again.
This marketplace for ideas futures immediately brings to mind the more visionary work of Philip K. Dick.
Pro and anti
I’ve been reading about Common Purpose on the internet and can find only extreme opinions, mostly against it. For instance, heavily in the ‘anti’ camp there’s ex-Royal Navy anti-submarine warfare officer, Brian Gerrish, who runs UK Column and who says, among other things, that the EU is evil and that Common Purpose brainwashes its participants and proposes a treasonable agenda in this video on Common Purpose.
On the ‘pro’ side, there’s Stef Lewandowksi, who uses the negative criticisms of Common Purpose by the BNP, UKIP and David Icke, among others, to taint any further criticism of the organisation by association, consigning “the loons”, or ‘obviously’ idiotic critics, to the internet nuthouse. [N.B. This person’s site was not working properly when I looked at it, so I’ve linked to the cached text.]
I suspect Lewandowksi’s not unbiased. He dismisses any possible criticism of CP’s leadership ideology thus: “when you start using the word ‘leadership’ in anything you do, you’re bound to start getting a few weirdos interested in what you have to say - I find it funny that a few years ago, when it was called ‘management’ nobody would have given a damn.” Its news to me that only certain “weirdos” are interested in leadership: given the market for news product, that puts quite a few of us in the frame. However, I’m more interested in his parenthetical assertion, which is that when ‘leadership’ training of the kind CP offers was called ‘management’, “nobody would have given a damn”. Of course, that’s just silly. I think that given a couple of moments most people could call to mind many criticisms of management speak and associated management bollocks, whether from personal experience or in the media, and if they can’t, there’s commentary galore all over the place for them to read at their leisure. I think that people actually do give a damn that they were, and are now, subjected to the divisive and often contradictory edicts of ‘management’. And I doubt whether it’ll take them more than a couple of blinks to see that self-appointed ‘leaders’ are new-fashioned managers. Have a look at The Tomorrow Project on “futures thinking” if you doubt there’s a correlation between new-style ‘leadership’ training and old-style ‘management’. The point is precisely what such people call themselves; but it’s also about who appointed them our leaders and what we think about it. I don’t wish to be divisive, but by ‘we’ I mean those who are not identified as leaders.
Visionary leadership or new-fangled management?
CP’s offer of visionary leadership training to enable the new managers to understand and negotiate the layers of organisational complexity in the new modern world significantly pre-figures the debate pending on the future of democracy and pre-empts any discussion that might be had about who we want leading us (if, indeed, we want that at all). The imagined community, with communal power at its centre, vanishes with the introduction of specially trained leaders appointed by nobody, who will sniff out where the “real power” in communities lies and act accordingly, having co-opted, relegated or sidelined opponents who are not specially identified and trained leaders.
Now here’s the thing. I can’t easily locate balanced debate on this subject, which puzzles me. The ‘pro’ people seem to assume that there’s nothing more than training involved. The ‘antis’ are sure that it’s all about indoctrination and control. I want to find out more about who’s involved with Common Purpose and what they think they’re getting out of it.
So let’s have a debate and keep it nice, without any name-calling or whatever else it is that people do on the internet instead of having conversations with each other.
Some questions
On whose terms should the expansion of leadership beyond authority be debated?
If Common Purpose is, as it seems, about the ‘right’ people gaining power, what do we think about that? Are you the right person? Are those identified by unknown others as potential leaders the ‘right’ people?
Can governance be improved by a network coalition of the ‘right’ people? Will their friends and contacts whom they encourage to participate be the ‘right’ people, too?
If the things that need to be done get done ‘right’, does it matter who does the work?
Given the positions of some of the participants, is Common Purpose just the old establishment in a new outfit, working semi-transparently where it once worked opaquely?
Alternatively, is CP the regrouped and rebranded British Left?
What do those involved in CP get from the experience of observing ‘real power’ at work? Do they earn higher salaries? Do they bring those with the ‘real power’ with them on their journey of self-discovery?
How will the development of ideas futures benefit me and my community?
Does CP’s leadership training alter where the power lies?
Edit:
Here’s a fabulously bland site with CP participant endorsements.
Further edit:
In the face of criticism and vitriolic attacks, Common Purpose has started another site, Commonpurpose.net, devoted to explaining “The facts about Common Purpose” and, reasonably, countering various outlandish claims against it.
Through this new outlet CP reiterates that it offers leadership training and has no agenda. Commonpurpose.net emphasises that CP has “no alignment with any political party, religion or other organisation whatsoever”. Apparently, it exists “to give leaders the inspiration, the skills, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change in their work and potentially, in their communities or wider society.” Its charter “expresses its aim to identify opportunities and encourage leaders to become actively involved in civil society, but makes it clear that Common Purpose has no role in prompting or deciding what people choose to do”.#
Courage at work
So in Common Purpose, we’re seeing the birth of a novel social-cultural formation: a network organisation comprising individuals aspiring to leadership that claims only to facilitate, never to influence ideologically. CP rightly places responsibility on individuals. But are we to believe that there are no ideological choices, biases and prejudices in leadership training, whether in trainer or trainee? Is training someone to be a leader - to identify where the power lies and act accordingly - not a realpolitik assumption? And does the usage of realpolitik methodologies place users beyond ideology? Surely, this is new-fangled management speak: old ideas in new clothes. CP says as much in a section on its site, titled “Managers scared to manage”.
This, from a downloadable research document called, “Courage at work: Causes and cures for timid management” (2005): “Common Purpose is a campaigning organisation that believes the UK needs more – and more diverse – leaders.” The solution to society’s ills? More managers! Perhaps their thinking’s changed since 2005.
Through its new site, Common Purpose gives you “the facts”. Aside from the fact that these “facts” are factoid gobbets variously restating CP’s own (non-)agenda and addressing remarks it regards as defamatory and therefore actionable under law, are there really just things called facts that describe reality and which exist outside context?
I ask again: what does Common Purpose actually do? I should say at this point that I have read CP’s blurbs and understand the verbiage. (Please do not redirect me to the CP website for re-education.) I am inviting you to question CP’s cover-all mission statement and think about the effect of the training it offers. If every other organisation ever invented, whether network or institutional, perpetuates ideology, how is it that CP does not and, in fact, according to its own (non-)ideology, cannot? And what ideology is it, or isn’t it, perpetuating? Since its training facilitates individuals to make audacious interventions in situations where power relations are in question, what are the grounds for CP’s positioning itself as an disinterested mentor?
Is this just another back-slapping opportunity for managers and various policy makers/implementers?
Should we tolerate the existence and modus operandi of an organisation that effectively celebrates the appropriation of power by an unelected elite or at the very least seeks unproblematically to encourage individuals to manipulate power relations? We should be asking whether, given all that’s been discussed about power relations down the years, such a purpose can be regarded as politically neutral. Does it matter than we’re talking about a charity comprising supposedly disinterested individuals, whether professionals in the social sphere?
Update 7 August 2008
In the absence of any debate on this matter in the public sphere, here’s a video of Brian Gerrish speaking recently, deconstructing the present language of social control, which he identifies as cultural Marxist. Linguistic analysis of structures was/is the basis of Marxian deconstruction, but provides a great starting point for anyone wanting to understand social structuration.
Note that Gerrish is not wielding this analytical tool ironically: like the individuals involved in maintaining the structures he talks about, he understands that language is structure, is control. He states: “If your language is controlled, you are controlled.” It’s not passed me by that, beyond this analysis, he assumes there is a right way and wrong to use language — including in respect of how to run a state, how to promote religion, etc. — but my point here is not to show up the linguistic gaps in Gerrish’s appropriation of non-conservative discourse. Gerrish understands language is control. But what do those individuals involved in promoting efficient leadership in pursuit of social justice understand? If you asked them — if you could find one — about their part in creating more intrusive structures of control through their interventions, what would they say? (And please don’t refer me, as some have done, to the Common Purpose website, where participants speak blandly.) Do they visualize themselves as the positive element in a duality of good and bad control?*
*This South African CP course attendee narrates his view of the complexity of power relations in a Machiavellian, or amoral utilitarian, take on leading beyond authority: “The part that brings about real change and effectiveness, whether we like it or not, is simply academic method and manipulation, end-justifies-the-means kind of stuff. Having a pure original intent is not necessarily more useful than having an evil one, provided you are able to relate to all of the required players required for your vision in a manner which gains you influence”.
Posted by Neil
on June 2, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Tags: Consciousnesses, Counterculture, Regionalism, Spatiality, ventriloquism
7 comments | Permalink
Rockhaunter
What was going to be a Halloween online special has turned into something a bit more substantial. I’m afraid. I’ve produced a one-off magazine called Rockhaunter, subtitle, “Conceptual gaiety in sound and vision”, with a glossy-ish cover enclosing 20 relatively profusely illustrated A4 pages. Contents: “Hauntiquarianism not hauntology”, “Dead villages: horror, suffering and locality” and “The Weird and The Unexplained, Part 1″
I’m making this available at a modest price: £2.50.* If you’d like a copy, click the button below to pay by PayPal, credit card or debit card. If you’d prefer to send a postal order, please send an email to neil@feastofpalmer.com and I’ll let you know where to send your old school payment. Please allow 28 days for delivery.
The articles and illustrations will be published on this site after the small print run of Rockhaunter is exhausted.
* Yes, I know the cover says 75p. But we all say things we don’t mean occasionally.
Posted by Neil
on November 2, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Tags: Counterculture, Rockhaunter, The Explained, The Unexplained, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
No comments yet | Permalink
The Imagined Village: Update — Lost in England
The Imagined Village’s Myspace is a roaring success! They only signed up on 26 September and as of today they’ve already gathered 77 friends (including Tom)! That must be nearly all the villagers in England. Or all the participants. And I’m sure things will pick up during their November tour — concert dates to include question and answer sessions — by the end of which they’ll have raised a veritable duststorm of popular discussion among The People and have a workable popular definition of what “the English identity” is up and running in no time!
Posted by Neil
on October 19, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Tags: Music, Regionalism, antiquarianism, ventriloquism
No comments yet | Permalink
Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — The Imagined Village: “World Music” Celebrities Fly-Tipping a Revisioned Socialist National Culture in an Imaginary Rural Setting to Bolster Regionalism
Just when you think realism’s canvased its last audience, there’s a rough Halloo! as the media summons itself and gathers round yet another mytho-mimetic Englishness folly purporting to represent all of us in miniature. Herewith, The Imagined Village, on Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD-derived Real World Records. An early record sleeve boasts a mock-up of a brown, Highways Agency-approved heritage tourism signpost, which positions their product with excellent precision.
The Imagined Village identifies ‘the village’ as a recoverable national asset and seeks to tease out the essential village in even the most ghastly urban space by promoting the edginess of hidden histories and reanimating failed communitarianism in the only terms ‘we’ seem able to understand. The Imagined Village is cultivating the imaginary village as a site of contest, giving an ideal topos mostly placed in ‘the rural’ an aura of urban liminality. You might as well say that ‘the urban’ resides in the middle of rural England. Both positions are equally idiotic — as is interrogating one by applying the other as a text, lever, clamp or electrode. My dubjective antennae are drooping, stilled by non-sensation.
Turn left into The Imagined Village tourist destination
Before the off, there have been so many cogent criticisms of the continuing trend in English/British social life to revert to the archetypal, ideal topos of ‘the village’ in circumstances of distress, whether ironically to destroy the myth or in seeking empowerment through reclaimation, that I can hardly be bothered to take them to task over it. Read Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) for starters.
The reimagining of English folk music as Angliana has been a long time coming. It’s been a good four years since Jah Wobble’s English Roots Music. Even longer since Professor Brian Short’s editorial recontextualisation of rurality beyond ‘the village’ in The English Rural Community: image and analysis (1992). Taking its name from Georgina Boye’s excellent book, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (1994), The New Imagined Village, as I can’t help but think of it, limps in last. Full marks to them though for naming their ventriloquising after Boyes’ book, in which she agrees with a 19th century critic of folklore who said that folkism is “a fraud, a delusion, a myth” and “simply a name for our ignorance”. The Imagined Village is an imaginary community arts outing, an imaginary community memory project, an imaginary identity forum, facilitated to death by a handful of Eighties performers plus some newer ones, including:—
Benjamin Zephaniah
Billy Bragg
Chris Wood
Eliza Carthy
Johnny Kalsi
Martin Carthy
Paul Weller
Sheila Chandra
Simon Emmerson
The Copper Family
The Gloworms
Tiger Moth
Trans-Global Underground
Tunng
As if The Good, The Bad and the Queen (2007) wasn’t a revolting enough spectacle, with its metonymical music hall reimagining of the masses as full-on stoned prole metropolitan intellectuals — or was its sparseness about silencing the flow of sounds and voices the better to hear Albarn trill? — its cultural retrenchment and its hoarse Cassandraean wail of warning disguised as a paean. And isn’t the music hall invariably adduced when songwriters and popsters with pretensions to Englishness add the detuned pianoforte into their repertoire? As if Iain Sinclair’s increasingly provincial property pages hadn’t so effectively subborned space and community histories into narrative outcomes in the unfashionable commuter envelope. Disappearing even further up his own disappearance. As if class hadn’t been sufficiently reified in its unenviable non-metropolitan place by such meterorically entitled critical theorists as those working on The Idler’s hideous crap towns project. I think we’ve all cottoned on to the idea that these creatures actually mean crap people: povs, chavs, oaves, cider mums, with their ghastly wrong clothes and extraordinary manners and speech that the culturally entitled love to approximate nasally.
Now we have to contend with ‘classless’ — but fully racialised and gendered — artistes from The Past ventriloquising The Idiom of The People back at us, much as their dead mentor Cecil Sharp did with the tired corpse of a Cambridgeshire peasant shrouded in a shepherd’s smock to hide its horrid puppet-master’s diddling fingers.
The IV website is pretty anaemic: headings in copperplate, text in accessible non-serif, light pink background. The banner image is a faded blue willow-pattern print effect representing ‘the rural’ as what’s left of an open space on the edges of a heavily built-up urban area, with blocks of flats in the background, a jet flying overhead, what appears to be a lad in a shell-suit claiming through walking a small hill that could be a long barrow. The low wall running round the boundary of this open space is perhaps a piece of 1950s or 60s landscaping or maybe an survival of an earlier ruralist development statement made during the emparkment of an earlier village demolished so as not to ruin the view from a nearby country house. The policeman in a high-vis vest inspecting a burnt-out motor in the right foreground is clearly not preventing crime.
Even as I write, cadres of hauntologists and other more minor cultural figures are literally sweating ectoplasm trying to reconfigure, degrade and mash-up the past and make things better now by renarrating decades’ worth of educational material, antiquarian fictions, future sounds from the past, signifincant conjunctions of this and that, and whatnot. And some of them — notably Ghostbox — are doing a grand job, too. Clearly, the more graphically minded among the hauntologists were not asked to participate or refused and thinned out and the job went to a less switched on motherfucker.
A glimpse of home in The Imagined Village
I give standing ovations to affective imaginings and I’m all for letting the voices out/in/through — but not like this. The Imagined Village says it’s engaging with the great debate on “what constitutes the English identity”. Well, listen to this. The English identity envisaged by Billy Bragg’s mates in the Labour Government is an archive of data taken from citizens that, under the increasingly doomed-yet-inevitable identity card scheme, the state would own and sell back to the individuals who provided it under licence.
Bragg, like Cecil Sharp before him, is ventriloquising wildly. He’s using The Imagined Village project as a way to underwrite the Government’s failed regionalisation project, thinking that given people’s love of history, folklore and place — apparent in the popularity of Time Team, etc., they’ll eventually come round to appreciating the new territories of the invented regions. His imagined village is a reanimated Festival of Britain search for the best — a local identity competition with the usual penalties for not joining in. It’s habitus, but without the fun element.
Bragg supports the economic and cultural regionalistion of England, which was soundly rejected by the plain villagers of England in the only direct vote on the subject so far in the north-east, but which is currently going full steam ahead and overseen by the spookily generically titled Government Offices Network, which covers the Government offices for the regions — effectively the regional civil service — that administer the unelected regional development assemblies and the regional development agencies they serve.
What historical English regionalism looks like: a flag for East Anglia, invented around 1900 by George Henry Langham, later president of the London Society of East Anglians
According to the South East England Development Agency, the regional development agency with responsibility for corralling culture in the imaginary village I don’t live in:
A SEEDA document called “Culture Counts” spells it out even more clearly: “We must harness the energy and abilities of people to improve the productivity and the standard of life for all.”
The imagined Village seeks to harness the English villagers’ imaginations, the most powerful weapon in the political arsenal, in the cause of economic regionalisation.
19th century infrastructure in the imagined village
It’s a fact that the or even a English identity has lessened me. English identity — its weight, distance and proximity — has by turns made me crazy, afraid and ashamed. England gives black people schizophrenia and gives the wretched poor cancer to kill them off. England is the sound of my mum and dad excusing themselves. English identity is not forgotten, unclaimed. We threw it away and don’t want it back. Or if we’re willing to countenance its return, we want its weirdness called to mind, visibly altered by our scarring it on ejection, whited-out and/or felt-tipped in, like Belbury or Rawlinson End.
The Imagined Village: “We all walk in the footsteps of our Victorian song collecting ancestors but feel it is more relevant now than ever to question who decides what it is to be authentic and English and more importantly what it is that makes us proud to be English musicians.” I don’t walk in the footsteps of Victorian song collectors. Many of my direct ancestors were unlettered rural peasants from whom songs may have been collected. If I walk in anyone’s figurative footsteps, it’s those of late 20th century record collectors.
I’d really like to know what it is that makes them proud — PROUD! — to be English musicians. They don’t care to say on the website and I missed the Newsnight featurette yesterday evening at 11pm. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’ve found a forum for their collective ignorance. I can wait to find out more…
An illustrated talk in the imagined village hall
The most pressing task for all hauntiquarians is avoiding at all costs a dialogue with Billy Bragg, a future peer of the realm in waiting due to his support for Tony Blair’s plan for a mainly non-elected second chamber in Parliament and for his championing regionalism at a time when no politician will touch it. We hauntiquaries won’t be dragged into the village hall under false pre and subtexts yet again for another of his talks, illustrated with magic lantern slides, about the joys of common land, vintage socialist processions and Englishmen in shirtsleeves standing proud without flags to cover their pride.
I’ll set up my own talk about the dead villages of England, remembering their tight surveillance-mindedness and all the fighting with villagers from other villages.
A hauntiquary intuitively appreciates authenticity as a strategically dialogically useful experiential counter-factual. A hauntologist, thinking authenticity an unutterably dreamy fiction, would of course purposefully collide two past experiences — genuflecting over their meaningful dissolution/compaction and the specificity of the (culture) space they describe in their implosion/explosion, in the empty garden at the end of (history) time — and stand ruefully regarding the vista of their own regarding.
John Clare in the 1860s, from Johnclare.info
It’s no surprise that The Imagined Village don’t mention John Clare, England’s best nature poet, for whom the village represented a community from which he was excluded, albeit partly through inclination and choice.
I end with Clare’s poem, “I Am” (1840), which should put to rest any lingering doubts about the worth of reviving the village idea. After all, Clare was a conscious man, an autoethnologist, aware of the ebb and wane of folk tradition and village life, which he put behind him at every opportunity, walking out and away into the fields and woods and sky, till he was “out of his knowledge”. The imagined village left him a conscious psychedelic husk. Do ‘we’ all now relish immediately being entitled to the thing Clare rejected?
I am: yet what I am no one cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live — like vapors tossedInto the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the restI long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below — above the vaulted sky.
Edit:
Eliza Carthy has entered into a dialogue on this post (see comments). She does right in calling into question the dualism of the ventriloquist/dummy idea I used to characterise Cecil Sharp’s internal colonialism and links that with a thought-provoking line about people’s conscious continuation and appropriation of musical traditions, especially in respect of families who sing and play music: “When exactly do you stop being the ventriloquist and become the dummy, do you think?”
Comments closed, 17 September 2008.
The best part of a year has passed since I posted it and it’s time to let it go. Thanks to those who’ve taken the time to read it and voice their opinions.
Posted by Neil
on October 13, 2007 at 1:16 am
Tags: Ecology, Regionalism, Spatiality, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
24 comments | Permalink
Rockhunter: Cover Versions
I’ve finally got round to photographing the original artwork for Rockhunter Nos. 1 to 4. My reason for doing this, other than for completism’s sake on this site, is because I’m compiling a book of Rockhunter articles for publication early in 2008. I’ve managed to retrieve cover art, some original typed pages and even a couple of original copies from the collective archive and I’m hoping to reproduce some of this stuff in an 8-page photoset in the middle of the book, much as you’ll find them in true crime books, special forces memoirs and movie novelisations, etc.
I’d like to finish all Rockhunter activity before 31 October, when Rockhaunter, my new and occasional journal of hauntiquarianism, commences. It seems inconceivable that both projects could exist at the same time.
Posted by Neil
on October 7, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Tags: Art, Ladybird books, Rockhaunter, Rockhunter, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
2 comments | Permalink