John Hutnyk is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.
He is the author of a number of important books in his field, including Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (2004), Critique of Exotica: Music; Politics and the Culture Industry (2000), and Diaspora and Hybridity (co-authored with Virinder Kalra and Raminder Kaur) (2005). SoN editor Jon Bailes conducted the following interview via email in April 2009 to discuss his analyses of hybridity, incorporation and cultural revolution.
State of Nature: Is the supposed multicultural or hybrid society not so much all inclusive as merely a more complicated way of defining who is incorporated in to the ‘centre’ and who is left out on the ‘margin’ than simply using racial categories of white (in) and not white (out)? Are such racial categories then insufficient for dealing with this dynamic, which in fact would be better served by concepts such as politics and class?
John Hutnyk: Insofar as my work is that of an academic commentator within cultural studies, in a Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths which is pretty heavily invested in theory and philosophy, and with a training and a political inflection that includes a commitment, at least to some degree, to the overturning of such all too easy polarizations implied – even enacted – by white/non-white, centre/margin (and you have already put these terms in scare quotes), as well as the polarizations around race, class and the multicultural, I cannot respond to the spirit of this question without a few provisos. Well, maybe a lot of provisos.
I do not think we can talk simply of multicultural society. There is a history of the use of this term which is quite convoluted, which shifts from what might once have been a quite progressive critique, right through a range of positions, so that the intent of some who used the term comes under attack, others originally opposed to what is implied in the multi of multicultural start to use the term themselves and it becomes useful for a marketing of a ‘multiculturalism’ that is thoroughly hollowed out, with nothing to do with the redress of inequalities, the redistribution of wealth, the inclusive community, that was once – we forget this – was once at the heart of the multicultural.
I remember a politician in Australia called Al Grassby, whose efforts had at least something of the spirit of a redress, but this drive was slowly transformed through institutional and opportunist means. The mid-1970s effort for multicultural transformation of Australia, which could not be ignored after the atrocities of White Australia immigration restriction and policy of extermination, was nonetheless slowly repackaged. Early on, Grassby was able to get quite a lot of research into inequalities around race and ethnicity in Australia done through the policy framework. I am not saying that the delegation of multiculturalism to policy and ‘research’ is a good thing, but there was once an organization called the Australian Institute for Multuicultural Affairs (AIMA) which was responsible for considerable early research and position papers that started the discussion of multiculturalism, or at least moved it along in progressive ways. Of course, given the character of Australian politics, and the fall of the Whitlam Government, under which Grassby was a controversial minister, AIMA was then attacked under the Frazer Government that replaced Whitlam (at the behest of the Queen’s representative, Governor General Sir John Kerr). Eventually a Commission of Review of AIMA was set up (CRAIMA) and then – I remember this as part of the Hawke administration, but I may have the dates slightly out of sync – AIMA was replaced by an Office of Multicultural Affairs. Now, like AIMA, the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) was still able to produce some reports, and a number of information leaflets, but the researchers and staffers had by then a sniff of the constraints under which they worked and language like ‘community’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ became dominant while ‘redress of inequality’, ‘redistribution of wealth’ and so on were relegated as bad words. Equality of opportunity was the code word of the new opportunists, but this was cultural opportunity – grants for cultural festivals and ethnic arts replaced any significant address of stark inequalities. And this does not even take into consideration the mass dispossession and continued impoverishment of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples or the stultifying effects of a conservative forelock-tugging suburbanism that still called England home, even after many many years of settle colonization of the ‘sunburnt country’. Eventually even OMA was disbanded, and I remember visiting, as a young researcher in the 1980s, a sad office on a back street of the inner-city (in Fitzroy) which was called the Clearing House for Multicultural Issues (CHFMI) where I could find the dust covered reports of the early years now neglected, and certainly no longer commissioned in the same numbers by the various Departments delegated to ‘manage’ multiculturalism and attend to the maintenance of inequality in Australia. So, from redress, to review, to an office, to a clearing house, the ‘issue’ of multiculturalism was derailed. Such that now, multiculturalism exists as an empty mockery of a potential there once was, a missed opportunity, made into a very nice museum that tourists may visit whenever they are in Melbourne for the wonderful smorgasbord of foods and joys of multicultural shopping and summer festivals that… I’m sorry, that totally ignore the vicious undercurrent of racial conflicts and the inequalities that persist in the Lucky Country to this day.
I apologize for the acronym salad given just now (AIMA, CRAIM, OMA, etc), but I am responding with a hunger for a renewal of the politics of radical redistribution, and an anger at the bland celebration of spices and flavours that masquerades as multiculturalism today. In the book Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, Koushik Banerjea writes of England and the high point of the ‘multicultural encounter’ between a suited city trader and an immigrant curry house worker in the fashionable Brick Lane end of town. Banerjea described this cultural exchange as one where we merely have the suit shouting ‘Hey Sabu, where’s my fucking vindaloo’. There are many reasons to blame the bankers for this crisis, and oftentimes they deserve it – this is part of the reason why.
Similarly, when we talk of a hybrid society, I do not think we are talking of an ‘inclusive’ society in any way except insofar as all cultures have become hollowed-out items for a ‘cultural’ exchange in the market. What Capital has impressively achieved is to make everything the same in the same narrow way – for sale. I can eat an Indian tonight, a Chinese tomorrow, and – after the success of the South Asian TV comedy show ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ – I can even have a bland ‘English’ the next night – probably at an expensive gastro pub where again the staff are immigrant workers, the clientele still the well-to-do. Hybridity in theory is about ambivalence and a more complicated or nuanced understanding of cultural difference, but really there seems to me to be a very big deception going on here. The curry shift workers are still on minimum wage or less, the bankers bailed out by the Government still on an expense account lunch. Again here we are not even beginning to address the problems of the terminology of centre and margin, or the rest of the world, the majority South, nor Aboriginal Australia nor…
SoN: You describe how since 9/11 the theory of hybridity and diaspora as sites of political resistance “seems meek and mild in the face of an aggressive neo-liberal conservatism”. Now, the current political narrative in the US seems to be that it is time to return to a more ‘enlightened’ pre-Bush era, ignoring the fact that US foreign policy was hardly much different in previous decades. What does the election of Barack Obama mean for cultural theory?
JH: I think there are big problems associated with the election of Barack Obama if we are to think of this as anything to do with Hybridity. You saw during the election campaign what a mess that turned out to be. Was he Black? Was he mixed? Was he black enough? What about that surname? That middle name? These were pretty distasteful scenes, and clearly the Republican team ‘A’ were in self destruct mode, but if we remember the primaries, the ‘B’ team did some of this low muckraking as well. But then I think all these issues of Barack’s cultural (read political) identity were also ‘meek and mild’ insofar as they disguised the ascendancy of a continued neo-liberal agenda on the part of both ‘sides’ of politics in the USA. Do I need to note that ‘our’ full of ‘hope’ new president managed to bomb Afghanistan on his first day in office, proceeding then to build a new coalition of the coerced to escalate the Afghan war, to launch a concerted recovery package for Capital that involved massive hand outs to the Auto industry, a renegotiation of the role of the World Bank and the IMF (rather than their abolition), an attempt to shore up the unravelling hegemony of the west in the face of military defeat in the Middle East (yes, it is certainly not a victory) and the ascendance of China and India in Asia? Some of us have been reading Quentin Peel’s article in the Financial Times of April the 6th. He says of the G20 summit in London at the start of April (in which, in passing, I note the death at the anti-summit protests of a 47 year old man at the hands of overzealous Police, with the Independent Police Complaints Authority investigating – will charges be laid?) that the summit indicated an important shift in the international order. The rise of new international powers meant ‘fundamental adjustments’ are taking place ‘including a switch of power from West to East. In the crisis, China, India and Brazil (not east, but anyway, it’s the FT after all) must be at the table, with China playing an ever more important role in development and geopolitics. As well ‘China lectured Mr Obama’s new administration on the need to follow stimulus spending with renewed effort at fiscal consolidation’. Of course all this, and more – see http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.com/2009/04/g20-newspaper
-of-british-financial.html – is not anything other than the FT translating business-as-usual into an opportunity as ever. Capitalism is hybrid remember, it can come across as Chinese, but the change in the US response is such that the old stalking-horse accusations of Human Rights violations, usually used by the West to beat up on the rest of the world, were hardly mentioned during Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic visit there in February, as Quentin Peel also notes at the end of his piece. If the FT thinks the times are a changing, then we might want to take a more critical stance here too.
-of-british-financial.html – is not anything other than the FT translating business-as-usual into an opportunity as ever. Capitalism is hybrid remember, it can come across as Chinese, but the change in the US response is such that the old stalking-horse accusations of Human Rights violations, usually used by the West to beat up on the rest of the world, were hardly mentioned during Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic visit there in February, as Quentin Peel also notes at the end of his piece. If the FT thinks the times are a changing, then we might want to take a more critical stance here too.
SoN: What has the media coverage of Barack Obama (for example the constant reiteration that he is America’s ‘first black president’ when in fact, by any criteria, he is neither ethnically nor culturally any more black than white) signified in terms of dominant ideas of race, hybridity and multiculturalism?
JH: Surely this question has to be relegated to the future judgement of history. Will Britain now elect its first Black president? It is interesting that there have been discussions on current affairs radio of just this prospect. The point being that we do not have a president in the Westminster system, and being prime minister does not have the same ring of achievement here – I mean, given the mess of the economy, no-one wants to be prime minister here. What I want to know is when we will get a Black Queen? There were those conspiracy theorists who said that Diana was pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s child when she died, but the line of succession would have excluded any possibility of Muslim royalty. I think here the theory gets absurdist. The aspiration to be President is as bad as the aspiration to be a royal – the sooner we do away with both hierarchical systems, and the corporate interests, stock market players, and big-time lobbyists behind it all, the better. Hmmm, did I tell you I was not in favour of the fake democracy that is the parliamentary system – voting once every four years is not really participation in decision making as to how we live our lives. I want real democracy – which is communism. At least that is one way we can define communism – everybody having a real say in how they live. Radical democracy. You don’t even have to vote for it in a guarded booth (remember the hanging chads).
SoN: How much is the identification of Jews as ‘white’ (not ‘Other’) in the dominant discourse of the contemporary Western world caused by, and dependant on, the continued existence of Israel as a state which remains useful in protecting and advancing Western interests in the Middle East?
JH: I am not really competent to answer this question (but which question am I ever really competent to answer?). My views on Israel are formed through long involvement with the Palestinian struggle, with campaigns of support and with solidarity, and with involvement with progressive Israelis. That said, it is not an area of research for me. I read a lot. I think the reports that my former student Ewa Jasiewicz sent from Gaza during December and January were terrific, harrowing, meaningful (Ewa Jasiewicz is a co-co-ordinator of the Free Gaza Movement in Gaza, writer and paramedic services volunteer www.freegaza.org). She had also spent time reporting from there five years ago, and a year in Iraq. She writes well. I like Jean Genet’s book on Palestine “Prisoner of Love”, and Ted Swedenburg’s blog Hawgblawg (http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/) which is where Ted’s work as Professor of Anthropology in Arkansas and as vigilant chronicler of the commercialization of the Palestinian Kufiya scarf by American Apparel etc is exhaustively documented. Great stuff. At my college recently the Academic Union entered into a twinning arrangement with Berzeit University in Palestine and the students union occupied the administration building in order to win 20 scholarships for Palestinian Masters students to come to Goldsmiths over the next ten years. Universities in Palestine have been blockaded on a daily basis, the Islamic University in Gaza was bombed, scholars and students have limited access to resources and – well, its not a place to be a researcher, as with nearly every other profession, such as they are in a state of occupation. Yet still the Palestinian’s prevail. This can only be considered impressive. I am also very much impressed by those Israelis who still fight for a just Israel. To mention one great book, also from a Goldsmiths colleague, I recommend reading Eyal Weizman’s “Hollow Land” – a penetrating account of the uses of postmodern and post-structural theory, including Deleuze and Guattari, on the part of the IDF. An astonishing read. I do not know if the defence of the Israeli state on the part of the West, the arms sales, the failure to intervene to prevent death and destruction raining down on Gaza, allowing the ongoing blockades, the attacks on anyone who raises questions about Israel – the attacks on Professor Joel Kovel at bard College for example – I don’t know if this mode of protecting and advancing Western interests in the Middle East is well served by saying its related to identifying Jews as ‘white’ and not ‘Other’. I don’t think a reversal of this would change anything, so the suggestion of a dependence on this formula seems also somehow culturalist in too easy a way. There are massive interests at play, we know – we see it on TV even when there is a news blackout – but the extended consequences for characterization of Jewishness or Otherness is more problematic. There are many kinds of Jews, we are all ‘Other’ to somebody – if only it were as easy to solve as it is to say this.
SoN: One of the factors in the debate about the circulation of different cultural products has always been that the means of circulation rests in the hands of a small group of (‘white’) elites – the owners of publishers, TV channels, record labels and so on. How has the internet affected this control of distribution and access?
JH: Internet proliferation has given media owners a new opportunity for commercialization of desires we didn’t even know we had (or want). I mean, how many people are playing Facebook scrabble compared to reading Ewa’s reports from Gaza? Both of course see the ads that come along with email or web 2.0, and all of course are contributing a little to the algorithms that make Google a success and the internet the most popular new tool since the automation of weaving transformed the garment industry. There is a great discussion of such transformations in Marx as we know, all about a coat he wanted (shivering on the way home from the British Museum). I am in favour of reading Marx to make sense of the internet. I think there are still many insights to be found in the work of the most important social scientist who ever wrote, and in the most important book – bar Bible and Koran, that we have, agree or disagree? These are insights that can reveal new things about the internet, so long as we read more than just the opening chapter on fetishism. In the chapters on the working day, and chapter 16 through 24, Marx talks about co-operation and its management in ways too often skimmed. That stuff is dynamite – take a look again at the passage where he talks about education. Marx makes a distinction between productive labour and ‘subordinate functions’ that should give academics pause. He writes that: ‘a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his[her] pupils, [s]he works [her]himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his[her] capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation’ (page 644 Penguin edition). A sausage factory – ha! This is a crucial passage for discussion of the ‘teaching factory’, where academics add capacity and help reproduce the productive labourers of the future (their students), while at oftentimes also producing a ‘surplus’ through fees, consultancy, research contracts and the like. It is also crucial for thinking of the new media factories, the piece workers at home, numb before the screen. This is not free media, distribution has not escaped control.
At Goldsmiths we have been having a debate in relation to this under the slogan of the ‘economy of contribution’. Here, the importance of the distinction between those who produce and those who consume is not touched by consideration of those who own the means of production. There are of course differences in 2.0 Capitalism from that extant in Marx’s day, but we should be careful with celebrating or elevating the new too fast. I have written a lot on this topic, in critique of Derrida for an incautious aside (he usually means more in his asides than any Freudian could ever credit) where he says that email will transform the entire public and private space of humanity, ‘above all, email’ (in “Archive Fever”). I think maybe Derrida had just bought a new Mac at the time (for discussion, see my book Bad Marxism: Cultural Studies and Capitalism). We might also have consideration here of the relation between the contribution we make to an ‘associative milieu’ – the term is from Bernard Stiegler, another colleague at Goldsmiths – and compare the milieu of contribution to Google as merely of a different density or distribution to the milieu that was the family or community in the period where the mode of production was predominantly the factory (sausages or not). Theorists such as Leopoldina Fortunati (in her book The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labour) have directed us to look at the various ways in which unremunerated and often unacknowledged forms of labour are essential to the maintenance of the paid worker. If we take also into account what Marx had to say about training, co-operation, and the sustenance of the labourer, including the reserve army of labour, we can see that the calculus of class into Bourgeois and Proletariat was never a simple two-part game. There are multiple roles on both sides, the division indeed blurs and collapses at times – it was, as Marx himself said after all, just a ‘sketch’ (certainly in the opening lines of the Manifesto, rewritten in ever more nuanced forms over and over even after Kapital itself was published). The point is that we all participate in a complex and hierarchical array of wealth and power, and an owner of a large capital venture is still the one who profits at the expense of the producers – though again, owner and producer are never easy categories. We are all producers now, some of us also remunerated just like owners.
SoN: How suitable is music as a medium for communicating political issues and acting as a catalyst for radical politics? Do you think revolutionary aesthetics is more effective when art carries an overt political content (as in the cases of groups you have written about, such as Asian Dub Foundation and Fun^da^mental), as opposed to form?
JH: Yes, the revolution should be televised. I would like to hold one of the cameras.
SoN: To what extent is political music at risk of losing its impact because, through mass media distribution, the artist loses control of the context in which it is heard? Is this loss of control in any way avoidable? Would it be right for an artist to want to maintain control of such things in the first place – taking away freedom of interpretation from the audience?
JH: I have to leave much of this question aside as well – there are several PhD students working on this topic at Goldsmiths. There have been a couple of public workshops, but I expect and hope for the conventional discussions of these themes to be utterly transformed by what is new in their work. It will soon be made available. We can still ask some general questions – such as was music ever so important and did it have an impact before? Maybe it’s a bit too hard to measure these things as it is not just a matter of calculating the significance of the Rolling Stones singing ‘what can a poor boy do, except to play for a rock and roll band, cos in sleepy London town there ain’t no place for a street fighting man’ (only for the stones to later be sponsored by Budweiser). I mean, consider the impact of Abba, or of station identification tunes, or elevator music. What is an impact? Compare this impact to those that would censor music, for whatever reason. I am not going to defend any form of control of music, and I think the new technological possibilities of file-sharing and collaborative work do change the circumstances of production a little. But, I think it is still a question of property rights, and these we can be against. Property is not just theft, it’s a high stakes control game in the market of culture. The scenario where the owner of music is able to use corporate backing and the courts to come down on some small example of borrowing is the obscene side of the intellectual property debate. Consider how some years ago now, Paul Simon prevented the band Fun^da^Mental from sampling a lyric from the Simon and Garfunkel song ‘The Sounds of Silence’. Simon had played his guitar riffs over the music of Afro-Brazilian drum band Odulum without adequate compensation, but he can prevent FDM from using his early, and very schmaltzy, work in what was to be a pretty powerful track against war. The track was renamed ‘Deathening Silence’, sample removed, and is available on the album “Erotic Terrorism”. In my view, Paul ‘Mr World Music’ did not do so well in the deal.
SoN: Is it double standards to expect every example of, say, ‘British Asian’ cinema to have some sort of political message or comment on the experience of ‘British Asians’ in general, when there is no such expectation of ‘white’ cinema to make political comment on ‘white’ experience? Is there a theoretical assumption that white people are not supposed to be political any more – and have therefore been let off the hook of responsibility to produce whatever culture they please – but ‘Other’ people are, and some sort of betrayal takes place when they fail to mention politics in cultural products?
JH: This is the question of Centre and Margin again in a way. The Centre doesn’t have to make its every move count in terms of cultural coverage because it has hegemony. Of course there are plenty of folds in which to invoke oppositional moves within that hegemony, but these are also oftentimes readily absorbed or cushioned (e.g., ‘street fighting man’). We can talk a lot about complicity and unexamined privilege, even of the ‘white’ critic, and even of the white critic that is down with the Black, or the blues. These are not insignificant problems. But as the marginalized struggle for, and in fact win, space in the cultural sphere for their product, it becomes exactly that: product for sale. The cascade of co-option that we saw in the first question, that turned multiculturalism from its now lost origins in an oppositional demand for redress and into mere cuisine, also operates in terms of media visibility. Writing with Virinder Kalra some years ago, we argued that the effort to get Asian faces on the telly in Britain was an admirable anti-racist move at a certain moment. It was the first step in a cultural politics. But, having such faces on screen only to reinforce stereotype or to repeat the conformity of everyday expectations is a great missed opportunity. Visibility as step one also needs a step two, three and four. An insistence on doing something else than the usual, an extension – perhaps even an overcompensation – that would transform the expected and undo the hierarchies of exclusion and privilege that were there in the first place, an organisational effort is necessary to sustain this, an educational and a political campaign, relentless. For a multiculturalism that does away with the bland culturalism of visibility, that extends out into multiple redress, economic and political, as well as much more than a few token contracts on the BBC and a turn as a soap star on East-Enders.
SoN: What do you see as the cultural impact of academic debate? Can a shift in the academy to more radical concerns have an effect on wider public opinion?
JH: I am afraid that professionally and by inclination I am required to concede I still feel teaching and research are all important. I may be brainwashed as well. The hegemony gets us all. I think education is a social good. Well, is it? There has been quite some discussion of late at Goldsmiths about new initiatives in education. This is fine, remembering that Adorno insisted that education had to combat totalitarianism. New thinking is what we require if we are to think at all. In the interest of this thinking, my colleague at Goldsmiths, Irit Rogoff, comments on two tendencies in education in Europe in a way that perhaps deserve a few remarks. Irit mentions both the Bologna Process aiming at some sort of compatibility conversion coherence across degree offerings in the EU countries, and a second tendency which amounts to a proliferation of self-organising Arts School formations, or what Florian Schneider calls ‘non-aligned initiatives converging around “education”‘. Education here is becoming a ‘model’ for various initiatives, where the key terms are, it seems to me, recitations: ‘new methods’, new initiatives, new models, ‘radical pedagogy’, ‘collaborative work’ and proposals ‘to change the terms of the debate away from a purely bureaucratic engagement with quantitative and administrative demands and from the ongoing tendency to privatize knowledge as so-called “intellectual property”‘ (Rogoff at Goldsmiths Education Debate). So far so good. I guess. I do not see this as very much different from the training programmes that so concerned the writers of the Factory Inspectorate reports cited by Marx in the middle chapters of Kapital.
Coming from engaged colleagues, of course these ideas are welcome and we have a lot of ground on which to agree. The problem is that when we think of Education as a model and academic debate as designed to shift public opinion, I want to reach for my gun. The trouble is the context has changed. I mean, what is it to promote education and debate as a model in the new economy – creative economy, culture industry – context of the abstracted immaterial multitudinous spaces of net-activism and culture as product et al? I am not convinced. We are turning debate into product as well and once again there is a critical component missing in the context of racist war, and where the internet and other networking 2.0, new compatibilities, initiatives and formations are the advance thinking of a new distanciation, new discretizations, new world orders.
Here, for example, taken from the website, is a key sentence which I would like to discuss:
The model of education has become central to a range of creative artistic practices and to a renewed interest in radical pedagogy. As a mode of thinking an alternative to the immense dominance of art as commodity and display as spectacle, education as a creative practice that involves process, experimentation, fallibility and potentiality by definition, offers a non-conflictual model for a rethinking of the cultural field. (Education Summit website)
It seems to me that there are several things going on here. Not all of them thought through as radically as they might be. Forget the ‘non-conflictual model’ since this is relegated to the cultural field and we know that class conflicts are not only operating there. The ‘thinking as alternative’ to art really does grab me. An alternative to commodified art, though, would be what? Fabulous possibilities distract me – popular votes on which pictures should hang on the walls? The Tate Modern emptied out? No more National Gallery souvenir postcards? Free access, and free coffee, to all museums? No, that is not what is meant – what we have is a renewal of experimentation, creative practices, process and potential. Yawn. Although interestingly in the quoted passage the word ‘fallibility’ cuts diagonally across these invigorating, but you have to admit, fairly standard educationalist terms, I am not concerned too much with the threat this model will pose to hybridized commodification and the war machine. Confined to the cultural field or not, this is, surely, just what the smartest employers want – new thinking, new opportunities, renewal all round. Rather, it seems to me, the model of education needs to be re-imagined, since this kind of modelling is perhaps one of the main ways in which the promotion of education is a promotion of some pretty old modes of thinking. This thinking is smuggled in at the very moment that it claims to be new. A radical pedagogy in a context where education is seen as a good model, is still education that has not thought through the ways this very model operates to train operatives for hierarchy within the cultural economy and hierarchical society, the global war economy, at large. Education as a model has not yet thought through the ways education is not simply or unproblematically a social good. I totally agree that the old collegiate model of academic ‘debate’, such as it was, should not be protected, worn and frayed as it is. But to renovate that model with a ‘radical pedagogy’ without questioning the projected model as model is also suspect. For conflict then. For telling stories of a possible delinking from Capital, for breaking the divisions between those inside and outside since the old model and the new model can also prepare the ground for even greater commodification, commercialization, bland multiculturalisms, hybrid Capital. What if we saw education as a Trojan Horse for exactly that old enemy, and then looked for ways to tow the thing out to the beach and burn it down. We’ll tell stories round the fire. That would be an education for change we need.
Thanks for the chance to talk with you.
Jon Bailes is co-editor and webmaster of State Of Nature. He is currently writing a PhD thesis on ideology theory at the Centre for European Studies, University College London, and has an MA in European Thought from the same department. He is co-author of Weapon of the Strong: Conversations on US State Terrorism (London: Pluto, 2012).
