wallpaper animals

Following on from yesterday's post, and a few others where I have been developing ideas around meaning, I'm thinking more about the economic role of 'disconnected relics' (Bach Passions, Picassos, Beethoven manuscripts, etc), for whilst the inherent meaning of these relics is lost in time, they still play an important function in economic life. I alluded to this yesterday when I said that the risk society can exploit the fractured meanings in our lives by presenting these relics as cyphers of integrity and meaningfulness (for which money is exchanged), but actually they exacerbate the fractured meaning problem (and consequently drive further process of economic behaviour).

If education can be seen to be such a relic, then I think it is obvious how an education industry can function, and moreover can function well, divorced from any demonstrable benefit to skills or cormpetencies (and indeed the 'skills and competency' discourse is itself disconnected). But none of that matters, because economically, this works. My guess is that the world economy will pull itself out of its current crisis when it realises this.

But that's not to say it's a good thing: it's actually quite horrible. Universities will have students over a barrel in the same way that banks do at the moment:

"So Mr. Johnson, I can see looking at your academic records that you have some educational deficit, but a few credits. I have a great offer for you - but you have to agree today - a discount top-up degree course that would clear your deficit and give you a degree certificate in 'Reflective practice in Electronic Engineering'. Yes - yes - it should help you to get a job, although you would have to top up further to get your professional accreditation. But I can offer you that today (and today only) for £5500 per anum for 2 years of study plus administration fees and Accreditation of Prior Learning fees to carry over your existing credit. There is a failure penalty too. I don't think you'll do better than that. Oh.. the professional accreditation...? er.. hang on.. that's another year at £10,000. But you may not need it..."

I don't think that's a million miles from where we're heading. It will work, it will be economically successful because it is a model of risk creation that has already worked well in Banking, Insurance and increasingly Health. I find it very frightening.

The question for us is in the face of this (I think inevitable) development of education is "what do we do?" How do we help students who are going to be the victims of this? How do we ensure the educational equivalents of Bernard Madoff and Fred Goodwin don't simply run off with the students' cash, leaving the students high-and-dry? This is already happening amongst the less scrupulous private education providers right now. And in difficult times, everyone become less scrupulous.

The important thing here is that it is an aspect of the atomisation of the individual, without which the risk society couldn't operate. Collectives and communities share risks, they help people make balanced judgements, and they are powerful enough to set their own timescales and not be bullied or rushed into decisions which are not in their interests.

Our technology is completely geared around atomisation. I want technology for communities (and not 'online coommunities' because they are not communities! - that's a big con of the global tech companies)

There may be a way of putting this together which harnesses the emergence of the global education industry (and other global services) to empower real face-to-face communities. At the heart of it, I believe, lies the principle of 'giving'.

When we give we do something extraordinary to others to the material detriment of ourselves. 'Disconnected relics' often lie at the heart of giving rituals: sacred objects, Picassos, etc. But why not education? But giving education to a community is not the same as giving it to an individual (we have always done that with our children). Education is difficult to give to a group. But maybe an educational 'activity' or 'performance', like any performance, can be given to a community, or at least to a group (an audience). The trick then is to give a performance where the meaningfulness of the gift can be genuinely shared, rather than just available to 'those who know': i.e. the audience becomes a community. I think technologies can do this - particularly physical technologies which can disrupt and invite a community into a meaningful experience.

Why does this matter?

• I think it matters because we need to think of a way of dealing with where Universities are going (and there's no stopping them, I fear). 
• It matters because the fundamental problem of education is one of disconnected meanings. 
• It matters because the only way of dealing with disconnectedness is to deal with the fracturing and atomisation of individual experience, and the only way to do that is to rebuild communities. 
• It matters because 'giving' lies at the heart of community life
• It matters because technologies can give us new ways to give less tangible 'disconnected relics' like education in ways that the giving of them to a community can genuinely address the fracturedness of meaning that is the curse of modernity.
• It matters because conviviality matters above everything else.

I had a strange experience at a concert performance of the St. Matthew Passion last night. Performed by the Thomas Kirche choir (celebrating its 800 year anniversary), it was deeply affecting. But all the more so, not because of the intrinsic beauty of the music, but also I found the experience moving because of what it meant to me. So after three and a half hours, the music closed, tired singers, rapturous applause (too soon) and we made our way back into the world. And there then followed an absurd situation with a car park ticket machine. I managed to lose my ticket between paying for it and reaching the car door. The equisite beauty of the music was lost in my vexatious rage at my predicament!

On reflection (and being slightly calmer) I am wondering about the collision of meaningfulness of the music as compared to the meaningfulness of my anxiety at not being able to leave the car park. I certainly felt more vexed partly because of the contrast between these experiences: I was tired, and experienced a certain unwillingness to re-enter the dirty, messy world again after being seduced and moved so much by the music.

How would church goers in Bach's time have reacted after a liturgical performance of the piece? What was the re-entry into their dirty world like? Might they too have had an unpleasant experience as they stepped out of the church into the smelly and grotesque world around them? I might be wrong, but I think it was different for them because they were immersed in the context that the music itself was the expression of. They understood it in those terms (in the same way that Shostakovitch's Leningrad Symphony was understood by the people of that war-torn city)

Here, I think there is an important difference. For the performance we heard for all its technical mastery (and sheer power of endurance) wasn't liturgical. It was divorced from the world within which it acquired meaning. It is a disconnected relic.

I'm beginning to think that we live amongst so many 'disconnected relics'. In the same way as the St Matthew passion behaves as an object of apparent meaning to us, it sits at odds with everyday life. And the modern human condition of anxiety and risk is somehow related to the disconnectedness of meaning. As human beings we seek to connect meanings: to relate the meaning of our children being born, falling in love, going to work, grieving for relatives, and so on. But in a world of disconnected relics, there are no connections that can be made, because the ground of meaning disappeared long ago, leaving the relic behind.

I think the risk society can exploit this to drive the generation of wealth. Put out disconnected relics like a "special once-in-a-lifetime performance of a Dufay mass" (for example), or a undiscovered Beethoven manuscript, or Leonardo drawings, or a Picasso and the disconnectedness serves to drive the need in already fractured lives which strive towards something that promises some secret balm to the fractures. But it can't.

I believe the path to healing the fractured meaning in our lives lies in our deep love and knowledge of each other. And the risk society needs nothing else than to atomise individuals - with technology, mortgages, semi-detached houses and cars - to keep us away from that knowledge.

But what then of education - that means by which surely meanings might be consolidated? That may have been what education meant at some point in history, in some place. But like the Picasso and the St. Matthew Passion, education may have become a disconnected relic, there only to promise the hope of something which  has long gone. And in the process, drive deeper the fears and anxieties that will keep us paying for it, for our mortgages, and keep us driving our cars.

Maybe this isn't new. I'm reminded of Louis MacNeice's bleak assessment of the British Library Reading Room:

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers

Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge -

Honey and wax, the accumulation of years -

Some on commission, some for the love of learning,

Some because they have nothing better to do

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden

The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Last but never least, we find ourselves back in our childhood, with the big twist of maturity already encoperated. See how wolf drives off with little red riding hood who doesn't seem to be so little anymore.

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