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Slow-thinking the Revolution: Sound Diary from Brazil

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This post was contributed by Raluca Soreanu, a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, currently researching peace activism in Brazil.

[Homepage image of Brazilian protests: Agência Brasil.]

To move from Tahrir Square, to Syntagma Square, to Puerta del Sol, to Zucotti Park, to Gezi Park, to Brazil’s recent “20 centavos” movement, to capture their common rhythms as well as their distinctiveness, we might need a new vocabulary. To meet radical changes in the political imaginary, a new semiotics is called for. In Bracha L. Ettinger’s words, I wish we could slow-think, slow-feel and slow-paint these movements, in ways which overlay one form of understanding with another and with yet another. We could thus move beyond the hastiness of boxing one of the indeed unsettling semiotisations which the Brazilian movement has produced – “o gigante acordou” (“the giant has awoken”) as simply an instance of fascism. In the womb of the giant in the past week, I have encountered forms of social creativity and forms of sociability that invite me to slow-think. In the womb of the giant, people took care of one another, intervening to protect one another from being trampled. They met with strangers across their strangeness and across the colour codes of political parties. Surely, we will need to look closely at this alternative urban traffic of large manifestations, and see how it fits within the movement for the right to the city. There were also important forms of defence of patrimony, where the multiplicity of people surrounding a monument decided on the spot that the locus of memory that it carries is more important than the grievance of one individual who wishes to stand on its pedestal. Surely, this is not a movement toward the indiscriminate and confusion, but a collective spiral toward clarification on what matters and what needs to be preserved. And so, the chant “Vem vem vem pra rua vem!” (“Come come come to the street come!”) emanating from thousands of people on the same beat with one another is something quite localised when we shift to a new semiotics (perhaps a Deleuzian-Guattarian semiotics) where meaning is facialised and corporealised. What is the facialised consciousness and the rhythmic embodiment of the protester who does not aggress but protects, who does not provoke but contains, who does not destroy but creates political artefacts?

A multitude of voices

While many voices decry the lack of political organisation, I saw compelling organisation. How many times in our lifespan did we set a political rendezvous with 300.000 people and everyone showed up? With this new phenomenon of mobilisation we have temporarily lost our ability to count: there might have been 300.000 people out on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or less, or more, nobody knows. This loss of the ability to count does not solely mark the scale of the protest, but its transcendence of the very context for counting and screening which the urban texture sustains. We couldn’t count the protesters because they circulated in a new way, constituting new flows of large gatherings: they were circular, oblique, spiralling, rather than just merely passing though obligatory points or grids. Zooming in, observations on robust forms of organisation continue. A community I follow closely, that of Horto Florestal, planned its presence thoroughly, walked for hours to the centre of the city, in defence of their right of dwelling, which is threatened by the redefinition of the boundaries of the Botanical Garden. There was an impressive anti-homophobia mobilisation nested within the protest. These are just instances of the plurivocality – for there were also the “negros” and the “sem-terra” embodying their long histories of struggle. There were militants of conventional party politics. And, surely, the extreme right performing its usual abuses and aggressions, but not in a position to engulf the whole vitality of the movement in its morbidities.

A temporary museum of grievances

There is plentiful organisation that we do not see for we might need a new semiotics; but there is also organisation that we do not see for there is a constant motion for opacity by an order that wishes to preserve itself unaltered. We here might need to think in terms of the lifespan of political artefacts surrounding the protest. The immense gathering in Rio de Janeiro produced thousands of banners carrying the messages of people and groups (in registers from tragic to ironic, to robustly humorous). These many hundreds of square metres of political expression were displayed on the fences of the Praça da República. People literally weaved their banners onto the fences, organising a museum of grievances. These compelling materialities, which would have helped us in the process of looking at ourselves and at one another, were no longer there ten hours later. They had been removed, cleaned away with the rubbish. I went back in the morning, anticipating the loss of this political object, and all that was preserved were the remains of broken glass panels of some bank headquarters, aiming to create an alternative museum of vandalism, underarticulation and indiscrimination. If anything, the fence of political grievances was discriminate, in its contents and weaved constitution. This too short and unaccomplished life of political artefacts speaks about capitalism’s capacity to consistently efface all traces of an emergent alternative political rationality.

The sound of war

On the scene, there is another force that disorganises. The simulation of the sound of war. On the day and night of the immense gathering, the streets sounded like war because of the constant background noise of explosions. What was exploding were the “bombas do efeito moral” (“bombs with moral effect”), as they are called here, in a perplexingly self-disclosing way. These bombs are used by the Military Police to intimidate and contain by sound a potentially or actually violent adversary. This is an ill-contained tool for containing violence, however: it does not act locally, it acts on the entire protest, even miles away; it does not clarify where actual violence might be taking place, so that protesters have a chance to synchronise away from it, or against it, but it multiplies it. But it is a fake bomb. It does not belong. Sly-bomb. Part-bomb. These tools of war institute a dangerous (and immense!) scene of constant re-traumatisation, where we indeed might lose all control we might want to be holding on to, and things might indeed drift anywhere. There are very recent traumas related to the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) entering the Rio de Janeiro favelas, starting in December 2008. Memories of violence here are overlaid on one another, and none of them are respected or creatively put to work by sinking 300.000 people in the sound of war. Why should we feel, because of sound, as if we were in war? What happens to the memories of the true deadliness and death-fulness of the bomb, within this simulated bombardment? Part of the right to the city is precisely that of not feeling as though we were in war times, if we are not.

“Solidarity with the wretched of the earth”

And finally, a question I constantly return to these days: how do academics live the morning after? How does the university organise itself in relation to the polity, despite all the structural constraints, the novelty of the phenomenon to be dealt with, and the uncertainties that come with it? It is perhaps the time to return to Adorno’s thought on “solidarity with the wretched of the earth” and work humbly from there on. The matter of organisation is for me first and foremost a matter of self-organisation and of organising the proximities of our lived life. This movement will not call for leaders. It will and does call for co-inhabitors within a historical transformation. Some of the lawyers of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, responded beautifully to the local challenges, by offering their expertise to those who were subject to police abuse. I think of it as lawyer kairós. I believe the university can fast-organise frames of utterance where we can slow-think what is happening on the streets of Brazil. The intervention that I see myself a part of is one that will struggle to ensure that the fabric of the collective process we are experiencing is not being constantly ruptured and traumatised by the simulation of the sound of war. Thus, people and groups that are already thoroughly organised can sit together and organise themselves further, instead of having more recent or more distant violent past times enforced upon them.

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Notes from Brazil, June 2013

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This post was contributed by Belinda Mandelbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Psychology of the University of São Paulo. The Department has a partnership arrangement with Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies, involving exchanges of staff and students.

Brazil is undergoing something unheard of in its history. A series of protests that began in São Paulo, due to the increase in public transportation fees, spread to various cities in the country, taking hundreds of thousands of people into the streets at the most unthinkable moment:  the beginning of the Confederations Cup, a sort of general rehearsal for the most eagerly awaited event ever – the World Cup – that will be held this coming year in this country. This popular uprising had not been foreseen by anyone here, and certainly not at this specific moment. The truth is that nobody can explain the phenomenon we are undergoing. And, given the heterogeneity of demands that characterize this movement, what we see now is a sort of a war of interpretations, in attempts to take “ownership” of the phenomenon and offer a specific political determinant to characterize it.

One reading of the situation is that there is a type of generic indignation, with no clear goal decisively defined.  Understood as a whole, we might comprehend it as a sort of collapse in the state of things as they have been up to present. In this sense, what we are living through in Brazil comes very close to what happened in Spain in May of 2011 (movement 15M), in the United States also in 2011 (Occupy Wall Street) and even with the protests in London in the wake of Mark Duggan´s death, between the 6th and 10th of August of that same year. There is also perhaps something that resonates with the so-called Arab Spring. The form the protests take emerges from electronic media as this is the tool used most broadly to mobilize participants; it reflects the breaking out into public spaces of people used to electronic virtual reality. The content of the protests tends to be as fragmented as the electronic media and takes on the characteristic of a rebellion which generates perplexity and unrest.  Media analysts are struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff, trying to legitimate what in truth is characteristic of a peaceful and just protest for enhancements in health, education and the way the public apparatus is managed, whilst separating this from the acts of violence that have been present, such as looting in stores, attacks on public buildings, bank branches, churches and cultural institutions, calling these acts of vandalism. What the media still does not seem to want to comprehend is that this violence is inherent to the phenomenon, that this vandalism is also political, that violence is part of these so called horizontal movements.

Freud has a text that has a title that is deeply appropriate nowadays in Brazil: Civilization and its Discontents. It is precisely this we are witnessing: a sort of discontent,  an outbreak of what has been repressed, not due to one thing or another, but looking at the situation at large. Looking at the way things unravel in a globalized routine that sets forth mega events – such as the World Cup, which in the case of Brazil represents the wastefulness of enormous resources in the construction of opulent stadiums – the bureaucratized administration of life, its forms of entertainment and means of communication. The phenomenon seems to be inherent to the way we live nowadays, globally.  What nobody expected is that it would burst out as it did in Brazil. The fact is it did, and at a moment in which the economic model which had been highly successful for an entire decade now seems to be collapsing. And all of this poses something profoundly unknown for the Brazilian reality.

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Lobbying: why is it so difficult to reform?

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This post was contributed by Dr Ben Worthy, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Politics.

Last week David Cameron admitted that Westminster has a ‘problem’ with lobbyists. Governments have long struggled with lobbying. The Coalition has had its own share of scandal around ‘inappropriate’ influence, from former military chiefs to access to the prime minister.

However, finding a solution is tricky. Like many political issues, the solution depends very much on what you believe the actual problem to be.

Now, MP Patrick Mercer and three peers face allegations of misconduct after a lobbying ‘sting’ by journalists. As of Sunday 9 June, the controversy is spreading to Select Committee chairman Tim Yeo , and questions are being asked about Conservative election strategist Lynton Crosby. This is not only a Conservative problem – two of the peers suspended from their party are Labour.

Like ‘expenses’, the word ‘lobbying’ is now synonymous with corruption. David Cameron made this link explicit

“…secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money, and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest.”

In 2012, a report by the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee pointed out that lobbying is not all bad. Indeed ‘it is a fundamental part of a vibrant democracy’ – lobbying  ended the slave trade and gave us all seat belts. It is also a vital information channel for politicians.

It is the ‘perception of undue influence’ that is corrosive. So, the solution is to regulate and open up the system: sunlight, as a famous man argued, is the best disinfectant. The Coalition government has dusted off suspended plans to introduce a register of lobbyists, requiring third parties lobbying on behalf of others to sign a public register.  But why, given the continued allegations, is it so difficult to do?

How you define lobbying shapes the solution. The government pointed out in 2011 that ‘the scope of the register will in large part be set by the final definition of lobbying’.

In his statement last week Cameron defined the ‘problem’ in a particular way: ‘I think we do have a problem in Parliament with the influence of third parties’ – meaning those lobbying on behalf of others. The Committee had previously said that

“…a statutory register which includes only third party lobbyists would do little to improve transparency…as these meetings constitute only a small part of the lobbying industry. The Government’s proposals only scratch the surface.”

The groups consulted last year also felt a ‘third party’ definition was too narrow. Many ‘could not identify the problem that the register was aiming to solve’.

To further complicate things, any definition is also highly political. Does lobbying include church groups? Charities? And does it include, crucially for Labour, Trade Unions, as Cameron thinks it should?

The Committee overall took a dim view of a third party register:

“We recommend that the Government scrap its proposals for a statutory register of third party lobbyists…the proposals…will do nothing to improve transparency and accountability about lobbying.”

So is there a better solution? For the Committee, a well-functioning regulation ‘would include all those who lobby professionally, in a paid role, and would require lobbyists to disclose the issues they are lobbying Government on’. This would help ‘improve transparency about lobbying, and reduce public concerns about undue influence’ (see more here).

The government should also do more to ensure basic information, such as records of meetings published online, are kept up to date. But even keeping track of when and where lobbying is taking place is difficult. Speaker Bercow has restricted access to passes to Parliament pending an investigation. The site ‘who’s lobbying’ seeks to map who is doing what and where. Yet while having a pass and formal meetings with a Minister can be connected to lobbying taking place, where do you draw the line? Does dinner with an old (ex-minister) friend, who happens to work for company X, count as lobbying?

The key question is whether transparency promotes good behaviour or pushes bad behaviour even further underground. Work by Cornelia Woll and David Coen show how lobbying adapts to new and different systems. For example, the US has some of the strongest transparency regulations around lobbying. Yet lobbying still exerts huge amounts of pressure on politicians – see here and here. The reason is obvious – a study calculated that in lobbying over one tax issue, companies gained $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying, a 22,000% return. With such returns and no agreement on how to define it, no solution or regulation will fully ‘solve’ the lobbying ‘problem’.

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Free China?

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On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Dr Andreas Liefooghe of Birkbeck’s Department of Organizational Psychology explores the powerful message of the award-winning documentary Free China, and asks why the West lacks the courage to believe.

For the first time, the service industry accounts for more than half of China’s economy, with manufacturing now accounting for less than 40%. Reports state that this is because of a burgeoning, and wealthy, middle-class doing what they do best: consume. Yet this is only part of a story.  For every Vuitton bag sold (fake or otherwise), someone else labours not for a minimum wage, but for nothing at all. Beyond the glossy facades of Shanghai and Beijing lies the ugly underbelly of repressive China. The laogai system provides labour from ‘criminals’ and prisoners incarcerated for ‘crimes against the regime’ who need ‘re-education’. Those Homer Simpson slippers you are wearing may just be made by one of these prisoners, and perhaps it’s time to listen to some alternative account of China’s might.

On the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the documentary Free China: The Courage To Believe does just that. Following the lives of two protagonists, Free China tells the story of Jennifer, a mother and former Communist Party member, who along with more than 70 million Chinese people, was practicing a belief that combined Buddhism and Daoism, until the Chinese Government outlawed it. The Internet police intercepted an email and Jennifer was imprisoned for her faith. As she endured physical and mental torture, she had to decide: does she stand her ground and languish in jail, or does she recant her belief so she can tell her story to the world and be reunited with her family? A world away, Dr. Charles Lee, a Chinese American businessman, wanted to do his part to stop the persecution by attempting to broadcast uncensored information on state controlled television. He was arrested in China and sentenced to three years of re-education in a prison camp where he endured forced labor, making amongst other things, aforementioned slippers sold at stores throughout the US.

As political scandals surface and tensions rise, along with more than one hundred and fifty thousand protests occurring each year inside China, this timely documentary highlights the issue of unfair trade practices with the West, organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience and widespread forced/slave labor. The film also highlights how new Internet technologies are helping to bring freedom to 1.3 billion people in China, and other repressive regimes throughout the world. Free China also has another aim. It has partnered with an internet technology team, who have developed new peer-to-peer software, which allows users inside China to safely and securely breakthrough the Great Internet Firewall, and access uncensored information. This is hoped to allow Chinese people with alternative sources of information, to be able to make more informed decisions about their own future, and to help transform ‘China-net’ from a tool of control and oppression into one of freedom of expression on the world stage.

This week from the 4 June people can buy DVDs of the film, plus there will be theatrical releases in New York and Los Angeles, as well as a series of international screenings. Despite high-profile endorsement, very little is heard of this story. As we continue to court China for its economic power, perhaps we also need to check our courage to believe some alternative accounts.

Free China was screened at Birkbeck on 18 March 2013 as part of the Vulnerable Selves, Disciplining Others ESRC Seminar Series, examining the relationship between vulnerable individuals and oppressive regimes. We were joined by the producer Kean Wong, protagonist Jennifer Zeng, and interviewee Ethan Gutmann, and became part of a list of screenings alongside US Congress and EU Parliament.

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I don’t feel like dancin’

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This post was written by Professor Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies in Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies.

‘Margaret Thatcher is Dead: This lady is not returning!’ is one way of the calmer statements celebrating Thatcher’s demise on my Facebook page. I can’t join the clamour singing ‘Ding dong the witch is dead’, trailing as it does its horrific historical sexism. More sadly, I can’t see anything to celebrate. Whilst this once formidable Tory trailblazer is dead, her ideas are more resurgent than ever. Neither Cameron nor Osborne will ever be damned as a warlocks or necromancers – this rarely happens to men – yet it is thanks to them that Margaret Thatcher dies triumphant. Thatcher’s success, like that of her pal, Ronald Reagan, was that through a combination of shrewdness and luck she could ride the high tide of corporate capital’s determination to increase profits by rolling back all the popular gains of the postwar settlement. She was neoliberalism’s willing tool, rather than something unique, evil or otherwise.

What is truly extraordinary about these times is that while Thatcher’s economic legacy has imploded, her ideological stance – which as she said was always her main agenda – is more viciously enforced than ever. “Markets know better than governments”, was her pivotal mantra, the rest flowed from this. Oh no they do not! You would think we must all have learned this from the catastrophic economic collapse in 2008, when so many banks had to be bailed out by governments, only to be returned as quickly as possible: old bonuses intact; new regulations nonexistent. All too quickly forgotten is the revelation of the cruel absurdity of the economic collapse set in motion by the buccaneers of the finance sector that Thatcher had ‘liberated’ in October 1986, with all the reckless gambling and belief that ‘toxic debt’ was itself a tradable commodity. Or at least, any such knowledge is drowned out by the continued combination of Coalition rhetoric baiting Gordon Brown and the Labour Party, together with relentless media attacks on the ‘undeserving’ poor, or any other scapegoats conjured up to misdirect people’s sense of resentment, fear and insecurity: ‘Crisis: Blame the baby boomers, not the bankers’, was a typically absurd headline in The Times when Irish Banks banks were on the point of collapse at the start of 2010, summarizing the argument by their chief economic analyst, Anatole Kaletsky.

In these topsy-turvy times, any thoughtful, reforming responses to the crisis, no matter how carefully argued and widely supported by fellow economists – such as those put forward by the highly respected American economist, Paul Klugman – are tossed aside in the UK. No reference to Keynesianism or any policies for decreasing the obscene inequality that helped generate the crisis are considered. Instead, after so much mayhem, Thatcher’s worship of market values rules supreme, motivating vicious cuts in welfare and the surreptitious turning over of what remains of the public sector to the private, even as the crisis in market forces and the finance sector continues to deepen, especially in Europe.

Of course there have been impressive flurries of resistance, and for a while in the wake of the Occupy movement, grass-roots dissent was back on the political agenda. Networks of resistance are active around the country, especially in defence of the NHS. Yet those eager to dance on Thatcher’s grave have much thinking to do, when there remains such a lack of connection between protesters and mainstream politics. Indeed, as Paul Mason admits in his book celebrating all the new protest movements around the globe, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, most of the people he interviewed ‘were hostile to the very idea of a unifying theory’. Yet it is surely some sort of compelling counter-ideology and alternative strategy to the ubiquitous rule of market forces that we are desperately in need of if we are ever to safely bury Thatcher. Although the rich few get richer and the rest of us poorer, the left has yet to strike any real chord with the broader public. We know that it was Tony Blair, or ‘Blairism’, which – as Thatcher knew – did so much to entrench her legacy: with his seamless endorsement of market values and public veneration for wealth and celebrity, even as it furthered cynicism about politicians and politics generally. We have headed so far down that stream, it is hard now to turn things around.

It took the extraordinary conditions of the Second World War to create the Labour Party’s comprehensive commitment to welfare, albeit of a conservative and authoritarian kind. The reforms and nationalizations inaugurating the British welfare state, post 1945, were based on the deliberate spread of a consensus that it was economic insecurities and domestic unhappiness that created unhappy societies: ‘many of the maladjustments and neuroses of modern society’, as Bevan explained when Minister of Health, arose directly from poverty and insecurity. When will our politicians say these words again? Any direct action, movement politics or coalitions of resistance we build today has to find ways to influence national government to reaffirm that mind-set, hopefully with more creative agendas than hitherto, before we can bury Thatcher. And since I began with a feminist note, let me also end there. Some women have argued that it was Thatcher who provided the best role model for helping women release their true potential. No she did not. She was the perfect role model for the ever deepening gulf between women, as the privileged few have been able to rise to the very heights of political or corporate power, even as the majority of women, affected at every turn by the rolling back of welfare and the politics of individual success she promoted, are ever more firmly left at the bottom of the heap.

Lynne Segal’s new book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing will be published by Verso in the Autumn.

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Media coverage of the Iraq invasion

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This post was contributed by Dr Tim Markham, Reader in Journalism and Media in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

The build-up to the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has featured a lot of media coverage about media coverage. Dodgy dossiers and sexed-up briefing reports have been dusted off with something like affection, while the key players are wheeled out to reprise what have inevitably become hackneyed condemnations and rationalisations, former Prime Minister Tony Blair with that look of stark incredulity that has become his default countenance. There’s nothing unusual about any of this: journalists like to talk about journalism, and the added whiff of nostalgia makes this particular temptation irresistible. It’s true also of war reporting in the post-modern era, with British and American news reports often focussing explicitly on the PR tactics surrounding the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue or George Bush’s Mission Accomplished jamboree. But there’s a broader problem here, one which I would describe as a kind of ironised distance between our elites and the public, with journalists hovering uncertainly in between.

Iraq didn’t break British politics. Disengagement has many origins, and this was just one of a series of fruitless attempts to find political meaning or even national identity through military intervention. But the prevalence of media management in both political decision-making and as a central preoccupation of journalists gives audiences an easy opt-out, enabling a reflex scepticism about foreign and domestic policy alike. David Cameron was never going to find his Falklands in Libya, not because we’re unsupportive as a nation of the uprisings of the Arab spring, but because any sense of investment in a political system that makes decisions about foreign intervention has been hollowed out.

The atrocities of Abu Ghraib, awful as they were, gave journalists a chance to atone for what is now widely acknowledged as a collective loss of nerve at the beginning of the war. Those images became a kind of functional evil, a way of ‘othering’, as we say in the trade, responsibility for all of the nihilism, politicking and casual dehumanisation that any war entails. But however many of us chanted “Not in my name” on a bleak afternoon in Hyde Park, Iraq was and remains our war. Susan Sontag put this well, describing the photographs depicting abuse of Iraqi prisoners as representative of what we condone, however implicitly, our governments doing: “Considered in this light,” she wrote shortly before her death, “the photographs are us”.

Much has been said about the need for journalists to report war responsibly and humanely, avoiding both the reduction of conflict to spectacle and the blanket victimisation or demonisation of those caught up in it. It would be helpful too if journalists could find a way of covering the politics surrounding military intervention that avoids the feedback loop of jostling egos, sanctimonious moralising and pious outrage.

But the generalised disavowal of political responsibility for what a nation does runs deeper than how it plays out in the news. If editorial responses to military intervention range narrowly from cheerleading to sulking, and with a sardonic knowingness now the chief marker of journalistic professionalism when it comes to foreign policy and domestic politics, then this is only symptomatic of a broader, festering culture of world-weary yet instinctive withdrawal.

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YouTube justice UK style

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This post was contributed by Professor Leslie Moran, of Birkbeck’s School of Law and Barbara Villez, Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Professor Université Paris 8

The UK Supreme Court has launched a new communications initiative.  As of late January 2013 you can watch, on demand, videos of judges in the highest court in the land delivering summaries of their judgments. Who is the audience for these five minute programmes? Is it the hard pressed smart phone/iPad generation law student, lawyer or legal advisor? No; far from it.  The Court’s press release announcing the launch of the YouTube initiative suggests the target audience is much wider. Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, is quoted expressing his hope that the videos will broaden the audience for the Court’s work. Are they the next hot internet viral sensation educating the public about the work of the highest court in the land? The short answer is ‘no way’. Are these videos a ‘must watch’ offering valuable insights into the decisions of the court? We have our doubts about that too. But they do make fascinating viewing.

The visual challenge of judicial activity

Judicial activity has been described as ‘visually challenging’. These videos do much to confirm this and do little to meet that challenge. Five minutes watching someone with their head down reading out loud from a set of papers is not great telly by any stretch of the imagination. The way the images are put together adds to this static quality, with each video being made up of two basic types of shot. Throughout, the camera’s presence is unacknowledged by the speaking figure.

There is little in the way of props or costume to attract the eye. Judges in the UK Supreme Court don’t wear special robes in court. These judges look very much like ordinary business men. There is only one female judge, Lady Hale. In contrast to this there is much to distract the ear. The microphones, built into the judicial bench, not only pick up the voice of the judge but also the endless rustle of their papers.  Coughing and other background noises regularly punctuate the proceedings. All tend to obscure the words spoken by the judge.

Adaptation from written texts

What are you going to get out of watching the highest judges in the land reading out loud? The judges, so they tell us in the videos, are ‘giving the judgement of the Court’.  But law students and other diligent viewers beware; ‘giving the judgement of the Court’ is not the actual opinion of the court. What you actually get is an image of a judge delivering a speech adapted from a press summary published on the Court’s website to accompany the judgement itself. Written initially by the judicial assistants, the judges approve these summaries and then adapt them for the ‘live’ presentation in Court. The judgment is a written text. And it is written to be read, not spoken. It is available on the Court’s website, as is the accompanying press summary.

As the videos show, the adaptation of the press summaries into scripts for a courtroom performance is problematic. Despite the rearrangements, these scripts are not easy to speak. Judges stumble over the dense text and struggle to incorporate quotations from the trial judge into oral delivery.

The videos do, however, have much to offer. You not only hear the voice of the judge but also the accent which is a marker of their social class. The folding and refolding hands of a courtroom assistant on screen behind the talking head of the judge add an unexpected physical ‘commentary’.

Television trivia?

But are many of these points indicative of the dangers of putting courts and judges on TV? Are we in danger of getting caught up in what some describe as the trivia of the moving image? Our first response is that image making and image management are central to judicial authority. As the 2008 Judicial Studies Board, Framework of Judicial Abilities and Qualities reiterates time and time again, all the core judicial abilities and skills have to be ‘demonstrated’ and communication is central to this demonstration of authority. The courtroom is one long established context in which these abilities and skills have been performed and communicated. Props, wardrobe, voice and the body all have a role to play in demonstrating and communicating judicial abilities and qualities. Video is a new communication format, context and set of challenges. It has characteristics similar to and different from both face to face courtroom encounters and the more formal and enduring qualities of the text of a written judgment.

The current YouTube videos are a return to primitive television. They are simply the result of the presence of the camera in the court. The camera appears to be no more than a tool that records an event. However as the simple editing shows, the record is subject to a degree of manipulation. The resulting image is not just mediated by the technology but has been subject to judicial control. If essential information about the judgement, the press summary and the full judgement are already available what extra is provided by these judicially approved moving images? It may well be just that there is a camera in court and that camera is a symbol of openness, transparency and a form of accountability.

But is that going to satisfy a public that lives in a culture saturated with sophisticated video imagery.  One problem with them may well be that the public is too sophisticated for primitive television. Viewers have expectations acquired from countless hours of watching complex moving images, generating high levels of visual literacy. The primitive visual aesthetics of the UK Supreme court’s YouTube videos are likely to be a real turn off. If the judges of the UK Supreme Court are going to use video available via the Internet as a means of communicating, then they may have to think harder about the moving image that it is being made and adopt a different approach to the use of the moving image as a means of communication.

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Beyond Citizenship? International Women’s Day: the gender agenda

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This post was contributed by Sasha Roseneil, Professor of Sociology and Social Theory and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

International Women’s Day is the moment each year to reflect on the ongoing struggle against the inequalities and oppressions that mean that women continue to be less than fully equal citizens. It is an occasion to stand back and think about how far we’ve come, what remains to be achieved, and how we formulate our demands for the future.

Since the late 18th century, the prospect of full and equal citizenship has animated generations of feminists. Yet citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism because whilst it promises inclusion it always also enacts exclusion. Citizenship simultaneously creates insiders and outsiders – citizens and aliens, as well as good citizens and bad citizens. And whilst feminists have fought for a say in the running of states – as voters, workers, politicians and activists – feminism has also always been a process of exposing the limitations, restrictions and violence enacted by states through their constructions of citizenship. This paradox has intensified in recent years, as the notion of citizenship has become a buzzword in politics and academia, particularly in a Europe increasingly concerned with questions of borders and membership.

On the one hand, feminists have expanded the concept of citizenship beyond the classical concern with political citizenship, to articulate demands for wider social, cultural and economic change. The notion of intimate citizenship, for instance, has been developed to refer to the goal of ensuring that every person should be free to develop her own identity and sense of self, and the close personal relationships that matter to her, with the respect, recognition and support of the state and society. And the idea of economic citizenship refers to the right to work in the occupation of one’s choice, in a non-discriminatory job market, to earn wages adequate to support self and family and to access adequate social benefits when work is not possible. Both these concepts enable us to think more clearly about the extent to which feminist claims for full and equal citizenship have been realised. They help us to see the many successes of 20th century feminism in remaking citizenship for women. So, as well as opening up access to formal politics, women’s movements have meant that social benefits and welfare provision for women were established, economic participation and financial independence became possible, and self-determination and freedom of choice in intimate and sexual life were radically extended.

But, on the other hand, feminists continue to draw attention to the lived realities of those who are still not caught in the warm embrace of a full and equal citizenship – those suffering gendered violence and sexual abuse, the disabled and the dependent, members of minoritised, racialised and sexually excluded groups, illegal aliens and the “sans papiers”, the poor and precariously positioned, gender non-conformists and many others. From this perspective, feminism needs to ask whether the incompleteness of the victories of second wave feminism actually marks the limits of what is possible under the auspices of “citizenship”?

Perhaps there are fundamental flaws in citizenship as a feminist objective, tied as it is to the liberal individual and to the nation-state? Can the inherent vulnerability of the human body, and our fundamental human interdependence, ever be truly recognised and supported when citizenship adheres to the individual? Can the differences between peoples, and the singularity of each individual, really thrive under the universalistic intentions of citizenship?

This paradoxical situation produces a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” relationship with the ideal of citizenship for feminism. And as with any attachment that seems to offer so much, that tantalises and teases, but that continues to fail to give us what we really want, we should ask ourselves whether we should hang on in there, trying to make the relationship work, or whether we should let go and move on? Is citizenship still an idea worth fighting for, or should we find a different language to express our yearnings for equality and our desire to belong?

Sasha Roseneil is editor of ‘Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging’, a new book exploring the current state and history of feminist politics (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, March 2013), and co-editor of “Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: women’s movements, gender and diversity” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela

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This post was contributed by Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Senior Lecturer in Birkbeck’s School of Law. The post was originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke. Hugo Chávez, whose death has been announced, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average of 40 hours per week. As president, he didn’t hold regular cabinet meetings; he’d bring the many to a weekly meeting, broadcast live on radio and television. Aló, Presidente, the programme in which policies were outlined and discussed, had no time limits, no script and no teleprompter. One session included an open discussion of healthcare in the slums of Caracas, rap, a self-critical examination of Venezuelans being accustomed to the politics of oil money and expecting the president to be a magician, a friendly exchange with a delegation from Nicaragua and a less friendly one with a foreign journalist.

Nicaragua is one of Venezuela’s allies in Alba, the organisation constituted at Chávez’s initiative to counter neoliberalism in the region, alongside Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia. It has now acquired a life of its own having invited a number of Caribbean countries and Mexico to join, with Vietnam as an observer. It will be a most enduring legacy, a concrete embodiment of Chávez’s words and historical vision. The Bolívarian revolution has been crucial to the wider philosophy shared and applied by many Latin American governments. Its aim is to overcome global problems through local and regional interventions by engaging with democracy and the state in order to transform the relation between these and the people, rather than withdrawing from the state or trying to destroy it.

Because of this shared view Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentinians perceived Chávez as an ally, not an anomaly, and supported the inclusion of Venezuela in their Mercosur alliance. Chávez’s Social Missions, providing healthcare and literacy to formerly excluded people while changing their life and political outlook, have proven the extent of such a transformative view. It could be compared to the levelling spirit of a kind of new New Deal combined with a model of social change based on popular and communal organisation.

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d’état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Chávez’s meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered.

All this talking and direct contact meant the constant reaffirmation of a promise between Chávez and the people of Venezuela. Chávez had discovered himself not by looking within, but by looking outside into the shameful conditions of Latin Americans and their past. He discovered himself in the promise of liberation made by Bolívar. “On August 1805,” wrote Chávez, Bolívar “climbed the Monte Sacro near Rome and made a solemn oath.” Like Bolívar, Chávez swore to break the chains binding Latin Americans to the will of the mighty. Within his lifetime, the ties of dependency and indirect empire have loosened. From the river Plate to the mouths of the Orinoco river, Latin America is no longer somebody else’s backyard. That project of liberation has involved thousands of men and women pitched into one dramatic battle after another, like the coup d’état in 2002 or the confrontation with the US-proposed Free Trade Zone of the Americas. These were won, others were lost.

The project remains incomplete. It may be eternal and thus the struggle will continue after Chávez is gone. But whatever the future may hold, the peoples of the Americas will fight to salvage the present in which they have regained a voice. In Venezuela, they put Chávez back into the presidency after the coup. This was the key event in Chávez’s political life, not the military rebellion or the first electoral victory. Something changed within him at that point: his discipline became ironclad, his patience invincible and his politics clearer. For all the attention paid to the relation between Chávez and Castro, the lesser known fact is that Chávez’s political education owes more to another Marxist president who was also an avowed democrat: Chile’s Salvador Allende. “Like Allende, we’re pacifists and democrats,” he once said. “Unlike Allende, we’re armed.”

The lesson drawn by Chávez from the defeat of Allende in 1973 is crucial. Some, like the far right and the state-linked paramilitary of Colombia would love to see Chavismo implode, and wouldn’t hesitate to sow chaos across borders. The support of the army and the masses of Venezuela will decide the fate of the Bolívarian revolution, and the solidarity of powerful and sympathetic neighbours like Brazil. Nobody wants instability now that Latin America is finally standing up for itself. In his final days Chávez emphasised the need to build communal power and promoted some of his former critics associated with the journal Comuna. The revolution will not be rolled back. Unlike his admired Bolívar, Chávez did not plough the seas.

Dr Guardiola-Rivera is the author of What if Latin America ruled the world? How the South will take the North into the 22nd century, published by Bloomsbury.

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Britain in the EU

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This blog post was written by Dr Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of the MSc programme in European Politics and Policy. It summarises parts of the lecture he gave to British diplomats at the Foreign Office on 18 February 2013.

Britain has been described as an ‘awkward partner’ (George, 1994) within the EU but the chequered history of her membership is even more complex. Although it is true that until 1997 there were only two major episodes of positive engagement (the establishment of the single European market in the second half of the 1980s and John Major’s short-lived attempt, upon his arrival at 10 Downing Street, to place the UK ‘at the heart of Europe’) a more thorough understanding of Britain’s 40-year history as a member of the EC/EU ought to be couched not only in contemporary debates on the future of European integration but also Britain’s own past, present and future.

For a start, Britain’s accession to the then European Communities was a sign of an undeclared defeat. As Hugo Young appositely notes,

‘For the makers of the original “Europe”, beginning to fulfil Victor Hugo’s dream, their creation was a triumph.  Out of defeat they produced a new kind of victory.  For Britain, by contrast, the entry into Europe was a kind of defeat: a fate she had resisted, a necessity reluctantly accepted, the last resort of a once great power, never for one moment a climactic or triumphant engagement with the construction of Europe’ (Young, 1998, 2).

Indeed, not only did Britain’s governments shun the opportunity to participate in this process from the beginning – in the 1950s – but their pronouncements were matched by further concrete action: Britain played a major role in the establishment of the European Free Trade Association which was meant to be a counter-weight to the emerging European Communities, and was devoid of a common external tariff and a common trade negotiator vis-à-vis third countries, i.e. two ‘state-building’ features of the EEC. Britain was initially joined by Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland, nearly all of which [i] subsequently became full members of the EC/EU (as did Finland that became a full member of EFTA in 1986 but joined the EU only nine years later).  In addition, far from its usual position as a leading decision shaper in international affairs, Britain has had to apply three times in order to join the European Communities.

Since then, by and large Britain’s membership has been marked by a number of paradoxes or even contradictions: a sceptical member state but also one whose basic preferences are often (though not always) congruent with key developments in the process of integration as indicated by the single market project, successive enlargements, market-based approaches to a series of policy issues, including employment.

More recently, the terms of the domestic debate on Britain’s membership have not only returned to the themes of the late 1980s and early 1990s but can be seen as evidence of the British political elite beginning to catch up with the continental European debate on the future and the finalité politique of European integration – a debate essentially launched by Joschka Fischer’s famous speech at Humboldt University in May 2000. This involves a struggle between the supporters and opponents of essentially two quite different options for the future of Europe, namely neoliberalism and regulated capitalism. Indeed, on the one hand, David Cameron’s recent speech at Bloomberg and other pronouncements made by senior Tories place them firmly on the side of those who support unfettered markets, a neoliberal Europe – that is arguably the essence of contemporary Tory Euroscepticism for they see the EU as an actual or even just potential source of intervention in the economy. As the emerging debate on the UK’s membership of the EU is bound to reveal, when Mr Cameron refers to ‘flexibility’ he actually has in mind what many on the Continent as well as the UK call ‘social dumping’. In that sense, the recent developments in the debate in the UK mark a return to the early 1990s, when the late John Smith, then Labour leader, was castigating the Major-led government for trying to turn the UK into the sweatshop of Europe, trying to compete with Taiwan on low wages, rather than with Germany on skills, as he put in a speech in the House of Commons. The fact that Mr Cameron has singled out the EU’s Working Time Directive makes him particularly vulnerable to that line of attack because that directive (like others in the socio-economic and environmental domains) actually allows individual member states to pursue higher standards. So, if Mr Cameron wants flexibility, this is bound to mean the dilution of standards, not their improvement.

The Labour Party’s response was largely couched in Ed Miliband and his team’s preference for ‘responsible capitalism’ which has a clear social democratic ‘flavour’. This is good news for those who want to have real choices not only in national electoral contests but also the forthcoming European elections for, ultimately, the kind of Europe that we want is inextricably linked to the kind of Britain we want.

References cited

George, S. (1994) An Awkward Partner.  Britain in the European Community. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Young, H. (1998) This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair. London: Macmillan.

[i] Norway and Switzerland are the two exceptions.

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