Militant training camp and the aesthetics of civil disobedience

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’ (Grindon 2010), and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political (Groys 2008). As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences (2010: 11). Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ (Groys, in Abdullah & Benzer 2011: 86): a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience (such as the Yes Men; Avaaz.org; Bike Bloc), the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’ (2010: 58). However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment (the ‘civility’ of civil disobedience), the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy (be it symbolic, banal or simply pious) which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience

Book review: Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks, volume 7: journals NB15-NB20

This volume of the new complete translation of Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter (for my review of earlier volumes, see The European Legacy 17.2 and 19.4), includes the journals and notebooks archived as NB15 to NB20, written throughout 1850. As with previous volumes, this edition features a translation of the journals in a two-column format, in order to best represent the multiple alterations and drafting Kierkegaard made to his own personal documents. These are followed by a “Critical Account of the Text” (discussing both the physical appearance and chronological information of each notebook), and “Explanatory Notes” by the editors. These notes include maps of the cities and areas that Kierkegaard discusses, the calendar for the year he followed (particularly pertinent in this edition, given the number of reflections on holy feast days Kierkegaard reflects on in NB15), and any illustrations that he refers to in his writing

On Covidiots and Covexperts: Stupidity and the Politics of Health

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of the politics of health as an ongoing interpretative event. The effectiveness of delivering prevention strategies is in negotiation with day-to-day arguments in the public sphere, not just by “experts” in peer-reviewed papers, but also in the everyday interpretations and discussions of available expertise on print and digital media platforms. In this paper I explore ae particular facet of these public debate over the politics of health: the deployment of the commonplace of stupidity. I argue that the growth of this commonplace within discussion is rooted in particular models of interpretation which limit self-understanding, by over-emphasising certain points of significance within the interpretative horizon over more banal (and “stupid”) aspects that are, nevertheless, influential on health interventions

Spoilers, Triggers, and the Hermeneutics of Ignorance

A hermeneutics of ignorance may, at first, appear to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, ignorance and stupidity remain a pressing issue in the realm of today’s public discourse. The form this takes concerns, not the actual intelligence of people per se, but rather the use of the denomination of ‘stupidity’ as an active framing of debate, or the use of perceived ignorance to strategically organise individuals, publics and audiences. This offers a challenge to hermeneutic practice; or, at least, a pause for reconsidering some of the assumed figures that govern the hermeneutic endeavour, namely dialogue and intelligibility. In this paper, I want to sketch out some provisional areas of consideration for such a challenge and its potential response. Focusing on one aspect of the contemporary media milieu – the work of the spoiler and the trigger – I want to suggest how the digital ecology through which much of public discourse takes place requires adjustments to hermeneutic approaches, and the implications of these to what a hermeneutics of ignorance might look like

Leadership development programme: a multi-method evaluation

This report investigates findings arising from a variety of forms of feedback provided by the first cohort of participants (2012-2013) in Cumbria Partnership Foundation Trust’s “Leadership Development” Programme (LDP). The report summarises both quantitative and qualitative feedback, and synthesises findings to provide a more three-dimensional overview of participant experience and systemic impact. Feedback reflects, throughout, the diversity of the participating cohort in terms of professional roles and levels of seniority

The use of technology in healthcare education: a literature review

This paper presents a literature review into the use of technology in healthcare education. A search of three electronic databases resulted in 20 articles for inclusion in the review. The articles were synthesised into a narrative review. The review identified four key themes across the literature: the types of technologies used in healthcare education; the integration of technology into the healthcare curriculum; the skills and knowledge of the healthcare educators; and the benefits of using technology for the learners. The literature demonstrated that a wide range of technologies are now used within healthcare education, and this requires educators to adapt their practice and develop their technical skills to be competent users. The successful integration of technology into healthcare curriculums can be beneficial for healthcare learners by developing their clinical and professional skills, and enhancing their learning experience

Learning Leaders: a multi-method evaluation, final report

This report investigates findings arising from a variety of forms of feedback on Cumbria Partnership Foundation Trust’s “Learning Leaders” Programme (henceforth LLP) running from 2012-2013

Mountains, cones and dilemmas of context: the case of "ordinary language" in philosophy and social scientific method

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this paper, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating

Foetal space in real time: on ultrasound, phenomenology and cultural rhetoric

The development of four-dimensional ultrasound pre-natal scans carries with it an intriguing range of philosophical questions. While ultrasound in pregnancy is a medical test for detecting foetal abnormalities, it has also become a social ritual in Western culture. The scan has become embedded within a discourse of the parent’s ante-relationships with their future child as much as it is a screening function. Within such a scene, the advance of technology – the move, for example, the increasing addition of dimensions to pre-natal imaging, from 2D to 3D and 4D – is inextricably merged with the spatial rhetoric of the foetus. Drawing on both Heidegger’s insights into the relationship between the human and technology, and debates within feminist cultural theory, this paper explores how these spatial and temporal rhetorics of the foetal ultrasound relate to the philosophical motifs around self, knowledge, gender and the technical image. It charts these relationships through an analysis of two classic images of the foetal self, before considering how the fourth dimension of ultrasound – that of real-time image streaming of a foetal scan – enhances, develops and critiques these motifs

The boy done good? Football’s clichés and the philosophy of language (games)

Football is often celebrated as a global language. No less global, though considerably less celebrated, is the plethora of football-specific clichés which make up the language of commentary, post-match interview and expert analysis. The persistence of clichés suggests they are an important element in understanding the world of football. However, cliché itself is a relatively unexplored philosophical phenomenon. In this presentation, findings are reported from some research for a forthcoming book chapter. We aim therein to challenge the philosophy of language to account for the meaning that football gives cliché, and, in turn, use this account to assess the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ clichés in language of football. The problem is that, philosophically speaking, the notion of the ‘cliché’ seems to resist critical appraisal because of the number of different and opposing meanings that can be attributed to a clichéd statement: when it comes to definitions, cliché literally gives 110%. What, then, makes a cliché? More significantly, what differentiates ‘meaningful’ or ‘authoritative’ cliché from mere lazy or banal uses of language? As football is a game of two halves, we will explore two approaches within the philosophy of language for possible explanations, approaches that offer very different accounts of how such a use of cliché produces meaning; the approaches of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Through a comparison of the effectiveness of these philosophies for assessing footballing cliché as meaningful, we explore (at the end of the day) what particular conditions enable cliché to be useful, and what conditions produce simply tiresome language