I speak, therefore I am

I remember the moment as an undergraduate when I first came across Saussure and the theory that rocked my world. I am, he told me, constructed by language. No - more than this, reality is structured by language. If language was a science full of codes and rules, what had I been saying all those years? And what would I talk about now?

30 years on, I bumped into him again this morning and realised that the process of naturalisation his interpreter, Roland Barthes calls mythology, had worked. Since he blew my mind all those years ago, I've come to terms with the fact that we're fed a line, and in turn feed our own to keep everything just as it is. I know as much as my 15 year old does that beauty is a myth constructed not just for the beauty industry but for our sense of self, and what that really means. I pondered this as I sipped my Thai soup over a spot of MTV at lunchtime, and still I marvelled at Shakira's wiggle .

Barthes said that it is our complicity in this 'knowing' that makes the difference, and as we reach the last four weeks of this module in Critical and Cultural Theory, I wonder if that isn't the point of this semester's work. From Racism to Feminism and Post Colonialism to Structuralism, all these isms were oppositional at birth, and grew up to raise our awareness. All those movements were domesticized and incorporated into our world as progressive and hegemonic. Civil rights might have started on the streets but ended up around the dinner table. I showed my students the John Pilger documentary 'The War You Don't See' yesterday, and although they were pretty disturbed by the horrific images of the 'reality' of war, they had a fair idea that we're not fed the whole truth. They hadn't quite got as far as working out who writes the press releases of war or who told the cameramen where to stand when Sadaam's statue was felled, but they've got a pretty strong sense that there's a puppet master who's calling the shots

So, if we're aware now, is that enough? Now we know that Race is a construct, how can we be racist? Society's relationship with women was based on a constructed truth of our place in the home, but when we took the aprons off and showed that we have more uses as multi-taskers, would anyone - including ourselves - treat us the same way again? Did the kids leave home as a result? Why would they? They still got fed. They still had their lullabies. Once the Wizard of Oz was revealed to be a conman, it didn't take much to dismantle the myth, but did the people of Oz file out of the Emerald City in disgust when they realised their leader was a charlatan? Why would they if things were so good? Isn't that what Gramsci meant by hegemony? They knew what they'd got and had signed up with both eyes open. That the wizard turned out to be living a myth of his own was so not the point.

The people of Oz lived in a political system based on benign dictatorship, but their political act was in consenting to be ruled by him. Meanwhile, they got on with building a world in which their own everyday realities had very little to do with the fact that he didn't really exist. Did they need to be told this by all those philosophers from Gramsci to Adorno, Althusser and Barthes who, back in the 'real world' were reacting to a real revolution in Western Europe? Whipping away the bedrocks - from language to the culture industry - may have exposed the alienation between the means of production and the consumer, the pig and the bacon roll, the soldier and the war, but there was a hell of a lot to become conscious about then.

 If we put it altogether in a nice neat chronological narrative, does one theory build on the next until we emerge, 'knowing' in to the sunlight. In short, are we there yet?  Bizarrely, the academic elite probably is, in that we now have as much access to understanding what's really going on as we ever will, but will they tell anyone who hasn't paid up for an MA? As long as it's wrapped up in academic language designed to obscure ideas from those not given the key to the ivory towers, what use is it really? Surely democratisation of these ideas is essential if the isms are to be exposed as the myths they really are.

Barthes talked about innoculating us by exposing the myths, but was it about giving us a shot of chemicals to avoid us getting anywhere near the truth, or stopping nature from dealing with it like any disease would? Demystifying, said Barthes, was a political act, and was part of his job on the left wing French newspaper he wrote for. I love his article on ornamental cooking; even in France where people eat every part of the animal, haute cuisine sets about changing the colour, shape and taste of the raw ingredients until they have been so removed from peasant food that the final dish represents the myth itself. And how hilarious - what genius - it was to turn that back on the Brits who would then pay a fortune for French peasant food like cassoulet, buying into the double myth of the classiness of French cuisine.What a hoot it must be to work in Advertising. I have a vision of a Machiavellian version of the Wizard of Oz lording it in Saatchis, reading Barthes and writing myths to be pumped out to a salivating crowd. How come Kate Middleton and Prince William just popped into my head?

Barthes said that myth is neither false or true, but about the compromise that we make in absorbing it. Not as individuals, of course, but as society. We haven't started with Derrida yet, but it looks like chaos theory ahead. While my poor old seminar chum wrings her hands and begs us to prove that essentialism has a place in all this, it was Sassure, the scientist, who said that his codes and structures offered us a way of seeing through those myths, that there was light at the end of the Structuralist tunnel. Perhaps there is something outside the box of constructs. I doubt it though.

Feminism revisited

Oyyy, those waves of feminism are once again washing over me. We've moved from the first, and the basics of legal and political parity and through to the second,  the social, cultural, biological. But as I watch the tide roll in and out on Brighton beach these Tuesdays of my Masters degree, I wonder if the sands ever really shift at all.

My girls are probably watching Lady Gaga at the moment, playing with notions of self expression, pushing the boundaries of what women can be - so much so that for a while, she was even thought to be a man. And all the while, beneath those Emperor's clothes, can we admit that there's little she deliberately leaves to the imagination? Surely that was always the overriding proof that that gushing, whispering, weeping award accepting popster was so not a bloke. But what do the kids see? That must be the test of which wave we're currently surfing, and if there's ever any real rip in the tide.

But I am loving Carolyn Steedman's 'Landscape of a Good Woman', her autobiography which offers a more individual understanding of women at a certain place in a certain time. That I read my own biography - and my mother's and hers - in it is for another time (and maybe I'll even write the book myself one day), but for now, the question is did the fracture of Feminism in the '80s create a stronger generation of women who are free, in Britain in 2011 anyway, to make their own choices? I'm sure it did, but do they know it, and if not, does it matter? Do my kids need to deconstruct the way Gaga plays with perceptions of women or do they just absorb the mixed message that women can do anything as long as they're fit and happy to get their kit off?

'Consciousness' was my conclusion about what the tide reveals as we made our way out of Cultural Theory this morning. If we grow ever more aware of the politics of identity, of the language that shapes our thinking, of the frameworks in which we make our life choices, has the revolution already happened? Perhaps, but maybe with less of a bang than a whimper.

MRes Land - A World of Possiblities

Sebastian Faulkes in 'Engleby' had a similar problem with his tutors; 'Most of the history dons are Marxist' he wrote as he blagged his way through Oxford. 'They are careful to define whether they are 'pure' Marxist-Leninist or Communist...or Trotskyist or Menshevik or Gramsci-ist or Eurosocialist or Luckacist or something even more refined'. I haven't even discovered Mensheviks yet, but I'm plumping for Adorno.

Despite the deliberately elitist academic language that is designed to keep the proletariat out of lofty revolutionary thinking, I'm really enjoying my Masters in Arts and Cultural Research, and in particular, revisiting the cultural theory of my undergraduate days. Marx is wasted on the young; I had no idea that Stuart Hall and his cronies at The Birmingham School who I was studying in the 80s just down the road in Coventry would be presented to me 30 years later in the same module as The Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Said and of course Marx himself. Nor did I think that I would be teaching my own students that there is no such thing as Truth, that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' It's all come back to knock on my door; we are all constructed by our history, our culture, our class, and there's very little that anyone is going to do about it.

But from Stuart Hall and the creation of black identity, to Spivok's 'subalterns' who were silenced by the colonisers who made them 'other',  to feminism and just about every other differentiated group, it's all about language. And without language, thought is tough. And tough means pain, the land of Adorno who never got over the horror of Nazi Germany. For him, the con of culture is designed to distract us from the pain and keep us keeping the wheels in motion. The idea that anyone who spotted the doom of it all would stop and look must have driven him to hide his philosophy in those dense, inaccessible texts. That angst of my teens and twenties - it was real. I was right to worry about the world. No wonder Disney has its own channel now - get 'em early before they realise that there's no hope!

There really is a trail of destruction in everything we do. From colonialism to the exploitation of workers, we've got blood on our hands. Those rivers of blood Powell predicted had their source in the mountains of Western Imperialism. Adorno would have been right behind me when I told the kids not to shop at Primark. Not that they listen. Adorno blamed Disney too.

I feel strangely good about spending my Tuesdays picking at the seams of society, even if the absurdity of the elitist language of academia - including Adorno's deliberately obscure writing - is ignored by our tutors. It provides a rather neat narrative that is all about identity, language and awareness. The question is: is it enough?  If we are mere constructs, defined by the rulers of the moment who set the cultural agenda - our very own colonisers - and then blended with a dash of history and sprinkled with a bit of enlightnement, is that it? Yes, it'll change the taste, and it must be for the better if it makes our world more palatable. Political correctness may be its bitter pill, but is the simple act of awareness the spoonful of sugar that leads to acceptance? I do hope so because I can't imagine much of a revolution coming out of the University of Brighton.

Done (in)

Gina's feedback means a big redraft but also that the help doesn't stop today, deadline day. I shall publish, and with expert help, but for now, today, I'm done. I still have to grapple with the concept of methodology and finding an academic tone that is not a straitjacket but from today, I step out of the course and into the real world of academic publication. It helps that The Journal of Media Practice emailed this week to say that my first piece will be published in the October issue.

And now, the end is near..

My 4000 article is done, the film is ready to be cut, my research has found original findings and I'm really rather excited.  This summer, I shall take it to the next stage of testing whether or not the teaching of dance in secondary schools can make kids want to write, as well as give them some rhythm with their words. If six out of eight Year 9 students said that they hate writing, something's got to change. 


So while my article percolates a little before its final tweak on Friday morning, it's time to look through my tick boxes:

...your thoughts and feelings on each aspect of the module including:

• The 2 day workshop  - wonderful opportunity for sharing ideas and networking across the university.
• The negotiated plan for writing. Good idea to put dates on an email and send to a critical friend. Not that they checked up on me but hey.
• Your experiences of planning and writing your piece. Loved having the opportunity to get my teeth into something but got stuck in my head too much at first. Had to be harsh and remind myself that this is what I've been doing for 20 years.... Thinking like a journalist again helped enormously.
• The role of peer support and feedback in your writing process  This is what I put on the WAP blog:

Hi all

I thought a lot about what we learnt on Thursday and Friday and realised that the notion of the 'critical friend' is probably the answer to life, the universe and everything. The difference between getting your husband to glance over a piece of work and having someone who you know has signed up for telling you what you really need to know is really quite profound.

In fact, it was also the subject of our Saturday night author dinner party. We host these evenings on occasional weekends to encourage writers and would-be writers to share an evening with a well-known author to discuss the business and ideas of writing, and this weekend we had journalists Lucy Cavendish and Miranda Glover down to talk about their self publishing imprint, Queen Bee Press. They've just published an anthology of women's writing, but what was far more interesting than the future of publishing in the hands of the authors themselves was their critical friend approach. Calling themselves The Contemporary Women Writers' Club, they set out to encourage each other with their short stories, meeting regularly around a kitchen table in one of their homes and rigorously, but supportively getting those words out and on time.

What was fascinating about it was that nobody around the table had ever heard of such a thing before. Even the documentary producer from Sussex University didn't recognise this as the critical friend approach until I told them all about our course. There were business women and writers of all shapes and sizes around the table but the thing that we had most in common was the solitary nature of our work. We may pop in and out of where we do our thing but most of the time we're on our own. The idea of finding like-minds around a kitchen table, or as on Saturday night, around the dinner table, was really quite moving, and they all took it away as something to use in their own lives.

So thank you critical friends, not just Jane and Ming, but to all of you. I'm now facing this uphill battle of academic writing with new boots on. And they feel really rather warm and squishy..

• The role of individual guidance and feedback from the tutors     Gina's advice was solid and real which made it all feel very accessible. I liked the exercises on the stuff that stops, the mind games we play and as a regular writer, I hadn't experienced that for a long time. So it was funny when it all came up again, this time about not being rigorous or heavy weight enough. Enough; it's a funny old word. It also means 'give it a rest'. 

• What are you finding enjoyable about writing for academic publication?    The getting over the mind games and getting stuck in. Having the opportunity to think about a project that I can make real change with
• What are you finding less enjoyable?   The mind games. The things I can't do yet - like online library searches, reading dense text books, doing a literature review which I've never done before - worrying that it might not be good. Enough
• What are you finding easy? Writing, seeing it in my head. The journalistic bit. 
• What are you finding less easy? Writing in the academic 3rd person. Pretending to people I'm researching that I have a clue about what I'm doing (it was better when I told them I didn't)
• How does it feel to ask for and receive feedback? Worrying, so I haven't really. I did and then Gina didn't respond so I got paranoid. Then I did some work, submitted again and got nice feedback. Did she read the first ramblings? I hope the God of Email secreted it somewhere in Cyberspace
• How have you made space and time for your writing? How easy/difficult have you found it to make time and space? Yes - too much time. This project which I did for my PG Cert and WAP took way too much time and stopped me earning. So we have to sell the house? There are worse things in life... And yes, that's true (except we;re clinging on to the house) but I saw it as an investment in my academic career.  

Effective Communication (DfE 1995)

I do love Twitter.

Of all the thousands of words I've written on this subject now and the millions in the books and articles I've ploughed through to find out how to encourage young people to breathe out in their writing, Twitter forces me to think what it's all about. And at the end of this project (for now), with original findings and a hugely exciting urge to go and prove it in schools, I can Tweet 'Think I might just have saved the English language'.

Storybases

Just come back from a fascinating lecture by Paul Rankin of LCS, or Living Cultural Storybases, an NGO which helps indigenous tribes all over the world to record and share their stories. Rankin is an inventor and looks at the most appropriate means of collecting these increasingly endangered traditions as young people move away from the villages and their storytelling elders.

But, entranced as I was by the work he was telling us about at the University of Brighton, he made me think about the young people I'm researching and their diverse language and the culture it expresses. He was talking about indigenous tribes but when he reminded us why their culture is being eroded, I wondered if our missionary zeal to push punctuation is missing the point in the same way as those other zealots who took the written word to oral traditions. If diversity sparks the kind of creativity we all know it's so important to keep, maybe we should be looking at what this texting culture is creating.  What stories are young people telling and what's in this new melting pot of cultures that we didn't grow up sharing the playgrounds with and mixing in with what he had around our own dinner table? What are they, just like we did, keeping us elders out of?