Blog bots?

Here's a wee impromptu blog post. My last few posts have been read much more than previous ones. Colonised in particular has been read much more than any other of my posts, by a factor of about three. I don't know who is reading, if they find the posts useful or ludicrous. I wonder if my blog is attracting non-human traffic for some reason I haven't quite been able to imagine yet. Most come from the USA. None of them leave comments or contact me.

Owners of other blogs will know that some of their views appear to come from a link in another blog which usually turns out to be advertising porn or some other 21st century service - I, the blog owner am the target. Seems an elaborate way of sticking adverts under the noses of just a few people, of uncertain customer potential, when it's cheap and easy to buy lists of email addresses. Anyway I don't think these constitute most of this recent traffic.

I can imagine that people googling "Fanon, colonization, MacKinnon" (the last for the feminist academic Catharine MacKinnon) might find my blog by accident, look briefly and decide it's a complete red herring for the topics they're interested in. That might explain the viewing figures, at least for Colonised - albeit in a way that's disappointing for me. It doesn't explain the upsurge of interest in my other, recent, rather random musings.

So here's a wee blog posting with almost no content, certainly little that will be interesting to very many other people. I wonder if bots are attracted to anything that gets mentioned on social media so no tweets, etc. Will it be seen?

Kerrera

In an outside pocket of my rucksack, crumpled and slightly weatherbeaten, I found a copy of the London Review of Books. I'd completely forgotten I'd stuck it in there when we headed off to the island of Kerrera. Kerrera is very quick and easy to reach from Oban but feels remote and undeveloped - no mobile phone reception, at least where we were. It seemed the perfect place for a couple of nights' getaway and the ultimate contrast with the megacity of São Paulo where I'd been working for a couple of weeks.

The weather was rather dreich after the first evening but that didn't stop us enjoying the island. Gylen Castle (above) is famously scenic and the wee tearoom is a treat for daytrippers but the whole island is really rewarding to explore. Just a couple of dozen people live there now but the population was substantially greater in the past, closer to 200 at the start of the 19th century.

I didn't get round to opening that copy of the LRB because I found I was enjoying Kerrera: Mirror of History by Hope MacDougall of MacDougall. Miss MacDougall was one of the family who have been the owners of Kerrera since the 13th century, younger sister of Coline MacDougall who was Chief of the Clan. Her book deals with many aspects of Kerrera life over the last few centuries: community, church, schools, mills, sheep, ferries, etc. It's quite scholarly, sometimes leaving the story to the original sources, but she also writes with some warmth about events and people she clearly knew personally or from first-hand accounts; a very nice combination of learning, personal involvement and indeed humane concern. The island, its inhabitants and its owners become a lens - or as she says, a mirror - offering a particular view of key events and big trends in Scottish history. We didn't sit about reading that much on Kerrera but I've finished reading it since coming back.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on "schools", perhaps because it reminded me a bit of my own experiences in a rural, one-teacher primary school. (I say, "a bit" because I don't think my teacher was as nice to her pupils as the Kerrera teachers). A school was first established on Kerrera about 1757, partly through the agency of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. There are accounts of the teaching in the 19th and early 20th century, of drilling in mental arithmetic, spelling, scripture, but also sewing (presumably only for the girls?), singing and natural history. In 1904,

A new feature this year was the Botany class, and great eagerness was shown by all in the work … one little girl alone exhibiting and knowing as many as 302 of the Island's wild flowers

. In 1917 the Educational Inspectors found

a very happy little school, characterised by an excellent tone … the children are frank and alert, and seem eager to do well. Their oral response is good and they are willing to think. The ordinary subjects are supplemented by a fine variety of practical and recreational activities, all admirably fitted to compensate for the isolation of the place.

There are accounts of nature rambles, identifying plants, seashore creatures, excitement at visiting waxwings and a lovely story of the whole school going to see an octopus that had been stranded on a nearby shore:

They put it in the sea, and watched it swim away.

One is left with an impression of a schooling that developed intellect as well as the person more broadly, together with understanding of and sympathy for surroundings.

Back in Glasgow I rediscovered that copy of the LRB and turned eagerly to Jenny Turner's review of K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism was a big influence on me as I tried to understand what was being done to us in DACE, and why. I don't know where my copy is. Did I thrust it into your hand, possibly invigorated by a beer or two, going, "you need to read this!!!"? Maybe losing the book is a good sign - it didn't languish on the shelf.

LRB articles are usually more than just brief reviews of the book at hand and this one provides an overview of key Mark Fisher themes: "there is no alternative", the bleaching of cultural identity by capital, the meaningless bureaucratisation of work, mental illness (he himself suffered and his death in 2017 was by his own hand). He worked for some time in a Further Education College and also - I'm sure I read somewhere - taught in a university continuing education department. He, too, has things to say about education, but in a totally different time and setting from early 20th century Kerrera:

His [FE College] students … knew perfectly well that their prospects were poor, and that there was nothing they could do about it: they studied or didn't bother studying, attended or didn't bother attending, in a state that he calls 'reflexive impotence', a bored, depressed, withdrawn suspension.

This bumps up against another Fisher theme: the rising incidence of mental health problems, particularly among young people. These statistics for England show even primary school age children slowly becoming more likely to suffer from mental health problems. The problem becomes even more pronounced when we reach late teens. In universities particularly, 'over the past 10 years there has been a fivefold increase in the proportion of students who disclose a mental health condition to their institution' (IPPR report, 2017). Everyone who works in a university knows about the rocketing demand for counselling services, something most institutions can now barely cope with.

Mark Fisher sees this as an inevitable result of capitalism, particularly the version that has operated in the last few decades: the 'privatisation of stress'. 'Instead of being the only social system that works,' he wrote, 'capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and the cost of it appearing to work is very high.'

Part of his perspective on his own mental health difficulties is particularly worrying for anybody aiming to promote social mobility. 'Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are "supposed" to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror,' he wrote, perhaps a more heightened description of what gets laughed about as 'impostor syndrome'. These ideas came initially from the writings of David Smail, described in the LRB article as a 'radical anti-psychotherapist' (I'm not sure what this means!), who believed that '...the injuries of class are "indelible" and always ready to take over.'

I do not know if children on Kerrera would have been educated until 14 (the school leaving age after 1901) in the same school, or if they would have crossed to the mainland for a couple of years, to a secondary school in Oban. At any rate they were younger than the people Mark Fisher met in FE. In their small community, with a small range of well-defined roles in front of them, their world posed different challenges from those facing young people nowadays, physically harder, closer to poverty but perhaps more manageable. They knew each other, and each others' families, and the teacher no doubt knew every one of them very well. Humane concern grows naturally between the members of such a small community - as indeed do petty jealousies, spites, personal conflicts, etc., but everything operates on a manageable scale between people. Compare that situation with a typical urban primary school now of say 1,000 pupils, an organisation concerned with its place in the league tables, with the management of dwindling resources in a time when government wants continually to drive down costs, with showing that it can manage its available human resources effectively; and in a time when fruitful niches in the world post-school look like they will be harder and harder to find. The world of the Kerrera young people was so different in most respects from the modern one that there may be no useful comparison to be made; they may touch only in the contents of my weekend rucksack. Or perhaps the useful comparison is less the circumstances they met in their education, but the political systems around them that shape how that experience is going to work; time then to put the nature and potential of every human, a concern for their growth and wellbeing, back at the centre of thinking.

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(pictures are copyright me, by the way!)

East Ayrshire

Giffnock - Newton Mearns - Neilston - Dunlop - Stewarton - A77 and home. I spent a couple of hours on my bike in the countryside south of Glasgow, in East Renfrewshire and East Ayrshire. Lots of hills! - 2000 feet of ascent in total and I could easily have added several hundred more. The reward for climbing a hill is of course the roll down the other side, for instance once you've passed the highest point of the road from Neilston to Dunlop - a very small town for a name found so widely. I passed through green fields, some cut for hay or silage making a patchwork of green and yellow. Bright sun and dark clouds, rain showers not far away - typical Scottish June. In the distance, hazy blue on the horizon, lay the mountains of Arran.

I stopped a couple of times on this run to take photos.

But these are from before and after my roll through the Dunlop farmland. You don't get to share that. You weren't there. For a few minutes I thought, "wow, great photo there" over and over again but I didn't want to stop. Well, I was on a bike ride and I wanted to keep going. But even more, sheer motion was a large part of the pleasure of those moments; not just the sights but the moving through them, at some speed, under my own steam, by my own volition. If I'd stopped the sequence of those moments would have been lost, and their significance; they'd have been extracted from their place in the passage from birth to death.

Colonised

Frantz Fanon wrote Wretched of the Earth in 1961. This deservedly famous book deals with the psychology of individuals and groups in a colonised nation and in the process of decolonisation; and with the destructive tension in the mind of the individual between traditional views of reality and those appropriate to the colonising power. Fanon was born in Martinique, trained in psychiatry and worked in Algeria where he became caught up in its struggle for independence from France.

This passage in Chapter 2 caught my attention:

The country people are suspicious of the townsman. The latter dresses like a European; he speaks the European's language, works with him, sometimes even lives in the same district; so he is considered by the peasants as a turncoat who has betrayed everything that goes to make up the national heritage. The townspeople are 'traitors and knaves' who seem to get on well with the occupying powers, and do their best to get on within the framework of the colonial system. This is why you often hear the country people say of town-dwellers that they have no morals. Here, we are not dealing with the old antagonism between town and country; it is the antagonism which exists between the native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account.

This is from Chapter 2, Spontaneity: its Strength and Weakness and he is addressing the tensions that exist among the colonised people, between those who cling to their rural identity and a traditional world view, and people who have been able to reconcile themselves to the colonising power.

I amused myself by changing some of the words, replacing "country people" with "teaching and researching academics", "townspeople" with "managing academics", "Europeans" with "Administration". You know exactly the sort of conversations you'd overhear in the staff club: "We never see him any more. He's always in his other office, in the main building. He does almost no teaching nowadays. He spoke up in Senate in favour of that departmental closure and the redundancies. You can't talk to him about ideas any more, you can see him glaze over and this thoughts already on the next committee meeting, how they're going to meet their KPI's or move us one more place up the Times Higher league table."

I had similar thoughts reading many other sentences, passages. As has been noted, Fanon's discussion has a significance well beyond the specific context it emerged from. Divisions, psychological tensions found in higher education mirror those found in a country that has been colonised. But universities are not countries. They have not been "invaded" by colleges, or high schools, or hospitals. Maybe this is no more than an amusing parallel but if it is, what has done the colonising? When universities conduct themselves increasingly like corporations, is the phrase "slow AI" relevant?