MEDIACTIVE editorial

Issue 1: The Uses of Learning

Issue I of Mediactive begins where its contributors find themselves - in the crisis-hit universities. As the government attempts to turn universities into corporations we ask the question what kind of education do we want? The crisis in education is symptomatic of a nation state which is privatising its activities. Philip Bobbitt, in The Shield of Achilles, argues that an historical transition is taking place as the nation state is transformed into a new type of market state.¹ He identifies a number of characteristics of this trend. The nation state is responsible for groups. The market state enhances the opportunities of individuals. The nation state embodies the values of an ethnically homogeneous national culture. The market state promotes economic efficiency and individual choice, and seeks to minimise transactional costs. In the nation state the economic arena is the workplace and factory. Men and women are workers and producers. In the market state the economic arena is the market place. Men and women are consumers. The nation state seeks global stability through national and international political institutions. The market state depends upon the international capital markets, transnational corporations and elite networks.

Bobbitt's assertion that the nation state is in decline is perhaps overstated. As he recognises, 'there is an irreducibility of governing that cannot be assimilated into market operations'. Governments will continue to carry out functions the market cannot and produce public goods 'which engender the qualities of reciprocity, justice, solidarity, empathy, and civility' (p337). The nation state, with its mass free education and health service, has traditionally sought to guarantee the welfare and security of its national population and provide people with public goods. That role will remain in some form or another. (This form of state - even in its social democratic incarnation - may have failed the poor, but it has provided the middle classes with significant advantage. Thus New Labour will gauge the pace and scope of its public services reforms by the reactions of Daily Mail-reading Middle England.) Nevertheless, Bobbit's thesis is a powerful one. New forms of public private partnerships are disaggregating public sector services and reintegrating them into new markets as a series of commodities. In these markets the frontier between the public and private sectors, and between social and economic domains, is being redefined. UK education is such a frontier market. The articles in this first issue of Mediactive explore the effects of these trends on the way education and knowledge are viewed in Britain, and the complex interactions between politics, markets and education.

New Labour's policies on education reflect its commitment to the idea of the market state. They define its response to the knowledge driven economy and business demand for continuously improving human and social capital. In the 1990s, the utilisation of knowledge and its codification into digital information was recognised by a growing number of economists as an intangible asset, crucial to wealth creation. The raw materials of this type of economic activity are cultural - sounds, words, symbols, images, ideas, produced in creative, emotional and intellectual labour. Economic value increasingly resides in the cultural meaning invested in a product or technology. Knowledge and information provides in large part the key competitive advantage of a company.

This knowledge/cultural economy, driven by the globalising of capital markets and technological innovation, represents historically new modes of production and consumption. Productivity in education is perceived to be as important as productivity in manufacturing and services. One significant rationale behind marketisation has been the link between higher education and increased economic productivity. Yet economists do not fully understand this link, and we still don't know how knowledge and culture behave as economic resources. A significant factor in economic growth is the flow of ideas, but how is this flow translated into productive output? There remains a large gap in our understanding. As the OECD Working Party on the Information Economy admitted in its 1999 report, 'we are not really certain where we are heading with all this'.

Despite this note of caution, New Labour have uncritically embraced the corporate rhetoric of learning, innovation and creativity, and endorsed the prevailing neo-liberal ideology - as Alan Finlayson argues in his contribution. New Labour's policies are steering universities toward forms of education geared to commercial incentives, the flexible labour market and the needs of business competitiveness. The symbolic value of knowledge is subordinated to its exchange value. In Finlayson's words, New Labour is promoting an 'ignorance economy'. Education secretary Charles Clarke's recent dismissal of mediaeval history as 'ornamental' and his wish to see the state pay only for subjects of 'clear usefulness' is one example of New Labour's ambiguous, sometimes contemptuous, attitude toward learning and culture.²

We are now faced with a new paradigm of governance in education. Glenn Rikowski's article in this issue looks at private sector involvement in primary and secondary schools, detailing the construction of a new market in education, and analysing the way in which public goods are becoming commodified.

Several contributors to Mediactive focus on the implications of the commodification of knowledge and information. Clare Birchall provides a clearly explained grounding for us to think about the competing claims made on the meaning and purposes of knowledge. Jonathan Rutherford outlines the drivers behind the knowledge economy and its impact on university life and learning. Lynda Dyson explores another public sphere which is being encroached on by market forces: she argues that journalism is being commodified and its claim to objectivity compromised as news making becomes part of corporate branding strategies. Driven by the new ICTs, knowledge/cultural capitalism pursues the principle of optimal performance, commercialising what were once public forms of communications and knowledge making.

The influence of the liberal and social-democratic values of education, knowledge and professionalism associated with the 'nation-state' university are now being marginalised in policy-making. There has been little collective resistance to this exclusion. This is partly because universities have traditionally tended to be Tory institutions, fearing the meritocratic pretensions of the market as much as the radical levelling of socialism. Their mission has not generally included a commitment to widening participation and a more equal society of learning and opportunity. They are thus vulnerable to intervention from a small coterie of modernisers, who can jettison any democratic or liberal potential they may have had. In 1992 the old polytechnics offered models of change, but too often downplayed their own radical, innovative qualities in favour of a poor emulation of the Tory archetype. With no coherent democratic alternative to oppose to the market-state justification for their existence, universities are succumbing to utilitarian and cognitive-based criteria for measuring the value of knowledge, as pit forward by the advocates of neo-liberal reform. The consequence is an erosion of a sense of purpose.

The corporate university poses a serious challenge to open ended, inquiring learning and research. Its privileging of the exchange value of knowledge over its symbolic value, incapacitates its ability to engage with the big issues in life: justice, ethics, love, humanity. These are the intangible public goods which bind societies together and without which markets would cease to function effectively. By evacuating this role, the university will be unable to defend its structure and continuity as a community of scholars. Market forces will create a risk-averse institution of academic uniformity, anonymity and an indifference to individuality. In opposition to this trend, the university needs to reclaim the value of knowledge and learning as a public good. We need a language with sufficient potency to articulate ways of organising and valuing learning, knowledge and culture which are rooted in a democratic as opposed to a market paradigm. In one fruitful approach to this task, Gary Hall's article invites us to think how information technologies might help democratise education and intellectual work. Not simply what we do, but how we do it, highlighting the creation of new institutional forms of learning and modes of thinking. In his article on immunology, Andrew Goffey takes the debate into the area of epistemology and subjectivity; how might new forms of thinking transform our understanding of the world and of ourselves?

There is no golden age of the university to recover. We need to look forward, and attempt to shape an institution which is an open, dissenting community, defined by its obligation to the project of thinking and arguing about what it means for people to live together. The aim of Mediactive is to be part of this project. Each publication will focus on a specific theme. Issue 2, edited by Jo Littler, will look at Celebrity. The promise of personal fame through media exposure has become a dominant idea of a successful life. The celebrity is an aspirational figure of consumer culture. What does the individualised pursuit of fame and the fear of invisibility and failure tell us about the nature of our society, about private life and its relationship to the public sphere? The Celebrity Issue will contribute to an understanding of fame, glamour, teenage bedroom culture, desire, gossip. Issue 3 is about the asylum seeker in British and European society. The media representation of the asylum seeker as stranger, parasite, virus, recalls the anti-semitic reaction to late nineteenth century Jewish immigration. What do these representations tell us about the state of national cultures, and the paranoia invoked by cultural difference? As government and popular responses to asylum seekers threaten to spiral into ever more harsh and inhumane reaction, how might we manage the flow of people in a European wide context? The Asylum Issue looks at the political and cultural attitudes which are shaping the UK's relationship to the global migration of people.

Watch out for future issues of Mediactive: Water Worlds - the life and death politics of water; Happy Endings - the issue about redemption; and MediaWar - on the media and the war in Iraq (edited by Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn).

Jonathan Rutherford Editor

1. Philip Bobbitt (2002), The Shield of Achilles, Penguin.

2. 'Clarke lays into useless history', THES, 9 May, 2003.