Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool 9781138631823, 9781315208596

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Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool

Emerging from Inside Film, a project that helps prisoners and people on probation make their own films, this book discusses the need for workingclass people to represent themselves and challenge mainstream stereotypes and assumptions about them. This project gave prisoners and parolees (see last comment) the technical skills necessary to make their own films and to tell their own stories in order to counter the ways they have been misrepresented. The author demonstrates that film and television are key means by which socioeconomically marginalized groups are classified according to hegemonic norms, as well as the ways such groups can undermine these misrepresentations through their use of the media. As a theoretical reflection on the Inside Film project and on the relationship between filmmaking and education, this book explores what radical pedagogy looks like in action. Deirdre O’Neill is a filmmaker and independent scholar.

Routledge Studies in Education, Neoliberalism, and Marxism Series editor Dave Hill, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford and Cambridge, England For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

  7 Underprivileged School Children and the Assault on Dignity Policy Challenges and Resistance Edited by Julia Hall   8 Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism Insights from Gramsci By Peter Mayo   9 Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities Edited by Julia Hall 10 Neoliberal Education Reform Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts By Sarah A. Robert 11 Curriculum Epistemicide Towards an Itinerant Curriculum Theory By João M. Paraskeva 12 Alternatives to Privatizing Public Education and Curriculum: Festschrift in Honor of Dale D. Johnson Edited by Daniel Ness and Stephen J. Farenga 13 The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in U.S. Higher Education: Voices of Students and Faculty Edited by Nicholas D. Hartlep, Lucille L.T. Eckrich, and Brandon O. Hensley 14 Ethnography of a Neoliberal School: Building Cultures of Success By Garth Stahl 15 Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool Deirdre O’Neill

Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool Deirdre O’Neill

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Deirdre O’Neill to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-63182-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20859-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For mum and dad

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

ix 1

2 Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film

13

3 Working-Class Subjectivity and Representation

47

4 Broadening the Referential Framework: Prison as an Event

81

5 Hegemony and the Culture of the Working Class

97

6 Radical Cinematic Practices

115

7 The Foodbank Film

145

Conclusion References Index

153 159 169

Acknowledgments

Research has demonstrated that people from manual working-class backgrounds rarely go onto participate in higher education. As a person from such a background who left school at 16 with no qualifications and who did not do a first degree until my mid 30’s the process of acknowledging those who have helped me reach this point is far from straightforward and stretches quite a way back. My motivation to enter higher education was love for my daughter Abigail and the need to create a better life for her than the one I was able to provide as a single parent on a council estate who claimed benefits and cleaned the houses of the middle classes. Without those feelings of maternal love, I am sure I would never have begun the evening A level courses as a preparation for applying to university. Without the support of my parents who supplied practical and emotional help, the A levels would not have been possible. Both of them were working in low paid manual work but they supported me financially and practically as much as they could even though they were often exhausted by their own jobs. John Rose who taught me A level sociology at Southwark College of Further Education was a brilliant and inspiring educator whose lectures were fascinating and illuminating, while his concentration on the classed nature of society brought into focus theoretically much of what I was experiencing as a single parent living on a council estate. When he returned essays that I had written he always told me ‘you should go to university.’ His faith in my ability increased my confidence and fostered my self-belief. Even though I did well in my A Levels, I did not do my first degree at an elite university but at one of the old polytechnics. I was surprised to discover that even here many of the students were from middle-class backgrounds and did not have to work while doing their degrees; they lived in flats owned by their families or had their rent paid by their parents. There were some inspiring lecturers who encouraged me and challenged me in equal measures, particularly Bob Barker whose Marxist analysis of film culture is still something I draw on.

x Acknowledgments The University of Ulster provided the funding that enabled someone who has never had a ‘proper’ income to be able to take three years to do the research on which this book is based. It was there I met Steve Baker who supervised my PhD, a more inspiring, committed, original thinker I have yet to meet. I will be eternally grateful for his almost magical ability to turn my rants about the unfairness of the lives of the Inside Film students into intelligible (I hope) academic arguments. The Inside Film students I have worked with over the last 12 years both inside the prison and outside of the prison have been some of the most wonderful people I have ever met. Coming, as they do, from incredibly deprived backgrounds where awful things have happened to them, sometimes unimaginably awful they, who cannot take anything for granted, they have produced some of the most heartfelt and brutally honest films I have ever seen. Although some are still in prison and some I have lost contact with, others have gone on to be my friends and potential colleagues. My son Jacob has grown up with this work and has always offered his help and support. He has been too young to go into the prisons with me but has always helped when we have worked on the ‘out’ where he has he has contributed his own filmmaking skills. He has acted in the student films, and built relationships with those who have taken part in the project. And last but not least, my husband and partner in all things Mike Wayne. The genesis of Inside Film grew out of discussions in our kitchen. He has constantly encouraged, supported, and challenged me in relation to my political beliefs and my academic work; his political commitment and incredible knowledge of oppositional film practices has anchored and inspired me. He has welcomed the Inside Film students into our home when the project has had nowhere else to go. He has shared his knowledge and given up his time, talked me through the moments when I thought I might give up, and provided much needed technological support during the filmmaking process. He makes all things possible. London, June 2017

1 Introduction

The process of theorizing, the generalizations, the concepts, are not driven by the desire to create an objectifying distance, but to honor the suffering of these people in a way that is adequate to its significance: to do justice to them, to honor their lives. (Charlesworth 2000:26)

This work is concerned with questions of subjectivity and representation as they relate to the issue of (working) class both in theory and in practice. The research upon which it is based was carried out within the context of series of filmmaking courses adapted to the requirements of both serving and exprisoners and those on probation. Considered holistically, it can be regarded an explicitly activist, cultural, and political intervention: the purpose of which is to challenge the generally accepted marginalized positioning, negative (mis)representations, and ignored knowledge (cultural and political) of the working class. The achievement of these goals is dependent on a collective filmmaking praxis that creates the conditions for cognitive, ideological, and subjective shifts that make it possible to articulate the already existing knowledge of the people who participate in the course. The Inside Film project and the considerations it generates is an attempt to situate theoretical concerns, filmmaking strategies, pedagogic practice, and material impacts within a dialectical relationship not only to each other but also crucially to working-class experience in ways that blur the boundaries between theory and practice. The refusal to draw rigid lines between the theoretical and practical components of this work and to consider the process of filmmaking as a fusing of thought and action is fundamentally an attempt to resist the division between intellectual and manual labor that Marx considered a socialist society would be able to eradicate because it is precisely this division that is constantly and consistently utilized to justify classed divisions of labor and inequality. According to Marx, theory can only be considered relevant if it connected to the practical activity of working-class experience.

2 Introduction All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism, find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. . . . The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1970:122–123) It is for this reason that for Inside Film, learning about film involves the application of a theoretical knowledge of filmmaking as well as the practical ability and skills to make films that engage with the experiences of the working class. Drawing on a polymorphous group of theorists from various disciplines, the approach to this work is a multidisciplinary one, which, considering the multifaceted nature of what Skeggs has pinpointed as the ‘problem of class’ is the only logical approach to take. Undoubtedly questions of class intersect with all areas of life, and by focusing on the development of an independent and class specific critical engagement with film, education and politics the Inside Film project is able to identify and make explicit the ways in which class is central to the organization and workings of all those aspects of everyday life. In the process of doing this, it becomes possible to expose how class remains obscured by dominant discourses that deny the economic oppression and classed racism that function to reproduce a class conflict rarely named as such (Haylett 2001: 366). Working alongside the Inside Film students and taking an active role in the filmmaking process highlights the complexities of my own position in relation to this work, the Inside Film project itself, and to the challenges that occur as a direct result of that position. Situated as I am as being part of but not part of academia1 while at the same time being working class but often accused of no longer belonging to the working class, my position as an hourly paid lecturer means I occupy a hybrid position: as a person produced by the same economic and material conditions as the people who participate in the project, I have never belonged in any meaningful way to the rather privileged, rarefied world of academia, and my relationship to it is different to that of many of the people I work with within the university sector. My life experiences, my attitudes, and my values all mark me as working class, and regardless of any academic ‘achievement’ I still lack the political, cultural, and social capital of those from more privileged backgrounds. The detailed experiential and contextual knowledge of working-class life and working-class experiences that are methodologically essential to a project such as this is made possible precisely because I was produced by the same socioeconomic environment and material conditions as those of the Inside Film students. Like all people in this country regardless of their gender, religion, race, or sexuality, my sense of who I am has been shaped by a historically and contemporaneously entrenched class system. Precisely

Introduction  3 because of this, it would be unrealistic in the extreme to think I could simply shake off the experiences that have formed my subjectivity and slip comfortably into an environment traditionally and increasingly closed to people from my background. As a person whose parents were both manual workers, who grew up in a small council flat, who was a single parent on benefits, and who entered higher education as a mature student when none of my contemporaries or family had done so, my identification as working class rests on continuing feelings of my difference from middle-class people, my identification with working-class people, my biographical history, my feelings of alienation, and the conscious choices that I make on a daily basis. Therefore this is a ‘situated’ (Munt 2000:11) work,2 and there is no intention, or wish, to represent it as an abstract universality or to suggest that it is a model that could be transposed to other groups. The political and pedagogic objectives of the Inside Film project and the work it carries out cannot be described as ‘neutral’: methods and objectives are not, and cannot be neutral; neither can they be applied to all people in the same way. The methodological intentions of this project rest upon the knowledge that working-class life is defined externally to the people who experience it and that any transformation of this state of affairs is dependent on a critique that is generated internally. What little documentation there is on working-class culture has been written ‘from the outside in, ’ by middle class writers and researchers. Inevitably, many working class customs tend to escape middle-class attention and working class people have failed to document the networks, language and customs central to their lives. In this sense working class culture is neither fully understood by those outside it, nor properly documented to encourage understanding. (O’Neill 1992: 27) This has led to a situation where the current systems of representation of working-class people within what is generally referred to as the mainstream media often presuppose experiences and attitudes that have been worked into instantaneously recognizable visual stereotypes shared across different platforms. Inevitably these representations fail to contextualize lives exposed to and defined by numerous situations of exploitation, oppression, and hardships or the extent to which responses to exploitation and oppression are linked to the social and political framework within which they occur. The relentlessly mediated conditions of public life under neo liberalism where spectatorship and spectacle have replaced engagement (Fisher 2009:5, Sanbonmatsu 2004:197) has created the conditions (and necessity) for a project such as Inside Film that makes it possible to highlight the part the visual plays in fragmenting any sense of the whole. These conditions exist because the participants involved in the project have direct experience of

4 Introduction the instabilities, contradictions, and myriad lies that are required in order to sustain a neoliberal society that treats their lives as economically justifiable collateral damage. The cognitive dissonance created as a result of their engagement with the demands of neoliberalism is expressed in the short, questioning, and angry films they produce. Unlike most films with working-class life as their subject matter, the films made by the Inside Film students are not filtered through the perspective of middle-class graduates of film schools and unpaid internships for whom the designation radical is a branded product to advertise themselves in the marketplace, while the lives they film are nothing more than another subject to document before they move onto the next subject. The Inside Film project works on the assumption that as long as workingclass life is organized in order to increase the profit margins of a small powerful elite, there will exist the potential to transform the relations of production and to replace them with a fairer more equal political and economic system. Marx claimed that capitalism was its own gravedigger (Marx and Engels 1967:94). The challenge faced by political radicals and critical educators is the creation of a new paradigm, an oppositional hegemony that will equip us with the tools we need to dig that grave. It is fair to say the work of the Inside Film project is in a constant state of negotiation between established fields of perception that generally function in direct contradiction to each other, the conscious and the unconscious, the theoretical and the practical, the prison and the university, opposition and incorporation. As Paul Willemen has argued, occupying this kind of ‘in-between position’ brings with it a ‘sense of non-belonging, non identity within the culture that one inhabits’ and brings into play a ‘social intelligibility’ (1989:28) able to provide a perspective that encompasses not only the work itself but crucially the context in which the work takes shape. What this theoretically paradoxical positioning allows in practice is the ability to understand (feel) how people are shaped by the harsh conditions that have formed them while at the same time realizing that academic discourses, no matter how well intentioned, potentially create a distance that renders the research unintelligible to the very people it is involved with. Therefore, this work is not only concerned with prisoners and ex-prisoners but also with how working-class academics who are no longer determined by economic necessity but who still share the outlooks, values and attitudes, as well as the life experiences of the people they are collaborating with produce research that is recognizable to the people involved. This means that the usual academic orthodoxies of distance and detachment are not only inappropriate but are impossible and that the project needs to be understood as being rooted not solely in academic enquiry but in the need to share experiences of anger, despair, and alienation. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of the course run by Inside Film have, like all critical movements, the same objective—to illuminate the hidden structures of power or what (Balibar 2002:46) has referred to as ‘a

Introduction  5 determinate economic policy’ and to reveal how those structures are part of a whole that both influences the way in which lives are lived and the choices open to the people who live them. This stands in direct opposition to the mainstream media narratives of working-class life which concentrate on narrating individual stories framed within already existing conditions while ignoring opportunities to explore systemic structures. It is important to realize and to acknowledge the often negative perceptions and repeated stereotypes of working-class people and the representation of working-class lives we witness within mainstream culture are based on end results and not on the processes that create those results. One of the ways in which we attempt to reframe the existing perceptual filters through which working-class life is viewed is the breaking down of the conceptual (and false) distinction between theory and practice. The pedagogic methodology and the films produced by the Inside Film students are not just examples of filmic practice or even simply the result of a pedagogic model: they are the conjunctural reimagining of critical pedagogy, workingclass politics, and ethical interaction filtered through working-class experience. The films produced by the Inside Film students are not waiting to have theory ‘done to them’; they are not illustrations of theory but theoretical essays in their own right. The works themselves have developed a sophisticated argument for how cinema can represent embodied experience and why it should do so. (Marks 2000:xiv, author emphasis) The films represent the ‘embodied experience’ of the working class whether that involves blurring the boundaries between right and wrong as The Interview does, or considering how social and economic inequalities are embedded within the geographical spaces of London as in Bare Inequality, or the economic and political exploitation involved in justifications of the death penalty as Death Watch does. All of these films deal with working-class life, working-class resentments and anger, and the current consequences of being working class. According to Marx and Engels, any transformation of society is dependent upon the working class emancipating themselves it is as well to remember why Marx ascribes a determinative primacy to class struggle. It is not because class is the only form of oppression or even the most frequent, consistent, or violent source of social conflict, but rather because its terrain is the social organization of production, which creates the material conditions of existence itself. (Meiksins Wood 1995:108)

6 Introduction The recognition of the primacy of class is the crucial factor in the implementation of the work done by Inside Film. We have never found this concentration on class to pose a problem for the work we are engaged in; rather, it offers a defensive opportunity to challenge the postmodern rejection of stable identities and paradigmatic bodies of knowledge. The insistence on class as a stable identity and Capitalism as a paradigmatic system could, it does indeed need to be acknowledged, lead to accusations of ‘essentialism’ or of adherence to a kind of intransigent Marxism. These are accusations that I am happy to accept, insisting as I do upon the importance of exploring from a working-class perspective the complexities inherent in the interplay of the structural determinants of social relations, the formation of subjectivities, and the institutional restrictions that reproduce classed determined ways of being, and as Zavarzadeh has argued hegemonic rhetoric conceals the underlying logic of exploitation that traverses all seemingly heterogeneous social practices. There is of course nothing more ‘essentialising’ to say once and for all that under all historical circumstances, ‘essentialising’ is a ‘bad ‘argument . . . under certain historical conditions, ‘essentialisation’ might be the only mode of (revolutionary) intervention in the dominant social arrangements. (Zavarzadeh 1991:41) It will, I trust, become clear that the Inside Film project is not simplistically demanding reconfigured visual representation for the working class, or equal access to dominant cultural institutions; rather, it is linking representation to class consciousness and action and demanding active participation in a public sphere from which the working class have been strategically and increasingly excluded. Furthermore, it is claiming working-class perspectives are not simply marginalized perspectives that need to be considered as one perspective amongst many; on the contrary, I am arguing that working-class experience and the knowledge embedded within those experiences holds the potential to construct a very different worldview. The Inside Film project does not distinguish between culture and politics; on the contrary, it insists on their integration and mutual dependency, as Javier Pérez de Cuellar affirmed in the Unesco Report Our Creative Diversity in 1995: ‘Economic and political rights cannot be realized separately from social and cultural rights.’ The project aims to articulate and to bring into focus what should be glaringly obvious: it is working-class people who have the unique ability to talk about what it means to be working class. Although there are, of course, differences of race, gender, religion, age, etc. all of which often function within unequal power relationships resulting in oppressive situations and creating fractured subjectivities—there is also, as I argue in Chapter 2, a case to make for treating the working class as a homogenous group (Charlesworth

Introduction  7 2000:7). People of different genders, ‘races, ’ and sexualities can be granted equality because their assimilation into the state reinforces the legitimacy of that state as pluralistic and inclusive, but this can never be true of the working class. As Helen Meiksins Wood (1995:258) has claimed: the ‘politics of identity’ reveals its limitations, both theoretical and political, the moment we try to situate class differences within its democratic vision. Is it possible to imagine class differences without exploitation and domination? The ‘difference’ that constitutes class as an ‘identity’ is by definition a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sexual or cultural difference need not be. A truly democratic society can celebrate diversities of life styles, culture or sexual preference: but in what sense would it be ‘democratic’ to celebrate class differences? From this perspective, class represents not an identity but a structural relationship that exposes the way in which identity politics derives its legitimacy from its deflection of class politics onto non-economic, more socially and politically acceptable forms of single issue optics of oppression, those generated not by the capitalist system itself, as is the case with class, but emerging from the need to deflect attention away from the unequal distribution of wealth under capitalism. Identity politics removes the issue of class and, rather than building solidarity and connections, concentrates on what divides us. The poor cannot be included in a capitalist society because then there would be no capitalist society as Paulo Friere (1972:26) has pointed out; the poor and dispossessed cannot overcome their dependency by ‘incorporation’ into the very structure responsible for their dependency. There is no other road to humanization, theirs as well as everyone else’s—but authentic transformation of the dehumanizing structure. I think it is important to point out that there already exists for the majority of the students who participate in the course a ‘them and us’ attitude that expresses an awareness, not only of their own subordinate position within the class system, but an insight into the system as whole which results in the consideration of their own culture, beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes; their mode of life as distinct from that of those who have power over them. There is an awareness that their knowledge of life exists in a classed hierarchy that privileges the knowledge and experiences of the already privileged. Our aim is to build an awareness of the possibility of an oppositional consciousness and provide the students with an analytical framework within which they can begin to explore the ways in which this hierarchy, this them and us, is produced. The hypothesis of the work we do—that it is possible to use film as a radical pedagogic tool—is dependent for its outcomes on a paradigmatic Marxist understanding of class as a theoretically relevant model adequate

8 Introduction to the conceptualization and practice of a class-based radical pedagogy. The definition of working class is a complex one often producing contradictions and disagreemen—-but for the Inside Film project, as for Marx, ‘the fundamental problem of how you define and how you view the working class is the problem of whether the working class is a viable instrument for social change’ (Glaberman 1974). Of course to even pose this as a possibility is to assume there is an ontological category that can be identified as the working class (Charlesworth 2000:7) while at the same time acknowledging it is a complex category that demands to be understood in a number of different ways. The overarching paradigmatic use of the concept is a utilization of the Marxist model of class that is at ‘base’ a socio-economic one premised on the division of labor wherein the working class sells their labor to the bourgeoisie who own the forces of production. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie . . . , has this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeois and proletariat. (Marx and Engels 1967:80) This binary division of the two classes situates both classes within the allencompassing structure of the relations of production wherein they occupy interdependent but polarized positions. According to Marx, this polarization, which is the apex of a capitalist society, produces not only struggle but also conflict generated by the inevitable antagonistic nature of the capitalist system. It is their experience of their position within this polarized equation that the working class as a whole have in common, and it is this that unites them as a class. This remains true even if they are not conscious of themselves as a class—something that has become increasingly difficult when the current dominant discourses function to erase the optic of classed commonality that unites people of different genders, races, and nationalities. But it is crucial to acknowledge consciousness of class is not necessary in order to experience class. Over 35 years of neoliberalism has dramatically reconfigured the working class while the category has almost been erased from public discourse and led to the decline of class as an analytical and intellectual framework within which it is possible to situate contemporary pathologies affecting all classes political, social, and individual and which are current within society. According to David Harvey, this reconfiguration of the way in which the working class is constructed does not mean that class does not exist, on the contrary: Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and free trade, it (neo liberalism) legitimized draconian polices designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power (Harvey 2011:10).

Introduction  9 The rhetoric of neoliberalism has become deeply entrenched over the last 35 years, and, while I would argue that the Marxist binary model of class is still a viable one (particularly if we consider the working class globally), theoretically the examination of the present condition of the working class and its relationship to education and the media demands a more nuanced exploration of the concept. Marx did not allow for the growth of a professional middle class. This class is positioned (increasingly precariously) between the working class and the capitalist class but belongs to neither; it would be productive for our purposes to view this class as an intermediate one, caught as it is between capital and labor. The middle classes are obviously not members of the capitalist class but, while they do not own the major means of production, they do not occupy the same relations to capital and the means of production that the working class do. They are differentiated from the working class by their cultural and educational ‘capital’ (Bourdieu 1996), which generally speaking bestow on them material advantages and access to resources not available to the working class. This inevitably means their experience of capitalism is very different in quite pronounced ways from the experiences of the working class. At the same time, their willing complicity in the structures of oppression can be evidenced through their ongoing participation in processes of control, which are articulated through the supervisory and managerial roles that their socialization and education prepares them for. These process of control also take place in professional roles such as teachers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, psychologists, media workers, politicians, etc. all professions increasingly dominated by the middle class whose function it is to categorize, supervise, police, and contain the less powerful while at the same time institutionalizing class relations.3 Typically the middle classes are employed in positions which bestow upon them a measure of control and authority in relation to the working class (Wright 1978:63). Therefore, the second way in which this work deals with class is a more stratified tripartite system that combines the classic binary model of class with a more ‘sociological’ attention to differentiation within classes. Within this tripartite system of class categorization, I address the working class and the middle class in very different ways. While acknowledging that there are different fractions within the working class and that in relatively recent history there was a comparatively affluent working class, this work concentrates on those members of the working class who have a limited or curtailed education; those whose earning potential peaks early in their working lives and then flatlines; those who carry out unskilled, low paid, repetitive, sometimes dangerous work; or those who are long-term unemployed and often in debt. As a result of the destruction of council housing, they are more likely to be living in substandard accommodation that is rented, to be homeless or imprisoned, and more likely to suffer from food poverty and to use food banks. Among this section of the working class, I include the working poor and the unemployed. It is the experiences of these members of the working class that are distorted and silenced by a cosmopolitan liberal

10 Introduction middle class who not only control the resources of knowledge dissemination but maintain them in ways that protect their own interests. As I indicated previously, class, as I understand it, is not purely an economic category. This work treats it as a multivariate relational category which considers the economic, social, cultural, and political aspects of the way in which class is formed and experienced. As Mieksins-Wood has stated The point is . . . to have a conception of class that invites us to discover how objective class situations actually shape social reality and not simply state . . . the tautological proposition that class equals relationship to the means of production. (Meiksins Wood 1995:17) A consideration of how class actively shapes our social reality demands that we recognize and explore the role of a whole range of pedagogic practices (not just those confined to the class room) in constructing dispositions amenable to consensus for, and compliant incorporation in to, the present order: one that demands the denigration, silencing, and effective erasure of the concerns and experiences of the working class. The crucial question here is, of course, what do I mean by a radical pedagogy in the service of the working class? Do I mean pedagogy of workingclass educators using a curriculum designed for working-class people that deals with only working-class issues? Or is it a question of bringing to the fore the interpretive potential of subjectivities that identify as working class? Or is it concerned with a more inclusive conception of the public sphere? The answer to these questions is dependent on the Marxist distinction between two kinds of working-class consciousness—firstly, the consciousness that may consider the world as unjust and unequal but which at the same time accepts that world without considering the class-based nature of inequality. On the other hand, there is a consciousness that is aware of how those injustices and inequalities are directly linked to the structural conditions of a class-stratified society and that it is necessary to transform those conditions. There is . . . a role for class analysis to continue to emphasis the brute realities of social inequality and the extent to which these are constantly effaced by a middle class, individualized culture that fails to register the social implications of its routine actions. (Savage 2000:159) The course offered by Inside Film aims to restructure the conventional power dynamics normally found in the student/teacher relationship within an educational context, implementing what Raymond Williams (1977:212) referred to as the ‘active struggle for new consciousness through new relationships’. This in turn allows for a reconceptualization of how we understand the role of education and raises questions about what we consider to be ‘common knowledge, ’ and importantly, for our purposes, the visual

Introduction  11 imagery associated with that knowledge. The practical and experiential disjuncture between the lived experience of being working class and the images that purport to represent them can yield to a practical application of theoretical questions. In fact, it becomes a precise question not only of how to theorize radical pedagogy and class but how to put it in to practice Once an oppressed group becomes aware of its cultural as well as political oppression, and identifies oppressive myths and stereotypes . . . it becomes the concern of that group to explore the oppression of such images and replace their falsity, lies, deception and escapist illusion with reality and truth. (Gledhill 1978:62) With this in mind, I wish to reiterate the importance of practice and emphasize how difficult, in work of this kind, it is to separate it from theory because each part is integral to the other existing as it does in a relationship of mutual dependency. The films made by the Inside Film students demonstrate how the relationship between radical theory, pedagogy, film practice, and working-class experience exists within dialectical configuration each part depending upon and working in cooperation with the other part which, when taken as a whole, connects with the politics of class. This work is premised on a Marxist understanding of the dialectical nature of the environment in which we live. To understand the world dialectically is to recognize that everything is related and connected, existing within a relationship of mutual dependence. To consider anything in isolation is to misunderstand the nature of our lives. A dialectical understanding does not see relationship of interdependence and connection as one that exists in a condition of stasis; rather, a dialectical understanding of the world is one that allows for change, a dynamic process of growth and shifting developments: ‘dialectics refers to the idea that change emerges out of the clash and contradiction between mutually imbricated aspects of a social relationship’ (Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006: 56).

Notes 1 I have now worked in academia for over twenty years in that time I have had one short term full time contract the rest of that time I have either worked for short periods outside academia or worked as an hourly paid lecturer. 2 Munt refers to class and the ‘situated knowledges’ it produces in an attempt to foreground how crucial it is to recognize the importance of working class experience and the knowledge it generates, particularly for working class academics. 3 Although as Skeggs points out (2004:41), the working class often reject these classifications and provide their own often in direct contradiction to the perceived values of the middle class who they distance themselves from.

2 Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film

If man [sic] is unfree in the materialistic sense—that is, free not through the negative capacity to avoid this or that but through the positive power to assert his true individuality—crime must not be punished in the individual but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed to give everyone social scope for the essential assertion of his [sic] vitality. If man [sic] is formed by circumstances then his [sic] circumstances must be made human. If man [sic] is by nature social, then he develops his true nature only in society and the power of his [sic] nature must be measured not by the power of the single individual but by the power of society. (Marx 1980:34)

Introduction: The Project The aim of this chapter is to establish the complexities inherent in the conception of film as a radical pedagogic tool at this particular historical conjuncture and to give some consideration to the social, political, and ethical imperatives that make such a conceptualization of film and pedagogy necessary. At the same time, it will attempt to consider what is involved in applying this theoretical conception in practice. Over the last 12 years the Inside Film project has worked both within prisons and ‘on the out’ enabling prisoners and those on probation to make their own films. This superficial description of the work we do suggests a deceptively simple goal easily obtained through the transference of the technical and practical skills which makes it possible to situate the work of the project within the hegemonic framework of education programmes designed to improve the employment skills of the ‘under privileged.’ Of course, within the framework of accepted definitions of education provision in these circumstances, this is precisely what it does, but the Inside Film project is concerned with the relationship between those accepted definitions and the kind of subjectivity they produce. It also works on the assumption that Antonio Gramsci was onto to something when he claimed in relation to the specificity of classed modes of thought and action that ‘The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind’(cited in Davidson 1977:77).

14  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film Inside Film runs practical workshops where the students can learn to use a film camera and familiarize themselves with the necessary editing software to edit their films. But before we use the cameras or start shooting the films, the first part of the course explores the theoretical, ideological, and historical aspects of film and filmmaking. This theoretical underpinning is linked to the aim of the project to act as a counter-hegemonic intervention challenging the essentialist, personalized, and negative taxonomies of workingclass people and working-class life. Not just by pointing out that they are, to put it very simply, ‘wrong, ’ in the representational sense of bearing very little resemblance to working-class life but also wrong in what can only be called the moral sense because of the ideological role these representations play in normalizing the negative images of working-class people utilized in the media to justify, legitimize, and continue the brutal inequalities that are the reality of working-class life in this country. These theoretical sessions are facilitated by academics who volunteer to talk with the students on such topics as class and ideology, documentary film practice, Third Cinema, and genre. By definition, the people who run these sessions are committed to the attempt to expose the validation of a social order transmitted through the normalizing strategies of numerous institutions. In order to achieve this aim, we tailor the theoretical sessions as much as possible to the life experiences of those participating in the course. The academics who contribute to the sessions have found this approach to be liberating: not because they do not have to concern themselves with facts. On the contrary, the analysis and dissection of facts is an integral part of what they do because they are free to expose the links those facts have with oppression and bias and to educate in a way that offers recognition rather than imposition. In some cases, the results are almost instantaneous. This is not to claim a global manifestation of a more critically engaged consciousness but to point out that confronting the ‘myths’ of the dominant society particularly as they are enforced within the institutions of prison and education can and does lead to a disruption in the belief systems that justify those institutions. This approach to education has little to do with the gradual, unquestioned accumulation of facts and has much to do with starting from where we are now and engaging with a politically strategic consideration of the contradictory nature of the totality of a neoliberal society. Education in this country is premised on the reproduction of middle-class norms, and education policy—no matter how it is manifested or implemented—leaves untouched the elite institutions of private schools and the Russell group universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. The way in which the concept of knowledge within the education system is understood and delivered does little but reproduce existing class, race, and gender inequalities and ensures their uncritical acceptance. After the theoretical sessions and before the actual filming begins, the students take part in ideas sessions where they discuss (and argue about) the kind of film they would like to make, what the subject matter will be, and what form the film will take. These sessions are, generally speaking, committed and engaged—lively and loud—as by this point the students have all

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  15 begun to develop ideas about what they want their films to say and how they want them to look. For some of the students, their ideas will have been influenced by the preceding theoretical sessions where they were exposed to the kind of filmmaking that they might not generally have the opportunity to view.1 It is interesting to witness during the discussions that take place as part of these sessions (which are only a few weeks into the course) a recognition that the mainstream dominant film product is not the only option available; this consideration of other possibilities takes place not only at the level of form but also in relation to representations of class, gender, and race. When a decision has been made about what kind of film they would like to make, the students write the scripts, storyboard their films, and cast them. If they are making a documentary they decide on a subject, do the necessary research, and draw up a shooting schedule. After which they act in, film, direct, shoot, and edit their films. The postproduction process allows for adding music, sound, and special effects. For the duration of this process, the students engage with alternatives from mainstream, dominant, filmmaking strategies. At the same time, the dominant practices and conventions of mainstream filmmaking and the ideological purpose they serve are interrogated and analyzed. The work the project does emphasizes the relationship between the discourses used to fix the working classes in a position from which there is very little hope of escape, (Skeggs 2004:80) and the neoliberal practices enshrined in the institutions of the 21st century, in this case the media. The establishment of this relationship enables a more generalized critique of the neoliberal system as a whole and demonstrates how the continuing suffering and marginalization of the working class is a necessary prerequisite of the capitalist system in its present historical moment. We develop critical positions from which to engage with and process those practices, creating knowledge of the ways in which existing processes and practices fix the working class. It is by consciously and systematically challenging unquestioned existing forms of expression that function strategically within established power relations that the potential to transform the way in which those relations are viewed and by extension the way in which they are understood becomes a possibility. This melding of theory and practice—this praxis—creates a vacuum between the established and the possible in which those taking part in the project can develop ways of thinking that begin to engage with the contradictory double bind of acknowledging the total failure of capitalism and the ways in which we are integrated into that failed system while, at the same time, leaving it unquestioned. It is through praxis that we are able to combine the way we actively live our lives on a daily basis with the ability to reflect upon why we live them in the way that we do. The method by which the Inside Film project attempts to achieve these aims is through the utilization of popular culture within a particular strand of the media (film) as a vehicle to develop a visual literacy and an analytical

16  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film language adequate to understanding the social determinants that affect all our lives considerably but whose impact and long term consequences are dependent upon the social class to which we belong. It is the possibility of putting this understanding and this language into practice that has the potential to contribute to a paradigmatic shift in our conscious comprehension of our relationship to the world. The mode of consciousness fostered by the media and reinforced by class conditions invested in the relations of power into which we are born and into which we have inherited produces alienated ways of perceiving and thinking. The media deal only with end results and are not able or are unwilling to trace the processes that produce those results (Channan 1997:213). Knowledge of these processes has the potential to lead to a transformation in personal consciousness which in turn creates the possibility of a critical interaction with the social world, that is, an engagement with these processes and the structures that make them possible and the continuing role they play in the oppression of the working class. This process demands knowledge both individual and collective that encompasses the intersection of the political, the social, the cultural, and the historical. Ignoring the divisions between each of these and concentrating on the way in which they are connected is fundamental to a critique of current relations. This informed critique can then lead to the construction of radical resistance. To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates is a new subject—a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for. At the same time, consciousness-raising intervenes in the ‘object, ’ the world itself, which is now no longer apprehended as some static opacity, the nature of which is already decided, but as something that can be transformed. This transformation requires knowledge; it will not come about through spontaneity, voluntarism, the experiencing of ruptural events, or by virtue of marginality alone. (Plan C 2017) The Inside Film project concerns itself with a specific group of people (prisoners and ex-prisoners) in a particular set of circumstances (in prison or on probation) and explores the ways in which film can be used within prison education, or with people who have been to prison, as a means of developing a class-based critically aware consciousness that more traditional academic subjects or subjects approached in a traditional pedagogic manner are unable to do. The United Kingdom imprisons more of its citizens than any other European country. In the last 10 years of the New Labour government alone,

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  17 the prison population rose year on year.2 The Conservative-led Coalition government showed no signs of reversing the trend; indeed, after the riots that took place in London and other major cities in the United Kingdom in August of 2011, there was a sharp spike in the number of people in prison.3 In March of this year (2017) the present Conservative government announced that they would be building four new prisons in England and Wales creating 5 thousand places. Approximately 70, 000 school-age children enter the youth justice system annually; locking children up is a threat to their health. Between 1990 and 2016, some 34 children aged 10 to 17 years died in custody. Over two-thirds (68%) of under-18-year-olds are reconvicted within a year of release.4 England and Wales have the highest adult prison population in Europe5 and sentences are getting longer. This would appear to confirm the established solution of warehousing the casualties of capitalism and criminalizing working-class responses to austerity. The human cost of this is breathtaking: between 2010 and 2016, there have been 1,316 deaths in prisons; 439 were self-inflicted. In March 2017, the prison population in England and Wales was nearly 86, 000. Since 1993, the prison population in England and Wales has increased by more than 41,000 people, a 92% rise. In 2015, the Conservative government announced its ‘prison building revolution’ an ambitious plan to build nine new prisons by 2020. The rates of incarceration in Great Britain are not only greater than any other western European country but also exceed those of Burma and Malaysia. It did cost on average almost £55, 000 per year to incarcerate someone in a UK prison. The cost of a prison place was reduced by 18% between 2009–2010 and 2014–2015. The average annual overall cost of a prison place in England and Wales is now £36, 259. This means that, while the prison population is increasing, the conditions under which people are held are becoming even less humane. Prisons are chronically overcrowded, and this has been the case since 1994. As of the end of May 2016, of the 118 prisons in England and Wales, 74 of them were overcrowded. More than 50% of prisoners (both men and women) have been imprisoned because of economic crimes e.g. burglary, handling stolen goods, petty theft, etc.6 This concentration on what might appear to be at first glance a rather narrow sector7 of society is not intended to detach the research from the wider social world or from the problems suffered by the many subjugated groups under capitalism. On the contrary, it demonstrates the relationship between the demonization of those who suffer most under neoliberalism and how definitions of crime and the implementation of prison sentencing are often utilized as a smoke screen to prevent any engagement with these casualties of neoliberalism. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment are becoming increasingly criminalized as the harsh conditions of ‘austerity, ’ in particular and neoliberalism more generally create groups of people with very little legal protection or formal redress against the policies that impoverish them. Criminalization and imprisonment serve both an economic and

18  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film an ideological purpose. Economically, prisons are undoubtedly expensive but, in the long-term, considerably cheaper than the financial investment required to build decent homes, put in place the structures needed to deliver a good education to everyone, and create fulfilling and well paid jobs. Ideologically, prisons ensure a concentration on the ‘crimes’ of the impoverished in ways that deflect attention away from the crimes of the rich and powerful. One of the major functions of prison is to deal with the people for whom capitalism has no use. This is precisely why we should be attentive to the prison system; the micro focus on the particular can construct a model for addressing the general or, in Lukacsian terms, the totality. The totality refers to the different spheres of social life, culture, economics, education, law, politics, which under capitalism appear as autonomous but are in fact subordinated to systematic imperatives such as accumulation, commodification, and competition (Jay 1984:103–115). These imperatives offer no advantages to the working class because the societal norms embedded within them favor the desires, perspectives, and needs of the dominant classes. The increasing trend of prison building, privatization of the justice system, and the incarceration of those with no investment in the status quo demonstrates that the preferred response to the social and individual pathologies that are created as a direct result of the brutal and brutalizing inequalities of neoliberalism—such as addiction, racism, unemployment, and poverty—is decontextualization and criminalization. For the rich and powerful and for the liberal middle classes who lack the political will to bring about change, this is the alternative to the long-term social and economic investment necessary to build a more equal society. An analysis of crime and imprisonment hoping to make some sense of the above incarceration statistics will find it necessary to acknowledge that, generally speaking, people who experience the prison system are some of the most marginalized and dispossessed members of the working class. As Bennett has pointed out those in prison are not a ‘random’ group nor are they ‘representative of the community’ as a whole (Bennett 2008:459). Rather, those who find themselves in prison are people whose actions can indeed be defined as ‘crimes, ’ but should in actuality be defined as ‘manifestations of some social distress’ (Stern 2006:3) Inevitably the people who are most affected by the criminalization of social distress are those for whom capitalism has the most negative impact—the working class—who because of their lack of material resources are most likely to commit acts designated as criminal (Quinney 1994:07). The Inside Film project poses the question of how to challenge the ideological practices of neoliberalism not by creating new spaces (an impossibility in the ever-shrinking allotment of spaces to any project considered transformative) but by occupying already existing spaces in order to achieve this aim. This entails an attempt to construct a space within the confines of the prison, a space that differentiates itself from the usual education provision, a cognitive- and practice-based space in which it becomes possible to consider and to implement oppositional perspectives and create

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  19 counter-narratives. Within this space, the prisoners can produce their own narratives of their own lives, provide evidence of their daily experiences both inside and outside of the prison, and thereby challenge assumptions of working-class people, working-class life, and, of course, prisoners. The right to self-representation that Inside Film attempts to provide is embedded within Article 19 of The Human Rights Act which enshrines the right to communicate and translates this right as ‘the right of every individual or community to have its stories and views heard’ (X1X Article 19 Global campaign for free expression 2003:13). This sounds deceptively simple and hard to disagree with but it is important to consider the barriers involved in certain categories of people telling their stories and how some communities are vilified and ignored to the point where they believe they have nothing to communicate. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) was drafted to ensure that the right to communicate would guarantee • • • •

The unfettered right to hold opinions The right to express and disseminate ‘any information or ideas’ A right to have access to media A right to receive information and ideas

Furthermore, international law requires states to take positive measures to ensure all citizens have access to the means to achieve the right to communicate and that no state interferes with these rights (Ibid 3). Therefore we could argue that Inside Film is providing a service the state has neglected to make provision for! Antonio Gramsci theorized that working-class lives are marked by the contradictions and antagonisms inherent in capitalism but that the working class are often unable to articulate their discontents in a constructive way. The inability to articulate obviously leads to a failure to communicate. The hostility and aggression this results in is channeled into (at best) reformism or more negative and individualized areas such as crime (Landy 1994:14). The prisoners and ex-prisoners that Inside Film works with, it is true, are aware of the way in which their lives are constrained by the unfairness inherent in the British justice system and the way in which they are viewed by the general public; but, awareness alone will not alter their position in the hierarchal structures of a class-stratified society. What I lay claim to here is that the act of self-representation makes possible the necessary consciousness of their lives as part of a wider totality. The pedagogical practices of Inside Film emphasize the importance of placing dominant representations within the wider context of the neoliberal system in which they exist, insisting on the relationship between economics and culture. This dialectical analysis allows for an exploration of popular culture as just one aspect of dominant political, economic, and ideological hegemonic practices and refuses to countenance its detachment as ‘just entertainment.’

20  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film

The Empirical, the Actual, and the Real There can be no concept of the human being not situated within a historical context—men and women are always products of the pre-existing spatial, temporal, social, and material organization of the circumstances into which they are born.8 Their position within the division of labor will influence, in determinant although not unchanging ways, the process of their socialization and the construction of their subjectivity. For Marx ‘as individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce’ (Marx and Engels 1970:42). Capitalist societies function in ways that make it possible to detach positions within the division of labor from the structural determinants of class. Therefore, the market is perceived, by many, as a place where labor can be traded freely. Marx exposes this as merely the phenomenal appearance-form, real in the sense that people do sell their labor in the market place but merely external in the sense that it does not expose the underlying reality that people are forced by the ‘dull compulsion of economic life’ to accept the terms of the capitalist class. This assumed universal neutrality acts as a useful cover for the ways in which the ‘actual relations of capitalism’ proffer not the freedom to trade but a hierarchy of exploitation. As Lichtman puts it: Capitalism requires individuals who are legally free and able to enter into and out of contractual relationships. Such individuals cannot be slaves or serfs nor can they possess the means of their own reproduction, or they would lack any incentive to exchange their labor power for wages. The capitalist takes all of this for granted, but he translates the fact of contractual exchange based on necessity into the ideology of free movement and individual liberty. (Lichtman 1982:108) And while Marx’s original conception of the exploitative relationship was premised on the relationship between the factory worker and the factory owners of the 19th century, the dialectical relationship of exploited/ exploiter cannot be dismissed on the grounds that it is an outdated view. The continuing exploitation of the working class is apparent in employment practices, unfair economic distribution, and in the numbers imprisoned by those who hold wealth and power. All of which lend as much credence to Marx’s original conception as when these workers were involved in manual labor in the industries of the 19th century. While it is necessary to recognize that the nature of labor has changed since Marx’s time, it is equally important to consider that for Marx it was not the production of goods per se that defined the working class but the mode of that production, that is the relationship of the workers to the capitalist class. This was a relationship built on exploitation, and there is no reason to suggest that this relationship has changed (Callinicos 2006:144).

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  21 For those in employment, the reality of the wage form is uncoupled from the actuality of the way in which work is separated into necessary labor and surplus labor. This separation results in the worker laboring for a certain amount of the day for no remuneration, but solely for the profit of the capitalist (Marx 1954:208). For those out of work, conceptually their position remains the same within the economic dynamic of contemporary capitalism. Their relationship to the institutions of capitalism and the purpose that the relationship serves for the capitalist system as a whole remains fundamentally the same as it did in Marx’s time. The paradigmatic drives of the division of labor are still in place; the pursuit of profit and the divisions encouraged by a culture of competitiveness depend as they have always done upon the exploitation of the working class. Under this system, representations become mere appearances, appearances that contribute to the social construction of a reality which is nothing more than a semblance of reality and which correspond to the appearance of the division of labor as one of equivalence. Representations therefore contribute to the illusion of legitimacy upon which capitalism is built. This illusion of legitimacy which characterizes neoliberalism has to be confronted in order to create a picture of the totality. For those taking part in the Inside Film project, the challenge is to understand how media images are constructed, how those constructions are linked to questions of power and legitimacy, and how it is possible to begin to use the media to document and articulate issues in their own lives. It is by exploiting the interface between the politics of class and the optic of media representations and through an understanding that by treating crime as an individual pathology that the systemic social and economic causations can be ignored or dismissed. During the riots that took place in English cities in 2013, the then Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to frame them as ‘criminality, pure and simple’ and in doing so severing any connection between the riots and political agency refusing to situate what had taken place in relation to social and economic hardships, framing it as a question of conduct and lack of morals. This highlights how the challenge to dominant ideological representations disseminated in the mainstream media is dependent on a rigorous and detailed exploration of the way in which the real is determined by the structures of capitalism and how the rejection of that version of the real relies on a coherent program of analysis, identification, and contextualization. And while we have discussed the riots with the people we work with, we also discuss representations within popular films that might not appear so obviously biased. To take an example of how we approach this problem, a film we have watched with the students is The Green Mile (Dir: Frank Darabont 1999), about the inhabitants of death row in a prison in the southern states of America in the 1930s. The film ostensibly portrays the wrongful conviction and execution of a black man with supernatural powers for the rape and murder of two small white girls. On the face of it, the film engages with the wrongful criminalization of people of color. It is a sentimental film that appears to be sympathetic to the plight of black people in the Southern states of America

22  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film and one that the students, particularly the black students, respond to in a positive way. Their collective response is to view the passivity and sacrifice of the central black character as a ‘true’ representation of how black people have suffered due to poverty, racism, and oppression. A critical analysis of the film reveals that the black character becomes secondary to the white characters and that the film functions as a justification for the death penalty. Furthermore, it reinforces a discourse of black sacrifice necessary to make possible a stable (white) world order. The response to the offered critique of this film is revealing; the black students insist it is a true reflection of the lot of black people, and even when they accept the problems inherent within the film, they are still reluctant to view the film in a negative light. This example illustrates the cognitive work involved in identifying the distinction between the empirical real, the personal experience of those watching the film, and the actuality of working-class experience. It also, I would argue, offers a demonstration of how existing collective identification is conditioned by the frameworks dictated by dominant modes of understanding. The relationship between the experience of working-class life and the reality of those lives is crucial to an understanding of how we perceive the world in which we live and how we overcome the limitations of the merely empirical real. Perception in this sense is not immediately revelatory but is a complex endeavor mediated through a collective linking of the experiences of the social world with the ideological and cultural practices that correlate to class position. The mechanisms involved in articulating our subjective (classed) experience in relation to conceptions of the real offer a route for us to change our understanding of the world. The subjective, perceptual quality of classed perspectives as encouraged by the ideological work of neoliberalism results in, as Eagleton has pointed out, a situation in which one class has power over the other (and) is either seen by most members of the society as ‘natural’ or not seen at all. (Eagleton 1989:5) It is of crucial importance that we understand that the reproduction of class relations depends not simply on the economic in order to succeed. In Western democracies, the working class has lost much of the economic leverage it gained after WWII; the workforce has become deindustrialized as, over the last 40 years, industrial production has shifted to ‘developing’ countries where labor costs are considerably cheaper, are likely to be non-unionized, and where health and safety regulations are considerably less stringent. The working class in the West is now often unemployed or underemployed (working part-time on zero-hour contracts), and consequently reliant economically on state benefits which are progressively shrinking as the state increasingly moves away from any responsibility to provide for its citizens. No longer dependent on the physical presence of the working class, as it was in the post-war years, Capital has appropriated culture, particularly

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  23 the media, as a means of justifying the exploitation and ongoing assault on the rights of the poor. That is why the concentration in this work on culture does not mean an abandonment of the material realities of political economy; rather, it is a recognition of how one has been utilized to obfuscate the other and how the realities of both cannot be exposed without an exploration of the way in which they are dialectically linked. As Gitlin has pointed out, the media plays a central role in the production and dissemination of ruling class ideology. By presenting the dominant ideology as universal, the media becomes one of the ‘primary pipelines for capitalist values, primary weapons of social control’ (Gitlin 1980:363). The dominant media’s concentration on appearances rather than determinants creates a politically calculated ideological separation between a specular reality and working-class experience, the outcome of which is a constant and consistent misrecognition of the totality of social relations. The real and the appearance-forms should not be considered as opposing forces; rather, they exist in a dialectical relationship where one implies the other, and it is not possible to make sense of one without a critical engagement with the other. Challenging the forms of appearance of capitalism, we can begin to develop knowledge of the structural causalities of capitalism. Without this knowledge, any project, including the Inside Film project, offering the possibility of transformation, will be aiming to transform the external reality and not the fundamentals of capitalism, and is therefore doomed to failure. This is, of course, exactly what most educational projects taking place in prisons or that work with ‘excluded’ groups do; they attempt to deal with the end result the ‘criminal behavior, ’ while failing to bring into focus the conditions that created that behavior in the first place, or while indeed questioning definitions of criminal behavior. The ways in which Inside Film works in contrast to these other projects will, I hope, become clear, but the essential difference between Inside Film and more conventional approaches to pedagogic practice lies in its insistence on a bottom-up involvement in deciding the route to a more critically engaged working class as a means to overcoming the limits of the structures put in place by capitalism. We never run workshops or make films that are predetermined or that conform to a standardized lesson plan. Our lack of what could be called course material is a direct result of a very loose set of specifications for the course. What we teach and the manner of that teaching is determined by the interests of the group: as topics arise during group discussions, we will opportunistically encompass them within the theory that we are discussing or will arrange to bring in films that demonstrate a point—for instance, a discussion about mixed race relationships initiated by one of the students led to an exploration of the Hollywood Production Code and the historical ban against miscegenation in the Hollywood film industry. This in turn led to a discussion of the ways in which representations of race have changed, and have not changed, in dominant films. This provided the opportunity,

24  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film the following week, to screen the short Third Cinema film dealing with the Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960’s Now (Dir:Santiago Alvarez 1965). Which in turn led to a discussion of the racism inherent in the present criminal justice system. This sequence of pedagogic events led by the students encompassed history, memory, contemporary attitudes to race and class, low budget filmmaking, and the political reasoning behind acts of censorship. The important point here is that the students were engaging with events and concepts that have a direct relevance to their lives, some of which they had not been previously aware of. Crucially the contribution of their own experiences and perspectives was essential in building an understanding of historical and contemporary political schema. Marx’s claim that the working class will be the agents of social change is dependent on the active involvement of the working class in relationships of change; therefore, it is of the utmost importance that we attempt to clarify how that involvement might come about. The most crucial thing about this episode is the way in which it demonstrated the willingness and capacity of a group of imprisoned working-class men to actively engage in creating their own narratives in direct opposition to the ones that the dominant society would impose upon them. Narratives that meshed in a critical way historical, theoretical, and personal knowledge, which through a process of identification and recognition became collective knowledge. These oppositional narratives and the alternative knowledge that framed them then fed into the films they went on to make. The two-fold distinction between the forms of appearance and the real relations or conditions of existence has been further developed by Roy Bhaskar who offers a three-fold differentiation: the empirical, the actual, and the real (1998:33–47). The empirical refers to those experiences open to observation. Bhaskar stresses that the empirical is still mediated by concepts that make the empirically observably intelligible. The actual refers to those experiences that constitute the trends in empirically observable phenomena. In a context of natural science experiment, the actual is the regular pattern of events produced by the scientist in laboratory conditions. When the scientist does X to Y, Z tends to happen. But the actual is just the recurrent event. The real is the theoretical analysis of the generative mechanisms—the deep lying causal complexes that are at work so that when X is done to Y, Z tends to happen—at least in the laboratory, which is a closed system where interfering factors have been excluded (ibid: 3). When we apply this model to the prison system we can see the empirical is the imprisonment of people who have committed a crime. The empirical is shaped by the dominant conceptions of what constitutes a crime. The actual are the underlying trends, which mean that in general, if we look closely enough we can see prison is a place for working-class people with few material resources who have committed a ‘crime.’ The real is the generative mechanisms of a class divided capitalist society, which produce both the dominant conceptions of crime and the people who tend to end up in prison.

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  25 These three levels of stratification can also be applied to an education system where classroom-based education is the empirical; we can observe that children and young people are sent to school to receive an education. The actual is an education shaped by the demands of a capitalist system that requires passivity and unquestioning acceptance of prescribed, commodified bite-sized pieces of ‘knowledge’ that can be transferred into the market place to be sold as commodities. The real takes us back to a class society in which class interests are paramount and working-class children receive an education that prepares them for a life of exploitation, badly paid, uninteresting work or unemployment. The possibility of exposing this three-fold stratification comes about because of the contradictions inherent within the structures of capitalism that create areas of weakness which, when identified and acted upon, enable a destabilization waiting to be exploited. The universalizing impulse of the bourgeoisie is achieved by the separation of the economic and the social, that is the ways in which the social relates to the forces of production but is manifested ‘outside of the sphere of production itself ’ (Meiksins Wood 1995: 67). What this means is quite extraordinary; the social, or what we understand as the social, manifests itself outside the experiences of the working class. The education of the working class, their daily relationship to the institutions of society (whose function is to discipline them (Charlesworth 2000:23)), their inherited historical sense of their place in society all combine to situate the working class as external to the economic, educational, social, and cultural knowledge of the whole. According to Marx, it is the social individual and the relations under which that person exists that is of the utmost importance in understanding the social conditions of society. Consciousness of the whole is dependent on a perspective that is able to relate the complex interactions of the lived experience of class to the totality. This suggests that experience and cognition are irretrievably linked to reflection and practice. Experience links us to the world in practical ways; we feel our lives through our senses. Experience is what we do (and what is done to us), and this is what shapes our consciousness, our way of being in the world; how we feel about the world, how we think of the world is directly related to our experience of the world. The denial and disavowal of working-class experience within the dominant culture means that the necessary understanding that can lead to political transformation require a process of disinterment of working-class experience so that it can be re-evaluated, not under the terms of the universal values of the dominant culture but in relation to the specific values of working-class life. Bhaskar’s three levels of stratification allows for a recognition of the actual as an intelligible structure which when interrogated reveals how it is determined by its integration with, and contradiction to, the underlying reality on which it is dependent. This dialectical connection between the actual and the real allows for an exploration of the empirical concepts of crime and criminals that moves away from the universal application of

26  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film predetermined binary concepts that function opposingly such as good and bad, moral and immoral, right and wrong—and introduces a dialectical appraisal that uncouples the criminal act from the empirical assumptions of bourgeois notions of the law-abiding citizen. It then becomes possible to view acts designated as crimes not as a single event but as the interaction of a plurality of events that instigate certain programmed outcomes while, at the same time, considering justice not empirically as an individualized moral dispensation for wrong doing but as a systemic and collective response whose purpose is the protection and preservation of capitalism. When the actuality of crime is discussed separately from economics and the real structural inequalities of economic distribution or when the actuality of media reports on crime are considered as functioning in a different sphere from elite attitudes to the poor, the result is a failure to comprehend the real interrelatedness of media reports of crime with elite attitudes to the poor. This results in a structured blindness to the ways in which crime operates as part of the totality of a system dependent on the fracturing and obscuring of knowledge of the whole. Normative assumptions of morality and justice are no more than ‘historically specific expressions of class interest’ (Callinicos 2006:218). Considered in this light it becomes clear that the act of committing a crime goes far beyond the act itself and the actions of the individual who carries out the ‘crime.’ It is integrally linked to society as a whole, and therefore comprehension of crime as a totality demands a radical alteration in of the way in which we understand it. When students arrive for the first session of the course and there is some discussion around issues of crime and punishment, often the attitude of the prisoners and ex-prisoners is that they deserve to be in prison because they have committed a crime. This attitude directly contradicts the awareness, alluded to above, of the unfairness of their lives. Inside Film attempts to provide an alternative model of crime that moves way from the hegemonic notion of the criminal and the neutrality of the justice system. We feel that many of the films made by the students are evidence that we are often successful in this attempt. We do not ask the students to fill in questionnaires or attempt to ‘measure their progress, ’ and there is no documented record of prisoners or ex-prisoners saying such things therefore the films are our only way of measuring if we have achieved what we have set out to achieve.

Representing Crime Attitudes to, and knowledge of, crime are based not on the experience of crime as part of the totality of structural social relations (although we might as individuals experienced a crime), but on popular mediated conceptualization of crime and the criminal act which demands that we distinguish between the official version and the reality of crime which exist in total opposition to each other. Our reaction to questions of crime and punishment are based not on the experience we have of them as a part of a social totality but on preconceived assumptions of them as aberrations from the norm of a healthy,

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  27 functioning society, which is framed independently of politics and economics. Crime becomes an empirical question of moral choices related to ideological imperatives concerning what it means for individuals to lead ‘honest, hardworking’ lives. The legal system in this country, and the criminal court that enforces it, do not acknowledge the presence of a class structure— and therefore do not take into account the poverty, destitution, and desperation that motivate most ‘crimes’ committed by the working class. The most common characteristic of offenders [sic]9 are not professional villainy and self interest but poverty, isolation, boredom, an inability to cope, drink problems and mental illness. (Farrell: 154) The strategic significance of Bhaskar’s distinction is that it allows us to confront the ways in which the system of historically embedded beliefs and common sense rationalities that are drawn upon to justify and reinforce the apparatus of capitalism serve to deflect attention away from the behavior of the rich and powerful, suppressing the experience of the working class and, in the process, contributing to the systemic subordination of those whose lives are blighted by the way in which the world is ordered. Viewed as a totality and contextualized in relation to lived experience, our knowledge of the institutional spheres of capitalism and the role they play in the structural oppression of the working class is exposed as partial and contradictory. Crime is generally considered to be the work of an individual who intentionally harms someone else either directly and physically though violence or indirectly and economically as in the case of burglary. What Reiman calls the ‘one-on-one’ model of crime successfully constructs a visual signifier of the ‘typical’ criminal as someone who is generally young, male, working class, and often black (Reiman 1995:57). Indeed, this is an accurate description of the majority of people who are in prison, as Jewkes has pointed out ‘prisoners are overwhelmingly young, male, unemployed and drawn from the lower working classes’(2005:45). The model used by Reiman serves a double purpose. It creates a profile of the criminal corresponding to the image of the working class currently in circulation, and the blurring of distinctions between the two images operates to effectively criminalize the working class or associate working-class culture with criminality. At the same time, this model directs the anger of those who are the victims of crimes or those who are concerned about crime not upwards towards the rich and powerful but downwards to the poor and dispossessed (Reiman1995:44). The young mother who works while claiming benefits because she does not have enough money to buy food and pay the rent is labeled a criminal while the perpetrators of the Iraq invasion—responsible for the deaths of over a million people and generally conceded as based on systematically and consciously planned lies—are free to go about their daily business unheeded.

28  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film Or to take another example, the incidence of death and disease that occur as a direct consequence of management refusal to fund the necessary health and safety procedures that result in potentially fatal hazards in the workplace (Tombs and Whyte 2008:2). The definition of the ‘typical’ crime means that the actual crimes committed by those in power result in a society where damaged children who commit acts of violence are labeled criminals (children from the age of 10 are considered criminally responsible in this country) but where a mining disaster in which four men are killed,10 because the correct health and safety procedures were not in place,11 is not considered mass murder: Is a person who kills another person in a bar brawl a greater threat to society than a business executive who refuses to cut into his profits in order to make his factory a safe place to work? By any measure of death and suffering the latter is by far a greater danger than the former. But because he wishes his workers no harm, because he is only indirectly responsible for death and disability while pursuing legitimate economic goals, his acts are not called crimes. Once we free our imagination from the irrational shackle of the one-on-one model of crime, can there be any doubt that the criminal justice system does not protect us from the gravest threats to life and limb. It seeks to protect us when that threat comes from a young, lower class male in the inner city, when that threat comes from an upper class business executive in an office it looks the other way. (Reiman 1995:72) Reiman’s conclusion is that we need to consider the question of ‘crime’ and what is constituted as a crime by the state combined with the inability of the state to address the problem of crime, not as a failure, but on the contrary; the construction of the typical crime is successful in fulfilling the ideological purpose that it is intended for: that of creating a fear of the working class and deflecting attention away from the actual crimes committed by the rich and powerful12 (Gordon 1971:53). the actions we label crime, the acts we think of as crime, the actors and actions we treat as criminal is created. It is an image shaped by decisions as to what will be called crime and who will be treated as criminal (Reiman 1995:293). The actions of those with money and power are not classified as criminal and, if they are, the perpetrators receive fairly lenient sentences, which they carry out in open prisons. Corporate fraud in the UK is running at £144 billion a year whilst income tax and vat evasion cost the Treasury £16 billion in lost revenue. One analysis has produced a figure of between £13 and £20 trillion hidden in offshore tax havens (cited in Winlow, Hall and Treadwell 2017:37–38).

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  29 politicians stay stoically silent with respect to crimes committed by middle class ‘respectables.’ The constant barrage of publicity around benefit fraud compared to the ongoing silence around middle class fraud and income tax evasion remains the classic example of how the crime problem is ideologically constructed by the majority of politicians, media commentators and state servants. (Sim 2010)

Education and Radical Pedagogy The development of a theoretical and practical, politically committed, radical pedagogy of film in the service of the working classes is built upon a multi-disciplinary approach which endeavors to cross-fertilize the rigid specialism’s current within intellectual life (Boggs 2000:viii). The isolationist impulse of these specialisms contributes to fostering a partial view of the totality of life under capitalism, each with its own conception of reality and discrete repertoire of meanings. This leads, inevitably, to the obfuscation of the connections that exist between different areas of knowing. Fixing on a particular object and objective, other factors in play are reduced in significance and prominence given to the specialism in focus. How then is it possible to begin to comprehend the actuality of the political and ideological if the other contributing factors are not present? This is not to say that the work carried out within the framework of specialist knowledge is not useful in the production of information or that the knowledge it produces is without use. But to be truly effective any project of transformation must be connected relationally and complexly to other disciplines and to experience as it is lived. It is important to grasp that seemingly diverse areas of study within academia, no matter how differentiated, each is with its own language and ‘schools of thought’ actually function as sub-genres within the overarching genre of neoliberal education (Hill 2006; Giroux 2014; McLaren 2000). It is often the case that the claims of different perspectives and new approaches fail to recognize that perspective is always classed; our view of the world is constructed by our place within it and the class position we occupy. Our perspective as individuals is dependent upon the social relations which constitute our knowledge and experience. There is no binary opposition between the individual and society no matter how determined neoliberalism is to effect a separation between the two (Read 2016:5); the individual is a product of the social relations into which they are born. Therefore, our perspective is not neutral; it is embedded within the perceptual relations of class, and our understanding of the world is filtered through that perspective. A progressively more commodified education system has witnessed an increasing cognitive uniformity, and a leveling of intellectual differences in order to create an unvaried product that easily translates into an exchange value in the market place. Commodification focuses on formulas and universals and is dependent on the production of standardized

30  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film products which can be easily categorized in order to be bought and sold in the market place. Commodification therefore fails to make the connections within and between existing social relations, which creates a uniform conception of knowledge that translates into information which fails to recognize the particularities of class. It is important here to draw a distinction between the concepts of the universal and the totality. The universal refers to the ways in which capitalist ideology functions prescriptively in order to construct phenomena which are in reality dependent upon social and historical specificities such as class relations as independent of such specificities. In the process, it subsumes them into an essentializing category that fails to allow for the primacy of such particularities as well as their social interconnectedness. This process results in an ahistorical, standardized, and homogenized (mis)understanding of social relations. The totality on the other hand offers a fundamental challenge to the concept of the universal, recognizing the particulars it would efface and placing them within a network of social relations that coalesce into the whole. At the same time recognizing the instabilities inherent in any social category and its potential to shift in unpredicted ways results in subjectivities produced within specific historical conjunctures. The continuing existence of the working class is evidence of the impossibility of the universal; the defining relations of capitalism are intelligible and knowable only if they are understood in relation to questions of power and the constitutive role of knowledge. Once we understand this, it is become clear that universalism is the articulation of the ideology of power; indeed Balibar refers to ideology as the ‘dream of an impossible universality’ (Balibar 2002). The economic and social relations of capitalist education in most societies reproduce ways of (not) seeing that put in place the hierarchal relations of existence that prepare children for their role in a workplace mirroring as they do the prevailing organization of relationships in the school/college / university (Bowles and Gintis 2011:12; Reay 2006). These relations also act significantly as filters to screen out information, the ‘pedagogical unsaid, ’ a two-pronged process which leaves unchallenged the structures that perpetuate a system of class inequality while at the same time conveying through its own structures information on how to fit into the system that it fails to acknowledge exists. This is information that it is often rejected by the working class and leads to alienation from the education system (Davies 2000; Reay 2006) In the West, a progressively market-led approach to education has resulted in an education system increasingly linked to the commercial imperatives of the neoliberal goals of profit acquisition and consumerism. (Ball 2008; Hill 2006) The result of these imperatives when they are imposed onto the education system results in a conception of education reduced to the acquisition of quantifiable test results. The expression at all levels of personal and civic life of the ‘logic of capitalism’ or what Mark Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’ exerts a pressure on the development and form of education,

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  31 ensuring the closing down of spaces for education as a liberatory, creative, democratic process where counter-narratives, diverse experiences, and critical engagement are prioritized (Friere 1985: 101–105; Allman 2001:115; Lipman 2004:180). According to Small (2005:32), the alienation of the learner from educational achievement is not to be seen as existing in ‘the failure, the drop out, or the delinquent but rather in the normal and even the successful student’ It is successful students who internalize the demands of a class-differentiated labor market. I would argue that the low educational achievement of those who are imprisoned by the state is evidence of the impossibility of the imposition of a universal capitalist logic. Their low educational achievement is connected not to their status as prisoners but to their experience of being working class (I discuss this point in more detail below). A radical pedagogical methodology starts from a theory of the totality— the application of this paradigmatic conceptual tool makes it possible to begin to build connections between seemingly disparate areas of social relations and the ways in which their significance lies, not only in their material affect, but also in the cognitive and perceptual blindness to the ways in which structures of power operate. Just as Reiman claims that we need to view crime policy not as failing but as succeeding, so Mara Sapon-Shevin (talking about the American education system in ways that can be applied generally to institutions in the West) has challenged us to see the education system in this country not in terms of failure but in terms of success. A system built on the reproduction of class difference can be considered successful if it prepares the working-class student for a life of subservience, manual employment and/or custody, with very little expectation of market rewards. If we are concerned that we are failing to educate all children, or failing to prepare our future citizens, or failing some commitment to equity and social justice—then, yes, the system is failing. If we wish to see the reproduction of the current unjust system then the system under which we all live is actually succeeding perfectly. It does a superb job sorting out the winners from the losers, perpetuating a stringently classed society, and creating the work force that our stratified, capitalist society requires. (Sapon-Shevin 2011:22) The condemning of working-class people to a life of material hardship and unsatisfied needs demanded by neoliberalism while at the same time holding out the possibility of a change in fortunes (the lie of meritocracy) creates one of the central concerns for Inside Film. The overwhelming problem in dealing with this concern is that all the while ‘the norms of capitalism appear as features of the natural world, ’ that is, as universal truths, we as human beings ‘need take no social and political responsibility for these norms’ (Wendling 2009:2). How to expose the workings of capitalism when

32  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film we are all so firmly caught up in those workings? As Mark Fisher puts it ‘what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation’ (2009:15). The enormity of this challenge of how to view individual knowledge, subjectivity, and desire as the result of collective classed experience and of how to recognize that both are shaped by capitalist modes of production and the demands of hyper consumption has been raised by Alex Callinicos (2006:1) in relation to building new models of cognition and action: ‘how are we able to go beyond the limits set by existing practices and beliefs and produce something new something as yet unimagined?’ To be human is to exist within the structures of the society in which we live: there can be no human development or indeed existence outside of those structures. It is not possible to stand outside of what we know and construct a position that will enable us to produce an abstract theoretical standpoint to understand the society in which we live that will encompass the experience of all the people who live in that society (Castoriadis 2005:3). The limits of what we know are dependent on how we relate to class position. Knowledge of social relations relies on an application of a pedagogy that engages with the myriad contradictions between the social, the economic, and the cultural in the ways that they are connected to lived experience. A ‘theoretical practice’ that does not engage with the experiences that exist outside of those acknowledged by the dominant ideology will limit its own ability to see beyond that ideology and to offer a counternarrative. Engaging with the cultural and experiential distance between the working class and other classes within the structures of capitalism provides a way of addressing the economic as it is manifested in the cultural and the social. A pedagogical practice seeking to ‘go beyond the limits set by existing practices’ must seek to occupy an autonomous space within already existing spaces. As Castoriadis notes ‘autonomy emerges when explicit and unlimited interrogation explodes on the scene—an interrogation that has a bearing not on “facts” but on the social imaginary significations and their possible grounding’ (1991:163). Crucially this social imaginary must be a collective one. The specific shared experience of the prison or the shared experience of probation produces knowledge of the world that is determined by that experience and which is in a direct contradiction to the prevailing ideology. It is within these contradictions that the intervention of a project like Inside Film can initiate a re-negotiating of the ‘facts’ and occupy an autonomous space within an already existing space that resists the accepted dominant conceptualizations of film, education, and culture and that insists on the interrogation of each of these. The Inside Film project then has to be understood as an attempt to project ourselves into a future that does not exist, which is not known, one that will be produced in the very act of projecting ourselves into it. This is not an imagined utopianism into which our ideas of something different must fit; rather it is a struggle to wrench the future from those who are content

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  33 to continue as we are and who truly believe there is no alternative (Eagleton 1981:68) and those who who would begin to build radical ‘future in the present’ (Cleaver 1993). The task is a large and complex one. Film as a radical pedagogic tool • connects the cultural consideration of film dialectically to the political project of praxis, linking the abstract category of theory with the process of production as it applies to both filmmaking and to education. • integrates radicalism as a methodology into pedagogic practice and the process of filmmaking. • is concerned with education, not in the conventional model of knowledge transmission and acquisition but as a reaction to our environment (Biesta 2006:27) and the ways in which our experience of that environment shapes how and what we learn and so consequently conditions our subjectivity (O’Neill and Wayne 2007) • insists on (classed) experience as the conceptual and theoretical basis of political and cultural analysis. Following on from this, it acknowledges that the working class has a culture, both historical and contemporaneous, that differentiates it from the dominant culture of the middle class. • strives through praxis to illuminate the dominant strategies of neoliberalism exposing the structural weight of the power concentrated in elites. • recognizes the definitional power of the media and the unequally distributed cultural capital (Bourdieu 1996) involved in accessing that power. • argues for the production of film and the process of education to be viewed dialectically through the lens of the wider social and political spectrum of capitalist relations particularly as they relate to class. As this list demonstrates, the Inside Film project, taken as a whole is a political intervention into film, education, and questions of class. Film as a radical pedagogic tool attempts to facilitate a critical engagement with the structural and ideological underpinnings of the dominant media whose representational processes produce negative images of the working classes constructing them as problematic and dangerous. As a tool, a word consciously chosen for its association with manual labor, the project unambiguously aligns the work it carries out with the working classes, constructing itself as a class specific intervention. It is concerned with dismantling the ideological construction of the dominant visual and discursive imagery peddled by the liberal elites who dominate the ‘creative’ and media professions.13 What is at stake here is the realization that the powerful institutionalized conduits of ideology, the media, and the education system in particular, generally speaking, offer no other version of reality than one that chimes with the values of elite groups. Access to the resources essential to the task of communicating an organized opposition encompassing radical versions of social and political reality are extremely unequally distributed and dominated by an elite class (Benson 1978:96). Essentially, within the mainstream media,

34  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film working class meaning is constructed as a ‘subordinate one.’ Indeed the continuation of the present system is dependent on the exclusion and rejection of working-class meaning.14 The aim of the Inside Film project is to bring that ‘subordinate’ meaning to the fore; in effect to position it as the primary meaning—this can only be achieved by wresting control of the means of cultural production from those for whom the present state of affairs is both rewarding and profitable Within . . . education the definition of culture usually operates within a clearly defined framework of middle class taste grounded in middle class experience. The possibility of a more egalitarian cultural landscape was destroyed by the Thatcher government from 1979 and since then the teaching of culture and cultural provision has been placed firmly back into the hands of a university educated middle class elite whose very existence is dependent on the cultural inequalities that sustain their jobs and which they do very little to challenge. (Cultural Democracy 1994:13) It is not unusual for those serving prison sentences to take part in opera, theatre, or creative writing projects. Although there is no doubt that the prisoners enjoy this work and derive pleasure from being involved in creative activities, these projects provide a top down version of how we understand art and offer no opportunity for a more critical participatory engagement with the creative process. Art in this instance becomes a political practice embedded within a conventional educational strategy providing knowledge of legitimatized cultural forms. Presented as a cultural provision intent on improving the lives of prisoners, there is no critical analysis of the purpose served by art and its utilization as a form of control reproducing a standardized conception of what constitutes art and who becomes an artist. At the same time art is commandeered as a means of regulating the imagination and confining any radical potential within the framework of officially sanctioned cultural production. (Murphy 2012:4; Davis 2013:28). A perfect example of having your ideological cake and eating it. This model of cultural provision serves the purpose of reproducing existing modes of social, cultural, and economic power and crucially the modes of perception that sustain them. Discussions of class, poverty, and inequality are mostly absent from these kinds of projects. Offering a superficial version of reality, they are unable to go any further than which is already visible, and point to the limits of pedagogic and cultural practices enshrined within the prevailing socioeconomic order. The not-so-implicit message contained within the content and delivery of projects such as these is the conveyed assumption that the working class lack a culture of their own and that the mass culture they enjoy is one that is passively consumed, and that can be legitimately dismissed and replaced. Cultural provision therefore is considered to be part of a project of

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  35 self-improvement premised on the notion that to ‘improve’ themselves the prisoners must learn to appreciate middle-class art forms and the explicit naturalization of capitalist structures contained within their content, form, and aesthetic strategies. This is not a conception of art that can openly address questions of class even though it takes place in one of the institutions where the class divide is at its starkest. Within the prison, the organization of art-based activities, their content, and their delivery are dependent on a classed conception of the purpose of art. Both the definition of art and the perceived purpose of art are subject to a narrowly defined, aprioristic role that contributes to the consolidation of class power. This model of art and art provision is not grounded in a view of education or art as a social and civic engagement with the potential for a deeper understanding of, and a more critical engagement with, the social forces that impact on our lives, but in one embedded within the self-interest of the middle classes and the universalizing impetus of class power. Art provision for the working class then becomes nothing more than proof of their symbolic and material lack.

Class and Representation The unquestioned cultural domination of middle-class art forms and art provision within prison education in particular, and within the education sector more generally, is linked to other forms of domination, social, political, and economic. The decline of the culture of the working class has according to Charlesworth(2002:2) been one of the most ‘powerful, telling developments in British Society.’ John McGrath (1990:5) links this decline of workingclass culture to the ‘systematic destruction’ by consecutive governments, of the institutions embedded within the lives and history of the working class, out of which this culture grew and which sustained it. Crucially, for McGrath, these institutions were the ‘very embodiment of working-class consciousness.’ If, as McGrath claims, it was through these cultural institutions and the forms they took that the working class were able to recognize and identify themselves as a class with a distinct set of experiences differentiating them from other classes, then it follows that at the present moment it is of the utmost importance that the working class produce their own cultural forms that are able to translate their own experiences. One of the most telling, and perhaps contradictory, results of this decline has been the higher visibility of representations of the working class in the media. While the institutions, jobs, communities, and ways of life that supported them have been eroded by the policies of the neoliberal project, the working class as a group has become more visible. High profile shows such as Shameless (Channel 4 2004–2013) and Little Britain (BBC 2003–2005) and films such as Fish Tank (Dir: Andrea Arnold 2009) present workingclass life as an instantly recognizable visual cliché. More recently there has been a proliferation of documentaries that have been designated as ‘poverty porn.’ Reality TV documentaries such as Benefit Street (Channel 4) Nick

36  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits (BBC1), Skint (Channel 4) Benefits Britain 1949 (Channel 4), and How to get a Council House (Channel 4) (Wayne and O’Neill 2013) all point to the inequalities that are the result of class differences while inviting audiences to blame the working class for those inequalities (Couldry 2011:36). The contradictory nature of a class society and the unequal access to the dissemination of knowledge and education results in an antagonism between those who are ‘educated’ and those who are receiving an ‘education.’ As Gramsci pointed out, all relationships that are hegemonic must be considered as pedagogic relationships as they are all involved in the struggle over whose perspective holds the most power to influence the education of other groups (Sanbonmatsu 2004:146). This approach acknowledges the class-based nature not only of education practices but of all social institutions. This in turn draws attention to the importance of working in collaboration with dominated groups, acknowledging the particularity of their experiences and providing access to both material and ideological resources that encourage a questioning of the legitimacy of the prevailing order. One of the ways in which the Inside Film project does this is by drawing on the already existing knowledge of popular film culture that the students have acquired through watching Hollywood films. There is among the students who take the course an already existing large degree of media literacy. This engagement with the dominant Hollywood product with which the prisoners and ex-prisoners are most familiar raises a series of questions that there is an attempt to address throughout the duration of the course. Mass cultural forms such as popular film are, ideologically, firmly embedded in the spectatorial strategies and signifying practices of the dominant modes of representation and consumption corresponding to Gramsci’s concept of hegemonic practice. The content to a greater or lesser degree unquestionably reproduces the norms of capitalist society and recycles the stereotypes of working-class people and the lives they lead. But this engagement with, and exploration of, mass culture during the Inside Film course presents an opportunity to consider mass culture as being in a dialectical relationship with high culture (Art) and for both to be understood in terms of their relationship to the totality of the capitalist system, which enables the existence of both. The cultural distinction between Art and mass culture and the many prohibitive hurdles to be overcome before any participatory inclusion in the production of art is possible, should itself be evidence of how tenuous the concept of the universal is once looked at closely. Considering the on-going and continuing success of mainstream, dominant hegemonic representations the task of a project such as Inside Film is to identify, through a process of discussion, debate, and critical engagement and through the production of self-authored representations and antagonisms, expose them, and develop an understanding of how cultural artifacts such as film reproduce the existing structures of oppression and exploitation. It is important to acknowledge that I am not referring here to the

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  37 promotion of popular culture by middle class academics and their appropriation of the popular to their own careerist ends (Cultural Policy Collective 2004:19). Popular culture became integrated into film studies in the late 1960s/70s and was part of the radical impetus aimed at validating mass cultural forms including TV, pop music, and of course film, but has since been absorbed into the area of identity politics that has institutionalized the marginalization of class politics (James 1996:3). A visually oriented class-based pedagogy must work towards the expansion of visual experience, not necessarily in the sense of introducing new or novel forms of the visual but rather in the sense of critically interrogating the already existing dominant images that circulate often unchallenged. Contemporary visual culture has developed alongside neoliberalism; therefore, the negation of class experience is an integral part of that culture. Reforging the link between experience and the image in a world such as ours where the visual plays such a dominant role is no small task. Of course, there is a contradiction here in linking the visual with the concept of experience. Contemporary visual culture presents us with an unprecedented knowledge of the world and not just our own small corner of it, but at the same time a constant stream of mediated images can provide us with a way of shielding ourselves from direct contact with the world we are experiencing secondhand. We are bombarded with images that allow us to acknowledge them without the need to question them or act upon them. Our visual culture has delinked appearance and existence (or to use another word, experience). We consume images without the necessity of reacting to what we see, either in the sense of interrogating the version of events we are offered or in the sense of actually doing something about it. The problem of the shift to appearance away from experience occurs on two levels, and they both have the same consequence of refusing the working class access to their own lives. Firstly, the problem manifests itself as one of signaling the importance of classed experiences being placed in a relational context both socially and morally and secondly on a more abstract level representing working-class experience unmediated by the perspective and worldview of middle-class professionals The alternative of more avant-garde or challenging art forms catering for a university-educated intellectual elite are on the whole rejected by the working-class viewer, not because they are incapable of understanding the films but because the cultural and educational capital that is required to do so is not readily available to or easily sourced by the working class (Lovell 1980:86). So, while we do not reject the films the prisoners consume, we suggest a critical engagement with the representations and ideological concepts that they disseminate. We do this in order to consider the myriad ways in which representations of the working class in these films correspond to and cross-fertilize other discursive strategies that attempt to incorporate them into the hegemonic perspective that constructs the working class negatively. Like all of us, they have internalized many of the values and attitudes

38  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film that are presented through the medium of mainstream films, TV, and other media outlets. It is these values and attitudes that we attempt to analyze and deconstruct emphasizing the importance of questioning whose values we are being asked to accept when we watch an ‘entertainment’ film, what and whose ideological purpose do those values serves, and whose social reality is being denigrated or ignored? This task is as much the responsibility of those involved in running the course as it is of those taking the course. As Lovell has pointed out, the dominant ideology has the ability to incorporate most challenges to its hegemony, even the radical ones, but it is possible for this to work in the opposite direction and for images and ideas that support the hegemony of the elites to be radicalized when they are used in radical ways for transformative purposes (Lovell 1980:53). It is important to point out here that I am not promoting what post-structuralists refer to as ‘reading against the grain’ nor am I calling for a rejection of the coherent self as a fictional construct. On the contrary, this is about claiming an ontological category called the working class and identifying the ways in which this category is signified within dominant media productions and how that signification is crucial to the hegemonic struggle for power and legitimacy within a class-stratisfied society.

Experience, Memory, History The concept of experience is a crucial one not only to the Inside Film project but also to any attempt to construct radical transformative projects. It is the recollection of previous experiences, what Lovell has referred to as the ‘recovery of suppressed experience’ (Lovell 1980:50)and the consideration of present ones that the Inside Film project attempts to synthesize within the filmmaking process. Recovery alone is not sufficient—what is of the utmost importance is the ability to begin to view these experiences not in relation to a framework dictated by the accepted ways of making sense of the world but rather to place the experiences within the context of a shared knowledge of being working class. More than one of the films made by Inside Film students does this, to take just one example: The Interview draws on past childhood experiences to consider their affect not only on actions in the present but in the ways in which if considered in a decontextualized manner these actions can be judged in ways that will have negative consequences for the future. The recollection of previous experiences is not simply the recollection of personal memory although this is often the starting point of remembered events. Rather what I am referring to here is the recollection of collective classed experience that can be re-inscribed into the network of contemporary political, cultural, and personal meanings in ways that impact on the formation of subjectivity and which, if left unchallenged, contributes to the legitimization of existing power structures. (Foucault 1975:28). It is the restoration of collective working-class subjectivity within an unremembered history that is concealed or rewritten in order to bypass questions concerned

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  39 with how power is gained, exercised, and crucially reproduced. To define a memory as classed and to consider it in relation to the experiences of a specific group of people (the working class) is to stake out a claim for memory as an act not so much of remembering but of refusing to forget (Carter and Hirschkop 1996:v–vii.). This requires inserting the continuation of past injustices into the present as contemporary injustices and reclaiming the struggles, defeats, and victories of past generations that are threatening to the status quo.15 Memories are simultaneously individual and collective and formed through interactions with other individuals and collectivities. In order to understand this dialectic as it relates to the working class it is essential to understand the ways in which the collective of the working class is contradicted by the images shown and stories produced by the ideologically powerful. These disqualify the experiences of the working class, and reframing them through the optic of progress and the neoliberal reworking of the individual as separate from the concept of class. Contemporary representations of working class people assume apriori life experiences that are easily projected as generalized stereotypes. These representations fail to take into account the particularities of responses to myriad situations of exploitation, hardship, and oppression or the extent to which these responses are linked to the social and political framework within which they occur. What needs to be clarified is the relationship between working-class experience—which takes place within situations over which the working class has very little control—and the political and cultural landscape, intent on negating or denying that experience. An example of this negation of working-class experience took place at one of the institutions in which Inside Film worked. The films that were produced by those taking part in the course dealt with the realities of workingclass life on ‘the street’ for many young black men in London; gang violence, guns, crime, and ‘bad language’ was used. The institution in question did not view the films as a way in which the young men who made them could engage with the realities of their lives; rather, the films were viewed as reflecting badly on the institution. Consequently, they requested that I did not screen the films anywhere and refused to let me return to run the project again. In one fell swoop, the experience of a group of young working-class men had been negated, and their achievement in making the films were annulled. Many of the students had not been in formal schooling since they were 14 years old. Some of them had been in institutions since they were 12; one of the students was selling drugs on the street so that his mother could pay her mortgage; only one of the students had used a film camera before. Literacy levels were low and IT skills negligible, and yet the real achievement of planning, scripting, acting in, shooting, and editing their films was denigrated as it was felt they would not pass the ‘public acceptability test.’16 The films dealt with childhood memories and relationships with parents; they explored interactions with institutions such as school and parole boards—they looked at questions of perception and notions of revenge, all areas that had directly impinged on their lives. And yet, we were

40  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film not allowed to show them and the students’ achievement in making them was not celebrated. If considered collectively, memories become part of the shared struggle for subjectivity, legitimacy, and history. Memories, when they are interpreted as classed experience, demonstrate continuity with the past struggles of working-class lives, the present conditions of hardship and want, and the challenge to survive, demonstrating how little these lives have changed for generations. This continuity also demonstrates how the economic organization of capitalism has effects that are not confined to the economic but which impact all areas of life: personal, social, and cultural, as Benjamin pointed out: Another reason why the past cannot be ignored, is that quite simply the struggles, the toil, the injustices and hopes of the majority of all the accumulated dead generations have yet to be redeemed. (1999:252) That is, the past and the future are joined together in the present, and it is in the understanding of how these memories are dialectically interwoven that we are able to create a picture of the totality. The political significance of the history of working-class oppression as it is remembered by the working class alerts us to the fact that the: ‘State of emergency in which we live is not the exception, but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight’ (Benjamin 1999:248). Memory in this equation is not something shrouded in the past, something unreliable, but is a living presence whose structure and contents are irretrievably linked to the social formations that construct them (Huyssen 2001:69) and which can be verified by others who share the same experiences contemporaneously. These memories have an ongoing immediacy, and their intrinsic relationship to the past can be confirmed not by experts and academics but by comparison to the continuities of the present. Film as a visual medium can reinsert memories in ways not only recognizable to individuals but to groups. It has the power to make visible the past and present condition of the working class, to politicize memories and to consider them as illuminating the present rather than as nostalgia for the past (hooks 2015:204–205). As I have previously pointed out, the most pressing aim of the project is to begin to see the totality of existence. Images that resonate with the present can be interrogated to discover why and how this can be so. What was considered to be specific—belonging to certain people at particular moments—is recognized as part of a continuum in which the oppressions of the past are echoed in the structures of the present. This form of counter-memory functions in direct opposition to the ways in which memories established by the dominant media construct remembering as a means of reflecting its own cultural and political values, creating a visual imagery that colonizes not only the past but the present and the future (Foucault 1975).17

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  41

Class and Experience Experience is the mediating factor between the structures of capitalism and the agency of the working classes. Belonging to a particular class formation situates individuals in a temporal trajectory that exists as a result of classed circumstances which affect life chances and opportunities and which produce a particular kind of subjectivity, one formed through the daily experience of learning to negotiate (or failing to negotiate) the struggles, hardships, and deprivations of working-class life and its increasingly narrow options. These options are inscribed within the spatial contours of home, education, institutions and the finite employment opportunities open to the working-class person. (Charlesworth 2000:94) The resulting subjectivity is one whose experience of this spatial and temporal confinement is mediated by economic organization. This subjectivity demonstrates how the relationship to what can only be described as the mode of production has consequences for the personal, the social, and the cultural and bestows a sense of self and a disposition to act in certain ways that stem from the experience of lives of hardship, vulnerability, and non-recognition. Crime is not a product of classed experience; crime is classed experience, and it is a product of structured inequality—to consider it otherwise is to miss the opportunity to realize the extent to which the working class are shaped by an environment and experiences that ‘produce severe vulnerability, degradation and lack of self worth’ (Charlesworth 2000:129). The political and popular media discourses which construct the working class as feckless and lazy scroungers and the ‘typical’ criminal as violent, immoral, and working class (see next chapter) are simply not able to recognize the nature of working-class experience and the extent to which these experiences create a group of people who, although integral to capitalism, are denied market rewards and opportunities to express the consequences of those experiences, but who need to be controlled and subjugated: ‘People are in this predicament because of a particular relation to the institutions of English society, which they inherited at birth’ (Charlesworth 2000:150). Thompson has warned against thinking in terms of abstract external concepts that dismiss the lived experience of people in their daily lives. Class is something that happens to people (something they experience), and because of this they react to it: When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as ‘the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle’ we must be put on our guard. For behind this trade cycle there is a structure of social relations, fostering some sorts of expropriation (rent, interest, and profit) and outlawing others (theft, feudal dues), legitimizing some types of conflict (competition, armed warfare) and inhibiting others (trades unionism, bread riots, popular political organization). (Thompson 1995:224–225)

42  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film The working classes are not always joined together in places of production. Mass unemployment and the deindustrialization of the British work environment means people do not meet together on a daily basis in the work place, and even when they do the neoliberal led downturn in trade union membership and party affiliations of the last 30 years has meant that people do not meet collectively as members of the working class. From a Marxist perspective, class is defined by the relationship of specific groups of people to the means of production, generally taken to mean the factories, mines, and fields or more contemporaneously in the West, call centers, and service sector jobs, where the working class, who do not own the forces of production, sell their labor to those who do. This relationship still exists, particularly in what is often referred to as ‘developing countries’ but which are in fact the countries where colonialism has taken its heaviest toll. In these countries, the lack of recognized, organized unions and workplaces that are unregulated and unhindered by health and safety obligations has meant global corporations go to wherever their product can be produced most cheaply with the highest profit margins without worrying about the human cost. Globally this has resulted in the proletariat doubling since the 1970s.18 Here in the West, neoliberal global corporatism has overseen the introduction of zero-hour or short-term contracts, rising unemployment, and chronic levels of underemployment. Consequently, job insecurity now plays as significant a role in the lives of working people as work itself did in the past. The relationship to the forces of production as Marx understood still remains but has been reconfigured so that it no longer simply refers to products produced to be sold in the marketplace in order to generate profit. It must now be considered to encompass the social and civic institutions put in place to regulate and oversee the lives of the working class. Without the structure of the working day which had provided a rhythm and order to the lives of the working class, punitive, authoritarian institutions such as the welfare system and the legal system have been imposed and now serve that purpose. It is important to recognize that the relationship of the working class to these institutions is a very different one to that which the middle classes experience. For the middle classes, these institutions legitimize the cultural and social capital of the bourgeoisie and reflect back at them their values and attitudes reinforcing the status quo; while for the working classes, they only increase their sense of alienation and failure. It is true to say that many of the middle classes will never come into contact with some of these institutions, the job center or the housing office for instance. These institutions organize and reproduce divisions in the social world in their role of reinforcing dominant social relations at the expense of the working class. The experiences and geographical specificities of working-class life result in a relationship with the forces of production, civic institutions, and ideological structures of capitalism that differ from the experiences of those from more advantaged backgrounds. The everyday struggles against the contradictory and oppressive forces of capitalism result in ways of being, of reacting, that paradoxically both resist and accept the hegemonic strictures of

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  43 life under capitalism. The experience of class relations—how we are treated, how we see others treated, what is expected of us, what we expect of others— results in a consciousness formed differently from those in more privileged positions. The subjective experience of class and the ways in which those experiences shape consciousness results in the ‘disposition to behave as a class’ and cultivates what Thompson has referred to as ‘class struggle without class’(1978:149). What he means is that even where there is no recognition of belonging to a class that has been formed and is continually shaped by capitalist forces, people still act in ways that are a direct consequence of belonging to that class. This is true even when there is no conscious recognition of belonging to a class. Although the working class are no longer joined together in places of production, they are joined together in prisons and are in prison because their experience of being working class has resulted in actions defined by the state as ‘criminal.’ Experience as an analytical category has often been viewed with suspicion within academia. Thompson famously challenged the structuralism of Althusser who dismissed the concepts of experience and history as empiricism insisting that experience was conterminous with ideology and that history was ‘a process without a subject.’ For Althusser, the work of Marxism should concern itself with philosophy and the refinement of theory. Contemporaneously academics of all persuasions have argued against the utilization of experience as a research category preferring to speak of subject positions and discursive difference.19 The fundamental principle of this is a concentration on the concept of individual identity. Proponents of what has come to be known as identity politics claim an insight into the complexities of human experience but only those experiences that are confined to a demographically specific declassed celebration of difference. Over the last 30 years, most theoretical frameworks within the humanities have become more interested in defining difference and finding the hidden voice of discrete identities that are marginalized by mainstream society rather than conceiving of and implementing inclusive class-based strategies to organize for a more equal society. While there is much to celebrate in this project, it begs the question: once that voice has been discovered and heard, what kind of dialogue will result? A theory of radical politics that goes no further than the excavation of the voices of cultural minorities has very little to offer in the way of social transformation (Sanbonmatsu 2004:51). Capitalism is quite capable of working towards the abolition of racial and gender inequalities; indeed it already incorporates these forms of difference but the acknowledgement of class difference (and its intersection with race, gender, etc.) is rather more difficult (Meiksins Wood 1995:258). There is also a paradox in the exclusion of class from the politics of identity, as Milner has pointed out (in Kirk 2002), identity politics is, generally speaking, grounded in the class interests of the well-educated, professional middle classes. He goes so far as to call them middle-class movements (although they are never referred to as middle-class movements) whose focus on identity rarely includes the working class.

44  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film The social consciousness of the working class is directly shaped by the conditions of exploitation and oppression that are the daily reality for working-class people. It is this experience that shapes their attitudes and values—reinforcing what Eagleton has referred to as Marx’s ‘ever scandalous discovery’ (Eagleton 1981: 70) that it is still possible to utilize demonstrating as it does the ways in which the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and the intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1968:181) The relationship between existence and consciousness is mediated through experience. Experience is, as I have argued, classed, therefore it suggests that people are not simply individuals but also members of a particular class who share the same experience of life under a set of historically specific social conditions. And while I have previously claimed that that the working-class person has very few options open to them and very few means of escaping the trajectory on which they are often set before birth, I do not wish to claim that the outcome of those lives as predetermined. Transformation of both individual consciousness and social conditions is possible. Indeed Marx insisted on the dialectical relationship between the two ‘by thus acting on the external world and changing it, (man) at the same time changes his own nature’ (Marx 1954:173). The pressing theoretical and practical problem for any project involved in the attempt to bring about change is how to understand the experience of change and the process in which that change develops (Small 2005:viii). Contemporaneously education is not concerned with change or transformation in the wider sense; on the contrary, it is concerned with reinforcing the already existing distribution of wealth and power through established modes of thought and forms of sensemaking (Callinicos 2006:3; Reay 2006:291) The continuing association of accumulation of already existing knowledge with academic achievement results in an unchallenged limitation on the possibility of transforming not only the injustices of the society in which we live but also in a limitation on the transformation of the subjectivity formed by the institutions that propagate these injustices. Karl Marx points us in the direction of the reciprocal nature of subjectivity and social structures and how change in one can result in change in the other (Lichtman 1982:92). Inside Film carries out the work it does by acting on the assumption that education as a specific form of engagement in its present form functions to reinforce the already existing paradigmatic precepts of neoliberalism. We situate this information historically by pointing out to the students that there is very little difference now from the historical aims of the public education system which was introduced with the intention to ‘police and control the working classes rather than to educate them’ (Reay 2006:203).

Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  45 As Marx made clear, what we accept as the norm is in fact nothing more than class interests masquerading as the universal human condition. Change comes about in a two-fold process of subjective change leading to environmental change. Through intervening to alter people’s subjectivity we can begin to create the conditions, which will allow for a change in the material relations of capitalism. Struggling to expose the contradictions within capitalism we can come to an understanding of how culture, ideology, and economics are closely related and how working-class experience made visible can develop ways of seeing that demands not only political analysis but political action dependent on the inclusion of working-class experience. As Sanbonmatsu has put it Our task is to construct a theory of the whole that will enable us to ‘see’ more fully the dimensions and textures of social life, particularly structures of power and their points of internal contradiction and, hence, strategic vulnerability. (Sanbonmatsu 2004:192) I hope the next chapter will begin to go some way to sketching out what such a theory might look like and how it might be put into practice.

Notes   1 To take just one example—one of the theory sessions is devoted to a filmmaking practice known as Third Cinema—a low budget, politically committed cinema that grew out of the anti-colonial struggles taking place across South America and Africa in the 1960s and 70s (see Wayne 2001) One of the most interesting films to have been produced by the students is a film very heavily influenced by the filmmaking practices and strategies of Third Cinema, Who Am I? In this documentary, the students make connections between personal identity, national identity, and international violence in an unconventional and thought-provoking way.  2 It is worth noting here that New Labour created an astonishing 3,600 new offenses during their time in office, and between the time they took office in 1997 and were voted out office in 2010 the prison population rose by 41%   3 Ministry of Justice Statistical Bulletin on the public disorder of August 6 and 9, 2011–September 2012 update: Published September 13, 2012   4 The figure for number of adults reconvicted within a year of their release; the figure is 46% rising to 60% for those who serving sentences of less than 12 months.  5 Not including those detained under the mental health act or in immigration centers.   6 These figures and a more detailed breakdown of the prison population in England and Wales can be accessed at www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Bromley%20Briefings/summer%202016%20briefing.pdf.   7 Of course, if we take into consideration the family members of those who are imprisoned—wives, husbands, children, mothers, fathers etc.—along with friends and employers and add these to the ever-increasing numbers of prisoners, it no longer appears to be a narrow section of society—on the contrary, it is one that has the potential to affect most of us.

46  Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film  8 As Richard Lichtman has pointed out it is ‘this contention that distinguishes the Marxist position from every religious or therapeutic movement that claims to transform the self without transforming the natural social world’ (Lichtman 72:1982).   9 Terms such as ‘offender’ need to be rejected as state-centric classifications that justify the imprisonment and punishment of those who have been failed by the neoliberal state. 10 Morris, Steven Gleision colliery: the pit disaster that devastated a Welsh mining community https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jun/19/gleisioncolliery-tragic-pit-disaster-welsh-mining-community accessed August 24, 2013. 11 I write this a week after the Grenfell Tower fire in which the official figure of those killed stands at 80 but which unofficial figures put much higher—The cause of the quick spread of the fire was the refusal of the council to pay for cladding material that would have been safer had a fire broke put.As of today, no one has been charged with any crime. 12 When the rich and powerful are accused of crimes their punishment is considerably less than that of the working class person who has committed a crime, and the consequences to their lives considerably less. www.guardian.co.uk/ politics/2011/nov/04/jailed-peers-expense-lords-return 13 And it is not just the creative professions; a recent study by the Sutton Trust revealed that a privately educated elite were hugely over represented in all professions. www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/leading-people-2016/ 14 Other strategies, as Dave Hill has pointed out, include incorporating, deriding, and devaluing. 15 It is interesting to note here that John Ruskin College, the Oxford University college associated with the education of working class students, is in the process of dismantling its labor undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and making all the staff who teach on them redundant. 16 A ‘Public acceptability test’ was introduced inn 2009 following press negativity in relation to a comedy course being run in a high security prison. This test requires any activity that occurs in the prison, which involves prisoners, must be sufficiently punitive in order to avoid negative criticism from the public. 17 There is an attempt by Foucault to illustrate this point in his discussion of films dealing with the subject of the French resistance in which he argued the films were attempting to impose on people a framework from which to interpret the present so people were shown not what they were but what they must remember being. 18 This claim is based on a report produced in 2010 by the UN Conference on Trade and Development which stated that there had been a doubling of poor countries and a two-fold increase on the number of people living in extreme poverty. (France-Presse Agence 2010) 19 For a further discussion of the post-structuralist rejection of experience see Sanbonmatsu (2004:112–113).

3 Working-Class Subjectivity and Representation

Does it require intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word mans consciousness, changes with every change in the condition of his material existence, in his own social relations and in his social life. What else does the history of ideas prove, than that the intellectual production changes it character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class.

(Marx and Engels 1967:102) I concluded the previous chapter with the suggestion that initiating a shift in working-class subjectivity can trigger the potential to bring about the conditions necessary to challenge the social relations of capitalism. This challenge can then begin the process that will eventually transform them. In the pursuit of this aim, an engagement with the methodological and theoretical systems currently in circulation in relation to the concept of subjectivity is crucial, the better to understand the ways in which they are constituted within the ideological framework of the capitalist order (Meszaros 2010:13). This chapter will attempt to conceive of the ways in which the constitution of these methodological and theoretical systems constructs not a collective workingclass subject aware of its potential power to demand changes leading to a transformation of society, but an individualized subject impoverished by the lack of a theoretical understanding of its place within the totality of capitalism. The chapter will also consider the part played by pedagogical practices (both radical and mainstream) in the construction of subjectivities. It will go on to explore some examples of films that, while they appear to be realistic portrayals of the working class and working-class communities, in fact contribute to the construction of those people and communities in ways that reinforce other negative representations currently in circulation. Following on from this, the chapter will conclude by considering the connection between subjectivity and representation. As a means to underpin and reinforce the theoretical aspects of this chapter, the discussion will reference the pedagogical practices of Inside Film and will consider the films produced by the students who take part in the course.

48  Working-Class Subjectivity

Subjectivity and the Working Class As I hope has become clear from the first chapter, subjectivity cannot be separated from the conditions under which it comes into being or the material ways in which it manifests itself. Our sense of self develops through personal and institutional social interactions, interactions directly influenced by historically determinate class positions. Therefore, it appears illogical not to acknowledge that working-class people will develop subjectivities that differ in many ways from those from more privileged classes. Marx has made clear that this applies to both the way in which we think and the way in which we act and the attitudes we have; this holds true even in relation to biological drives, as Marx’s visceral example illuminates Hunger is hunger; but the hunger that is gratified by cooked meat eaten with a fork and knife is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production then produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively and subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer. (Marx 1973:92) It is critical that attempts such as the Inside Film project (and any other counterhegemonic project)—whose aim is to expose the ways in which working-class people and the culture of the working class are represented negatively in order to justify the brutal treatment they receive at the hands of the state—must consider how capitalism universalizes the historically and socially determined structures of society. It can only achieve this aim by taking into account the process of acclimatization to these structures and the part this process of acclimatization plays in the construction of subjectivity. The prominent ideological institutions of capitalism, family, academia, education, religion, and the media, shape and mediate representations relentlessly naturalizing and reinforcing the attitudes and values of the materially and culturally privileged. The range and force of these representations often results in an internal disjuncture in working-class subjectivity opposed as they are to the objective reality of working-class lives. The relationship between the social and the subjective, that is between the forces and the relations of production, is for working-class people often an incoherent one. Many of the Inside Film students struggle to make sense of the discrepancy between the way in which society treats them and the demands society makes upon them and the impossibility of meeting those demands. This circular formulation produces a state of ongoing conflict exacerbated by the lack of an explanatory framework that might offer ways of understanding the cycle of deprivation, crime, and imprisonment in which they are trapped. As Lichtman points out, in relation to institutions, the most important work they carry out consists of

Working-Class Subjectivity  49 Channeling human action in accordance with previously constituted relations of power and meaning. Every significant institution serves the same structure of power- the domination of the productive process by the class with predominant control over its property and forms of accumulation. . . . The conduit of social structure is the institution, which articulates individual existence through a system of variegated roles. (1982:27) Bearing this in mind we have no choice but to engage critically with institutions such as the law, the education system, the dominant media outlets, prison, and the ideological precepts they propagate. Not simply because it is then possible to demonstrate a ‘historical temporality’ essential to undermining bourgeois claims of the timeless, natural and universal but because a critical engagement is the first step in comprehending class, in the Marxist sense, as a relationship between our life experiences and the material world that shapes those experiences. Externally this relationship is a mutually dependent one between those who have only their labor to sell (even if they are not actively selling it, the relationship still holds) and the owners of the means of production; without the existence of this relationship and the surplus it generates in the form of profit, capitalism would cease to exist. Therefore, as I have just pointed out, subjectivity, or our sense of who we are and where we belong, is, in a capitalist society, determined by classed responses to our experience of that society. For the working class this means as Charlesworth puts it ‘knowing the world through a medium and in a manner that emerges from conditions of deprivation and symbolic impoverishment . . . ’(2000:6). The social relations through which we are formed and through which our understanding of the world takes shape are the social relations necessary to the reproduction and continuation of capitalism. This of course is not the end the matter; if it were, the charges of determinism often leveled against Marx would hold true. Tensions and contradictions between the life experiences of social actors and the precepts of capitalism have a destabilizing effect on conceptual appraisals of the self and the environment in which the self exists. This can bring to the fore antagonisms, which potentially result in the search for alternative appraisals. Any change (transformation) in subjectivity demands ‘knowing’ the world differently, but this ‘difference’ requires action upon the external world thereby transforming the environment in which our sense of self was conceived. According to Marx, it is only by acting in the world that we can begin to change it and, through this action, change ourselves, ‘by thus acting on the external world and changing it; man [sic] at the same time changes his own nature’ (1954:173). This is the central, most significant aspect of Marx’s notion of praxis; engaging actively with objective reality results in the transformation of subjectivity. Praxis in the sense meant by Marx involves critical knowledge that can be

50  Working-Class Subjectivity tried, tested, and applied to practical activity, and it is the unity of thought and action or theory and practice that creates the conditions for change. One, without the other, is meaningless. Theoretical comprehension of the necessity of exploitation under capitalism and, consequently the necessity of radical rupture to destroy such dehumanization—absolutely essential conditions for successful revolution—gives way to lived conviction in the practice of gradually acquiring social power. (Lichtman 1980:270) To act upon the world in order to bring about effective change requires comprehension of the need to act upon the world and a consideration of the most effective strategies to bring about that change. Marx does not dictate a universal model for his notion of praxis. On the contrary, his insistence on a unification of theory and practice acknowledges the historically dynamic process of change. Within this notion of praxis is a dialectical conception of the relationship not only between theory and practice but also between society and the individual that allows for a simultaneous looking-forward while looking backward. Buck Morris argues (in relation to Benjamin) that: A construction of history that looks backward rather than forward at the destruction that has taken place, provides a dialectical contrast to the futurist myth of historical progress (which can only be sustained by forgetting what has happened). (Buck Morss 1991:95) Here I would like to look at one of the Inside Film student films Who Am I? which demonstrates some of the issues I have raised in this discussion so far. Using the documentary form the film is constructed around a series of questions in relation to identity that include not only class, but gender, race, and religion. The film critically engages with the concept of identity from three different perspectives: the subjective, the national, and the global. It poses a series of questions that attempt to link the actions of marginalized individuals with collective actions carried out by the rich and powerful—making connections between the struggle to survive on the streets of England and the invasion of Iraq. It does this within the context of consumer capitalism, drawing attention to the ways in which advertising and celebrity distract us from the criminal activities of politicians and world leaders, while at the same time constructing the action of the marginalized and those in need as criminal. It uses direct address with questions being asked straight to camera, leaving the spectator in no doubt that the issues the film deals with affect all of us. Formally, the film is structured in a non-linear way presenting a series of dramatized vignettes mixed with montages of found material utilizing both still and moving images drawn from print and television news.

Working-Class Subjectivity  51 The group who made this film had never made a film before; indeed, the majority of the students had never picked up a film camera before. Their knowledge of film was limited to the dominant film product that is readily and easily available and has a near monopoly on various media platforms. Their ideas about the kind of film that they wanted to make were influenced by a workshop on Third Cinema run by one of the project volunteers, a university academic. Third Cinema is a low budget, politically motivated cinema that has its origins in the anti-colonial struggles that took place across South America and Africa during the 1960s and 1970s (I discuss this mode of film practice in more detail in Chapter 4). It was clear to the students almost immediately that their anger and frustration could find an effective channel in this often formally unconventional and politically stringent film practice. A limited budget, time restraints, and the fact we were confined to one room meant that the range of complex subjects they wished to engage with—war, crime, violence, consumerism, celebrity, drug dealing, nationalism—was not suited to the conventional continuity editing strategies of dominant cinema practice but would find a more suitable outlet in the radical strategies of Third Cinema with its celebration of an ‘Imperfect Cinema’ (Espinosa 1979:24–26). Choosing this mode of filmmaking liberated the group to think about film less in terms of the dominant filmmaking strategies of continuity editing, symmetrical composition, and spatial and temporal logic and more in terms of analysis and engagement. Filmmaking in this formulation is less interested in technical and formal proficiency and is more concerned with critically committed political and social interventions that hold out the ‘possibility for everyone to make films’ (Espinosa 1979:24). Who Am I? attempts to explore the complex interactions between the media, politics, economics, and crime, the way in which their established discourses are integrated and the role they play in contributing to a sense of identity. Implicit within the films exploration of the complexities at play in the formation of identity is that the various positions offered to us to from which we can construct a sense of self and build allegiances are nothing more than methods for displacing the question of class. The working class is inseparable from capitalism; indeed, the very existence of capitalism is dependent upon it, but the alienation of the working class due to the miserable conditions in which they often suffer creates a position for them that is distinct from the more privileged members of society (Charlesworth 2000:74). This is not merely a local phenomenon but a global one. (O’Neill, D 2017:279/80) The socially determined position occupied by the global working class results in a subjectivity formed out of a habitus of degradation, unemployment, poverty, want, and of the experience of exclusion. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is one that allows some purchase on the generationally reproduced cycle of deprivation and poverty. The spatial, social, and economic environment into which we are born means we inherit our relationship to the world.

52  Working-Class Subjectivity The relationship to the social world is not the mechanical causality between a ‘milieu’ and a consciousness . . . when the same history inhabits both habitus and habitat, both dispositions and position, history in a sense communicates with itself, is reflected in its own image. History as ‘subject’ discovers itself in history as ‘object . . . in which a body, appropriated by history, absolutely and immediately appropriates things inhabited by the same history. (Bourdieu 1981:306) We are born into a class position that we feel we don’t have the power to change, not least because we often do not attempt to change it considering it to be natural. This acceptance of ‘the way things are’ has become more pronounced during the last 35 years as the collective historical knowledge, anchored in the ideological and political resistance of the working class, has been buried or dismissed by a generic neoliberal pragmatism. This is why, as Balibar has pointed out, ‘it is important to have at our disposal instruments of analysis which are not neutral but comparative’ (Balibar 2002:62). Film is uniquely positioned to function as one of these ‘instruments of analysis’; films are visual records of the past and documents of the present and, as such, can be a vehicle for comparing both. Films can reveal the lives of the poor, which can be analytically compared to the lives of the rich. Radical pedagogic practices can also be utilized comparatively by refusing neutrality as Balibar demands: a refusal of neutrality can expose the differences between a state sanctioned education and one with a participatory, liberatory potential (Friere, P: 1970; hooks 1994). The working class inhabits specific ways of being and develops specific modes of knowledge, but the universalizing strategies of the neoliberal environment construct these differences as aberrations. Who Am I?, a film informed by a sophisticated analysis of politics, class, and filmmaking from the perspective of a group of imprisoned working-class men articulates the resulting feelings of alienation, anger, frustration, and sense of not belonging within the society in which life is lived. And yet when I screened the film quite recently at a conference of self-defined ‘radical’ filmmakers, the feedback I received was that the discussion of class was too challenging, and the report on the conference chose not to mention the film. In contrast to Bourdieu theorists such as Laclau do not consider class as an aprioristic identity; on the contrary, he considers contemporary society to offer a proliferation of subject positions all of which contribute to the diluting of the antagonisms of workers and militates against classed identity and working-class hegemony (2005:86/87). According to Laclau, structural changes that have taken place in the capitalist system have resulted in working-class subjectivity no longer being linked to working-class identity. In fact, working-class identity is no longer the primary marker of identity. To reinforce his argument he claims that there has been a ‘drastic fall in the working class . . . both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of

Working-Class Subjectivity  53 structural organization . . . and the emergence of a social stratification quite different from that on which Marxist class analysis was based’ (Laclau 2000:230–232). It is not difficult to see how this example of academic theorizing reinforces a ‘retreat from class’ as an analytical framework through which to make sense of the world. It is true to say that there has been a restructuring of capitalist working practices over the last generation, and working-class industries in this country have been destroyed while working-class organizations such as trade unions have become weakened and demoralized. At the same time the people themselves have found it harder to organize as unemployment, zero-hour contracts, economic insecurity, and falling wages have put enormous pressures on the struggle simply to survive. At the same time the left-wing groups that previously offered the possibility of building a unified working-class movement have been marginalized (Callinicos 2006:138) or dismissed as ‘hard left.’ The liberal left abandoned the working class to the ravages of the capitalist system that they have chosen to embrace in return for material rewards and symbolic status. And while there has been some agreement with Laclau’s theorization of the changes in capitalism since Marx’s time, attention has also been drawn to the problems in his conclusion that this would necessarily lead to a weakening of classed subjectivity. On the contrary, as some theorists have argued, it would perhaps be more apposite to conclude that it has strengthened class allegiances (Thoburn, 2007:57). It has also been pointed out that Laclau does not take into account Marx’s claim that it is the position of the worker in relation to the forces of production that defines class position (Callinicos 2006:144). The globalization of capital has highlighted not the differences but the similarities in the national and global working class, and it is possible to imagine that this awareness of their positioning within the mode of production will result in a class that develops a subjectivity with the potential to create a movement intent on overthrowing capitalism. Therefore, class is not just one subject position among many other subject positions but is the definitive subject position. Laclau’s reduction of working-class subjectivity to numbers and changing structures fails to consider the ways in which consciousness is formed and shaped through the daily experience of poverty, unemployment, and marginalization. It is crucial to understand that what may have declined is class-consciousness, but not consciousness shaped by class; it is this paradox that the educational strategies of Inside Film attempts to bring into focus. The students who made Who Am I? produced a film that posed not just the question of who we are but who do we want to be. This is highlighted by a short sequence of a man sitting in front of a computer screen typing. He is dressed in a shirt and tie and is obviously an officer worker. He swivels around in his chair and, staring directly at the screen, asks ‘am I what you see?’ As the chair straightens in front of the camera, the man’s shirt is replaced by a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘anti-capitalista.’ At

54  Working-Class Subjectivity this point he says, ‘or am I what I want to be?’ The filmmakers do not offer any answers but appear to be suggesting that under certain circumstances we have choices, and those choices include denying who you are in order to live a life of quiet desperation, working in an office and conforming to the demands of a capitalist society or of making choices that could be considered revolutionary. This is underlined by the choice of the red T-shirt and the Spanish translation of ‘anti-capitalist’ connoting as it does the revolutionary potential of Latin America and, of course, the origins of Third Cinema. The debates that accompanied the making of the film, the struggle to make positions clear and to justify the raising of these questions, mean, the students, both as individuals and as group members are involved in the process and are being called upon to examine their own position in society and how that position relates to not only other members of their own group but to other people who would see the film. One of the most interesting aspects of the process of making this film was how much their experiences, not only of being in prison but of their lives before prison coincided, and how the conditions that had shaped them were recognized by other members of the group. The film and experience of making the film provides evidence of a working-class consciousness but at the same time demonstrates the necessity of a process of radical education, democratic participation, and critical engagement required to initiate an awareness of that consciousness. For both Marx (1970:118, 121, 123) and Lukacs (1971:262) it is only through the development of critical cognitive powers that a radical subjectivity that is able to perceive capitalism as a historically specific set of relations will begin to emerge. The barrier to the perception of this unity is the reification that takes place under capitalism. Reification refers to the social relations of capitalism, and the way in which the private monopoly of wealth, both social and economic, is naturalized to appear as an attribute of things rather than as historically shaped social and political relationships. We need to reintroduce the concept of grand narratives, and to insist on the systemic totality of a capitalist system that it at the root of all our problems (Fisher 2009:77). We can then begin to recognize the strategic need to nurture a working-class subjectivity that opposes capitalism not that simply resists it. According to Marx, the modes of production under capitalism encompass not simply an economic model but a concept irrevocably connected to the social and the cultural and to the theoretical concepts that organize and justify them. The capitalist mode of production does not allow for direct relationship between the producer and the means of production. Rather the worker, divorced from a direct relationship between production and existence, must sell their labor to the capitalist who pays them to produce whatever commodity is required. Any surplus value that is produced is appropriated by the capitalist as profit. The selling of labor in the market place for financial remuneration is the mediating factor between production and existence. Therefore the workers’ lives and the choices they make are

Working-Class Subjectivity  55 mediated by capital (Burton 1997:175). The mode of production prevalent in a given society produces both the objective means of existence but at the same time it produces the social conditions of that existence. Therefore the mode of production is ‘a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As Individuals express their life, so they are. The nature of individuals’ that is their subjectivity, ‘depends on the material conditions determining their production’ (Marx and Engels 1970:42). Consequently, from a Marxist perspective, the capitalist mode of production is integral to the construction of subjectivities, which inevitably leads us to ask about the nature of that subjectivity. This presents us with a problem; subjectivities formed under capitalism are distorted by the experience of capitalism—Wayne refers to them as ‘crippled’ (2003:185). What then does this mean for our radical practice? One of the most important aspects of the Inside Film project involves separating what it means to be working class from the crippling distortion of middleclass norms, that is, clarifying the specificity of working-class experience and the mode of living of the working class, as Lebowitz has argued in relation to the working class Given the differences in the specific conditions of their individual production (as well as the separation that capital itself produces), there is a definite material basis for seeing themselves as separate. (Lebowitz 2003:179) This movement towards a subjective mode of knowledge that can exist alongside the internalization of the logic of capitalism allows for both an objective knowledge of capitalist totality but also a subjective knowledge of how we are situated within that totality. This subjective knowledge provides insight into how that totality affects us as individuals belonging to a particular class at a specific historical moment, and involves a complex negotiation of both the particular and the general developed through praxis. This matrix of knowledge for the Inside Film students comes into being through the optic of filmmaking. Making films encompasses a total, collective experience. Tasks are not divided into specialized, and hierarchal units; rather the students work on each aspect of the filmmaking process sharing and swapping roles. Film studies as an academic subject has traditionally considered the film director as an auteur—that is, rather than see the making of a film as a collective endeavor, it is viewed as the creation of a single artist whose thematic and aesthetic world view it is possible to identify both within single films and throughout a whole ‘oeuvre’ or body of work. This conception of film as the creation of one exceptionally talented individual reproduces and encodes class relations in a way that renders them oblique and unquestioned. The concept of the auteur is, I would argue, evidence of the way in which the ideological tropes of capitalism in relation to the individual become embodied within cultural work. The Inside Film project

56  Working-Class Subjectivity rejects the notion of the film as the work of the individual genius and insists on the collective nature of filmmaking—one that fosters collaboration not competition. Mike Wayne has posited the notion of a ‘subjectless subject’ to describe the way in which the agency of all human actors is powered by the internalization of the social and economic relations of capitalism. Agency in this model is not agency at all but is rather the acting out of the logic of capitalism which has ‘emptied them [people] of authentic autonomy, power and free will . . .’ (Wayne 2003:184). This internalization often has the effect of reconciling the contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism mentioned before so that they are conceived of as individual failings with the result being that many people strive to reconcile themselves to the demands of the status quo. It is only when they are externalized and viewed as systemic problems that these contradictions and antagonisms can begin to play a dynamic role in the construction of a radical subjectivity with the potential to disrupt the hegemonic order. This process demands something other than agency. Although agency (action) is a prerequisite of change it is not of itself sufficient; meaningful change will only come about if agency is linked to critical understanding, and of course the equation works in the opposite direction: too critical understanding will not be about change if it is not linked to agency. Studying the components of the media in general and film in particular presents us with the potential to investigate how recurring visual representations condense in determinant ways many of the attitudes to, and anxieties around, the working class into an instantly recognizable iconography. Lack of different perspectives, knowledge, and experience means that the continually repeated representations, with few alternatives, offer a potential ‘truth, ’ often the only possible interpretation to which the middle class have access (Skeggs 2004:113). The image of prisoners in particular, and of the working class in general, that is held and propagated by the mainstream media is a fixed image that circulates in other discourses with little or no understanding of working-class life or of the damage caused by poverty, broken homes, institutionalized child care, violence, bad housing, lack of education, and the alcohol and drug abuse that proliferate as a way of dealing with the struggle to survive. The behavioral responses to these deprivations are decontextualized and pathologized by the middle-class expert, and become in the process a ‘moral’ problem of working-class culture which can be addressed institutionally by imposing middle-class solutions. These ‘solutions’ are doomed to failure because they fail to grasp the reality of working-class lives as they are lived within the relations of capitalism. One of the films made by a group of Inside Film students serving prison sentences is Change. This film illuminates these points. Although a fictionalized account, the narrative draws upon the authentic experiences of the group of prisoners who chose to make this film, and who were all taking part in an addiction rehabilitation program in the prison at the same time

Working-Class Subjectivity  57 as the project was running there. The film explores questions of crime but does this alongside an engagement with the problems associated with drug and alcohol addiction. In doing this, the film contextualizes and seeks to understand why certain crimes are committed. The subject matter of the film, to a certain degree, replicates what we can, without fear of contradiction, consider to be the stereotypes associated with the working classes, particularly working-class men, that is, crime, violence, prison, and alcohol and drug addiction. Utilizing a more predictable narrative trajectory than the film discussed previously, the story structure follows a linear cause-and-effect sequence of events using conventional continuity editing strategies and camera placement. It tells the story of a man who has been sentenced to prison for murder. While making no attempt to excuse or justify the crime or to suggest that there is not a price to pay for such an act, the film does however situate the crime within the context of addictive behavior and personal revenge in a society where the working class (with good reason) does not trust the police or the courts to protect them. Crucially it places the protagonist within a network of personal and institutional relationships and investigates how they affect his struggle to come to terms with what he has done. The film works to undermine the representation of crime as something that happens in isolation, unconnected to the environment and relationships of the person who has committed that crime. The casual acceptance of the crime by the protagonist, his family, and his friends and the defiance shown towards the judge in the law courts suggest that crime and punishment is, for many working-class people, not something particularly out of the ordinary. Rather it is, the film appears to suggest, a logical response to the conditions under which the working class live. The narrative traces the journey of the prisoner as he come to terms with his crime and the effect it has had on those who care about him. His determination to address his offending behavior results in his participation in a drug rehabilitation program in order to deal with his addiction. The film insists on the mutual support that the prisoners provide for one another and demonstrates how that support is built on the mutual understanding that comes with recognition and awareness of shared experiences. The content of the film is based, as I have already mentioned, on the lived experiences of the people who wrote, filmed, and acted in the production. This particular group of students were concerned that their literacy skills were not of a ‘high enough standard’ and that they would not be able to construct a narrative that they would be able to film. Initially the idea of producing a written script was rather daunting for them, but the knowledge that their own lives and their own stories could generate dramatic material not dependent on any previously acquired academic skills provided a way for them to negotiate their lack of formal literacy skills. Inside Film never assumes that the student taking part in the project can read or write. Many of the Inside Film students have not engaged with formal schooling and

58  Working-Class Subjectivity demonstrate a lack of interest in reading and writing; some of them feel intimidated by the written word and its association with the institution of school (Enzensberger1982:7 Charlesworth 2000:138). This is why we do not have reading lists or set homework. We do provide handouts but we do not insist that people read them; any student who does read them and who wants to raise questions or engage more deeply we accommodate, but it is always made clear that there is no pressure to read them and that participation in the course will not be affected if they remain unread. The Change group were able to produce a script with the help of one of the Inside Film volunteers who acted as a scribe, writing down what the students dictated to her and typing up the script at home to bring into the prison. This worked really well; the students were really pleased with the finished film and were never made to feel in any way inadequate because their writing skills were not up to the ‘standard’ of someone who had received a formal education. The mise-en-scène of Change provides a recognizable scenario of prison, prisoners, and therapy group, that on a practical level was an efficient utilization of space and people in a low-budget production. Significantly, the emotional content particularly in the final scene of the film contradicts the dominant cultural ‘knowledge’ associated with these visual representations of prisons and prisoners. There is no violence or inarticulacy here; instead we have a group of men caring and providing support for each other. What the film exposes is the way in which ideas around working-class men are based on the unquestioning acceptance of a hierarchal and elitist classism and fear of working-class masculinity.

Subjectivity and the Media The relationship between the visual construction of class and the media is a historically contingent one. This contingency is apparent in the way in which the working class has been reinterpreted as a threat or as a burden— often as both—over the last 35 years of neoliberal ideological onslaught (Charlesworth 2000; Skeggs 2004). This is in direct contrast to the comparable construction of working-class people and the communities in which they lived and worked as the backbone of the country in the post-war years. This was a particular historical moment when there were economic and social reasons for the shared goals of building a welfare state that depended on the physical labor of the working class, particularly working-class men, miners, steelworkers, laborers, etc. and when a benevolent Keynesian capitalism constructed a shared sense of cohesiveness that interacted with these goals. Positive visual representations of a strong, economically necessary working class (male) anchored in industry, community and landscape changes begin to degrade during the miner’s strike of 1984–1985 (see also Fisher 2009:7). As the Thatcher years saw the decimation of one workingclass industry after another so the pictures of the beaten and bloodied miners on the television screens indicated a shift in the way working-class men

Working-Class Subjectivity  59 were to be viewed, they were now increasingly represented as feckless and work-shy and most significantly as the enemy. It was a significant moment when, during the miners’ strike, Margaret Thatcher referred to the striking miners as ‘the enemy within.’ Comparatively speaking, these two opposing representations exemplify the historical specificity of the relationship between the working class and the economic and productive needs of capital, while at the same time revealing the role the media plays in constructing this relationship. A close analysis reveals how the contemporary configuration has resulted in a shift from shared national concerns and the importance placed on nation building after the Second World War to the ways in which the neoliberal global reach of capital has restructured that configuration resulting in questions about the relationship between the (global) working class and their place within the transnational neoliberal hegemony. Visual representational strategies play a crucial role in providing (decontextualized) justifications for the economic organization of neoliberalism while at the same time constructing the exclusion and brutal treatment of the working class in moral terms (Skeggs 2004:114). ‘Flexible’ casualized labor markets translate in reality into short-term and zero-hour contracts, part-time, casual, and insecure low-paid employment, contributing to a huge increase in subcontracted work that is done for global corporations and the privatized utility companies which were once in public hands. At the same time economic markets have been deregulated in order for capital to continue making huge profits (Callinicos 2006; Harvey 2005:3). The last 35 years have seen the composition of the post-WWII consensus based on the concept of social security for all and on the provision of a (limited) universal state support destroyed. It has been replaced by a brutal authoritarian political and economic model focused relentlessly on the pursuit of the profit margin, while what was once considered to be the potential of the welfare state to provide for all citizens has been reconfigured into a business opportunity for corporations. Representations concerned with justifying the rolling back of welfare provision, exacerbating difference, and with monstering the poor are disseminated by a dominant media system linked in multivariate ways to the interests of capital. That is why it is crucial to understand that any analysis of class must consider the question of representation and the ways in which the visual is linked to the economic particularly in reference to the ongoing gentrification of the media (O’Neill and Wayne 2013) and how the working class has been deprived of the right to speak. The success of the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state has been dependent on, as David Harvey points out, (2005:5) an appeal to a ‘conceptual apparatus’ that relates to the perspective through which the world is viewed; the ontological genius of those who have constructed an acceptance of the neoliberal agenda was and continues to be an association of state intervention, including the provision of a universal welfare state, with barriers to modernity, totalitarianism, and lack of freedom. As Lockwood

60  Working-Class Subjectivity (1958:209) and Benson (1978:121) have argued, the dominant values of capitalist society are those of the professional middle classes, whose allegiance lies with the propertied classes. The lie of middle-class meritocratic egalitarianism takes for granted and normalizes structured inequalities as a way of achieving individual mobility and, as such, serves only to reinforce the existing state of affairs. The middle classes continually justify Marx’s prediction of their role, that of bolstering ‘the social security and power of the upper 10 thousand’ (Marx quoted in Nicolaus 1967:247) which has allowed for either the dismissal of the very notion of a working class or their construction as work-shy, benefit scroungers, who are culturally backward and for whom the problems of unemployment and lack of financial security is the fault not of ‘the system’ but a fault of a culture of dependency fostered by the welfare state (Skeggs 2004). The contemporary working-class poor are classified across a range of media, political, and academic sites as ‘socially excluded, ’ ‘welfare dependent, ’ and more pejoratively as ‘underclass, ’ ‘lowlife, ’ ‘losers, ’ and ‘yobs.’ The different terms in use demonstrate a strategic refusal ‘to employ a collective way of naming the heterogeneous groups they refer to: the long-term unemployed, unmarried mothers, singleparent families, truants, petty criminals, and council estate residents in bulk’ (Haylett 2001:352). That is the working class. The contemporary refusal to engage with the politics of class and the obliteration of working-class perspectives anchored in working-class experience enables the misrepresentation of the particular and the historically specific as universal and eternal. More than this, it is part of a process by which working-class subjectivities are unraveled and the casualties of neoliberalism, in a perfect example of ideological masking, blame themselves for the problems of a deregulated economic system. The uniqueness of capitalist exploitation lies nether in the fact that individuals are dominated by the interests of the ruling class-this condition is historically common, nor is it the fact that the oppressed are deputized as their own oppressors—for this is also commonplace. Capitalism is unique in promoting the illusion of equality between oppressor and oppressed, a conviction that is the cornerstone of its cultural hegemony. (Lichtman 1982:271) Of course, it is not only the working class who are misrepresented in the dominant ideological discourse; the vested interests of those in the privileged classes are also misrepresented (in their favor) in the way in which these class interests are presented as universal and eternal, linked to the natural order of things and to the moral imperatives of the law (Meszaros 2010:73). The most significant methodological tool of a Marxist approach is the unshakeable premise that there are two classes: those who have ownership of the means of production and wield the power that is a direct result of this

Working-Class Subjectivity  61 ownership, and those who have nothing but their labor to sell in the marketplace. This is linked theoretically to the belief that the class with the power to dominate the forces of production consistently represses and distorts the experiences of those without that power (Lovell 1980:50, 67). The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx 1970:64) The mainstream media industries are generally speaking dominated by the proponents of ‘left’ liberalism and are drawn from a narrow socioeconomic background (Taylor and O’Brien 2017) granting them the power to disseminate their ideas and to air their concerns. This process creates a hegemonic view of the world corresponding to the needs of capital. Its success is dependent on the erasure, negation, or distortion of the experiences of the working class resulting in the ability of those with power to continue to consolidate their position. This consolidation is dependent on an assimilation, elimination, or marginalization of radical challenges to the system and a concentration on reinforcing the ‘norms’ of economic deregulation: hyper-consumerism rather than citizenship, private provision as opposed to the the welfare state, spectatorship and not engagement, individualism versus collective action (Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006:39). The misrecognition involved in the current spectatorial premise—the production of representations of the working class for the middle-class gaze—makes comprehension of the working class almost impossible. This means that it is imperative that we construct ‘ways of seeing’ that provide an understanding of how working-class lives are being destroyed by measures put in place by neoliberalism. If we truly want to bring about change, it is no longer possible to ignore the forms of representation fostered in the dominant institutions of the media, politics, and education or to believe that they do not have far-reaching and brutally harmful consequences. It is these forms

62  Working-Class Subjectivity of representation that justify the present system. Capitalism is not a purely economic system; it generates social, cultural, and political effects that have dire consequences. That is why the Inside Film project is so crucially important. If working-class people do not have access to the means of production and circuits of distribution necessary for representing and disseminating the truth of their lives, how are people going to learn about them? What I am attempting to do here is to map out the relationship between the communication industries, the denial of working-class experience, and the ways in which the machineries of capitalist society generate beliefs that are ‘real’ only in the sense that they provide the rationale for the present system of economic distribution and continuing inequalities. This draws us again to Bhaskar’s distinction between the real and the actual; what the surface reality of capitalism conceals is the misrepresentation of the true relation of capitalist wealth creation and economic distribution. The misrepresentation of the true nature of capitalism results in the misrepresentation of capitalist society as a whole. The question then is how do we begin to challenge a real that is nothing of the sort—according to Fisher (2012:6) ‘Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort’. A utilization of film as a radical pedagogic tool is committed to exposing the unreality of the capitalist real and how its continued existence is dependent on the elimination of a working-class consciousness that identifies as such. Inside Film considers films within the temporal, historical conjuncture in which they are produced and analyzes them, not selectively or exclusively as film texts, but as cultural conduits that encompass, in relation to politics, economics and culture, the terrain on which we can map the struggles of the working class. The task then becomes to link together the ‘discourses’ that capitalism separates and which make it difficult to ‘recognize the wholeness of the experience of being working class’ (Willis and Corrigan 1983:98). It is only when these different areas of life are synthesized dialectically in relation to the whole, that the role they play in contributing to the structurally determined social consciousness of the working class and the partisan limits of the politically determined capitalist real can be understood. We can then begin to understand working class subjectivity from the standpoint of the working class and not from those who ‘overwhelmingly promote(s) the views and interests of established power’ (Edwards and Cromwell 2006:179). All of the above points to the urgent need for a radical education adequate to fostering a subjectivity able to engage with and bring to the fore the realities of working-class experience that is consistently obscured by the current mode of production. The problem here is that many of these experiences are systematically denied, and exist externally to the accepted norms of bourgeois society. The challenge then becomes one of making working-class experience visible in ways that foster, not necessarily an understanding of

Working-Class Subjectivity  63 working-class life, something difficult for those who have not experienced that life, but at least a means of interpreting it. This can only be achieved when the working class produce their own representations, drawing on their own experiences and building upon the contradictions and instabilities inherent in a class society that attempts to deny the historical and contemporary specificity of class. This is not to claim that film (or any art form) can of itself change the ways in which a given society is ordered but it can in no small measure actively contribute to creating the conditions to bring about change (Eagleton 1976:10). My insistence on viewing working-class subjectivity as distinct from the dominant middle-class perspective within society is, to a greater or lesser degree, dependent on positing the working class as an ontological category. It is crucially important if we are to talk of the working classes being represented in a way that is congruent to their life experiences to have a concept of what we mean by working class, that is, an ontological basis from which to start. This depends upon developing an ontology; otherwise these phenomena remain phenomena of the ‘surface’ of social life, when they need to be situated as being at the core of social life (Charlesworth 2000:28). The link between an ontological notion of the working class and a radical approach to visions of a better society is dependent on recognizing that the working class has effectively been exiled from their own culture and now serves only the global purpose of providing the labor needed in order to keep profit rates up. Communities with historical and geographical ties have been displaced; cultural associations have been dispersed and, in their place, there is a destabilization of the old conceptual certainties that supported working-class life. Historically situated individuals are no longer in a position to share experiences that are directly related to their relationship to the forces of production or to formulate goals that are firmly grounded in the category working class. The distinction between ‘groups’ of working class people is the key strategy of the hegemonic discourse of the underclass whose purpose it is to divide the working class between the deserving and the underserving poor, the married and single parent, male and female, young and old, black and white. Therefore, the necessary consideration of the working class as an ontological category in this context is a political refusal of the use of superficial differences as a means of division. With this in mind, the Inside Film project attempts to return to the fundamental ideas of shared class interests and consciousness that, while recognizing the diversity of class in relation to race, gender, and sexuality and the potential for these groups to be doubly oppressed, considers class to be the strongest determinant of life chances. Therefore, the work done by Inside Film is premised on the working class as an identifiable category, claiming their experience of oppression, hardship, and exclusion construct subjectivities that result in them having more in common with other members of the working class than with any other classes. Engels made the same point when he declared

64  Working-Class Subjectivity The working class has gradually become a race wholly apart . . . the bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation on earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. (Engels 2005:150) The personal experiences depicted in the films made by the Inside Film students, informed as they are by lives of deprivation, violence, and oppression, do not suggest experience is a category that allows some kind of unmediated access to working-class life but rather that it is a system of knowledge which can expose the inadequacies of the current ways of knowing the working class. It is, of course, important to recognize that individuals are gendered and raced and that gender and race play a significant role in constituting the life chances of individuals. But gender and race are not the defining, and more crucially, limiting grouping that class is. The homogenization of the working class is not to suggest an undifferentiated mass; rather it is to concentrate on the limitations shared by those who exist within the parameters defined by being working class. From birth onwards, the construction of a subjectivity based on experience of rejection, derision, and the devaluing of a whole culture results in relationships with other people, with politics, and with the media that is different from those whose experiences confer a social capital which legitimizes one’s way of life and bestows a cultural capital that guarantees success (Charlesworth 2000:94). As we have already seen, it is the underlying forces in society that structure our relationships and determine our life chances, and the way in which these forces are constructed means it is not immediately apparent what form they take. It is the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers . . . in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice. (Marx 1981:927 author emphasis) Due to the curtailed depoliticized and inadequate nature of the education provided for the working class (Ball 2008:173) and the consequent lack of the right kind of cultural capital, it is very difficult for the working-class person to access the sites of decision-making power and to influence producing spheres such as politics and the media. Their class status effectively acts as a barrier excluding them from these arenas and, of course, if they do gain access, it is through cultural intermediaries such as the university. The university, an institution Benjamin referred to as a ‘bastion of protectionism’ encourages not only specific ways of seeing but also modes of existence that are not conducive to the liberation of the working class contributing as they do to the naturalization of the already existing hegemony of capitalism.

Working-Class Subjectivity  65 Additionally, the increasing difficulty of working-class people to access the university sector results in an isolated and weak base of working-class intellectuals who remain involved with the class from which they originated (James and Berg 1996:3). Working-class people who do succeed academically often take on the values and attitudes of the class they have arrived in and not of the class they have distanced themselves from in relation to educational achievement. Those who steadfastly cling to their working class identity are often told they no longer have a right to that identity (Munt 2000:9). The majority of those who go to university are selected from a group of people whose experiences up to that moment have prepared them for just such an event. The university will reinforce the predispositions and habits of perception that have been developed since birth through the experience of privilege. The reward for them (at least for those who attend prestigious universities) is access to power and influence, that is, to decisionmaking positions; this alignment to particular thought patterns and ways of being is very rarely questioned, even though the influence they wield affects the lives of many. Many graduate to become professional producers of the influential schemas of thought and within an unquestioned acceptance of the contemporary social and political environment: politicians, journalists, high-ranking civil servants, all of whom produce or contribute to a political culture predicated on the exclusion of the working class from the public sphere. The result is that the dominated are condemned to occupy a position that renders them passive consumers of political frameworks, policy decisions, and cultural products that are constituted for them elsewhere and in which they play no part (Charlesworth 1999:13). The partial representations of the reality of working-class life is apparent in the dismissive terms utilized to describe certain sectors of the working class within the mainstream media in phrases that have become part of the dominant discourse. Behind such contemptuous expressions as ‘hoodie, ’ ‘feral youth, ’ ‘benefit scrounger, ’ and ‘chav’ lies the desire to extinguish the subjectivity of the working class in order to justify the conditions under which they struggle. Representations of the working class in the mainstream media are determined by the definitions assigned to them in dominant institutional discourses, discourses reinforced by academic, scientific, legal, and medical representations of the working classes (Skeggs 2004:88). Unable and unwilling to engage with the reality of working-class lives institutional, political and media discourses applied to the working class articulate a social dynamic that constructs their lives as examples of moral failures and personal deficiencies. What we have consistently found is that, when given access to the means of producing their own representations, the Inside Film students produce work that exposes these one-dimensional and hackneyed versions of their lives produced by the dominant institutional channels of information.

66  Working-Class Subjectivity

Education and Perception If we are able to create new ways of seeing from our assigned position within the social practices of capitalism, what (Castoriadis 2005:47) called the nurturing of ‘new responses to the “same” situations’ or what Williams referred to as ‘oppositional work . . . not primarily designed to found a new position but to undermine an existing one’ (quoted in Mulhern 2001:68), if we can explore how class works as both a basis for lived experience and as an analytical tool to make sense of that experience then we construct an environment in which we will perceive current social practices as untenable and in the process reinscribe them within an oppositional and analytical framework. An understanding of our position within the hierarchies of capitalism can often result in that place becoming destabilized. Contextually it then becomes possible to anticipate the misrecognition of the subjective identity position imposed upon us by our birth into, and our interaction with, the classed structures of capitalism. This dynamic between subordination and liberation for Engels is perfectly clear. It is through knowledge that we are able to come to terms with the huge and complex disparity between our experience of the world and the messages conveyed to us by the dominant ideology: and in coming to terms with them begin to dismantle them Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand them and reckon with them. But once we understand them, where once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends upon only ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends . . . with this recognition at last of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. (Engels 2008:68) This interrogation of the normative conceptions and universalized principles of capitalism is dependent on an education, as Gramsci conceived it, by and for the working class so that it becomes possible to ‘truly understand the full implications of the notion of ‘ruling class’’ (Forgacs 1988:72). This necessity is linked to the dialectical methodology of Marxism that seeks to uncover the totality of relations under capitalism in which ideology is commandeered to sustain and reproduce the existing social order. Ideology in this sense is connected both to the (re)production of ruling class ideas and their (re)presentation through systems of intelligibility such as the education system and the media. For Gramsci as for Bourdieu (Callinicos 2006:82), the disjuncture between the experiences of what he calls the subaltern and the ideological system is one that creates contradictions in their relationship to capitalism. It is awareness of the existence of these contradictions that

Working-Class Subjectivity  67 can initiate the process of viewing the institutions of capitalism and the role they play in the reproduction of the relationships of class. The post-war welfare state consensus oversaw the expansion of postcompulsory education implementing an assumption that merit, and not financial status, would define educational outcomes. Higher education expanded, and, we are led to believe, the grammar system bestowed the possibility of a university education on working-class children who would not previously have had that opportunity. But, it is as well to remember that in the post-war world, capitalism needed a more highly trained workforce able to carry out the necessarily more complex tasks than those of the previous era. This resulted in a few working-class people able to go on to higher education, but overall the expansion of educational opportunities benefited the children of the middle classes (Ball 2008:68–69). While this expansion was a real one, it is important to acknowledge that the cultural attitudes and values transmitted and the people chosen to transmit them remained firmly ensconced within the dominant ideology. The price demanded of working-class children in return for access to higher education and intellectual achievement was a rejection of the culture from which they had come and a willing assimilation into the one to which they had arrived. Therefore, the education of the very small numbers of children from manual workingclass backgrounds offered no fundamental threat to the reproduction of the existing social order. The state provided education system at this specific historical moment offered the opportunity for a few working-class children to enter the professions, which was utilized as proof of a meritocratic society where the virtues of ‘intelligence’ and hard work were rewarded with entry into the middle class. It was this era which witnessed a Conservative Liberal consensus that agreed upon the necessity and implementation of the welfare state, but which has now all but disappeared. Global corporations are increasingly taking over the provision of education, an education that follows an increasingly corporate agenda, one that divorces education from politics, and concentrates on the achievement of exam results, The management of schools and school leadership are now modeled on the social relations, incentive systems and practices of business organizations. Schools are less and less specific institutions but rather are organizations that look and operate like businesses. (Ball 2008:200) Successful assimilation is now dependent upon the ability to adapt to the authoritarianism and standardized market-led subject matter imposed by a corporate culture that frowns upon independent thought (Hill 2006), and this is true for both those being ‘educated’ and for those doing the ‘education.’

68  Working-Class Subjectivity Teachers are now, by and large, trained in skills rather than educated to examine the ‘whys’ and the ‘why nots’ and the contexts of curriculum, pedagogy, educational purposes and structures and the effects these have on reproducing capitalist economy, society and politics. (Hill 2006) Indeed, any failure to conform to the demands of the educational regime now current in our schools is penalized usually through a process of pathologization or criminalization.1 This is due mainly to questions of perspective; the norms that govern behavior and, increasingly, attitudes which are enshrined within the education and prison sectors are, white, patriarchal, middle class, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual. The concept of education and schooling as a public good whose purpose is to produce citizens has now been all but eradicated. Education has been redefined as a commodity to be sold in the market place and is increasingly adapted to the demands of a corporate framework that dictates what should be taught in order to provide the skills to remain competitive within the international market (Hill 2006: ibid). As the state abdicates its role in the welfare of its citizens, the corporate agenda has become firmly ensconced within the institutions of education and education itself has become increasingly aligned with a business model of education. (Ball 2008:200) If the uniform, commodified product demanded of education providers is now the norm, what are the consequences of this for a radical pedagogy? Whatever form it might take and in whichever historical period we consider it, radical pedagogy designates education as a political practice concerned with questions of power (McLaren et al. 2002:167). It is concerned with autonomy and the production of critically engaged citizens who work towards a fairer and more democratic society. A radical pedagogy intends education to be a transformative practice linked to social and personal change. Friere referred to radical pedagogy as a ‘cultural act, ’ educating for critical consciousness, and he claimed it ‘had the power to transform reality.’ (1978) Radical pedagogy links education holistically to questions of agency, ideological perspectives, and the wielding of power. If we consider education in these terms, a politics of redistribution in the pursuit of a fairer and more equal society cannot depend solely on a redistribution of wealth. On the contrary, any lasting and sustainable change depends upon the redistribution of ideas (Haylett 2001:366). Questions of redistribution are now absent from much political discourse resulting in questions of class remaining unacknowledged or unengaged with while ironically, at the same time, allowing those who dismiss class to ‘articulate economic interests and classed positionalities’ (Haylett 2001:366) that reinforce the status quo. A radical pedagogy involves a paradigmatic shift away from the demands of a capitalist education system towards prioritizing the needs of those who have been excluded by and from that system. The maintenance of a narrative of meritocracy, fairness, and equality

Working-Class Subjectivity  69 within contemporary education discourses has profound implications for the culture and experiences of the working class. The educational disadvantages suffered by members of the working class are represented not as the result of economic deprivation driven by the systemic imperatives of capitalism but as the result of the culture of the (white) working class where a targeted intervention will bring about change.2 Therefore, the economic and ideological hegemony of those with wealth and power remains unthreatened; furthermore, it allows the extension of their own cultural capital and accompanying values and attitudes as those who are able to bring about change in the educational abilities of the working-class child. The goal of a radical pedagogy of film is not one that attempts to integrate individuals into the existing social order. Instead the goal of radical pedagogy of film is to provide the tools that enable a critical engagement with the production of representations and the ability to link those representations to the wider economic and social structures of oppression and exploitation. By insisting upon, and exposing the reasons why there exists an antagonism between those in prison, the experiences that have led them there and the powerful who sit in judgment on them, there is the opportunity to fracture the consensus imposed by those in power. As Marx insisted, any transformative politics are dependent upon an understanding of power relations. This objective of fostering a critical engagement on the part of those in prison, we have found, creates its own set of particular problems. Inside Film has been (unofficially) blacklisted from one prison for ‘making the prisoners feel negatively about their sentence.’ Another establishment has asked us not to show the films because they feel we have portrayed them in a bad way. In the light of this it becomes quite clear that the institutional arrangements in place within the prison system functions not only to physically police and contain the inmates but also to police their intellectual endeavors making sure that they are instilled with attitudes and values that do not question the validity of the existing order. The rejection of any attempt to question or engage critically with contextualized behaviors and their consequences reduces prison education to a shallow instrumentalization that in effect refuses the working class access to their own lived experiences and that reflects a conscious decision to keep them in a state of ignorance. In other words, the subordinate knowledge of the working class is suppressed and reordered to fit the dominant discourse of criminality and rehabilitation. Any project that attempts to contest this strategy and return agency to the prisoners is censored, power thrives through perpetual occlusion of the truth and the forced forgetting of the totality . . . every move by the counterhegmonist is met with a countermove by the dominant power, every feint with a counter feint and so on. (Sanbonmatsu 2004:198)

70  Working-Class Subjectivity Education has been reduced to the learning of competencies that actively discourage critical engagement. There can be no such thing as a neutral educational process. Crucially a radical pedagogy must acknowledge that any relationship involved in sharing knowledge and skills is not a neutral one: Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom, ’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society. But it could also contribute to the formation of a new (wo) man and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history. (Shaul 1978:13–14) According to Friere all education is political and therefore cannot be neutral. For him the choice is a stark one: education is concerned with liberation or with oppression. The pedagogical relationship is embedded within a wider network of historically specific social relationships and exists to serve the purpose of reproducing those relationships. This acknowledgement of the power relations inherent in pedagogical relationships is of particular importance when the relationship involves students who have been systematically disempowered by wider social structures and inequalities, as is the case for the working class in general and for the prison population in particular in the United Kingdom. David Buckingham (2004:7) has suggested that the central problem with what he refers to as ‘critical pedagogy’ lies in its attempt to resolve what are complex pedagogical problems by means of theoretical rhetoric. Since, I would suggest, all theory is rhetorical, I see the problem in different terms. The problem inherent in the conceptualization of a radical pedagogy is one of class or, to be more precise, the denial of class. Institutional education is overwhelmingly the way in which occupational success is achieved, and there is an indisputable link between occupational ‘choices’ and class position with those at the lower end of the social scale doing manual and service sector jobs that are low-paid and often dangerous (Benson 1978:72). The opportunity to succeed academically is rigged in favor of those whose background is compatible with the requirements of a hegemonic education system and the institutions for which it is a preparation, the civil service, politics, the legal profession, the higher echelons of the armed services and institutions of education. Whilst these patterns of elite recruitment are not the result of an overt process of selection the requirements of the professional position being applied for will act as a means of excluding those who did not attend the educational institutions—public school/ red brick universities which function to

Working-Class Subjectivity  71 create a continuous stream of elite professionals whose world view is congruent with existing dominant social and cultural forms. (Benson 1978:79) This results in not only the exclusion of working class people from decisionmaking positions but also crucially the subordination and marginalization of working class perspectives. This institutionalization of power (Gimenez 2001) is what Marx was referring to when he claimed that ruling class power takes on a normative function and results in the domination of one class by another. The construction of the subject within state education is therefore one that functions to domesticate the concept of radical pedagogy The capitalist state will seek to destroy any forms of pedagogy that attempt to educate students regarding their real predicament-to create an awareness of themselves as future labor-power and to underpin this awareness with critical insight that seeks to undermine the smooth running of the social production of labor power. (Greaves, Hill and Maisuria 2007) Or as Engels succinctly stated ‘the bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to fear, from the education of the working class’ (Engels 2005:139). Acknowledgement of the alienation effects of life in the 21st century for the majority of working class people is not in itself sufficient to initiate a project of change as Shaviro has pointed out: In the cynical early 21st century, cognitive estrangement no longer works (if indeed it ever did) as a viable strategy for subversion. Selfreference, irony, and formal alienation effects have all become widely used, and accepted, as marketing tools. What is needed is an approach that ups the ante on our very complicity with the technologies and social arrangements that oppress us. (Shaviro 2010:117) The neoliberal institutions of education and the media have appropriated our alienation, discontent, and anger and have sold them back to us as a means of incorporating the very things that would bring about its downfall (Fisher 2009:12; McGuigan 2009:1). This process results in an experience of capitalism that cleverly acknowledges the failings of capitalism but, at the same time, that closes down any critical opposition. We experience and reflect upon our lives only within the framework of a capitalist modality that constructs inequality as the norm while at the same time constructing it as something to be overcome. According to Rancière to begin from a position of considering others as unequal is to replicate the hierarchal and classed relations of the dominant society.

72  Working-Class Subjectivity Anyone who starts out from distrust, who assumes inequality and proposes to reduce it, can only succeed in setting up a hierarchy of inequalities, a hierarchy of priorities, a hierarchy of intelligences—and will reproduce inequality ad infinitum. (1995:52) Rancière’s claim is only viable theoretically. I have tried hard to consider where it is in practice that we have equality as ‘speaking beings.’ In practice, the class and geo-physical location from which we speak is one that confers or denies legitimacy on our voices. The voice speaking from the prison cell is not as equal as the one speaking from the political podium. To ignore this or to reject it as accepting the very structures that you are wishing to condemn seems to me solipsistic. Rancière is speaking only to other intellectuals who have the luxury of not ‘distrusting’ people—young black men on council estates in Britain or women working in sweatshops in ‘developing’ countries need to distrust in order to survive. While liberals might argue that we are all equal and that all voices have equal weight, this can only be considered to be true if you do not actually mix with working-class people. This inequality is not a symbolic inequality; it is an actual material inequality that affects the lives of the people subject to it and is an important consideration in the conceptualization of the different life experiences and subjectivities of dominated people. The Inside Film projects This recognition and collaboration means that people taking part in the projects are not anthropological objects of study or people who need to be ‘taught’ by middle-class educators. What the project does is utilize the already existing knowledge of the people involved in the course and apply that knowledge critically. At the same time, middle-class academics that might not under normal circumstances spend much time with working-class people find themselves working in close proximity with those they might not have come into contact with previously. We have had people express nervousness at working with prisoners or ex-prisoners, but this soon dissipates to be replaced by disbelief at the way in which people in prison are treated. The radical pedagogical approach of Inside Film is concerned with class and experience or, to be more specific, the experience of being working class and the ways in which this class-based experience can be utilized through the production of film as part of a radical pedagogy to challenge what Skeggs calls the ‘representational positioning’ (2004:135) of the working class. Representation in this model is not considered as passive images of class relations; rather representations are acknowledged to play an active political role in creating the perspectives through which the working class is known. The socio-economic position of those who create and disseminate representations of marginalized groups whether it is in the media, politics, or education is taken for granted and rarely discussed. The consequences

Working-Class Subjectivity  73 of this for the construction of class formation are rarely explored. It is important to recognize that representations of the working class, particularly those members of the working class serving prison sentences, are part of the wider specific political formations around the construction of class in late capitalism, and that these political formations have material consequences. It is crucial that the personal, social, economic, and political distance between the working classes and the professionals who represent them is foregrounded/acknowledged. The middle classes have an ongoing vested interest in propagating the social and economic inequalities from which they benefit—to draw attention to this would mean acknowledging their own complicity in propagating the brutal inequalities of the way in which society is organized. This is turn would mean giving up the, often large, economic differentials between manual and professional employment, and the democratization of an educational system (particularly in relation to private schools and Russell group universities) that functions to raise barriers and restrict entry into high status, financially well-rewarded professions. A radical pedagogy of film is not necessarily concerned with making ‘radical’ films. It is more concerned with producing knowledge of political processes through the validation of working-class experience and through an analysis of the existing cultural products that would deny those experiences. It is involved in exposing connections between the role of the capitalist state and continuing classed inequalities. It is involved in exploring the concept of national identity in the light of the global increase in the proletariat. It is about rethinking the relationship of the working class to institutional discourses and, crucially, it is about education as part of an ongoing process of liberation and justice.

Representation and Class The spaces (geographical, cultural, educational) in which media representations are produced are almost completely closed to the working classes. Having no access to symbolic systems that construct and categorize different groups of people in society, they are unable to produce their own representations or to challenge the dominant representations of themselves that circulate in various media platforms, and that crossover into other discourses such as the political and the academic. A political system that they are powerless to influence and in which they play no part3 legitimizes certain perspectives whilst their own perspectives are overwhelmingly misrepresented, ignored, or constructed as irrelevant (Skeggs 2004:45 Lynch and O’Neill 1994) Even more crucially as Charlesworth argues changes in society have . . . made it easy to reach the conclusion that working class people are no longer a group who experienced distinct cultural conditions. Conditions that shape the realm of personal possibility and destiny. (Charlesworth 2000:154)

74  Working-Class Subjectivity In order to produce representations of the working class that acknowledges working- class culture as a legitimate culture and working-class political struggles as significant and necessary, it is crucial that there is a shift away from the overwhelming representation of working-class people by those whose background is, generally speaking, a middle-class one with the value system, attitudes, and specifically middle-class perspective that entails towards working class self representation. This means it is necessary to occupy spaces in which the working classes can represent themselves. At the present time, the curriculum as it is practiced in schools and universities is one where there are very few points of reference for the understanding of working-class life or for an exploration of society as it is experienced by working-class people. Charlesworth considers the way in which, over the last 35 years, class has moved ‘towards the bottom of the hierarchy of objects of study’ within the university sector to be ‘a sort of treason of intellectuals: British Style.’ There is little one can say in the face of the denial of the importance of the most fine grained of human interactions in the face of the petty grand narratives that pass so much muster among the radical intelligentsia who occupy the art faculties,’ gaining huge symbolic rewards for what amounts to a social parody obscuring the grounds of their own privilege and investment strategies. Moreover, too much of their radical agenda, whatever its rhetoric, amounts to a stigmatizing of some of the most powerless sections of society. (Charlesworth 2000:155) But, of course, this it is not only true of academia; within the UK film industry (indeed the ‘creative’ industries in general), the vast majority of writers, directors, actors, producers, and financiers are from the middle and upper middle classes4This presents a serious and ongoing problem for the representation of working-class life within the mainstream media. This means the working class is for the most part represented by the middle-class graduates of universities and film schools whose attitudes, values, political and thematic concerns and, crucially, whose life experiences are not those of the working class. I think we need to be perfectly and absolutely clear that that the class position of the person writing/acting in/producing/commissioning the representations will have a material impact on the nature of these representations. voices . . . are frequently ventriloquized, distorted, co-opted, fought over, misattributed and misread. Perhaps the problem here in terms of political communication is that opinion is mistaken for representation and the expression of opinions is mistaken for the expression of voice. (Biressi and Nunn 2013:93)

Working-Class Subjectivity  75 It is a matter of the utmost urgency that we begin to explore the consequences, political, economic, cultural, and social theories, films and political rhetoric produced by predominantly white, middle-class people in relation to working-class and ethnic minorities. Litchman brings this into focus when he states ‘Theories embody (however indirectly) the tendencies of the social classes and specialized cadres that propound and defend them’ (Lichtman 1982:101). The objectification of working class people and the distortion of their lives by the middle-class professionals who represent them signals a form of ownership and an ongoing exploitative relationship where people who have no experience of your life speak on your behalf and know better than you do yourself how you should live your life (Lynch and O’Neill 1994:309). The British film (and television) industry often fails to represent workingclass life in a positive light, or in ways that suggest an understanding of working-class experience, or as an attempt to engage with the realities of working-class lives. There is a severe absence of media representations of working-class people actually working as well as an absence of associated activity such as trade union membership. There are very few references to the fact that many working-class people have to hold down two or more jobs in order to pay the rent, to the fact that parents go hungry so that their children can eat, that those children choose subjects to take at school based on whether they can afford the extra materials that are needed for subjects such as design and technology, that they are increasingly in debt, that the Benefit system treats them unfairly, that they are unable to purchase the basics such as toiletries necessary to lead a dignified life, that they rely on foodbanks to feed themselves. The central components of the daily lives of a large majority of British citizens are treated as not worthy of attention, and consequently any opportunity for class-based identification and the sharing of cross-class knowledge is closed down. In the film Billy Elliot (Dir: Stephen Daldry 2000), in order for Billy to live a fulfilled life he must move away from his working class mining community both physically and symbolically to become a ballet dancer. His father must sacrifice his union activity because it is an obstacle to his son’s progress. In order for Billy to achieve his dreams he must move away from the old industrialized North and build a better future for himself; this also means he must leave his family behind. This construction of working-class culture, working-class families, working-class spaces and, crucially, working-class struggle as an obstruction to fulfillment and a better life encompasses the working classes as a whole and represents them as a ‘threat to all respectability, a danger to others and a burden on the nation’ (Skeggs 2004:80). But it serves an even more ideologically loaded purpose: by defining the working classes solely in relation to their culture, class becomes detached from questions of economics and politics (Skeggs: ibid). It is working-class culture and not the economic polarities of capitalism that create the problems that beset

76  Working-Class Subjectivity the working class; when Billy embraces the culture of the middle and upper classes and moves away from his family and his environment, he is able to overcome all of his (personal and economic) problems and find an individualized happiness in a world which the closing scenes of the film appear to suggest his father and brother are in awe of. This discourse of working class culture as ‘old fashioned’ has become entrenched within the institutions of politics, the media, and education. Within the narrative trajectory of these films, it is imperative that the people surrounding the person who has the ‘means to escape’ also recognizes this, so in Billy Elliot, his father and brother are brought to see the error of their ways (trying to keep Billy in the community in which they live and which has been destroyed by the policies of the Thatcher government), and must sacrifice Billy and themselves for the sake of his own future (one in which they are unable to share). Billy’s exclusion is only partly predicated on poverty, and this is a problem easily overcome according to the film’s narrative. Billy’s real problem is a cultural one that is dependent on convincing his father and his brother that his inclusion in the world of professional achievement and high culture is contingent on embracing middle-class culture and, by extension, middle-class values. The solution to Billy’s problems and those of his family and his wider environment, of deindustrialization,5 unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, and the politically motivated destruction of whole communities is one only open to the mobile middle classes, that is an upwardly mobile escape. Billy’s success becomes not a question of class but of culture. Working-class culture is lacking, the film suggests, in the expertise and knowledge needed to ensure Billy’s upwardly mobile trajectory.6 This concept of escape, although of a different more limited kind, is apparent in another recent film dealing with working class life, Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold 2010). While Billy Elliot justified scab labor by placing the film at the time of the miners’ strike, Fish Tank closely scrutinizes the behavior and culture of the contemporary working class without any contextualization. In Fish Tank the central character Mia, like Billy, finds an escape from the deprivations of her life and culture through dance. But unlike Billy, she does not win a place to a prestigious ballet school and walks away from the ‘audition’ she attends to be a pole dancer. While she rejects this gender specific, sexually objectifying role her escape from the council estate on which she lives with her mother and younger sister is dependent on a young man who has the means (a car) to take her away from all of this. The character of Mia embodies all the pre-constructed signifiers of the workingclass person; behaviorally she is violent, unreliable, and irrationally aggressive, and at the same time her family relations and immediate environment condense all the signifiers of working-class life on a council estate: single parent, dysfunctional families, neglectful mother, anti-social behavior, and the lack of a ‘moral’ framework. Fish Tank like Billy Elliot depicts the culture of working-class life as constituting the problem and not the structural

Working-Class Subjectivity  77 economic inequalities that offer people no escape. Films such as Billy Elliot and Fish Tank continue the tradition of British social realist films that construct their characters as anthropological objects not to be understood but studied (something the film Fish Tank in a self-reflexive moment alludes to in the title) and offered up for the entertainment of the middle classes. The images in the film evoke other media images of the (imagined) totality of working-class life and are instantly recognizable as such. The working classes become intelligible in relation to the visual representations that describe them. Visual representations of the working class become intrinsically linked in various ways to the narratives that construct them negatively and, in the process, become part of the hegemonic knowledge of the working class. The visual familiarity of these cinematic landscapes, the postindustrial Northern town, the Essex council estate, the rubbish strewn innercity streets construct an iconic geographical map both in terms of space and character that offers neither engagement nor coherent understanding, but which produces a satisfied sense of recognition premised on the superior socio hegemonic gaze of the (middle-class) spectator. These films offer not the actuality of working-class life, but rather they appeal to the multivariate texts that have constructed a caricature of working-class life and which refer to the working class as out of date, lazy, criminal, scroungers, racist, feral, etc. At the core of the (mis)representation is an appeal to the popular imagination that enshrines not the working class but representations of the working class.7 At the same time, these representations conceal any explanatory political or economic context.8 To depict the enclosed space of the council estate, to define it culturally and spatially as Fish Tank does, with no reference to the economic and with no external relationships is to produce an unspoken norm that does not have to be seen because it exists independently of the working class. This strategy works at the level of visualization: the working class are knowable because they are recognizable; they can be identified and positioned without the impetus to contextualize their condition, understand their actions, or to tackle inequality. In this scenario, recognition masquerades as knowledge and conveniently becomes a substitute for action. Concentrating on the way the poor behave, there is no need to engage with the structural conditions that produce that behavior (Skeggs 2004:88). This ‘knowledge’ of the working class is one that has been developed independently of any contact with the working class and in ignorance of the everyday experiences of working-class life. It appeals to the shared understanding of those who make these films, who script them, who write about them, produce them, and to the predominantly art house audiences who watch them. Thus, the dominant understanding of the working class is one that is incapable of referring to working-class life because there is no actual knowledge of working-class life. What these films refer to is a discursive construct, the working class that bears only a passing resemblance to the working class and the lives they lead.

78  Working-Class Subjectivity The modes of address in the films referred to here9 construct the spaces where the working classes live as dangerous and /or undesirable. The spectator who is addressed is able to differentiate between spaces that characterize safety and security and those undesirable spaces occupied by the working class. The methodology of classed positioning is not merely a symbolic one but is one that has consequences for those who do not have access to spaces that offer opportunity and status. In what Skeggs has called the ‘increased spatial apartheid of Western cities’, these spaces are classed spaces and it is middle-class spaces that are associated with safety and security and a fulfillment of desires. The working classes, these films make clear, are not able to occupy spaces in which it is possible to develop the cultural capital necessary to economic advancement. This is particularly true of Billy Elliot. Billy is only able to develop and consequently fulfill his cultural and economic potential in the middle-class space of the ballet school away, not only from his environment, but also from his family.10Therefore the film reduces working class life to a question of culture and judges that culture as deficient and unamenable to the construction of a subjectivity that is able to participate in the wider world. The antagonistic relationship of the working class to the destructive economic imperatives of capitalism and the struggles that arise from this relationship, particularly in the case of the miners’ strike, are reduced to a question of ballet dancing. The militant working classes who struck for better conditions for the working class as a whole are constructed as out of date, living lives that are no longer relevant to a modern country. In fact, it is working class militant actions like striking that are constructed as barriers to the new generation’s achievements. The best they can do is to sacrifice themselves so that their children might have a better life.11 Furthermore these representations also deny the possibility of a collective solution to working-class deprivation and hardship—the protagonists of these films, through hard work, good luck, or in the case of the working class woman, good looks, ‘escape’ the working classes12 but of course their escape is individual. Working class poverty and tragedy is reduced to the moral and personal failings of individual characters or the inability to adapt to new ways of life. The uplifting stories told in these films13 leaves unanswered the question of all those other people who are left behind to suffer the daily indignities, deprivations, and inequalities of much working class life, what Sennett and Cobb (1973) referred to as the ‘hidden injuries of class.’ However, these films do reinforce the discourse of social mobility, an insidious concept that leaves intact the hierarchal structures of capitalism and that encourages people to compete with each other for a few crumbs from the table. Henry Giroux has pointed out that, generally speaking, films made for the dominant commercial market present: A politics of representation that attempt to render the workings of ideology indiscernible. That is, dominant groups seize upon the dynamics

Working-Class Subjectivity  79 of cultural power to secure their own interests while simultaneously attempting to make the political context and ideological sources of power invisible. (Giroux 1993:37) It is important to point out that representations of the working class used to validate and legitimize middle-class attitudes and values as the norm do not go uncontested in British filmmaking. Ken Loach, for instance, consistently produces films that highlight the systemic problems faced by those who have neither access nor resources to counter the accepted representations of working-class life. In his films, Loach explores the problems encountered by working-class characters but places the root of those problems within the institutions of the state and the capitalist system itself. Therefore, Loach challenges the now accepted wisdom that it is the working class who are responsible for the ills that befall them while at the same time exposing the ways in which ideas such as mobility, inclusiveness, etc. are used as a smoke screen to avoid discussion of the problems of living in a class-divided society.

Notes  1 This process is even further advanced in the United States where a Guardian newspaper report revealed that armed police patrol the corridors of schools in Texas and that children as young as 6 can be arrested for such ‘crimes’ as throwing paper planes or dressing inappropriately www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ jan/09/texas-police-schools accessed Tuesday January 10, 2011   2 Weale, S and Adams, R Schools must focus on struggling white working-class pupils, says UK charity www.theguardian.com/education/2016/nov/10/schoolsfocus-struggling-white-working-class-pupils-uk accessed July 2017.   3 That is unless we consider the right to vote every four/five years to play a part in influencing the political system. As Chapter 3 of the United Nations handbook on women and elections clearly states, there is much more involved in the act of voting than putting an x next to a name in the ballot box ‘Participation in electoral processes involves much more than just voting. Political participation derives from the freedom to speak out, assemble and associate; the ability to take part in the conduct of public affairs; and the opportunity to register as a candidate, to campaign, to be elected and to hold office at all levels of government. Under international standards, men and women have an equal right to participate fully in all aspects of the political process.’ It is not very difficult to see how little of this can be applied to working-class voters for all the reasons we have been discussing here.   4 Panic! What happened to Social Mobility in the Arts: Survey delivered in association with Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Sheffield and LSE  http://createlondon.org/create-announces-the-findings-of-the-panic-survey   5 Of course, the problem of deindustrialization only affects the west. In ‘developing’ countries there are vast industries producing cheap goods for the western market so the idea that we live in a ‘post-industrial’ society is, if we look at the whole picture, a rather misleading one.  6 The concept of social mobility is one close to the heart of the liberal establishment and one that is constantly utilized to justify various policy changes.

80  Working-Class Subjectivity However, there is ample evidence that demonstrates that this is a completely invalid concept and that people on the whole remain in the class into which they were born. (See Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Goldthorpe 1987; Marshall et al. 1988). More recent research has suggested there is less social mobility in this country than any other Western countr, See Danny Dorling (2013).  7 Owen Jones (2011:127) draws attention to a YouGov poll carried out at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2006 that revealed the majority of people working in British Television considered the representation of the working-class single mother Vicky Pollard in Little Britain to be an ‘accurate representation of Britain’s white working class.’   8 Andrea Arnold’s earlier short film Wasp (2003) for which she won an Oscar for best short feature also represents working class women as feckless, violent, and dependent on men with cars.   9 I have mentioned just two examples but there are many more—to take an example of the way in which these discourse are cross-fertilized we need only look at the television production Top Boy (Channel 4: 2011) ‘about’ life on a workingclass council estate. There was no reference to the institutions that make life so difficult on these estates and therefore makes selling drugs such an easy option. There was no representation of the ongoing police harassment of working class black men and how the institutions of capitalism have not only failed them but how they actively contribute to their failure. 10 This is a theme in many of the recent ‘post-industrial, ’ British social realist films where the presentation of the entertainment, creative, and cultural industries become a means of escape—stripping in The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo 1997) ballet in Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry 2000) and the manufacture of transsexual clothing in Kinky Boots (Julian Jarrold 2006). I am indebted to Steve Baker for pointing this out. 11 Interestingly this is not true of Fishtank in which the mother is constructed as a selfish woman not interested in parenting but in drinking and men. The brother and the father in Billy Elliot are on the other hand prepared to make sacrifices that are both economic and emotional. 12 Of course what these films are incapable of doing is dealing with the complexities of moving up the social ladder—just getting a better job/an education and the advantages those things bring in our society does not mean that it is possible to leave behind the class one originated from. 13 I am also thinking here of other mainstream films both British and American that deal with the working class as something to be escaped from, for example films such as Pretty Woman (Gerry Marsh 1990) My Fair Lady (George Cukor 1964) Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert 1983).

4 Broadening the Referential Framework Prison as an Event

It is of the deepest practical significance to maintain the seriousness of Marx’s view of human nature as self-transformative. To lose this vision, to become embarrassed by its rapture, is to contract in resignation before the density of the social world. It is to have lost any prospect of revolution. (Richard Lichtman 1982:61) The temptation to withdraw is great, but fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewerman cannot necessarily afford. (Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1982:5)

Introduction This chapter attempts to both raise and answer the question of how to translate the experiences of working-class life onto the screen in a way that privileges working-class perspectives. For many working-class people in the United Kingdom there is a deep and worsening underdevelopment1 and, given the widening inequality and increasing levels of poverty in the United Kingdom, there is an increasing and widening economic and cultural dependency. Do the films produced by the students who take part in the project have any intrinsic value or is it the process of making the films, the practice, that is of the most importance? Or perhaps this question itself is too simplistic (although it is one we need to raise), and we should not be dealing in dualisms that attempt to compartmentalize the work of the Inside Film project. We should instead consider the dialectical relationship between three separate but connected concepts, the process, the experience, and the product. Process here refers to the methods used to get to the point where the film is produced; experience refers to the nature of that process and how sense is made of it both at the time and retrospectively, What are the cumulative results of that experience and how does the interaction of the separate parts congeal into a whole? I think the best way to begin to illuminate these points is to discuss one of the films made by a group of young prisoners in a young offenders institution.

82  Broadening the Referential This particular group was finding it very difficult to agree on a subject for their film; there was much discussion and various competing ideas. Some of the ideas were rejected on the grounds that they were too ambitious; one had a cast of about 30 and included at least five women (a pronounced problem in an all-male prison). Another idea was rejected because there were too many scene changes and the list of props required was impracticable. Other ideas were rejected because a consensus could not be reached. Due to the impasse on developing a script one of the students came up with the idea of a ‘prison rap, ’ a collective rap in which each member of the group would perform individually but at the same time be part of the larger group. This idea was met with much enthusiasm and the rather fractious group quickly started to rehearse their performances. Topics and ideas that could not be agreed upon in the original discussions and which were scornfully rejected were now enthusiastically accepted; there was a sense of justice being done as everyone could contribute equally. It was from the point of view of Inside Film a very welcome solution, too much time had been spent trying to get to a point where all members of the group agreed, and the institution had allotted us a limited amount of time to run the project. The other groups were well on their way to the half way mark and needed support. It would have proved difficult to get a film up and running and shot and edited in the time we had remaining. As we never impose our ideas on any of the people we work with it was proving very challenging (and rather disheartening) trying to reach a point where this particular group would be ready to start filming. Although we did offer suggestions, they had all been rejected. The rap did not require any script; there were no concerns around sets or costumes as everyone agreed it would be performed on the prison landing and in the room where we met for rehearsals and it would be performed in the clothes they were wearing. The group rapped about the experiences and realities of young working-class men living in London: women, gangs, friendship, mothers, violence, and crime. Some of the content could possibly be interpreted as controversial if decontextualized and heard by those not familiar with the lives of young working-class men in gangs, but this was the reality of their lives. Had we attempted to censor the material we would have been as guilty as other educational groups they came into contact with who attempted to deny their experiences and produce work that was acceptable to the prison authorities. One of the most interesting and significant outcomes of this particular film was the attitudinal change of the young man who did most of the editing. During his hours of putting the film together, he began to remove parts of the rap that he felt were disrespectful to other groups, particularly some rather demeaning references to women. This was not a decision made by Inside Film—we had obviously talked in one of the workshops dealing with the question of representation about the ways in which marginalized groups, including woman, were objectified to make it easier to demonize or ignore them, but the decision to remove the offending references was taken

Broadening the Referential  83 independently of Inside Film. The decision was taken during the process of editing the film and was of course the result of a critical engagement with the work. I would suggest it went further than the process of critical engagement and was not just concerned with recognizing the strategies that marginalize and demonize people. The young man had reached a point when these strategies were being consciously resisted. Unfortunately, the prison authorities were unable or unwilling to interpret the cognitive shift of this young man as a positive development, and they emailed Inside Film insisting we did not show the film publicly as they felt it reflected badly on the prison.2 The completed prison rap; Bars Behind Bars demonstrates the paradoxical nature of resistant forms of expression: While the rappers disparage authority and reject mainstream codes of conduct and the imposed values of white bourgeois society, identifying themselves in relation to their areas and their gangs, at the same time they aspire to the material goods of a consumer society. The reactionary alignment of identity with specific gang related areas of London comes at the cost of viewing themselves as members of a larger configuration, the working class, and results in the contradictory position of both, undermining, while at the same time reinforcing, the norms of the society which has condemned the majority of them to poverty and imprisonment. The rap demonstrates both resistance and submission and exposes the complexities faced by Inside Film in challenging a hegemonic dominance whose reach extends to various spheres of society. As I have made clear in the previous chapters, it is those who benefit the least from the society in which we live who are the most likely to be prevented from articulating and representing their plight. And it is those who suffer the most who are the most likely to internalize the blame for their ‘failure’ when they are unable to ‘succeed’ (Lichtman 1982:282). The ideological bulwarks of the capitalist system are firmly entrenched, and the insistence on individual responsibility so successfully embedded that the systemic destruction of lives through the pursuit of profit is considered to be, not the result of a failed social order, but of individual, personal failings. The ‘social pedagogy’ of capitalism, its knowledge systems, the forms they take, and the way in which they are delivered favor certain perspectives and types of knowledge over others, reinforcing particular world views while ignoring or dismissing those that do not comply. What is available to us to make sense of the world shapes how we view the world and our place within the world (Skeggs 2004:35. Charlesworth 2000:94). As I hope has become clear, one of the main conduits for the transmission of information and knowledge of the world is the media in all its forms. In relation to the reporting and definition of criminal behavior the reciprocal relationship between those who own the media, those employed in it and other hierarchal, power-wielding institutions results in representations of the working class and definitions of criminal behavior being linked to the needs of the powerful (Barlow, Barlow and Chiricos 1995). Political expediency

84  Broadening the Referential and media discourses both serve the same purpose—to narrow the frames of reference in which crime is discussed and to perpetuate the criminalization of the working class. The consequence of this is the continued silencing and misrepresentation of the working class by those with economic and cultural power as a means of strengthening their own position, justifying inequality, and reproducing the already existing relations of production. The devaluing, criminalization, and patholigization of working-class people and the implementation of ideological strategies that fail to contextualize their actions drastically limit the possibilities of strategic interventions such as the Inside Film project with their potential to nurture a consciously determined political project resulting in critical subjectivities that offer, no matter how small, the possibility of change (Callinicos 2006:192, Fisher 2009:79)). If we fail to do this then the relationship between cultural and political consciousness becomes, as Gramsci claimed, fused, producing the appearance of a mutual coherence, while strengthening the position of those in control.3 It is the superficial coherence of this relationship that corresponds to a taken-for-granted ‘reality.’ Media images play a large part in the representation, production, and organization of that ‘reality.’ The expository power of dominant cinema alongside other mainstream media practices to impose a regulated ‘version’ of the real, which corresponds not to the conditions of neo iberal capital but its requirements, results in a hegemonic intensification of the precepts of capital. Within the gulf between the ‘actual’ conditions of neoliberalism and its rhetorical image designed to obfuscate those conditions there are two subjective states to be considered: the individual retreat into the self and the necessary repression of the antagonistic contradictions of the system that this leads to (Lichtman 1982:214). A radical pedagogic project must create the conditions to reconfigure these individualized responses to capitalism and, through the implementation of a dialectical film practice rooted in the daily experiences of class, foster a collective response able to politicize the unhappiness, alienation, and discontent directly related to the present system (Fisher 2012: 7). We can then create a practice that is confident enough to rigorously explore and stringently question the generally unexplored, unquestioned perspective of hegemonic positions that are manifested in the ideologies and behavior of dominant institutions. Working in the margins away from the center a counterhegemonic intervention can begin to steadily reconfigure the image as political method and as radical practice connecting the categories of the cultural, social, and economic. A theoretical concept I have found useful in explaining how this ‘journey’ could become a possibility in relation to prison education so that the politics of pedagogy can be situated more broadly within the politics of society is Badiou’s conception of the ‘event.’4 It is possible to argue—indeed it is precisely what I am arguing—that in some cases a prison sentence is the event that can begin to produce the cognitive conditions conducive to reexamining the taken for granted ‘rationality’ of our beliefs. This chapter will

Broadening the Referential  85 explore the concept of the event in relation to a prison sentence and how the intervention of a pedagogical project such as Inside Film can provide a framework within which to view prison not as a punishment for wrongdoing but to understand it as an ideological practice linking dominant conceptions of crime and punishment to the treatment of the working class. The chapter will also broaden the discussion to consider the Gramscian notion of hegemony and the culture of the working class, both nationally and globally, in relation to neoliberalism.

Prison as an Event A radical pedagogy of film can become one of the strategic interventions I referred to earlier, but in order for this to happen and more importantly for it to be effective, there needs to be a strategic and conscious combination of event and process providing an awareness of how culture is commandeered as a means of concealing the economic and social relations of capital. It is of the utmost importance to acknowledge that cultural domination and the denial of working-class experience is linked to unequal political and economic distribution. Connecting arguments for cultural and class domination as significant factors in the continuing imprisonment of the working class re-emphasizes the fundamental and total nature of the capitalist system bent on ignoring the collective interests of all people. In linking cultural practice to working class experience the Inside Film project offers a radical oppositional model of filmmaking underpinned by a theoretical approach that integrates working-class experiences into both the theory and the practice of filmmaking. Consequently, knowledge generated through participation in the project is not distorted or neutralized by the concerns of the educated middle-class expert. Any failure on the part of Inside Film to foreground the formative experiences of the working class and the role those experiences play in how working-class people inhabit the world would result in the Inside Film students producing nothing more than the standardized, depoliticized products demanded of those who participate in the education system as it functions at present. More than ever, the dominant ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class; this is not to posit an unproblematic relationship between those ideas and the way in which people act, but rather to point out that there are increasingly less opportunities for the expression of oppositional ways of thinking, therefore, dominant ideas often appear to be the only ideas. The translation of working-class experience through the medium of film has the potential to reshape paradigmatic political precepts in ways that offer the potential to filter specific life histories and the perspectives they engender in direct opposition to the social relations of capital. A radical pedagogic praxis is dependent upon foregrounding material experiences and the perspectives those experiences generate that are otherwise denied by or assimilated into mainstream representations

86  Broadening the Referential Experience is a necessary middle term between social being and social consciousness; it is experience, (translated as class experience) which gives coloration to culture, to values, and to thought; it is by means of experience that the mode of production exerts a determining pressure upon other activities. Classes arise because men and women, in determinate productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self making, although under conditions which are given. (Thompson 1978:98) Identifying the ways in which the capitalist system functions as a totality provides the students with knowledge of how, and more importantly why, the world is ordered in the way it is; but, according to Badiou, knowledge, while necessary is not sufficient of itself to bring about change; in order for this to happen we have to begin the process of identifying that which is true because ‘a truth is always something that makes a hole in knowledge’ (Badiou 2005:331). This is important because knowledge relates to the existing state of affairs and it is this knowledge of this state of affairs that the existing school system is premised on and so hides truth. What he is suggesting here is that the knowledge of the world we have—what we know, consider to be normal and accept—is different to that which is true. Interpreting the prison sentence as an ‘event’ can enable the foregrounding of contradictions and ambiguities that have become our knowledge of capitalism This knowledge will become the truth not just of the particular situation but of the whole; this is what Badiou designated the ‘truth event’ that in turn can activate the (pedagogical and cognitive) mechanisms that will begin to generate a transformative shift. The subject involved in the event does not produce the truth; rather it is the truth that produces (in Badiou’s word ‘induces) the subject (Badiou 2005:406). According to Badiou an event can be categorized as such when it causes a cleavage in already existing, takenfor-granted categories and throws them into question. He explains rather obscurely as as when it represents something that is present within the situation but is not represented by it what he refers to as ‘representations without representation’ (Badiou 2005:177). It is the fleeting break in the accepted and unquestioned hegemonic order that contains the potential for a new truth process. An event is always vulnerable to the imposition of ‘facts, ’ therefore what can be conceived of on the one hand, to take the example of Inside Film, as the intervention of a radical pedagogy of film, can on the other hand, be construed in a more conventional discursive light as a negative influence on those taking part in the project. As I pointed out in the previous chapter this has indeed been the experience of Inside Film: what we considered to be an event—a ‘rupture’ in the structures of the lives of the people inside the prison, which contained the possibility of shifting cognitive and behavioral patterns was, in relation to the criteria set by the prison authorities, a betrayal of their objectives.

Broadening the Referential  87 This example demonstrates the apparent fragility of the concept of an event. Its vulnerability to the imposition of other interpretations means that an event can only be constituted as such, recognized as such, within a radical narrative and not one based on empirical facts. If this identification does not happen, the event will pass unnoticed and be lost. One of the examples Badiou uses is that of the French Revolution, which in terms of designating it as an event involves more than the composition of the occurrences that took place e.g. the storming of the Bastille, the guillotining of aristocrats, etc. Even when taken as a whole these occurrences do not constitute an event that can be termed revolution, although they can be termed chaos, disorder, etc. (Badiou 2005:180). To be categorized as an event—what is happening/has happened—must create in the subject(s) experiencing it a recognition that an event has taken place and the question they have to ask is ‘if something has indeed taken place, what is to be done to remain faithful to it?’ That is, they must show ‘fidelity’ to the consequences of the event. Choosing to recognize an event and to be true to that event is an active decision that is taken by active subjects. It is only by staying faithful to an idea of the event as political that the event can escape the imposition of empirical facts likely to characterize its significance as unimportant (Badiou 2005:232). Although it might appear as such this is not simply an academic exercise; rather it should be viewed as an intervention that recognizes the importance of claiming the event of imprisonment and constructing a radical political interpretation rather than allowing it to be constructed in ways that reinforce the status quo. According to Badiou, truths exist that are not historically dependent although they are the bearers of history. As I have already made clear in my discussion of memory in the first chapter, any change in the subjectivity of the people who take part in the Inside Film project is dependent on the ability to be aware that what they are experiencing is not simply a product of this particular historical moment but that these experiences take their place as part of the accumulated experiences of those who lived before them. In Badiou’s terms, the treatment of those who are vulnerable and lack power is an eternal truth but its manifestation at this particular moment in time is historically specific and dependent on struggle. The truth process can begin when the event is recognized as such and when the possibility of creating a new truth is acted upon—that what we deem truth is identified through ‘intervention’ and active practice. Therefore, Badiou’s emancipatory politics depend upon acting as though the possibilities inherent within the event are already true. What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities. (Badiou 2005:242–243)

88  Broadening the Referential In the institutional and punitive space of the prison, prisoners are caught in an unstable identity position between what they are and what they might become—their status as prisoners is generally speaking a temporary one (although one that is vulnerable to the very real possibility of being repeated). The prison environment is designed to destabilize and minimize the support networks offered by the communities from which prisoners are drawn and minimize the prisoner’s own sense of identity. During the time spent in prison their relationship between the everyday regularities of their lives and the sense of who they are is both suspended and heightened. That is, in Badiou’s terms, there is a rupture in the hegemonic conditions that govern the limit and extent of their experiences. This is not to suggest that conflict with the normative expectations of society is cancelled or that there is a transcending of the structures, which limit and define life chances. While events are recognized as taking part external to the structures that have produced them, their very existence is conditioned by those structures and the situation from which the event has arisen. Working class people who find themselves in prison are there because of their response to the incongruence between the normative expectations of bourgeois society and their experience of that society. If crime is considered within a broader historical and social context and contextualized in relation to the existing modes of production, it becomes clear that it is the responses of the working class to the exploitation, alienation and very real material hardships they must endure that are labeled criminal by a capitalist state. (Jewkes 2005:60) As I hope I have demonstrated, the real and the actual bear very little resemblance to each other. This is amply demonstrated in the connection made between the working class and the designation ‘offending’ behavior which is the result of a plurality of mechanisms designed to obfuscate our understanding of working-class actions. The working class is not more predisposed to commit crime; it is simply that they are often forced to participate in actions designated as criminal in order to survive. Therefore, they are empirically more likely to be linked to ‘criminal’ behavior and for their actions to be criminalized. A broader definition of crime located within a socioeconomic environmental context would make possible the consideration of white collar and corporate crime as much more destructive and all-encompassing than the ‘crimes of subsistence’ committed by members of the working class (Taylor 2000; Young 1986). Of course there are other types of crime, usually involving violence that are still a direct consequence of the capitalist system that ‘merely expresses hopeless revolt and a hatred of a social order presented as entirely natural’ (Balibar 2002:25). Those in prison are cut off from friends, family, work, home, leisure activities, familiar surroundings and pastimes and most importantly from a sense

Broadening the Referential  89 of autonomy—what Gresham Sykes (2007: 63–83) has referred to as ‘the pains of imprisonment.’ The question is: in what ways can a radical pedagogy of the image transform the experience of the prison so as to generate oppositional cognitive forms distinct from the established modes of thought that predate the prison sentence? At the same time, how can that radical pedagogy bring into consciousness the ways in which established practices and modes of thought are related dialectically to class position. That is, how do the prisoners begin to view prison not as a temporal occurrence but as an evental modification? One that is able to begin initiating cognitive shifts and make visible that which the official or dominant discourse represses. A radical pedagogy of film offers a dialectical ontology that engages with the world as it appears to be (what we know empirically) while simultaneously developing an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. The concept of generation is critical here both in the sense of a sequential process from a preceding set of circumstances or objects but also in the sense of creating or generating something original. For Marx, the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system generate (bring into being) tensions which become internalized and are more keenly felt by the working class: he recognized that even though the working class share common experiences of oppression and exploitation, these experiences do not necessarily translate into an awareness of class. The process of identifying these contradictions is a complicated one: ‘the mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general’ (Marx 1968:181). In a capitalist society, this results in accepting as natural the conditions responsible for the exploitation of the working class. Political and intellectual engagement with the ideological forms of capitalism can overcome that determination so that it is not a determination at all. It is not my intention to draw a straightforward cause and effect linkage between prison and change in the consciousness of the students taking part in the Inside Film project (still less between prison itself and consciousness)— that would be too simple. Nor am I claiming that prison will unproblematically generate a positive change (that would be foolish in the extreme) or that all the prisoners who take part in the Inside Film course will view what is happening to them as an event; other longstanding and deeply-held beliefs often act to distort the outcome or prevent the desired effect that the intervention of a radical pedagogy of film attempts to generate. What I am suggesting, as I have pointed out in the previous chapter, is that as members of a subordinate group experience of poverty and the resulting inequality, exploitation and misrepresentation already form a subjective knowledge of life, and this leads prisoners into conflict with the normative strictures of society—and as Winlow and Hall have pointed out ‘the growth and concentration of a shared sense of suffering and dissatisfaction has throughout history driven progressive politics’ (2013:110).

90  Broadening the Referential The subjectivities of the students taking part in the project, who are currently serving, or who have served prison sentences, have been formed as individuals at a particular historical juncture defined by social structures determined by the capitalist mode of production within the collective framework of classed experiences. The formation of that subjectivity predates their identity as prisoners. A critical pedagogy attempts to reformulate the category of prisoner and consider it dialectically as linked not to the outcome of certain behaviors of individuals but to the social control and punishment of members of a class. The ‘crimes’ of which they are accused are reconstructed so that they are no longer evidence of a lack of individual morality but integral components of the ways in which the working class is criminalized, visualized, and identified. This reconfiguring of the prison and the people serving sentences within it opens a space for a reordered understanding of the narrative possibilities of lives whose stories have not been self-authored. Individual actions cannot be separated (as the legal system does) from their dialectical relationship within the totality of existing relations of production. As I have just pointed out, according to Badiou, knowledge and truth are two separate concepts. Knowledge relates to that which already exists and therefore can be known; knowledge is therefore characterized as existing within a framework of stasis. Truth on the other hand is precisely the opposite: truth is ‘processual’. It demands agency and therefore is constantly moving towards the future, a future in which the world has been changed and in which a new state of knowledge exists. But it only through movement/action that the subject comes into being. According to Badiou, change creates the subject and not the subject that creates change. The films that are produced under the aegis of the Inside Film project attempt to create a subjectivity at odds with the one that has been aprioristically bestowed by a classed society. That is, thorough discussion, debate, analysis, engagement, practice, education, self-reflection within the paradigmatic framework of a politics of the working class, we can begin the work of questioning accepted knowledge and hopefully go on to initiate the process of discovering truths that offer the opportunity to view society differently. And in viewing society differently, we can begin to see it not as an abstract entity over which actions have no effect but as place where struggle can lead to the possibility of transformation. One of the ways in which we do this is by deconstructing the category of ‘criminal’ (or offender) which becomes not simply a dehumanizing method of classification but a form of knowledge utilized to begin the process of viewing the prison sentence as an event situated within the totality of capitalist relations. It would be wrong to consider this as simply an exercise in subverting language. On the contrary, the aim here is the raising of consciousness and an understanding of the relations of power. In doing this the Inside Film students occupy designations from which they have been previously excluded. The students become working class filmmakers and organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense whose lack of access to the means of producing representations to narrate

Broadening the Referential  91 their own stories is a direct result of their class position. They are able to analyze and critically engage in the conditions they find themselves in and, through the process of praxis, produce films that reflect upon those conditions. In place of seeing themselves as ‘excluded’ from the rest of society— physically because they are in prison, and symbolically and materially because they are working class and have been criminalized—they begin the dynamic and political process of acknowledging they play a crucial role in the relations of capital. Education becomes something other than the filling up of minds with information decided by others to be worth knowing; it becomes a class-specific challenge to the dominant middle-class model of education and a critical response to how we are all situated within society. The sharply drawn distinction between critically engaged students and sentenced prisoners (or ex-prisoners) becomes less pronounced as the dialectical fusing of the two categories offers not an instantaneous transformation (this is an impossibility) but the generative potential to begin the transformative process of criticism, analysis, and engagement. This process of criticism, analysis, and engagement is apparent in the film Deathwatch. This film is a tragi-comic mockumentary set in an unspecified not-too-distant future charting a series of dramatic events as a group of documentary filmmakers follow the last hours of a man condemned to be executed live on the Internet. Using a series of interviews with the main characters and a cinema verite approach, the film demonstrates a sophisticated level of awareness of the history, practices, and conventions of the documentary film. The limitations of low budget, basic equipment, lack of space, and almost non-existent experience were expertly utilized by the filmmakers in the form of a mockumentary where shaky camera shots, missed cues, and unwanted reflections in windows became part of the narrative of the film. The combination of comedy at the ineptness of the film crew, plus the conventions of the drama and documentary genres, allowed the filmmakers considerable freedom within which to explore their subject. Deathwatch brings into stark relief the question of capital punishment and suggests the ulterior motives behind its use are profit and a pandering to popular, misinformed, public opinion. The film links this pandering to the demands of a detached public looking for ever more extreme spectacles with which to be entertained. The last 30 years or so of the neoliberal project has seen a huge increase in the prison population5and a decreased expectation on behalf of the general public that ‘criminals’ can be rehabilitated; at the same time there has been an insistence on more punitive measures to deal with the perceived problem of criminal behavior and a normalization of the prison as a solution to social problems (Garland 2001:139). Deathwatch deals with the commodification of pain and suffering and the exploitation of the vulnerable by a deregulated media in conjunction with—what we can only assume from the information the film allows us access to—is a privatized prison regime where profit and viewing figures are the most important considerations.

92  Broadening the Referential The condemned man is being held in an old prison housing only those prisoners sentenced by the state to die. We are never provided with any of the details of his crime or those of the other prisoners waiting to be executed. We never know if he really is guilty of the crime that he has allegedly committed although the fact that he has launched an appeal suggests he is not. Deathwatch is less interested in the details of the crime that has been committed and is more concerned with the response of society to the crime and the treatment of the men who have been found guilty. The film concentrates on the efforts of one of his lawyers as the appeal is lodged and as evidence is gathered to win a stay of execution. As the narrative progresses, we discover that the other lawyer working on the case, who is, in fact, in charge of the case, is working with a media company trying to persuade the prisoner to allow his execution to be screened live on the Internet for ‘payto-view’ customers. The fictional documentary filmmakers are included in the action of the film, becoming participants in the story as it unfolds, and the truth about what is taking place in the prison is slowly revealed. This inclusion foregrounds the role of the documentary filmmaker and, as the fictional filmmakers comment on the action, brings into focus questions dealing with the concept of neutrality. The film is very clear about how notions of ‘justice’ are constructed and represented to the world outside the walls of a prison and the role the media plays in representing and reinforcing the status quo. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the filmmakers are gathering incriminating material that could expose the corrupt links between punishment, the media, and economic gain. We already know from the opening text that the filmmakers have disappeared and that their documentary has never been shown. This appears to suggest that film has the power to capture the truth, but possession of the truth can be dangerous, and ultimately powerless, in the face of those who control the media. The films representation of the condemned prisoner is very different from the formulaic representations of prison and prisoners to be found in mainstream films dealing with prison, as Michael Fiddler has pointed out ‘contemporary representations of prisoners . . . tend to be remarkably consistent, there are a series of recurrent characters and tropes that one can reliably expect to see’ (Fiddler 2012:2).6 Deathwatch eschews the stereotypical representation of prisoners and prison and highlights the necessity for penal policy to be placed within a political and social context. The exploitation of the condemned man by the media and the legal system for economic gain suggests that it is inequalities of knowledge, power, and opportunity that have created the conditions that allow him to be manipulated by his corrupt lawyer and by the executive of the company that has bought the rights to screen his death. The film imagines a world (not very different from our own) where the logic of capitalism permeates all areas of life and where the once social and institutional bulwarks in place to protect the vulnerable have disappeared.

Broadening the Referential  93 According to Roscoe and Hight (2001:5–6), mockumentary films use the codes and conventions of the documentary film, particularly in relation to documentaries privileged relationship to the real. It then critiques them by representing a fictional subject or situation: therefore, a mockumentary is not just mock in the sense of not being ‘real’ but also in the sense of ‘mocking’ the documentary’s cultural status. Deathwatch complicates this relationship even further: watching a film made by prisoners about prison, crime, and punishment where the prisoners within the film are played by actual prisoners results in the blurring of the boundaries between filmmaker and subject. The self-reflexivity of the film rests not in its awareness of its status as a prison film but in the audience’s awareness that they are watching actual prisoners playing prisoners in a film about prison. As this extremely critical film demonstrates, the very existence of the films produced by the Inside Film students announces a rejection of the aprioristic position of subordination designated as belonging to the working class. In its place they offer a subjective engagement that carries within it the potential for an evaluation of identity, personal history, and representations of crime, punishment and imprisonment. I would argue this is made possible by a pedagogic framework consciously dedicated to exposing the links between culture and politics and by considering the institutionally strategic contexts within which the separation of these two concepts takes place. To ‘teach’ in this way entails a respect for working-class experience while simultaneously encouraging the students to transform their relationship with those experiences. It entails considering working class experience as organized by the structures of capitalism while at the same time demonstrating the potential for agency dependent on how we act within those structures. Working-class consciousness is not just consciousness of class—the ability to recognize the exploitation and hegemonic strategies that result in a subjectivity of subjugation—it is also a consciousness of the ability of the working class, ‘the subjugated group, ’ to bring about change in the conditions that have created their subjugation. Deathwatch was the idea of one of the students who is serving a very long sentence for a violent crime. When he offered it to the other members of the group that he was working with as a potential idea for a film, they really liked it and were happy to work with his fledging script. The script was further developed through a series of meetings with all members of the group who contributed ideas, discussed their parts, and who shaped the development of their characters. The role of the campaigning lawyer who was trying to save the condemned man was written as a female. We had received permission from the prison governor to invite professional actors into the prison to take parts that the Inside Film students were unable to take. Through another of the actors volunteering on the project, we were able to contact an actor who was temping in an office during the day but who was happy to take part in the film, arriving straight from work the two nights a week we had been allocated by the prison to run the project.

94  Broadening the Referential The interaction of a radical pedagogy of film and the questions raised by the event of imprisonment can result in an emerging consciousness of the social totality based not on the hegemonic precepts of capitalism as they are translated in the legal system, but on the counterhegemonic positioning needed to build oppositional ‘structures of feeling.’ Of course, the environment from which the participants originate and to which they will be returned often dictates what they will become. The class they have derived from and the disadvantages involved in having no formally recognized education, very few marketable skills, and a criminal record means what they can become under normal circumstances is very limited. In truth, what they can become is easily reducible to two options: reoffending or a low-paid menial job. But prison is not a normal circumstance; rather it is a rupture in prevailing circumstances and therefore creates the opportunity to generate something new. Prison is a break in the normality of everyday life—an interruption in the life sequence of the people who serve prison sentences. While it is possible to consider the time spent in prison as the conclusion to a sequence of occurrences that are predictable for working-class people (working-class men in particular) I would suggest that prison is a nonsequential event. According to Badiou 2005:81) an event can only be constructed as such if it is recognized as an event by those experiencing it; what he calls an ‘interpretative intervention.’ The ‘interpreting intervention’ is the function of a project such as the Inside Film, a project offering a conceptualization of prison as an excessive and irrational reaction to behavior that is a direct response to the logic of capitalism. If a prison sentence is a kind of ‘civil death’ (Gresham Sykes 2007:67) that functions to undermine both the psychological and social sense of self, the Inside Film project is an opportunity to bring to clarity the hidden antagonisms and class struggles inherent in the imprisonment of the working class. It can bring to consciousness a subjectivity predicated on the class relations of capitalism and therefore not a false sense of self but one that has been forged in the shared experience of alienation and exploitation.

Notes 1 The term underdeveloped is usually applied to countries whose lands and natural resources were appropriated by European imperialist forces during the 19th century and who became independent of these powers in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 Another positive outcome occurred after some of the bandanas we had provided the rap group with went missing. We did raise the question of returning them but without much hope of that happening. Towards the end of the course one of the young men returned a bandana he had taken telling us that he felt it was wrong to take it as we were all working together. 3 This fusion of the cultural and the political is of course rarely considered in reference to mainstream art products as art is generally thought to occupy a sphere separate from that of politics. Of course, this has never been the case and for a brief time in the 1930s as ‘realism’ attempted to make the link between the two

Broadening the Referential  95 a more obvious one. In the 1960s, publicly funded arts projects underpinned by organizations such as the GLC in London and regional public arts funding bodies in other parts of the country attempted to increase democratic participation in the arts. When Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979, arts subsidies were drastically cut in favor of corporate control of the arts. The supervision of the arts was handed back to the elites who had run them previously and patronage and sponsorship became the defining criteria for the successful arts project (Cultural democracy 2004:70). 4 Event and Being (Badiou 2005) is a very complex work mainly because it is ‘studded with equations and theorems that may frighten off the scholar who fled to the humanities to escape mathematics’ Byrne (2006) It is not my intention, neither do I think I would be capable of explaining Badiou’s use of mathematics to construct his theory—rather I am going to utilize the concept of the ‘event’ in relation to the course run by Inside Film. 5 Since 2000 globally the prison population has grown by approximately 20%. www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_prison_ population_list_11th_edition_0.pdf, downloaded June 2017. 6 ‘To give a decidedly partial list, there is the naïf, the kindly old-timer, the threat of (often sexual) violence or the dank darkness of “the hole” ’ Fiddler (2012:2).

5 Hegemony and the Culture of the Working Class

In the first chapter I talked about the culture of the working class being ignored or misrepresented by the institutions of capitalism. I think it is important to discuss this point in a little more detail here in order to consider what we mean by working class culture and to situate it within the work of the Inside Film project. Since 1979 in this country and 1981 in the US neoliberalism has restructured, through a planned simultaneous program of privatization, systematic deregulation, decimation of the welfare state, and of the introduction of competition into all areas of public life, the institutions and communities which supported working-class ways of life and the culture and sense of identity that they fostered. The forms of employment, the communities, the trade unions, the pubs and institutions with their links to political ideologies, education, and leisure for working people which served the purpose of anchoring working-class communities in environments where they could relate to people who shared their values and experiences, have been systematically eradicated. Although rarely oppositional1 in the political sense, working-class culture provided the opportunity to live in ways that provided an alternative to the ideological values of capitalist society and to reject the middle-class people who upheld those values. Ruling and subordinate classes faced each other with separate interests and identities. Proletarian culture and ideology as mediated at work, in the home or in leisure were in essential respects alternatives to dominant society. To express it another way workers have been able to resist capitalist ideological impositions and indeed reshape messages from above by all manner of means to conform to their own class needs and priorities. (Jones 1987:4) The destruction of this way of life has had profound economic and cultural consequences, which have manifested themselves in social problems, job insecurity, and unemployment. Low wages, inadequate state benefits, lack of jobs, and unregulated, exploitative working conditions has resulted in drug addiction, alcoholism, ever-higher rates of dependency on prescription

98  Hegemony and the Culture drugs, and increasing suicide rates (Charlesworth 2000:69). Politically, the old Labour Party strongholds, now post-industrial wastelands abandoned by a metropolitan elite who see no returns in supporting the people who live there, have seen either disengagement with parliamentary politics or a move to the extreme right.2 (For a sustained and brilliant analysis of the move to the right in post-industrial working-class communities see Winlow, Hall and Treadwell (2017). The students who participate in the Inside Film project bear witness to this state of affairs: many of them have addiction problems; many of them have rarely attended formal schooling; they suffer from mental health conditions; and the options offered to them by the middle-class professionals who play a large part in their lives are inadequate and often demeaning. For the most part they have never voted and long ago abandoned, if they ever held it, a belief in the possibility of voting as a solution to their problems—whichever party is in power, their material conditions do not change. As I suggested in the first chapter, one of the crucial questions posed by the Inside Film project is how to go beyond the limits of the social conditions in which we are all embedded but which for the working class have incredibly damaging and brutalizing consequences, so that we can actively construct a reality that can only be imagined because it does not yet exist. How do we create what De Laurot describes as the ‘power to perceive futurity within the present’? (quoted Eshun and Gray 2011:8). The experience of the social for the working classes is one that is grounded in an everyday struggle for survival where impoverishment is both symbolic and economic (Charlesworth 2000:6). Therefore, we come back to the crucial question of not how we go beyond the limits of our social conditions but what is involved in identifying the imposition of those limits—that is, what is involved in the practice of a radical pedagogy of film? How do we make visible the experience of the working class in ways that remain true to those experiences? The first task is to acknowledge that the culture of the working class is distinct from that of other classes. Working-class life has traditionally been rooted in communities that struggle to escape the hegemonic dominance of the bourgeoisie (Hoggart 2009; Williams 1958; Thompson 1995; McGrath 1996) If the distinctive form of working-class life is no longer apparent in the way it was when these theorists were writing, it is because the neoliberal project has on the one hand strategically destroyed these communities while at the same time it has created a hegemonic environment conducive to the needs of neoliberalism, that of the consumer and contemporaneously; to a greater or lesser degree, our class position is defined by our ability to consume. Adherence to hegemonic ways of thinking and being, according to Gramsci, involves the internalization of dominant modes of thought that are often, as is the case for working class people, counter to the well-being of those who internalize them. Dominant, privileged groups safeguard their own position through the dissemination of certain beliefs, values, and attitudes while excluding or delegitimizing alternatives. This dominant

Hegemony and the Culture  99 hegemonic system of interwoven beliefs about the world is not imposed through coercion but is consensually disseminated through multivariate channels of reinforcement that include such institutions as the media, state education, the family, and religion. The historical moment in which we find ourselves is witnessing Western governments shifting from a welfare state to a security state (Beckett and Sassoon 2003:62) justified in part by hegemonic discourses that demonize and criminalize the global working class. It is important to acknowledge that this is a global and not just local phenomenon. Nation states have, over the last 35 years of neoliberal saturation and conservative authoritarian pedagogic strategies, gradually abdicated the bulk of their responsibilities. This abdication has allowed for the transformation of the institutional arrangements in place since the end of the Second World War that regulated for all in society to have, at least in theory, access to the resources of that society.3Both the state and its functions have become ‘deregulated’ and reordered in favor of transnational corporations whose market-led priorities penetrate all areas of life. Therefore, economically it has become increasingly difficult to make the distinction between nation states and global corporations, who in many key areas have become interchangeable. This corporatization of the state is relegated to the realm of economics where it is justified politically as being in the interest of ‘the nation.’ Consequentially economic decisions made to maximize the profits of the wealthy are presented as political decisions made in the interests of everyone. As Mike Wayne has pointed out, one of the specificities of the capitalist state is its ability to formally separate the political and the economic (Wayne 2003:88) even as the political substantively reproduces the given economic order. Therefore, the legitimacy of the privatization of the public sphere is normalized within the political discourse of the nation state and attempts to question this legitimacy become questions of the law. The legal characterization of what is in effect the result of the capitalist mode of production became apparent in the response to the riots in London in 2011. The then Prime Minister, David Cameron’s response was one that collapsed all the visible rage and anger felt by those rioting into ‘criminality, pure and simple.’ When legally binding democratic procedures become an obstacle, they are completely ignored,4as has been the case, to take one example, with the severe austerity measures imposed upon the people of Greece without their consent in favor of the banks that caused the problems in the first place. Therefore, although there are real differences within nation states in terms of histories, language, and culture, in the face of the global ontological onslaught of neoliberalism these differences become subsumed within the totality of capitalist relations and dissipated in a symbiotic interdependence on a market that creates our needs and then sells them back to us as commodities with the means of satisfying those needs. The hegemony that, historically, Gramsci considered in relation to the single nation state must be understood contemporaneously in relation to a global context wherein the

100  Hegemony and the Culture dynamic between the state and the market is one resting on a mutual interdependence the success of which relies on a continuing commodification of all areas of life—cultural, symbolic, and material. Until quite recently the notion of hegemony attempted to conceptualize the development of a subjectivity whose way of thinking resulted in the reinforcement and reproduction of the relations of exploitation and domination as a function of the nation state. In the light of a globalized world and in the erasure of class politics from the public sphere, there needs to be conceptual shift that considers the international structures and reach of this specific historical model of capitalism. These global political and economic structures work strategically to annihilate local and distinctive ways of being by ignoring the needs and demands of local indigenous peoples and by imposing undemocratic top-down decisions which remove the accountability of the state (Dutta 2012:37). At the same time, in the interest of the demand for profit, they are ‘sponsoring a virtual race to the economic and social bottom for the workers of the world’ (Moody 1997:55). The history, memories, struggles, and culture of working-class life become subsumed within an all-encompassing neoliberal program premised on individualism, careerism, competition, and an ‘international division of labor’ (O’Neill 2017:13). This shift in the understanding of what constitutes the hegemonic paradigm of Western capitalist democracies over the last 35 years has seen a move away from a Keynesian welfare state to the neoliberal rejection of Keynes. The continuing implementation of neoliberalism and the deregulation and liberalization of markets that accompanies it globally can be traced to the responses of the capitalist class to the global economic crisis of the 1970s, but the conditions for it to develop in earnest begun to fall into place during the 1980s. While the threat of Communism had loomed large in the imagination of the capitalist class, a compromise between Communism and Capitalism was conceded in the acceptance of the Keynesian welfare state, particularly in Europe (Klein 2007:253). With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that threat was removed and neoliberal policies began to replace the Keynesian hegemony. The ever-widening wealth gap developing as a result of more than three decades of neoliberal policies is producing a global polarization of people that lends credence to Marx’s essential methodological contention that capitalism can be viewed in relation to two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.5 This apparently crude distinction is perfectly valid when considered in global terms because the poor in ‘developing’ countries work in the factories6 and fields of large corporations in order to provide the cheap goods demanded by the First World. One of the ways in which the potential unrest and insurrection of the poor in the face of the often inhumane conditions of capitalism and the incredible disparities in wealth are dealt with is to criminalize or brutally overthrow potential insurrectionary behavior such as trade union activity, political protests, and strikes and to imprison those who agitate for them (Harvey 2011:251; Garland 2012:29–39). And it is this that returns us from the macro social

Hegemony and the Culture  101 considerations of a global society conditioned by the precepts of neoliberalism to the localized micro social project of Inside Film and its participants whose lives are affected by the global locally on a daily basis. Some examples of the way in which people are forced into criminal activity because capitalism has given them no other choice is apparent in some of the stories of the people who have taken part in the Inside Film project: one young man had been selling drugs in order to pay his mother’s mortgage; another man was dealing drugs because he had no job and no employment prospects. A young man (who actually decided not to take part in the course) told me that he had received a three-year prison sentence for a first offense of spraying graffiti inside a train. The ‘war on terror’ initiated by the Bush administration after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 has been taken up by many countries across the world and used as the justification for the ongoing curtailing of civil liberties. In the pursuit of ‘security’ the new neoliberal hegemony places draconian anti-terrorist laws before the welfare of citizens with the help of a complicit dominant media, political class, and self-interested liberal ‘left’. At the same time discursive and representational strategies have constructed the welfare state as encouraging crime and represented the poor as dangerous and undeserving (Beckett and Sasson 2003:51). Alongside this, it has a violent rejection of people who, for whatever reason, arrive in the United Kingdom from other countries constructing their very presence as a threat to national and personal identity and economic security. The concept of a national identity creates a separatist space in which the representatives of a particular country identify core traits and characteristics that differentiate them from the people of other nations while at the same time constructing a fantasy of themselves as superior. The outcome of this in class terms is two-fold: on the one hand, it displaces the importance of class and, on the other, it ensures that the working class consider themselves geographically and not economically or politically. They therefore construct disparate (national) identities in relation to perceived (national) differences and refuse to consider the material similarities and experiences of the global working class. The working class of other nations is viewed as competition for increasingly scarce resources rather than allies to confront those who keep those resources to themselves. Although, it is important to point out here that they often are in competition for scarce resources, so any dismissal of those members of the working class who worry about immigration as racist or intolerant is politically, completely misguided (Winlow, Hall and Treadwell 2017:145). The globalization of the economic has resulted in the cultural increasingly being utilized to convey the ‘norms’ of capitalism. Mainstream cinema strategies have an active role to play in this standardization of consciousness offering as it does the dominant representational knowledge which we all consume and which produces our knowledge of the world. This insistence on nation bound classes in a globalized world functions as a means of (mis)

102  Hegemony and the Culture interpreting classed experience and curtailing knowledge of the similarities of those experiences for the working class across the globe and, in the process, preventing links from being forged. Although globally it is analytically sufficient to talk of two classes, that is not the case at a national level. Here in the West, particularly in the United Kingdom, considering its deeply entrenched class divisions, it is necessary to take into consideration the expansion of the middle classes in the last hundred years. As David Harvey has argued, the economic shifts that have paved the way for neoliberalism are not only dependent on the elites but need the cooperation of the middle classes (Harvey 2005:12; Winlow et al. 2017:56). It is the middle classes (it is more analytically rewarding to consider the heterogeneous groups that make up this class as the middle classes and not one homogenous class) that provide the dialectical dynamic of contemporary capitalism. Caught within the conflicting and contradictory pathological demands of capitalism, the professionals and managers of this class desire the bourgeois (for what they have) and fear the proletariat (for what they do not have). This dichotomy is not as rhetorically simplistic as it first appears. To be middle class is to ‘internalize the dominant meaning system of capitalist society with its strong emphasize on competitive individualism’ (Benson 1978:109). It is the values of the entrepreneurial middle class that dominate in a capitalist society. Encouraged by those who own the means of production, the middle-class belief in individual achievement and mobility justifies the emphasis on an education that denies the inequalities it produces and the vital role it plays in reproduction of the class system (Reay 2001). The success of this hegemonic insistence on educational achievement and the related belief in social mobility and meritocracy depend on the apportioning of individual blame for ‘failure’ in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The systemic and deeply held faith in these narratives can be measured in part by both the over-policing of working class areas and the enormous increase in the prison-building program. The increased incarceration rates in these countries have become part of the way in which the working class is both governed and punished as the welfare state is rolled back and as the safety nets it provided are removed. Those who are most vulnerable and surplus to the requirements of capitalism are blamed for their ‘failure’ to achieve, demonized and warehoused away from ‘law-abiding citizens’ who are constantly told that prisons are needed in order to keep them safe. Therefore, although the concept of consent is a key element in the reproduction of capitalist relations, it is crucially important to reflect upon the outcome when that consent is withheld or refused. Gramsci considered that for some people hegemonic compliance would be unsuccessful precisely because of their life experiences. Hegemony must be understood as a dynamic not static state in which there is a continuous and ongoing struggle to ensure the dominant modes of thought and ways of acting without which

Hegemony and the Culture  103 capitalism could not exist remain embedded and accepted by the majority of people. Therefore, there is a constant and always present threat that certain groups of people will not be able to or will choose not to conform to the strictures of neoliberalism—for example, people with committed dissident views, politically active members of the working class or the group we are concerned with here, prisoners. Most of the prisoners and ex-prisoners who participate in the course demonstrate varying levels of resistance to the normative rules of social order. There is in many cases an overt conflict between societal norms and the behavior of those convicted of committing a crime. This is manifested in myriad ways: in the language used, a refusal to participate in formal politics, choosing rather to believe in conspiracy theories, the music listened to, the choice of dress, and of course the crimes committed. These, what could be interpreted as counterhegemonic transgressions, demonstrate a refusal to accept the bourgeois model of everyday life. No matter how fractured, how apolitically motivated or economically necessary there exists, as a result of the experience of being working class, a creative, sometimes desperate, (not always a constructive) resistance to the material realities of their lives. Arrival in prison can be seen as a form of mediated resistance to the ideological imposition of classed expectations: the (enforced) preference for criminal activity rather than “Mac jobs” is both an acknowledgement of the dead-end nature of such work but also as a form of resistance to the expectations of the class-stratified employment system. Prison becomes if not the preferred option then a calculated risk in the struggle to avoid the limited opportunities open to the working class. I am not suggesting that these are consciously taken political decisions but they are ‘resistant’ decisions and are made as a result of the experiences of living as a working-class person under capitalism. What these actions do is make manifest class ‘as real effects in the world and not just as theoretical constructs that refer to no actual social force or process’ (Meiksins Wood 1995:93). It is also not my intention to idealize crime as a conscious form of class resistance although my hypothesis is a causal one. For Thompson, these ‘imperfect’ incidences of classed resistance are part of the process of class struggle, spaces in which there exists the possibility of building something more tangible (1995:105). Of course, the irony is, as Willis has pointed out (Willis 1977), these acts of defiance are doomed to reproduce the very conditions that they were initiated to refuse. The resistance to capitalist categorization results in a prison sentence which confirms for the bourgeoisie the dangerous and unruly status of the working class and which feeds back into dominant discourses of control and punishment—but “equally these forms of resistance are forms of resistance and they have been and are being produced as much by the system that produces commodities, profits, and ‘real’ subordination” (Willis and Corrigan 1983:101). It is these forms of resistance that the Inside Film project hopes to take advantage of and reframe in political and transformative ways.

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Education, Prison and Class In 2016, over half of the people in prison were assessed as having reading skills below that of an 11-year-old (Coates 2016): the number is 65% in relation to numeracy skills, and 82% in relation to writing skills. Half of all prisoners do not have the skills required by 96% of jobs. (Greenstreet 2017)7 Only one in five people in prison are able to complete a job application form (James 2009). The acute shortage of literacy skills amongst prisoners is predictably reflected in qualification levels; 47 % have no qualifications at all. In addition, it is perhaps unsurprising that 68% of all prisoners were unemployed at the time of imprisonment. (Prison Reform Trust 2016).8 These figures would appear to correlate a link between “criminal” behavior and levels of not only literacy specifically, but also education in general. Research carried out by Rice, Howes, and Connell (1998) and quoted in the ‘Report by the National Literacy Trust into Literacy and Offending Behavior’ suggests that this is not the case. What the research revealed was that the levels of literacy in the prison population were matched or exceeded by levels of literacy in the socioeconomic group from which prisoners are drawn: that is, the working class. Indeed, the government’s insistence on the provision of basic literacy and numeracy skills as a way of tackling recidivism and increasing employment prospects is not borne out by its own research. In 2005, the House of Commons Education and Skills committee (Para 47) stated, ‘the heavy concentration on basic skills qualifications is based on little more that a hunch.’9 Recidivist prisoners account for a large percentage of those in prison, and ex-prisoners are more likely to be unemployed. What the research carried out by Rice at al. indicates is that people do not carry out acts designated as ‘criminal’ because they are poorly educated or unemployed but because they are working class. And as Angela Davis has pointed out there is a direct link between the decimation of the welfare state and the increase and the growth of what she calls ‘the prison industrial complex;’ people ‘disappear’ into prison, the people affected the most by this decimation of the welfare state (Davis 2005:41). What these national targets also do is to demonstrate the ways in which there is a universal notion of education in which all children in the system are expected to meet preconceived targets; this suggests that the education children receive is a standardized product that fails to take into consideration the backgrounds and experiences of the students. This obscures the class-related differences in delivery and consumption and outcome embedded within contemporary education policies. While there are often flurries of interest in gender and ethnic differences in relation to the educational performance of different groups, there is less discussion concerning the continuing and undeniable part played by social class in performance and participation in education. Class is the biggest indicator of educational achievement (Ball 2008:173; Reay 2001). The concentration on gender or race obfuscates structural

Hegemony and the Culture  105 inequalities that are inherent in the capitalist system. The ‘real foundation’ of the economic desperation and structural inequalities that drives workingclass people to commit ‘crime’ is their class position. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that certain groups of people are being criminalized and punished for the crime of being poor and that blaming their incarceration on their lack of formal education is a way of obfuscating this fact. It is their class position and the correlation between that and poor educational achievement that determines the likelihood of receiving a prison sentence or of being accused by the state of committing an act that will be defined as criminal.10 Thus as I pointed out in Chapter 1, the failure of the system is restructured as an individual moral or cultural failure on the behalf of the ‘criminal, ’ and the structural inequalities are glossed over. In the language and tactics of (education) policy, there has been a move away from concern with ‘inequality’ to ‘social inclusion, ’11with a focus on the cultural rather than the structural bases of exclusion (Ball 2008:197, Lister 1998:215–225). This allows education policy to be interpreted as a reaction to social problems that can be solved rather than as an attempt to deflect attention away from the discrimination suffered by working-class children. According to Marx, it is important that we refuse the normative conceptions of the bourgeoisie and the language used to implement them. We must realize that the universalizing norms of law, education, justice, morals, etc. are historically specific ideological weapons utilized in the interests of the ruling class in order to conceal the class antagonistic nature of capitalist society. The class domination embedded within the concepts of education, crime, and punishment is not openly acknowledged; rather it becomes a question of an apparently ‘disinterested’ state. Of course, the problem here is the absence of class as an analytical framework: the marginalization of class as a concept through which to make sense of the experience of exploitation and subjugation actively prevents the working class recognizing themselves as such. Methodologically speaking the Inside Film project emphasizes the relationship between media representations that circulate within mass media outlets and the ongoing pedagogic project of neoliberalism that frames education as a commodity within the precepts of capitalism (Allman 2001:55). In raising the class consciousness of the people we work with, not only do we provide oppositional information, we interfere in existing relationships with the norms of society. We attempt to foster the realization that there is power contained in the knowledge of the working class and, in the process, produce a new subjectivity that goes beyond the limits set by the educational strategies of neoliberalism. But this is not an automatic process; experience of oppression and exploitation alone will not bring this knowledge to the fore rather the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and represents an achievement which requires both science to see beyond

106  Hegemony and the Culture the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education which can only grow from struggle to change those relations. (Hartsock 37:2004)

Film Praxis Media images of mass culture permeate every area of our lives: advertising, television, film, the internet, etc., and it would be naive and politically submissive to think of this mass culture as purely a form of entertainment or a simple educational or information tool. Rather it is an aspect of neoliberalism that entertains us, provides us with knowledge of the world in which we live, expresses our fears anxieties and desires, and contributes to the construction of our subjectivities. In fact, it is impossible to consider our experience of identity formation as separate from the influence of the mass media. The image . . . reaches out to sell more than a service or a product it sells a way of understanding the world, it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanism for social order. . . . Mass imagery creates for us a memorable language, a system of belief, an ongoing channel to inculcate and effect common perceptions, explaining to us what it means to be part of the modern world. (Ewen and Ewen 1982: 24) According to Gitlin, the media play a central role in the production and distribution of ruling class hegemony (Gitlin 1980:253). Images do not derive this power in isolation; it is only when we begin to make connections and situate them within the ‘social matrix’ of other dominant discourses which reproduce the existing structural order and justify the brutality of the current system that we can account for their ability to influence the beliefs of social actors. Crucially these beliefs and these ways of thinking, derived as they are from the worldviews of those with power, do not speak to the experience of the working class.12 Our understanding of the world is not an accurate one, our ‘common perceptions’ and ‘system(s) of belief’ broadly fit into those ways of thinking and being required to justify the continuance of the neo liberal order. For Marx, social relations are distorted by the underlying mechanisms of capitalism but we do not have immediate access to these mechanisms although they have a profound effect on our subjectivity and consequently how we live our lives. Both he and Engels are clear that the proletariat are aware of the ways in which their lives are distorted and that it feels Its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence (and) is necessarily driven to indignation by the contradiction between its

Hegemony and the Culture  107 human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. (Marx and Engels 1975:36) According to Lukacs (as cited in Lovell 1980:68), our ability to perceive the distortions within capitalism is dependent on our class position and the level of our investment in the dominant ideology. He also claims that it is the proletariat who have most need of understanding the totality of social relations. Indeed, it is in their interests as a class that they do so. Those in more privileged classes, because they are protected from the worse ravages of the neoliberal order and have no investment in overthrowing the system (on the contrary it is in their interest that it remains in place), require only a partial knowledge. In fact, their class position prevents them from accessing a full knowledge of the totality (Lovell: ibid) Artistically these more privileged groups speak to themselves through the avant-garde, creating films (and art forms) that are only superficially concerned with art and that are more concerned with producing signifiers that will be recognized by those with the educational and cultural capital that the working class does not have access to. (Cultural Democracy 2004:22). The really crucially important point here is the consideration of the way in which the visual and our perception of it is defined by our position within the class structure. Therefore, we can only conclude that it is not technologies or even the image itself that are really significant but the (classed) way in which our perceptual vision is structured. The Inside Film project insists on the validity of the Marxist claim that there is a knowable world, one that can be accessed through the intersection of political knowledge, education, and film practice. The capitalist global media complex seeks to treat these as separate entities obfuscating the connections between entertainment, education, and politics that underpin and mediate our perception of the world. What a radical educational project grounded in film practice attempts to do is to develop perceptual skills that highlight the connections making it possible to collapse the distinction between personal experience and collective knowledge. Historically, generally speaking, audiovisual technology and the ability to disseminate its products have been in the hands of those with wealth and power. As the technology has become cheaper and therefore more accessible, the production of images has become a possibility for more people in Western countries than ever before. This relative accessibility creates two problems: on the one hand the extension of audio video technology has resulted in, as (Beller 2006:74) puts it, the potential extension of the ‘range and extent of our subjugation.’ On the other hand, this accessibility and the relative simplicity of the technology to use has created a dilemma for the political elites. If people have access to the means of producing their own images, they then have the power to represent their lives. If they have the power to represent their own lives they are potentially able to mount a

108  Hegemony and the Culture direct challenge to the ideology of capitalism, exposing the inequalities and injustices upon which it is built and which those who benefit from the logic of its system reproduce. The solution to this dilemma is again two-fold: image technology may be accessible to all, but the platforms of influence necessary to represent/interpret the world remains the privilege of those who have received certain kinds of education, and that education is inaccessible to all but a limited number of working-class people. The working class have access to technology to post funny videos on YouTube and Facebook, film weddings and christenings, have (carefully selected) three-minute slots on Channel Four, but this commercial idiom dressed up in the language of the popular still functions within the framework of the dominant hegemony. As Les Back has argued this ‘proliferation of media in our informational society’ has rendered us less likely to participate ‘we have become ‘spectators in the lives of other people’ (Black 2007:14). As the role of the spectator becomes the one with which we are most familiar, we are less likely to actively challenge what we see. Kevin Robins has claimed that what he calls ‘the visual hegemony’ of our contemporary culture has resulted in a retreat from actual experience and a disembodied knowledge of the world (1996:29). He goes on to identify the way in which the new image technologies have been shaped by Western imperialistic and militaristic concerns grounded in theories of rationality and logic (Robins 1996:38) but his philosophical and psychoanalytical approach completely fails to engage with the issue of class and the ways in which this visual hegemony is both shaped by, and shapes responses to, class. The global reach of communication and media outlets and the utilization of popular culture as the main conduit for these global networks are closely related to the needs of neoliberalism, creating new markets for the programs themselves and the products that are showcased within them. As Biesta (2006:105) has pointed out, global capitalism/neoliberalism has resulted in the preference for one subject position: that of the consumer, and much of the mainstream media output is geared towards creating this subject position. Superficially the working class has more access then ever before to the means of producing images, but the decimation of workingclass organizations and the ongoing destruction of working class spaces such as council estates over the last 30 years has resulted in less organizational power and many obstacles to ownership. Therefore, their main activity in relation to the image is one of consumption and even if that consumption is not one that unquestionably accepts what is being offered, there are still very few politically and socially informed images being produced by and for the working class. Academia, politics, and the dominant corporate media function as integrated networks of manipulated information and rarely challenged influence simultaneously underpinning, strengthening, and naturalizing the dominant representational modalities of poor people and, of course, the rich who are rarely represented as causing any kind of threat to society. At the same time, they effectively work to marginalize, contain, or

Hegemony and the Culture  109 incorporate signs of working-class resistance. The working class, according to Marx, was not defined by what they produced but by their relationship to the forces of production: from this perspective, visual representations of the working class produced within the mainstream media are still connected to modalities of exploitation. Therefore, the definition of class as a relationship premised on ownership of the forces of production and exploitation of those who are denied ownership as envisaged by Marx remains in place. Kaldor has demonstrated how any form of knowledge detached from the use value that it was originally intended for is prey to forces external to that knowledge which can result in distortions not considered by the originators of the work.13 Critical thought estranged from practice, and film theory divorced from practical application, allows abstract ideas and concepts to become separated from the material practice of film production and creates a vacuum into which commodified knowledge, and unquestioned assumptions, rush to fill. Separated from this practicable application insights which theory offers become meaningless and demands no engagement apart from that required by time spent in the classroom (Small 2005:418). Divorced from practical application, conceptual resources encouraged by theoretical considerations remain peripheral to the educational process. I am referring here to the educational process in the Marxist sense of education as an ongoing intervention in the social world that results in knowledge production and not simply the imposition of facts in an unequal relationship dependent on coercion and the promise of material benefits and status rewards. The ubiquity of the image as a cultural and educational resource has resulted in the need to consider the part the image plays in relaying knowledge of the world to us and the way in which vision and perception are dependent not so much on new technologies but on existing power structures. There is also, as bell hooks has argued, the need to Transform(ing) the image . . . asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, post critical alternatives, and transform our world views and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making a space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation. And even then little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking. (hooks 1992:4) Hegemonic political conceptions of reality are apparent within the film image; the logic of neoliberalism permeates all areas of society and all activities within it. Therefore, within a single image we can find a summation of the totality of the capitalist mode of living. The dominant cinema encapsulates the social conditions of neoliberalism in its depiction of women, children, gendered and classed space, work and relationships, and of war and peace; but this social totality is grounded in the ideological fragmentation of dominant modes of representation (Beller 2006:75–76).

110  Hegemony and the Culture The task is to disconnect the image and the concept, and to reconfigure them dialectically in relation to working class experience in order to understand the ways in which images manifestly reinforce negative responses to the working class which function reciprocally within the totality of social relations to structure hierarchies of legitimacy and value. There is an example of this in the analysis of Fish Tank in the previous chapter. That is, not to respond to the category working class as we read it on the screen without explanation, but to recognize the image as part of the social and political totality that naturalizes the workings of capitalism. Images of the working class are never simply an image. They are a symbolic encapsulation of the material conditions of a group of people whose lives are constructed as negative and whose abject state is considered to be self-inflicted. Therefore, the image of the working class reconfirms the middle-class subject position as not only superior but also legitimately held and places both classes within a hierarchy of presumed universal positions and moral judgments the consumption of which has material consequences. This contradictory dialectical space between the ideal and what is known (experienced) is the basis for praxis. Praxis is not the application of theory to practice; this rather restricted view of the process avoids a dialectical engagement with theory and depends on the existence of the theory to justify the practice. In Marx’s conception of the notion, praxis is the dialectical engagement with the theory itself, before, during and after it is put into practice. Only through the work of challenging and readjusting established theory can we begin to activate—that is put into practice—strategies allowing us to see more clearly the politically structured, historically specific conditions under which we live. This configuration of the relationship between theory and practice encapsulates the essential aim of the Inside Film project. Film is both an economic and a cultural object existing in the capitalist market place, and it enters into a relationship of exchange with the spectator. The exchange value of film is an economic one, but because it is a commodity it also has a use value. The use value lies in the cultural work of the film. The dominant film product offers instantaneous fulfillment and ongoing reinforcement of the ideological, psychological, and material needs manufactured by capitalism, needs for material goods, romantic love, and the security involved in having what one knows confirmed. But there is also what might be termed a symbolic exchange value. In the distance between the immediate, if short-lived, gratification and the selfinterested yearning for even more, an exchange is demanded of the spectator; this exchange expresses the social value of the film as commodity, one that is not acknowledged or even necessarily realized. What is exchanged is the critical engagement necessary to make the invisible visual; the consequences of capitalism may be visible but the ways in which capitalism works remain invisible. In exchange is left a ‘structural complexity of ignorance’ (Sholette 2011:11) requiring constant reinforcement in order to sustain

Hegemony and the Culture  111 itself. The implications of this exchange are enormous and far-reaching. In the absence of the application of a critical engagement that allows for the ability to perceive the ways in which capitalism organizes our lives and how the roles we play are determined by class power, we are condemned to perpetuate a society and to reproduce the relations in which millions of people suffer hardship, desperation, and deprivation on a vast scale. What remains hidden in this moment of exchange is the discrepancy between what is supplied and what is relinquished. The transitory satisfaction the dominant film offers is exchanged for the critical engagement that might begin to view the totality of social relations. This is made possible by the fact that in all other areas of life under capitalism this exchange is the norm (Simmel 1978:80). That is, as Marx points out, exchange has to become generalized and systematic (Marx 1981:139). A specific commodity has the capacity to be a universal equivalent; according to Marx, this universal equivalent is money. The claim I make here is that the dominant film product is a particular representation of the needs of the powerful but is presented and often consumed as a universal equivalent. The effectivity of this generalization results in a singularity of response in the relationship between the spectator and the film. This is not to claim that there is not an awareness of the contradictions between what is seen on the screen and the reality of life as it is lived; this particularity masquerading, as the universal must, inevitably, create conflictual responses and generate tensions. Rather, it is to claim that the use value of mainstream films in conjunction with other ideological arenas function to close down alternatives while constantly in the process of replicating the capitalist mode of thought and relations of production, constructing them as timeless and universal. Therefore, while we refer to the use value of film, considering its exchange value to be merely an economic one, it is the exchange value of film I would argue that is the most significant. This process is not as simple as the imposition of ideologies from above concerned with the reproduction of attitudes and values. If this were true it would just be a matter of a project such as Inside Film exposing the realities of capitalism and waiting for people to demand its overthrow. The problem is a much deeper one than that. These representations contribute to the formation of psychic structures that have been formed over many years and which are replicated generationally (Lichtman 1982:11). Our consciousness is formed within an already existing set of historically specific relations (Allman 2001:38). Any destabilizing of these structures of consciousness threatens to bring into question the ontological certainties that we depend upon to make sense of the contradictions that we suffer under capitalism. To generate the pedagogic environment (and as Gramsci pointed out, all counterhegemonic work is involved with pedagogy) able to challenge the existing framework within which films are produced, consumed, and understood and to offer something which opposes itself ‘to the glossed over and bowdlerized official account’ (Black 2007:166) is an attempt to create

112  Hegemony and the Culture the conditions for a cognitive shift that brings into question the ways in which we both produce and consume films. The problems associated with the attempt to create this cognitive shift are at times almost insurmountable. There is, increasingly, a dearth of spaces, physical, educational, cultural and psychological within which to construct an oppositional model of film involved in a democratic restructuring of the social and political tenants of neoliberalism that can begin to build collective political and social alliances. As I pointed out in chapter one, this means we have no choice but to occupy already existing spaces, it is within these already existing spaces that class is lived (experienced). It therefore makes methodological sense to occupy them in an attempt to comprehend the ways in which they contribute to the formation of class and the assignment of classed ways of thinking and being. As Marx pointed out, people make history but not in conditions of their own choosing. When we come across concepts such as representation, mediation, context, and other terms routinely used in the discussion of media texts we need to be aware that we are articulating class relationships. In practice these concepts are involved in a systematic process of knowledge selection and transmission and the crystallization of particular classed perspectives while ensuring that others are not made available to us. This suggests the need to acknowledge two kinds of images: those that confirm the present structures and those that foster a critical lucidity of those structures. (Robins 1996:7). As Friere made a claim for two kinds of pedagogy—one that liberates and one that domesticates—and situated that claim within the relationship between the educator and the person learning so we must think about the visual image in terms of its relationship to the spectator and the two potential images. Benjamin’s claim that film has the power to shock seems to have lost some of its validity in the present age, but there is the possibility for it to return redefined within a visual economy concerned with the totality of working-class life. Culture, and more specifically popular culture, is the constantly shifting terrain on which competing visions concerned with the way in which we live our lives are struggled with and defined. In the next chapter, I want to look at two instances where that cultural struggle took place.

Notes   1 Raymond Williams distinguishes between alternative and oppositional cultures: both are different from the dominant society but an alternative culture creates a way of being that protects its own values while attempting to improve conditions for its members while an oppositional culture wishes to change the society in the interests of all its members (Williams 1991:415).   2 For a very necessary and brilliant analysis of this phenomenon see Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell (2017).   3 Although as Mike Wayne (2003) has pointed out, the attempt to regulate the unstable nature of capitalism began in the 1920s and 30s when huge swathes of industrial production was nationalized by the state in order to protect the stability of their own economies particularly in the face of the demands being made by organized labor. It was Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s that began to dismantle this area of the state.

Hegemony and the Culture  113   4 As Harvey (2005:215–216) has pointed out, neoliberal lack of respect for legalities can be traced back to the 1973 coup in Chile that was backed by the United States and which overthrew the democratically elected Left government of Salvador Allende and reconstructed Chile’s economy as a privatized free market, free trade one.   5 This contention is borne out by the increasing global gap between the rich and the poor (Baird 2013; Shah 2007).   6 It is important to point out that when theorists and commentators refer to deindustrialization they are of course referring to what has happened in the more ‘developed’ countries. In many poorer countries and in those where labor laws are minimal there are vast industrial complexes where goods are produced for the affluent North.  7 https://philosophynow.org/issues/102/Prison_Doesnt_Work.  8 Available at www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/FactfileJune 2012.pdf.   9 House of Commons Education and Skills Committee. Prison education: Seventh Report of Session 2004–2005, Volume I, HMSO, London, 2005. 10 The word ‘criminal’ is one I loathe using when applied to members of the working classes. It seems strange to me that the crimes committed in the name of neliberalism—where 22,000 children everyday die of preventable diseases, where children go to bed hungry, where people are killed in imperial wars—are not referred to as crimes, and yet a single mother living on a council estate who does not have the money to pay her TV license can end up with a criminal record. 11 Ball (2008:14) traces these shifts in education policy from the Conservative governments of 1979–1997 that were then carried on by Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government starting in 1997. He considers these shifts to be partly but not wholly linked to a global shift in discourses around education and knowledge acquisition (ibid:18) that have seen education—as something life enhancing and valuable in and of itself—become a commodity that can be sold in the market place to the highest bidder (ibid:23). 12 The experiences of the working class do not escape this process; they are also mediated by the institutions of neoliberalism—their experiences do not come to them directly / are not felt directly but are part of the class-determined socialization of capitalist society. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that the working-class consciousness of itself has been permeated by middle-class values and ways of viewing the world. 13 For a discussion of Kaldor’s work see Sanbonmatsu (2004:76–80).

6 Radical Cinematic Practices

The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man [sic] must prove the truth, that is actuality and power, this sidedness of his thinking. The dispute about the actuality of thinking, thinking isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question. (Marx 1980:35) The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector a gun that can shoot 24 frames a second. Solanas and Getino (1997:50)

One of the ways in which I hope to achieve some conceptual clarity in relation to the theoretical points made in the previous chapters is by discussing them within the context of two examples of radical cinematic practice: the early silent cinema of North America at the turn of the 20th century and Third Cinema, a cinema practice that has its roots in Latin America in the 1960s. Both film practices shared a conception of film as a radical pedagogic intervention into the public sphere working with and on behalf of the poor and marginalized; in the case of silent film a mainly immigrant working class population and in the case of Third Cinema the Latin American peasantry. Both practices utilized film pedagogically as a vehicle to provide information, pose crucial political questions, and examine power relations. Significantly both practices linked filmmaking and spectatorship to its ability to create an experience of resistance that could in turn translate into action for change. I hope, therefore, that it becomes apparent that I wish to situate the work of the Inside Film project within these radical ‘traditions.’ To begin the discussion I feel I need to point out that there are complex considerations to be taken into account in the claim of any cultural practice to be radical; not least the frame of reference within which the decision to designate it as radical is taken. Generally speaking, radical is a term bestowed on the film (or any other art work) that exhibits a conscious separation in form, content, and production practices from dominant products with the political intention of destabilizing the prevailing social and

116  Radical Cinematic Practices political conditions. It is primarily this intention, I would argue, that makes a cultural product radical. As a concept, a description and a practice the designation radical has conventionally been associated with socialist politics and movements; this is, counter intuitively, not always the case. Margaret Thatcher’s government, historically one of the most reactionary and rightwing governments this country has ever known has often been described as radical in its political aims and ideological intentions. John Downing, referring to radical media in generic terms, has described it as that media ‘generally small scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative to hegemonic policies, priorities and perspectives’ (Downing 2001:V). The problem I find with this definition is the lack of consideration paid to how the forms of communication and the ways in which those communications are expressed, are, generally speaking, embedded within existing power relations. It is important to note as Fisher has pointed out: ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. (2009:9) So, if we begin with the concept ‘alternative’ we can perhaps see that this is in itself problematic. In a pluralistic society that considers itself to be a democracy there will be, by definition, space for alternative points of view. In fact, the very concept of liberal democracy is heavily dependent on the ability to publicly voice alternatives to the normative processes of society within the public sphere.1 The designation alternative bestowed upon certain media practices suggests the possibility of choosing one perspective over another only within the boundaries of the already existing system. The ideological effectiveness of this is apparent, as the framework within which alternative voices can be heard is limited and remains defined by the existing status quo providing a concessionary reproduction rather than an oppositional intervention. I would argue that the transformation of the current exploitative structures within society cannot be reduced to a question of alternative viewpoints. Radicalism consists in opposition and not in choosing ‘alternatives’ easily subsumed within a paradigmatic democratic framework ultimately restricted by institutionally enforced economic and political mandates. The Inside Film project is radical because it attempts to offer the students not an alternative perspective but an oppositional one; not a view that can exist alongside the dominant one, but one that opposes it. What Inside Film attempts to do and what the film practices under discussion struggled to achieve is difficult and extremely complex in that they actively strived to construct new ways of approaching the question of education and different ways of producing and consuming films.

Radical Cinematic Practices  117 Radical implies a heightening of consciousness, moving cognitively from one perspective towards another with the intention of invoking change, becoming radical is a process of realization that former ideological positions are no longer viable as a means to an end and other methods must therefore be adopted to achieve any ends deemed necessary . . . radical ideas are therefore intrinsically counterhegemonic and to a certain extent form a crucial part of the dialectic of change and development, if not in real, physical terms, then at levels of perception and consciousness. (Berry and Theobald 2006:6) Whilst ‘alternative’ media form and content can offer the potential for exposing the contradictions within the existing order, the ever-increasing onslaught of media communications in today’s world results in the ‘many different forms’ that demand justice and equality being categorized generically rather than acted upon politically. Therefore, any action deriving from them is subsumed into a plurality of competing perspectives. Mainstream film theory . . . has developed a populist ‘generic’ brand of the ‘political’ . . . for reading film; it places its primary emphasis on the ‘resistance’ of the subject as ‘agent’ rather than on the ‘domination of the prevailing social arrangements.’ (Zavarzadeh 1991:31) I am not suggesting here that there is only one perspective that is the true one; but I am defining radical practice as one that engages with the question of class as the predominant social determinant in our lives. As Tom Hickey succinctly argues: Historical materialism explains social development by reference to the requirements of surplus extraction by the ruling class from the labor of the direct producers. All forms of oppression are explained in relation to that. Thus, the oppression of women will take different forms in different societies, and in no society will the nature and impact of oppression be the same for all women irrespective of their class. With women from different class backgrounds experiencing oppression in radically different ways, and targeting different objectives as part of its eradication, the generic and undifferentiated category ‘women’ does not identify an effective agency of social change. Moreover . . . though many working class men may enjoy the effects of an unequal division of domestic labor which has survived from the nineteenth century, the main beneficiary of oppressive practices and ideas is capital, not men. Oppressions, in dividing the working class, operate to secure the reproduction of capital; they construct social conflict between men and women, or

118  Radical Cinematic Practices black and white, or skilled and unskilled, thereby tending to dissolve the conflict between capital and labor. It is in this sense that the Marxist argues that the whole of the working class suffers from oppression, and has an objective interest in opposing it. It is for this reason that the contemporary Marxist argues that it remains the proletariat that is the only agent of change that combines the potential power to effect social change with an objective interest in doing so. (Hickey 2000:173) According to Lukacs, the capitalist system is organized in precisely such a way so as to expose culture and consciousness to the risk of commodification. It is only the proletariat that can overcome this process, but in order to create a truly oppositional film/cultural product it is necessary, in the absence of any discourse of class justice, to oppose the parameters and shape of the existing framework. Therefore, the task is to forge a new framework that includes perspectives and ideas not normally considered and not easily assimilated into the existing framework. This means engaging not only with the end results of neoliberalism but identifying the structures in place that perpetuate and reproduce them. As significant as Downing’s concentration on the concept of ‘alternatives’ is in highlighting the lack of opposition to dominant media strategies, more important is his failure to analyze the class make-up of the new social movements, which he claims ‘represent one of the most dynamic expressions of resistance’ (Downing 2001:24). Research has demonstrated that the new social movements in the west are predominantly middle class (Claus 1985; Amin 1990; Byrne, 1997) and that political grievances tend to be channeled ‘through . . . feminist, ecological, peace, community, ethnic/nationalist and ideological demands’ (Frank and Fuentes 1987; Winlow et al. 2017: 67–68) often at the expense of class (Henry-Harter 2011:15). Many of the middle-class people in these social movements would find identification with working-class people and with their problems extremely difficult, if not impossible; their life experiences are not the same, and, as I have pointed out previously, few members of the middle classes have experienced longterm exploitation, social prejudice, employment discrimination, poverty, bad housing, poor education provision, and the concurrent problems occurring as a direct result of these ‘social ills.’ And while they might sympathize with the plight of the poor and dispossessed there is a tendency to both fear and dislike the working class on the part of the liberal left. (Winlow et al. 2017:189) This is precisely why the notion of the 99%, which has been taken up as a rallying cry by many involved in the contemporary social movements as a sign of resistance, is a problematic one. There can be no disputing its usefulness as a tool to distinguish the extremely rich and powerful from the rest of society, but its all-encompassing remit and contradictory model of inclusivity is problematic and functions to dissipate the vast and myriad differences in the lives of the 99%. Consequentially developing

Radical Cinematic Practices  119 anti-capitalist alliances between the poorest people in our society and the professional middle classes for whom economic redistribution and practicebased class politics are not overarching objectives become impossible. The result of an emphasis on the 99% is to effectively render the working class non-existent. Rather than a tool against neoliberalism it becomes in practice a method of annihilation rejecting the working class as a material category. Therefore, I would suggest, that for all their egalitarian rhetoric, the new social movements and the liberal left who are often involved in them exclude the working class precisely because of their class make-up. Downing agrees with Raboys that the problem facing the social movements is their inability to ‘organize an effective alternative media’ (Downing 2001: 30). While this claim flags up the importance of recognizing the need to utilize the media in a politically interventionist manner, again, that recognition becomes a question of offering alternatives and is reduced to the problem of how the middle classes involved in the social movements communicate their insights to one another. There is no sense in which there is the need to encourage a participatory cultural engagement with the material narratives of working-class existence or their ongoing concerns, not as told by those who have not shared the experience of that existence, but by those who are living that experience contemporaneously, and who want to tell their stories free of the social and cultural dominance of those who have not lived those experiences. Downing goes on to dismiss the trade unions—the traditional organizing point for the working class—as outdated and only being able to ‘operate laterally in an ideal world and not the real world’ by which he means their scope is confined to a utopian vision of working-class unity and collectivity and cannot therefore be expected to contribute to the contemporary struggles. As to why he might consider a vision of working class unity and collectivity to be utopian or indeed why the idea of being utopian is in direct opposition to the real he does not venture to explain. This consideration of a radical media that excludes the working classes2 and the organizations that have traditionally supported them is evidence of the need for projects such as Inside Film, anchored as they are in the daily experiences and perceptual schema of working-class people and not in the considerations, attitudes, and perspectives of a politically liberal, intellectual elite. What needs to be clarified is the relationship between a working-class experience, which takes place within situations over which the working class has very little control, and the political imposition of a framework that exists to ignore or invalidate working-class experience. Inside Film works upon the premise that experience is produced and shaped by the capitalist mode of production under which we exist. In order to comprehend the experiences of the working class, it is necessary to situate those experiences dialectically: on the one hand to see those experiences as personal and individual, but on the other hand, to recognize them as the result of broader social, political, and historical forces (Gimenez 2001: 23–33; Couldry 2010:93–96). The process of making films is, for the Inside

120  Radical Cinematic Practices Film students, one that demands the integration of the experiential, biographical, and historical perspectives of their lives and, in the process, reveals a much more complex view of social formations and the relationships they create. Making films in this way, the students are not simply ‘finding their own voices, ’ nor do we consider ourselves to be ‘giving them a voice’—the students of Inside Film already have a voice. What we do is create a space where what they have to say can be articulated. As Charlesworth has argued (2000:8) the dominated nature of working-class lives garners its effectivity as a consequence of the ‘discourses used to bestow intelligibility on everyday experiences.’ As a group the Inside Film students, through a process of examining these discourses by way of discussion, dialogue, debate, and sometimes heated argument, develop a visual literacy which means that they can begin to reframe (literally) the taken-for-granted realities of everyday life, creating the potential for them to become counterposed to the realities of their own lives. They can create a visual narrative in which their image no longer signifies an ‘ideological enemy’ but one that contests the reductionism involved in dominant perspectives. Critical enquiry and engagement is a necessary component for creating awareness of the structures of capitalism, revealing the ways in which these structures function. But it is as well to remember that the ability to critique a society is not in itself sufficient to change that society in which we live to be a more democratic equal one. But it is a first and necessary stage in the process. Central to a strategy of contestation, politicization, and transformation which the Inside Film project aspires to is the disruption of accepted versions of reality. Dominant films posit the subject as image but in the process convert some images, such as those of the working class, into objects. When this occurs the image/object circulates and becomes, as I have argued, the currency of representation. The exchange value of this currency is dependent upon the extent to which it confirms the working class as a commodity readily exploited in the interest of a ruling elite. This objectification and concomitant commodification can be challenged only when the working class is in a position to construct themselves as subjects able to assert the validity of their experiences within a contradictory system structured upon the disarticulation and containment of class conflict. The practice of ‘teaching’ film for the Inside Film project is one that contrasts with the top down hierarchal methods embedded within neoliberal technocratic, managerial, and increasingly financialized teaching institutions where education is interpreted as a commodity to be sold in the marketplace. The form the Inside Film teaching sessions take is based on what can be best described as the ‘participatory democracy’ model. (Freire 1975; Fielding and Moss 2010; Dewy 1887). This model begins with where the students are, not where a preconceived conception of education thinks they should be. It is a revolt against the perceived ignorance of the working class and a response to the dominance of the neoliberal perspectives that

Radical Cinematic Practices  121 dominate hegemonic thinking in relation to education. Of course, without doubt it is of the utmost importance to challenge neoliberalism politically and economically, but a coherent and consistent fight back begins at the level of ideas. Inside Film has seen the struggle to promote this form of democratic pedagogic practice when we worked for a year in the University of Caracas in Venezuela.3 In contrast to the representative democracies of Western countries, in Venezuela we witnessed an attempt to include all people in the decision-making process, not only those elected to government. This model of education travels far beyond that which is taught in the confines of the classroom and considers education as an ongoing process that occurs in all areas of life. This is what Inside Film aspires to achieve on a micro scale: the inclusion of all the participants in the decision-making process from start to finish, considering all ideas and contributions to carry equal weight and all disagreements to be discussed collectively. Knowledge, therefore, is not preconceived but is actively constructed through the process of discussion, debate, and filmmaking. There is no lesson preparation for the students, no testing, and no penalties for being late or for non-attendance. There are no hierarchies and, because we are not linked to any institutions, there is no pretense at neutrality. As Kozol has argued, there is no such thing as a ‘neutral skill, ’ nor is there a ‘neutral education.’ (We) can learn to read and write in order to understand instructions, dictates and commands. Or else (we) can read in order to grasp the subtle devices of their own manipulation—the methods and means by which a people may be subjugated and controlled. Oppenheimer, working on the final stages of development of the atom bomb, and his co-worker Fermi (said) that they were ‘without special competence on the moral question. . . . ‘It is this, not basic skills but basic competence for basic ethical enquiry and indignation, that is most dangerously absent in our schools and society today. (Kozol 1980:89) We provide the students with empirical case studies of oppositional film practices and political configurations. We talk of Third Cinema and early North American silent film (the two practices we are discussing in this chapter). We discuss Venezuela and Chile, deaths in police custody in the United Kingdom, the link between class and imprisonment and the ratio of working-class to middle- and upper-class people in prison, racial segregation in the United States of America, and apartheid in South Africa. If a student introduces a particular subject such as religion, food, homosexuality we will stop what we are doing and have that discussion. All discussions allow for the expression of differing viewpoints but we attempt to contextualize these viewpoints, for example, those aligned to homophobia and negative gender assumptions, as part of a larger totality of division and inequality, and we

122  Radical Cinematic Practices situate attempts to polarize and objectify as part of a hegemonic project to discourage cohesion, cooperation, and collective understanding. Consequently, students attend the course because they are motivated to do so and not because they are forced to.4

Silent Cinema, Third Cinema In the light of my previous discussion considering subjectivity as a historically dependent social formation, which, under capitalism, is produced in order to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist system, one of the significant links between the two radical filmmaking practices I have cited is the attempt to intervene in the universalizing strategies of capitalism in order to create a consciously oppositional subjectivity, a politicized consciousness linked to broader democratic projects involved in exposing the realities of lives oppressed by economic subjugation. The structurally dominant films with which we are all familiar are ‘firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius and the original version and thus are often conservative in their very structure’ (Steyerl 2012:35). The dominant Hollywood text reproduces the subject positions necessary for the continuation of the social relations current under the present neoliberal system. As spectators, we are familiar with these subject positions intersecting as they do with other ideological systems of intelligibility that are generally the main ones accessible to us. Consequently, watching the films most easily accessible confirms and naturalizes our present positioning within the social order. We recognize and respond to the familiar and taken-for-granted—that is narratives, characters, and interpretive frameworks that offer subject positions reinforcing white, middle class, able-bodied, heterosexual, entrepreneurial, individualistic identities and which posit the presently existing reality as universal, natural, and unchanging. Therefore the film is most intelligible to us if we accept the subject positions that are proffered and which exist within the framework of the dominant ideology (Zavarzadeh 1991:19). Accepting this ideological framework has the effect on the spectator of equating the available meaning with the already existing meaning and, in the process, contains the ways in which we might consider the ‘possible.’ Film spectatorship, as Zavarzadeh has pointed out, is itself a political act, wherein the spectator learns their place within the class structures of society (1991:16). This is not to suggest that there are not moments of ideological incoherence within the mainstream commercial film but, as this work is at pains to point out, there is a need to provide a level of visual literacy able to ‘decode’ the film and understand moments of resistance and incoherence ‘finding a truth which has previously been obscured by accommodation to everyday life’ (Alea 1988:45). Our aim is to rupture the super structural codes and constantly repeated visual conventions whose function is the rationalization and

Radical Cinematic Practices  123 legitimization of the present inhumane treatment of the marginalized and which are disseminated and justified within the mainstream media product. The early days of filmmaking in North America and the filmmaking practice known as Third Cinema, at first glance, appear to be discrete types of filmmaking practices belonging to different social and historical eras. And, of course, superficially they do. In creating a theoretical framework that links cinema practices separated geographically and temporally by 50 or more, I am suggesting there have been specific moments in the history of cinema when social struggle and radical filmmaking have become linked in ways that have made possible intervention within the public sphere as part of an ideological struggle for the transformation of society. These ‘specific moments’ only make sense if cinematic history is constituted as part of a broader cultural and political history of communication and representation linked not only to the historical movements of the time but to the wider struggles of working class people to transform the social world. This view demands a rejection of the deterministic, evolutionism of the teleological approach of such theorists as Bordwell and Thompson (2004) in order to constitute film and filmmaking itself as part of an ongoing class struggle. Any attempt to understand the connections I am proposing between these two filmmaking practices make it essential to identify connections that link them ideologically and institutionally in relation to the articulation of their political intentions, production practices, and spectatorial strategies. A radical filmmaking practice cannot of itself lead to the transformation of social relations but, as part of a wider network of practices linked to resistance, it can communicate contradictions in the interdependent relationship of the working class and capitalism while at the same time highlighting the commonalties of the international working class and the specificities of discrete national groups. Although Inside Film is a filmmaking project and the end-product of the course is a short film, it is not the film itself that is the most important component of the course. For Inside Film making a film is a process concerned with integrating political discussion, ideological interventions, and the rejection of the individual as the starting point of debate and action and the raising of a collective consciousness. The course does not achieve these aims with radical representations of prisoners or the working class, and for the most part teaching is constructed around a series of mainstream, ideologically conservative visual texts often concerned with reinforcing dominant ideological constructions of class, race, and gender. As a strategy for engaging the Inside Film students with theoretical perspectives of class and the dominant ideological position of the mainstream media, it is very successful, for two reasons: firstly, the students are familiar with the forms of the media we present them with through their own viewing habits. Secondly, they instantly recognize the characters and situations taking place on the screen, often accepting them as realistic, even when they fail to ‘fit’ their

124  Radical Cinematic Practices own lives. Furthermore, the presumed universality of mainstream cinematic representations creates a contradictory tension between the normative concessions to neoliberal conditions of mainstream cinematic representations and the inequalities that, as members of the working class, they are made aware of daily Contradictions, Marx claimed, were inherent within the forces and relations of the capitalist mode of production. The material consequences of this mode of production are denied by the forces of capital, which ensures the experiences of the working class are obscured, distorted, or eradicated. The inherent ideological compliance of mainstream modes of filmmaking and the theoretical tools which are applied to analyze them results in an explanatory model where working-class experience is placed beyond the reach of mainstream representational strategies and are excluded from the theoretical constructs that confer viability upon those strategies. The dominant middle-class expectations and norms of educational practice are often brought by the students into the learning situation, in particular deference to an assumed superior knowledge and an expectation of being told what the right kind of knowledge consists of and how it should be applied. One of the first tasks of Inside Film is to convince the students that transformational knowledge and radical cinematic practice cannot be taught but rather it is a ‘constant and methodological exercise of practice, search and experimentation’ (Solanas and Getino 1997:48). The theoretical knowledge we provide at the beginning of the course is subject to reframing and rejection because this is knowledge that might not ‘fit’ the perspective of the people who participate in the course or might not make sense in relation to their experiences; the practice of radical pedagogy allows for the legitimacy of dominant ideas to be contested, as Castoriadis has argued: the very object of praxis is the new, and this cannot be reduced to the simply materialized tracing of a pre-established rational order. In other words its object is the real and not a stable, limited dead artifact. (Castoriadis 2005:77) Central to the analysis of film practices in the distant past from the vantage point of the present is the attempt to view these practices not simply as film history, but as cultural practices determined by classed experience. This makes it possible to reclaim and share experiences that have been reconstructed by dominant cinematic regimes or, quite simply, ignored. This is not simply a question of unearthing that which has become lost or purposely obscured by a neoliberal narrative that would deny continuities. To view these historical film practices as sites of recovered memory can suggest continuity and identify change in relation to the material conditions of working class people in the present moment. The official version of events constructs an evolutionary linear history that chooses to forget the perspective of the powerless and the downtrodden. At the same time, it authorizes responses

Radical Cinematic Practices  125 to injustice as carefully delineated historical actions disconnected from contemporary struggles, therefore depriving those struggles of the power to provide the political impetus necessary to situate them within ongoing and wider structures of oppression. By reclaiming these perspectives, contextualizing them, and making them ‘ideologically visible’ they become not history but memory. The image of workers from other eras and the struggles they undertook are not frozen in time but become viable contributions to ongoing contemporary struggles speaking not only to contemporary experiences but creating a consciousness of a collective class identity. Knowledge of working-class struggles encapsulated within past production processes is crucial to an understanding of the uneven development of hegemonic representation of the working class and the ongoing struggle around cultural forms. Analytically speaking film practice can be viewed as falling into two broad categories, the popular and the experimental—the dilemma here, as Lovell (1980:77) pointed out, and as I discuss above, is that the popular has been directly implicated in bourgeois ideology while experimental forms of filmmaking involve a cultural and educational capital not accessible to the working class. Trotsky argues that the relationship between art and social and political change can only be mediated through the prism of experience: It is silly, absurd, and stupid to the highest degree, to pretend that art will remain indifferent to the convulsions of our epoch. The events are prepared by people, they are made by people, they fall upon people and change these people. Art directly or indirectly, affects the lives of the people who make or experience the events. (2005:32) This would appear to describe a way of grasping the political and historical specificity of all cultural products allowing for an exploration of the attitudes and ideological standpoints that informs them. Terry Eagleton makes a similar point in his discussion of literature that can equally be applied to film. He points out (Eagleton 1976) that whatever form it (the art product) might take, it cannot be conceived as simply reflecting the reality of the social world; all art plays an active role in the construction of the social world and is itself a social practice. In the intentional structuring of a conjuncture between filmic images of the past and those of the present, it is possible to demonstrate the ways in which classed experiences from different eras are connected. It provides the people who watch these films with a sense of their own past not, an individual past but a collective one. Failure to view history in this way results as, Eagleton informs us during his discussion of Benjamin, in the relegation of the past to a safe distance where it poses no threat and in effect serves no purpose (Eagleton 1981:45). Both models of filmmaking under discussion grew out of periods of enormous social and cultural flux and change and both were dependent on

126  Radical Cinematic Practices emerging new technologies. Early North American silent cinema saw the introduction of the new technology of the movie camera itself. This new invention allowed for the representation of working-class life in a manner never before possible and offered the potential for people from other classes, completely unaware of working class life, to become more informed. Workingclass life was not just visual it became visible. Technologically speaking, Third Cinema benefitted from the new lightweight cameras and sound recording equipment that bestowed a previously unimagined mobility and economic accessibility making it possible for filmmakers to travel, particularly to remote areas. In turn this increased access to filmmaking for those previously excluded from being involved in filmmaking. Some of the circumstances that delayed the use of films as a revolutionary tool until a short time ago were lack of equipment, technical difficulties, the compulsory specialization of each phase of work, and high costs. The advances that have taken place within each specialization; the simplification of movie cameras and tape recorders; improvements in the medium itself, such as rapid film that can be shot in normal light; automatic light readers; improved audio visual synchronization; and the spread of know-how by means of specialized magazines with large circulations and even through non specialized media, have helped to demystify filmmaking and divest it of that almost magic aura that made it seem that film were only within the reach of ‘artists, ’ geniuses, and ‘the privileged.’ Filmmaking is increasingly within the reach of larger social layers. (Solanas and Getino 1997:44–45) It is not difficult to see how Inside Film itself has been the beneficiary of the more recent technological advances. Handheld cameras, editing software, and laptops have made it possible for us to take equipment into prisons and other confined spaces and set up in small areas not necessarily designed for film production. Editing can be done on site with special effects and soundtracks added without having to leave the room. Then as now new media and communication technologies offered the potential for a reimagined public sphere with the possibility of posing a radical challenge to the established institutionally concentrated structures of control, ownership, and the concomitant subjectivity formations of the mainstream media.5 The development of a truly democratic inclusive media can reframe the parameters of involvement and discussion, and in the process integrate political action in order to create a truly inclusive public sphere. As Benjamin was aware, this is possible because technologies of reproduction such as film have the potential to widen knowledge of the world beyond one’s own experience: Our taverns, our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up

Radical Cinematic Practices  127 hopelessly. Then came film and burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second/ (Benjamin 1999:229) The democratic and transformative potential of any radical film practice lies in its ability to begin to communicate areas of social life that until that point have been concealed, ignored, or skimmed over, and in the process it can expose the ways in which they are connected to class domination and political control. We are not just concerned with making films that illustrate or document, we want to intervene in the situation in order to bring about change (Solanas and Getino 1997:47). In the early days of cinema in North America, film was able to expose the class divisions that were hidden, taken for granted, or simply not known about. This was made possible because, unlike newspapers and periodicals, film as a visual medium was not dependent on skills such as reading and was therefore accessible to immigrant and illiterate workers and ‘reached a genuinely mass audience that cut across class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, age, language, geography and political affiliation’ (Ross 2011). Like the Third Cinema practitioners of 50 years later, the goal of the filmmakers was to produce films that engaged with working- class lives and that represented class struggle in a positive way. Films were made for an audience marginalized and exploited by the dominant conditions of that particular contemporary moment. Both models were overtly political and make clear that their aim was the dissemination of knowledge of injustice, the liberation of the working class, and, in the case of Third Cinema, a contribution to anti-colonial struggles.

Working Class Film Before Hollywood In its initial stages, film (particularly in North America) was utilized by the working class as a form of not simply entertainment but of education and of propaganda. Working-class organizations and societies quickly realized the potential of film to unite diverse members of the working class: By creating a common link between millions of working people who were often divided by ethnicity, religion, race, and gender, movies emerged as a vehicle capable of expressing a new public identity dominated by working class sensibilities. (Ross 1998:12)6 Political radicals and trade unionists were very quick to realize the organizing potential of this new form of communication and began to make and screen pro-labor films (Ross 1998:101). These films occupied the cultural and social spaces of working class areas as records of collective experiences identified with and shared by the people who watched the films. This public

128  Radical Cinematic Practices sharing of experiences recognized across gender and ethnic lines nurtured awareness and radicalism and created a demand for working-class stories told from a working-class perspective to be seen within a public sphere occupied by the working class (Ross 1998:12). This was a both a participatory and oppositional public sphere separate from the state and populated by a diverse working class. It was not simply a case of creating a space for workers to let off steam or congregate together socially at film screenings. The ‘spaces’ opened up by the films were economic, social, and political and enabled workers to communicate their collective struggles, gain knowledge of their shared exploitation, and initiate plans of resistance. The important point to make here in relation to the concept of ‘the public, ’ is that the public is generally conceived as a ‘group that enjoys commonalties’ (Zarhani 2011) who come together to participate in rational and reasoned debate. As this work has been at great pains to point out the working class as a class have experiences that differ very much from those of other classes within society. The traditional public sphere as Habermas envisaged it was, as critics (Negt and Kluge 1993) have pointed out, exclusionary and elitist in the way in which it took for granted levels of education and certain experiences which excluded the working class, women, and children. The public sphere as it existed at this time was not a public sphere that included the working class, and we can see in the film culture of this period a struggle to have working-class culture and working-class knowledge included. These early silent films bear witness to how the frames of reference within the public sphere are constantly shifting and taking new forms. These films made before the First World War were watched by working-class people, made by working-class people, and it was their lives that often provided the subject material of those films (Ross 1998:6–7). The visibility of the working-class life on the screen included for instance trade union meetings, the exposure of factory conditions, and the necessity of strikes. They bore witness to the potential of film to contribute to the material expression of the experiences of working class people and created the possibility of an inclusive, dialogic public sphere. As Ross has pointed out it was not simply working-class organizations that took advantage of the new technology of film, ‘far-sighted unionists, radicals, capitalists and reformers understood the enormous power of this new medium’ (Ross 2011) and were also producing films and putting forward their point of view. This plurality of perspectives regardless of the ideological underpinning of individual films allowed film not only to intervene in an inclusive public sphere encouraging debate, involvement, and action but also to actually function as a distinct pubic sphere denoting a discursive matrix or process through which social experience is articulated, interpreted, negotiated and contested in an intersubjective potentially collective and oppositional form. (Hansen 1993:201)

Radical Cinematic Practices  129 Hansen points to how at this time ‘the Nickelodeon was hailed as ‘democracy’s theatre, ’ ‘the laboring man’s university, ’ or striking a moralistic tone, ‘a worthy rival of the saloon’ (1993:147). She also points to the work of Dieter Prokop whose study of pre-1908 cinematic production demonstrate how films produced at this time were anchored in the situations and experiences of the predominantly working class immigrant population who watched them and who were involved in making them (ibid).7 At this time (like the present time) representations of the working class, their concerns, desires, wants, and needs were not being organized or defined within the bourgeois public sphere whose narrow perspective did not include the hardships and discontinuities of working-class life. The introduction into the public sphere of films that allowed for the experiences being shown on the screen to be linked to interventionist political projects were designed to transform the conditions of the working class. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers—a term I use to describe movies made by individual workers, labor unions, worker-owned companies, or members of radical organizations like the Socialist Party— made films that challenged the dominant political ideas of the days and offered millions of viewers positive visions of what it meant to be working class. Moreover, they attempted to use those visions to show working people how to transform their lives, their government, and their nation. (Ross 2011) Like Ross, Tom Gunning believed early cinema had the potential to develop in ways other to which it did. There were, he claimed, ‘a number of roads not taken’ (Gunning 1983:366) and as Ross has pointed out these roads were fought over in myriad ways. From 1907 until the coming of sound in the late 1930s, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry personal, and federal agencies over the kinds of class images audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own time, for the winners got to shape the dominant images of class and radical politics in twentieth century America. Indeed, many of our present cinematic images and understanding of class relations—the nature of labor unions, radicalism, mass movements, being working class or middle class- are, partially, the result of the battle for control of the silent screen. (Ross 2011; italics added) According to Gunning, early cinema was ‘a cinema of attractions.’ This is a term he borrowed from Eisenstein and is clearly an attempt to link the practice of early silent cinema with the political promise of the Russian

130  Radical Cinematic Practices revolution of 1917 and the innovative practice of Soviet Cinema. The implication was that it was possible to conceptualize early film as having a transformative political potential and relate the image to the response of film spectators in revolutionary Russia. Gunning’s argument insists upon the relationship between early cinema films and the political potential of the image when it is utilized to raise consciousness. Eisenstein’s conception of the cinema of attractions (Eisenstein 1988) was predicated on shocking the spectator, jolting them out of their comfortable acceptance of, and absorption within, a system responsible for their exploitation. This would be achieved by involving the spectator in the active construction of meaning. By juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated images side by side a third image would take place in the spectator’s mind that would construct a new meaning. This ‘montage of attractions’ provided a cinematic shock to the system and would constitute a radical jolt unconducive to passively accepting what was shown on the screen and would stimulate and potentially radicalize the audience.8Eisenstein was not alone in his belief that film held a revolutionary potential in its power to shock and destabilize the existing status quo as Gunning’s work on early cinema and Benjamin’s claim for the power of film both demonstrate. The rationalization and consolidation of filmmaking by the businessmen who wanted to control the production, content, and exhibition of filmmaking took place throughout the teens. By the 1920s the radicalism of the movie industry diminished, and the standardization and commodification of film meant that it was no longer a geographically dispersed industry open to trade unionists and political activists to make films but a business where the radicalism of the working classes was transformed into the desires of the middles classes. As Mitchell has argued, the monopolization of filmmaking by business had a more profound effect on the content and technique of films than any technical innovation, change in the audience or epochal event, control off cinematic production with high levels of financial investment led to a lack of innovation not only at the aesthetic and technical level but also at the level of content—experimentation and risk taking became anathema to the business men now running the film industry in the pursuit of profit. (Mitchell 1991:255) As both Ross and Butsch have made clear the trajectory of the North American and European cinemas was predicated not on a linear progression of technical advances but rather on the choices made, choices that were influenced by class. This becomes quite clear when we consider how the economic consolidation of the American film industry led not only to a change in the methods of filmmaking but also to a change in the content of the films that were produced (Mitchell 1979:66). This was particularly noticeable

Radical Cinematic Practices  131 in the representation of the rich (ibid). In the films made before the consolidation of the industry the rich were often portrayed in a very negative light, and their callous actions were depicted as being directly responsible for many of the evils that befell the working class. Conscious decisions made by the businessmen who now controlled the industry resulted in changes in the representation of class relations and a shift away from blaming the rich to blaming lazy workmen and irresponsible unions. The depiction of the rich was not the only element of film that worried the businessmen intent on consolidating their power within the fledging film industry. While they were beginning to shape this new technology in ways that contained any threat to the status quo, they were also worried about the possibility that films might undermine the state and the institutions that sustained it. There was a growing fear amongst the middle classes that films were being made that called into question the power of the dominant culture by mocking strict Victorian sexual codes and by attacking the traditional authority of the police, employers, clergy, and politicians (Ross 1998:30; Butsch 2000:29). Middle- and upper-class reformers worried about the lower classes absorbing dangerous ideas from movies, many made by immigrants themselves. Lists of topics to be avoided in movies included workers’ strikes . . . recreational surveys . . . were sponsored by private elite groups and directed primarily at gathering data on working-class neighbourhoods and working-class children. (Butsch 2000:28) These fears were exacerbated by the international upheavals caused as result of the First World War and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution (Shaull 2000:7). At this stage of cinematic development films were not self-enclosed entities where the spectacle, the story, the message were all contained discretely within the film. Rather at this time, films were part of more general performances that included lectures, discussion and other attractions: The conception of film exhibition as a live performance (the incompleteness of the film as a circulated commodity) created a margin of improvisation, interpretation and unpredictability which made it a public event in the emphatic sense, a collective horizon in which industrially processed experience could be reappropriated by the experiencing subjects. (Negt and Kluge 1993:208) The reality of working-class life shown on the screen in films made by the working classes connected the social, the political, the cultural, and the economic in ways not determined by a powerful elite. The collective public nature of film production and exhibition promoted a mutual sense of solidarity that cohered with the power of cinema to reach so many people

132  Radical Cinematic Practices encouraged an engagement with the realities of working class life and economic exploitation that had previously been impossible. This was an intervention in the public sphere not as Habermas had envisaged it (for Habermas, questions of class are secondary to considerations of fair and just agreement and discussion) but an intervention that exposed the ways in which this conception of the public sphere functions to exclude those who do not have the requisite skills, or time to contribute to this ideal space (Negt and Kluge 1993:208). This was a cinematic public sphere occupying the already existing public sphere to include, however tenuously, those whose economic position had previously excluded them; what made it possible was cultural production mediated by a consciously classed based radical resistance. The early filmmakers were concerned to use film as a means of communicating information about their lives. The films they made demonstrated the contrast between how society presents itself and how dependent that society is on the exploitation of the working class and the class antagonisms that result from this relationship. Film became a social practice that could work to oppose the domination of capital whilst creating a truly popular culture not dependent on the affirmation of the middle classes. The movies were not simply gathering places . . . they were centres of communication and cultural diffusion. What was most galling to many well to do city districts, suburbs and small towns was the idea that working men [sic] and immigrants had found their own source of entertainment and information- a source unsupervised and unapproved by the churches and school, the critics and professors who served as caretakers and disseminators of the official . . . culture. (Sklar 1994:18–19) Film was relatively cheap before the advent of multi-reel features which meant various groups of reformers, trade unions, reform organizations, and other interest groups utilized film to intervene in public debates and for the first time to make visible the places of work that had until then remained invisible to all except those who worked in them (Ross 1998:6–7) This was an intervention into political and public narratives that was able to amplify the conditions under which people were living and working, build alliances, and have an effect on how the public and decision makers viewed the working class. What people saw on the screen could sway public policy. Films advocating the abolition of child labor, prison reform, and factory safety laws helped raise public awareness and, in so doing, eased passage of laws aimed at correcting these problems. By making class conflict visible, movies played an equally important role in shaping public responses to hotly contested class issues. (Ross 1998:10; italics added)

Radical Cinematic Practices  133 Cinema at its inception in North America was a politically committed form of filmmaking, and those involved in making the films recognized that working class solidarity had the power to transform the economic and political base of society. Its aim was to educate and entertain not only the working classes but also other classes and to agitate for not only a change in the conditions of the working class but a revolutionary overthrow of those in power. Although this may sound suspiciously like hyperbole it is nothing of the kind—as Ross has declared—the struggle over the American film industry ‘was one of the greatest power struggles in American history, (it was) a struggle for the control of the American consciousness’ (Ross 1998:10). The rise of the studio system and the monopolization of distribution and exhibition by the major chains decimated the promise that this new industry had held for working people. It became much more difficult, both physically, in terms of distribution and exhibition, and economically as monopolization and patents of equipment increased prices, for working-class people to access the means of production necessary to make and distribute films. The businessmen who had invested in the studios were ideologically motivated to not show films that stirred up discontent in the working population or that alienated the cross-class audiences that they were desperate to attract to the movie theaters. Censorship and the rise of the star system also contributed to control being removed from the workers directly engaged in the making of the films (Ross 1998, 2011). The business of filmmaking was removed from working-class filmmakers who directed, acted, wrote, and shot the films and whose lives and concerns were the subject matter of the films and was placed in the hands of businessmen whose only allegiance was to the corporate heads (Mitchell ibid; Ross 1998, 2011). Film became a hegemonic tool representing the particular needs of the powerful presented as the universal needs of all. According to Ross the labor-capital genre (films dealing with labor unrest and class conflict) were very popular between 1917–1922 and on average 31 labor-capital films were released every year during this period. This situation dramatically altered after 1923 and, between then and 1929, these types of films only averaged approximately six a year (ibid: 44). It is also important to note here that many of the films released before US involvement in World War I were supportive of the working-class and labor struggles (ibid:41). After the First World War, films began to ignore the workplace and the struggles for justice the unions were involved in. They concentrated on the heterosexual romance and offered people a subject position that normalized middle-class experiences, aspirations, and attitudes (Ross 1998:211) through the subjective desires of the individual protagonist. The collectivist thrust of the early years was contained by the ideological concentration on the fulfillment of individual desires. As the wealthy began to dominate the film industry, films portraying the rich in a positive light began to proliferate; films critical of the wealthy and the powerful almost completely disappeared. By the 1920s, radical and

134  Radical Cinematic Practices innovative cinema and the politically conscious working class who made it to all intents and purposes had been subsumed within the capitalist industry. The expense of filmmaking with finances increasingly centralized on Wall Street, and the difficulty in exhibiting the film product meant that for the majority of working-class people and working-class organizations opportunities for autonomous control over the filmmaking process became increasingly difficult. Significantly as Ross points out before 1917, the film industry was not organized into unions, and consequently there were very few trade disputes which meant that it was ‘easy for producers to be tolerant of unions on the screen when they did not have to battle them off the screen’ (ibid:33); This attitude began to change after 1916 when workers began to unionize (ibid:40). Working-class opposition to capitalism became a demand to be included on better terms.

Third Cinema Third Cinema9 both in theory and in practice was a radical, political cinema utilized in the pursuit of justice for those suffering social and political injustices under the auspices of colonialism. Technological advances in the late 1950s and early 1960s that produced lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment made possible a filmmaking practice linked physically to the working class, as well the rural proletariat and peasants. Cameras and recording equipment could be transported to places that had previously been difficult to reach, and films could be made on location Third Cinema grew out of the major political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s and was given its original impetus by the success of the Cuban revolution in 1959, producing a generation of filmmakers and theorists dissatisfied with what they saw as the limitations of First Cinema (Commercial Hollywood cinema) and Second Cinema (European Authorial Art cinema). This politically motivated rejection of the contemporary established modes of filmmaking initiated the demand, not merely for an alternative model of cinema, but for an oppositional model of filmmaking. Solanas and Getino coined the term Third Cinema in their essay written in 1969 ‘Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World’. This manifesto is an attempt to define a cinema conceptually, politically, and formally different from the types of filmmaking they were in the process of rejecting. They drew attention to the effects of colonialism in Latin America at that time and called for a cinema adequate to representing those effects and to participating in the struggle to overcome them. They considered existing forms of habitual expression to be embedded within established power relations, contributing to distorted modes of thought which affected the formation of subjectivity. The result of this for the dispossessed they claimed was that the discourses, frames of reference, and forms of knowledge made available to them to make sense of the world were limited to those that presently existed and which reflected

Radical Cinematic Practices  135 the views of the dominant classes. These dominant views erased or misrepresented the history and the culture of the indigenous people of Latin America recreating them in ways that concealed the crimes of the colonial imperialists who had dominated the continent for so long. Third Cinema sought to meld a radical conceptual framework as a means of rejecting selfserving Eurocentric myths, images and histories with a consciously political mode of film practice. To create a model of filmmaking and consumption that contested and challenged the status quo by making visible those who images were excluded in order to sustain the colonial consensus. Solanas and Getino considered a crucial part of the role of Third Cinema to be the ‘decolonization of culture’ which would result in the potential to construct a liberated subjectivity. The achievement of this aim is dependent not only on recognizing that the ways in which we think are inherited but also on acknowledging the political nature of cultural work. Landy has claimed that in order to confront the idea of culture as political we must be prepared to rethink the word political ‘in the context of the critical work that has been done since the 1960s on gender, sexuality, national identity, globality, and the role of intellectuals’ (xxiv: 1994). The danger inherent in following this strategy lies in what appears to be an uncritical acceptance of that work as a starting point. The failure to acknowledge the perspective of explanatory theories, detached, as they often are, from the actuality of working-class lives, lies in not recognizing ‘critical work, ’ itself as a facet of class interests. The majority of the ‘critical work’ that Landy refers to has been carried out in a university setting and not in consultation with working-class people. Unless the working class is included in this ‘rethinking, ’ it remains a pointless exercise confined to an academia which functions implicitly to exclude the working class. It is important to recall Gramsci’s insistence on the necessity of the oppressed producing ‘organic intellectuals’ from within their own ranks was predicated on a politically conscious, organized working class. This itself is only possible when the working class produce critical work rooted in working class experiences. Both film practices under consideration here were concerned with the experience of alienation and exploitation and the mediation of the knowledge shaped by those experiences. The denial and suppression of workingclass knowledge and the repression of working-class experiences is a form of censorship (Stead 2001:52) that contributes to the prevention and suppression of the development of forms of cultural knowledge that have the potential to transform into political knowledge. These film practices shared a conception of experience that was both individual and classed, that is they were concerned with the collective experience of being working class. While the experience of class is felt profoundly at an individual level, the aim of these film practices was to make manifest the multiple and overlapping social and political outcomes of those experiences. A coherent political intervention is dependent on recognizing experiences as classed engagements with the world that are active in the creation of subjectivity.

136  Radical Cinematic Practices The most important application of the theoretical underpinning of Third Cinema is linked to the practice of a specific film The Hour of the Furnaces (Dir: Solanas and Getino 1968) in ways that make impossible any attempt to separate the two. Crucially for Solanas and Getino, Third Cinema, like the earlier silent film we have just been discussing, was never purely a theoretical concept but was always first and foremost a cinema of ‘intervention’ whose purpose it was to bring about change in the world. Revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one that illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation; rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. To put it another way, it provides, discovery through transformation. (Solanas and Getino 1997:47 original emphasis) Radical cinema cannot simply be an aesthetic question of new forms or different content dedicated to portraying those who are often ignored or willfully misrepresented in a more positive light. Any attempt to create a truly radical cinema with the aim of intervening in and reconfiguring current political debates must, as these examples demonstrate, encompass all aspects of filmmaking including those of production, exhibition, and spectatorship within a classed framework. The finished product, the film, is the culmination of all of these and cannot be considered radical unless the categories have been complicated and reconstructed in ways that change the condition of the cinematic product, considering the whole process and all the social and political implications that are a consequence of moving away from the isolated insularity of the text. This will result in the necessity of engaging with the ‘history, politics and social context’ of filmmaking (Burton 1997:158). To produce films that fulfill this criteria demands of those making the film, exhibiting, and viewing the film that they interrogate and critically engage with existing images while at the same time demonstrating a commitment to the creation of oppositional ones. For Solanas and Getino this involved the disruption of the relationship between the spectator and the image. Hour of the Furnaces was made in chapters so that the film could be easily stopped and what had just been viewed could be discussed, questions could be raised, points debated We realized that the most important thing was not the film and the information in it so much as the way this information was debated. One of the aims of such films is to provide the occasion for people to find themselves and speak about their own problems. The projection becomes a place where people talk out and develop their awareness. We learnt the importance of this space: cinema here becomes humanly useful. (Quoted in Channan 1997:372)

Radical Cinematic Practices  137 The concept of space here is an important one because it restructures the conceptualization of space and its relationship to those who use it. It allows us to begin to construct an oppositional filmmaking practice that uses other forms of articulation than the one we are familiar with and which play a part in our oppression. A radical democratic space is one not dominated by those who already ‘know’ but one occupied by those rejecting established knowledge—it allows for the articulation of the antagonistic and oppositional discourses that First and Second Cinema practices generally speaking close down. It understands the importance of creating horizontal relationships that make possible the integration of theory and practice. It is important to acknowledge that the experiences of space is not the same for working-class people10 as it is for the middle classes, therefore, how we theorize and makes sense of space must take into consideration how different spaces function to actively confirm classed subjectivities. The process of becoming radical filmmakers involves transforming our conception of space. Third cinemas concentration on process, practice, and product is alert to how both form and content, even when they stake out a claim different from the dominant cinematic models, can be assimilated into the capitalist framework where the power to challenge and destabilize can be dissipated and rendered harmless (Burton 1997:166). Engaging with film in relation to ideology, context, and class relations within the wider social political environment can begin to expose the ways in which the different aspects of the totality of social relations are fractured in order to deflect attention from the whole. Radical film practices demand a different conception of the relationship of film and spectator. Watching a film is a political commitment, an activity in which the spectator is invited to become part of the action. The public screenings of the Inside Film films have always included a post-screening question and answer session with the Inside Film students (as far as has been possible). When one of the films Who Am I? was shown on a television channel in Venezuela in 2008 it was presented as an example of radical pedagogy in a country that was actively looking for ways to involve the people in a participatory democracy. The films have also been shown as part of an ‘A’ level film course in a secondary school in London as examples of low-budget filmmaking. The teacher who taught the class told me that after watching these films the students raised questions concerning the justification for giving ‘criminals’ the opportunity to make films. In the act of watching these films, the spectator becomes aware of the political dimension of film and must engage critically with what they have seen: spectatorship becomes a political act This person was no longer a spectator, on the contrary, from the moment he [sic] decided to attend the showing, from the moment he [sic] lined himself up on this side . . . by contributing his living experience to the

138  Radical Cinematic Practices meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films. (Solanas and Getino 1997:54) In the early days of cinema and even at the time of Third Cinema, the image/ visual was for many people still a relatively new phenomenon, whereas in our present moment it has become the most dominant form of knowledge production. When a previous generation of Third Cinema filmmakers were active it was possible, and at time necessary, to utilize film as an alternative to the spoken word. The vast majority of the peasant population were illiterate, and watching films as a means of understanding their political situation was a way of engaging collectively with their experiences, just as the radical films in turn of the century North America meant that problems posed by illiteracy and varied immigrant languages could be overcome.11 The extension of the image industry into every area of our lives and its global links to the normalization of neoliberalism means that it is no longer a case of rejecting certain images in favor of choosing others (if it was ever that simple). Ironically, although we are bombarded with a proliferation of media images on a daily basis, the concentration of corporate control of the communication industries and the neoliberal commodification of culture has resulted in a tightly managed communication environment where counterhegemonic media has been progressively eliminated. A deregulated privatized communication industry in the hands of corporations with a global reach, whose single goal is the maximization of profit has created a ‘class society of images’ (Steyerl 2012:33) where the high resolution, professionally produced image has a legitimacy not bestowed on other kinds of images produced under very different circumstances to those of the highly regulated film and television industry standards. Espinosa argued for an ‘Imperfect Cinema’ claiming ‘perfect cinema— technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema’ (1979:22). He stated that the ability of everyone to have access to the means of making their own films was an ‘act of social justice’ and claimed the act of breaking down the barriers between the ‘professional’ and the ‘nonprofessional’ would transform ‘artistic culture.’ The circulation of the films made by the Inside Film students incorporates the model of ‘imperfect cinema’ aspired to by Espinosa as it attempts ‘to create an alternative economy of images, existing inside as well as beyond and under the commercial media streams’ (Steyerl 2012:42). The short, often angry films made on smart phones and cheap recording equipment and then uploaded onto YouTube, are the Third Cinema films of the current historical moment. One of the methods by which powerful elites have consolidated their power is through restricting access to the forces of production, in this case the media. Global technological and economic restrictions concerning access to filmmaking has long been a major problem for those who would make politically committed films exposing the

Radical Cinematic Practices  139 workings of capitalism. One of the barriers for the original producers of Third Cinema was the struggle to create alternative modes of distribution and exhibition; not only was shooting Third Cinema films dangerous, showing them could be equally hazardous. The advent of the Internet has, for the present, reframed the exhibition and distribution aspect of this predicament. While actually getting oppositional film footage remains difficult and can sometimes be dangerous particularly in places such as Iraq, or Syria, internet platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo have made it possible for politically committed filmmakers without access to the mainstream avenues of distribution and exhibition to upload and distribute their films. Generally speaking these films are not treated seriously by the mainstream film establishment. Poor images are poor because they do not reach the standard demanded by the industry and are therefore not assigned any value within a class society of images; their status as illicit or degraded grants then exemption from its criteria (Steyerl: 2012:38). Therefore, while the result is that these films are ignored by those involved in mainstream film production and are not critically discussed it does mean that there are few barriers to uploading radical content. This breaking down of barriers in the digitalized sphere offers hope of breaking down of other barriers in the capitalist free market (Sholette 2011:31). The anti-colonialism of an earlier moment of Third Cinema films has given way to an understanding of the contemporary global nature of this latest phase of capitalism. The democratic potential of the digital image reflects the liberatory potential of the lightweight equipment that made possible the post 1968 Third Cinema films. In the current historical moment, films not welcome on a festival circuit dominated by a middle-class film community often hostile to films dealing with class find a place online forging connections and passing on information that would otherwise not be available. This has been the experience of Inside Film. When we have submitted the films to ‘independent’ film festivals, we have generally met with rejection. This is particularly true of the films made by prisoners and ex-prisoners. We tend to show the films at academic conferences (where they have been rejected as ‘too challenging’) or at radical left-wing meetings where what Vertov referred to as the ‘visual bonds’ are already well established. The struggle to establish those bonds in the wider context of dominant media outlets has proved an ongoing struggle. Online dissemination of our work means that the films are in the public domain for those who are interested in what we have to say. The ideological and political movements upon which Third Cinema was premised no longer exist. After the rise of the military dictatorships in Latin American in the 1970s, radical cultural work was repressed and the conditions that had allowed Third Cinema to flourish changed. Third Cinema became, on the whole, a theoretical approach to the study of film taken up by academics in the West that responded to its theoretical concepts,

140  Radical Cinematic Practices particularly its investigation of the part played by intellectuals in the struggle (Wayne 2001:119). In the conservative climate of today’s university, Third Cinema is neglected even as an academic subject. Although there are differences of temporality, geography and culture existing between the Inside Film project and previous generations of radical filmmakers, there is also much they hold in common: the attempt to construct a cinema that interrogates the hegemonic conditions of powerful elites, the struggle to expose the unequal conditions of the society in which they live, and the insistence on the ability of people to tell their own stories based on their own experiences. When viewed in this light the similarities become striking; these filmmaking practices may be spatially and temporally separate but it is possible to connect them to a dynamic, non-commodified resistance to the forces of oppression and exploitation. The people involved in these practices developed counterhegemonic ways of viewing the world and produced their own cultural products in the hope of initiating a wider class struggle as part of a continuing and necessary demand for a transformed society; this is also the aim of Inside Film. This discussion of Third Cinema and early silent North American cinema makes clear that there is an attempt on my part to make a claim to the status of radical cinema for the Inside Film project, not in the sense that I wish to construct a linear narrative of succession or to look for continuities that manifest previous practices in the present. Rather there is an ambition to consider how a contemporary reconceptualization of radical cinema that demonstrates an awareness of the past can bear witness to the existence of counterhegemonic values embedded within oppositional practices that disprove claims of universality. This in turn makes it possible to lay the groundwork for conditions that could begin to foster the seeds of critical engagement with the system responsible for the exploitation and continuing degradation of the working class. When viewed in this light, the Inside Film project becomes less a question of giving a voice to the people who do not have one (this kind of project is one that fits smoothly into the neoliberal project of assimilating potentially egalitarian and subversive contents and aspirations into its own radar) but of finding ways to contextualize these representations and to understand the lives of the working class, particularly those whose actions are considered to be criminal. This becomes a question of how to translate the experiences of working-class life onto the screen. The condition of the working class is a direct result of the policies of successive governments and a liberal left who look to existing authorized solutions based on social reform which fail to engage not just with questions of class, but with the experiences of workingclass people. For working-class people in the United Kingdom there is at present a deep and continuing process of stigmatization (Tyler 2013) which functions to deny their social identity. In order to understand the way in which the majority of representational narratives of working-class lives contribute to this stigmatization, while at the same time obscuring the ingrained

Radical Cinematic Practices  141 inequalities and injustices inflicted on a whole section of society, there must be an understanding of the way in which that society can function only if the working class are subjugated. An analysis of Bare Inequality, a film made by two young men recently released from a young offenders institution and a woman living in a homeless hostel, highlights the growing distance between the wealthy and privileged and the poor and working class. The film opens with a short animation of two young men discussing the fact that there are ‘two Londons.’ One of the young men says he does not believe this, insisting that there is only ‘one London, ’ and any attempt to suggest otherwise is madness. The other young man tells him he will provide evidence for his claim. The film then segues into the two men walking through the streets of Mayfair attempting to interview people on the street. They are met with one refusal after another as no one stops but just carries on past them saying they are ‘too busy’ or ‘too rushed.’ The conclusion the young men reach is that the inhabitants of Mayfair are particularly busy, and that they are not used to seeing young black men in hoodies walking around with a camera. Mayfair is an extremely wealthy part of London. It is very different from Peckham, where Prince, one of the student filmmakers is from, and that geographical difference manifests itself not just economically but also socially and culturally. The space of Mayfair proved to be a problem for Prince who found it difficult to remain in the area as he did not feel as though it was somewhere he belonged. The longer we were there, the more visibly uncomfortable he felt and he insisted on leaving as soon as we had finished filming. This episode provides a very stark example of literally ‘knowing your place’ in a society in which we are witnessing an increasing geographical segregation based on wealth. It is not race or ethnicity that militates against integration and social cohesion—a false flag that continues the strategy of divide and rule—the most prominent geographical and social divisions are those between the rich and everyone else (Dorling 2014:384) Eventually the filmmakers did get a few interviews, one was with a Jesuit priest, whose church was in Mayfair, and who, when challenged about the difference between where the rich and poor lived excused the disparities by claiming that although you will always have inequality you ‘must have dignity.’ They later interviewed two young men sitting outside a café smoking cigars. One of them, when he heard the question replied in a moment of self-reflection that recognized the gulf between his life and the lives of the young men asking the questions, ‘basically, we’re arseholes.’ The filmmakers also interviewed mothers on Wandsworth common (Wandsworth is another very wealthy area of London), and mothers on a council estate in West London. They visited a homeless hostel in East London to interview the residents and were told by one young man that he often committed petty crimes to get himself arrested so he would have a bed for the night. They also interviewed a worker from the charity Child Poverty Action Group and a trade union official at the TUC. It was through building

142  Radical Cinematic Practices a network of different voices all willing to talk about poverty in one of the richest cities in the world that they were able to test their thesis of the ‘two Londons.’ Bare Inequality attempts to contrast the material differences affecting people who live in different areas of London and explores the results of this geographical apartheid based on class. Interestingly the shock of discovery belonged to the filmmakers who had never visited these areas before or spoken to people as wealthy as the ones they interviewed. At one point Prince shouts—‘why isn’t my area like this—why can’t I live here?’ This discovery of the huge discrepancies in their lives came about as a direct result of making Bare Inequality and led to the introduction of class as an explanatory variable. Class as a category is crucial but only if it leads to a greater understanding of that category. Left as a description it merely tells us what we already know—poor people belong to a ‘lower’ class than rich people, and this means that they live in areas that are not as nice. The essential usefulness of class as a category depends upon a realization of how consciousness of class might have consequences for action. Making this film removed the working-class filmmakers from their usual social milieu and, as Prince’s reaction demonstrates, disoriented them. The shock of experiencing for themselves the differences in geographical location and the attitudes of the wealthy to questions of inequality opened up a space where their own personal situations could be located in a wider context in relation to the way in which society is ordered. In this situation, it was class that mediated between the theory of film and the practice of filmmaking, providing a means of understanding workingclass experience. Not only in the sense that knowledge is gained of alternative modes of living but in the initiation of a self-conscious awareness that goes beyond the immediately given and begins to engage with the totality of capitalist relations and locates the filmmakers within that totality. This dialectical position has the effect of producing recognition of how class both fixes us into positions from which it is hard to break free while at the same time providing us with the tools that make that liberation a possibility. Bare Inequality refuses any sense of closure. The final scene reverts back to the animated figures of the opening scene and the two students discuss how there really are ‘two Londons.’ When one asks the other ‘what are we going to do about it’ the reply is ‘I don’t know, but we could make a film.’ This indicates that the contradictions the film highlights have not been resolved, and that it is not possible to resolve them at the present moment. The self-reflexivity apparent in the suggested solution of making a film locates the spectator within a discourse that acknowledges the social and political importance of the questions being asked and implies that knowledge produces the power to resist the ideologically imposed existing representational frame work. Having just watched the film, the students would go on to make it also suggests that film itself is not the solution but that it can make a political and social intervention.

Radical Cinematic Practices  143

Notes   1 Downing’s work appears to conflate the two concepts and he refers to ‘oppositional cultures, ’ but his main focus is on what he considers to be ‘radical alternative media forms.’   2 Quite recently I was invited to discuss radical film at a radical film conference—I talked about the Inside Film project and the importance of working-class people representing themselves and screened one of the films made in the prison. I was told in the post-screening discussion by one of the attendees that she was tired of feeling oppressed because she was privately educated and middle class. The feedback I received from the organizer was that people felt it was too challenging to talk about class at the end of a long day listening to presentations. The written report on the conference which covered the other keynote presentations completely ignored mine. There was never any discussion of this or the fact that the designation radical makes very little sense without an engagement with the politics of class.  3 Inside Film spent a year in Venezuela starting in February 2008 teaching in the barrios and the Bolivarian University. The time there also produced a film Listen to Venezuela. More details can be found here http://listentovenezuela.info   4 Although when we have run the course in prisons we have been informed by some of those taking part in the course that they initially chose to do so because it meant time outside of the cell.   5 This is not to proffer a utopian deterministic vision of the new media and communication technologies but to draw attention to their potential both in relation to structures and to practices.   6 It was not just in North America that workers were utilizing the potential of film as a means of informing and educating the working class. Socialist filmmaking co-operatives came into being in France, Germany, and Holland and in England there is a history of film co-ops and collectives dedicated to making films in the service of the working class.   7 Although Butsch has argued that it is rather simplistic to consider the nickelodeon as purely a working class/immigrant phenomenon and has argued that the bigger cities offered plenty of opportunity for a more ‘respectable’ middle-class audience to watch films on subjects they were interested in (2000:19/20).   8 The Pavlovian aspect of this theory was one acknowledged by Eisenstein himself, ‘ “If I had known more about Pavlov at that time, I would have called the theory of montage of attractions a “theory of artistic stimulants.” ’ Eisenstein quote in (Strauven 2006:20).   9 Third Cinema is not to be conflated with Third World Cinema. 10 hooks talks about how the experience of space and location is different for ‘black folk’ from different class backgrounds (2015:206). 11 As late as 1964, villages in Cuba were seeing films for the first time.

7 The Foodbank Film

What does it mean to deny experiences? (Trotsky 2005:120)

The most recent Inside Film project (2016) has been working with a group of people who need to use an independent foodbank in South London run by the local church. Volunteering there on Saturday mornings I have once again been struck by the discrepancies between how the poor, in this case those who use foodbanks, are represented in the mainstream media and the broader realities of their daily lives. One of the major challenges related to exploring the links between the working class and the political processes that have ensured they remain depoliticized but in a constant state of fear and insecurity, is providing a model of popular understanding that highlights the connections between the increasing monopolization of wealth by the few and the continuing and strategic impoverishment of the already underprivileged. The factories and other workplaces, the council estates, the local pubs, the spaces that supported and fostered working-class communities providing them with a shared language and ideological outlook are either in the process of being destroyed or no longer exist. Spaces that provided a sense of collective identity and the potential for agency within what Charlesworth called ‘the customary reference points of . . . existence’ (2000:5) have been decimated and replaced, as I have argued throughout this work by the dystopian spaces of prisons and increasingly foodbanks. It is in these spaces where the working class, the homeless, and the dispossessed— people who do not have the means to act within the market place and who, in a world where status is contingent on the ability to consume, are unable to do so— become invisible. Their experiences become systematically obscured within the narrative of the need for austerity. Prisoners, foodbank users, the homeless, refugees can all provide evidence, all bear witness to, capitalism as a dysfunctional, amoral system that benefits very few people, but they are rarely asked to do this and are hidden away in prisons, detention centers, and homeless hostels. These are places difficult to enter if you want to film what goes on in them, and there are many rules

146  The Foodbank Film to prevent you from doing so. The bureaucratic regimes that govern the poor and the dispossessed present a facade of concern and good management reinforced by the people who work within them. At the same time their assumed neutrality provides representations that disavow their role in the political processes responsible for the disinvestment of working class people. Marginalization, stigmatization, and pathologization come together to justify the rendering of the people suffering from the terrifying brutality of the present system invisible. At the same time discourses of personal responsibility deflect attention away from structural faults that appear to offer us no alternative. (Fisher 2009:12; Tyler 2013) The combination of analysis and intervention offered by Inside Film that has the potential to result in a radical praxis has a crucial role to play in the rearticulation of class narratives and the task of making the working class visible. A class-based understanding of the world is increasingly difficult to articulate as people mobilize around categories of identity considered more important than the material conditions under which people live. The absolute genius of identity politics is its ability to create a hegemonic framework that has fragmented lines of solidarity and fostered division between different groups of people based on gender, race, religion, sexuality, etc: crucially they deflect attention away from the issue of class and the economic question of redistribution of wealth. Therefore, while over the last 40 years or so specific groups have raised their visibility and have become more culturally equal within society—women, people of colour and gay people for example—the working class have witnessed their social and economic conditions progressively deteriorate (poverty wages, decimation of social housing, an inadequate benefit system, insecure / often dangerous jobs) through a strategic joining together of ‘cultural equality and a deregulated market’ (Nachtwey 2017:136). At the same time while the disciplines (and disciples) of identity politics have carved out comfortable and welcoming spaces for themselves within the media and academia, those who exist outside of these rarefied worlds and whose class status excludes them remain invisible and are denied any opportunities to speak about their own experiences (Charlesworth 2000:9). In fact ‘if your life is one marked by lower educational attainment, lower income, and lower class, you are less likely to be considered an expert about anything, even your own life’ (Hodge 2008:362 quoted in Biressi and Nunn 2013:93). In this country while there is a reluctance to talk about class (Sveinsson 2009:3) the material reality of class stratification is a fact of everyday life— we are born into our class position and therefore the unequal distribution of resources both economic, and cultural become accepted as natural and legitimate. This has become abundantly clear when the rights we think of as essential to a functioning democracy are so easily ignored when they are denied to the working class—currently the right to a home and to adequate food are two of the rights for which the state has abdicated responsibility.

The Foodbank Film  147 Whereas the state interferes in the lives of those in prison—monitoring, controlling, ccategorizing, planning their day, for foodbank users—it is often the case that the opposite is true; rather than intervene in the lives of those least able to survive the brutalities of neoliberalism because of illness, poverty wages, addiction, inadequate education, etc., the government washes their hands of them and leaves them to the vagaries of charitable organisations. Without doubt while voluntary and charitable organisations provide essential and necessary support and services to those in desperate need, they are unlikely to create or encourage conditions conducive to raising the consciousness of those who use them or who contribute to bringing about radical social change. In fact, because of their ability to ‘plug the gaps’ and their lack of engagement with capitalism as the economic system responsible for hunger, homelessness, high levels of unemployment, ghettoization, it could be argued these organizations serve the purpose of containing radical solutions to a system that prevents people from being able a to feed themselves. Charity in the form of food banks and soup kitchens is highly depoliticizing Riches (1997:70). Consequently the state relinquishes responsibility and the existence of foodbanks becomes normalized while the public is encouraged to think something is being done about the problem of ‘food insecurity.’ This state of affairs, which we need to acknowledge, is a method for consolidating class power and continues to be successful because the connections between the increasing wealth of the rich and powerful and the pauperization of great swathes of people are not made by the media or the charities themselves. The official figure for those using food banks according to the Trussell Trust1 who run the largest network of foodbanks across the UK is one million people, although that figure is likely to be considerably higher as many people access foodbanks through independent food banks run by local community groups and churches.2 The food distributed by foodbanks is mostly donated by local people through individual donations or through church or school collections. Some supermarkets now donate food that is near its sell-by date.3 Volunteers run Foodbanks, and the food distributed is generally speaking of the non-perishable kind, mostly tins and dried goods. For foodbanks such as the Trussell Trust there is a voucher system in place, and people can only access the service for a fixed amount of times and must be referred by an official agency such as the Citizen Advice Bureau, a social worker, health visitor, doctor or other healthcare professional—other foodbanks are less stringent and do not ask for a referral and do not limit the amount of times people can access the foodbank. It is difficult to find exact information about foodbanks, and although we approached Boris Johnson (who at the time was mayor of London), Rosie Boycott then the Food Tsar for London, the head of Bromley council—the London council where the foodbank is based—and two local MPs—one Labour and one Conservative—none of them were prepared to speak to us.

148  The Foodbank Film Consequently, the film had a short animated sequence of a filmmaker having various doors slammed in her face. The people who use food banks have become decontextualized statistics whose stories are merely a part of larger narrative of the paradigmatic ‘need for austerity measures’ and welfare reform. The film made by the foodbank users wanted to address their categorization as an abstract homogenous group and provide a space to tell their own stories and discuss their own experiences. So, we speak to the man who had been a carer for his aunt for a very long time and for whom, as he puts it ‘the wheels fell off’ after she died: the woman in her 60s, who assumed she would be retired by now but who because of changes to the retirement age is now expected to continue working when she has health problems and cannot find a job. There’s the young man who is sleeping in the woods because he cannot afford the extortionate rents charged in London and cannot find a job and there’s the people who have physical and mental health problems who have been sanctioned by the Department of Work and Pensions often for reasons they cannot comprehend. What became clear as the film progressed is how closely connected the question of food is to questions of class not just in relation to the kind of food you eat in Britain today, it is a question of how much you eat, how often you eat, and increasingly if you can afford to eat at all. The United Kingdom is the 6th richest country in the world and yet in 2016 an estimated 8.4 million people in this country did not have enough food to feed themselves properly on a daily basis (Taylor and Loopstra 2016:1). Research has demonstrated poverty in the UK increased between 1983 and 2012.4 There are now some 13 million people (21% of the population) living in poverty.5 Nearly 5 million of those are living in what has been termed ‘deep poverty.’ One million people are living in destitution.6 This means that not only is their poverty long-term but they do not have the means to obtain enough food to stop themselves from going hungry—they are starving. This is not about the quality of the food people eat—these people literally cannot afford feed themselves. 1 in 5 parent skip meals in order to feed their children, and there is evidence people are dying of hunger and malnutrition—7 foodbanks are literally a lifeline. The previous Coalition government under Cameron dismissed much of the research that has been done into foodbank use and the statistics provided by food banks themselves on the grounds of it being too political or that the research is not peer-reviewed.8 The present Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has claimed that the reasons people in work such as nurses use foodbanks are complex;9while one of her ministers suggested people who used them had a cash flow problem10, another minister claimed they were a very good thing11 In 2000, there was only one food bank in the country—A month before the election of the coalition government in 2010, there were 54 Trussell Trust food banks. Now they are opening at a rate of about 90 a week.

The Foodbank Film  149 Originally people who used foodbanks were employed but their wages were not sufficient to meet all their needs. There are still many people who find it necessary to use food banks because of poverty wages but more recently, a major reason both for accessing food banks and the rise in the number of people using them has been inadequate welfare payments which have resulted in a steep rise in poverty. Welfare payments are inadequate because of the benefit cap, the ‘bedroom’ tax, reassessment of an original claim so that you are placed in a one where there is reduction in payments or being ‘sanctioned’ which means having your benefits stopped altogether and having to wait weeks or even months before they are reinstated and where you have literally no money coming in whatsoever. Conservative politicians have been quick to blame the people who use foodbanks for their ‘predicament’ with comments about inappropriate spending on alcohol or cigarettes12or the inability to budget or cook properly.13 In 2013, Michael Gove the then education secretary referred the House of Commons to people having to use foodbanks as a ‘result of decisions that they have taken which mean they are not best able to manage their finances.’14 Edwina Curry an ex Conservative MP has had a lot to say on the subject.15 When we contacted her during the making of our short film to ask if she would be interviewed, she said she would if she could go to people’s houses and tell them where they were going wrong—when we pointed out it was not that kind of film and that we wanted to interview her about the reasons for the rise in food banks, she said that was ‘not a film that was propaganda.’ Edwina Curry’s response to our request for an interview was very interesting. She assumed she was invited to take part in a reality TV show, because of course the main media outlet where we are now offered access to the working class in the public sphere is on reality television. Reality television reinforces discourses of abjection and a ‘culture of poverty, ’ which in turn reinforces political discourses of irresponsibility and economic mismanagement. As welfare cuts have been rolled out so there has been a corresponding rise in reality television shows representing welfare claimants. Recent research carried out by De Benedictis et al. (2017) has suggested that these programs reinforce negative appraisals of the working class and poverty. Edwina Curry’s assumption that as a wealthy upper-middle-class person she had the right to tell people where they were going wrong, and that she would be able improve their lives because of her superior knowledge and skills, reveals a subjectivity that hold the working class in contempt. It is the mainstream corporate media who play a crucial role in the process of defining a social problem such as foodbank use who influence the way in which people think about it. The way in which a subject is discussed will ‘set the agenda’ for audiences by emphasizing certain aspects over others or by establishing the ‘frame’ within which the discussion takes place—for example referring to people as being poor rather than to people on welfare benefits (Wells and Caraher 2014:1428) will affect the response from people who watch or read items to do with foodbanks.

150  The Foodbank Film The effects of austerity on the working class have been horrendous—not just food banks, but evictions, homelessness, hunger, cold, suicides, the list goes on—and yet the working class and their poverty have become a form of entertainment. Reality television programs situate social problems in a decontextualized landscape as a means of both creating and confirming stereotypes which then become a kind of currency used in justifying the harsh treatment of the poor. The mainstream press is to a very large degree occupied by ‘journalists’ who have been educated at private school and Oxford or Cambridge universities. They go on to build careers writing about workingclass people offering solutions to problems they have never experienced to people they never mix with. The definitional power of the media and the broader power structures within which it is situated means working with groups of people such as foodbank users within a framework decided and constructed by them. Confronting economic and cultural inequalities is only possible through the implementation of an egalitarian approach to education and the production of film. This mean rejecting the mantra of inclusion which, while it may appear to be an admirable aim, in reality means the incorporation of the poor and dispossessed into a neoliberal system that depends on their exploitation. The consideration of cultural oppression is equally as important as economic oppression; the two are dialectically entwined and there can be no democracy if people do not have the power to represent their own lives.

Notes   1 The Trussell Trust is the main provider of statistics for foodbank use—the government does not collect this information.   2 Butler P, Report reveals scale of food bank use in the UK www.theguardian.com/ society/2017/may/29/report-reveals-scale-of-food-bank-use-in-the-uk-ifan   3 And, in another example of the normalization of foodbanks supermarkets often have economy food advertised on their shelves as suitable for the foodbank or they have collection bins at the front to the shop that people can donate to.   4 PSE Team Going backwards: 1983 – 2012 http://www.poverty.ac.uk/pse-research/ going-backwards-1983-2012 accessed May 2017   5 The discrepancy between the amount of people who are living in poverty and the number of people using food banks highlights how accessing food bank figure is an insufficient measure for ascertaining how may people in this country are going hungry.   6 Butler, P More than a million people in UK living in destitution, study shows w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / s o c i e t y / 2 0 1 6 / a p r / 2 7 / m i l l i o n - p e o p l e - u k living-destitution-joseph-rowntree-foundation  7 Glaze, B Number of Brits dying of malnutrition or hunger is soaring, shock figures reveal www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-brits-dying-malnutritionhunger-8611991   8 Butler, P Government dismisses study linking use of food banks to benefit cuts www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/19/cuts-benefit-changes-driving-upuse-food-banks-study  9 Handley, R General election 2017: PM blames 'complex reasons' for nurses using food banks www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/general-election-2017-pm-

The Foodbank Film  151 blames-complex-reasons-for-nurses-using-food-banks-on-andrew-marrshow/154431/ 10 Walker, P Dominic Raab accused of ‘stupid and offensive’ food bank commentswww.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/29/tory-mp-dominic-raabjeered-over-food-bank-comments 11 Milne, O and Blackedge, S Tory says she is “pleased we have food banks” - then threatens to call police on hustings audience www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ tory-says-pleased-food-banks-10562993 12 Aitchison, G Councillor in attack on food bank www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/ 10138097.display/ 13 Holehouse, M Poor going hungry because they can’t cook, says Tory peer www. telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11279839/Poor-going-hungry-because-they-cantcook-says-Tory-peer.html 14 Vale, P Michael Gove: ‘Families Turn To Food Banks Because Of Poor Financial Management’ www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/09/10/michael-gove-families-tur_ n_3901443.html 15 Currie, E Food banks aren’t solving problems — they can make things worse too https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/food-banks-arent-solving-problemsthey-can-make-things-worse-too/

Conclusion

Class struggle is alive and well . . . in fact class is so ubiquitous, one wonders why all the energy, anxiety and aggressive denial is put into proving that the working class either does not exist, or if it does . . . is worthless. Why is so much time and effort put into discrediting those whose access to power is so highly restricted? Why do academics, politicians and media producers continually euphemize the working class, whilst simultaneously reproducing middle class experience as universal, through their own perspectives? (Skeggs 2004:173) From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly everything is possible again. (Fisher 2009:81)

The title of this book Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool? has been posed as a hypothetical question, as a statement and as an invitation. In the end both the question and the statement remain in place whether the invitation to accept the potential of film to act as a radical pedagogic tool is accepted remains to be seen. As a hypothesis, it has raised more questions than it originally posed and as a statement it remains a challenge to dominant pedagogic models, filmmaking practices, and educational theories. The overall goal has never been theoretical or methodological certainties. The ambition was to develop an enquiry into how specific pedagogic practices with definite aims in mind might initiate in students who are serving prison sentences or who have in the past served prison sentences the ability to situate their experiences of being working class within the totality of the social structures that contribute to the formation of their subjectivities. This aim encompasses the desire to broaden the discussion to include the people who are most affected by the policies of neoliberalism and to bring class to the fore as an analytical category in order to consider how the changes in labor practices and the ways in which we are governed bought about by neoliberalism have resulted in the marginalization and demonization of the working class and how that has real affects upon the lives people lead. Alongside this is the need to consider working-class struggle and how resistance operates, how it can be initiated, and how the challenge to a hegemonic dominant culture can be managed.

154 Conclusion It should be clear that the theoretical concern of becoming ‘conscious’ of one’s class position no matter how crucial this might be is not in itself sufficient to bring about change. Therefore, the practical component of the work Inside Film carried out is an attempt to align a theoretical awareness of class and filmmaking practices to a practical attempt to render working class concerns and perspectives visible through the medium of film. It is the argument of this work that working-class students participating in this process will begin a decisive transformation of the relationship between their own social, political, and personal history and their experience of capitalism. While this might, at first glance appear to be a phenomenological position, that is, one rooted purely in the subjective experience of the participants in the project, the dialectical interplay of economic, social, and personal forces is in fact a political one. The experience of being working class is rooted in the everyday, in the interactions between people, in their relationship to the world and how they understand that relationship (Todd 2014:401). The films produced by the Inside Film students stand as testimony to the possibility of objective political and subjective cognitive expression when working class people are able to frame their own experiences as political processes and to translate experiences of domination and oppression in a language that contextualizes and explains. The centrality of Marxism to the work of Inside Film has inevitably concentrated on the class antagonisms that the division of labor within a capitalist society entails. The classed separation of intellectual and practical work is precisely what the Inside Film project has attempted to challenge. Film is a product of symbolic labor, the type of labor that is generally denied to the working class. The utilization of Marxism as both theory and as method results in a materialist underpinning of the explanatory role of a radical pedagogy while simultaneously providing a methodological touchstone for the making of films. A radical pedagogy of film changes the parameters and shape of the framework in which learning takes place by including within that framework perspectives and experiences which, generally speaking, are negated or ignored. At the same time, it allows for an engagement with and a rejection of mainstream representations of the working class that both naturalize and legitimize their subordinate position within society. And in the process, it nurtures more aware, more conscious subjectivity, a workingclass subjectivity capable of fostering participation, engagement, and solidarity Two of the main thrusts of this work have been to claim that middle class filmmakers cannot comprehend and therefore cannot represent the specificity of the experiences of working-class life, and that middle-class educators simply prepare the working class to take up their pre-assigned place in the capitalist order. I have sought to demonstrate through both the theoretical and practical components of this work how education and media practices are structured in ways that result in the unequal treatment of the working

Conclusion  155 class, reinforcing a system that condemns them to lives of suffering, constant struggle, and unfulfilled potential. The significance of the films made by the Inside Film students is that they represent the perspective of lives that ‘social conditions are rendering useless’ (Charlesworth 2000:81). It is difficult to definitively name the components for a radical pedagogy of film, partly because one of the components of that radicalism is its contextualization. This has been demonstrated in the discussion of early North American films and Third Cinema. Both these film practices are historically significant in relation to their documenting of the oppression and exploitation of the working class. They are also important as combative moments when the dominant ideology was challenged through a combination of film, politics, and working-class activity. The ability to function radically depends crucially on a flexible approach to difference and the willingness to adapt to different people with specific needs in particular situations whose experiences are unique to them. This works against the contemporary neoliberal discourse of globalization insisting as it does on a democratic interdependence within the global marketplace in which all people are considered equal but which in reality functions to generalize specificities (Mosco 2009:179; O’Neill 2017:280) and to construct a universal mono subjectivity—that of the consumer. As Biesta argues: global capital threatens the opportunities for different ways of being a subject, different ways of leading ones life and of being human, it tends to make one contingent subject position-the subject as consumer- into something that is inevitable and has almost become natural; a mode of subjectivity for which there is no alternative. (2008:05) The present media and education environments in which we find ourselves do not address the injustices and inequalities of contemporary life. There is at present an ongoing process of annihilation of working-class subjectivity and the imposition of a middle-class hegemony, which denies not only voice but also subjectivity to the working class. We are witnessing the expropriation and destruction of working-class communities and the physical removal of working class populations through social cleansing. The abject conditions imposed on the working class has seen the rise of the Social Justice Warrior—1 generally speaking, privately-educated Russell Group professionals who undertake, with a colonial missionary zeal, the project of saving an essentialized working-class which they have helped to create. As Reay (2006) has pointed out there are ‘punitive consequences’ involved in being positioned ‘within middle-class imaginaries as the “other” to a middle-class norm.’ The image of warriors fighting on behalf of the working class serves the purpose of confirming in the imaginary of the privileged an image of the working class as helpless and in need of organizing. Therefore, one of the most vital concerns for a project such as Inside Film determined,

156 Conclusion as we are, to contest any attempt to neutralise or water down the stories told by the people we work with is the fear that we might be projecting an illusion of civility and democratic practice, that ultimately has a civilising influence on the market and state rather than create a genuinely free space where political agency might be articulated and lead to a political project. (Fenton 2007:228) This is a problem that the project continues to struggle with, and we remain constant in our determination to focus not on the ‘symptoms’ of oppression but on the ‘causes’ (Castoriadis 2005:4). For Ranciere (2004:12) ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.’ The implementation of a program of radical change rests upon the voice and visibility of the working class. The task then is to create a situation wherein this becomes a reality where the mantra of ‘there is no alterative’ is recognized as the political vocabulary of privileged class interest that facilitates social and economic control and the endless pursuit of profit. For the working class, there is no other option but opposition. What are the prospects for a radical pedagogy of film? There can be no doubt that they do not look very promising; the privatization of the education system carries on apace and the curriculum from school through to university is one that is not adapted to the needs of those who remain invisible or demonized, and while the technology to make films becomes increasingly accessible, it is important to consider how technology is far from being a simple neutral instrument. (It) is always shaped by wider social forces and processes, technology generally takes on the character of those social structures in which it is embedded: it is an integral part of elaborate networks of institutions, norms and processes that help shape and regulate most of what takes place in society. (Boggs 2000:269) The very selective anti-working-class, criteria-laden, targeted-funding streams have made it nearly impossible for Inside Film to access funding. And the general resistance to any talk of class within academia even among those who would self-identify as radical has meant that projects such as Inside Film are isolated form wider networks of cultural workers. A radical pedagogy of film cannot be left to the mercy of the market. The situation as it exists at the moment means that projects such as Inside Film are competing for funding in the market place through grants and charities while central government slashes the money going into a public sector that has been cut back to the bone. And it has been a very long time since we had any funding.

Conclusion  157 As have already pointed out it is crucially important to understand that the reproduction of class relations is dependent on agencies other than the economic in order to succeed, and it is culture that plays the most prominent role. The exclusion of the working class from the means of cultural production has resulted in a homogenized cultural landscape dominated by a welleducated middle class where ‘the very real factors limiting who gets to make art garner almost no commentary at all’ (Davis 2013:90). The single most pressing conclusion generated by the work of the Inside Film project is that there can be no doubt that the need for projects such as Inside Film is more urgent than ever.

Note 1 The privately educated Oxford and Harvard graduate Laurie Penny provides a perfect example of this phenomenon. http://laurie-penny.com/why-werewinning-social-justice-warriors-and-the-new-culture-war

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Index

Althusser, M. 43 Arnold, A. 80(n) auteur 55 Ball, S 113(n) Balibar, E. 30, 52 Baidou, A. 84, 86 – 88, 90, 94, 95(n) Benjamin, W. 40, 64, 112, 125, 126, 130 Bennett, J. 18 Benson, L. 60 Bhaskar, R. 24 – 25, 27, 62 Biesta, G 108, 155 Black, Les. 108 Bordwell, D and Thompson, K. 123 Bourdieu, P. 51, 52, 66 Buckingham, D 70 Buck-Morss. 50 Butsch, R. 130, 143(n) Callinicos, A. 32 Castoriadis, C. 32, 24 Cameron, D. 21, 99, 148 Charlesworth, S. 35, 49, 73 – 74, 120 Conservative 17, 113(n), 147, 148, 149 corporate fraud 28 Davis, A. 104 deindustrialization 22, 42, 76, 79(n), 113(n), 150(n) Downing, J. 116, 118, 119, 143(n) De-Benedictus et al 149 Eagleton, T. 22, 44, 71, 125 Eisenstein, S. 129, 130, 143(n) Engels, F. 5, 63, 66, 106 Espinosa, J.G. 138

Fiddler, M. 92 Fisher, M. 30, 32, 62, 116 Foucault, M. 46(n) Friere, P. 7, 68, 70, 112 gentrification Gitlin, T. 23, 106 Giroux, H. 78 Gove, M 149 Gramsci, A. 13, 19, 36, 66, 98, 99, 102, 111, 135 Gunning, T 129, 130 Hansen, M. 129 Habermas, J. 132 Harvey, D. 8, 59, 102, 113(n) Hill, D. 46(n) Hickey, T. 117 Hollywood 23, 36, 122, 127, 134, 150 hooks, b. 109 Human Rights Act 19 Inside film 1 – 6, 8, 10 – 11, 13 – 16, 18, essential aim; 110 – 111; 115 – 116, 119 – 120; Human Rights Act 19; 21, 23 26, 31 – 34; popular culture; 36 – 37; 39, 44, 47, 50; radical practice; 55 – 56; 58, 62 – 65, 69, 72, 81 – 87, 89 – 90, 93 – 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 107; technological advances; 26; 137 – 140, 142(n), 145, 146, 154 – 157; Venezuela; 121; 123 – 125; identity politics 6, 37, 43, 146 Jewkes, Y. 27 Kozol, J. 121

170 Index Labour Party 16, 45(n), 98, 113(n), 147 Laclau, E. 52 – 53 Landy, M. 135 Lebowitz, M. 55 Lichtman, R. 20, 46(n), 48, 75 Loach, K. 79 Lockwood, D. 59 Lovell, T. 38, 125 Lukacs, G. 54, 107, 118 McGrath, J. 35 mainstream media 3, 5, 21, 33, 56, 61, 65, 74, 84, 108 – 109, 123, 126, 145 Marx, K. 1, 4, 5, 8; class, binary model 9; 20 – 21, 24, 25, 42; middle class 60; 69, 71, 89, 100, 105; social relations; 106, 109 – 112; subjectivity 44; 45, 48 – 49, 53 – 54 May, T. 148 Mitchell, G. 130 Munt, S. 11(n) neoliberalism 3, 8 ontology 63, 89 Prison Reform trust 104 Prokop, D. 129 Pérez de Cuellar, J. 6 Penny, L. 157(n) Ranciere, J 71 – 72, 156 reification 54 Reay, D. 155 Reiman, J. 27 – 28, 31

Robins, K. 108 Roscoe, J and Hight, C. 93 Ross, S 128 – 130, 133, 134 Sanbonmatsu, J. 45, 46(n), 113(n) Sapon-shevin, M. 31 Sennett, R and Cobb, J. 78 Shaviro, S. 71 silent cinema 115, 121 – 122, 126, 128 – 129,  140 Skeggs, B. 2, 11(n), 72 Small, R. 31 Solanas, F and Getino, O. 134, 135, 136 Soviet cinema 130 studio system 133 Third Cinema 24, 45(n), 51, 54, 115, 121 – 123, 126, 127, 134, 136 – 140, 143(n), 155 Thatcher, M. 58 – 59, 76, 95(n), 1129(n), 116 Thompson, E, P. 41, 43, 103 Trotsky, L. 125 Trussell Trust 147, 148, 150(n) Venezuela 121, 137, 143(n) Wayne, M. 55, 56, 99, 112 Willemen, P. 4 Williams, R. 10, 66, 112(n) Willis, P and Corrigan, P. 103 Winlow, Hall, S and Treadwell, J. 89, 98, 112(n) Zavarzadeh, M. 6, 122