Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
Against the Global Right Vol 5 (1)
Lee Grieveson, University College London
The 2007-9 economic crash made abundantly clear the failures of the neo-liberal project of de-regulation and the financialization of markets. In the midst of the crisis, the fusion of state and capital intrinsic to “liberal democratic” states was made starkly visible, resulting in a bailout to investment banks orchestrated in part in the US by a Treasury Secretary (Henry Paulson) who was a former CEO of one of those banks (Goldman Sachs), but, of course, paid for by tax payers. Here the accumulation by dispossession central to earlier formations of capital and empire was brought bang up to date. What followed was, and is, a period of “austerity” that has led to a further “deconstruction of the administrative state,” a stripping away of the social democratic reforms established after the last periodic crisis of capitalism – the Great Depression – as the final realization of the neo-liberal dream of a state limited principally to the protection of property rights. Albeit in that hazy way of dreams, where one thing can mean another, this stripping back of the state is perfectly consistent with the state bailing out finance capital. One can think of this as a failure of the neo-liberal project, given the global consequences of this crash (and the desperation, poverty, loss, heartache, despair) it engendered. But it is of course in economic crashes that financial institutions like banks take back materiality – here frequently in the form of property – and the resulting solution of state austerity and the eradication of social democratic reforms was long willed for by the neo-liberals and their libertarian cousins. One can think of Michel Foucault’s remark in his book on prisons that the prison fails and because it fails it continues. The logic of that could be extended to other components of neo-liberal globalization, too: the War on Terror fails so it can continue, for example.
One of the consequences of the neo-liberal project to strip back state investment is the de-funding of universities. In the country where I currently work, the UK, a university was once considered a public good to be funded by the state (albeit for large parts of its history a public good mostly for the elite), but the neo-liberal project championed by so-called “New Labour” began the process of dismantling this in the late 1990s – about the same time as Bill Clinton was de-regulating finance capital in the US – and this sped up in the aftermath of the 2007-9 crash. In 2010, the cost of fees was raised dramatically. Universities moved from the public sector to something like the private sector, in pursuit of the private US model, in the process turning students into “consumers” accompanied by a whole host of efforts to re-shape that “consumer experience,” measure it, rank it, and monetize it. The ramshackle, disorganised, but somewhat humane institutions of old were transformed into new corporate forms designed to maximise profits. Casualization of labour forces was one component of this.
I belatedly began to think more carefully about these issues of economy and state, of the neo-liberal revolution, and the violence of austerity in my teaching in the aftermath of the 2007-9 crash. I say belatedly because the brutality of the liberal and neo-liberal project was of course abundantly clear before, in a line from imperialism to the military imposition of neo-liberalism in Chile in 1973 and from there to the structural adjustment programs of the IMF across the Global South (and even the north, at times) from the later 1970s as the neo-liberal project gathered speed. But, still, the 2007-9 crash made all this so abundantly, insistently, egregiously obvious and present – really? Paulson, an investment banker, is treasury secretary and makes decisions in the interests of those banks? – that it was hard not to think about it. The class I began teaching thereafter came to be called Political Media and a recent-ish syllabus is included here.
But the class had other influences too, and emerged out of my own ongoing research at that time about the ways in which elite organisations like states or corporations or banks had begun to use film and media to sustain their interests. I had been working on corporate uses of film in the 1920s, for example, and was co-directing (with Colin MacCabe) a large multi-institutional research project on the ways the British state had used cinema to further its imperial interests. (See http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk.) I wanted the class then to pursue some of those strands of analysis but to begin to stitch them together with the intensification of the neo-liberal project beginning most clearly in the 1970s and crucial to the then current crisis. Here it is worth noting that I am fortunate enough to work at a research institution that largely leaves me alone. I orchestrated the teaching, then, also to learn myself, a central component of research-led teaching, and the class mutated as I sought to figure out more things about – at its broadest – the global capitalist system and the place of media within it. I should observe also that the institution I work at in London attracts a great deal of international students – our Provost would have it no other way, of course, because they pay high fees – and this was enormously helpful to me as I began these explorations, because it meant I could learn from people from across the globe who had been variously effected by the developments we were charting and discussing. I had students from Latin America, for example, where neo-liberalism was imposed with great violence in the 1970s; from the Middle East, shaped by the legacies of imperialism, structural adjustments, and the ongoing War on Terror (as, in part at least, a proxy for US control of crucial resources); and from China, Russia, and Eastern Europe, in particular, as one consequence of the expansion of capital markets (and the chaotic destruction of previous modalities of governance and culture).
Obviously, I was not the only one learning from the 2007-9 crash, and in its immediate aftermath a parallel critique of the failures of neo-liberal globalization emerged from a complex mix of libertarian and fascist imperatives. I confess I did not see it emerging. But it became clearer in the context of the 2016 “Brexit” referendum in the UK and in the presidential election in the US that year, both modelling forms of ethno-nationalism, and we began to address some of these issues in the class. Not least because media was central to this development in all sorts of ways: from online films (made for example by Steve Bannon, who became Chief Strategist in Trump’s White House), to new online fascist websites (e.g. The Daily Stormer), to the data-mining joined together with the surveillance capitalism of the new digital age to produce new forms of psychographic messaging. The class explored these issues as they emerged, in pursuit of the same broad goal: to discern how media is used to facilitate and sustain elite interests. In the process I began (in discussions with others, particularly Francis Gooding) to think about the mutation of neo-liberalism and libertarianism into fascism, articulated by some – like Bannon, the Brexiteers – in direct response to globalization. The class got re-shaped in response to this, meaning some of the earlier material was stripped out to focus more on the period from 1973 onwards, and this is consistent also with my own evolving research interests. It meant the class got too baggy, ultimately, and I have stopped teaching it in this form. I attach a more recent draft syllabus for a class tentatively called “Capital Screens” focusing on the neo-liberal period only.
One final observation here. Right before our eyes, a radical project to strip back social democracy to better facilitate the expansion and circulation of capital was carefully orchestrated. Media was central to this project. In turn, the institutions that many of us work within have been radically transformed. But of course more expansively, and significantly, the intensification of neo-liberal practices, of accelerated globalization, has led to extraordinary inequality, poverty, and the violence needed to sustain that (both domestically and globally); the intensification of these structures and practices, the stripping away of regulations, is leading, inexorably, towards environmental destruction, with a series of knock-on effects starting with those most vulnerable to climate change but ultimately expanding to include all humans. Under these circumstances, I have come to believe that the scholarship and teaching we do should be directed at explicating and trying to change this; and this is desperately urgent. Over time this meant that the class I taught began to include and explore resistant practices, in part prompted by questions from my students: what do we do about this? (Plus, Lee, your class is so goddamn depressing can we at least think about what people across the world have done to challenge these structures and practices.) Usually I tell them: well, happily, I have now done my bit to roll back neo-liberalism and fascism by telling you about this, so really the question is: what are you going to do about it? But of course the truth is these imperatives must shape our scholarship, pedagogy, and life. Connecting those is an ongoing project.
Lee Grieveson is Professor of Media History at University College London. In recent years his teaching has broadly explored media and political economy, exploring the roles media plays in shaping political and economic practices across the globe and across time. Usually this pursues a history beginning with cinema, as the first mechanized mass media emerging from the second stage industrial revolution, and then radio, before exploring the expansion of television and the digital, stretching, then, from extractive imperialism to surveillance capitalism via the Cold War to sustain liberal capitalism and the ongoing War on Terror. The “Political Media” class included with this dossier is one example of this. (Another would be an undergraduate class called “Manufacturing Consent.”) Recently this teaching has come to focus more clearly on the neo-liberal era, from the early 1970s, in conjunction with emerging research projects. The “Capital Screens” draft of a class included with this dossier is one example of this.
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