TRASHFUTURE - Riley's Commie Book Club: The Amateur

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

Welcome to the second installation of RCBC. Today I'm talking about yet another book off Verso, The Amateur by Andy Merrifield. While Merrifield is currently a fellow in Human Geography at Cambridge, he's spent much of his life as an independent thinker outside the system. This book serves as both a memoir of his life and an argument against "professionalism as ideology." As the market creeps in to more spheres of life, an obsession with box ticking and targets posing as hard nosed realism limited not only what could be done, but what could be thought. Life, therefore, is not made better by rigorous systematisation, but crueller and dumber. Like Psychopolitics before it, The Amateur informs a lot of how we see society on TF. Here's the link to the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2405-the-amateur  Here's the link to the Non Linear Borefare article:https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-stuplime-object-of-ideology/  Here's the link to vote for us for the British Podcast Awards, which we totally don't care about: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote/  xoxo Riley

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness gracious me. It's almost that time again. Yep, that's it. Riley has had at least one beer. In fact, I'm going to get a beer. And it's going to record another commie book club. Because you know me, I love commie-ass literature. This is what I'm going to be talking about today

is another one from the Geniuses at Verso Books. Geniuses, that seems a little fawning. I only really call people geniuses, and I think they're really dumb. From very able publishers, Verso Books. I got it called Andy Merrifield. And the title of the book is, I'm just going to grab it from the sofa over here.

It gets weird, right? It's a weird book because it's called The Amateur, The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, by Andy Merrifield. And it sounds like it's a self-help book, right? Honestly, that's what a self-help book would be called. But even though I actually found it very helpful, it is not a self-help book by any stretch. Rather, it is what I think of as a pretty scorching critique

of the ideology of professionalism. Now, Merrifield's an interesting character. He is sort of an amateur himself. He is dabbled in a number of subjects. He talks a lot about urbanism and economics and history and all this. And he refers quite a bit to people like Jane Jacobs, who was an urbanist, who was a radical

urbanist, who was sort of from outside the circles of what was acceptable and so on. And he refers to other amateurs, even like Karl Marx, who was a autodidact economist, who just happened to define podcasts for centuries. So I think this is a great book. I don't really review books. I don't think they're great.

And I strongly recommend you give it a read. It's not a spiritual sequel to psychopolitics. If anything, if you listen to the psychopolitics review, I sort of talked a lot about the evolution of sort of almost disciplinary society into most facilitative society. This is very much a book that's still thinking about disciplinary society,

but it begins to think about facilitative society. I think it gives us a lot of interesting, gives us a lot of language to talk about the ways in which sort of professional sensibility not only carries out an agenda for capital, but also really limits what it's possible to think. So I think it's important to start by distinguishing between what Maryfield refers

to as an amateur and as a professional. He would think of a professionalism meaning sort of thinking of your work, and I'm quoting from the book here, as something you do for a living with one eye on the clock and another cocked at what is considered to be proper professional behavior, not rocking the boat, straying outside the acceptance paradigms or limits,

making yourself marketable, and above all, presentable. And what really gets me about this book, and this is a book that I read first over the couple of times, the first time I read it, I was thinking a lot about Marcel Proust, who's a French novelist in the early 20th century who talks a lot about sort of passion and authenticity and artifice.

I mean, it books like fucking, I don't know, 7,000 pages long or fucking whatever. He talks about everything. There's one scene where two guys fuck, and it's described for like 40 pages in relation to the dance of a bee and a flower. Shit's hilarious. Anyway, so let's see.

Proust talks about, yeah, there's one sort of sentence. I'm especially thinking about the second and third volumes of A La Recherche de Tumperdu, which is, within a budding grove, and the Grimante's Way. Grimante, I don't know, I never hear it said. I've only ever read it. The imagined remoteness of the past, he writes, is perhaps one of the things that enable us

to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian. When he's talking, he's referring here to the poet James McPherson, who was sort of said to have rediscovered the sort of wonderful work to this Gaelic Bard Ossian. But we're thinking, well, what about Ossian was really so great?

He was just old, he's speaking a different language. He says all the trappings of something that might be considered significant, but at the time, it's what really is so great about him other than that sort of oldness. And I think Maryfield's book is really concerned with pulling down sort of modern mediocre mystifiers, sort of gray professional men claiming

that they can solve all of society's problems with a cool detachment from ideology, bias, and preference, setting the kind of analyzing the hard numbers to smooth out life's rough patches and bevel the edges of square pegs to fit them into round holes. And so I'm probably going to bring up Bruce a couple of times, because I wrote some notes

about to inform an essay I never ended up writing, but that I thought might be useful. I turned out to be useful for this. What the hell? Awesome. And so how does Maryfield begin thinking about professionalism and say, well, somewhere it was easy for us to look for politics?

Maryfield quotes James Scott's book seeing like a state with the example of forestry, which I think is absolutely perfect. In state fiscal forestry, Scott writes, and Maryfield quotes Scott writing. So Spider-Man pointing to Spider-Man pointing to Spider-Man. In state fiscal forestry, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses

was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. So I think we can begin to sort of draw out a dev. I mean, he used a definition of amateur, but I'm going to draw out my own definition of amateur, because I have a fucking amateur, and that's the point. Which is that the amateur forester might see in a tree any number of things.

Yes, he might see firewood or lumber or whatever. But I think they would also see, for example, the capacity of the tree to reproduce itself, the capacity of the tree to host woodland critters. Perhaps the tree sort of drops nuts that people like or whatever. What? And what have you? Because I think Maryfield's point about the amateur

is that whereas the professional deals with his work in order to just kind of bring about a given predictable result over and over again, the amateur deals with his work much more holistically. The amateur is in love with the thing, and that's why the root of the word love, Amara, is in amateur. Let's say it's got the same fucking shit going on.

And I think that's really what we get to, right? Is the amateur, because they would look at a tree and see so many different potential possibilities, because they see the tree in itself. The professional sees only the tree in terms of its end uses, which have been designated the end uses of hard-nosed practicality. Well, the state requires lumber in order

to build ships in order to fight a war. You sort of rank amateurs seeing the trees in terms of just the people of the village enjoy the trees. But that is seen as, oh, that's parochial. That's small-minded. That's not seeing the bigger picture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But really, all that's actually doing

is seeing an alternative picture to the one the state might have wanted you to see in, I don't know, 18th century pressure, I guess. So this is the thing. This is where we, so this is like, why do we talk about, why do I keep coming back to Proust now? As I can say, is that Proust is obsessed with aesthetics, and he's obsessed with uncovering the true nature

of certain things. He's focused on the relationship between the name of the thing and the thing, the appearance of that thing, the thing's true inner nature, the sensuousness of it. And the whole time, the whole book really is, in many ways, him uncovering, coming closer to things as they move from his imagination of what they are

into his relived experience. And in many times, he's disappointed, the narrator. So at one point, he is in Paris in a salon hosted by a famous noble family. And he realizes, sort of experiencing it, that he's been admitted to just another dinner party. The aristocracy, as it existed in his imagination, as the realm of something special and greater,

a kind of priesthood of beauty that sort of will administer to you little droplets of truth, sort of it's just becomes nothing. The realm of something special, greater than humanity, just disappears. To quote the book, the imagination, because they resembled their fellow men, sorry, they disappointed his imagination,

because they resembled their fellow men, rather more than their name. And I think it's at the same sort of detachment and mystification that Maryfield aims at his words at professionals. So the distinction he draws then between professional and amateur, rather, is not one of rightness and rigor, but the aesthetic of rightness and rigor,

the sort of the appearance of rightness and rigor, the idea that they have this sort of access to a privileged knowledge. Because professionals are professional. They support degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. Their suits are looking very good. All of their ideas are backed up by spreadsheets that we shouldn't bother trying and trying to understand.

And they're serious and they're qualified. And they find their power in this cool, joyless detachment and almost inconceivable specification. And the amateur, on the other hand, is finds her power wrapped up in the subject itself and driven by a kind of inner fire rather than an external metric. Now, Maryfield also tells his story,

it's not just a polemic. It's part autobiography. It shows a sort of really eclectic reading. So in addition to Jane Jacobs, whose book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is absolutely wonderful, the references. He also evokes sort of a lot of Dostoevsky as well. He evokes a boat layer, I think.

You can open up any random book and he'll sort of either be talking about a very professional World Bank paper he's debunking, like Reinhardt Rogoff, which I'll get to later. Or a 19th century author, he is bigging up. So fucking, of course I love this shit. How could I not? Anyway, so this actually, when we talk about

this kind of professional weaponized dullness that professionals use in order to maintain their status as kind of cult priests, it actually brought to mind a concept that I saw a while ago in The New Socialist, which is the idea of non-linear warfare, which is an article by Joe Kennedy that came out last June. After Corbyn fucking did it last June,

which I needless to say, I'm sure we all remember, owned, what we got was we got a sort of a wave of concern trolling from centrists, like Owen Smith and his big penis and whatever, and people who thought of themselves as sort of very serious party insiders who suddenly found themselves on the outside. And now what the non-linear, now the non-linear warfare article makes quite a few points.

It talks about sort of what is concern trolling, what is just the simple wind-up of trolling. But one of the key, again, I suggest you read it, I'll link it in the episode description, but what I really sort of like about it is that it says, look, that as soon as the election was over, the sort of the centrist pundits immediately sort of tried to bring up their sort of specialist knowledge

of politics, we really know how politics works, not like you amateurs who are on the outside, we know that if you start calling your, if you start, if you call us melts, people won't trust you, we know that you don't, you have to play by our rules. And ultimately, it's the rules of a sort of insider cast that is sort of not connected to sort of the passion for any particular project,

it's not connected with any kind of politics, it sees politics as sort of just another process, another kind of thing that can be discovered, a thing that is simply there to be kind of calculated and moved, it seems sort of just tactically because there is no room to dream of a new strategy because dreaming of a new strategy is unrealistic or unelectable and it's this,

and I'm sure many of people listening to this, of the British listeners and some of the American listeners, I'm sure no doubt have tuned into and all around the world, of course, internationalism, was that this kind of, this kind of weaponized professionalism doesn't just exist to make a point, they don't think that they're really going to try to convince anybody that,

if we're rude to Chris Leslie, then it's gonna play poorly for us in fucking Knutsford. But rather, what they're trying to do is they're actually trying to limit what can be said. And that's the thing, is that anytime you think, you try to think about the ways in which people try to control language, to think of not only the limits of what can be said,

but what can be thought, the comparison always comes back to Orwell, where he's saying, oh yeah, so if we limit, if we limit the different ways you can say something good, by saying, oh it's double plus good, whatever, you sort of try to destroy thought, but isn't that exactly what's going on with professionalism? Where you're saying, oh, there is no,

there is one right way to mount a political campaign and it just so happens to be the kind of way that favors low taxes in a strong national security state. Anything else is foolish, with the facts don't lie, and by sort of laying claim, and it's basically making an epistemological claim that, oh, this is sensible knowledge and this is sort of rank amateurism,

this is outsiderism. So that's kind of how I sort of draw it into the politics of my adoptive home. Anyway, it's not just related to the politics of today, of today, of course. It's related, I think, to almost the politics of the neoliberal third way revolution everywhere, which is one of the key hallmarks of what professionals do,

is that they must reframe things in ways that are easily countable, because everything must be sort of abstractly understood and compared in the ways for which it can achieve a specified goal, right? And so it's almost, it's a way of shutting off what the goals can be by defining what metrics are reasonable to use.

So that's why the argument about single payer healthcare in the States is often made along the lines of the idea that, oh, well, single payer would actually be cheaper than what they currently have. That's true, but that's also the wrong argument to make, because it leaves open the possibility that if single payer healthcare weren't cheaper than what the US currently has,

then it would not be the right thing to do, when in fact it is quite simply just the right thing to do on its own merits, and even if it was more expensive, literally go fuck yourself. So that's why what I mean is it's that the professionalism is really about imposing this analytical frame, and that's a point I think Maryfield makes very, very, very, very well.

The way, and what he calls it is irrational consistency, which is, I think, an absolutely brilliant term, because it's basically suggesting that the only way you can understand the value of anything, say, is its monetary value, right? So, okay, he talks a lot about urbanism, and I think that's very interesting, because how do you count the value of a community?

You know, how do you, and there are some ways to do it, you can sort of, you can do some statistical tricks to kind of get a vague estimate of the value that a sort of strong community, whatever that is, and however you define it in relation to something countable, may help local business and therefore increase the tax take. Okay, cool, fine, but what this kind of irrational consistency

always forgets is, well, but if people just want to have a strong community, why do you need this other justification? And so what he talks about quite a bit is sort of, is slum clearances, and what we refer to as urban renewal, we could think of it as a HDV and herring gay, the American listeners just looked that up. Well, let's start our John Ellige episode,

which we talk about this quite a bit, actually. This is a good reference to the John Ellige episode here. But anyway, we can only understand the value of community in terms of, say, house prices, and business rates, and employment, and numbers of knife crimes, or what have you, you know, because those things can sort of more easily be taught it up to have an economic value.

And so when, in fact, Maryfield talks about his own experiences living in Liverpool in the middle of the 20th century, when his family was sort of forcibly moved out of their community because it was decided from on high that that community was no longer really going to be viable, even though no one who was living there really thought that. And the professionals who instituted this policy

of, say, clearance were called managed decline, which is the idea that, well, these people in these communities are hopeless, their communities are worthless, and they are living by metrics that we came up with in ways that are unacceptable by our metrics. So we are going to move them out of their community. We are going to build them a new house

that turned out to be terrible. It turned out to be one of the worst housing estates ever built that Maryfield moved into outside the city limits where they will have space, but they won't have any connections with anyone. All they will be sort of families, yes, families will be kept together, but those intrafamilial connections will be rent asunder because, well, there's no legal status

to an intrafamilial connection. How do you, and again, how do you assign, how do you give a legal status to and assign a monetary worth to the fact that I just really like going to the store near me because I know the attendant and because the attendant, maybe I watch the attendant's kids every once and again and so on and so on and so forth.

It's sort of professional, professionalism is about sort of willful stupidity when it comes to these kinds of things. It is about stupidity as ideology, I think. Anyway, so where else does Maryfield talk about irrational consistency? Well, he talks about it quite a bit. The universities is one of the most recent examples

of the irrational stupidity. He is talking about, because what we're looking at is the universities, the universities, especially in Britain, again, to American listeners, until very recently they were free, Blair, it was Blair, yeah, introduced tuition fees 15 years ago, and then the coalition government between Tory David Cameron and Tory and all but name Nick Clegg

introduced a hike in tuition fees, they're like 9,000 pounds a year, still pretty good compared to what I hear you guys pay. Anyway, but with the promise that, well now, universities will have to compete to sell the best services to students. And so, of course, the universities were then measured. They were measured on the Research Excellence Framework,

which looks at how many professors in your, oh, how many faculty in your university are generating papers that other people are citing. How often are they being cited? Are they basically getting kind of academically famous by publishing a fuck ton? And duly, of course, they're spring up departments to manage the professors, the professors, the faculty,

to make sure they continue hitting their research outputs, to have them log their hours to teach them how to be more efficient business faculty, more or less, where everyone's in the business of business now. And, of course, you have to pay for these new administrators. And the government's certainly not going to because the whole point of the targets was that so you'd run yourself like a business.

You brought these people in to help you run yourself like a business, but you have to pay them a lot so you can run yourself like a business. So where does the money come from? It comes from the faculty. And so, all of a sudden, the university stops being all of these wonderful things that made the university problematic, but pretty cool in many ways. Institution over the last sort of some hundreds of years.

Again, I know they fucking invented phrenology. Now they all suck, but you know, you got to like a thing or two. And it just becomes a target-reaching machine because in the ultimate professionalized society, it doesn't matter. It's sector agnostic, whether you're in education or you're in health or you're in whatever. We can compare the value of what you do

to the value of what everyone else providing your service does and the value of what everybody else providing every other service does. And then we can find the optimal balance of education and health spending and fucking social housing spending even, maybe. To some, then, we can say, well, if we mix all the ingredients together this way, then we get an increased GDP coming out the other end. And that's the best they can really do. They can say, well, we can increase our GDP by 2%.

All we've had to do is make everybody's lives more precarious and stupid. All we've had to do is all of the little bits of life that are inefficient that you kind of like, like the fact that, I don't know, maybe you go to tutorials with your professor at the pub and kind of talk for like an hour and a half and you sort of touch on the thing you were meant to talk about but it's actually a wonderful conversation that ends up shaping you for a long time or whatever like this.

Or perhaps you have just, yeah, that personal relationship you have with your fucking shopkeeper where maybe you watch their kid occasionally. All of that shit doesn't fit in a society where everything is directly comparable, intra and cross-sectorally and then is sort of micromanaged to be perfectly consistent and comparable across everything, right? So that's what I mean.

The consistency may be rational if it is directed towards control. Sorry. And so what else do we have? We have the idea that universities are now supposed to produce satisfied students. You know if students are satisfied. Well, we've decided it's if they get jobs. So what are the universities other than professional training centers? So what's the point of a university then?

Really, if all you want to do is train someone to be able to write a memo. So that's increasingly what they are. I mean, you know, it's someone who's worked in the higher education industry, I don't know, sector before. I know that what you hear a lot about is well, students want to learn skills that will make them employable. Well, you know, do they really? I mean, I guess they do because they have to.

But I don't know. I mean, I mean, the net of that, is that what they really should be learning for? Like what's and this is where we sort of get back a little bit to amateurism, which is basically I think about living your living your life for a reason that you kind of have a reason to value because professionalism, the professional ideology is about seeing the world instrumentally. It's about seeing education, not as a thing that just is cool to be doing

because we only have a limited amount of time on this earth. And there are some people who just think it's pretty sweet to be a nerd and read. It's unable to see education that way, right? It can only see it instrumentally because it is sort of focused on kind of build it and sort of obsessively sort of creating a very large machine. So you and you get that job, but then your life becomes more instrumental because more of what you do then is about doing better at your job. And your job is mostly about doing better for someone else.

And so at what part of your life are you really living your life? You're living someone else's life. Or you're living a life that could more or less be automated, which is why I think that this, why I was sort of almost called weaponized stupidity. It's something that sort of, it's a virus that's coming in and just kind of you know, attacking your brain. And you know, if we were to use Marxist terms, we would say that it sees everything in terms of its exchange value,

education exchange value, health, they even invented something called qualities, quality adjusted life years. So you can actually, you can adjudicate between in money terms, which surgeries to perform because it's a given that your resource constrained and couldn't perform say both if you have sort of competing demand, right? So what we get, right? What Maryfield talks about as the sort of, as the sort of solution to this kind of thing is a concept I'm flipping to it now called de-schooling, right?

We are, he's quoting this, and there's another amateur educational theorist called Ilich. In de-schooling society, a text that emerged from the Centro Intercultural de Documentación, a language research center at a free university at an old Hacienda in Mexico City. This chap, Ilich, wrote a book called De-Schooling Society. Ilich said that students in the U.S. and Europe are schooled into confusing classrooms with learning, great advancement with education, and a diploma with competence. Bureaucracies claim professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible.

The values educational institutions instill are quantified ones. So that basically explains what I was saying better than I ever could, but I was less mad. So what we have to do basically is we have to sort of, we have to really learn, I think, to reject classrooms and grades and professional achievements and sort of being self-motivated, successful entrepreneur, because fuck that. And that kind of gets into what I was talking about last call me book club with Psychopolitics, which is that we're sort of being asked to see ourselves as these neoliberal achievement subjects who are all very smart, who are all very goal-directed,

who are all constantly sort of engaging in the work of self-improvement. And we have to be a kind of idiot outsider in order to avoid it, in order to sort of get out of that, you know, insultingly banal, infantilizing hamster wheel. And we're seeing the same argument here from Maryfield, but it's about, I think, this one's more sort of nakedly political, I guess, not that Psychopolitics isn't political, but this one is more obviously political because it's pertinent to bureaucracy and those institutions of control rather than in Psychopolitics, which I think we're more about sort of diffuse institutions of belief.

So where I'm going to go back to my man, my boy, my big boy, Proust, here, where we talk about how his character, the schooled and de-schooled of his characters. So most of Proust's characters are deeply flawed, pretentious and shallow, inner lives abbreviated by their own egos, living very respectably in the eyes of one another. So I'm thinking of Monsieur le Duc de Gamante, Basse, Madame la Gamante. I'm thinking of basically almost every character in this book. There are like, I don't know, five characters in this book who don't suck, and spoiler alert, they're all artists.

And these, and they're compared, I guess I said they're all, the characters in the book who don't suck are artists, and one of my favorites of the artist characters in this book is a guy called El Stier, and he decries seriousness and respectability in favor of self-direction. So he says, when a mind has a tendency towards daydream, it is a mistake to shield it from them and to ration them, because it is in those dreams, this is my interpretation, that we find our descent from orthodoxy.

So to quote, if a little daydreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more and all the time. So in talking about this, I sort of was thinking about the world of sort of Parisian art collectors in the early 20th century. Maryfield thinks about the Crystal Palace, which the underground man in notes from underground sort of sticks his tongue out at and hates so much, because the underground man is also de-schooled. The underground man is sort of sees sort of the people around him

who have lived essentially successful, but very anonymously successful lives, and I think basically feels like on their deathbed, they'll have no memory in particular of their life that was particularly theirs, except, I don't know, maybe a pretty sunset they saw once, but anyone can see a fucking sunset. And that theirs is the world of this Crystal Palace, which was built in, I think, Sydenham for a World's Fair, that was the example of this perfect, transparent way of life, where everything is kind of just taken care of,

and all the hard edges of society are smoothed out, and it's everything you could possibly want, is it not? And that, you know, is what he thinks that he has to put his tongue out at, because the only way that's possible, the only way life in the Crystal Palace makes sense, is if it is smoothed down to one possible way to live it, to sort of, if all lives are sort of lived with irrational consistency, and in a world in which every desire is fulfilled at maximum efficiency, then, and this is back to Merrifield,

every aspect of our everyday lives are cashed, measured, counted, and quantified, and then given a price, and in this cashing, measuring, quantifying, price giving, et cetera, that the professional world hoodwinks the rest of us, because their science is basically presented in bad faith, back to Merrifield. What's significant here is the idea that these data are value-neutral, without prejudice, and beyond ideology, because that's the thing. They are laden with ideology, and the political act of rendering everything, from art to philosophy or any field, into a nailed-down science,

is to basically valorize one vision of the world, and it disguises the exercise of power as the natural order of things. And so you can think about something, you can think about how this way of thinking doesn't just displace communities, but also costs lives. So if you were to think about Grenfell, you'd think, okay, let's think about how we refit Grenfell. If we are a council, or if we are managing a trust or whatever, and we know that we kind of have to provide some social housing,

but really what we're being judged on is the value of the housing stock of the borough, and we have limited resources to sort of work on housing, then what is our priority going to be? Well, it's sort of obvious that it's going to be raising the value of the housing stock, so we'll clad the tower, rather than, say, making it more safe, because in the world of the positivist science, and I'll get into positivism in a second, in this world, one of these choices is a must-have,

and will create the conditions for us through a greater council tax take to be able to get the nice to have and make the building safer. So sprinklers, we'd love to get those, we do need to get them, but we need to make sure the value of the housing goes up, and we won't be able to put in the sprinklers. It seems like it almost sort of makes sense from one perspective, which is, well, it makes logical sense, A, B, C, which is we have X amount of money, we can only do one of these things.

We are going to do the thing that will get us slightly more money in the future, so we can do more things. It sort of makes sense until you question the basic premise of, well, why do you only have X money? Why do you only have enough money for one of the things? Why can't we just do both of the things? And that's because of what is decided to be sort of hard-nosed and sensible, and so on and so forth.

And one of the reasons it's so pointless going to one of those sort of town meetings, or unless you're doing it sort of as part of a mass action, but why maybe a lot of people feel like it's pointless, even if it's not pointless. People feel like it's pointless because the professional is there to bore you into not caring. The professional is a very highly paid consultant who is there to say, to sort of present to you an Excel model, to basically embarrass you into being quiet,

even if you've got a great idea because your idea is just, let's make it so people don't die. You say, well, that's actually, that's very good, but it's not sensible. When we say professionalism is the exercise of power through control of knowledge, it's doing two things. The first thing it's doing is it's saying that knowledge is, it's basically taking a positivist epistemology, epistemology, where you imagine that there is one set of facts about the universe, right?

And those facts extend everywhere. And all of those facts are equally fact-ish. They're all kind of reified. I'm looking at my new audio interface, and it is red. That's a fact about the audio interface. It's a fact about the universe. And now that I've told you it, you've all discovered it. One more fact about the universe is known.

But if you're a positivist in the social sciences, you would be able to see stuff like, well, we've looked at, quote, the data. We've looked at the data, the capital T, capital D, and we have drawn the correct conclusion, because we have looked at the facts about what it is feasible to do with the money in Kensington and Chelsea Council. We've actually run the economic model, so we figured out the most efficient way to spend the money.

You could spend it another way that would be suboptimal, or it would be kind, but it would be suboptimal. And that's the logic with which the neoliberal politician speaks to us, because that is a professionalized way of seeing the world where a set of facts is basically encircled by a curtain, and only the professional is allowed to look behind it. And, you know, someone else may guess what the facts are, and, oh, they may be a secret genius because they guessed what the facts were,

and then they're admitted to the rank of professional. Anyway, they see knowledge as basically positivist, and because knowledge is not, because positivist knowledge asserts that there's basically a single answer to every question, a right answer, and then a series of wrong answers that may be nice and cuddly. But they're being hard-nosed. They're not being cuddly. They're doing the right answer. That's better for everybody, even if a lot of people have to die because of it.

Anyway, because it is ideology-laden knowledge, positivist knowledge of professionals inherently places its thumb on the scale for the benefit of capital ten out of ten times. The hard-nosed correct answer is always the answer that benefits capital. What a fucking coincidence. And it's almost when we look back at talking about cities and so forth, well, it's easy to see why some things are counted, the things that are scary for capital,

like crime and unlicensed street vendors or whatever, and the things that are, you know, capital is sort of neither here nor there for capital aren't counted, like, you know, the relationship you have with the shop owner. And if they are counted, they have, if they are sort of taken into consideration, they have to be sort of abstracted into the realm of money to the point where they're meaningless.

And so, and then suddenly you're able to compare the value of everyone's relationship with that shop owner within a mile radius of that shop to a routine maintenance of street lights. And you're able to say, well, this one's worth more. How? Why? Honestly, it is literally one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Right, so that's positivist knowledge. But then you can have knowledge that's not positivist,

but more dialectical, where we say, well, what's this knowledge for? Who makes this knowledge? What is the, who benefits? You know, we, from, say, saying that one thing is important and one thing is not, perhaps it is possible that there is a conflict between what you think is important and the right answer and what I think is important is the right answer. Maybe it's equally true that the right answer is to,

is to refit Grenfell in both different ways. It's just one is true for capital and one is true for everybody else. And the idea that there is a single pillar of knowledge behind a curtain but that you can't look at. But trust me, it's good for, it's good for us, us ones this time. But trust me, this is good for everybody. It begins to feel a little bit like a trick. I think that's what one thing Maryfield does.

It's just rather than wear sort of ornate flamboyant robes, these professionals wear gray suits. These mediocre mystifiers who claim that knowledge is not dialectic because they are stupid as shit. I'm drinking a new beer today. An Earl Gray IPA by Yeasty Boys. Shit's fucking, fucking damn fine. One of the very interesting things is that professionalism is largely obfuscatory.

And this is, I don't know again how many of our listeners know this, but one of the main academic muscle behind austerity was a paper that's commonly referred to as Reinhardt Rogoff called Growth in a Time of Debt. And what Growth in a Time of Debt says is that when I think your gross national debt reaches like 90% of your GDP, then basically growth becomes impossible. And the only thing you can do is basically just austerity yourself out of that situation, which is basically a more sort of liberally acceptable version of the managed decline that was happening to Maryfield's neighborhood in the mid-20th century where we've just decided that whole swaths of the population

basically aren't necessary anymore and that if we can provide for fewer and fewer of them, they'll start to live shorter and shorter lives, but it will be fine because they're not really contributing economically and we're only really keeping them alive because we'd feel kind of icky about letting them die. So Reinhardt Rogoff is an interesting piece of scholarship largely because it was completely fucking bollocks. It was proven to not just be reading the data correctly, but from an ideologically laden position. So, you know, for example, with something like a tower block refit, you could just correctly tot up all the costs and from an ideological position decide they're not worth it. Well, in the case of Reinhardt Rogoff, they actually just got it fucking wrong.

In creating their model, you know, they just left out a bunch of countries. They rated like 20 years of positive growth in New Zealand the same as like one year of negative growth elsewhere. You know, their results were not replicable. Like someone else looked at their data and were like, no, these people just made a fuck ton of mistakes. But that didn't really stop austerity because they had their Harvard stamp. They had their academic respectability and they just carried on. And they just carried on because even the individuals responsible for carrying on these policies just did so just stupidly because that's their job.

Because my job is to take this paper from here and put it over here. And that means that someone's benefits get cut, I guess. And I say stupid quite a bit in this episode. And I mean it sort of in two very particular ways. I mean, in its colloquial sense, you know, dumb as shit. But I also mean it in another way. I mean it, I mean in sense almost willful ignorance. Sort of like someone who has been instructed to walk in a straight line.

And then when they hit a wall, they just continue stepping. They just try that can you walking into the wall because they have this sense of sort of just pervasive narrowness. I find it almost personally troubling. So we get back to, I think, amateurism. She's not just personally satisfying. But I think I'm not going to say it's praxis. But I think it's certainly a kind of resistance both for the amateur and for any discipline to which the amateur turns his attentions. Because what it provides is it provides a language and a vision of the future and a set of possibilities sort of hitherto undreamed by the professional.

Whose job it is to be basically to be to subtract and take away and limit what can be done because they have a single right answer because they have the crystal palace. If we have the crystal palace, why do you need another place? It just so happens that in the crystal palace, your everything about you is kind of predetermined. So he says, what we might glimpse once the fetters of professionalism are sort of thrown off is a release of a process of self recovery. So in my notes, where I go back to Proust a little bit here, I think this comes to why I found Proust, in addition to just he was an amateur himself. Why I found him to be such a such a great example. Should we say earlier, you know that the Duke is known to be very small minded. No small minded, but you might say he hasn't he's not a man of examined premises, but he is a man of enormous appearance.

He is he is respected as a collector and a taste maker and all of this. The narrator asks Monsieur Le Duc, Le Duc, Le Duc, if he had seen the Vermeers in Delft to which the Duke responds, he does not remember, but quote, if there is a painting worth seeing, I have seen it. So his taste is kind of weaponized and deployed as a sort of offensive respect ability to silence the questions of those resound him, resound him around him and present him as a kind of arbiter of rightness and wrongness in matters of art. It's sort of a positivist view. Elstier, the painter, the one we talked about daydreaming, abhorrors respectability and the codes of what is acceptable. So he's, you could sort of say he is he is de-schooled and this is at the root of what makes him a genius. The effort made by Elstier to strip himself when face to face with reality of every intellectual notion was all the more admirable in that this man who made himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint forgot everything he knew and his honesty of purpose had in fact an exceptionally cultivated mind. And it was the cultivation of Elstier's mind that sort of leads him to have absolute disdain for a respectable costume, giving himself instead entirely to the act of painting.

And in fact, he's defining himself by his labor, by what he's producing, and his labor is self-defined and self-directed, and it is self-governed. It is not, it is not, it is not essentially, if the, in the positivist world of Moshe Le Duc, then it's all paint my numbers. And it's paint my numbers based on what's respectable from before on, even if Vermeer was a genius and was, it was someone who was breaking molds of his own time. All he's done is create the molds of the present that everyone must sort of hew to because there's the right way and there's the wrong way to paint. And the only way to be creative is to throw those off. And so we talk, we get to a point where we're talking about a picture of asparagus that Elstier paints. There was nothing else in the picture, the Duke said. A bundle of asparagus, exactly like you're eating now, but I must say I declined to swallow it must hear Elstier's asparagus.

He asked 300 francs for them, 300 francs for a bundle of asparagus. A Louis, that's as much as they're worth, even if they are out of season. So he collects prestigious paintings, but that's the only, only those that are deemed to be good or important by the numbers consensus by people who share that aesthetic of respectability. This bundle of asparagus is new, unconventional and the product of a mind stripped of pretension. And Elstier's asparagus are invisible to the Duke, who sees them only as an instrument to cultivate the aesthetic of respectability. So in his painting, I think Elstier is dissenting from and creating his own kind of artwork. And it's a kind of artwork that the Duke doesn't really understand because it's not for him. But he's also, it's also resistance because the Duke's vision of the world is one that is based entirely on sort of unsolidified hierarchies of shit.

Look, there's a lot in this book. There's a lot of great shit in this book. And I chose to do this review, not by talking about necessarily in detail about what Maryfield says. I think in rather kind of offering my thoughts on how it can be applied and how, what other stuff it's made me think about. He's got a lot of great stuff about employment and work and how we can't imagine that unemployment could also lead to happiness because we can't conceive of what could be happy and fulfilling in that world. I mean, you know, I think we can. I think the people who listen to this podcast can, I think I certainly can because I frequently do. Holy shit, there's like a pack of dogs over the road from me.

No, they have collars. And I think it's a very good, it's a very good book. I strongly recommend it. I think the critique of professionalism ultimately rests on this idea of resisting control. And this control crops up everywhere. It crops up in art, it crops up in urbanism, it crops up in the highest echelons of government or it crops up in the fucking office when someone tells you to iron your shirt. You know, why? And it also comes in sort of being, and the resistance comes in looking at what is sensible and sort of always running from it and running from what is respectable.

Because it's never a universal truth. It's never positivist. There's no sort of positive vision of what is what is good for society. And I think the whole point of amateurism is to say that you can do better. I hope. Kind of what I'm doing currently. I don't know why you fuckers all tune in to listen to all this shit. Anyway, it's going on about an hour in the recording, but I genuinely did love this book.

Once again, I'll link it in the bio. To any of you who wants to buy a shirt, who lives in the US, you can. You can order one from Edie's Store, Lil Comrade, at Tiny Comrade, and it's sort of both. And also if you have a baby and you like gentle socialist puns, you can also get some of those. Please do follow us on Twitter. It helps. If you like this show, like share it. I don't know how else we're going to get this amateur project out there.

But I am genuinely touched all the time by all the people who contact me saying that they somehow enjoyed it. And that somehow made their lives somehow good. And thank you for all of that. And thank you also to Jin Sang for our song, Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify, which is a very good song. And all of his music is also very good. And thank you to our producer, Nate Bethay, in these deserts on Twitter, who has fronted the capital for our new audio interface, which is the device through which I am speaking into your ears right now.

Yeah. So thanks a lot for listening. I hope you enjoyed reading my book report as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you.