The Question
Plato asked questions. Lots of them. Such as what is the form and who is the maker - to which Aristotle, the star pupil replied, "But what is the question?" Today, I have a question. What does Marx have to do with marks?
Introspection
For the past several weeks in my capacity as a lecturer at RMIT Vietnam, I've had to refamiliarize myself with the basics of critical theory. The semesters lectures have thus been: Reading Images, Intertextuality and today's week three brain cramper, Semiotics. In the course of my crash reacquaintance with these terms, ideas and analytic tools, one thing strikes me as odd. There is very little mention of Marxism. All the books I've been reading devote huge chunks to Marxist analysis, but there is very little mention of it in the course syllabus, despite following lectures devoted to modernism, post-modernism, and the list goes on. But why is Marx absent? This is Vietnam for chrissakes... precisely.
Most university students here, that is to say those in Vietnamese universities such as the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts University, are obligated to study Marxist-Leninist thought whether they be preparing for careers as graphic designers or chairpersons of multinational conglomerates. I wonder what they really learn in this class. During my college education, there was a good dose of media studies and media criticism. But swallowed it at face value for indeed it had no face. Reading back into those critiques, I now realize it did have a face and that face is Marx. I don't necessarily cozy up to terms such as "class consciousness" and "alienation" but as the book I'm reading summarizes:
"Marxist thought is one of the most powerful and suggestive ways available to the media analyst for analyzing society and its institutions...(dealing) with such fundamental principles of Marxist analysis as alienation, materialism, false consciousness, class conflict and hegemony - concepts that can be applied to media and can help us understand the ways media function. Particular attention is paid to the role of advertising in creating consumer lust , and some cautions are offered about the danger of being doctrinaire."
Authur Asa Berger. Media Analysis Techniques. Third Ed.
London: Sage Publications, 2005. p.42
And before anyone gets all up in my face one ought to prepare first by realizing the differences between Marxist cultural critique and say, for example, communism. Anyhow, I'm straying off point...
I've long been critical the media's relationship to capitalism. In fact, that is likely the reason I dropped out of a graphic design degree in my third year of university studies for media arts. I simply didn't want to go into advertising. But exploitation exists in socialist states as much as it does in capitalist ones, often in a more repressive form. That's the irony. How does something like that happen? Some would argue that Marxism is utopian or outdated and there is evidence that socialism, at least in a Maoist or Stalinist sense, has long been on the wane. But frankly, I'm less interested in the political slant and more in the analytic framework for culture and media (or what Marxists would refer to as the superstructure). The challenge is how am I going to speak concisely about Marxist analytics without becoming entangled with the other side of Marx? The methodology serves to critique capitalist culture as much as it does itself.
Retrospection
In yesterday's BBC, there appeared an interesting article, "Vietnam ambivalent on Le Duan's legacy". For me, I knew little about the man beyond the fact that I have to cross a street of his namesake everyday on the way to work. Okay, I admit that I also knew he was a politician rather than say, an ancient hero or poet, for which many of the other streets take their names. The article is one of many recently appearing on the BBC concerning Vietnam as it prepares to enter the WTO this year. Most of the articles seem to play up the "once enemies now friends" storyline. This one is no different except that it sheds some light on Vietnam's struggle and coming to terms with its recent history and its new global role as the last year's second fasting growing economy. The first was China. Go figure.
Inspection
Coming back around to teaching. During my staff induction week at RMIT, the issue of plagiarism was introduced on day one and reinforced throughout the week. Evidently, the problem of cheating had become so problematic that RMIT will be implementing advanced software analysis that computationally compares student papers against a database that will flag "questionable" text areas. Students are required to sign a form at the beginning of each semester acknowledging that they are aware of the penalties and policies of cheating at the university. In the last weeks, its been all over the local press. Cheating. Cheating. Cheating. In Hanoi, the cheating has become so sophisticated that organized networks have form using mobile technologies to stream answers to students on their phones (or for the cool ones, their bluetooth-enabled handsets). The Education Minister recently took a page from Nancy Reagan and announced the "Say No to Cheating" campaign. But one knows its really gotten out of hand when a local cheating issue becomes so endemic that it get another full article on the BBC. But I question again, why are the Vietnamese so prone to cheating? I've written about this issue before on this blog, particularly as it concerns the arts in "A Vietnamese Original."
For design, so much is dependent on exposure and influence from the visual world around us. In multimedia, the remixed, mashed-up, bricolage of sound and image is in fact the prevailing design style. One a big fat cup of maximalism please. David Carson, Neville Brody, Stephan Sagmeister... You think all that stuff came from their dreams? So, it's got to be a case by case basis here. But as the above link mentions, there are lines that can be drawn.
Marx/Marks
So, what does Marx have to do with marks. I'm still not sure, but I'll have to know in the next weeks as I continue to find the best way to encouage my students to be honest and critical.
"We need to rethink educational success. We need to improve critical thinking and measuring improvement and knowledge in a new way." - Me (in Mala Educación)
