Realizing the potential of everyday experience as a definitive source of critical reflection and democratic struggle requires a reconstruction of the notion of “individualism” that Dewey’s idea of “growth” makes possible.  Although lived experience is, in and of itself, not necessarily a resource for critical reflection, Dewey argues that the critical potential of experience can and must be tapped if we are to mount an effective challenge to entrenched interests and actualize our democratic commitments to liberty and equality of opportunity. This realization of potential, however, first requires a dedication to reconstructing our understanding of individualism. Therefore, in the last section here, I turn to Individualism Old and New (1929) and argue that Dewey advances a profoundly critical notion of individualism that is based on his unique conceptions of experience, growth, and social intelligence. In order to pave the way for an examination of this nexus between experience as critical reflection, growth as reconstructed individualism, and social intelligence as the fodder for democratic struggle as key components of Dewey’s critical pragmatism, I begin here by tracing key historical dimensions of the relationship between critical theory and pragmatism. As Hans Joas has noted, this history is one of “misunderstandings, deliberate distortions, and well-meaning incomprehension.”

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-153189579.html

Alison Kadlec Reconstructing Dewey: the philosophy of critical pragmatism in Polity (2006) 38, 519–542

Margaret Archer on reflexivity, presentation given at the launch of Dictionary of Critical Realism 17th March 2007

Notes. These are relevant for a discussion of social intelligence and mass intellectuality.

Routinised action, habitual behaviour, is not discussed to much extent in the Critical Realist literature. Routinised action performs a reproduction function, it’s a perpetuating device that reinforces the status quo in conditions of little and very slow change – morphostasis. There is no explicit theorisation of what makes routinised action routine.

Archer considers ‘meanings’ to be ’causes’.

Dismisses Bauman, Beck and Giddens as ‘central conflationists’ but concentrates her attack on Beck in particular. They conflate the affects of structure with the causal powers of agents. They talk of reflexivity at the level of systems and institutions but this is anthropomorphism as it can only be a property of individuals. However else we may explain change in institutions and systems it is not through their reflexivity.

Reflexivity is an individual phenomenon and in conditions of late modernity we have seen a significant growth. Reflexivity is the capacity that all normal individuals have to consider themselves in relation to their social context and their social context in relation to themselves. We all have this capacity. Reflexivity is a mediating process; how we react to situations we have to involuntaristically to obtain some portion of self government and become to some extent the human being we want to be.

Against Bourdieu, she says notion of habitus amounts to saying that disposition is position. But disposition is not homologous with position.

Premodern societies are characterised by morphostasis. But even here a degree of reflexivity is required. In fact reflexivity is a precondition for the existence of any society Even in ‘primitive’ society individuals always have to deal with ‘unscripted’ situations where they must work out for themselves how to cope within the traditional way of doing things. To this extent reflexivity ‘papers over the cracks’ of traditional ways of doing things. In such societies education is little more than socialisation and induction.

Earry modernity saw dramatic changes but over a period of about 300 years. Many could still live on the basis of routinised action and changes were slow enough for socialisation to adapt to new modes of habitual behaviour. But for some groups the need for reflexivity grew. This was a period of great ideological debate over what education was, for what purpose and who should control it.

We have now entered the morphogenetic millennium of rapid change that outstrips the capacity of  intergenerational socialisation processes and knowledge transference. There are more and more contextual discontinuities and a reduction of many spheres of routinised action. Processes of socialisation are fragmenting. The need for reflexivity has become ubiquitous – it is thrust upon nearly everyone. It is the case that we must now, reflexively, make lives of our own ‘but not in circumstances of our own choosing’.

See also:
Margaret S Archer Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism in Sociological Theory Volume 28, Issue 3, pages 272–303, September 2010. In this article she doesn’t name Bauman as one of the ‘central conflationists’ and there is no mention of him in the text or references. Perhaps she’s changed her mind.

The Discourses of Dissent public seminar was held on the 16th February in Birmingham. This is not a fine tuned blog post, just a transcript of the notes I made during the presentations and discussions. The presentations are being prepared for uploading to the web as I write this and I will add links as they become available. There will be errors, some due to not being able to read my handwriting in some places, some due to mishearing (voices didn’t travel well to where I was sitting) and sometimes because no doubt I misunderstood.

New 19/2/2011 All the videos are on line now curtesy of Jennifer Jones who recoded them at the event
http://jennifermjones.net/2011/02/18/all-videos-from-discourses-of-dissent-february-16th-2011/

Karen Rowlingson, presentation

Using evidence from the Social Attitudes Survey, Karen discussed the way the media had reported her research, presenting it as showing that today the public is more Thatcherite than ever before. But she demonstrated how it was much more complex than this and that people held rather contradictory views about poverty, the undeserving poor, the possibilities of individual autonomy and still valuing key aspects of State provision for support and protection. The role of this talk seemed to be to establish some aspects of the ‘public’ we would implicitly and explicitly be referring to throughout the seminar.

Ruth Levitas, presentation

H. G. Well’s quote – critique of utopias is sociology’s proper function and method. The imagination of alternative futures.

Three approaches to critiquing utopias:
1. Archaeological – notions of the good society are embedded in every political position (i.e. big society)
2. Architectural – imagining holistically what social institutions should be, i.e. no point in reimagining the university without imagining wah all the other institutions (social, political, etc.) would be
3. Ideological – how individuals will be interpellated into the new society

This method of utopian critique must be reflexive, dialogical and discursive. The idea is to achieve a distance from what we are doing (the present) to judge it in the light of what is possible.

We now are suffering Thatcherism with bells and whistles. Big society is how to mobilise unpaid labour by cutting mainly women’s jobs in the labour market.

All justified by the claim there is a shortage of money. Not true. The question is ‘who has it?’ Over the last ?? years top 10% share up from 20% to 30%. In the same time bottom 10% share has dropped from 4% down to 1%.

All measured GDP as market activity so ignoring all other forms of ‘product’ in voluntary and unpaid sector outside of markets.

Assumption private sector makes wealth and the public sector spends it. Not true.

New ways are needed of valuing labour. A new society would need to live within ecological limits, based on equality, a redefinition of ‘wealth’ and what the good life is, involving a total organisation of labour, markets and the social, basic incomes, education etc. But this requires collective action rather than individualised responses that echo the neoliberal self, the epitome of what Marx meant as 1 of the 4 dimensions of alienation. We need to see ourselves as agents of transformation to a better society, not operating in the mode of neoliberal selves. Needs some sort of spontaneous organisation linking collective and individual experience.

Sasha Roseneil, presentation

Our understandings are constitutive, bring reality into being. She draws on critical theory but makes the distinction between criticism, critique and criticality – the latter focuses on present possibilities and is not entirely negative as are the first two. (Rogoff?). Eve Sedgwick – what does knowledge ‘do’?

Unveiling and disclosure is sociology in the register of paranoia. Things are bad and getting worse. Not practical or future oriented. We need a ‘reparative’ more hopeful analysis. Having shown how things could have been different we can also show how they can or will be different. We need to mediate what is wrong with what is possible – criticality.

The key to Sasha’s approach is:
1. Show how things could have been different
2. Link this with the understanding of the performative constructive role of culture and ideas. Exploit the discontinuities and ambivalences and the counter normative practices.

RL – but must denaturalise the LibDem utopia. Part of this would show how they have they have appropriated ideas and discourses to distort and exploit them. Mass mobilisation not only prevented by (dominant?) discourses but by the structure of everyday life. Protest is not enough in any case needs to thrust out and connect with a collective political force/project. Counter normative movements and action can be alternative, oppositional but rarely transformative (as Raymond Williams pointed out).

SR – pockets of counter normativity won’t do it by themselves but in some parts of the world it has given people a way to survive.

Floor – there is plenty of evidence of counter cultural activity taking place in the ‘cracks’ (Holloway) and interstices (Sasha) but no evidence that there is any development of an organised and effective political movement.

Floor –  Holloway, yes. But need to organise a political project – socialism.

SR – can’t go back to the older forms of labour organisation and ideological education of the past. Life, selves, etc. now very different. The starting point is different.

RL– the need to be reflexive and dialogical. Cannot dump on people a ready-made complete ideology, cannot merely indoctrinate. It is a matter of engaging in a process rather than persuade others of an ideology.

John Holmwood, presentation

Clarke Kerr’s notion of a multiuniversity i.e. a number of different functions and purposes including producing workers and creating economically valuable knowledge. One of these is the notion of a public function on Dewey’s lines – to promote ‘collective intelligence’ which allows dialogue and discussion ‘before’ the state. The development of a social self to operate in a democracy and in dialogue. Public actions ramify into people’s lives etc, and collective intelligence helps the public deal with resulting issues and problems. Improvement of discussion in public debate is the need met by the public function of the university. The marketisation of the university meets all the purposes of the multiuniversity but the public one. This is being diminished dramatically.

Steve Fuller, presentation

Main point is that we are all against what is happening now but if we began to specify what sort of Uni we want there may be much more disagreement. Agree on a common enemy but that may be all. A unis job is to manufacture knowledge for the public good. Teaching and research very different activities and measured in different ways. Not compatible. Still need elite professors as exemplars of learning and knowledge creation for others to aspire to.

Dan Hind, presentation

Main point is about the way that information is controlled by the media. Many writers warning of the imminent financial collapse but main media spokesmen still the apologists and the ‘no one could see it coming’ school. David Harvey and others get no air time as not ‘respectable’ etc. Tainted by Marxism.

SF – People like Harvey mainly only speaking to believers in jargon so their own fault they don’t get media coverage.

DH – economic policy is being made by ‘private publics’. The student protest is a ‘mutiny against the future’.

JH – meaninglessness of measuring sociology’s impacts in terms of individuals and specific research projects.

Floor– we need a participatory and deliberative democracy

DH – we need a way of allowing the public to set research agendas and commission research project s and objectives.

Floor – Yes, but the public is fragmented, individualistic, etc. We need a way of recreating a public.

DH – Democracy as a learning community.

Floor -There are other social issues and victims as a result of uni cuts if some vulnerable unis have to close. London Met has more Afro-carribean students than the entire Russell Group. So who is this ‘public’ we want a public uni for and who’s voices are heard and are influential?

This is the end of the unedited notes. The discussion did not really address the issue of ‘what is to be done’ in any systematic way. There were comments on the need to think holistically, for instance imagining what a public university should be needs also to think about all the other institutions and how they would need to change as well. How will an alternative society interpellate individuals, i.e what new forms of socialisation would be needed, what sorts of ‘selves’ does this imply? How do the various protests, counter cultural movements, etc. coalesce into a political programme, and organisation and a project that has some definite connection to the State and institutions that need revolutionising? Or will transformation just happen if and when a critical mass of counter cultural and protest movements is achieved? Does politics wwith a small p have to engage wwith and become Politics with a big P?

Related resources

Ruth’s inaugural lecture 2005 The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, or, why sociologists and others should take utopia more seriously. Her talk here was partly based on her article Back to the future: Wells, sociology, utopia and method in The Sociological Review 58, 4 2010.

Over the years I have accumulated a number of blogs, wikis and other on-line content of various sorts. terrywassall.org is an attempt to organise these and weed out stuff that is redundant. At some point I will produce a page that maps out what’s where. This will become a sort of portal to my digital life. There are a few more details of this on the About page.

This post was first published in the British Sociological Association’s Sociology and the Cuts blog on the 13th December under the title The danger of devaluing sociology. Three comments have been made on the original post.
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Commenting on the economics profession’s mystification at its failure to foresee the current financial crisis, former chief economic advisor to the US government, Thomas Palley, attributed it to “the economics profession’s complete inability to come to grips with its sociological failure which produced massive intellectual failure with huge costs for society” (http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=148). The economic theory presumed to explain and predict the workings of financial markets is based on complicated mathematical theorems and equations that empirically bear no relationship to the reality of economic life embedded as it is in the combinatorial multilayered complexities of society. The advanced mathematical basis of this sociologically inadequate theory has led to the employment, by the casino bankers and traders, of bright mathematics and physics graduates and computerised algorithmic systems for buying and selling shares, financial derivatives and commoditised risk. (For a readable account see John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: the logic of economic calamities Penguin 2009). Physics and mathematics will continue to have their teaching funded. Economics, like sociology, is having teaching funding withdrawn but economics has largely been reduced to mathematical fantasies and political doctrine. The consequences of withdrawing funding from other social science subjects, including sociology, may be disastrous however.

Economics is not the only discipline that is impoverished by a lack of sociological perspective, for instance climate change science and policy. Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the UEA, advisor to the UK Government, the European Commission and the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), in his recent book Why We Disagree About Climate Change CUP 2009, identifies three areas of uncertainty in climate science and what the implications are for policy. The first two relate to the uncertainties of climate science itself: uncertainties due to our incomplete understanding of the interlocking physical systems involved and to the inherent unpredictability of large, complex and chaotic systems. The third source of uncertainty and unpredictability “originates as a consequence of humans being part of the future being predicted. Individual and collective human choices five, twenty and fifty years into the future are not predictable in any scientific sense”. He goes on to bemoan the “elite judgements” that lead to social scientists being “poorly represented among the nominated experts”. A strong implication of Hulme’s account of mainstream climate policy discourse is that, rather than prioritising ever more climate science to refine the calculation of ‘climate sensitivity’ – the global temperature increase in the event of the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – we desperately need a considerably more sophisticated understanding of the sociological aspects of anthropospheric impacts on the climate.

We need a continued investment in teaching and research in sociology. It is a sad irony that the neoliberal economic doctrine that informs (or rather deforms) the government’s policy for higher education (and much else), its assumptions about the efficiency of markets, the one dimensional calculative and self interested economic rationality of student ‘consumers’, and the devaluing of the social sciences, demonstrates its own, destructive, sociological inadequacy.

Student-as-producer: reflections on the socio-historical moment of technology-in-education

Richard Hall has posted an excellent piece  on the relationship between technology and education prompted by a reflection on the student demonstration on the 10th of November in London. As Richard points out, this was about much more than the cuts and the increased fees. Most of the demonstrators would not be immediately affected by these anyway. What is now being questioned is the whole nature and purpose of higher education at a time when the government and its corporate backers are steering it remorselessly towards a privatised consumerist market driven institution in the service of the economy and GDP growth.

This is a debate I am intensely interested in for a number of reasons, political, moral, ethical and personal. My ideas are nowhere as advanced as those of Richard’s or of Mike Neary (cited in Richard’s post) and I am learning a lot from them. My take on this will probably build on the ideas of Bourdieu on education and Zygmunt Bauman’s views on the contribution sociology could make to a general process of reinvigorating public discourse and democratic engagement. This also chimes in with a variety of writers and thinkers who are seeking to defend and extend democratic processes where privatisation, managerialism and forms of social and political exclusion have significantly reduced them.  This, I think, chimes in well with the thrust of ideas like ‘social knowing’ and ‘mass intellectuality’.