Review article in the Guardian by Hari Kunzru Thursday 15 September 201. This offers a succint background to the books I am reading by Owen Hatherley – Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.

Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum (full text)

The Sony building stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and 56th Street in midtown Manhattan. At 197m, it’s a little higher than its immediate neighbours, but there are at least 60 taller buildings in the city. It is an inoffensive, creamy colour. At ground level there’s a spectacular atrium. Yet when it was completed in 1984, it was considered the most shocking building in the world.

The reason is the top. You have to walk a block or so away to get a sense of it. The building, originally known after its first corporate owner, AT&T, is crowned by a broken pediment; a circular space has been carved out of the apex of the triangle which tops the façade. It’s a simple, rather beautiful gesture. It is also a huge act of betrayal by the architect and the most visible trace on the New York skyline of postmodernism, a cultural current that is the subject of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, a major new exhibition at the V&A.

Why betrayal? The architect was Philip Johnson, who in 1932 had curated an extraordinary architectural show at the Museum of Modern Art. Images and models of buildings by Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and others led a generation of architects to make an absolute break with the styles of the past and embrace the tenets of modernism, chief among which was the idea that form should follow function. Johnson termed this new wave the “international style”, a name which stuck as the skylines of major cities (notably Chicago) were transformed by constructions of plate glass and structural steel, buildings which banished decoration, mere skin and bones enclosing volumes of space.

Initially a radically utopian architecture, dreaming of a rational future uncluttered by superstition and ornament, the international style had, by the 1970s, become a rather joyless orthodoxy. For every triumph of the movement, such as Mies and Johnson’s Seagram building or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, there were 10 undistinguished tower blocks, whose indifference to their context seemed less an expression of universality than of the arrogance of planners. Britain suffered particularly badly, as shoddy system-built high-rises gave modernism a bad name from which it has never entirely recovered.

For the man who had brought the international style to North America to put an ornamental pediment on his building was like Mondrian deciding to put a vase of flowers in a corner of his black and white grid. The AT&T tower became known, sneeringly, as the Chippendale building, because it reminded observers of the ornamental broken pediments the 18th-century cabinetmaker often put on highboys and bookcases. A building that looked like a piece of furniture? It seemed trivialising, a tasteless joke.

But Johnson was not the only person finding his sense of humour. Suddenly serious architects were adding colour to their creations, making little historical references, nudges and winks. All sorts of things that had been off-limits came back: trompe l’oeil, vernacular, pastiche. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published a theoretical book about the tackiest built environment in the world, the Las Vegas strip. They called it, provocatively, Learning from Las Vegas. The strip, they argued, with its riot of billboards and neon, was (literally) a place of signs rather than things, where the buildings were only a minor part of an environment of semiotic seductions, designed to be legible to a person travelling by at 35mph.

This is the essence of postmodernism: the idea that there is no essence, that we’re moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways. Nothing is direct, nothing is new. Everything is already mediated. The real, whatever that might be, is unavailable. It’s an exhilarating world, but uncanny too. You look around at your beautiful house and your beautiful wife and you ask yourself, like the narrator of the Talking Heads song: ‘Well, how did I get here?” After that, it’s only a short step to deciding that this is not your beautiful house and your beautiful wife at all. The world of signs is fast, liquid, delirious, disposable. Clever people approach it with scepticism. Sincerity is out. Irony is in. And style. If modernism was about substance, about serious design solving serious problems, postmodernism was all manner and swagger and stance.

The curators of the V&A show have sensibly decided to steer away from art and literature (which could fill a second exhibition), and to present postmodernism as a set of design strategies, visible across the spectrum from fashion to graphics to furniture. They have also cheekily periodised it, choosing a 20-year time frame, which they gleefully ignore when it suits them. The result is revelatory, a ground-breaking history of a recent cultural past that has, almost without us noticing, gone from the cutting edge to the museum.

For designers, postmodernism meant making material things that felt like signs of themselves. The Italian pranksters of the Memphis group defined the aesthetic of the late 70s and early 80s with household objects that looked as if they’d materialised from cartoons, absurdly juxtaposed simple forms presented in bright, artificial colours. LA-based Peter Shire created candy-coloured furniture that always seemed on the verge of retreating back into two-dimensionality. His Bel Air chair of 1982 is the very avatar of postmodern weightlessness, an object that could exist at any scale, at home by a pool, in an aquarium, at the bottom of a cocktail glass. But postmodernism, protean, ever hard to pin down, wasn’t just about a cartoon future. The taste for historical pastiche, for country kitchens and neo-Georgian kitsch, was also part of the same tendency. Laura Ashley, Merchant Ivory and the fake past of Poundbury are (whether Prince Charles knows it or not) just as postmodern, in their way, as the fashion designs of Rei Kawakubo or the graphic riot of Arata Isozaki’s Team Disney building.

If postmodernism could be fun and bright, it was also disturbing. In a friction-free world of signs, what happened to value? Nowhere did this question arise more forcefully than in Oliviero Toscani’s advertising campaigns for Benetton, in which deliberately-confrontational images of Aids patients and death row inmates were used to sell pastel-coloured knitwear. The cynicism of Toscani’s work seemed to suggest we were now living in the corporate world of Videodrome, David Cronenberg‘s 1983 horror film about a sleazy producer discovering an anonymous cable channel broadcasting extreme sexual violence. The relentless march of money across the cultural landscape of the 1980s, with figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring describing brief and tragic arcs, seemed to many a fundamental debasement of the idea of art. To others, it was just fun.

Fittingly, for a cultural moment where everyone appeared to be playing themselves, postmodern performers such as Grace Jones, Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi developed a style of self-presentation that, for the first time, floated free of human limitations. On MTV (on air 1981) and magazine pages designed with the new Apple Macs (on sale 1984) they appeared both more and less than human, like the replicants from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Postmodern bodies often suggested machinery, as in the deadpan totalitarianism of the bands Kraftwerk and Devo. The most human of acts, such as singing and dancing, became infected with something robotic and unheimlich: David Byrne’s jerky dancing and oversized organisation-man suits, Laurie Anderson’s vocoder voice singing lullabies about Superman and big science, Boy George’s liquidation of gender, Madonna’s hyper-disciplined blonde bombshell, who seemed closer to the man-machines played by Arnold Schwarzenegger than the pop pin-ups of the previous generation. Jean-Paul Goude’s manipulated, post-produced photos of Grace Jones, her limbs elongated, her oiled skin suggesting chrome and spray paint, stand among the most powerful documents of the period. Jones was pointing the way towards something both troubling and exhilarating, something which as the 80s became the 90s, became codifed as the “posthuman”.

Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, the curators of the V&A show, point to the video for New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” as a paradigm of postmodern visual style. Its director, the New York artist Robert Longo, produced a palimpsest of decontextualised, pixellated imagery, incorporating a signature of his Men in the Cities series of images of contorted, falling figures dressed in business wear. Post 9/11 this is uncomfortable to watch, which makes it even more curious that Mad Men, the popular TV drama, alludes to Longo’s figures in its title sequence, which has a businessman falling past a façade that inescapably calls to mind the most famously absent international style buildings in Manhattan, the twin towers of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center.

For many, the events of 11 September signalled the death of postmodernism as an intellectual current. That morning it became clear that “hostility to grand narratives”, as Jean-François Lyotard defined it, was a minority pursuit, an intellectual Rubik’s cube for a tiny western metropolitan elite. It seemed most of the world still had some use for God, truth and the law, terms which they were using without inverted commas. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was widely ridiculed for declaring that the attacks signalled “the end of the age of irony”, but his use of the po-mo buzzword proved prescient. If irony didn’t vanish (though during the crushing literalism and faux-sincerity of the Bush-Blair war years it seemed like a rare and valuable commodity), postmodernism itself suddenly seemed tired and shopworn.

Use Google’s ngram viewer to look at the incidence of the word “postmodernism” in books since 1975 and you find a sharp rise, peaking in around 1997, then an equally sharp decline. Plot this against the use of the word “internet” and the comparison is startling. Almost unused before the mid-80s, “internet” overtakes “postmodernism” in 2000, and carries on rising. All avant-gardes are in the business of futurism. They make an attempt to inhabit the space they predict, and in so doing, they bring it into being. Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It’s as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.

Since I posted my own initial reflections on the festival on this blog (Camping, conversation and conviviality)I have read quite a few others and found them very interesting and illuminating. Although there are some similarities in the reflections it is clear to me that there were subjectively many parallel festivals depending on what each person brought to the party – their previous knowledge and dispositions, their interests and concerns, the forms of language they constructed their experiences through and so on. Re-reading my own reflections after reading these others I find that, from the point of view of many, I may have rather missed the point! One piece that articulated some of my concerns was that by  Andrew Lainton –
http://andrewlainton.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/the-dark-retreat-and-…

He starts by quoting from the Dark Mountain Manifesto

We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’….
We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies.

Given the main question I had about much of what I heard and enjoyed at the festival – where is the politics in all this – I can now perhaps see why this didn’t seem to resonate with anyone outside the immediate circle of friends I went to the festival with and why my blog post now seems a little out of kilter with the general tenor of most of the others post I have read. I hasten to say that I only partially recognise Andrew’s characterisation of the festival and my experience seems to have been much more positive. But I too am looking for a constructive way forward from our current critique and understanding of the capitalist dystopia we are living in. I would take a more positive interpretation of the quoted manifesto. Rejecting the faith that we can reduce our crisis to a set of problems that can be solved with technological and political solutions does not necessarily mean rejecting technology and political thinking and activism as part of what is needed. In any case, it is by now quite clear that what is required are significant social, political, economic and personal changes that go way beyond any possible technological and managerial solutions to environmental problems. And I do not see, as Andrew implies, that the Dark Mountain project in its latest development is necessarily or inevitably anti-civilisation and a deeply primitivist turn. As the session on Luddism made clear, it was not a rejection of technology per se, but of technology that destroyed sociality and conviviality. And the desire not to lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies (and I would be interested in how this distinction is to being made) does not preclude the necessity to engage in some theoretical and/or ideological work. After all the development of ideologies is the elaboration of meaning and the process whereby it becomes our commonsense and the taken-for-granted background to the conduct of our everyday lives. The battle against fascism, growthism, corporatism, the Washington consensus, the power of neoliberal ideology (so powerful that the neoliberal category of the individual was alive and well in many of the discussions at the festival) must also be fought at the level of ideology.

Simultaneously posted on the Dark Mountain community website: http://uncivilisation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/reflections-on-uncivilisation-2011

I’ve been trying to start this post since getting home last Sunday from the Uncivilisation Dark Mountain Fesitival. It’s now Wednesday and I still don’t really know what I want to say so I’ve decided to just sit here and see what comes out, partly prompted by the report on the event in the Independent this morning The Uncivilisation Festival : The apocalpyse? Now we’re talking…. So this is likely to end up as a collection of random observations.

First, the people. For me the main delight of the Festival was the simplicity of tented living and the environment this provided for leisurely, spontaneous and random conversation with fellow campers. Tents and simple camping technology are indeed excellent tools for conviviality. I hadn’t camped for over 25 years and so was a little nervous about how I would take to it again. I arrived at the Sustainability Centre near East Meon in the Hampshire Downs about 4.30pm with two friends, Brian and Helen, who had been complete strangers when I picked them up at Leeds Station about 5 hours earlier. The weekend could not have got off to a better start. On arrival there were only a few tents up so we were able to to find a section of forest glade not too far from the loos (or too near for that matter), the main event spaces, the café, the bar tent and the food wagon (who incidentally did an amazing job). Over the next hour Jennifer, Tom, Jen, David, Mark and Gabrielle turned up and pitched in the same area. I think it is fair to say that none of us would have been meeting up here if it was not for David and Twitter – the real power of social networking, the virtual made flesh!

When I told friends I was going to the Dark Mountain Festival this year I struggled to answer their questions about why I was going since I didn’t know anything very much about the Dark Mountain Project and, in any case, I was not sure why myself – probably virtual peer pressure. I have since learnt (and please correct me if I am wrong) that the general thrust is to imagine, in some instances re-imagine, how we might make sense of and live in a world where all the taken-for-grantedness of our civilisation and our civilised way of life – from a Western perspective at any rate – collapses around us. For we may well be living in Žižek’s ‘End Times’. Certainly two sessions I went to, Collapsonomics: living through the unfolding breakdown and Bubbles and their consequences made a very good job of convincing me! If you juxtapose these with self-sufficiency sessions on How to make booze for (almost) free, Foraging and low-tech communal leisure pursuits like story telling and music on acoustic instruments by candle light, you’ll get an idea of what a lot of the festival was about.

However, story telling is much more important than just a sociable low cost leisure pursuit. The title of the festival was ‘Uncivilisation’. This was not an invitation to behave in an uncivilised fashion and to throw off our civilised inhibitions (actually it was to some extent judging by the feral singing sessions and the willingness to talk to and trust strangers). It is an invitation to examine the taken for granted values and affordances of our energy and technology intensive way of life based upon monetarised values and commodified relations and to imagine what life could be like (in both dystopian and utopian modes of imagining) when the well runs dry, i.e. don’t make the mistake made by Russell’s inductive turkey.  Our immediate past experience is not an infallible guide to the future. We need to see our taken for granted story about civilisation, especially its up side, for what it is – a story – and begin to tell alternative stories not only about the civilisational story itself but stories about other possible worlds, societies and satisfying and fulfilling ways of living.

I guess I am predisposed to have sympathy with the Dark Mountain agenda having consumed a pretty gloomy reading diet over the last year or two. Low lights have been Ronald Wrights’ A Short History of Progress and Richard Manning’s Against the Grain. Mildly uplifting (for someone who is not very good with his hands) has been Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for US and Fixing Things is Good. Snappy huh? More intellectually challenging but in keeping with the Dark Mountain agenda is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, a telling challenge to the self-understandings of capitalist modernity and its categories of thought and fundamental concepts.

I say the Dark Mountain ‘agenda’ but in practice there doesn’t seem to be one, certainly not clearly articulated anyway. This may well be in the spirit of post-modern sociological doubt and uncertainty and the denigration of meta-narratives and grand theories. It chimes in well with my old professor’s, Zygmunt Bauman, insistence that the only role for his discipline, sociology, is to act as a facilitator and interpretor amongst different stories. It’s old role from an earlier and apparently more certain period of modernity, as providing sound knowledge to legislators, was a delusion which has been painfully exposed by our current predicaments. It is little wonder that, when asked what readings inspires his work today, he mentions only literary figures like  Robert Musil, José Saramago and Miguel de Cervantes. If you have not yet read any Saramago why not start with The Notebook, the hard copy of a daily blog he ran for a couple of years in his eighties before he died. Zygmunt (also now well into his eighties) also recommended to me The Cave. There is much in these books for the Dark Mountaineer. I am currently drafting a piece on the power of literature as the way to sociological understanding inspired by Zygmunt and a quote from George R.R. Martin “A reader lives a thousand lives before they die. The person who never reads lives only one”.

An articulated agenda presupposes some sort of clear political position and this was the basis of the only question I asked at one of the sessions –  where is the politics in all this? Or, what sorts of implicit politics can be disinterred from what is going on here? One of the problems with notions of self-self-sufficiency, individual survival strategies, reclaim the past, return to the soil, etc. (and there were elements of this in several discussions I overheard or took part in)  is that they can be appropriated by a wide range of political positions some of which most of us would not be comfortable with. A diagnosis that leaves open the possible pathways to the future can accommodate, for instance, the (probably tongue-in-cheek) question asked at the collapsonomics session, why not just arm ourselves and shoot anyone who comes to take our stuff? It is an entirely feasible possible strategy. In this session one of the presenters, I think it was Anton Shelupenov speaking about the Albanian collapse, reports one of his acquaintances at that time saying a night wouldn’t go by without the sounds of gunshots. He called on his neighbour to ask if he had any spare bullets he could let him have. He hadn’t got a gun but he wanted his neighbour to think he had. To avoid this entirely possible future we need more than a critique of civilisation and survival skills – both very necessary of course. We need a clear set of articulated values with a political agenda linked to a cunning plan. Where’s Baldrick when you need him?

This is a brief summary of the Leverhulme Lecture John Holloway gave on the 11th of May at Leeds University. The lecture focussed mainly on the ideas developed in his book, Crack Capitalism.  John spoke for over an hour (though it didn’t feel like it!) so this summary will no doubt do some violence to what he said but hopefully others there will correct these brief impressions and perhaps fill in any important gaps I have left. In due course a video will be made available on-line. He structured his talk round a number of key points and this is a set of notes on the ones I can remember and that made a particular impression.

Generally John avoids prescription but there are two things he was adamant about. Our understanding and action has to start from a concept of capitalism and from struggle rather than seeking domination. The two are related.

We look for enemies. We look for who is to blame so we have a target and adversary. We blame the government because they run the State; we blame the corporations, the capitalists, the bankers, or empire, or patriarchy. But all this is to miss the point. Behind all of these is the impersonal system that is capitalism. It is a system that has a life of its own, controlled by nobody, not State institutions and apparatus, not corporations, and not capitalists. Certainly some massively benefit more than others and some have more sway than others but the system that is capital holds all in its strangling embrace. Behind all our bogey men is the totalising (but not totalitarian) impersonal force of capitalism.

So it is necessary to understand what we mean by capitalism as an impersonal system. The key thing here is that it is a system that structures the social relations that make up society. John spent some time on this. We can understand the system fundamentally in terms of the social relations and social cohesion it produces, seen as a triumvirate of equivalences – capital, money, labour. It is this system that engulfs us in a “tsunami of social determinations”. We are obliged to work and live within the money economy to survive. This reduces (or attempts to reduce) our social relationships to monetised relationships and transforms our activity into labour that reproduces the system and provides the engine of capital accumulation. But there are cracks in capitalism that allow us to push against this current and take some opportunities and the responsibility to say “no”, to refuse to fit into the pattern of capitalist social relations. We can engage in different types of doing that are within, against and in some instances beyond capitalist social relations and the spaces we can do this in are everywhere, in many respects quite everyday and ordinary. These possibilities are the result of a fundamental weakness in the capitalist system: it depends on us and our labour to meet its need for accumulation and to reproduce the form of social cohesion the system requires. It is dependent on those it dominates. This is the key to the possibility and actuality of our resistance.

Living in the cracks in social relations and activities that deny and resist the social determinations of capitalism is not the old failed agenda of trying to take control of the state in order to build a new society from the top. It is not a project to seek domination via the State. Resistance and change need to start on the ground by subverting the forms of social relationships that the system depends on. John gave many examples of cracks in capitalism, spaces where literally or metaphorically signs at the edges announce that capitalist social relations are not welcome and do not operate here. He instanced, among others, the Zapatistas, the  Really Open University and the students taking the MA in Activism and Social Change at Leeds University he is currently working with. Other excellent examples are the Social Science Centre at Lincoln and the Roundhouse Journal.

The cracks and their forms of relations and activities are fluid and dynamic. To some extent they come and go. But there is evidence of proliferation and confluence.

This, I think, is the gist of John’s argument. The questions from the predominantly student audience were impressive and homed in unerringly on what John himself admitted was a potential weakness in his position. Early on in his lecture John characterised capitalism as a dynamic and developing system driven by the necessity to handle its dependency on labour and its disrupting potentialities. Resistance tends to be neutralised and absorbed, even sometimes commodified and swallowed into the system of capitalist relations. The problem of this feature of the capitalist system seemed to be the context of nearly all the questions. One question was concerned that the many instances of cracks would not necessarily join up and coalesce into a total transformative movement to overcome and replace capitalism. Just as likely would be that they would remain isolated and fail ultimately to be transformative. How would the ‘confluence’ that John alluded to occur? Surely it would need some sort of organised cohesion, some forms of overarching leadership? John’s response was to say that institutions do not work. Inevitably hierarchical and vertical structures and relations develop. Distinctions begin to be made between roles, between part-time and full-time, more or less committed, and so on. Gradually forms of domination and distinction emerge and solidify reproducing in many respects the forms of social relations that were being resisted. But how, if not through organisation and leadership will the confluence of cracks occur? John gave as an example the forms of communication and transition that occurred with the Zapatistas – resonances and echoes created and transmitted through poetry, art, theatre, and forms of non-hierarchical democratic dialogue. No one mentioned the internet at this point, a form of communication that has developed its radical (and to some extent repressive) potential enormously in recent years.

John was asked what his attitude is towards more conventionally ‘reformist’ approaches, for instance the attempt to institute some sort of financial transaction tax to finance welfare measures and/or pay for public services. John’s answer invoked his earlier reference to resistance within, against and beyond. There are different forms of resistance which individuals will be more or less comfortable with. But the bottom-line for him is that capitalism stinks and needs to be completely dismantled. His response echoed that of Slavoj Žižek – of course no one can object to feeding the poor but we should be fundamentally concerned with and focussed on the system that produces and reproduces their poverty. Reformism ultimately supports and reproduces the system of repression and indignity.

One questioner made the powerful point that cracks as characterised are often instrumental for the system. One of John’s examples of a space where relationships and actions do not conform to the pattern of capitalist relations is the family. But historically and still today the family is crucial to the functioning and reproduction of capitalism.

To summarise John’s answers to all the questions, he consistently stated that there are no guarantees, that the possibility of change is uncertain, even that it may be too late. But the hope and potential for change rests in autonomous struggle, not the acquisition of the power and institutions of state. It is the practice, proliferation, propagation and confluence of other ways of doing that resist and subvert the social determination of capitalist relations that we should engage in, promote and nurture.

[This post has been published on the Really Open University (links to post) web site. If you wish to comment or discuss the lecture you may wish to visit the post there where it will probably get a larger readership. Of course, if you prefer, please comment here!].

Hedge funds accused of gambling with lives of the poorest as food prices soar refers to a report on how trading in food commodity derivatives inflates and destabilises food prices with devastating consequences for the poorest communities globally.

Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: “Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving. “Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world’s poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable.” The group used figures in Goldman Sachs’ annual report to estimate that the bank made a profit of $1bn (£650m) through speculating on food last year.

This report follows the issue blogged on here on July 2nd – How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world’s poor – and won.

David Harvey calculates that the global capitalist economy has to aim, for a variety of structural and systemic reasons, for about 3% growth per annum. As a result capital is always looking for forms of investment to achieve this. As one set of opportunities collapses or becomes exhausted – for instance the dot.com boom and bust 1995 to 2000 – capital looked elsewhere. When the dot.com bubble burst capital moved into property eventually leading to the toxic debts underlying the current economic crisis. More recently it has moved into commodity futures, destabilising markets such as energy and food. Regulations to control speculation on food prices were dismantled about 5 years ago spawning the food derivatives industry. Perhaps the latest money spinner for the speculators and casino capitalist will be carbon cap and trade. The full story has a number of components that need investigation – commodification, marketisation and financialisation, deregulation and the development of speculative derivatives markets. All of this is connected with privatisation, the loss of accountability and the erosion of democratic controls.

For a brief history of bubbles and burst see  The Great American Bubble Machine.

I have been in email correspondence with my colleague Richard Kilminster following on from some very interesting and constructive comments on a draft article I am writing on critical pedagogy. The discussion concerns various issues around the marxist underpinnings and the normative basis of critical pedagogy as developed from the Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its successors, Habermas for instance. Richard’s main issue is that it all still depends to some extent on Kantian transcendental categories and a prioris that act as founding assumptions rather than empirically substantiated concepts. To this extent sociology generally is still in the thrall of philosophical forms of thinking, to its detriment. Richard strives for a post-philosophical sociology and to this end is developing the work of Norbert Elias who recognised the problem and made significant progress towards this goal.

Richard pointed me towards an article by Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh where he demonstrates how in practice  sociological analyses and diagnoses often look for the causes of the state of affairs of interest  in order to produce an explanation and, perhaps, help develop a plan of action or set of policies to alter that state of affairs. Often, in practice, these diagnoses and explanations take the from of  finding something to blame for the condition. This can then lead to a ‘personalisation’ of the causes in a manner not dissimilar to other sorts of pre and non-scientific orientations to the world. From a scientific point of view this is an obstacle to knowledge as this form of attribution of cause and explanation  “implies that one has to isolate the action(s) of one identifiable entity, whether individual, group or reified (and at the same time often personalised) ’cause’, from a complex sequence of events”. He gives examples of ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernisation’ being used in this way. This form of thinking, or at the very least this style of writing, is still prevalent in contemporary sociology. In a forthcoming article Richard gives a number of examples of this quoting from well known and influential current sociologists, for example  –  “modernity ‘is coming of age’ and is now ‘consciously abandoning what it was unconsciously doing”; “Post-modernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious of its true nature – modernity for itself”; ” What happens when modernization, understanding its own excesses and vicious spiral of destructive subjugation begins to take itself as object of reflection”? – and others.

With respect to ‘capitalism’ Richard points out that  ‘capitalistic’ social relations cannot exist without being embedded in “a whole socio-genetic complex of interdependencies that makes them possible. The specifically ‘capitalistic’ aspects may not in fact be the most instrumental in producing what are perceived as the undesirable consequences of contemporary global developments”.

This implies that ‘capitalism’ cannot be a singular foundational unit of analysis based on the notion that ‘it’ is the primary cause of what appear to be, or are assumed to be, ‘its’ effects and consequences. If this is a mistaken orientation than solutions may be misdirected and may exacerbate conditions rather than improve them, amounting to, perhaps at best, an amelioration of the condition rather than changing the system – like an aspirin ‘cures’ a headache without having any transformational effect on the underlying causes. In fact it can make things worse by developing new forms of subjugation, dependence and the reproduction of the very system we are seeking to change.

What is the broader sociological context that must be factored into an analysis of globalising capitalism for activists who want to do something about inequality, exploitation and the destruction of the environment? It will be interesting to see how Norbert Elias’s sociology conceptualises and constructs ‘capitalism’, its apparent contradictions and contemporary neoliberal ideology. If the analysis is too general and too synthetic it may be difficult to draw political and policy conclusions from it. In which case, pragmatically, where do we go?

Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh (1986) The Improvement of Human Means of Orientation: Towards Syntheses in the Social Sciences in Development Studies: Critique and Renewal Eds R Apthorpe and A Krahl

Most, but not all, of this article is available on Google Books

Austerity drive will hand billions to private sector guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 21.50 BST

This report seems to confirm that the outcome of the ConDem’s budget and economic policy, intentionally or otherwise,  will be the front door, back door and side entrance privatisation of everything the corporations can lay their hands on that will turn a buck for their directors and shareholders. This surely compromises even more the fragile political democracy we still have with more and more services being managed from the unaccountable private sector. This has already taken a hit with the proposed integration of (unelected) business leaders directly into a business friendly and private profit orientated government. Why the former BP boss’s new government job is beyond parody Independent Friday, 2 July 2010.