This blog will remain as an archive in the medium term. It has been moved to http://terrywassall.org where it is current and will continue to be updated.

At a recent talk by John Holloway at the Space Project in Leeds he mentioned a number of ways that people and communities around the world were organising politically to resist the ‘restructurings’ being used to bail out the banks and sovereign debt. He also gave examples of how people were surviving massive increases in costs, decreases in income and very high levels of unemployment at precisely the same time benefits and services were being cut, citing some of the things going on in Greece. Coincidently a couple of days later an article was published about Samos, a Greek island, covering this exact topic.

As I was thinking about this I also received a number of reports about the progress of the current talks in Durban (http://unfccc.int/2860.php) about climate change and the attempts to come to some new international agreement now the Kyoto agreement is coming to the end of its time span. It seems clear that several of the rich countries, for instance Canada and the USA, are resisting any new agreement in, one would suppose, what they see as their national interest. I’m convinced that the warnings about the consequences of climate change, peak oils and so on, are correct and that sooner or later circumstances will force some sort of draconian reaction by governments. Given their current perspective is driven by narrow self interest (and when I say ‘government’ I mean of course the corporatist amalgamation of politics, the State and business) I see no reason to hope this will not also be the case when we are running into the buffers. Militarism, a diminution of democracy and war are just as likely an outcome as some sort of national and peaceable agreement on how to cope with the coming disasters. Rather like Stalin’s attempt at achieving communism in one country, there may be attempts to circle the wagons and attempt continued western style growth in specific parts of the world and let the rest go hang. The German military establishment has already produced a report anticipating a number of possible future scenarios and their military implications. One conclusion is that the German government may well have to dilute and even abandon its position on human rights in order to achieve the strategic alliances and partnerships it will need to secure energy supplies. It’s hardly surprising there has been a recent renewed interest in Carl Schmidt’s theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt)  on exceptionalist government power, the idea that in periods of exceptional danger, in states of emergency, governments have the right and responsibility to adopt a dictatorial mode beyond the law.

But of course growth is the issue and the problem.  What would a non-growthist way of life look like? This is were I need to read Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’. As it happens the way of life we need in the west is probably very similar to those that are emerging as a response to austerity programmes. As Holloway says, there is no point in making demands of politicians as they do not have any answers or the power to grant our demands. In fact to make demands concedes that they have the power and we are the supplicants. And it means that, in principle, we wait on them.

This is why it is so important to see how the Greeks and others are taking their lives into their own hands and getting on with the job of living without money, without the props of and services of the consumerist society, and finding new meanings, new satisfactions and new values to live by. What may be thought of as a temporary survival strategy to hang on until the good times return may turn out to be an enduring solution to the deeper environmental problems we confront and, in the process,  a new sort of ‘good times’ will also emerge.

The Space Project in Leeds has recently started a new initiative, the Radical Library Collective. In addition to accumulating books and resources that encourage critical, systemic political thought to help  understand the society we are part of, the project aims to encourage “a culture of discussion”  through a reading group New Weapons, by inviting speakers and hosting book launches. In January next year the the first discussion group meetings will address the issue of Crisis. Quoting from the blurb on the Space Projects Facebook community page:

From bankrupt PIGS, revolting Greeks and an £1 trillion hole in Italy abroad, to riots, banker bailouts and strikes at home, wherever you look these days there’s banter about ‘crisis’. But what crisis? Where, and for whom? Facilitated by Leeds Radical Library, this first discussion series, Crisis!, aims to provide a lively forum for debate about some of the key issues of our time: what is capitalism and why does it seem to break again and again? Taking short, weekly texts as a starting point, we want to explore the history of capitalist crisis to find out what ‘our crisis’ has in common with previous crises, and what might be unique about it. While economists and bankers whom we’ve never met or elected seem able to make more and more decisions about the way we run our lives, Crisis! aims to unravel from the very beginning the modern day myths about ‘finance’, ‘capital’ and ‘democracy’.

It would be great if some ‘out-of-towners’ could come along. Hopefully the discussions will be blogged.

Reading the introduction by Norbert Elias the  The Sociology of Community edited by Bell and Newby 1974. Richard Kilminster told me this is a recycling of an essay Elias wrote sometime before that is connected to his ideas on The Outsiders and the Established but explicitly is an application of his ideas on levels of integration. I think this is also illuminating on our current condition of burgeoning critique of our current state of affairs due to unregulated and dysfunctional capitalism but our lack of a way forward or any clear articulation of what needs to be done and to what ends. I will be making some notes here in due course on Zizek’s and Bauman’s take on this. It is a great shame Elias is no longer around to shed light on this but I think we an construct something along the lines of what he may have argued had he witnessed the Arab Spring, the the UK ‘consumerism by other means’ riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement spreading round the globe.

The nub of his argument is that as societies become more complex a higher level of integrations develops involving a restructuring of webs of interdependencies. The opportunities for relatively autonomous decision making and action in the old communities and localities become reduced and constrained as they become restructured as components of a lower level of integration. This is putting it in the most abstract terms but the important thing is to study how the resistance and instability is a consequence of this process. Although these are increasingly widespread networks of interdependencies the process does not produce an equal balance of power. The lower levels of integration become more dependent on the higher levels and are shaped, enabled and constrained by the higher levels that are much less dependent on any particular component of the lower level. This leads to a number of difficulties for members of the lower levels of integration trying to make changes and have a clear idea of what to do and to what ends. Firstly, they are in several crucial ways ‘constructed’ by the higher levels they are resisting . This can, for instance, mean that they conceptualise their predicament and its solutions in terms of the vocabulary and framework of the higher level and this reinforce it or at best modify it. This is s sort of intellectual colonisation or dependency. Secondly, the dependencies that restrict their freedoms ‘from’ and ‘to’  cannot be simply recast as an act of will. The new forms of autonomy desired cannot easily be disentangled and reconstituted form the complex webs of dependencies people are embedded in and embodied in them. There may be a nostalgic harping back to previous forms of local autonomy and living but the development of the systems of dependency we now inhabit cannot just be rewound.

The Popular University (Unsigned, Avanti, 29 December 1916. (CT, 673-6))

I have in front of me the programme for the Popular University (Universita Populare) for the first period 1916-17. Five courses: three devoted to natural sciences, one to Italian literature, one to philosophy. Six lectures on various subjects: only two have titles giving some guarantee of seriousness. I sometimes wonder why it has not been possible in Turin to develop a solid institution for the popularization of culture, why the Public University has remained the poor thing it is and has been unable to win the public’s attention, respect and love, why it has not succeeded in forming a public of its own.

The answer is not easy, or it is too easy. There are clearly problems with organization and with the criteria which inform the university. The best response should be to do better, to show concretely that it is possible to do better and to gather a public round a cultural heat source, provided it is alive and really gives off heat. In Turin the Public University is a cold flame. It is neither a university, nor popular. Its directors are amateurs in matters of cultural organization. What causes them to act is a mild and insipid spirit of charity, not a live and fecund desire to contribute to the spiritual raising of the multitude through teaching. As in vulgar charitable institutes, they distribute food parcels which fill the stomach, perhaps cause some indigestion, but then leave no trace, bring about no change in people’s lives. The directors of the Public University know that the institution they run has to cater for a specific category of people who have not been able to follow regular studies at school. And that is all. They are not bothered about how this category of people might be drawn most effectively to the world of knowledge. They find a model in the existing cultural institutions: they copy it, they worsen it. They reason something like this: people who attend courses at the Public University are the same age and have the same general background as people who go to the state universities; so let us give them a surrogate of the latter. And they ignore everything else. They do not consider the fact that the state universities are a natural point of arrival of a whole activity of previous work; they do not consider that when a student arrives at university he has passed through the experience of high school and this has disciplined his spirit of research, has bolstered his amateurish impulsiveness with a methodical approach. In other words he has been through a process of becoming, he has been made alert gradually and gently, falling into error and pulling himself up, taking wrong turns and getting back on course. These directors do not understand that bits of knowledge, plucked out from all this previous activity of individual research, are nothing other than dogmas, absolute truths. They do not understand that the Public University, as they run it, is reduced to a form of theological teaching, a new version of the Jesuit schools, where knowledge is presented as something definitive, self-evident and unquestionable. Not even the universities are like this. There is now a common conviction that a truth is fecund only when one has made an effort to master it, that it does not exist in and for itself but has been a conquest of the spirit, and that each individual must reproduce in himself that state of anxiety which the scholar passed through before arriving at it. This is why the truly magisterial teachers give great importance in their teaching to the history of their subject. Taking one’s audience through the series of attempts, efforts and successes through which men had to pass in order to attain the present state of knowledge has far more educational value than a schematic exposition of the knowledge itself. It forms the scholar, it gives his mind that elasticity of methodical doubt which makes an amateur into a serious person, which purifies curiosity (in the popular sense of the word) and turns it into a healthy and fecund stimulus towards ever increasing and more perfect knowledge. The author of these notes speaks partly out of personal experience. The courses he remembers most vividly from when he started at university were those where the lecturer made him feel the active effort of research over the centuries to bring the research method to perfection. In the natural sciences, for instance, we were shown all the effort it cost to liberate the human spirit from prejudices and a priori religious or philosophical notions in order to arrive at the conclusion that sources of water originate from atmospheric precipitations and not from the sea. In philology we saw how the historical method was arrived at through the trials and errors of traditional empiricism and how, for example, the criteria and convictions that guided Francesco De Sanctis in writing his history of Italian literature were nothing other than truths which had emerged through tiring research, truths which liberated the spirit from the sentimental and rhetorical dross that had polluted the study of literature in the past. And so on for the other subjects. This was the most living part of studying: this spirit of re-creation, which enabled encyclopaedic items of information to be assimilated and fused them into a flame burning with a new individual life.

Teaching done in this way becomes an act of liberation. It has the fascination of all vital things. It needs particularly to demonstrate its effectiveness in the Public Universities, whose audiences lack precisely that intellectual preparation one needs in order to arrange the individual items of one’s studies into an organized whole. For them, particularly, what is most effective and interesting is the history of research, the history of this immense epic of the human spirit which slowly, patiently, tenaciously takes possession of truth, conquers truth. How from error one arrives at scientific truth. This is the road that everyone must follow. To show how it has been followed by others is the lesson that produces the best results. And it is, besides, a lesson in modesty, which avoids the formation of those irritating know-it-alls who believe they have plumbed the depths of the universe when their memories are fortunate enough to pigeon-hole a few dates and some random bits of knowledge.

But the Public Universities, like that of Turin, prefer to run useless and unwieldy courses on ‘The Italian Soul in the Art of Literature in Recent Generations’ or give lectures on ‘The European Conflagration as Judged by Vico’, where more care is taken to impress than to teach effectively, and the pretentious little lecturer outstrips the efforts of the modest teacher, who at least knows he is talking to uneducated people.

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 conlationists’ 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.

Ealty modernity saw dramatic changes but over a period of about 300 years. Many could still live on the basisi 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 millenium 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 circumstaces 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.