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.
Category: General
Idiots or puppets?
Marx famously (infamously?) referred to the peasants of feudal societies as idiots and as like so many potatoes in a sack. In particular he was talking about the conditions (of production and relations) that prevented them from developing any sort of social collective consciousness as the basis for political awareness, organisation or mobilisation. This seems rather insulting and no doubt it was meant to be but, as Hobsbaum reminds us, we shouldn’t forget Marx’s classical education. The word ‘idiot’ as the Greeks used it describes some one who is only concerned with their private affairs and not with those of the wider community. Does not this sound like the condition of many in Western societies today? Gramsci, describing a proletariat devoid of political consciousness, says they would be like puppets on a string. Both Marx and Gramsci were considering the conditions within which a critical revolutionary shared consciousness would develop, through the dawning recognition of the conditions of their subordination and exploitation, and through being able to see the strings and who was pulling them. There is then the important further question of how this consciousness leads to revolutionary social change. Reform is not the issue for either Marx or Gramsci as that is fully in keeping with the reproductive dynamism of Capitalism anyway. Reform is business as usual by other means, reproducing the same forms of exploitation, political exclusion and inhumanity.
This account of idiocy and puppetry has resonances today with the hyperindividualism that many social theorists and commentators attest to. We are not short of sociological accounts of how individuals have become disembedded from social connections and support with the waning of community and, more recently, the welfare state. Thatcher’s claim that there are only individuals and families and the current emphasis on individual responsibility reinforce this impression, as does the ideological reliance on economically rational individuals operating in free markets to cure all our social ills. Beck’s theory of ‘individuation’ seems to agree with this as well although there is a hint of radical possibilities in his account.
What are the conditions of existence today that shove their way under the noses and into the faces of individuals who want nothing more than to focus on their own affairs, seek their own advantage and tend to their own security. These people do exist, and in large numbers. Many times have I heard strategies being outlined to shore up established positions and advantages – an adaptation, an accommodation to the social and political environment rather than a challenge to it. Gramsci says only the pursuit of a higher goal can break and destroy this reformist tendency to adaptation. This is why development of political awareness is a collective process that takes in a much wider context than that of the individual. This is why it requires political action.
Rereading texts 30 years later
I went to university to study sociology at the age of 32 after having a fairly chequered career up until then in the world of work including, amongst others, periods in electronics (selling photo-electronic control systems), an order picker in a warehouse (groceries), financial services (selling life assurance and unit trust investments), laying concrete bases for a construction firm (North Sea Gas), publishing (selling Caxton encyclopedias) and running a couple of my own businesses (fencing and importing racing tyres for bicycles). My introduction to social thought and sociology came between 1976 and 1978 when I was driving a bus for the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive in Leeds and listening on most days to my conductor (the buses were front loaders and before one man operated buses became the norm) talking about Marxism, class warfare, the coming revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat. He happened to be the garage shop steward for the TGWU. I went to Leeds University to study sociology under Zygmunt Bauman in 1978 after wandering around in the labour market for 16 years fairly aimlessly (although, as it turned out, learning quite a lot).
Several things struck me when I started my sociological studies – how hard it was to understand anything I was told or read, how narrow and inexperienced where most of (but not all) my lecturers and fellow students however clever and erudite in other respects, and how it seemed de rigueur to have a specified guru (Althusser, Marx, Elias, Weber, Habermas, Marcuse, Luhmann, etc. ) and rely mainly on a fairly restricted range of canonical texts.
Now, 33 years later and after continuous habitation in the world of higher education and professional sociology, I am turning (for fun!) back to some of the texts I read in the early days with so much difficulty and feelings of inferiority. Many I have not looked at again since those days. However, rereading some of them has been a revelation. I now think H Stuart Hughes’ Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought (1958) is magisterial. He was one of the very first in the English speaking world to recognise and comment upon the importance of Gramsci. When I first read it I found it almost impenetrable.
Speaking of Gramsci, another book I am reading that I haven’t looked at since the late 1980s and really struggled with is A Gramsci Reader (2008) edited by David Forgacs. Now I am finding it written clearly and succinctly and of enormous relevance to today’s political changes and unrest. Quite a few forthcoming notes and quotes in this blog will be from this book.
I am not, however, looking for the holy text or texts that will answer all my questions and tell me what to think and do. I have had a couple of dispiriting exchanges recently where individuals who I otherwise respect have said when, for instance, I have expressed an interest in Bauman’s ideas on the changing role of public intellectuals from legislators to interpreters and what this means for their relation to civil society and politics, that he is mistaken and his work so flawed it is not worth spending time on. This usually comes with a recommendation to read some other thinker who has got it right. I have had similar reactions, from different individuals, when I say I am rereading Capital, or Elias, or Foucault. I really don’t know what their problem is, unless a fear of the messy and uncertain real world. Social, political, economic and cultural processes are unimaginably complex. I will read and take from anyone who has made a principled attempt to understand society and social change. For instance, Alhusser was on dodgy ground when he characterised individual actors as mere ‘bearers of structure’ but his views on identity formation and ‘interpelation’ are useful and are saying something important, as is Foucault when he talks of ‘regimes of truth’ and Elias when he elaborates his ideas on sociogenesis, or Marx on surplus value. At the end of the day these are all resources to think with and about in discussion with others to make sense of the world we live in and to work out what we believe and how we should act, how we should live, what sort of world we want to live in and how we might achieve it. Pre-eminantly, how do we want to relate to and live with others with respect, in common humanity in harmony with ourselves and the environment. None of the putative gurus can answer this for us. This is a job we must do for ourselves by means of a bit of intelligent collegiate ‘winging it’.
Intellect and intelligence
Gramsci makes a distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intelligence is what has been operating throughout human evolution and the development of culture broadly understood. Intellect is referred to as an ‘arid and pedantic intellectualism’ contrasted with the engaged vitality and products of intelligence. He also equates intellect with a certain misunderstanding and distortion of knowledge. Gramsic is concerned with how the masses can become intellectually autonomous and not dependent on what he calls ‘career intellectuals’. His starting point is that everyone is already an intellectual.
How does this fit in with a critique of knowledge? It seems to imply the distinction between wisdom (applied and developed intelligence) and knowledge (fragmented codified facts and models) that is often made from other perspectives, i.e. Buddhism. It also fits in with ideas on mass intellectuality and social knowledge. However, the implication is that mass intellectuality is mired in its colonisation by elements of career intellectuality and also by its pragmatic development in localised day to day living and survival. It needs to become more autonomous with respect to both of these limitations – building on the authentic experience of life but developed in the context of a broadening awareness of the conditions of life and connections with others (loosely the conditions and relations of the production of surplus value). Gramci’s writings on education might usefully be explored on these points.
After thought: Margaret Archer (a critical realist) claims everyone is inherently reflexive and is capable of distancing themselves to some degree from their circumstances and exercising their intelligence. In practice this may be limited to dealing with immediate living and problems but the most routine tasks and the most unthinking automatic behaviour is routinely confronted with instances of ‘having to make sense’ and acting to some degree autonomously.
The danger of devaluing sociology
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.
A socio-historical critque of technology-in-education
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’.
Notes on mass intellectuality
This is not intended to be a forensic analysis of the concept, just some notes on what seem to be key features of the concept, mainly drawing on Paolo Virno’s work on the General Intellect. It all starts with a passage in Marx where he builds on the idea that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, becomes productive for capitalism at one remove from the human labour process as it is embedded and embodied in machines. This has consequences for human labour since, as the labour process becomes intensified via knowledge and machinery, the position of many workers becomes more precarious through deskilling, technology substitution and becoming surplus to requirements.
However, as the capitalist means of production develops the knowledge component of the means of production, this is not limited to scientific forms of knowledge. It also includes the all the forms of knowledge developing socially within the institutions of the capitalist system by workers. Marx refers to this as the ‘general intellect’ developed through social life and which becomes, under the conditions of capitalism, “a direct force of production”.
A key point here seems to be that the general intellect is not necessarily or inevitably contained within and restricted to its development as a force of production, i.e. in the service of the system of production and its legitimation. The general intellect has the potential, presumably under certain conditions, to become critical of the system and its role within the system.
Containing as it does science and other forms of knowledge, including common sense, art and cultural production generally, the general intellect can be both a force in production (of commodities for the market) and also a source of material for the process of commodification as well. The process of the commodification of knowledge that can be sold as a factor in production or as a commodity bought for its use value is well known. It is under conditions of post-modernity that this process fully explores the potential for commodifying culture and experiences. Free, leisure and private time, i.e. outside of the labour process of production, becomes another sort of labour, the labour of consumption, of enjoyment, of status building and maintenance, and so on. In this way culture and all aspects of the life-world are brought into the web of capitalist economic and social relations.
What is learned, carried out and consumed in the time outside of labour is then utilised in the production of commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is computed as profitable resource. Even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into labouring task. […] The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labour and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul. The matrix of conflict and the condition for small and great ‘disorders under the sky’ must be seen in the progressive rupture between general intellect and fixed capital that occurs in this process of redistribution of the former within living labour. (Emphasis added).
But, as noted above, the general intellect is not irrevocably tied to the process of production and consumption.
Mass intellectuality is the composite group of Postfordist living labour, not merely of some particularly qualified third sector: it is the depository of cognitive competences that cannot be objectified in machinery. Mass intellectuality is the prominent form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The scientific erudition of the individual labourer is not under question here. Rather, all the more generic attitudes of the mind gain primary status as productive resources; these are the faculty of language, the disposition to learn, memory, the power of abstraction and relation and the tendency towards self-reflexivity. General intellect needs to be understood literally as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think, rather than the works produced by thought – a book, an algebra formula etc. (Emphasis added).
Some insight is given into this potential for mass intellectuality to become radical and how this can be promoted in an address given in Barcelona January 2009 by the activist, writer and curator Marco Baravalle. He points out that a great deal of cultural work in Venice, in the private galleries and museums, is done without a wage by interns, often doing other badly paid jobs as well in the tourist industry. In both cases they are employed, paid and unpaid, for their knowledge at various levels.
Today, in Venice, on the side of the technical composition, we are facing that famous full exploitation of life (quoting Paolo Virno and others) that involves language, affects, creativity, relationships.
The typical type of worker exploited by the ‘culture factory’ in Venice is
… white, female, young, qualified (usually with a master’s degree in arts or human sciences), employed in a second job linked to touristic economy and with a lot of experience of not remunerated labour in other cultural institutions (the system of trainings). This not remunerated labour is a plague that can last far beyond the end of the educational career of the worker, in a perverted system in which the illusion of a hiring in the cultural factory, pushes the young precarious to work more and more for free.
And, rather in the way Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism) demonstrates capitalism’s abiliy to exploit seemingly anti-capitalist tendencies, either by commodifying them or subverting them in the cause of legitimating itself, Baravalle notes:
… living in a culture factory means to face a kind of capitalism eager for uniqueness, authenticity, alternative ways of life, etc. A kind of capitalism that tends to parasite informal cultural production and peculiar forms of life in order to trigger monopoly rent, in order to make money out of real estate speculation, for example. This process of putting to value the collective symbolic capital is based on the necessity to find new marks of distinction attached to a place, included those formed by local resistances, media-activists and social centres.
The process is parasitic because it is merely a process of:
… capturing, trapping and exploiting what subjectivities creates. Postfordist capitalism, with its articulated devices of governance, is characterized by a total incapability of creating . That’s why it is correct to describe the capitalistic process of valorisation of the immaterial dimension as parasitic.
And herein lies one of the contradictions that is capable of producing a critical consciousness within the general intellect. What is needed, according to Baravalle, are:
… institutions of the common [whereby] the institutionalisation of our spaces and practices responds to the need of collectively organizing something that is more than a personal action and that can break the process of capitalistic governance and valorisation.
This needs a clear analysis and bringing in to mass intellectuality a recognition of how the culture factory works. We need to
… look at the latter as a factory, [as a] means to underline the importance of the relationships of production that structure it. It means to study who’s taking advantage of the value socially produced in the metropolis and who’s being exploited and how it happens. But it means also to analyze the power of the different types of metropolitan workers to reclaim that socially produced value, it means to be aware of the existing subjectivities and to empower them, or to work with the goal of creating and organizing new ones.
How to understand ‘mass intellectuality’?
At the meeting in Lincoln I referred to in the last post I found myself thinking about and in terms that I am not particularly familiar with or, if I was, found the envelope of my understanding being’ ‘pushed’, as they say. ‘Resilience’ was one. Others were ideas about ‘the social mind’ and ‘mass intelllectuality’. One temptation, perhaps unavoidable, is to subsume new ideas into existing ways of understanding. You’ve got to start somewhere rather than nowhere. ‘Social mind’ immediately calls up Durkheim’s ideas on the ‘conscience collective’ for instance. ‘Mass intellectuality’ sounds like it might be an amalgam of Gramsci’s ideas on hegemony, commonsense and organic intellectuals coupled to various processes of socialisation and ‘interpellation’, a term used by Althusser to denote the process whereby individuals internalise identities, roles, ways of understanding (being knowledgeable?) and expectations through a process of being ‘addressed’ by society and culture. Then there are Marx’s ideas on how classes develop collective class consciousness, become a class ‘for itself’ rather than just an objectively existing class ‘in itself’. Class consciousness develops as individuals, in the company of others in the same position (so communication and discussion are important) are hit between the eyes by the objective exploitative features of their daily lives.
So I need to investigate mass intellectuality and the social mind in a ways that do not presupose my automatic categorisations or at leaset are aware of and if necessary critical of how this prior knowledge may be constrainign what it is I’m learning. This will require reading new ideas and new thinkers. One way to begin to think out of the box is to read writers that are already out of the box you are in. Of course there is always the possibility you discover that some of these new thinkers are not really that far out of the box as they seem and in fact are repackaging the older ways of thinking and understanding and what is new is the bottle they have put the old win into.
Towards this end I will be looking at the references I have been kindly in addtion to the about the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno on notions of mass intellectuality and a number of critiques.
The Resilient University
Had a great day in Lincoln yesterday, Friday 29th October, to discuss the Resilient University project with Mike Neary, Joss Winn and a great team putting together a cunning plan, more of which in due course. A lot of discussion revolved around notions of what ‘resilience’ means in the context of the existing crisis ridden university system and in the context of a re-visioning of what a ‘university’ could and should be. There is clearly a mainstream language of resilience that is all about shoring up the structures and institutions of the status quo. But if the status quo is seen as the cause of the various crises and conditions it needs to become resilient with respect to, then striving for the status quo’s resilience creates a negative trajectory double bind – strategies for resilience that are doomed to make the system ever less resilient. If this is correct the system is unsustainable and cannot be made resilient in its own terms and will eventually fail and, by necessity, become something else, for good or ill, for progress or extinction.
My view is that the sort of education system we have now, including HE, is a significant part of the problem. It is itself in crisis and is a major component of the broader crises that it is a part of, political and cultural crises (legitimacy crisis), health and well-being crises, economic and financial crises, and military crises. If this is so, how can education be conceived of and organised differently? And what does resilience mean for this re-visioned form of education? What is needed is a new, or at least different, language and conceptualisation of resilience. Perhaps the focus of resilience should not be on the current system but what it is degrading and destroying. A good starting point would be a look at how the concept is currently used and defined in practice.
“Resilience is the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.” So, absorbing, recycling and exploiting the changes that impact.
“Resilience in psychology is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a “steeling effect” and function better than expected” Or, what hurts us only makes us stronger.
“The Government’s aim is to reduce the risk from emergencies so that people can go about their business freely and with confidence”. With the object of being prepared for emergencies and to ensure “continuity of business”. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience.aspx
“Resilience is the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organise and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning).” http://www.resalliance.org/564.php
Using sociological theories
I have recently beome more involved in reading Zygmunt Bauman and discussing his ideas, particularly with respect to the contribution of sociology to understanding contemporay society and what a leftist agenda and programme might be – the practical contribution of his sociology. This is in addition to returning more explicitly and systematicall to a marxist account of capitalism and the current finacial crisis and a renewd discussion with my colleague, Richard Kilminster, on Norbert Elias’s theories. Which of these three, Bauman, Elias or Marxs, gives us the best understanding of our prblems – social, economic and political – and the best basis for developing political and personal strategies ? It seems to me that there is no simple answer and in any case it may be a mistake to assume any one social thinker is sufficient. This is my current position – Bauman for his continued belief in the values of socialism and his coherent account of how sociology should still be politically engaged, Elais for theoretical and conceptual rigour, and Marx for his diagnosis of capitalism.