Extracts from Feather, H. (2012) 'Cracking Capitalism...'

 

 

Cracking Capitalism…

 

 

The network of interdependencies amongst human beings is what binds them together… a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people…it expresses what we call ‘society’ …as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals…nor a ‘system’ or ‘totality’ beyond individuals, but rather a network…(Elias, 2000, p.   )

 

 

 

       Where are the cracks[1]?

 

 

The recent focus on networking as a means  to personal success may be no more than the sensing of an epiphenomenon, an echoing of an everyday reality, the spectral presence of capital in what we take to be spontaneous contacts on the Internet etc.  However, the trite business-speak de nos jours (cf. J. Hobsbawm on networking[2]) may also be an indicator of something profoundly central to capitalist modernity: something lateral that escapes hierarchy,  subsumption, subjection to formations of capital.[3] The modus operandi of student protest, the Occupy movement, for example  suggests a form of networking that evades commodification –how is this possible, what are its grounds?  We will examine the spontaneous connections which underlie  more formalised, institutionalised social arrangements. These are not to be confused with ‘networking’ but are peer-oriented, often unnoticed ways of working upon which more conscious organisational processes are based- be they ‘horizontal’ or hierarchical formal arrangements.

        The concern of this discussion is with the way the  coordination and reciprocation constitutive of networks gets subsumed within modern capitalist social formations as its everyday life and the potential for circumventing this subsumption of the visible cracks, tensions which, for example, protest movements represent. The paper is a survey of some ideas that might facilitate seeing through or around modern capitalism.

 

 

          The way  into this discussion is made via a slight detour  into the exchange engendered  over the existence of hierarchy and networks by Giddens’ structuration theory.

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[1].   This discussion was provoked or stimulated by  reading Holloway’s Crack Capitalism. The piece is not a response to Holloway and interprets cracks not as alternative spaces but as something more dynamic, conflictual representing not just escape routes, but rather a systemic intertwining of different forces which open up lines of visibility.

[2]   The Guardian, 2012, ‘It’s not what you know, but who- the return of an unfortunate reality’ June 30^th, p.43

[3].  See David Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, for a critique of ‘horizontalism’, the pitfalls of which, hopefully, this paper avoids.   

 

         Mouzelis (1995, pp.123-4)  points out that Giddens in his theory of duality of structures does not  deal with hierarchy -although referring to power as a resource in relation to legitimacy. The implication here then is that this is a ‘flat’ theory rather than a theory of stratification, a theory of interconnection.

           

             Clearly (with Mouzelis) hierarchy is real but at the same time it is abstract; it posits relationships which exist outside the way people relate spontaneously beyond the bureaucratic definitions and  requirements of  formal settings; in that sense it is a reorganisation of concrete, informal relationships, ways of doing. As such it is a mode of abstraction from interactions as networks of associations and as such, arguably secondary to these, that is, the networks are its ontological ground because they already contain the content which appears in hierarchisation .

             ‘Labour’ as Marx (1974, p.78) argues , has a ‘two-fold social character’: the shape the value of commodities takes ultimately depends on ‘living labour’, the concrete relationships between producers, producers and products and producers and capitalists. Use value is  open-ended and depends on specific contexts and so commodities are shaped by creative forces outside the generality of the value form and  carry this with them to be extracted in different ways by different concrete users

         Arguably, every  hierarchy is also a network in which stratification is grounded: the members of hierarchies relate to each other as interactants, as elements of a network, as rhizomes, as well as rank statuses etc.

 

           The following is an illustration of how this conflict between subsuming organisational power and the popular, everyday, informal network  becomes visible.  Linux Open Source computer programming (Kelion, 2012) offers a way of linking various trade products such as Microsoft’s Windows packages to free software which in important ways parallel and provide access to those packages, i.e. provide alternative access to computing and the Internet.  Microsoft (ibid.) described Open Source programmes as ‘a cancer’ and ‘un-American’.  It reveals both the possibility that using the Internet can be improvised and controlled by users and renders visible the subsumption of networking by powerful organisations; one can see how Microsoft is ultimately dependent on coordination because Open Source does what they do without formal hierarchy. The  politics of the Internet is revealed, shown to function through the occlusivity of subsumption i.e. networking is made mysterious rather than everyday; it is blackboxed.

 

               

Teams and co-ordination: another way of thinking about  informal agency within hierarchised structures       

             Organisations frequently use ‘team’ or network strategies as these are believed seen to increase  potential for innovation, synergies, information flow, cross fertilisation and so on, via in effect creating new discursive formations. It’s an attempt to objectify, render visible, processes that go on anyway as the organisation’s taken for granted or black-boxed modus operandi. Hence formal ‘teamwork’ etc. is the misrecognition of the way the organisation actually functions i.e. the coordination, networks, interrelations which have been already subsumed as the ground of its bureaucratised structures. Company human relations techniques therefore attempt to harness  the drift of such informal logics for the benefit of company telos.  However, this is a case of the uncanny, as organisational strategy takes management ideas as its apparent ground by reproducing in objectified form something that already goes on informally.

 

                We can see then that subjects relate to an other in the mediated way that the other is given to the subject, that is as the subject’s otherness.  In coordination of activities with other subjects it is therefore its own  sense of relation  that the subject  has to negotiate, rather than its direct relation to an other as directly given to a subject’s consciousness. Elsewhere Mead (1970, pp.152-64) expresses a cognate idea:  relating via the ’generalised other’, and so on. This is a ‘different’, non-identical subject which exists in relation to, mediates self-identity. In other words, the other is given via its relationality, as for example, Sartre’s regulatory third shows. Harvey’s concept  of relational space is also productive here in that it enables us to view the subject as a coordinated existent constituted across different spaces.

 

One recalls here Beauvoir’s (Beauvoir, 1972, p.17)  argument that although in patriarchy men dominate women, they still require recognition in eyes of women, experience dependency on them  and thus there is the basis for mutual relation. The argument here is moreover posed in more general terms

 …if following Hegel, we finding in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed  only in being opposed- he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

       But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim…willy nilly, individuals and groups are forced to recognise the reciprocity of their relations 

And in Beauvoir (1944)

                  I must recognise my situation as founded by the other, even while affirming my being beyond the situation…Only the freedom (subjectivity) of the other is able to give necessity to my being (pp. 83-4, 95-6). 

We can see from this that Beauvoir posits a mode of interrelating or intertwining of subjects which is a kind of conflictual intersubjectivity, one which exists between peers as such and also one which cuts across hierarchy to create a peer dimension there.

         Such reciprocity, coordination or network is a de-objectifying moment, one in which hierarchies, black boxes, categories are opened up and contents presented as interrelation, a kind of Deleuzian, rhizomatic moment.

 

 

 

 

Michael Dummett's Interpretation of Frege's  Context Principle / Theory of Meaning

is discussed at length in Feather, H. (2000/2010) Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Social Theory whereDummett's approach is seen as offering a basis for phenomenological social theory.

Hannah Arendt and Critical Theory

 

Critical Theory- critique of society in terms of the standards it upholds i.e. whether it does actually meet them…freedom, justice, truth, aesthetic standards etc.

Arendt as an influence on Habermas’s theory of communicative  action- the lifeworld as the basis of society, social systems

Arendt and phenomenological social theory. Influenced in turn by Schutz’s  idea of the life world as an open horizon where we avoid the classification, stereotypes, pigeonholing, objectification etc. found in institutional life. Lifeworld as taking everything in as we go along through the day etc., absorbing the formal world as a series of unstructured experiences which can then be  modelled/personalised to suit the individual’s outlook, situation. Improvisation.

Importance for Arendt: unpacks the power associated with  institutional life  e.g. bureaucracy, the world of strategic action. Weber’s iron cage melts away- institutional power depends on the people ultimately.

The public realm.  A concept from which Habermas derived his public sphere as the world of political action. Salons, debating societies, political groupings, parties, pressure groups. Engagement with the media as means of debate, spreading of ideas…

Political Action is foundational. It’s only through action in the public realm that we can create new departures- laws, constitutions etc. Arendt derives this insight from the Roman republic with its mass meetings in the Forum where the citizens decided state policy. Plebleian v. Imperial factions.  No neutral bureaucracy, direct democracy.

 

Differences with Habermas

Habermas argues that instrumental rationality allows a value- neutral consideration of ‘the facts’ about policies by disinterested state officials (following Weber). Arendt claims there is no value neutral instrumental rationality. Goals always influence our  calculations…we will go for a goal even if it less ‘efficient’ in terms of profit etc. See below.

Also,   rejects Habermas’s view that political action can take place effectively through the established institutions of the state in modern societies- Parliaments, state administration and parties

Gives examples from history of politically foundational action outside mainstream institutional life. Change from ‘below’: the people invent their own institutions-  French Revolution, Paris Commune, Russian Revolution, Hungarian workers’ councils (1956). Other examples might be the spontaneous self -organisation of workers and students in Paris in May ’68  (‘Autogestion’).

Habermas is opposed to the idea of direct democracy as bureaucracy contains neutral rationality- a systems functional rationality which is required for the coordination of society- follows Parsons here.

He also sees the rationality of the lifeworld and public realm as diminished by blocking mechanisms used by money and power to prevent arguments being heard e.g. press monopolies, advertising, concentrated political power, big business (food and drinks industries etc. re sensible eating/drinking) etc. He calls this censorship of ideas/understanding  ‘structural violence’.

 

Power

For Arendt power exists wherever people come together to act in concert  (cited in Habermas, 1986, p.78).

As with Foucault Arendt argues that the political system cannot dispose/use power at will. Power is a good for which the political groups struggle (slightly circular!) and with which a political leadership manages things.

Both find this good already at hand, already existing. They do not produce  it.

‘The impotence of the powerful’- they have to borrow their power from the producers of power

The producers of power- the people acting within the public realm. 

Idea of  the sovereign people.

 

Totalitarianism

Arendt- it is constituted out of elements existing in any contemporary setting- if they come together in a certain way (e.g. state securitisation, war on terror, surveillance techniques etc.)

4 Elements of totalitarianism

1.    Imperialist and capitalist expansionism  (also mimicked by Hitler and Stalin in Europe)

2.     Decay of the nation-state  (crisis in nation -state ). Brought about by imperialism- nation dominates over state- ethnicity dominates state in terms of rights , citizenship (see Hollande and the Hijab)

3.    Racism-  imperialist justification for conquest and biological basis for community makes citizenship redundant

4.    Alliance between capitalists/bourgeoisie and the mob. The  mob as the socially rootless, unscrupulous adventurers, chancers engaged in on-going criminality

NB. In a crisis bourgeois society abandons/downgrades economic goals and plays the race card- restricting immigration, scapegoating immigrants and minorities- as at present, arguably? Here the mob might include tabloid journalists as operating on the margins of criminality, perhaps?

 

 

 

Arendt: the Public Sphere and Totalitarianism

 The decline of the public sphere or realm  is associated by Arendt with the growth of totalitarian tendencies. Power of the state and business over the people/public (‘the totally administered society’- Frankfurt School  -important parallels with Critical Theory)

Canovan  (1992, p.121) –the distinctiveness of her position is that instead of seeing modern society as impersonal, rational, individualistic…she sees it as stiflingly uniform, paternalistic and monolithic. …it is like the familiar liberal nightmare of bureaucratic socialism (E. Europe under ‘communism’)  except that for her that nightmare includes liberal societies themselves

 

The political & cultural  trends behind totalitarianism:

1.    The Enlightenment- bureaucracy, homogenisation, abstraction, rationalisation, reification, erosion of individuality, spontaneity, difference

2.    Romantic Conservatism (neo-feudal view)- rejection of the following: reason in favour of myth e.g. ‘the nation’ and its ‘destiny’, rejection of science, democracy and  the republican ideal (the sovereign people)

 

Influences on Arendt:

1.    Enlightenment: political equality- the sovereign people, reason

2.    Marxism: The Frankfurt School critique of modernity as a crushing bureaucracy,  homogenising capitalism (passive, standardised consumers), decline of the public sphere –see also influence on Habermas

3.    Romanticism- she maintains some elements of this- plurality, diversity, uniqueness, individuality, spontaneity  (Goethe, Novalis etc.)

 

The origins of totalitarianism are the basic trends which come to make it up,  not historical causes or roots (Bernstein, 2008). Some features of this are:

 

(a) Homogenisation and the decline of individuality, difference,  plurality into robotic ’man’, ‘radical evil’ (see the death camps- Bettelheim and the ‘walking dead’ as extreme cases of this);

 (b) the power of nations over states which means territorial identities over universal ones,

 (c) the growth of superfluous population –peoples without rights, citizenship.

 

   

 

References

 

Arendt, H. (1986),’Communicative Power’, in S. Lukes (ed.) Power, Blackwell, Oxford

Canovan, M. (1992) Hannah Arendt: an interpretation of her political thought,  C.U.P. Cambridge

Feather, H. (2000), Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Social Theory: the everyday as critique, Ashgate, Aldershot (on Schutz)

Habermas, J. (1986), 'Hannah Arendt’s Communication  Concept of Power' in Lukes (ed.) op.cit.

 

 

 

 

Review of Merilyn Moos's The Language of Silence

Merilyn Moos, The Language of Silence, Cressida Press in association with Writersworld, 2010, 288pp., £10.00 pb., 978 0 9566467 005

The ‘nation’s subconscious’ is figured by its secret services, Le Carre tells us. And one might  then  say that  this tells us  something about how culturally generic and interiorised processes of  state practice are, the constitutive role of state apparatuses in cultural formation of the individual, but more of this later. The Language of Silence is  inter alia a story about a key implication of this: the effects of state security, the culture of securitisation.

           This fictionalised biography, which covers three generations of a family, is concerned with loose ends- to do with place, relationships, commitments and rather than tying them up it shows them as irremediably riven. The plot is characterised by contingency as three generations are shaped by world historical events. During the search for past family members people appear and then just as suddenly vanish back into the general diasporic melee.  Relationships are thrown into doubt, distrust and damaged lives supervene, paranoia is evoked, but what is the source of the fear?  The Holocaust  and its ramifications for successive generations is the underlying theme but the story also raises wider questions about the nature of modern states and how they produce the  state of exile, both as structural processes of displacement and as an individual’s interiority. Hence contingency is  not  simply that-  contingent- but a structural feature of the text and the reality it purveys.  Whilst this might be an obvious concomitant of Nazism  and Stalinism, which the first generation experience, there are broader implications both on terms of how second and third generation deal with this history in the context of the way ‘liberal’ states function to securitise societies.

        The story tells us something important about the way the state is experienced in modern capitalism. Classical liberal theory, following on from Hobbes celebrates both the sovereignty of the individual and their security. The paradox of modern states however is that the claim  of individual freedom comes at the price of individual angst…securitisation of society is at the same  time the paralysis of the individual by fear that ‘security’ engenders. Here the state is seen is seen as separate from, external to the individual and so the individual then becomes the source of the problem of security

          In this way the citizen confronts themselves as sutured/disconnected from the social, generic basis of anxiety and  viewing the state as externality  on the one hand, whilst on the other its product, anxiety is seen as purely internal to the individual. This kind of bureaucratic disconnect is perhaps the flip side of commodity fetishism’s presentation of the individual as directly confronted as a ‘consumer’ by the  market where again mediations are displaced.

           These conundrums of the disconnect are explored in the story in the way that plot and character suggest a kind of  abyssal relationship with their cultural context. The question of exile is dealt with  via the first generation’s incomprehension of context, place, identifications and the sense of being a permanent refugee.  Attitudes are expressed rather than articulated and thus a whole world is conjured where experience cannot be related or identified as one’s own. i.e. the generic side of experience is  paradoxically received as exterior to the individual. The trajectory of the exile is characterised by dead ends, as temporal dislocations affect the ability to escape the mode of ‘living in the past’. It’s impossible to make sense of context and its directionality.

       Hence a permanent state of interpersonal othering is engendered but  the key implication is the othering of the state: that even in its more benign manifestations the nightmare of the modern state as ideal- typical Weberian construct, the iron cage, is  somehow inherent; its objective extremity is present in every detail, process. Processes of bureaucratic selection within the population connote something final whether in mass murder as in reactionary modernity (fascism) or the 11 Plus and benefits system in the liberal variant. The lived continuity of the everyday is displaced with  a sense of discontinuity, entrapment, isolation, absolutised categorisation.

         However, generally speaking such a classificatory power, a kind of taxonomic terror, functions as a bad reified everyday and simply passes below the radar: processes of othering simply don’t register, they’re not explicitly manifest, but routine. The language of classification here is purely indexical, a product of usure, where as Derrida notes, language acts behind our backs, carries on its communicative logic without saying so. Hence in the story  otherness/othering  is illustrated in the too explicit critical framing of Christianity in a classroom encounter which marks out the speaker as a stranger by virtue of transgressing the silent meanings.

         Othering then  in the story and ‘real life’ suggests a problem of representation: how do we move beyond the abyssal or exile state, the terminus of sense, the  suture?  Loss, detachment, mourning, dislocation, disorientation are features of the structural operations of the state seen in Gramsci’s terms as the integral state but as fetishistic representations they appear as problems of the individual confronting an external body. Jameson has aptly noted MacIntyre’s insight that the effect of bureaucratisation is to reduce us to individuals, the dissolution of commonality. Arguably this projects the fear which is in fact a structural feature of  the state’s own ‘fractured’ existence.

     How can these experiences be represented- maybe by othering the state as source of fear. Popular conceptions of officialdom demonstrate the everyday reversal of official taxonomy, state logic. In the story political articulations of this and ensuing  commitments provide a means of signifying and displacing, ameliorating  the disconnects, and the involvement of the third generation in anti-capitalism and environmental politics appears as a redemptive elaboration of the reversal. Functionaries of the modern capitalist state become in Merleau-Ponty’s expression L’On, or literally, ’the they’ .

Howard Feather

Link to Merilyn's website: www.merilynmoos.tumblr.com

Henri Lefebvre: the social production of space
3 types of space- physical, social and representational
Traditional view- space is empty and fixed by its physical boundaries. This idea of space is associated with the classical physics of Newton as the space within which bodies move. As such Lefebvre, 1994 Prod. of Space (p.169) describes it as a view of space as being substantial, absolutely fixed and empty. As against this view Liebniz argued with/against Newton that space was relational i.e. it could only be grasped in terms of what it related to what e.g. the spaces of urban life exist relationally in the sense that they are linked aspects of a single division of labour- industry, finance, consumption, leisure, administration are all interdependent spaces of urban life.
This idea of space is of a space that doesn’t exist separately from the things (as above) that occupy it. (ibid., pp.169-70). All activities nevertheless also exist in physical environments (absolute space) at the same time. Relational (social) space can be reduced by speeding up the connections between different activities e.g. via use of the Internet or faster modes of travel (see below on this).
For Lefebvre (The Urban Revolution) space in modern capitalism is often determined by property values: this determines who lives where- a relationality of class residential spaces. Lefebvresees this as an abstract relationality of money values (commodity relations).

How these types of space come together

Our own experience of space is as an amalgam of these three pure types and  for Lefebvre the experiential dimension is key to everything else.

Lefebvre- the  three types of space are thus  overlaid or organised by social constructions of space which we experience as ’lived space’. In other words, lived spaces are also spaces of representation in that they concern how we symbolise space, what meaning it has for us. For example, the built environment of the city is a physical space which has social spaces such as physically-based car parks and cathedrals which have a certain meaning for us. Depending on the construction of space so we experience it and imagine/represent it. Cities dominated by car parks are experienced and symbolised differently from those say, dominated by cathedrals.

Space becomes increasingly abstract as the city/urban centres develop: there are more specialised spaces in such cities- industrial, administrative, financial spaces/places for instance. Spaces are increasingly dominated by rental values and their consequence- property developers. The latter often control urban development

Space and time are interlinked: our sense of space is linked to the time it takes to move across it. Hence the horse, car, train or plane provide different senses or constructions of space.
Globalisation produces a compression of space as the Internet and global interconnectedness make the world seem smaller: producing a different kind of space i.e. smaller space. Hence spaces must be thought of relationally -the space of walking compared to the space of the jet plane etc.

Space is about power relations- territoriality, for example.

Space is heterogeneous- broken up into places of specialised activities – activity spaces (Massey)

Spaces have their own time or rhythms of development

E.g. Milton Keynes shopping centre contains the spaces of leisure (strolling, gathering, meeting, passing the time of day), the spaces of consumption (shopping times) and the space of calendrical time as it is oriented to the high point of the summer sun (summer solstice). The space-time rhythms of urban developers also intrude in shop rentals and their attempts to control public access to the shopping centre (see Owen Hatherley in Maev Kennedy: 'Milton Keynes shopping centre becomes Grade 11 listed building', Guardian, 16th July, 2010 and his  A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

Representational spaces- these are the activity spaces occupied/produced by those who develop ideas in the form of symbols, images, concepts, theories…for example anthropologists, architects, sociologists, advertisers, artists, journalists and so on

Representations of space- products of the imagination which has lived through the experience of particular relational activities e.g. travelling from A to B, working with other professions, trades which provide a sense of relative nature of work/skills etc. and their different rhythms/routines of life

Criticism of Lefebvre- whilst he sees property values as abstract rather than real critics have argued that money and property values, although abstractions from everyday life in that they don’t recognise individual, personal or intrinsic worth of things but only their market value, are nevertheless real in that they determine where we can live, what we can buy etc. i.e. they are real abstractions. For example, towns and cities have tended to become standardised with the same sorts of stores and banks etc. in the high street. In this way the high street becomes an abstraction or generalised, rather than particular to a given town; it is part of a wider pattern, not individual. (see David Cunningham in Radical Philosophy 133, Sept/Oct. 2005, 'Metropolis and Urban Form')
          A further objection is that space seems to take on a life of its own rather than being linked to, structured by the activities that  produce it as an on-going dynamic flux, thus it becomes a thing rather than a shaping process or relation.

David Harvey- many of these ideas have been taken up by the urban geographer, David Harvey. He uses them in an article ‘Space as a keyword’ in the book David Harvey: a Critical Reader (edited by Castree & Gregory)

Theories and Research Methods in the Social Sciences

Background
Quantitative research- questionnaires, experiments- about measurement of a social phenomenon e.g. voting behaviour
Theory behind it- positivism, the view that all significant data are measureable via systematic observation. Non-observable phenomena are meaningless or not the subject of scientific investigation
Qualitative research- participant observation, observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups- about the interpretation of people’s actions, motives, beliefs etc.
Theory behind it- idealism, the view that we can use concepts, ideas to identify people’s beliefs as being of a type. Ideal types, typical constructs, categories (grounded theory)

Grounded Theory
This is a research method which is used to produce models of responses to certain kinds of situation e.g. the experience of early motherhood (Rogan). Researchers use interviews or focus groups to identify key themes in people’s experiences.
They note
1. The types of response when discussing an issue and label these ‘indicator concepts’ as they indicate a more fundamental underlying reality within the experience.
2. Each issue discussed might produce a common core e.g. early mothers talked about realising what obligations were entailed by motherhood, they also experienced a ‘coming to cope’ with motherhood. Both of these topics contained elements of
3. A core experience which was that of being alone, isolated
Hence by comparing the issues (axial coding) a common core of experience is identified. This then serves as a way of understanding people’s responses to the situation..the situation is seen to cause this response. The approach is often used in policy research e.g. health and social services. Another example is patients responses to the availability of information re their condition (types of cancer). Here the researchers characterised responses in terms of three basic categories: faith in ndoctors, hope as a way of putting off bad news and charity- a sense that other patients might need information/consultation more than themselves.
Methodological Basis
The research contains both interpretation (Idealism) and measurement-counting most common responses or elements of them and hence positivism. The models developed can then be used to predict people’s responses (positivism). It is neither purely quantitative nor qualitative but a mixture of both.

Critical Realism
Whilst concentrating on underlying causes (hidden mechanisms) critical realism shares the idealism of grounded theory in that reality is seen as constructed by human agents and that theories of it will be skewed by the perspectives of agents. Emancipation is seen as the goal of analysis. Critiques of capitalism, patriarchy and racism have all used critical realism.
Realist epistemology- starts from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Hegel- the slave knows the nature of reality as they do the work- act on nature etc.
Marx- alienation/fetishism is an objective category experienced by living labour as it is turned into an object. This experience is the basis of knowledge and emancipation as it leads to a desire to overthrow oppressive conditions.
Feminism (Sandra Harding, Jane Flax)- standpoint feminism takes up this model to explain why men cannot see the problems women face in patriarchal societies. Women have a privileged insight into patriarchal relations.
Anti Racism (Gilroy, Carter)- whilst racism is property of structures (institutional racism etc.) it is also a source of meanings. Hence ‘race’ is produced in interaction between agents and structures in ways that are not predictable i.e. it’s not ‘in’ individuals.
Bhaskar’s critical realism- agents produce structures and vice versa. Culture mediates between the two; meanings are had by agents but are not predictable.

Three levels of reality in Bhaskar’s approach:
empirical- perceptions, impressions, sensations
actual -events, states of affairs
real/deep - structures, mechanisms, powers/liabilities

Institutions can be seen to operate as underlying i.e. hidden mechanisms which produce visible effects from the actualisation of their powers as in sexism and racism e.g. institutions make the power of men look natural in the way it is actualised as ‘scientific objectivity’, ‘the facts’. For instance gender role socialisation and its inequalities becomes in turn, invisible. Similarly racism becomes invisible to white majority as it is not experienced by them. So institutional factors affect what we perceive.

Realism: an ethnographic case study
Porter’s participant observation study of ideologies in a large Irish hospital. (Porter, 1993, 2002). Cited in Bryman 2004
Porter concluded that whilst ethnic majority staff tended to be racist this tendency was counterbalanced by ideologies of professionalism in the interactions between doctors (ethnic minority) and nurses (ethnic majority).
Racism and professionalism were seen as generative structures (Bhaskar’s level 3). The study fund that racism was not sinficant in the interactions between staff but did play a role in comments made behind people’s backs. Racism did not significant in work relationships as these depended on performance (skills and qualifications) for evaluation of others. Minority doctors emphasised their professional standing in interactions with others and this neutralised potential for racist responses.
One structural mechanism was countered by the operation of another and racism did not become visible- except during prayers which seemed to mix the secular and the religious contexts for the ethnic majority. Potential for racism is there but cannot be actualised situationally (level 2) and therefore perceived (level 1).

Criticisms of Bhaskar’s Critical Realism
It is difficult to make the distinction between perception and events perceived as what is perceived tends to be influenced by the perceiver. The 2 faces or wine glass diagram suggests this point. Points of contact between different perceivers/observers might establish an alternative view of objectivity as a shared reality

The structure-agency model –this suggests a separation or dualism between agents and structures which might make it difficult to see how agents can give meanings to structures.
H.F. 12.05.11

Youth, Resistance and Social Control

Youth, Consumerism and Violence

Globalisation and marginalisation

The banks, global credit and the crisis of capitalism- who pays? Cut backs, unemployment.

Employment and globalisation. Move from manufacturing to services. Full time to part time work, insecurity in the flexible labour force
Destruction of the skilled working class: the legacy of the 1980’s
Social impact on working class subculture …fragmentation, sink estates and the ‘right to buy’ policy in housing. Concentration of deprivation

Consumerism At the same time an intensification and mediatisation of consumer culture. Staging of show-biz solutions to dead ends via recognition through reality TV programmes. Magical mobility. Spectacle and self-exhibition (Debord, Society of the Spectacle)

Egoism and Instrumentalism- The lifeworld of everyday interaction has been colonised by commercial values…people more likely to use each other than value each other (Hall et al. 2008). Increasing narcissistic individualism, ‘cool’, competitiveness and violence

Homogenisation- the ironic consequence of spectacular consumerism is standardisation of identities

Crisis of Youth Theme (Margo and Dixon, 2006, IPPR)
Lack of structured activities, neighbourhood support, single parents, increasing family breakdown, gender roles- mothers not role models for girls, peer rather than family socialisation, media influence,
drugs, knife crime

Moral Panics -Acid House parties, knife crime, guns. Has the media created the crisis? Amplification spiral- more police attention, more arrests etc. (Stan Cohen- Folk Devils and Moral Panics)

Media and Violence Are the media to blame, and if so how? Effects model. Market model. Young & Cohen …’media provide a script or narrative which suggests when violence is appropriate. Dissociation from effects of violence…violence as spectacle, Iraq War, legitimate violence- heroes and villains. Impact of media on the socially deprived...greatest consumption of violent media (IPPR - Institute for Public Policy research)

Foucault 2: The Production of Sexuality

Foucault- The History of Sexuality
Sexuality varies over time and place, no naturally given sexual practices or identities

C18th as comparator with modernity: women seen as an inferior version of men, not as the ‘opposite sex’, but a variant of men. C20th women seen as the opposite of men, sexually

The development of types of sexuality is a product of the emergence of discourses around managing the population question in the C19th. These types don’t exist naturally but are produced by classifying the population in this way who then behave according to the types they’ve been labelled as (subjectification of the individual to the power/knowledge of discourse).

Norms: the types themselves constitute norms for those groups themselves but from a discursive point of view these groups are abnormal.

Diffuse sexuality prior to the C19th non- heterosexual practices were often punished but they were not regarded as crimes committed by homosexuals, paedophiles etc. but as crimes committed by those who had succumbed to temptation by the Devil (who might suggest such acts) and this could apply to any person. Alternatively, they might also be seen as crimes against nature, or the natural order of things.

Foucault argues (see Mort, Wood etc.in Subjectivity and Social Relations) that the management of sexuality is about the productivity of the population and that the promotion of the heterosexual monogamous nuclear family in the second part of the C19th is based on this.

Heterosexual nuclear family –secures the disciplined reproduction of the population as a workforce with the correct norms for this. Hence sex and the population question are central to discursive actions and regulation in the C19th.

Bentham –Foucault follows Bentham’s idea that the modern period was concerned with the optimisation of human output and activity (‘the greatest good for the greatest number’) and hence discourse proliferated to train people accordingly. Instrumental action, efficiency, rationalisation (see Weber) are all characteristics of the Industrial Revolution.

Social/System Integration- the discursive formation – individuals are subject to a variety of discursive influences- familial discourses, educational, work, leisure and so on but these have to work in tandem as a system.
Discursive figures- Foucault argues that what coordinates the different areas of discourse is some central unifying figure such as the heterosexual family in the C19th and following du Gay, at the end of the C20th, the self-managing, entrepreneurial figure capable of coping with a rapidly changing social world (prevalence of the idea of ‘managing’ in current language). The Con-Dem government might use the figure of the ‘Big Society’ as socially inclusive yet depending on the individual’s ‘self-government’ compared to Blair’s figure of education/training as offering ‘opportunity’.
However diverse the different discourses, they focus on one figure and attempt to normalise the individual across all these different areas in line with the central figure /idea.

Resistance- how does one resist the oppressive normalising power of discourse? Foucault suggests that the personas or subjectivities produced by discourse can be subverted by inverting the meaning of the terms so that e.g in the 1960’s ‘black is beautiful’ became a way of resisting negative typing in racist Western societies. Youth culture often inverts establishment labels e.g.’wicked’, punk rock as the celebration of the rejected, despised, the biker ‘One percenter’ etc.

Criticisms of ‘normalisation’ and the shaping of human conduct by discourse. The objections may be the same as those levelled at functionalism or Weberian rationalisation. Against functionalism- that there is conflict and diversity rather than normalisation, that people have different values, norms and importantly, do not conform to discursive stereotypes. Against rationalisation- that we hybridise, mix and match, are eclectic- to cite Giddens rather than stuck within the logic of one discourse/discursive formation (as with Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rules)

Interactionism/phenomenology suggests identities are more open-ended, biographical rather than institutional-discursive.
Schutz’s inversion of Weber (taken up by Giddens) is an example where the iron cage of rules gets customised as a resource for action and the system can be colonised in a reversal of Habermas’s invasion/ colonisation of the lifeworld by the system. See Goffman, Asylums
Cultural life suggests hybridity of global multicultures (Robins in du Gay) and culture as the cannibalisation of past styles (Jameson)- fusion of different ideas.(see Gadamer ‘fusion of horizons’ in Feather, Intersubjectivity).
Monologicism – hence while discourse suggests we are trapped within its terms, whatever their positive or negative meanings, Schutz suggests we can raid other areas for ideas, that knowledge in everyday life is like a recipe (add some of this and a bit of that) or free flow of consciousness (open horizon of types). Similarly, Lefebvre argues that everyday life, the informal, unstructured world is the source of new ideas, it represents the junkyard of institutional life, ripe for plunder, customisation, reconstruction

Q: How does Simpson’s account of Houlbrook’s Queer London fit Foucault’s notion of discursive normalisation? -only a suggestion for approaching Foucault

References
Beechey V. & Donald, J (1985) Subjectivity and Social Relations
Du Gay, P (1997) The Production of Culture
Feather, H. (2000) Intersubjectivity
Hall, S. (1997) Representation
Jameson, F (1991) Postmodernism
Woodward, K (ed) (1997) Identity and Difference