Realities as Political Agents

In yesterday’s post I tried to assemble a personal political statement about how I believe American government ought to work. I proposed that the American democratic culture supports the liberal idea of the individual as agent and the Multitude as the sum of individual agents. I acknowledged that there is also a collective tradition of the American People as a collective agent, manifesting itself especially in the urge to promulgate “the American way” and to overcome resistance both at home and abroad.

This sort of analysis distinguishes between individual and collective agents operating within the political sphere. Immanent forces can assemble themselves into subjectivities, which are individuated intentional centers of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and will, and intersubjectivities, which are collective intentional centers of norms and ideologies and power. But agents don’t have to be so personal, or even interpersonal. Immanent forces can assemble themselves into realities: collections of phenomena mapped onto coherent explanations of what they mean. Realities can be appropriated or occupied by individuals or groups or whole societies, but realities aren’t centered in these personal/interpersonal entitites. Realities are themselves agents, assigning meaning to individuals and collectives.

Some people I know believed that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Israel and the Unites States, that Saddam had WMDs and the means of delivering them, that he was in cahoots with Osama Bin Laden, that Iraqis would rejoice in Saddam’s removal and the installation of democracy. Other people believed that Iraq presented an opportunity for America to appropriate a reliable supply of oil and cheap labor, driving a wedge into a potentially powerful unified Middle East that posed an immanent threat to American economic dominance. It could be argued that these two alternative perspectives constituted intentional constructions of particular societal agents, constructions which were then intentionally propagated throughout the Multitude in an effort to promote these societal agents’ agendas. But these alternative perspectives wouldn’t have any chance of finding a home in the minds of individual personal agents if these perspectives didn’t make sense. “Making sense” isn’t just a subjective feeling; it’s a way that objects and events and people can be assembled into a coherent picture or story or set of propositions. It is a reality.

The individual agent can create a unique way of making sense of things, but more often the individual appropriates a meaning that’s already been pre-assembled. It’s conceivable that the individual consciously selects one particular way of making sense from among the others. But I think it’s more accurate to say that one particular reality resonates most strongly with the individual. This resonance occurs at the unconscious level, where the raw materials of a whole array of virtual realities — representations of things and events and people, trajectories of power and love and violence, ideas and beliefs — are waiting, loosely arrayed, to be assembled into a coherent whole. When a particular way of making sense of the Iraq situation makes itself known to an individual subject, it may resonate with the loosely-structured subjective array in such a way as to actualize one of the virtual realities that co-existed in nascent form in the subject’s unconscious. This particular reality offers the subject a way of formulating the subject’s unformulated experiences. Why does this particular reality take up residence in this particular subject’s consciousness? Probably because it’s more easily incorporated into that subject’s meta-reality — the array of interrelated realities that has already taken up residence in that subject’s head.

There may be an infinite number of ways to make sense of Iraq. Only a very small subset of the imaginable alternatives take up active residence in the minds of individual subjects. This means that individuals can be assigned to a small number of categories. These categories can be construed as interpersonal agents, convergences of subsets of the chaotic Multitude into a few organized and competing subsets of the People. But the categories can also be regarded as alternative political realities. Once a reality takes up residence in an individual subject’s head, that subject becomes incorporated into that reality, much as an individual English-speaker becomes incorporated into the Anglophone reality. Once a person becomes embedded in a particular political reality, it’s hard for that person to think about things in some other way, just as it’s difficult for an English-speaker to think in French. It’s very difficult for someone who occupies one political reality to “talk sense” to someone who occupies a different reality. That’s because realities aren’t just collections of raw phenomena disconnected from collections of ideas: the phenomena and ideas are assembled together, fused into interlocking strands of meaning. It’s hard to pluck any one strand without setting up sympathetic vibrations in the whole fabric. As an impersonal agent, a reality resists disaggregation and disassembly.

Politically, America may be characterized as a Multitude of individual agents assembled into a relatively few alternative versions of the collective People. But America may also be characterized as a multitude of individual events and objects and people assembled into a relatively few alternative political realities. To alter the landscape of political realities, a few strategies can be envisioned. Unbundle the realities into their individual components and subject each component to logical and empirical scrutiny. Consciously rebundle the components from the bottom up into a different configuration. Imagine other alternative realities that haven’t yet been widely actualized and see if they resonate with the virtual assemblies in individuals’ heads.

A Very Tentative Political Manifesto

Challenged by what I’ve been reading, spurred on by discussion and provocation and personal abuse, stimulated by three cups of coffee and an early morning walk through deep snow, I offer the preliminary and tentative personal political position of an individual American. It’s a sort of liberal isolationism that looks a lot like Hardt & Negri’s Empire but without the globalization. (UPDATE 1, 11:15 am — added one more “resolved” clause)

Inasmuch as:

1. The American government rarely acts against American economic self-interests in world affairs, regardless of the publicly stated rationales for its actions.
2. The American public can be persuaded that the government is acting in their best interests even when it’s not. Example: Iraq has WMDs and capabilities for delivering them, therefore it’s in our best interests to launch a pre-emptive strike.
3. The American public can be persuaded that the government is motivated by consensual ideological commitment even when it’s not. Example: it is our sacred duty as the beacon of democracy and freedom to liberate the Iraqi people.
4. The structure of the American republic is most compatible with a libertarian protection of individual rights of “the Multitude.”
5. The American republic is flexible enough to accommodate more collective expressions of “the People.” Example: constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage.
6. The democratic process in America is structurally free and open.
7. The two-party system and the winner-take-all operation of government virtually assures that the parties will converge on a central position, severely curtailing choices available to voters.
8. There is virtually no class consciousness in America, so calls for working-class solidarity have only very narrow appeal.
9. The American governmental structure is very stable and receives strong popular support, with hardly anyone calling for any fundamental overhaul or revolution.

Therefore be it resolved that:

1. The present republican and democratic structure of American government needn’t be toppled from within.
2. The ideals underlying the republic –“liberty and justice for all” — should be upheld, keeping in check the populist and potentially fascistic expressions of the People as well as the special interests of the economically privileged.
3. Because the democratic expression of sheer self-interest would, by virtue of demographics, shift power away from the rich, the Multitude should be especially vigilant against governmental attempts to invoke either the People or the national Ideals as justification for public policy.
4. Barriers to entry or immigration into the US based on financial resources, promise of employment, ability to speak English, etc. should be eliminated.
5. Americans should be encouraged to extend their libertarian instincts to foreign affairs, respecting other nations’ efforts at self-determination even if the resulting governments don’t look anything like our own.
6. Organized efforts at “counter-detailing” government propaganda with fact-based analyses of policy issues and the exposure of hidden motives behind the propaganda should be undertaken.
7. The potential value of forming a third party shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

Okay, I’m ready to be talked out of it now. And I have no idea how any of it can actually be accomplished.

Amin on Empire

I think this is going to do it for me on reviews of Hardt & Negri’s Empire. This time up: an essay by Marxist political theorist Samir Amin, as recommended by Chabert — the link is HERE.

Amin, like the other far-left critics I’ve read, doesn’t much care for H&N’s ideas. Amin too objects to their contention that Empire is already global, discounting the nationalism behind America’s global economic and military ambitions. He refers to the imperialistic triad of the US, Europe and Japan, which together dominate the rest of the world more through the expansion of capital than through conquest of territories. I’m not clear how Amin’s view differs significantly from H&N’s in this sense of an American-centered Empire penetrating local economies throughout the world, other than a difference as to how far this penetration has already taken place.

More importantly, Amin disagrees that the Left’s agenda should and must be achieved from inside the Empire. The US, which dominates the triad, is in many ways unique historically and culturally. American workers have virtually no class awareness, Amin contends; individualistic liberalism has always permeated American culture, making it a rocky ground for leftist-communistic inclinations to take root. The long history of American democracy is undeniable and Amin contends that democracy must be part of all future progress in achieving economic equality. However, Americans are nearly apolitical, participating in state affairs only at the ballot box. Economics dominates American life, and so its government is primarily an arm of the marketplace. Americans aren’t reluctant to acknowledge their intention to protect the resource-intensive American lifestyle, securing their own economic interests at the expense of other nations and ensuring their dominance through massive military strength. By submitting to the American-dominated Empire, other nations would be acting against their own self-interests.

The idea of Multitude is central to H&N’s vision of a better future: a congeries of individual agents shooting trajectories of energy into the world. By eliminating restraints on freedom of movement, along with assuring a worldwide minimum wage, an upgraded Empire can release a vast reservoir of creative force that will lift workers’ economic status and generate an explosion of creativity in the world. Amin says that here H&N completely subscribe to the liberal ideal of the free individual as the agent of change in the world. For most of the world individuals are pretty much powerless to resist the nationalistic hegemony and intrusive power of the American empire. Amin proposes agency resides with a variety of democratic, leftist hegemonic states that aren’t modeled on America but rather are compatible with local “political cultures.”

In essence, Amin writes off America altogether. Its democracy is essentially rightist; it wants to dominate the world militarily and to hoard the lion’s share of resources. To uphold the liberal ideal of individual agency for those who stand outside the American empire is to serve as an advocate not for a global Empire that will emerge from the Multitude but for American world conquest. America isn’t the portal for the emergence of global progress of the left’s economic agenda; it is the enemy that can’t be rehabilitated but that must be actively combated. So what do you do if you happen to have the (mis)fortune of being an American living in America? Apparently you have three options: go along with the liberal status quo, pursue a radical disruptive course that will probably bring you into conflict with the authorities, or leave.

Original Sin Reinterpreted

Here’s a brief interruption in the Empire series… Awhile back I mentioned that I was launching a series of posts at Open Source Theology exploring what would happen to the rest of the Bible if the creation narratives from Genesis 1-3 were simply deleted. I’m getting close to the end of this project, which will be sort of a relief: other than my friend Sam, hardly anyone has engaged in discussion other than to tell me that my whole project is ill-conceived. Today I wrote a piece about original sin, which might be of interest both to the Christians and to the Lacanians who happen to show up here.

Nothing in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve suggests that Adam’s sin somehow infected all of his descendants. They were banned from the Garden and its Tree of Life, which would have granted them immortality, but in the Genesis creation narratives mortality is the natural human condition. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul goes so far as to say that the natural, mortal human body has a kind of “glory” to it.

Nothing in God’s curses on Adam and Eve suggest that he’ll cause them or their progeny to be more prone to sin than would naturally be the case. In the very next chapter Yahweh poses this question to Cain: “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?” or perhaps “will you not be accepted?” (Gen 4:7) By this question isn’t Yahweh saying that it’s possible for Cain, son of Adam, to do well? To the best of my knowledge, nowhere else in the Old Testament is there any suggestion that Adam’s sin was passed on to his descendants. Jewish theology has no concept of original sin. I’m not sure to what extent the early Christians believed in original sin. Augustine formulated the doctrine of original sin that came to dominate Christian thought from the Middle Ages on. The Protestant reformers also subscribed to Augustine’s formulation. What about in the New Testament? Again as far as I can tell, Romans 5 is the only NT text to suggest the idea that Adam’s original sin caused the sinfulness of his descendants. Here’s the one verse that’s hard to account for:

For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many were made righteous (Romans 5:19).

That sure sounds like original sin to me. Is there a straight reading of this verse that doesn’t turn into the historic Christian doctrine of original sin, whereby everyone inherits a sinful nature from Adam? Here’s a stab at it…

In Romans as elsewhere Paul addresses what is arguably his main theme: justification by faith. It is in this context that Paul talks about the law. Not only are people incapable of following the law — the law itself has no power to bring justification. Even worse and paradoxically so, the law makes one aware of one’s sinfulness rather than removing that awareness.

Paul summarizes his justification-by-faith argument in the first eleven verses of Romans 5, at which point he moves into an extended comparison between Adam and Christ. Therefore, Paul begins verse 12, signaling that the analogy is going to be relevant to his larger justification-by-faith argument — Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin… This “one man” isn’t named here, but he is two verses later: it’s Adam. But how can Paul say that Adam sinned if it’s through law that we become aware of our sinfulness? Paul highlights this dilemma in verse 13: for until the Law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law.

Clearly, though, sin was imputed to “the one man,” to Adam. For his sin Adam was condemned to death, and death reigned from Adam to Moses (v. 14) — in other words, death reigned during the entire pre-Law era. It would seem, then, that Adam must have acted in the context of some sort of law, even if it wasn’t THE Mosaic Law.

Later in Romans Paul outlines the intrinsic link between law and sin. The law doesn’t just create an awareness of having already broken the law; it actually stimulates the desire to break the law:

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “YOU SHALL NOT COVET.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. (Romans 7:7-8)

So, Adam is in the Garden and God tells him not to eat from one particular tree. This is God’s only rule as far as we’re told, but it’s enough to produce the very desire it prohibits. The fruit looks tasty, it will make me wise — I’m having a bite! Man was created good and the law was good; it was the interaction of human nature with the law that went badly. Paul says that it always goes badly.

Let’s say that Adam and Eve really did acquire the knowledge they sought in the Garden. In fact, Yahweh says they did in Genesis 2:22: Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. It’s possible that the desire to be like the lawgiver is the motivation behind lots of sins, maybe even all sin. When God says “Don’t eat from that tree” He also means “Only I am allowed to eat from that tree.” The person who’s told not to eat admires the lawgiver, wants to become like the lawgiver, wants therefore to do precisely what the lawgiver told him or her NOT to do. It’s a sad story really.

This knowledge of good and evil can be expressed in the form of laws: you should do this, you shouldn’t do that. No other animal besides man is possessed of such knowledge. Babies aren’t born with this knowledge, but they begin learning it in infancy, and once they learn it they can never unlearn it. This knowledge, says Paul, is a mixed blessing: knowing the good produces both an awareness of having already done wrong and a desire to continue doing wrong. Human nature is good, and the law is good, but human knowledge of law establishes the preconditions from which sin invariably emerges.

Adam and Eve learned good and evil, and they could never forget it, never again escape both the self-awareness of sin and the desire to sin that’s stimulated by knowing the law. The first parents almost surely conveyed this knowledge to their children. Do this; don’t do that — it’s hard to imagine being a parent without laying down the law. Still, there must have been a particular time when humans moved beyond the instinctive stimulus-response, action-reaction style of non-sentient animals. In so doing, in teaching law to their children, parents transmit the preconditions that, says Paul, invariably generate sin in their children.

Okay, back to the problem verse: For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners… This interpretation could work, couldn’t it? Adam and Eve learned good and evil, which can be expressed as law. Knowing law creates awareness of having broken law and stimulates desire to break law some more. Once this knowledge enters human awareness it never goes away. And it’s exactly the kind of knowledge that parents almost immediately impart to their children. Paradoxically, by laying down the law to their children, parents become the conduits of sinfulness to their children. There’s no biological inheritance of a sinful nature; it’s just the way things invariably go when humans acquire the knowledge of good and evil.

Here’s how Romans 5 wraps up:

For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:19-21)

Paul finishes the parallel between Adam and Jesus by giving his readers a foretaste of the Law-sin connection he elaborates in chapter 7. Adam and his descendants experienced this fateful connection on a small scale; the Jews under THE Law got a full dose. Christ breaks the Law-sin connection that began with Adam and intensified via Moses.

Leninino on National Global Empire

Continuing my review of critiques of Hardt & Negri’s Empire, today, again through courtesy of Traxus, there’s THIS POST from the archives of Lenin’s Tomb. Leninino’s (not the “real” Lenin, hence the diminutive) essay addresses the broader issue of nationalism in the global economy, which is only one aspect of H&N’s book. H&N contend that, whereas the USA is the center of Empire’s hegemony and power, the globalization of Empire through international trade and the free movement of capital and labor across boundaries is effacing the importance of separate nations.

Leninino notes that the “state” isn’t a self-explanatory concept. In Weberian liberal terms the state is a mechanism for protecting a particular geographic territory and its people, whereas for Marx the state is a force for securing the ends of the bourgeoisie. In this latter formulation the modern state isn’t merely a means of overcoming obstacles to free trade within and between territories: it serves to reinforce the obstacles separating bourgeoisie from proletariat; it functions as the instrument of an unacknowledged ideology.

Leninino acknowledges the empirical fact that economic activity has become increasingly global, with greater multinational investment in infrastructure, reductions in tariffs and other trade barriers, etc. This isn’t a new trend, L observes — geographical extension has always been part of modern capitalism. But most of this multinational activity still takes place between nations, and especially among those few nations that dominate world capitalism. He cites evidence that firms’ international investments generate lower profit margins than do their domestic investments. Nations also continue to restrict the in-migration of low-wage labor. Whether new state policies serve to release or to restrict trade across national boundaries, they are actions taken at the national level.

“I think it is useful to dispense with the term ‘globalization’,” L. concludes. “Given what has been said, it can be seen as an obfuscatory device with little real referent.” Globalization is a “fiction,” an “ideological construct” that attempts to unify a variety of independent and multidirectional trends. “If [one person] said that globalization was making the poor worse off, while someone else said that it enabled one to communicate with many people of different faiths and backgrounds, they would not be disagreeing because they are speaking of different things.” The former is speaking from the perspective of Marx’s definition of state; the latter, from the liberal definition.

I’m not sure of the implications here. Leninino acknowledges that the economy has been extending itself internationally for a long time. As L. presents it, Marx’s definition of state can be decoupled from nation and its geographic and ethnic connotations, such that the state’s bourgeois empowerment apparatus could go multinational or global without significantly changing its function. Arguing that national interests still dominate multinational exchange seems to support Weber’s liberal definition of state as a mechanism for protecting local interests. Is that the idea: that globalization is a liberal deception intended to seduce people into believing that something like global communism is emerging from multinational capitalism? If so, then why would Marxists want to deny the acknowledged movement toward a horizon dominated by a global bourgeois state? Maybe it’s because a strictly national bourgeois state is easier to topple. Let’s say that Empire is only an American-centered movement that comprises only a handful of nations working in loose collaboration to dominate other nations and the working class. If so, then by thwarting America and its collaborators Empire can be toppled. It’s not a total world hegemony; it’s just a very powerful locality with plenty of external space surrounding it, plenty of opportunities to resist from outside the Empire.

Juridical Concept of Empire

In the discussion of Hardt & Negri’s Empire on the preceding post, Traxus accused me of being caught in a polarity. Are societal institutions the self-organizing emergent product of uncoordinated vectors of potential expressing themselves throughout the society? Or are they the top-down imposition of restrictions and directions on this emergent expression of diffuse human potential? Okay fine, I’ll read Hardt & Negri for awhile and see what they have to say for themselves — how they resolve the polarization through the juridical concept of Empire.

“The concept comes down to us through a long, primarily European tradition, which goes back at least to ancient Rome, whereby the juridico-political figure of Empire was closely linked to the Christian origins of European civilizations. There the concept of Empire united juridical categories and universal ethical values, making them work together as an organic whole. This union has continuously functioned within the concept, whatever the vicissitudes of the history of Empire. Every juridical system is in some way a crystallization of a specific set of values, because ethics is part of the materiality of every juridical foundation, but Empire… pushes the coincidence and universality of the ethical and the juridical to the extreme… From the beginning, then, Empire sets in motion an ethico-political dynamic that lies at the heart of the juridical concept. This juridical concept involves two fundamental tendencies: first, the notion of a right that is affirmed in the construction of a new order that envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless, universal space; and second, a notion of right that encompasses all time within its ethical foundation… In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary.”

H&N contend that this universal merger of law and ethics persisted through the Middle Ages, but that the Renaissance inaugurated the “triumph of secularism” which split law and ethics apart. So in the political came the concept of universal rights, whereas in the ethical arose “utopias of ‘perpetual peace.'” When I think about localized ethical utopias I picture the early American religious communities, trying to establish outposts of heaven in the wilderness. But these communities engaged one another in society and in commerce. There were fundamental agreements on universals that enabled them to establish federations across communities. In America at least the divide between the political and the ethical didn’t really hold. Each utopian community was a merger of both principles, and the federation across communities was built on (relatively) universal agreement on both principals among the diverse mini-utopias.

I don’t see H&N acknowledging that the medieval Western ethic also split between the old Catholicism, which was more a tribally syncretistic variant of Christianity, and the new Protestantism, which like the Renaissance was an attempt to return to a past classical age of Christianity. Protestantism extended the universal ethos of Christian fellowship, making possible the formation of societies and economies that unite total strangers from different cultures. At the same time Protestantism re-emphasized the juridical and ethical ideal of the Christian “constitution;” i.e., the Bible, and especially the New Testament, and even more especially the universalizing ideal of Paul. The New Testament ideal isn’t only enforced by the powers of Empire, as was the case with the Roman law or the Jewish law of the Old Testament; rather, it’s intended to guide the individual exercise of freedom in a way that permeates the society at every level. It’s a Foucaultian internalization of power, transforming from within the expression of potential energy. The form of secularization that came to dominate Western Empire arose specifically within those societies that adopted the Protestant variant of Christianity. This new “re-formation” of the Empire didn’t even need Italy, the original locus of the Renaissance and Negri’s home country.

Bull on Empire

In discussion on the Immanent Marxist Utopia post I expressed the wish that someone would point me toward a Marxist critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Traxus (American Stranger) sent me links to not one but four such reviews. Here’s my understanding of the first one, written by Malcolm Bull — here’s the link.

Bull says that, in a world where capitalism is everywhere, it’s hard to tell the difference between the neo-Marxists and the neoliberals. To energize the potential of the emerging worker multitude Hardt & Negri call for free movement of labor across national boundaries and a worldwide minimum wage. Bull says that libertarians likewise support both of these positions; I’d say that he’s right about free movement of labor but not about minimum wage, which in a libertarian world would be established, like everything else, by the unfettered marketplace. Bull says that minimum wage is part of the dismantling of welfare, but that’s not so: minimum wage is a barrier to hiring low-cost workers, which would increase unemployment. “Just because the ‘anarchists’ espouse bits of the Neoliberal agenda that even George W. Bush has not yet got to does not mean they are pursuing Neoliberal ends,” Bull acknowledges; he doubts that these means will achieve the Left’s desired ends.

Following Spinoza, Hardt and Negri want to release workers’ potentia — the strength and force of creative activity — from the state’s potestas — authority or sovereignty. Not only should potestas serve potentia; potestas emerges from potentia, even as for Spinoza God’s sovereignty is a natural outgrowth of his ability to create worlds.This, says Bull, isn’t a rationale for a Marxist revolution but for a Jeffersonian-republican one. He quotes H&N: “The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organisation of global flows and exchange.” By invoking the ideals of both “positive liberty” (freedom to fulfill one’s potentia) and “negative liberty” (freedom from authority) in service of a global collective surge of creative work, H&N propose to use a key neoliberal tool in dismantling the hegemonic capitalist empire and building a self-governing workers’ world order.

Bull says that H&N offer a manifesto of natural-born power unconstrained by how that power should be exercised. The potestas of government isn’t a restraint on or a channeling of the exercise of power but rather its aggregation. Where, asks Bull, does the concept of duty come into the picture? This unchecked expression of power can lead just as easily to tyranny as to democracy, as Spinoza acknowledged. There are no “natural” rights to protect individuals and groups against tyranny, says Spinoza: such rights can be conferred and enforced only by the state. H&N don’t accept this countervailing force exerted from outside the potentia. Says Bull: “The conflict at the centre of the movement against global capitalism is the tension between its libertarian stance and the demand for global justice.” Do H&N subscribe to a sort of pantheistic belief in the intrinsic goodness of potentia? Spinoza does, I think, which is why an emergent potestas would be effective in expressing the collective will to goodness and justice. Certainly Nietzsche would be more skeptical about it, though far from clear that he’d want to restrain the potentia.

Bull acknowledges truth in Hannah Arendt’s contention that the compassionate urge to impose restraints on freedom does tend toward totalitarianism. “All those do-gooders are more dangerous than they look,” he says. “The ideological alternative to Neoliberalism is, as Neoliberals never tire of saying, some form of totalitarianism. But that can only be a reason for people to start thinking about what new forms of totalitarianism might be possible, and, indeed, desirable.” The minimalist global regulation envisioned by neolibs isn’t going to cut it. “Unlimited risks need total controls and, as Hardt and Negri point out, ‘totalitarianism consists not simply in totalising the effects of social life and subordinating them to a global disciplinary norm’ but also in ‘the organic foundation and unified source of society and the state’.” But, says Bull, H&N “have no interest in the control of risk — a world of unlimited risk is a world of unlimited constituent power.” This is inadequate, says Bull. “Total social control” is what’s needed, a socially benevalent totalitarian protection that “involves a degree of microregulation with which individuals have to co-operate.” This totalizing force assures inclusion of the powerless in the creative society, guaranteeing work and welfare to all.

Curiously, Bull ends his essay by contending that, no matter what sort worker revolution arises, it will have to involve the United States. He says that, while H&N frame their argument in American terms, they ignore the importance of America the place. Says Bull:

“But theirs is the America of potentia not of potestas. They miss the point that even if the multitude could create its own Americas, it would be stronger under the sovereignty of the existing one – not just materially better off, but better able to bring about its social and political objectives. The international Left’s few successes of the past fifty years – decolonisation, anti-racism, the women’s movement, cultural anti-authoritarianism – have all had proper (and often official) backing from within the United States. The United States is no utopia, but a utopian politics now has to be routed through it… The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century got a bad name less because of their monopolistic control of everyday life than on account of their stifling insistence on a maxim of shared values, and their draconian punishments for nonconformity. They were, in Durkheimian terms, attempts to create total communities rather than total societies. The US offers a model for a different type of totalitarianism. Within a total society – a world of universal anomie populated by the hybridised subjects of mutual recognition – monopolistic microregulation need not be concerned with conformity. Of course, a global United States is not a total society, but total society is rapidly becoming more imaginable than the state of nature from which political theorising has traditionally started.”

I can’t tell what Bull’s point is here. Is he suggesting that the present version of the US could be maneuvered toward a “total society” that would retain the positive and negative freedoms of H&N while imposing a mechanism of justice and protection that it currently lacks? The last sentence seems to bely that hope: “But in a total society, it is not the social that needs a contract but the individual – an anti-social contract that creates individual spaces in a world totally regulated by meaningless mutuality.” Is he saying that an incipient American total society is the source of this meaningless mutuality that dominates the world, or that its full realization would make possible the release of individual agents who derive meaning from their participation in the American total society?

This is long. If (hopefully) discussion ensues I’ll try to formulate my own responses to Bull and to H&N.

The United States Says…

CARACAS (Reuters) – President Hugo Chavez crashed to an unprecedented vote defeat on Monday [note: the vote was 51% to 49%]. Celebrations immediately erupted throughout Caracas. Many said Venezuela had narrowly escaped the imposition of authoritarian rule. “The reform would have made some frightening changes in our country,” said an ecstatic Astrid Badell, 18, pulling a plastic green whistle from her mouth to talk.

The self-styled revolutionary [question: is it less arrogant to be an “other-styled” revolutionary?] and close ally of Cuba conceded defeat but said he would “continue in the battle to build socialism.” Chavez also said the reform proposals remained “alive,” suggesting he might try to push them through later on. “This is not a defeat. This is another ‘for now,”‘ Chavez said, repeating a famous quote when as a red-bereted paratrooper he acknowledged his coup attempt had failed [note: Chavez was later elected president, receiving the largest electoral majority in 40 years]. He did not appear despondent at his presidential palace [question: is the White House a presidential palace?], where he told supporters not to be sad and wished all Venezuelans a “merry Christmas.”

Students, rights and business groups, opposition parties, the Roman Catholic Church, former political allies and even [!] his usually loyal ex-wife all lined up against Chavez ahead of the referendum vote. They accused him of pushing the constitutional reforms to set up a dictatorship.

The United States [question: who’s he?] says Chavez is a dangerous influence in Latin America, using Venezuela’s oil wealth to win allies and undermine democracy. A fiery speaker, Chavez has called President George W. Bush “the devil” and “Mr. Danger,” says capitalism is “evil” and dismisses his critics at home as traitors. It was a major victory for Venezuela’s fragmented opposition, which had failed to beat Chavez in almost yearly votes or oust him in a brief coup in 2002 [question: so a “brief” coup doesn’t really count as an attempt to overthrow the elected government?]. The victory could embolden opposition leaders to try to block Chavez’s plans [question: is the US part of the opposition?].

Chavez still wields enormous power and his supporters dominate Congress, the courts and election authorities. Soldiers bark his slogan “homeland, socialism or death” when they snap their salutes.

[Question: has Reuter’s been acquired by The Onion? Or by “the United States”?]

To Boldly Go

Dominic at Poetix wrote a post about Star Trek, where he observes that every episode constitutes an excuse for Kirk and the Enterprise crew to violate the Federation’s Prime Directive, which prohibits them from interfering in local affairs on the planets they visit. I wrote a comment on Poetix, which I’m dragging back over here. Those of you who are familiar with my obsessions will recognize the plot…

Imagine a first contact story. As usual, the planet’s inhabitants are humanoid but possessed of a primitive culture. They are language-users, but their communication is very concrete, concerned exclusively with food, shelter, predators, etc. Again as usual, the Enterprise’s away team Violates the Prime Directive. They make friends with the natives, are invited to enjoy a meal and to spend the night. It’s early morning, and Kirk and the chief are shooting the shit around the campfire. The rosy fingers of dawn start stretching themselves across the horizon.

“Look,” says Kirk: “light.”

“He Mojo,” says the chief; “he drive chariot of fire across sky.”

“Right,” Kirk replies, “but I’m talking more abstractly here.” He points to the campfire: “Light.” He points to the volcano glowing redly in the distance: “Light.” He whips out his phaser and torches a nearby bush: “Light.”

Slowly the rosy fingers of enlightenment spread across the chief’s furrowed brow. Suddenly he jumps to his feet: “Light!” he bellows, waking up the whole tribe.

For six days Kirk talks with the chief about this local sector of the galaxy: light and darkness, earth and sky and seas, sun and moons and stars, plants and animals. On the sixth morning Kirk is awakened by a young and lovely maiden crawling under his fur blankets. They begin to snuggle…

“I am honored to sacrifice myself to the god who comes from the sky,” she confesses to him when they wake up the next morning.

What the heck? Hurriedly Kirk tugs on his overly-tight uniform and steps out of the tent; the chief, pleased, awaits. “What’s all this?” Kirk asks the chief.

“We have offered you our finest young virgin, and tomorrow we will throw her into the volcano for you.”

“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” Kirk demurs, “but don’t you see? I am not a god. You, your headmen, that fine young maiden in my tent, you – are – no – different – from – me. I’ve just been around the galaxy a bit more is all.”

Astounded, the chief exclaims: “the god Kirk has created us in his image!” Thus was born the Legend of the Six Days, when the god Kirk created the heavens and the earth.

Anybody ever seen that episode?

Legitimation

In The Social Construction of Reality, which I’ve been citing liberally the past few days, Berger and Luckmann describe legitimation as “second-order objectivation of meaning,” the object of which is “to integrate the meanings already attached to disparate institutional processes,” making them “objectively available and subjectively plausible.” Here are the architectural sketches for constructing the Matrix:

“It is possible to distinguish analytically between different levels of legitimation… Incipient legitimation is present as soon as a system of linguistic objectifications is transmitted. For example, the transmission of a kinship vocabulary ipso facto legitimates the kinship structure. The fundamental legitimating ‘explanations’ are, so to speak, built into the vocabulary…

“The second level of legitimation contains theoretical propositions in a rudimentary form. Here may be found various explanatory schemes relating sets of objective meanings. These schemes are highly pragmatic, directly related to concrete actions. Proverbs, moral maxims and wise sayings are common on this level. Here, too, belong legends and folk tales, frequently transmitted in poetic forms…

“The third level of legitimation contains explicit theories by which an institutional sector is legitimated in terms of a differentiated body of knowledge. Such legitimations provide fairly comprehensive frames of reference for the respective sectors of institutionalized conduct. Because of their complexity and differentiation, they are frequently entrusted to specialized personnel who transmit them through formalized initiation procedures… With the development of specialized legitimatating theories and their administration by full-time legitimators, legitimation begins to go beyond pragmatic application and to become ‘pure theory’…

“Symbolic universes constitute the fourth level of legitimation. These are bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order of a symbolic totality… The symbolic universe is conceived as the matrix of all socially objectivated and subjectively real meanings; the entire historic society and the entire biography of the individual are seen as events taking place within this universe.

“What is particularly important, the marginal situations of the life of the individual (marginal, that is, in not being included in the reality of everyday existence in society) are also encompassed by the symbolic universe… The provinces of meaning that would otherwise remain unintelligible enclaves within the reality of everyday life are thus ordered in terms of a hierarchy of realities, ipso facto becoming intelligible and less terrifying. This integration of the realities of marginal situations within the paramount reality of everyday life is of great importance, because these situations consitute the most acute threat to taken-for-granted, routinized existence in society.

“If one conceives of the latter as the ‘daylight side’ of human life, then the marginal situations constitute a ‘night side’ that keeps lurking ominously on the periphery of everyday consciousness. Just because the ‘night side’ has its own reality, often enough of a sinister kind, it is a constant threat to the taken-for-granted, matter-of-fact ‘sane’ reality of life in society. The thought keeps suggesting itself (the ‘insane’ thought par excellence) that, perhaps, the bright reality of everyday life is an illusion, to be swallowed up at any moment by the howling nightmares of the other, the night-side reality. Such thoughts of madness and terror are contained by ordering all conceivable realities within the same symbolic universe that encompasses the reality of everyday life — to wit, ordering them in such a way that the latter reality retains its paramount, definitive (if one wishes, its ‘most real’) quality.”

The New Deviance

According to Berger and Luckmann:

Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating.” It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual “cases.” Since every society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomenon. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psychoanalysis, from pastoral care to personnel counseling programs, belong, of course, under the category of social control.

The older therapies of our culture define deviance as immorality, imbalance, illness, irrationality, lack of self-control. More recent therapies address a different set of issues: failure, unhappiness, inauthenticity, lack of passion, excessive self-control. Do these new therapeutic regimens signal an opening-up of an overly restrictive culture, a sort of anti-therapy that does away with the very idea of deviance, a portal for those who wish to emigrate to a different universe? Or has the everyday universe redefined itself in such a way that what used to be characterized as deviant now constitutes the norm? If it’s the latter, are there any alternative universes left? Are they to be discovered by disregarding success and happiness, by cultivating artifice and dispassionate interest, by being less concerned with expressing one’s self?

Reification

Here’s some more Berger and Luckmann. Is this the ideological underpinning of the neocons’ plan to create reality on the ground in Iraq?

“Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products — such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity.

“…reification can be described as an exreme step in the process of objectivation, whereby the objectivated world loses its comprehensibility as a human enterprise and becomes fixated as a non-human, non-humanizable, inert facticity. Typically, the real relationship between man and his world is reversed in consciousness. Man, the producer of a world, is apprehended as its product, and human activity is an epiphenomenon of non-human processes. Human meanings are no longer understood as world-producing but as being, in their turn, products of the “nature of things.” It must be emphasized that reification is a modality of consciousness, more precisely, a modality of man’s objectification of the human world. Even while apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it. That is, man is capable paradoxically of producing a reality that denies him.

“…It would be a mistake to look at reification as a perversion of an originally non-reified apprehension of the social world, a sort of cognitive fall from grace. On the contrary, the available ethnological and psychological evidence seems to indicate the opposite, namely, that the original apprehension of the social world is highly reified both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. This implies that an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative dereification of consciousness, which is a comparatively late development in history and in any individual biography.”

Usage-Based Social Structure

I’ve been quoting long passages of Berger and Luckmann because they address the relationships between subjective and objective realities. They say that, largely through routinized social interaction, everyday reality comes to be regarded as objective by those who participate in it. To reiterate part of yesterday’s quote:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity… The institutional world is objectivated human activity , and so is every social institution. In other words, despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it.

In prior posts about psychology I’ve distinguished the more pragmatic, dynamic, usage-based structuralism of Chomsky and Tomasello from the more architectural and static structuralism of Saussure. The usage-based psycholinguists contend that consciousness doesn’t invoke pre-structured entities stored in the unconscious; rather, consciousness actively structures loosely-linked unconscious material on the fly according to present circumstances and intentions.

In their discussion of social roles Berger and Luckmann present what amounts to a usage-based conceptualization of social structure. Roles are stereotyped performances that take their meaning within the institutionalized social order. But B&L say that roles are more than just a component of the social order: The roles represent the institutional order. Institutions are represented in a variety of ways — in language and other symbol systems, in laws and codes, in institutions, in physical objects and their arrangements, etc.

All these representations, however, become “dead” (that is, bereft of subjective reality) unless they are ongoingly “brought to life” in actual human conduct. The representation of an institution in and by roles is thus the representation par excellence, on which all other representations are dependent.

Suppose I have a lot of knowledge about everyday social reality — symbol systems, values, expectations, common-sense understandings of the way things are, institutions. Roles, expectations of role-taking attitutes and activities, social situations in which particular roles are invoked. And now I’m at large in the world, carrying around in my head a representation of the larger social structure in which I’m embedded. This knowledge isn’t conscious, since at any given moment I only need a little bit of it to guide my thoughts, actions and interactions. It’s also not rigid, since in our world social institutions have very fluid boundaries that overlap in unpredictable ways. I need to be able to call up from my unconscious representation of everyday social reality those particular structures that serve my needs right now, in this particular situation. And I need to be able to act spontaneously and, yes, creatively while I traverse that small sector of the multiply-interconnected and dynamic institutional matrix which I happen to be traversing. So I call up from my loosely-structured and unconscious representation of social structures various components that I can assemble into a complex role performance, possibly a novel and unprecedented performance, that still falls within the accepted parameters of everyday institutionalized social reality. I don’t need to understand the whys and wherefores of these social structures: I just need to be able to use them when I need them. They are role-playing machines with which I generate novel yet socially stereotypical scripts.

Origins of Institutionalization

More from The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann:

“It is an ethnological commonplace that the ways of becoming and being human are as numerous as man’s cultures. Human-ness is socio-culturally variable… While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself…

Habitualization provides the direction and the specialization of activity that is lacking in man’s biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives. And by providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions. In other words, the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation…

Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution… The institution posits that actions of type X will be performed by actors of type X. For example, the institution of the law posits that heads shall be chopped off in specific ways and under specific circumstances, and that specific types of individuals shall do the chopping (executioners, say, or members of an impure caste, or virgins under a certain age, or those who have been designated by an oracle).

“Institutions further imply historicity and control. Reciprocal typifications of actions are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously. Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products. It is impossible to understand an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process in which it was produced. Institutions also, by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up predefined patterns of conduct, which channel it in one direction as against the many other directions that would theoretically be possible. It is important to stress that this controlling character is inherent in institutionalization as such, prior to or apart from any mechanisms of sanctions specifically set up to support an institution… To say that a segment of human activity has been institutionalized is already to say that this segment of human activity has been subsumed under social control…

“In actual experience institutions generally manifest themselves in collectivities containing considerable numbers of people. It is theoretically important, however, to emphasize that the institutionalizing process of reciprocal typification would occur even if two individuals began to interact de novo. Institutionalization is incipient in every social situation continuing in time…

“At this stage one may ask what gains accrue to the two individuals from this development. The most important gain is that each will be able to predict the other’s actions. Concomitantly, the interaction of both becomes predictable. The “There he goes again” becomes a “There we go again.” This relieves both individuals of a considerable amount of tension. They save time and effort, not only in whatever external tasks they might be engaged in separately or jointly, but in terms of their respective psychological economies. Their life together is now defined by a widening sphere of taken-for-granted routines. Many actions are possible on a low level of attention. Each action of one is no longer a source of astonishment and potential danger to the other. Instead, much of what goes on takes on the triviality of what, to both, will be everyday life… The construction of this background of routine in turn makes possible a division of labor between them, opening the way for innovations, which demand a higher level of attention. The division of labor and the innovations will lead to new habitualizations, further widening the background common to both individuals. In other words, a social world will be in process of construction, containing within it the roots of an expanding institutional order…

“What will in all cases have to be habitualized is the communication process between A and B. Labor, sexuality and territoriality are other likely foci of typification and habitualization. In these various areas teh situation of A and B is paradigmatic of the institutionalization occurring in larger societies…

“With the acquisition of historicity, these formulations also acquire another crucial quality, or, more accurately, perfect a quality that was incipient as soon as A and B began the reciprocal typification of their conduct: this quality is objectivity. This means that the institutions have now been crystallized (for instance, the institution of paternity as it is encountered by the children) are experienced as existing over and beyond the individuals who “happen to” embody them at the moment. In other words, the institutions are now experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as an external and coercive fact… The “There we go again” now becomes “This is how these things are done.” A world so regarded attains a firmness in consciousness; it becomes real in an ever more massive way and it can no longer be changed so readily…

“Only at this point does it become possible to speak of a social world at all, in the sense of a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world. Only in this way, as an objective world, can the social formations be transmitted to a new generation. In the early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations. To take the most important item of socialization, language appears to the child as inherent in the nature of things, and he cannot grasp the notion of its conventionality. A thing is what it is called, and it could not be called anything else. All institutions appear in the same way, as given, unalterable and self-evident…

“An institutional world, then, is experienced as an objective reality… The institutions, as historical and objective facticities, confront the individual as undeniable facts. The institutions are there, external to him, persistent in their reality, whether he likes it or not. He cannot wish them away. They resist his attempts to change or evade them. They have coercive power over him, both in themselves, by the sheer force of their facticity, and through the control mechanisms that are usually attached to the most important of them. The objective reality of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation. He may experience large sectors of the social world as incomprehensible, perhaps oppressive in their opaqueness, but real nonetheless. Since institutions exist as external reality, the individual cannot understand them by introspection. He must “go out” and learn about them, just as he must to learn about nature. This remains true even though the social world, as a humanly produced reality, is potentially understandable in a way not possible in the case of the natural world.

“It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity… The institutional world is objectivated human activity , and so is every social institution. In other words, despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it… [I]t is important to emphasize that the relationship between man, the producer, and the social world, his product, is and remains a dialectical one. The product acts back on the producer. Externalization and objectivation are moments in a continuing dialectical process. The third moment in this proces… is internalization (by which the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness in the course of socialization)… Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product…

“The more conduct is institutionalized, the more predictable and thus the more controlled it becomes. If socialization into the institutions has been effective, outright coercive measures can be applied economically and selectively. Most of the time, conduct will occur “spontaneously” within the institutionally set channels. The more, on the level of meaning, conduct is taken for granted, the more possible alternatives to the institutional “programs” will recede, and the more predictable and controlled conduct will be…

“The primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge on the pretheoretical level. It is the sum total of “what everybody knows” about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth… Such knowledge constitutes the motivating dynamics of institutionalized conduct. It defines the institutionalized areas of conduct and designates all situations falling within them. It defines and constructs the roles to be played in the context of the institutions in question. Ipso facto, it controls and predicts all such conduct. Since this knowledge is socially objectivated as knowledge, that is, as a body of generally valid truths about reality, any radical deviance from the institutional order appears as a departure from reality. Such deviance may be designated as moral depravity, mental disease, or just plain ignorance… In this way, the particular social world becomes the world tout court. What is taken for granted as knowledge in the society comes to be coextensive with the knowable, or at any rate provides the framework within which anything not yet known will come to be known in the future. Knowledge, in this sense, is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society. It “programs” the channels in which externalization produces an objective world. It objectifies this world through language and the cognitive apparatus based on language, that is, it orders it into objects to be apprehended as reality. It is internalized again as objectively valid truth in the course of socialization. Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality.”