two cheers for anarchism
(2012) by james c scott – Two Cheers for Anarchism – Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play – via kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-two-cheers-for-anarchism]
notes/quotes from 95 pgs:
2
contents
Preface
An Anarchist Squint, or Seeing Like an Anarchist
The Paradox of Organization
An Anarchist Squint at the Practice of Social Science
A Caution or Two
One: The Uses of Disorder and “Charisma”
Fragment 1: Scott’s Law of Anarchist Calisthenics
Fragment 2: On the Importance of Insubordination
Fragment 3: More on Insubordination
Fragment 4: Advertisement: “Leader looking for followers, willing to follow your lead”
Two: Vernacular Order, Official Order
Fragment 5: Vernacular and Official Ways of “Knowing”
Fragment 6: Official Knowledge and Landscapes of Control
Fragment 7: The Resilience of the Vernacular
Fragment 8: The Attractions of the Disorderly City
Fragment 9: The Chaos behind Neatness
Fragment 10: The Anarchist’s Sworn Enemy
Three: The Production of Human Beings
Fragment 11: Play and Openness
Fragment 12: It’s Ignorance, Stupid! Uncertainty and Adaptability
Fragment 13: GHP: The Gross Human Product
Fragment 14: A Caring Institution
Fragment 15: Pathologies of the Institutional Life
Fragment 16: A Modest, Counterintuitive Example: Red Light Removal
Four: Two Cheers for the Petty Bourgeoisie
Fragment 17: Introducing a Maligned Class
Fragment 18: The Etiology of Contempt
Fragment 19: Petty Bourgeois Dreams: The Lure of Property
Fragment 20: The Not So Petty Social Functions of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Fragment 21: “Free Lunches” Courtesy of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Five: For Politics
Fragment 22: Debate and Quality: Against Quantitative Measures of Qualities
Fragment 23: What If … ? An Audit Society Fantasy
Fragment 24: Invalid and Inevitably Corrupt
Fragment 25: Democracy, Merit, and the End of Politics
Fragment 26: In Defense of Politics
Six: Particularity and Flux
Fragment 27: Retail Goodness and Sympathy
Fragment 28: Bringing Particularity, Flux, and Contingency Back In
Fragment 29: The Politics of Historical Misrepresentation
5
preface
6
This twin disillusionment seemed to me to bear out the adage of Mikhail Bakunin: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”
whatever .. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
An Anarchist Squint, or Seeing Like an Anarchist
One thing that heaves into view, I believe, is what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had in mind when he first used the term “anarchism,” namely, mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule. Another is the anarchist tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity.
too many red flags.. ie: reciprocity.. cooperation.. et al
In proposing a “process-oriented” anarchist view, or what might be termed anarchism as praxis, the reader might reasonably ask, given the many varieties of anarchism available, what particular glasses I propose to wear.
kevin on anarchism w/o adj et al
My anarchist squint involves a defense of politics, conflict, and debate, and the perpetual uncertainty and learning they entail. This means that I reject the major stream of utopian scientism that dominated much of anarchist thought around the turn of the twentieth century. ..For many anarchists the same vision of progress pointed the way toward an economy in which the state was beside the point. Not only have we subsequently learned both that material plenty, far from banishing politics, creates new spheres of political struggle but also that statist socialism was less “the administration of” things than the trade union of the ruling class protecting its privileges.
2fp.. add/read him? heading.. mid 2 sents 3fp.. one thing.. 4.5 ps
7
*Unlike many anarchist thinkers, I do not believe that the state is everywhere and always the enemy of freedom. Americans need only recall the scene of the federalized National Guard leading black children to school through a menacing crowd of angry whites in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to realize that the state can, in some circumstances, play an emancipatory role. I believe that even this possibility has arisen only as a result of the establishment of democratic citizenship and popular suffrage by the French Revolution, subsequently extended to women, domestics, and minorities. That means that of the roughly five-thousand-year history of states, only in the last two centuries or so has even the possibility arisen that states might occasionally enlarge the realm of human freedom. The conditions under which such possibilities are occasionally realized, I believe, occur only when massive extra-institutional disruption from below threatens the **whole political edifice.
*oh my.. totally not emancipatory.. supposed to’s of school/work et al.. oi
**includes any form of m\a\p
Nor do I believe that the state is the only institution that endangers freedom. To assert so would be to ignore a long and deep history of pre-state slavery, property in women, warfare, and bondage. It is one thing to disagree utterly with Hobbes about the nature of society before the existence of the state (nasty, brutish, and short) and another to believe that “the state of nature” was an unbroken landscape of communal property, cooperation, and peace.
The last strand of anarchist thought I definitely wish to distance myself from is the sort of libertarianism that tolerates (or even encourages) great differences in wealth, property, and status. Freedom and (small “d”) democracy are, in conditions of rampant inequality, a cruel sham as Bakunin understood. There is no authentic freedom where huge differences make voluntary agreements or exchanges nothing more than legalized plunder. Consider, for example, the case of interwar China, when famine and war made starvation common. Many women faced the stark choice of either starving or selling their children and living. For a market fundamentalist, selling a child is, after all, a voluntary choice, and therefore an act of freedom, the terms of which are valid (pacta sunt servanda). The logic, of course, is monstrous. It is the coercive structure of the situation in this case that impels people into such catastrophic choices.
to me.. same as your 2fp we ed ness et al.. oi
I have chosen a morally loaded example, but one not all that uncommon today. The international trade in body parts and infants is a case in point. Picture a time-lapse photograph of the globe tracing the worldwide movement of kidneys, corneas, hearts, bone marrow, lungs, and babies. They all move inexorably from the poorest nations of the globe, and from the poorest classes within them, largely to the rich nations of the North Atlantic and the most privileged within them. Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was not far off the mark. Can anyone doubt that this trade in precious goods is an artifact of a huge and essentially coercive imbalance of life chances in the world, what some have called, entirely appropriately, in my view, “structural violence”?
structural violence et al
8
*The point is simply that huge disparities in wealth, property, and status make a mockery of freedom..t .. It is hard to see any plausible way in which such self-reinforcing inequalities could be reduced through existing institutions, in particular since even the recent and severe capitalist crisis beginning in 2008 failed to produce anything like Roosevelt’s New Deal. Democratic institutions have, to a great extent, become commodities themselves, offered up for auction to the highest bidder.
*and yet.. legit freedom has nothing to do w any of those..
What is clear to anyone except a market fundamentalist (of the sort who would ethically condone a citizen’s selling himself—voluntarily, of course—as a chattel slave) is that democracy is a cruel hoax without relative equality. This, of course, is the great dilemma for an anarchist. *If relative equality is a necessary condition of mutuality and freedom, how can it be guaranteed except through the state? Facing this conundrum, I believe that both theoretically and practically, the abolition of the state is not an option. We are stuck, alas, with Leviathan, though not at all for the reasons Hobbes had supposed, and the challenge is to tame it. That challenge may well be beyond our reach.
*need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be
The Paradox of Organization
Much of what anarchism has to teach us concerns how political change, both reformist and revolutionary, actually happens, how we should understand what is “political,” and finally how we ought to go about studying politics.
to me.. thi sis all irrelevant.. cancerous distractions..
9
*Episodes of structural change, therefore, tend to occur only when massive, noninstitutionalized disruption in the form of riots, attacks on property, unruly demonstrations, theft, arson, and open defiance threatens established institutions. Such disruption is virtually never encouraged, let alone initiated, even by left-wing organizations that are **structurally inclined to favor orderly demands, demonstrations, and strikes that can usually be contained within the existing institutional framework.
*episodes of legit structural change never yet occurred
**on order in order to fit in existing ness.. oi.. carhart-harris entropy law .. aziz let go law.. et al
As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have convincingly shown for the Great Depression in the United States, protests by unemployed and workers in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the welfare rights movement, what success the movements enjoyed was at their most disruptive, most confrontational, least organized, and least hierarchical.[2] It was the effort to stem the contagion of a spreading, noninstitutionalized challenge to the existing order that prompted concessions. There were no leaders to negotiate a deal with, no one who could promise to get people off the streets in return for concessions. Mass defiance, precisely because it threatens the institutional order, gives rise to organizations that try to channel that defiance into the flow of normal politics, where it can be contained. In such circumstances, elites turn to organizations they would normally disdain, an example being Premier Georges Pompidou’s deal with the French Communist Party (an established “player”) promising huge wage concessions in 1968 in order to split the party loyalists off from students and wildcat strikers.
The hardest case, but one increasingly common among marginalized communities, is the generalized riot, often with looting, that is more an inchoate cry of anger and alienation with no coherent demand or claim. Precisely because it is so inarticulate and arises among the least organized sectors of society, it appears more menacing; there is no particular demand to address, nor are there any obvious leaders with whom to negotiate.
10
Just as much of the politics that has historically mattered has taken the form of unruly defiance, it is also the case that for subordinate classes, for most of their history, politics has taken a very different extra-institutional form. For the peasantry and much of the early working class historically, we may look in vain for formal organizations and public manifestations.
but .. to date.. nothing legit mattered to mufleh humanity law ness
11
As Proudhon, anticipating Foucault, famously put it,
To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected..t
any form of m\a\p
ie: any form of people telling other people what to do et al.. any form of democratic admin
habits of social calculation that smack of social Darwinism
An Anarchist Squint at the Practice of Social Science
The populist tendency of anarchist thought, with its belief in the possibilities of autonomy, self-organization, and cooperation, recognized, among other things, that peasants, artisans, and workers were themselves political thinkers. They had their own purposes, values, and practices, which any political system ignored at its peril. That basic respect for the agency of nonelites seems to have been betrayed not only by states but also by the practice of social science. It is common to ascribe to elites particular values, a sense of history, aesthetic tastes, even rudiments of a political philosophy. The political analysis of nonelites, by contrast, is often conducted, as it were, behind their backs. Their “politics” is read off their statistical profile: from such “facts” as their income, occupation, years of schooling, property holding, residence, race, ethnicity, and religion..t
label(s) ness and nationality: human ness
12
This is a practice that most social scientists would never judge remotely adequate to the study of elites. It is curiously akin both to state routines and to left-wing authoritarianism in treating the nonelite public and “masses” as ciphers of their socioeconomic characteristics, most of whose needs and worldview can be understood as a vector sum of incoming calories, cash, work routines, consumption patterns, and past voting behavior. It is not that such factors are not germane. What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is *the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents.. t **without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves. Again, it is not that such self-explanations are transparent and nor are they without strategic omissions and ulterior motives—they are no more transparent that the self-explanations of elites.
*we have no idea what legit free people are like – black science of people/whales law et al
**as long as all in sea world.. this would end up just being whalespeak.. need global detox/re\set first..
The job of social science, as I see it, is to provide, provisionally, *the best explanation of behavior on the basis of all the evidence available, including especially the explanations of the purposive, deliberating agents whose behavior is being scrutinized..t The notion that the agent’s view of the situation is irrelevant to this explanation is **preposterous. Valid knowledge of the agent’s situation is simply inconceivable without it. No one has put the case better for the phenomenology of human action than John Dunn:
*rather.. we need nobody to be doing that.. need ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling for global detox/resets
**that anyone has to judge us is preposterously a cancerous distraction
If we wish to understand other people and propose to claim that we have in fact done so, it is both imprudent and rude not to attend to what they say…. What we cannot properly do is to claim to know that we understand him [an agent] or his action better than he does himself without access to the best descriptions which he is able to offer.
*pearson unconditional law.. paul know\love law.. et al
paul know\love law: you can never know anyone as completely as you want.. but that’s okay, love is better. – Caroline Paul
Anything else amounts to committing a social science crime behind the backs of history’s actors.
oi.. all we keep doing to date .. as structural violence (aka crime of spiritual violence) et al.. keeping us all in sea world
A Caution or Two
13
“Fragments” has a second sense as well. It represents, for me at any rate, something of an experiment in style and presentation. My two previous books (Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed) were constructed more or less like elaborate and heavy siege engines in some Monty Python send-up of medieval warfare. I worked from outlines and diagrams on many sixteen-foot rolls of paper with thousands of minute notations to references. When I happened to mention to Alan MacFarlane that I was unhappy with my ponderous writing habits, he put me on to the techniques of essayist Lafcadio Hearn and a more intuitive, free form of composition that begins like a conversation, starting with the most arresting or gripping kernel of an argument and then elaborating, more or less organically, on that kernel. I have tried, with far fewer ritual bows to social science formulas than is customary, even for my idiosyncratic style, to follow his advice in the hope that it would prove more reader-friendly—surely something to aim for in a book with an anarchist bent.
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One: The Uses of Disorder and “Charisma”
Fragment 1: Scott’s Law of Anarchist Calisthenics
15
It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh against the pressure of their scolding. Striding out boldly into the intersection with apparent conviction made a more striking impression, perhaps, but it required more courage than I could normally muster.
walk\able ness and jay walking w al ness
As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. “You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.”
16
Small wonder that Germany, which surely has paid a very high price for patriotism in the service of inhuman objectives, would have been among the first to question publicly the value of obedience and to place monuments to deserters in public squares otherwise consecrated to Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Goethe, and Schiller
61 ness et al.. oi
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Fragment 2: On the Importance of Insubordination
Acts of disobedience are of interest to us when they are exemplary, and especially when, as examples, they set off a chain reaction, prompting others to emulate them. Then we are in the presence less of an individual act of cowardice or conscience—perhaps both—than of a social phenomenon that can have massive political effects. Multiplied many thousandfold, such petty acts of refusal may, in the end, make an utter shambles of the plans dreamed up by generals and heads of state. Such petty acts of insubordination typically make no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of acts of insubordination and evasion create an economic or political barrier reef of their own. A double conspiracy of silence shrouds these acts in anonymity. The perpetrators rarely seek to call attention to themselves; their safety lies in their invisibility. The officials, for their part, are reluctant to call attention to rising levels of disobedience; to do so would risk encouraging others and call attention to their fragile moral sway. The result is an oddly complicitous silence that all but expunges such forms of insubordination from the historical record.
And yet, such acts of what I have elsewhere called “everyday forms of resistance” have had enormous, often decisive, effects on the regimes, states, and armies at which they are implicitly directed
on david on creative refusal ness et al
Thousands upon thousands of acts of desertion, shirking, and absconding, intended to be unobtrusive and to escape detection, amplified the manpower and industrial advantage of the Union forces and may well have been decisive in the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat.
19
Stepping back a moment, it’s worth noticing something particular about these acts: they are virtually all anonymous, they do not shout their name. In fact, their unobtrusiveness contributed to their effectiveness. Desertion is quite different from an open mutiny that directly challenges military commanders. It makes no public claims, it issues no manifestos; it is exit rather than voice. And yet, once the extent of desertion becomes known, it constrains the ambitions of commanders, who know they may not be able to count on their conscripts. During the unpopular U.S. war in Vietnam, the reported “fragging” (throwing of a fragmentation grenade) of those officers who repeatedly exposed their men to deadly patrols was a far more dramatic and violent but nevertheless still anonymous act, meant to lessen the deadly risks of war for conscripts. One can well imagine how reports of fragging, whether true or not, might make officers hesitate to volunteer themselves and their men for dangerous missions. To my knowledge, no study has ever looked into the actual incidence of fragging, let alone the effects it may have had on the conduct and termination of the war. The complicity of silence is, in this case as well, reciprocal.
In the historical struggle over property rights, the antagonists on either side of the barricades have used the weapons that most suited them. Elites, controlling the lawmaking machinery of the state, have deployed bills of enclosure, paper titles, and freehold tenure, not to mention the police, gamekeepers, forest guards, the courts, and the gibbet to establish and defend their property rights. Peasants and subaltern groups, having no access to such heavy weaponry, have instead relied on techniques such as poaching, pilfering, and squatting to contest those claims and assert their own. t
property ness et al as structural violence.. as cancerous distraction
Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organization, escapes notice. And that’s just what the practitioners of these forms of subaltern politics have in mind: to escape notice. You could say that, historically, the goal of peasants and subaltern classes has been to stay out of the archives. When they do make an appearance, you can be pretty sure that something has gone terribly wrong.
any form of m\a\p
21
Fragment 3: More on Insubordination
23
An astute colleague of mine once observed that liberal democracies in the West were generally run for the benefit of the top, say, 20 percent of the wealth and income distribution. The trick, he added, to keeping this scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially at election time, the next 30 to 35 percent of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20 percent. The relative success of this scheme can be judged by the persistence of income inequality—and its recent sharpening—over more than a half century. The times when this scheme comes undone are in crisis situations when popular anger overflows its normal channels and threatens the very parameters within which routine politics operates. The brutal fact of routine, institutionalized liberal democratic politics is that the interests of the poor are largely ignored until and unless a sudden and dire crisis catapults the poor into the streets. As Martin Luther King, Jr., noted, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Large-scale disruption, riot, and spontaneous defiance have always been the most potent political recourse of the poor. Such activity is not without structure. It is structured by informal, self-organized, and transient networks of neighborhood, work, and family that lie outside the formal institutions of politics. This is structure alright, just not the kind amenable to institutionalized politics.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be.. so we can org around legit needs
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that most *episodes of major reform have not been initiated without major disorders and the rush of elites to contain and normalize them. One may legitimately prefer the more “decorous” forms of rallies and marches that are committed to nonviolence and seek the moral high ground by appealing to law and democratic rights. Such preferences aside, *structural reform has rarely been initiated by decorous and peaceful claims.
*haven’t yet had any.. oi
*The job of trade unions, parties, and even radical social movements is precisely to institutionalize unruly protest and anger. Their function is, one might say, to try to translate anger, frustration, and pain into a coherent political program that can be the basis of policy making and legislation. They are the transmission belt between an unruly public and rule-making elites. The implicit assumption is that if they do their jobs well, not only will they be able to fashion political demands that are, in principle, digestible by legislative institutions, they will, in the process, discipline and regain control of the tumultuous crowds by plausibly representing their interests, or most of them, to the policy makers. Those policy makers negotiate with such “institutions of translation” on the premise that they command the allegiance of and hence can control the constituencies they purport to represent. In this respect, it is no exaggeration to say that organized interests of this kind are parasitic on the spontaneous defiance of those whose interests they presume to represent. It is that defiance that is, at such moments, the source of what influence they have as governing elites strive to contain and channel insurgent masses back into the run of normal politics.
*so.. major players in any form of m\a\p.. double oi
24
I began this essay with the fairly banal example of crossing against the traffic lights in Neubrandenburg. The purpose was not to urge lawbreaking for its own sake, still less for the petty reason of saving a few minutes. My purpose was rather to illustrate how ingrained habits of automatic obedience could lead to a situation that, on reflection, virtually everyone would agree was absurd.. Thus, immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate a more just legal order. To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessors were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.
oi to part\ial ness.. for (blank)’s sake
25
Fragment 4: Advertisement: “Leader looking for followers, willing to follow your lead”
28
The key condition for charisma is listening very carefully and responding. The condition for listening very carefully is a certain dependence on the audience, a certain relationship of power. One of the characteristics of great power is not having to listen. Those at the bottom of the heap are, in general, better listeners than those at the top..t The daily quality of the lifeworld of a slave, a serf, a sharecropper, a worker, a domestic depends greatly on an accurate reading of the mood and wishes of the powerful, whereas slave owners, landlords, and bosses can often ignore the wishes of their subordinates. The structural conditions that encourage such attentiveness are therefore the key to this relationship.
interpretive labor et al.. structural violence.. spiritual violence
29
At the end of the campaign, his oral “platform” was far more radical than it had been at the outset. There was a real sense in which, cumulatively, the audience at the whistle-stops had written (or shall we say “selected”) his speech for him. It wasn’t just the speech that was transformed but Roosevelt himself, who now saw himself embodying the aspirations of millions of his desperate countrymen.
even if he did.. wouldn’t be toward legit needs.. need global detox in order to hear them
ie: need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
This particular form of influence from below works only in certain conditions. If the bard is hired away by the local lord to sing him praise songs in return for room and board, the repertoire would look very different. If a politician lives or dies largely by huge donations designed as much to shape public opinion as to accommodate it, he or she will pay less attention to rank-and-file supporters. A social or revolutionary movement not yet in power is likely to have better hearing than one that has come to power. The most powerful don’t have to learn how to carry a tune. Or, as Kenneth Boulding put it, “the larger and more authoritarian an organization [or state], the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginative worlds.”
30
Two: Vernacular Order, Official Order
Fragment 5: Vernacular and Official Ways of “Knowing”
Vernacular and official naming schemes jostle one another in many contexts. Vernacular names for streets and roads encode local knowledge.. For local people these names are rich and meaningful; for outsiders they are frequently illegible. The nonlocal planners, tax collectors, transportation managers, ambulance dispatchers, police officers, and firefighters, however, find a higher order of synoptic legibility far preferable. Given their way, they tend to prefer grids of parallel streets, consecutively numbered (First Street, Second Street), and compass directions (Northwest First Street, Northeast Second Avenue). Washington, D.C., is a particularly stunning example of such rational planning. New York City, by contrast, is a hybrid. Below Wall Street (marking the outer wall of the original Dutch settlement), the city is “vernacular” in its tangle of street forms and names, many of them originally footpaths; above Wall Street it is an easily legible, synoptic grid city of Cartesian simplicity, with avenues and streets at right angles to one another and enumerated, with a few exceptions, consecutively. Some midwestern towns, to relieve the monotony of numbered streets, have instead named them consecutively after presidents. As a bid for legibility, it is likely to appeal only to quiz show fans, who know when to expect “Polk,” “Van Buren,” “Taylor,” and “Cleveland” streets to pop up; as a pedagogical tool, there is something to be said for it.
31
Vernacular measurement is only as precise as it needs to be for the purposes at hand. It is symbolized in such expressions as a “pinch of salt,” “a stone’s throw,” “a book of hay,” “within shouting distance.” And for many purposes, vernacular rules may prove more accurate than apparently more exact systems..t
literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
Fragment 6: Official Knowledge and Landscapes of Control
The order, rationality, abstractness, and synoptic legibility of certain kinds of schemes of naming, landscape, architecture, and work processes lend themselves to hierarchical power. I think of them as “landscapes of control and appropriation.”..t To take a simple example, the nearly universal system of permanent patronymic naming did not exist anywhere in the world before states found it useful for identification. It has spread along with taxes, courts, landed property, conscription, and police work—that is, along with the development of the state. It has now been superseded by identification numbers, photography, fingerprints, and DNA testing, but it was invented as a means of supervision and control..t The resulting techniques represent a general capacity that can be used as easily to deliver vaccinations as to round up enemies of the regime. They centralize knowledge and power, but they are utterly neutral with respect to the purposes to which they are put.
language as control/enclosure.. marsh label law.. et al
In its immanent logic, Fordist production and the McDonald’s module is, as E. F. Schumacher noted in 1973, “an offensive against the unpredictability, unpunctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man..t
graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al.. fromm spontaneous law et al
33
Fragment 7: The Resilience of the Vernacular
*Space exploration, the planning of vast transportation networks, airplane manufacture, and other necessarily large-scale endeavors may well require huge organizations minutely coordinated by a few experts. **The control of epidemics or of pollution requires a center staffed by experts receiving and digesting standard information from hundreds of reporting units.
*this causing/perpetuating **this.. oi
36
The assembly line and the monoculture plantation each require, as a condition of their existence, the subjugation of both the vernacular artisan and of the diverse, vernacular landscape.
Fragment 8: The Attractions of the Disorderly City
It turns out that it is not only plants that seem to thrive best in settings of diversity. Human nature as well seems to shun a narrow uniformity in favor of variety and diversity..t
discrimination as equity et al
Strict segregation of functions minimized the variables in the algorithm: it was easier to plan, easier to build, easier to maintain, easier to police, and, they thought, easier on the eye. . t Planning for single uses facilitated standardization, while by comparison, planning a complex, mixed-use town in these terms would have been a nightmare.
structural violence.. spiritual violence.. et al
At the same time that these housing projects, sailing under the banner of “slum clearance” and the elimination of “urban blight,” were being constructed, they were subjected to a comprehensive and ultimately successful critique by urbanists like Jane Jacobs, who were more interested in the vernacular city: in daily urban life, and in how the city actually functioned more than in how it looked.
magis esse quam videri ness et al..
37
Jacobs understood three things that these modernist planners were utterly blind to. First, she identified the fatal assumption that in any such activity there is only one thing going on, and the objective of planning is to maximize the efficiency of its delivery. Unlike the planners whose algorithms depended on stipulated efficiencies—how long it took to get to work from home, how efficiently food could be delivered to the city—she understood there were a great many human purposes embedded in any human activity. Mothers or fathers pushing baby carriages may simultaneously be talking to friends, doing errands, getting a bite to eat, and looking for a book. An office worker may find lunch or a beer with co-workers the most satisfying part of the day. Second, Jacobs grasped that it was for this reason, as well as for the sheer pleasure of navigating in an animated, stimulating, and varied environment, that complex, mixed-use districts of the city were often the most desirable locations. Successful urban neighborhoods—ones that were safe, pleasant, amenity-rich, and economically viable—tended to be dense, mixed-use areas, with virtually all the urban functions concentrated and mixed higgledy-piggledy. Moreover, they were also dynamic over time. The effort to specify and freeze functions by planning fiat Jacobs termed “social taxidermy.”
Finally, she explained that if one started from the “lived,” vernacular city, it became clear that the effort by urban planners to turn cities into disciplined works of art of geometric, visual order was not just fundamentally misguided, it was an attack on the actual, functioning vernacular order of a successful urban neighborhood..t
aziz let go law et al
hari present in society law et al
38
The insistence on a rigid visual aesthetic at the core of the capital city tends to produce a penumbra of settlements and slums teeming with squatters, people who, as often as not, sweep the floors, cook the meals, and tend the children of the elites who work at the decorous, planned center. Order at the center is in this sense deceptive, being sustained by nonconforming and unacknowledged practices at the periphery..t
caring labor .. et al
Fragment 9: The Chaos behind Neatness
The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist, informal processes that the formal order cannot alone create and maintain..t Here language acquisition is an instructive metaphor. Children do not begin by learning the rules of grammar and then using these rules to construct a successful sentence. They learn to speak the way they learn to walk: by imitation, trial, error, and endless practice. *The rules of grammar are the regularities that can be observed in successful speaking, they are not the cause of successful speech.
carhart-harris entropy law et al
caring labor et al
*oi to ‘successful’ speaking ness.. but see reg’s in speaking not cause of it.. good ish.. i mean.. to me.. has to be irregular reg’s.. constantly changing reg’s.. et al
Workers have seized on the inadequacy of the rules to explain how things actually run and have exploited it to their advantage. Thus, the taxi drivers of Paris have, when they were frustrated with the municipal authorities over fees or new regulations, resorted to what is known as a grève de zèle. They would all, by agreement and on cue, suddenly begin to follow all the regulations in the code routier, and, as intended, this would bring traffic in Paris to a grinding halt. Knowing that traffic circulated in Paris only by a practiced and judicious disregard of many regulations, they could, merely by following the rules meticulously, bring it to a standstill. The English-language version of this procedure is often known as the “work-to-rule” strike. In an extended work-to-rule action against the Caterpillar Corporation, workers reverted to following the inefficient procedures specified by engineers, knowing that it would cost the company valuable time and quality, rather than continuing the more expeditious practices they had long ago devised on the job. The actual work process in any office, on any construction site, or on any factory floor cannot be adequately explained by the rules, however elaborate, governing it; the work gets done only because of the effective informal understandings and improvisations outside those rules.
The planned economies of the socialist bloc before the breach in the Berlin Wall in 1989 were a striking example of how rigid production norms were sustained only by informal arrangements wholly outside the official scheme. In one typical East German factory, the two most indispensable employees were not even part of the official organizational chart. One was a “jack-of-all trades” adept at devising short-term, jury-rigged solutions to keep machines running, to correct production flaws, and to make substitute spare parts. The second indispensable employee used factory funds to purchase and store desirable nonperishable goods (e.g., soap powder, quality paper, good wine, yarn, medicines, fashionable clothes) when they were available. Then, when the factory absolutely needed a machine, spare parts, or raw material not available through the plan to meet its quotas and earn its bonuses, this employee packed the hoarded goods in a Trabant and went seeking to barter them for the necessary factory supplies. Were it not for these informal arrangements, formal production would have ceased.
39
Like the city official peering down at the architect’s proposed model of a new development site, we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder..t It is a natural and, I believe, grave mistake, and one strongly associated with modernism. How dubious such an association is requires but a moment’s reflection. Does it follow that more learning is taking place in a classroom with uniformed students seated at desks arranged in neat rows than in a classroom with un-uniformed students sitting on the floor or around a table? The great critic of modern urban planning, Jane Jacobs, warned that the intricate complexity of a successful mixed-use neighborhood was not, as the aesthetic of many urban planners supposed, a representation of chaos and disorder. It was, though unplanned, a highly elaborated and resilient form of order. The apparent disorder of leaves falling in the autumn, of the entrails of a rabbit, of the interior of a jet engine, of the city desk of a major newspaper is not disorder at all but rather an intricate functional order. Once its logic and purpose are grasped, it actually looks different and reflects the order of its function.
Though it contains many cultivars they are typically planted in straight rows, one cultivar to a row, and look rather like a military regiment drawn up for inspection at a parade. The geometric order is often a matter of pride..t Again, there is a striking emphasis on visual regularity from above and outside.
of math and men ness.. lit & num as colonialism et al
Visually, the fields seemed a mess: there were two, three, and sometimes four crops crowded into the field at a time, other crops were planted in relays, small bunds—embankments—of sticks were scattered here and there, small hillocks appeared to be scattered at random. Since to a Western eye the fields were obviously a mess; the assumption was that the cultivators were themselves negligent and careless. The extension agents set about teaching them proper, “modern” agricultural techniques..t It was only after roughly thirty years of frustration and failure that a Westerner thought to actually examine, scientifically, the relative merits of the two forms of cultivation under West African conditions.
schooling the world ness et al
43
It is frequently said by Europeans and European Americans that time means nothing to an Indian. This garden seemed to me to be a good example of how the Indian, when we look more than superficially into his activities, is budgeting time more efficiently than we do. The garden was in continuous production but was taking only a little effort at any one time: .. t a few weeds pulled when one came down to pick the squashes, corn and bean plants dug in between the rows when the last of the climbing beans was picked, and a new crop of something else planted above them a few weeks later.
not seeing this is where we grow takes a lot of work ness
Fragment 10: The Anarchist’s Sworn Enemy
44
Global corporations are instrumental as well in this project of standardization. They too thrive in a familiar and homogenized cosmopolitan setting where the legal order, the commercial regulations, the currency system, and so on are uniform. They are also, through their sales of goods, services, and advertising, constantly working to fabricate consumers, whose needs and tastes are what they require..t
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Three: The Production of Human Beings
The great Way is very smooth But people love by-paths.
Tao Te Ching
Fragment 11: Play and Openness
In the unpromising year of 1943 in Copenhagen, the architect for a Danish workers’ housing cooperative at Emdrup had a new idea for a playground. An experienced landscape architect who had laid out many conventional playgrounds, he noticed that most children were tempted to forsake the limited possibilities of the swings, seesaws, carousels, and sliding boards for the excitement in the street and to steal into actual building sites or vacant buildings and use the materials they found there for purposes they invented on the spot. His idea was to design a raw building site with clean sand, gravel, lumber, shovels, nails, and tools, and then leave it to the kids. It was hugely popular. Despite the site being crowded day after day, the possibilities were so endless and absorbing that there was far less fighting and screaming than in the classical playground.
The runaway success of the “adventure playground” at Emdrup led to efforts to emulate it elsewhere: in “Freetown” in Stockholm, “The Yard” in Minneapolis, other “building playgrounds” in Denmark itself, and “Robinson Crusoe” playgrounds in Switzerland, where children were given the tools to make their own sculptures and gardens (fig. 3.1).
48
The adventure playground, Colin Ward, writes, ‘is a kind of parable of anarchy, a free society in miniature, with the same tensions and ever-changing harmonies, the same diversity and spontaneity, the same unforced growth of co-operation and release of individual qualities and communal sense, which lie dormant’.. t
I recall visiting the slum housing project of an NGO in Bangkok that used essentially the same insight not only to create housing for squatters but also to build a political movement around it. The NGO began by persuading the municipality to deed it a tiny parcel of land in a squatter area. The organizers then identified no more than five or six squatter families who wanted to band together to build a tiny settlement. The squatters chose the materials, selected the basic layout, designed the structures, and agreed on a work plan together. Each family was responsible for an equal amount of sweat equity over the two- or three-year process of (spare-time) building. No family knew what section of the attached structures they would occupy when it was finished; all thus had an equal interest in the quality and care that went into each stage of the building. The squatters also designed a tiny, shared common ground that was built into the scheme. By the time the building was up, a structure of work and cooperation (not without tensions, to be sure) was already in place. Now the families had property they had built with their own hands to defend and they had, in the process, acquired the practice of working successfully together. They, and other groups like them, became the institutional nodes of a successful squatter movement.
iwan baan ness
The magnetism of the Emdrup playground, obvious in retrospect, perhaps, flowed from its openness to the purposes, creativity, and enthusiasm of the children who played there. It was deliberately incomplete and open. It was meant to be completed by the unpredictable and changing designs of its users. One could say that its designers were radically modest about their knowledge of what was on children’s minds, what they would invent, how they would work, and how their hopes and dreams would evolve. Beyond the premise that children wanted to build, based on observation of what actually interested children, and that they needed the raw material to do so, the playground was open and autonomous. There was minimal adult supervision.
but rather.. never completed
49
The test of openness is the degree to which the activity or institution—its form, its purposes, its rules—can be modified by the mutual desires of the people pursuing and inhabiting it.
oi on war memorial refs
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All mammals, but especially Homo sapiens, appear to spend a great deal of time in apparently aimless play. Among other things, it is through the apparent chaos of play, including rough-and-tumble carousing, that they develop their physical coordination and capacities, their emotional regulation, their capacity for socialization, adaptability, their sense of belonging and social signaling, trust, and experimentation. Play’s importance is revealed above all in the catastrophic effects of eliminating play from the repertoire of mammals, including Homo sapiens sapiens. Denied play, no mammals become successful adults. Among humans, those deprived of play are far more prone to violent antisocial behavior, depression, and pervasive distrust..t The founder of the National Institute for the Study of Play, Stuart Brown, began to suspect the importance of play when he first realized that what most violently antisocial people had in common was a deep history of play deprivation. Play, along with two other major apparently purposeless human activities, sleeping and dreaming, turns out to be foundational, both socially and physically.
gray play deprived law et al.. graeber fear of play law et al..
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
via oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
Fragment 12: It’s Ignorance, Stupid! Uncertainty and Adaptability
Adaptability and breadth serve as a personal and institutional insurance policy in the face of an uncertain environment. This was, in a larger sense, arguably the single most important advantage Homo erectus had over its primate competitors: an impressive capacity to adapt to a capricious environment, and eventually to act on that environment.
to me.. not about adaptability.. ie: undisturbed ecosystem ness
brown belonging law: the opposite of belonging.. is fitting in.. true belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are.. it requires you to be who you are.. and that’s vulnerable.. –Brené Brown
The importance of adaptability and breadth was brought home to me in a practical way by a brief article on nutrition in my university’s health newsletter. It noted, reasonably enough, that scientific research had in the past decade and a half discovered a good many nutrients now understood to be essential for good health. So far, so good. Then it made what I thought was an original observation (which I paraphrase here). “We expect,” it went on, “that in the next decade and a half we will uncover many new, essential elements in the diet of which we are not now aware.” “In light of this,” it continued, “the best advice we can give you is to eat the most varied diet of which you are capable in the hope that you will have included them.” Here, then, was advice that built in the postulate of our ignorance about the future.
imagine if we ness as means to steer clear of finite set of choices ness.. aka: curiosity over decision making et al
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Fragment 13: GHP: The Gross Human Product
What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? *What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people.
*oi.. still too narrow.. too cancerous distraction
What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an institution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was? There are many ways of *evaluating the human results of institutions and economic activities and it is unlikely that we could devise a convincing comprehensive measure of, say, GHP, for gross human product, that would be comparable to the economists’ GDP, gross domestic product, measured in monetary units
*need to quit evaluating things (esp humans.. alive things)
If, undaunted by these difficulties, we decided to make a stab at it, we could, I think, identify two plausible approaches: one that would gauge how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills and one that took its bearings from the judgments of the workers themselves about their satisfaction. The former is, at least in principle, measurable, in ordinal terms of “more or less.”
oi.. oi.. oi.. gotta get out of sea world first
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What if we asked the same questions of the school, the major public institution of socialization for the young in much of the world? The query is all the more appropriate in light of the fact that the public school was invented more or less at the same time as the large factory under a single roof, and the two institutions bear a strong family resemblance. The school was, in a sense, a factory for the basic training of the minimal skills of numeracy and literacy necessary for an industrializing society. Gradgrind, the calculating, hectoring caricature of a headmaster in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, is meant to remind us of the factory: its work routines, its time discipline, its authoritarianism, its regimented visual order, and, not least, the demoralization and resistance of its pint-sized, juvenile workers.
again.. oi oi oi.. supposed to’s of school/work.. any form of m\a\p.. cancerous distractions
lit & num as colonialism et al
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Universal public education is, of course, designed to do far more than merely turn out the labor force required by industry. It is as much a political as an economic institution. It is designed to produce a patriotic citizen whose loyalty to the nation will trump regional and local identities of language, ethnicity, and religion..t The universal citizenship of revolutionary France had its counterpart in universal conscription. Manufacturing such patriotic citizens through the school system was accomplished less through the manifest curriculum than through its language of instruction, its standardization, and its implicit lessons in regimentation, authority, and order.
huge to what ubi will do unless as the planned obsolescence .. as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring
oi
The modern primary and secondary school system has been much altered by changing theories of pedagogy and, most especially, by affluence and the “youth culture” itself. But there is no mistaking its origins in the factory, if not the prison. Compulsory universal education, however democratizing in one sense, has also meant that, with few exceptions, the students have to be there. The fact that attendance is not a choice, not an autonomous act, means that it starts out fundamentally on the wrong foot as a compulsory institution, with all the alienation that this duress implies, especially as children grow older.
rather.. any form of m\a\p starts off on wrong foot as compulsory/voluntary compliance ness
*The great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. This tendency has only been exacerbated by the push in recent decades for standardization, measurement, testing, and accountability. The resulting incentives for students, teachers, principals, and whole school districts have had the effect of bending all efforts toward fashioning a standard product that satisfies the criteria the auditors have established.
*nah.. great tragedy comes with any form of m\a\p
rest of p – cancerous distractions.. irrelevant s if would have tried sans any form of m\a\p
What is this product? It is a certain form of analytical intelligence, narrowly conceived, which can, it is assumed, be measured by tests. We know, of course, that there are many, many skills that are valuable and important for a successful society that are not even remotely related to analytical intelligence, among them, artistic talent, imaginative intelligence, mechanical intelligence (the kind that Ford’s early workers brought with them from the farm), musical and dance skills, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social skills, and ethical intelligence.
oi.. all the red flags.. ie: product ness, successful ness, intelligence, intelligence, intelligence.. et al
How ironic it is that I, who write this, and virtually anyone who reads it, are the beneficiaries, the victors, of this rat race. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw in a Yale toilet stall. Someone had written, “Remember, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat!” Below, in a different hand, someone else had riposted, “Yeah, but you’re a winner.”.. t
hari rat park law et al
*Those of us who “won” this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of **entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. ***This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out.
*huge.. to winning/opps in sea world ness and myth of normal ness.. and crazywise ness.. et al.. oi
**sinclair perpetuation law .. graeber rethink law .. et al
***and yet.. a privilege of cancerous flavor.. oi.. even more duped than rest.. (to me.. biggest message of crazywise (doc))
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And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? *They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of **a system that values such a narrow bandwidth of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?
*yeah.. that crazywise ness.. hari present in society law ness (but again .. to me.. no one is legit happy/free)
**oi.. ‘limited talents’ oi.. rather.. what cancerous-distraction/cope\ing-strategies talents/symptoms.. oi..
Are the dubious benefits of the privileges and opportunities accorded a presumed “analytical intelligence elite” by this pedagogical tunnel vision worth so much social damage and waste?.. t
oi.. beyond waste/damage.. again.. cancerous ness.. the death of us ness.. oi..
none of us legit free till all of sea world
Fragment 14: A Caring Institution
steiner care to oppression law et al
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As I drove off to inspect a fourth convalescent home, it dawned on me that I had just witnessed the operation of a *regime of low-level terror. To judge by this experience, the residents, constantly **dependent on the staff for their basic needs, were afraid to say anything other than what they thought the staff expected from them, lest they be punished. My aunts, particularly the lifelong English and debate teacher with a Napoleon complex, would not fare well under this regime. I also realized that until this last incident I had always spoken with the residents with a staff member constantly at my side. Henceforth, when I visited the four additional convalescent homes on my list, I insisted that I be allowed to walk on my own through most of the facility and talk with those I met. If this request was refused, as it was in three of the four, I left immediately.
*to the structural violence.. and spiritual violence.. ness .. of whalespeak.. oi
**and not even legit basic needs..
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
What was so demoralizing to me was to envision my two aunts, *who had long been figures of power and authority to conjure with, reduced in the last stage of their life to such servility, fear, and silence. Nor could one ignore the infantilizing terms of address that prevailed among the overburdened staff-when they spoke to their charges: “Now, dearie, it’s time to take our pills like a good little girl.”
*but again.. false premise.. oi
It’s not difficult to imagine how quickly and how thoroughly conditions of such abject bodily dependence for the most basic needs on a hard-pressed and underpaid staff might induce an “institutional personality,” how infantilization might produce elderly infants. The convalescent home, not unlike the prison, the cloister, and the barracks, is something of a “total” institution of such comprehensive power that the pressures to adapt to its institutional norms are nearly irresistible.
yeah.. but to all the ages.. we do that anywhere we allow/perpetuate any form of m\a\p
Fragment 15: Pathologies of the Institutional Life
We live *most of our lives in institutions: from the family to the school, to the army, to the business enterprise.. t
rather.. *all (this is huge and we’re missing it) of our lives.. (supposed to’s of school/work.. bs jobs from birth et al).. all of us.. always been in sea world
again.. this is huge and w’ere missing it.. we keep making up excuses to perpetuate it.. oi..
hari rat park law et al
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I believe we can, in a rough-and-ready way. The first thing to notice is that since the Industrial Revolution and headlong urbanization, a *vastly increasing share of the population has become propertyless and dependent on large, hierarchical organizations for their livelihood. The household economy of the small farmer-peasant or shopkeeper may have been just as poverty-stricken and insecure as that of the proletarian.
*yeah.. but always has been disturbing our undisturbed ecosystem potential..
The second thing to notice is that these institutions are, with very few exceptions, profoundly hierarchical and, typically, authoritarian. Training, one might say, in the habits of hierarchy begins, in both agrarian and industrial societies, with the patriarchal family. While family structures in which children, women, and servants are treated virtually as chattel have become less authoritarian, the patriarchal family still thrives and could not exactly be called a training ground for autonomy and independence, except perhaps for the male head of household. The patriarchal family historically was rather a training in servitude..t for most of its members and a training ground of authoritarianism for its male heads of household and its sons-in-training. When the experience of servitude within the family is reinforced by an adult working life lived largely in authoritarian settings that further abridge the workers’ autonomy and independence, the consequences for the GHP are melancholy.
no train.. and all the red flags
The implications of a life lived largely in subservience for the quality of citizenship in a democracy are also ominous. Is it reasonable to expect someone whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has acquired the habits of survival and self-preservation in such settings to suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking, risk-taking model of individual sovereignty? How does one move directly from what is often a dictatorship at work to the practice of democratic citizenship in the civic sphere? Authoritarian settings do, of course, shape personalities in profound ways.
oi.. so much deeper than that.. all of us need detox first..
More generally, political philosophers as varied as Étienne de La Boétie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the *personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. **While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgment and moral direction.
*both cancerous distractions..
**oi.. seat at the table ness.. need global detox first.. oi..
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Under the most severe forms of “institutionalization” (the term itself is diagnostic), such as prisons, asylums for the mentally ill, orphanages, workhouses for the poor, concentration camps, and old-age homes, there arises a personality disorder sometimes called *“institutional neurosis.” It is a direct result of long-term institutionalization itself. . tThose suffering from it are apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in their surroundings, make no plans, and lack spontaneity. Because they are cooperative and give no trouble, such institutional subjects may be seen by those in charge in a favorable light, as they adapt well to institutional routines.
*rather of any form of m\a\p
*The question I want to pose is this: Are the authoritarian and hierarchical characteristics of most contemporary life-world institutions—the family, the school, the factory, the office, the worksite—such that they produce a mild form of institutional neurosis? At one end of an institutional continuum one can place the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy and initiative of their subjects. **At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy composed of independent, self-reliant, self-respecting, landowning farmers, managers of their own small enterprises, answerable to themselves, free of debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for servility or deference. Such free-standing farmers, Jefferson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and independent public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies: a relatively open public sphere but a quotidian institutional experience that is largely at cross purposes with the implicit assumptions behind this public sphere and encouraging and often rewarding caution, deference, servility, and conformity. ***Does this engender a form of institutional neurosis that saps the vitality of civic dialogue? And, more broadly, ****do the cumulative effects of life within the patriarchal family, the state, and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists.
*oh my.. mild form ? no such thing.. .. for (blank)’s sake
**that’s not other end ness.. that’s same song ness
***thinking we have to have ie: civic ness saps vitality.. any form of m\a\p
****yeah.. so much so that anarchist and liberal democratic theorists too.. have no idea what legit free people are like.. and so.. are cancerous distractions as well..
If it does, then an urgent task of public policy is to foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry. How is it possible to adjust the institutional lifeworld of citizens so that it is more in keeping with the capacity for democratic citizenship?
oi.. none of that (again.. citizerny, democracy, et al) will allow for legit free people.. perhaps whales duped/blinded into more pluralistic ignorance/voluntary compliance et al
Fragment 16: A Modest, Counterintuitive Example: Red Light Removal
The regulation of daily life is so ubiquitous and so embedded in our routines and expectations as to pass virtually unnoticed. Take the example of traffic lights at intersections. Invented in the United States after World War I, the traffic light substituted the judgment of the traffic engineer for the mutual give-and-take that had prevailed historically between pedestrians, carts, motor vehicles, and bicycles. Its purpose was to prevent accidents by imposing an engineered scheme of coordination. More than occasionally, the result has been the scene in Neubrandenburg with which I opened the book: scores of *people waiting patiently for the light to change when it was perfectly apparent there was no traffic whatever. They were suspending their independent judgment out of habit, or perhaps out of a civic fear of the ultimate consequences of exercising it against the prevailing electronic legal order..t
structural violence.. safety addiction.. et al
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What would happen if there were no electronic order at the intersection, and motorists and pedestrians had to exercise their independent judgment? Since 1999, beginning in the city of Drachten, the Netherlands, this supposition has been put to the test with stunning results, leading to a wave of “red light removal” schemes across Europe and in the United States. Both the reasoning behind this small policy initiative and its results are, I believe, diagnostic for other, more far-reaching efforts to craft institutions that enlarge the scope for independent judgment and expand capacities.
Hans Monderman, the counterintuitive traffic engineer who first suggested the removal of a red light in Drachten in 2003, went on to promote the concept of “shared space,” which took hold quickly in Europe. He began with the observation that, when an electrical failure incapacitated traffic lights, the result was improved flow rather than congestion. As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten, handling 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following the removal of the traffic light, the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty-six crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared. Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters. He also believed that an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe.
hans monderman.. naked streets et al
Red light removal can, I believe, be seen as a modest training exercise in responsible driving and civic courtesy. Monderman was not against traffic lights in principle, he simply did not find any in Drachten that were truly useful in terms of safety, improving traffic flow, and lessening pollution. The traffic circle seems dangerous: and that is the point. He argued that when “motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully,” and the statistics on “post–traffic light” accidents bear him out. Having to share the road with other users, and having no imperative coordination imposed by traffic lights, the context virtually requires alertness —an alertness abetted by the law, which, in the case of an accident where blame is hard to determine, presumptively blames the “strongest” (i.e., blames the car driver rather than the bicyclist, and the bicyclist rather than the pedestrian.)
The shared space concept of traffic management relies on the intelligence, good sense, and attentive observation of drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. At the same time, it arguably, in its small way, actually expands the skills and capacity of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians to negotiate traffic without being treated like automata by thickets of imperative signs (Germany alone has 648 valid traffic symbols, which accumulate as one approaches a town) and signals. *Monderman believed that the more numerous the prescriptions, the more it impelled drivers to seek the maximum advantage within the rules: speeding up between signals, beating the light, avoiding all unprescribed courtesies..t Drivers had learned to run the maze of prescriptions to their maximum advantage. Without going overboard about its world-shaking significance, Moderman’s innovation does make a palpable contribution to the gross human product.
*similar to 10-day-care-center\ness
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The effect of what was a paradigm shift in traffic management was euphoria. Small towns in the Netherlands put up one sign boasting that they were “Free of Traffic Signs” (Verkeersbordvrij), and a conference discussing the new philosophy proclaimed “Unsafe is safe.”..t
safety addiction et al.. carhart-harris entropy law and aziz let go law et al
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Four: Two Cheers for the Petty Bourgeoisie
Fragment 17: Introducing a Maligned Class
No increase in material wealth will compensate … for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom.
R. H. Tawney
It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoisie. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoisie rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.
actually.. no one does.. all need detox
Why take up the cudgels for a class that remains relatively anonymous and is surely not, in the Marxist parlance, a class für sich? There are several reasons. First and most important, I believe that the petite bourgeoisie and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies. Autonomy and freedom are, along with mutuality, at the center of an anarchist sensibility. Second, I am convinced that the petite bourgeoisie performs vital social and economic services under any political system.
oi to 1 and 2
Finally, given any reasonably generous definition of its class boundaries, the petite bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world. If we include not only the iconic shopkeepers but also smallholding peasants, artisans, peddlers, small independent professionals, and small traders whose only property might be a pushcart or a rowboat and a few tools, the class balloons. If we include the periphery of the class, say, tenant farmers, ploughmen with a draft animal, rag pickers, and itinerant market women, where autonomy is more severely constrained and the property small indeed, the class grows even larger. *What they all have in common, however, and what distinguishes them from both the clerk and the factory worker is that they are largely in control of their working day and work with little or no supervision. One may legitimately view this as a very dubious autonomy when it means, as a practical matter, working eighteen hours a day for a remuneration that may only provide a bare subsistence. **And yet it is clear, as we shall see, that the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world’s population.
*whalespeak.. none of us do
**yeah and none to date have had that.. we don’t even grok what it would mean
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Fragment 18: The Etiology of Contempt
Before we start heaping praise on the petite bourgeoisie, we might well pause to consider why it has, as a class, such a bad press. ..The petite bourgeoisie, by contrast, are neither fish nor fowl; they are mostly poor but they are poor capitalists. ..they are fair-weather friends; their allegiance is fundamentally unreliable as they have a foot in both camps and desire themselves to become large capitalists.
The contempt for the petty bourgeoisie was joined to the germ theory of disease in terms foreshadowing Nazi anti-Semitism. Bukharin, stigmatizing the striking workers and sailors, at Kronstadt noted that “the petty bourgeois infection had spread from the peasantry to a segment of the working class.” ..the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie are relatively poor, hardworking, and own barely enough property to make ends meet; the exploitation they practice is largely confined to the patriarchal family—what one writer has termed “auto-exploitation.”
The distaste for the petty bourgeoisie also has, I believe, a structural source: ..almost all forms of small property have the means to elude the state’s control: small property is hard to monitor, tax, or police; it resists regulation and enforcement by the very complexity, variety, and mobility of its activities. ..For this reason, the state has nearly always been the implacable enemy of mobile peoples—Gypsies, pastoralists, itinerant traders, shifting cultivators, migrating laborers—as their activities are opaque and mobile, flying below the state’s radar. For much the same reason states have preferred agribusiness, collective farms, plantations, and state marketing boards over smallholder agriculture and petty trade. They have preferred large corporations, banks, and business conglomerates to smaller-scale trade and industry. The former are often less efficient than the latter, but the fiscal authorities can more easily monitor, regulate, and tax them.
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Fragment 19: Petty Bourgeois Dreams: The Lure of Property
To make a very long story very short, Homo sapiens has been around for something like 200,000 years. States were only “invented” roughly five thousand years ago, and until about a thousand years ago most of humankind lived outside anything that could be called a state. Most of those who did live within those states were small property owners (peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders). And, when certain rights of representation developed from the seventeenth century on, they were accorded on the basis of status and property. ..Relative autonomy and independence for subordinate classes thus came in two forms: a life on the margins, outside the state’s reach, or a life inside the state with the minimal rights associated with small property.
In the course of living in and reading about peasant societies, I found it impossible to ignore the incredible tenacity with which many marginal smallholders clung to the smallest patch of land. When pure economic logic suggested they would be far better off seeking a profitable tenancy or even moving to town, they held on by their fingernails as long as they possibly could. Those who had no land of their own to farm sought long-lease tenancies, preferably from relatives, that represented the next best thing, in terms of status, to owning one’s own fields. Those who had neither their own land nor a viable tenancy and who were reduced to working for others hung on to their house lot in the village to the bitter end. In terms of sheer income, a good many tenant farmers were better off than smallholders, and a good many laborers were better off than small tenants. For the peasantry, however, the difference in autonomy, independence, and hence social standing was decisive. The smallholder, unlike the tenant, depended on no one for land to farm and the tenant, and unlike the laborer, had at least land for the season and control over his or her working day, while the laborer was cast into what was viewed as a demeaning dependence on the good will of neighbors and relatives. The final humiliation was to lose that last physical symbol of independence, the house lot.
bachelard oikos law et al
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Each of the descending rungs of the village class system represented a loss of economic security and independent status. The substance of the petty bourgeois dream, however, was not some abstract calculation of income security but rather the deep desire for full cultural citizenship in their small community. What property meant was the ability to celebrate marriages, funerals, and, in a small Malay village, the feast at the end of Ramadan, in a way that gave social expression to their worth and standing. The secure “middle peasants” with the steady wherewithal to celebrate these rituals were not only the most influential villagers but also the models to emulate and aspire to. Falling far short of this standard was to become a second-class cultural citizen.
oi..whalespeak
Thwarted petty bourgeois dreams are the standard tinder of revolutionary ferment. .. the People’s Revolutionary Army represented the precious chance to have land of their own, found a (patriarchal) family, and achieve a passionately desired cultural citizenship that, among other things, meant an honorable burial. The key (bait?) to the enthusiastic participation of the peasantry in virtually all twentieth-century revolutions has been the prospect of land ownership and the standing and independence that came with it. When land reform was succeeded by collectivization, it was experienced and resisted by most of the peasantry as a betrayal of their aspirations.
*When asked what they wished for, their desires were remarkably modest. They wanted higher wages, a shorter day, and longer rests, as one might expect. But beyond what Marxists would disparagingly call “trade-union consciousness,” they yearned to be treated honorably by their bosses (and be called “Herr X”) and aspired to have a small cottage with a garden to call their own. I
*rather.. not legit desires.. but again.. whalespeak
Over the past several decades, standard opinion polls in the United States have asked industrial workers what kind of work they would prefer to factory work. An astonishingly high percentage pines to open a shop or a restaurant or to farm. The unifying theme of these dreams is the freedom from close supervision and autonomy of the working day that, in their mind, more than compensates for the long hours and risks of such small businesses. Most, of course, never act on this wish, but its tenacity as a fantasy is indicative of its power.
oi.. gain.. not legit wishes..
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Modern agribusiness has, almost diabolically, managed to exploit the desire for small property and autonomy to its own advantage.
What is perverse about this system is that it preserves a simulacrum of independence and autonomy while emptying out virtually all of its substantive content.
part\ial ness.. killing us.. for (blank)’s sake
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And it works! The desire to hold on to the last shred of dignity as an independent property owner is so powerful that the “farmer” is willing to forfeit most of its meaning.
Whatever else they may have missed about the human condition, the anarchists’ belief in the drive for the dignity and autonomy of small property was a perceptive reading of the popular imaginary. The petty bourgeois dream of independence, though less attainable in practice, did not die with the Industrial Revolution. Rather, it gained a new lease on life.
Fragment 20: The Not So Petty Social Functions of the Petty Bourgeoisie
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Fragment 21: “Free Lunches” Courtesy of the Petty Bourgeoisie
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It is surely the case that “big box” stores can, owing again to their clout as buyers, deliver a host of manufactured goods to consumers at a cheaper price than the petty bourgeoisie. What is not so clear, however, is whether, once one has factored in all the public goods (the positive externalities) the petty bourgeoisie provides—informal social work, public safety, the aesthetic pleasures of an animated and interesting streetscape, a large variety of social experiences and personalized services, acquaintance networks, informal neighborhood news and gossip, a building block of social solidarity and public action, and (in the case of the smallholding peasantry) good stewardship of the land—the petty bourgeoisie might not be, in a full accounting, a far better bargain, in the long run, than the large, impersonal capitalist firm. And, although they *might not quite measure up to the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of the self-confident, independent, land-owning yeoman farmer, they approach it far more closely that the clerk at Wal-Mart or Home Depot.
*oi.. that ‘demo ideal’ ness is the mark of success.. any form of democratic admin.. killing us with same song
One final fact is worth noting. A society dominated by smallholders and shopkeepers comes closer to equality and to popular ownership of the means of production than any economic system yet devised..t
only because we have not yet tried something legit diff.. ie: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
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Five: For Politics
Fragment 22: Debate and Quality: Against Quantitative Measures of Qualities
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While understanding the *need to guarantee that children became literate and numerate early in their schooling, the parents objected to the “drill and kill” atmosphere in the classroom, as did their children.
*oi.. whalespeak.. rather.. lit & num as colonialism
Finland, for example, has no external tests and no ranking of students or schools, *but scores exceptionally well on all international measures of achievement.
*oi.. any form of m\a\p.. same song
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Fragment 23: What If … ? An Audit Society Fantasy
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My poking fun at quantitative measures of productivity in the academy, however satisfying in its own right, is meant to serve a larger purpose. The point I wish to make is that democracies, particularly mass democracies like the United States that have embraced meritocratic criteria for elite selection and the distribution of public funds, are tempted to develop impersonal, objective, mechanical measures of quality. Regardless of the form they take: the Social Science Citation Index, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test and, more recently, the Scholastic Reasoning Test), cost-benefit analysis—they all follow the same logic. Why? The short answer is that there are few social decisions as momentous for individuals and families as the distribution of life chances through education and employment or as momentous for communities and regions as the distribution of public funds for public works projects. The seductiveness of such measures is that *they all turn measures of quality into measures of quantity, thereby allowing comparison across cases with an apparently single and impersonal metric. They are above all a vast and deceptive “antipolitics machine” designed to turn legitimate political questions into neutral, objective administrative exercises governed by experts. It is this depoliticizing sleight-of-hand that masks a deep lack of faith in the possibilities of mutuality and learning in politics so treasured by anarchists and democrats alike. Before arriving at “politics,” however, there two other potentially fatal objections to such techniques of quantitative commensuration.
*but.. any measure ness is a death trap.. oi
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Fragment 24: Invalid and Inevitably Corrupt
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My fun at the expense of the SSCI may seem a cheap shot. The argument I’m making, however, applies to any quantitative standard rigidly applied.
rather .. should to any quantitive of anything alive.. oi.. not the rigidity.. rather.. the concept of measuring things itself..
The second fatal flaw is that even if the measure, when first devised, was a *valid measure, its very existence typically sets in motion a train of events that undermines its validity. Let’s call this a process by which **“a measure colonizes behavior,” thereby negating whatever validity it once had.
*never valid.. oi.. gabor on validation.. validation ness et al
**yep.. but to any form of m\a\p
A citation index is not merely an observation; it is a force in the world, capable of generating its own observations. Social theorists have been so struck by this colonization that they have attempted to give it a lawlike formulation in Goodhart’s law, which holds that “when a measure becomes a target it *ceases to be a good measure.” And Matthew Light clarifies: “An authority sets some quantitative standard to measure a particular achievement; those responsible for meeting that standard, do so, but not in the way which was intended.”
*never was.. oi.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
need to let go of .. any form of m\a\p
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Let’s just say that with respect to education, the SAT is not just the tail that wags the dog. It has reshaped the dog’s breed, its appetite, its surroundings, and the lives of all those who care for it and feed it. It’s a striking example of colonization.
oi.. too much glory/focus/energy to sat ness.. was like that forever
Thus the desire to measure intellectual quality by standardized tests and to use those tests to distribute rewards to students, teachers, and schools has perverse colonizing effects. *A veritable multi-million-dollar industry markets cram courses and techniques that purport to improve performance on tests that were said to be immune to such stratagems. Stanley Kaplan’s empire of test preparation courses and workbooks was built on the premise that one could learn to beat the test for college, law school, medical school, etc. The all-powerful audit criteria circle back, as it were, and **colonize the lifeworld of education; the measurement replaces the quality it is supposed only to assess. . What began as a ***good faith exercise to make judgments of quality becomes, as parents try to “position” their children, a strategy. It becomes nearly impossible to assess the meaning or authenticity of such audit-corrupted behavior.
*that might be new.. but the cancerous distraction of it all.. not new..
**oi.. already colonizing if already ed-ing and assess-ing and observe-ing.. et al.. oi
***ferlini heroic flaw law et al.. maté parenting law.. et al
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Fragment 25: Democracy, Merit, and the End of Politics
The great appeal of quantitative measures of quality arises, I believe, from two sources: a democratizing belief in equality of opportunity as opposed to inherited privilege, wealth, and entitlement, on the one hand, and a modernist conviction that merit can be scientifically measured on the other.
Applying scientific laws and quantitative measurement to most social problems would, modernists believed, eliminate sterile debates once the “facts” were known. This lens on the world has, built into it, a deeply embedded political agenda. There are, on this account, *facts (usually numerical) that require no interpretation. Reliance on such facts should reduce the destructive play of narratives, sentiment, prejudices, habits, hyperbole, and emotion generally in public life. A cool, clinical, quantitative assessment would resolve disputes. Both the passions and the interests would be replaced by neutral, technical judgment. These scientific modernists aspired to minimize the distortions of subjectivity and partisan politics to achieve what Lorraine Daston has called “a-perspectival objectivity,” a view from nowhere. The political order most compatible with this view was the disinterested, impersonal rule of a technically educated elite using its scientific knowledge to regulate human affairs. This aspiration was seen as a new “civilizing project.” The reformist, cerebral Progressives in early twentieth-century American and, oddly enough, Lenin as well believed that objective scientific knowledge would allow the “administration of things” to largely replace politics. Their gospel of efficiency, technical training, and engineering solutions implied a world directed by a trained, rational, and professional managerial elite.
*aka: myth
The idea of a meritocracy is the natural traveling companion of democracy and scientific modernism. No longer would a ruling class be an accident of noble birth, inherited wealth, or inherited status of any kind. Rulers would be selected, and hence legitimated, by virtue of their skills, intelligence, and demonstrated knowledge. (Here I pause to observe how other qualities one might plausibly want in positions of power, such as compassion, wisdom, courage, or breadth of experience, drop out of this account entirely.) Intelligence, by the standards of the time, was assumed by most of the educated public to be a measurable quality. Most assumed, furthermore, that intelligence was distributed, if not randomly, then at least far more widely than either wealth or title. The very idea of distributing, for the first time, position and life chances on the basis of measurable merit was a breath of democratic fresh air. It promised for society as a whole what Napoleon’s merit-based “careers open to talent” had promised the new professional middle class in France more than a century earlier.
oi
Notions of a measurable meritocracy were democratic in still another sense: they severely curtailed the claims to discretionary power previously claimed by professional classes. Historically, the professions operated as trade guilds, setting their own standards, jealously guarding their professional secrets, and brooking no external scrutiny that would overrule their judgment. Lawyers, doctors, chartered accountants, engineers, and professors were hired for their professional judgment—a judgment that was often ineffable and opaque.
need: ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling
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Fragment 26: In Defense of Politics
The mistakes made by a revolutionary workers movement are immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of any party.
Rosa Luxemburg
*The real damage of relying mainly on quantitatively measured merit and “objective” numerical audit systems to assess quality arises from taking vital questions that ought to be part of a vigorous democratic debate off the table and placing them in the hands of presumably neutral experts. It is **this spurious depoliticization of momentous decisions affecting the life chances of millions of citizens and communities that deprives the public sphere of what legitimately belongs to it. If there is one conviction that anarchist thinkers and nondemagogic populists share, it is a ***faith in the capacity of a democratic citizenry to learn and grow through engagement in the public sphere. Just as we might ask what kind of person a particular office or factory routine produces, so might we want to ask how a political process might expand citizen knowledge and capacities. In this respect, the anarchist belief in mutuality without hierarchy and the capacity of ordinary citizens to learn through participation would deplore this short-circuiting of democratic debate. We can see the antipolitics machine at work in the uses of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and in the now ubiquitous cost-benefit analysis.
*real damage is in thinking we have to measure or debate or democratize.. et al.. any form of m\a\p
**oi.. decision making is unmooring us law
need curiosity over decision making
***oi oi oi.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. oi
The antipolitics of the SSCI consists in substituting a pseudo-scientific calculation for a healthy debate about quality. The real politics of a discipline—its worthy politics, anyway—is precisely the dialogue about standards of value and knowledge. I entertain few illusions about the typical quality of that dialogue. Are there interests and power relations at play? You bet. They’re ubiquitous. There is, however, *no substitute for this necessarily qualitative and always-inconclusive discussion. ***It is the lifeblood of a discipline’s character, fought out in reviews, classrooms, roundtables, debates, and decisions about curriculum, hiring, and promotion. Any attempt to curtail that discussion by, for example, Balkanization into quasi-autonomous subfields, rigid quantitative standards, or elaborate scorecards tends simply to freeze a given orthodoxy or division of spoils in place.
*oi.. perhaps no sub for it.. but no desire for it if legit free..
**oh my oh my oh my.. not lifeblood.. rather.. cancerous distraction
The SAT system has, over the past half century, been opening and closing possible futures for millions of students. It has helped fashion an elite. Little wonder that that elite looks favorably on the system that helped it get to the front of the pack. It is just open enough, transparent enough, and impartial enough to allow elites and nonelites to regard it as a fair national competition for advancement. More than wealth or birth ever could, it allows the winners to see their reward as merited, although the correlations between SAT scores and socioeconomic status are enough to convince an impartial observer that this is no open door. *The SAT, in effect, selected an elite that is more impartially chosen than its predecessors, more legitimate, and hence better situated to defend and reinforce the institution responsible for the naturalization of their excellence.
*had to reread a couple times.. but yeah.. sinclair perpetuation law et al.. because of ‘success’.. can defend/reinforce what’s killing us
In the meantime, our political life is impoverished. The hold of the SAT convinces many middle-class whites that affirmative action is a stark choice between objective merit, on the one hand, and rank favoritism on the other. *We are deprived of a public dialogue about how educational opportunity ought to be allocated in a democratic and plural society. We are deprived of a debate about what qualities we might want in our elites, individually in our schools, insofar as curricula simply echo the tunnel vision of the SAT.
*cancerous distraction.. would be seat at the table for whalespeak.. oi
all o.o.. oh my
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Each technique is an attempt to substitute a transparent, mechanical, explicit, and usually numerical procedure of evaluation for the suspect and apparently undemocratic practices of a professional elite. Each is a rich paradox from top to bottom, for the technique is also a response to political pressure: the desire of a clamorous public for procedures of decision and, in effect, rationing that are explicit, transparent, and, hence, in principle, accessible. Although cost-benefit analysis is a response to public political pressure—and here is one paradox—its success depends absolutely on appearing totally nonpolitical: objective, nonpartisan, and palpably scientific. Beneath this appearance, of course, cost-benefit analysis is deeply political. Its politics are buried deep in the *techniques of calculation: in what to measure in the first place, in how to measure it, in what scale to use, in conventions of “discounting” and “commensuration,” in how observations are translated into numerical values, and in how these numerical values are used in decision making. While fending off charges of bias or favoritism, such techniques—and here is a second paradox—succeed brilliantly in entrenching a political agenda at the level of procedures and conventions of **calculation that is doubly opaque and inaccessible.
*rather .. in assuming calculation is relevant (aka: not a cancerous distraction) to legit free people..
stop measuring things.. oi
**accessibility et al matters little if killing us either way.. oi..
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When they are successful politically, the techniques of the SAT, cost-benefit analysis, and, for that matter, the Intelligence Quotient appear as solid, objective, and unquestionable as numbers for blood pressure, thermometer readings, cholesterol levels, and red blood cell counts. The readings are perfectly impersonal and, so far as their interpretation is concerned, “the doctor knows best.”
*They seem to eliminate the capricious human element in decisions. Indeed, once the techniques with their deeply embedded and highly political assumptions are firmly in place, they do limit the discretion of officials. Charged with bias, the official can claim, with some truth, that “I am just cranking the handle”—of a nonpolitical decision-making machine. The vital protective cover such antipolitics machines provide helps explain why their validity is of less concern than their standardization, precision, and impartiality. Even if the SSCI does not measure the quality of a scholar’s work, even if the SAT doesn’t really measure intelligence or predict success in college, each constitutes an impartial, precise, public standard, a transparent set of rules and targets. When such tools succeed, they achieve the necessary alchemy of taking contentious and high-stakes battles for resources, life chances, mega-project benefits, and status and transmuting them into technical, apolitical decisions presided over by officials whose neutrality is beyond reproach. The criteria for decisions are explicit, standardized, and known in advance. Discretion and politics are made to disappear by techniques that are, at bottom, completely saturated with discretionary choices and political assumptions, now shielded effectively from public view.
*decisions are capricious.. based on finite set of choices.. oi
The widespread use of numerical indices is not limited to any country, any branch of public policy, or indeed to the immediate present. Its current vogue in the form of the “audit society” obviously owes something to the rise of the large corporation, whose shareholders seek to measure productivity and results, and to the neoliberal politics of the 1970s and 1980s, as exemplified by Thatcher and Reagan, Their emphasis on “value for money” in public administration, borrowing techniques from management science in the private sector, sought to establish scores and “league tables” for schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, and so on. The deeper cause, however, is, paradoxically again, democratization and the demand for political control of administrative decisions. The United States seems to be something of an outlier in its embrace of audits and quantification. No other country has embraced audits in education, war-making, public works, and the compensation of business executives as enthusiastically as has the United States. Contrary to their self-image as a nation of rugged individualists, Americans are among the most normalized and monitored people in the world.
The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast “antipolitics machine,” *sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public—while excluding that public from the debate—that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely making transparent technical calculations. They are, today, the hallmark of a neoliberal political order in which the techniques of neoclassical economics have, in the name of scientific calculation and objectivity, come to replace other forms of reasoning.[39] Whenever you hear someone say “I’m deeply invested in him/her” or refer to social or human “capital” or, so help me, refer to the “opportunity cost” of a human relationship, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
again.. *not legit.. we don’t need more/better whalespeak.. we need to get out of sea world
huge oi oi oi
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endnote 7(39):
Where do we draw the line between justified quantification, which seeks to achieve transparency, objectivity, democratic control, and egalitarian social outcomes, and metastasized quantification, which replaces and indeed stifles political discussions about the proper course of public policy?
you don’t.. same song.. till we stop measuring things.. oi
We surely cannot conclude that all official uses of audit methods are wrong and foolish. **Rather, we need to find ways to distinguish between sensible and dangerous uses of numbers. When confronted by audit or quantitative indices, we should ask ourselves a few questions. I would suggest asking questions that respond to the concerns I raised earlier in my discussion, namely, the presence or lack of construct validity, the possibility of “antipolitics,” and the colonization or feedback danger. Thus, we as citizens should ask ourselves:
*rather.. need to realize – lit & num as colonialism
a, b, c questions (to me) were ridiculous whalespeak.. so not adding here.. oi
In short, I am not proposing an attack on quantitative methods, whether in the academy or in the polity. But we do need to demystify and desacralize numbers, to insist that they cannot always answer the question we are posing. And we do need to recognize debates about allocation of scarce resources for what they are—politics—and what they are not—technical decisions. We must begin to ask ourselves whether the use of quantification in a particular context is likely to advance or hinder political debate, and whether it is likely to achieve or undermine or our political goals.
oi oi oi
rather.. we need to let go of any form of m\a\p
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Six: Particularity and Flux
History is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Fragment 27: Retail Goodness and Sympathy
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The particularity of identification and sympathy is a working assumption of journalism, poetry, and charitable work. People don’t easily identify with or open their hearts or wallets for large abstractions: the Unemployed, the Hungry, the Persecuted, the Jews. But portray in gripping detail, with photographs, a woman who has lost her job and is living in her car, or a refugee family on the run through the forest living on roots and tubers, and you are likely to engage the sympathy of strangers. All victims cannot easily represent one victim, but one victim can often stand for a whole class of victims.
This principle was powerfully at work in the most moving memorial for Holocaust victims I have ever seen, an exhibition in the great town hall of Münster, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War. Street by street, address by address, name by name, the fate of each and every Jewish family (some six thousand of them) was depicted. There was usually a photograph of the house in which the family lived (most still standing, as Münster was largely spared Allied bombing), the street address, sometimes an identity card or a carte de visite, photographs of the family individually and together (at a picnic, a birthday party, a family photo-portrait), and a note as to their fate: “murdered at Bergen-Belsen,” “fled to France and then Cuba,” “migrated to Israel from Morocco,” “fled to Lodz, Poland, fate unknown.” In quite a few cases there were no photographs, just a dotted rectangle indicating where a photograph would go.
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Perhaps the most stunning thing about this exhibition, however, was the very process by which it was created. Hundreds of Münster citizens had worked for more than a decade, combing records, authenticating deaths, tracing survivors, and writing personal letters to the thousands they could track, explaining the exhibition they were preparing and asking if the respondents would be willing to complete the record and to contribute a photograph or a note. Many, understandably, refused; many others sent something, and a good many came to Münster to see for themselves. The result spoke for itself, but the process of tracing family histories, locating survivors and their children, and writing them personal letters as star-crossed neighbors across the void of history and death itself was a cathartic, if not cleansing, recognition of a shared and tragic history. Most of those preparing the exhibition were not even born when the Jews were scourged, and one imagines the thousands of painful conversations and recollections the process touched off among the generations in Münster.
thought might be a way/means to get people listening.. but too many red flags
Fragment 28: Bringing Particularity, Flux, and Contingency Back In
The job of most history and social science is to summarize, codify, and otherwise “package” important social movements and major historical events, to make them legible and understandable. Given this objective and the fact that the events they are seeking to illuminate have already happened, it is hardly surprising that historians and social scientists should typically give short shrift to the confusion, flux, and tumultuous contingency experienced by the historical actors, let alone the ordinary by-standers, whose actions they are examining.
One perfectly obvious reason for the deceptively neat order of these accounts is precisely because they are “history.” The events in question simply turned out one way rather than another, obscuring the fact that the participants likely had no idea how they would turn out and that, under slightly different circumstances, things might well have turned out very differently.
graeber make it diff law et al
Knowing what in fact happened, unlike the participants, can’t help but infect the story and drain much of its actual contingency. Think for a moment of someone who takes his or her own life. It becomes almost impossible for the suicide’s friends and relatives not to rewrite the dead person’s biography in a way that presages and accounts for the suicide. It is, of course, entirely possible that a brief chemical imbalance, a momentary panic, or an instant tragic insight may have led to the act, in which case rewriting the entire biography as leading up to suicide would be to misunderstand that life.
*history ness as cancerous distraction
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Fragment 29: The Politics of Historical Misrepresentation
to me.. all history ness is misrep.. because 1\ don’t think you can rep aliveness 2\ all history to date based on whales in sea world.. we have no idea what legit free people are like
________
________
________
________
- anarch\ism
- accidental anarchist
- anarchism and other essays
- anarchism or rev movement
- anarchist communism
- anarchist library
- anarchists against democracy
- anarchy after leftism
- anarchy in manner of speaking
- anarchy works
- art of not being governed
- at the café
- billionaire and anarchists
- david on anarchism ness
- enlightened anarchy
- fragments of an anarchist anthropology
- freedom and anarchy
- graeber anarchism law
- inventing anarchy
- is anarchism impossible
- kevin on anarchism w/o adj
- nika on anarchism
- on anarchism
- post scarcity anarchism
- two cheers for anarchism
_________
________
______
be you. 