Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Dichotomy of Enlightenment?

1 Comment Posted by on March 15, 2005

I wanted to conclude this series of posts on Bent Flyvbjerg’s work with a brief discussion of his analysis of Habermas and Foucault. To many social theorists with a critical orientation, Foucault and Habermas appear to represent the key theoretical paths available to social critique. It is therefore common for a theorist to choose either Habermas or Foucault, with Habermasian theorists insisting that Foucault lapses into nihilism, and Foucaultian theorists asserting that Habermas advocates an oppressive consensus that leaves no room for difference. Flyvbjerg falls on the Foucaultian side of this theoretical divide, and I will suggest below that this choice causes him to miss some of Habermas’ core strengths and understate some of Foucault’s core weaknesses. A less partisan approach to both theorists, I suggest, might lead beyond a simple choice between the two, and onto a more adequate conception of critical theory.

Flyvbjerg criticises Habermas for seeking universal normative standards as the basis for his critical social theory. Flyvbjerg cites Habermas’ concept of the ideal speech situation – Habermas’ contention that, as beings who engage in communicative practice, all humans universally and necessarily understand the potential for the development of uncoerced consensus achieved by free and equal participants engaged in rational communication.

Flyvbjerg objects to this concept on two levels: he argues, first, that Habermas’ ideal speech situation can never be fully realised in practice – that power is always already present in any communication – and that Habermas’ approach therefore necessarily involves a gap between “is” and “ought”, between ideal and practice; he argues, next, that the actual realisation of the ideal speech situation – with its aim of universal consensus – would necessarily be oppressive in that it would suppress the inherent difference and diversity that always characterises all human communities. Flyvbjerg goes on to claim that Habermas’ approach involves a completely uncritical appropriation of modernity, while it leaves Habermas blind to the reality of power relations in contemporary society.

These are very common criticisms of Habermas from a Foucaultian approach, and yet they represent fundamental misunderstandings of the strategic intent of Habermas’ theoretical claims. By exploring that strategic intent a little more closely, it should be possible to assess Habermas’ work in a more balanced light, appreciating his insights, as well as developing a more targeted critique of the weaknesses of his approach.

Contrary to Flyvbjerg’s assertions, Habermas’ theory is not weakened by the observation that an ideal speech situation can never be realised in social practice, nor is it challenged by the observation that power relations will always exist in any human interaction. Similarly, Habermas does not seek to achieve universal consensus as some kind of prescriptive social ideal. Critiques based on the notion that universal consensus would be oppressive are therefore somewhat beside the point.

Instead, the strategic intent of Habermasian concepts such as that of an ideal speech situation, or of different action orientations that social actors can assume toward one another in a speech situation, is to demonstrate that all humans have access to critical forms of perception and thought, which they can then direct against the power relations embodied in existing social institutions, practices, and ideologies. The important thing for Habermas is not whether we can attain an ideal speech situation in our social practice: it is whether, as social actors, we can conceptualise what an ideal speech situation would be, if one could exist – whether we have been exposed to some form of perception and thought that introduces us to concepts of freedom, equality, absence of coercion, intersubjective agreement, and other normative standards Habermas brings to bear in his social critique.

Habermas’ intent is explicitly counter-factual: he believes that, if he can demonstrate that we have access to these critical forms of perception and thought, he can then account for the possibility that a social critique of an existing social institution might emerge – that people might declare that a particular social institution is, in fact, riddled with objectionable power relations – while still remaining within the boundaries of a secular, materialist social scientific analysis that does not appeal to religious sensibilities.

From this perspective, when Flyvbjerg’s dismissively criticises Habermas against Rorty’s claim that the “‘cash value’ of Habermas’ notions of discourse ethics and communicative rationality consists of the familiar political freedoms of modern pluralist democracy” (p. 98), Flyvbjerg demonstrates how poorly he grasps Habermas’ strategic intent. For this is precisely what Habermas sets out to do: to explain, in secular terms, how these “familiar political freedoms” have come to feel so familiar – often in spite of their flagrant contradiction to the practical power relations we experience in our everyday social life. Regardless of how we evaluate Habermas’ attempt to account for the historical emergence of these values – and I am very critical of Habermas’ account – the key question Habermas raises must somehow be addressed by any critical social theory that seeks to be consistent, to explain the possibility for the emergence of critical sensibilities, just as it also explains the possibility for the emergence of power relations in contemporary society.

Where Habermas can be validly criticised, I would argue, is over his failure to achieve this goal without appealing to fundamentally asocial mechanisms for inculcating critical forms of perception and thought. For, although Habermas avoids religious or metaphysical foundations for critique, and thereby remains in the purview of “materialism” in the broadest sense, he does not truly provide an account of the emergence of fully historical and socialised critical forms of perception and thought. Instead, he offers an account of how potentials that were “always already” embedded in the logic of communication – in human speech acts as such – were historically realised under particular social conditions. Having been realised, however – and this is crucial for the resistance-oriented character of Habermas’ theory – these critical potentials can never completely be extinguished. Instead, the critical potentials embedded in the fundamental logic of human communication stand, in Habermas’ account, somehow outside of the ebb and flow of society and history – like Kantian a prioris, categories in terms of which humanity judges historically specific forms of domination and abuses of power, but not categories that are formed completely in and through a particular historical form of social life.

Flyvbjerg of course also criticises Habermas for his lack of historical specificity and, in light of his similar critique, the distinction I am drawing here may seem pedantic. The “payoff”, however, can be seen when examining Flyvbjerg’s uncritical appropriation of Foucault.

Flyvbjerg appropriates Foucault as a model for an analysis of power relations, and for an understanding of the relationship between power relations and forms of knowledge. He approves of Foucault’s consistently historical genealogical method, and cites Foucault’s meta-theoretical statements to prove that that Foucault does not regard himself as somehow outside or above the history and the power relations he analyses, but rather as operating on the same historically and socially specified plane of existence. Flyvbjerg therefore rejects the Habermasian critique that Foucault is relativistic – arguing in reply that Foucault has never believed that “anything goes” (p. 99), nor advocated “value freedom” ala Weber (p. 126). He finally cites Foucault’s belief that thought provides freedom for critical forms of perception and thought, arguing (p. 127):

For Foucault, “[t]hought is freedom in relation to what one does”. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it meaning. Thought is, rather, what allows one to step back from this conduct an to “question its meaning, its conditions, and its goals”. Thus thought is the motion by which one detaches oneself from what one does and “reflects on it as a problem”. Thought is the ability to think differently in order to act differently. Thought defined in this manner – as reflexive thought aimed at action – stands at the core of Foucault’s ethics, which, then, is an ethics antithetical to any type of “thought-police”. Reflexive thought is therefore the most important “intellectual virtue” for Foucault, just as for Aristotle it is phronesis.

In this account, where Habermas is at least seeking to account for the forms of perception and thought that appear to underlie the democratic institutions and ideals of modernity, Foucault appears to be postulating a generic human capacity for critical thought, as such. If Habermas’ approach falls short of a fully historical critical theory by grounding critical forms of perception and thought in specific attributes of human communication, how much shorter must Foucault’s approach fall, when it appears to ground critical forms of subjectivity in the completely decontextualised and oddly Cartesian move: I think, therefore I critique.

Both approaches – contrary to the assertions of advocates on either side – fail to take seriously the possibility that, just as we can analyse specific types of domination by embedding them in their historical context, so might we also be able to analyse our specific normative standards – those forms of perception and thought that enable us to perceive power relations as dominating in a specific way, as abrogations of a particular type of potential freedom – by embedding those in their historical context.

From this perspective, Habermas at least recognises the need to account for his own critical sensibilities, even if he fears relativism too much to account for these sensibilities in fully historical and social terms. And Foucault at least recognises the potential for a fully social and historical form knowledge, even if he does not fully understand the need to account for the emergence of critical sensibilities.

Yet these two halves do not quite combine to make a theoretical whole: for that, I would argue, we need a fully historical critical theory, one which would provide a consistently historical account of how our shared form of social life can generate specific forms of domination, together with the potential for particular kinds of freedom. It is through an exploration of this alternative vision of critical theory, I would suggest, that we will come closest to realising Flyvbjerg’s goal of achieving a future that points beyond the domination of objectivist and instrumental rationality, and toward the realisation of a shared social life governed by a more substantive form of reason.

Critical Theory, Social Science

The Social Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

1 Comment Posted by on March 13, 2005

In the previous two posts on 11 March and 12 March, I’ve provided fairly extensive commentary on Bent Flyvbjerg’s approach to historically-grounded critical theory. My core critique is set out in these earlier entries. Here, and in the entry to follow, I intend only to sketch out a couple of placeholders for other issues raised by Flyvbjerg’s book, issues that I hope to be able to pursue at greater length over time. In this entry, I wanted to take up the thread of Flyvbjerg’s understanding of the relationship between the natural and social sciences.

I have argued previously that, while Flyvbjerg criticises the transcendence of objectivist and instrumental forms of reason, he seems to treat this transcendence as a type of conceptual error — a flaw of reasoning that can potentially be corrected by better thinking (in this case, by an appropriation of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis as a counter-balance to keep other forms of reason in check). I have also suggested that a fully consistent historical social critique would move beyond this line of argument, to explain both the appeal of the concept of phronesis (if this is the ethical value the critical theory wishes to wield), as well as the appeal of objectivist and instrumental forms of reason. I have argued that Flyvbjerg doesn’t fully perceive the need for these final steps, and therefore falls short of providing an adequate basis for a consistent historical social critique. Here, I wish to explore some of the implications of this failure for his understanding of the relationship between the natural and social sciences.

When Flyvbjerg discusses the relationship between the social and natural sciences, he diagnoses the social sciences as suffering from the application of a standard of truth or a mode of reasoning inappropriate to their proper object. The natural sciences, in his account, can validly search for universal, historically and socially invariant, objective, and timeless truths because their object of analysis is inanimate matter, whose properties do not change across time and space. That the natural sciences have based their activities on an appropriate standard of truth and mode of reasoning is evidenced by the fact that – however slowly – these sciences do have succeeded in making cumulative progress in their understanding of the natural world. Even if theorists such as Thomas Kuhn have successfully shown that scientific progress does not proceed precisely as the scientific ideal would have it, still, Flyvbjerg argues, progress is made, and our understanding of, and command over, the material world can meaningfully be said to advance.

The social sciences, by contrast, have failed to make cumulative progress, even while struggling valiantly to apply the same standard of truth and mode of reasoning. The reason, according to Flyvbjerg, is that the social sciences have as their proper object of analysis a very different kind of object – an object that is also a subject, an active agent capable of responding to the theorist, who is in turn embedded in the same historical and social context as the theorised. This special object of analysis is suited to a very different kind of reason and mode of knowledge – which Flyvbjerg expresses through the concept of phronesis, which he understands to mean a kind of reflection on the collective social lessons learned through practical engagement with our shared history.

Without contesting Flyvbjerg’s assertion that there is a meaningful distinction between the natural and the social sciences, I would like to problematise the tacitly naturalistic way Flyvbjerg seeks to account for that distinction’s existence. In Flyvbjerg’s account, the essential distinction relates to the object of analysis: inanimate nature – matter – on the one hand; animate, self-aware humanity, on the other. What is interesting to me about this distinction is that Flyvbjerg’s own historical-genealogical method could be used to raise an interesting question: not all human cultures have divided their experience of the natural and human worlds so starkly as does ours; many cultures have lacked a concept of “matter”, in the specifically modern sense of secularised, objective “stuff”.

I suspect that, if we were to tease out this thread a bit further (and I unfortunately don’t have time to do this here), we could arrive at an interesting understanding of what the social sciences could contribute to the natural sciences: an understanding of how and why the natural sciences came into being, of how and why natural scientific questions and answers remain socially meaningful to us, that would move beyond the notion that these sciences emerged only (to rehearse what is becoming a well-worn theme) as quasi-natural “discoveries” that corrected the poor (religious or superstitious) thinking that preceded them historically.

Such an approach – and, again, I cannot develop this here – would not require a lapse into conceptual anarchy or nihilism. It would simply require an understanding of why scientific knowledge, and the forms of perception and thought that underlie them, resonate so strongly with us – why it is comfortable for us to perceive the natural world in terms of inanimate nature, and to draw a sharp distinction between nature and human social life. This form of understanding is not something, I would suggest, that the natural sciences are likely to provide for themselves – it requires distinctly social scientific (and critical theoretic) forms of historical analysis: an investigation of the socially and historically specific dimensions of our shared culture that makes appeals to objective, timeless truths, on the one hand, and instrumental rationality, on the other, make so much apparent sense to us, in this time and place.

Aside from accounting for the current transcendence of natural scientific and technological approaches, I suspect such an investigation would also cast light on something Kuhn has noticed: the historical periodisation of scientific revolutions. Where Kuhn suggests an explanation for such revolutions that is effective internal to the scientific community, he leaves unexplored the many tantalising connections between shifts in scientific interest – and in the forms of perception and thought that express themselves in the formulation of specific scientific problems and the adoption of specific types of scientific theories – and potentially related shifts in other dimensions of social life.

As I said at the outset, this entry will have to remain in the nature of a placeholder for a future analysis. I have posted this, not so much to criticise Flyvbjerg for not attempting something I am also not prepared to attempt, but to point to a promising potential line of inquiry for a critical theory that would seek to understand the social and historical basis for the transcendence of the natural sciences and the dynamism of technological development in contemporary society.

Critical Theory, Math and Science, Philosophy of History, Social Science

Beware Greeks Bearing Norms

1 Comment Posted by on March 12, 2005

In this second of four posts on Bent Flyvbjerg, I examine one of his most original contributions to the project of constituting a more historically-grounded social science is his appropriation of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis. By analysing the basis for this appropriation, I hope to cast some light on some of the limitations of Flyvbjerg’s approach as the foundation for an historically-grounded critical theory.

In Flyvbjerg’s account, Aristotle distinguishes between three different forms of knowledge: episteme, concerned with objective, universal truth; techne, concerned with artistic or technical action on nature; and phronesis, a form of contextual, intersubjective knowledge constituted through reflection on shared social experience. Flyvbjerg argues that, while forms of knowledge consistent with episteme (objective and universal truths) and techne (means-end or instrumental rationality) are quite familiar to us and are bound up in our most common definitions of “truth”, the forms of knowledge associated with phronesis have been relatively neglected. Yet it is precisely these forms of contextual, practical knowledge of our shared social experience – which Aristotle associated with the sound exercise of practical ethics and of political life – that provide the best foundation for social scientific practice.

Central to Flyvbjerg’s argument is a contrast between the intrinsic concerns of the natural sciences, technological research, and the social sciences. In Flyvbjerg’s account, it is appropriate that the natural sciences pursue episteme, given the inanimate, invariable quality of the objects these sciences study. It is also appropriate that technological invention pursues techne, given the instrumental character of the manipulation of inanimate nature through technology.

The social sciences, however, study a very different kind of object: an object that is also a subject – self aware human agents who, through their own actions, constitute the shared social environment in which both the theorists and the theorised are embedded. For the study of the collective wisdom constituted through shared social practice, Flyvbjerg argues, the most appropriate form of knowledge and standard of truth is provided by the concept of phronesis. Unfortunately, in Flyvbjerg’s account, the social sciences have instead traditionally measured their worth against the inappropriate standards of episteme and techne – and have thereby devalued the contribution to collective knowledge that the social sciences are uniquely qualified to make.

Flyvbjerg thus advocates a return to the concept of phronesis – and a rejection of the concepts of episteme and techne – as guiding principles against which social scientific inquiry can be measured. Flyvbjerg then puts a critical spin on the Aristotelian concept of phronesis by supplementing it with a Foucaultian analysis of power relations. In Flyvbjerg’s account, adopting the Aristotelian concept of phronesis shows us what kind of knowledge social science appropriately seeks, while wielding Foucault’s historical genealogical techniques reveal the ways in which power relations can structure our socialised perceptions and practices.

The result, in Flyvbjerg’s account, is the social scientific production of practical political knowledge – knowledge that is non-universal, historically-specific, contingent, and subject to change, but that nevertheless offers the only kind of truth available to guide human ethical practice: ethical standards grounded in the lessons we have historically taught ourselves through our shared social practice. Flyvbjerg thus seeks to avoid the antinomy between approaches that seek an absolute truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, approaches that reject the possibility of absolute truth – and therefore abjure truth in its entirety and lapse into a nihilistic relativism that holds value judgments impossible.

This goal – uncovering the possibility of an alternative form of truth “for us”, one which can guide critical practice and ethical judgment without asserting its objective validity for all times and places – is also central to my own work, and I am therefore broadly sympathetic with many of Flyvbjerg’s declared aims. What I wish to do here (and in the blog entries that follow) is to explore whether Flyvbjerg has fully understood what would be entailed in reconstructing a critical social science grounded on this alternative conception of truth. As a starting point, I will examine Flyvbjerg’s appropriation of Aristotle, and ask how this appropriation fits with Flyvbjerg’s stated goal of constructing an historically-specific foundation for social scientific knowledge.

On its face, Flyvbjerg’s leap back into classical antiquity for a core analytical concept appears to be a peculiar strategy for a critical social theory concerned with the historical and social specificity of practical knowledge. If we take seriously the claim that social scientists are grounded in the very society they seek to analyse, it seems counter-intuitive to reach well outside the historical parameters of that society for the ethical standards and concepts of truth in which we intend to ground contemporary social critique.

Flyvbjerg seeks to square this circle by arguing that we must reach outside our current historical period, in order to find examples of alternative approaches to truth, ones that are not dominated by notions of timeless universality or of instrumental reason. Flyvbjerg argues (p. 54):

…many people now believe that alternatives to instrumental rationalism are needed. The precise content of such alternatives, however, remains vague. The Rationalist Turn has been so radical that possible alternatives, which might have existed previously, are beyond our current vision, just as centuries of rationalist socialization seems to have undermined the ability of individuals and society to even conceptualize a nonrationalist present and future.

One way of dealing with this situation is to study the era prior to the Rationalist turn… This strategy inevitably leads back to the Greek philosophers. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are often seen as forefathers of modern science and of present day rationalism. Aristotle, however, distinguished explicitly between several “intellectual virtues”, of which epistemic science, with its emphasis on theories, analysis, and universals, was but one, and not even the most important. Aristotle added intellectual virtues dealing with context, practice, experience, common sense, intuition, and practice wisdom, especially the intellectual virtue named phronesis.

In this account, then, the leap into the past serves as a leap outside our society, whose forms of perception and thought are so dominated by universals and means-end rationality that it is difficult for us to conceive any alternatives to these modes of thought, and into a prior historical period, where very different modes of thought purportedly predominated. In making this leap, we demonstrate the historicity of the forms of thought that characterise contemporary society – we show that these forms of thought have come into being at a particular time and place, under particular circumstances – and we thereby suggest the possibility that these forms of thought could pass away. This possibility then provides the basis for a critique of contemporary society, on the basis that other forms of social life are possible.

This, then, is Flyvbjerg’s vision of an historically-specific critical social theory. But what is it, exactly, that we have historically specified?

I would argue that, if we restrict ourselves to Flyvbjerg’s approach, we have actually completed only half the historicising task. It is worth looking very closely at Flyvbjerg’s reasoning in the passages quoted above: Flyvbjerg first argues that what he calls the “Rationalist Turn” has so influenced our forms of perception and thought that alternatives generated within this society are vague at best. He then seizes a category from a form of society that, he argues, lies outside our current historical moment. He uses this category – phronesis – to reveal that the current ascendency of natural scientific and instrumental forms of reason is not an historical inevitability – to argue that things could be different and to suggest that, in light of the possibility for things to be different, the ascendency of these forms of reason can be criticised as a form of domination, with reference to an unrealised potential for the fuller expression of other forms of reason.

But where does his account historicise or socially embed his own critical forms of thought – his ability to leap into the past to seize a convenient critical concept; the resonance of the category of phronesis to our times? In isolated, gestural passages, Flyvbjerg suggests a possible answer. He argues (p. 89):

Most contemporary philosophers and social scientists have accepted the consequences of more than two millennia of failed attempts to establish a universal constitution of philosophy, social science, and social organization, having concluded that such a foundation does not seem feasible.

Without holding Flyvbjerg too strongly to passages that he most likely does not regard as central to his argument, these occasional references to “two millennia of failed attempts” provide his only apparent theory of how we could account historically for the emergence of his conception of critical social science. The accounts are strangely quantitative in character: assuming that we accept that the historical boundaries of the present moment can be pushed back two thousand years, and that Flyvbjerg’s Rationalist Turn dates back to the borders of classical antiquity, it would appear that humanity possesses quite a lot of patience with “failed attempts” to identify objective truths – enough patience that we must wonder what straw has so recently broken the camel’s back, and driven us to pursue an alternative concept of truth.

Such questions aside, this approach gives Flyvbjerg no social and historical grasp on qualitative characteristics of an alternative social science – no ability to explain why theorists should suddenly advocate this specific vision of an alternative social science, why these specific ethical standards should suddenly resonate.

Without this kind of account, Flyvbjerg’s analysis – in spite of its best intentions – may fall back into a kind of critical social science I mentioned above: one in which, even while protesting the fact of his own historical and social embeddedness, Flyvbjerg fails to offer an account of why it should be historically and socially plausible for a theorist such as himself to emerge when he does – and, even more importantly, why his concepts should resonate widely with people socialised into his historical moment.

Among other things, such an approach would require critical engagement, not just with history, but with how we as social scientists engage with history. In Flyvbjerg’s case, it would require examining why Aristotle, and why phronesis, appear salient and relevant to us now. I suggest that this would, in turn, require an analysis of whether and how our own historical moment might be generating qualitatively specific social potentials for alternative organisations of social life, alternative forms of perception and thought, in light of which other dimensions of our shared social experience could come to be experienced as forms of domination. Such an analysis might ultimately obviate the need for the leap outside of our history, by showing us how we have been recognising (or projecting) bits of our own time in the distant past, and potentially misrecognising the source of our critical sensibilities – giving our contemporary social practice too little credit as the foundation for critique.

On the flip side, it would require moving beyond a jarringly idealist moment in Flyvbjerg’s argument. For, while Flyvbjerg refers constantly to the historical and social embeddedness of dominant forms of rationality, his alternative appears to be to highlight and advocate for an alternative vision of rationality. As the sole step in a critical social analysis, it strongly suggests that objectivist or instrumental forms of rationality have become dominant, primarily due to poor reasoning. Now that a better concept of rationality has come along, Flyvbjerg’s account suggests, we can collectively correct this error of judgment and move on to better social practice.

This type of account – in which an individual theorist suddenly discovers an intellectual error perpetrated by multitudes of social thinkers before them – is both very common, and provides a very problematic foundation for a self-consistent critical social theory. For, in a fully consistent approach, even “errors” in thinking – particularly ones that resonate on a wide scale, and over a substantial period of time – are in need of social and historical explanation. It is not sufficient, I would argue, to point out the historical specificity of the forms of thought or practice being criticised: it is necessary instead to explain why it might be socially plausible (even if incorrect) for people to perceive the world in a particular way, perpetuate a particular social practice, etc.

These levels of analysis – which I would argue are required to “close the loop” in constructing a self-consistent critical theory – are absent from Flyvbjerg’s analysis. As a consequence, Flyvbjerg finds himself in the position of advocating theoretical standards for which he cannot account – becoming the “voice from nowhere” that he explicitly repudiates, because he does not provide – or even indicate an awareness of the need for – an account of how his own vision of critical theory, as well as the forms of domination that theory criticises, might have become socially plausible, as elements of an historically specific form of social life.

These are high standards – and I do not argue that I am prepared to meet them in full. I do argue, however, that they are the only standards fully consistent with an historically embedded critical social theory that seeks to understand itself in terms of “truth for us”, without appealing to normative standards that purport to be grounded in something outside of the society being theorised. But if Flyvbjerg does not provide the ideal starting point for constructing such an approach, what would a better starting point look like?

On a meta-theoretical level, one avenue into this problem is suggested by Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the relationship between history and social critique in his late work Theses on the Philosophy of History. This deliberately convoluted, aphoristic text has been variously interpreted as an example of everything from crass Marxism, to mystical religious withdrawal from the world. Without fully accepting the theoretical framework the work implies (I would reject, for example, Benjamin’s focus on class domination as a defining framework for social critique), I suggest that we can productively appropriate some of Benjamin’s insights into how our relationship to the potentials of the present, comes to shape and colour our perceptions of history.

Without systematically interpreting the entire work (which is designed such that each passage is intended to be read in light of the whole, so that the entire piece functions as a “monad”, in Benjamin’s use of the term – I may have opportunity to explore this and related Benjaminian concepts in another blog entry), I want to focus here on some core concepts that inform a few passages. In the second “thesis”, Benjamin draws attention to what he calls our “image of happiness” – and explores what constitutes that he image. He writes (thesis II):

“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,” writes Lotze, “is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.

Peering through the mystical language, we can uncover in this passage a quite secular concept of social critique: Benjamin’s “image of happiness”, which arouses envy in us (and potentially motivates us to action, to acquire what we envy), is analogous to the concept of a standpoint of critique: the motivating values in the name of which we criticise dimensions of social life that we perceive as unfree. Where many approaches – including, I have argued, Flyvbjerg’s – understand that forms of social domination are historically specific, it is much rarer to find an approach that understands that the critical values applied by the social theorist must also be specific to the society being criticised. Benjamin, however, proposes that exactly this must be the case: that the values expressed through social critique – the “image of happiness” or alternative conception of social life, against which actual social practice is being criticised – are themselves generated by the very society being criticised: “The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed”.

Benjamin then moves on to claim that the same is true of our perception of history – that the way in which we perceive the past is itself fundamentally shaped by the potentials of our own time. Benjamin follows this theme through several “theses”, citing, for example, the appropriation of Roman history by the French Revolutionaries (Thesis XIV):

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

And problematising the way in which historical moments attain significance in our present time (Thesis XVIIIa):

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

In each of these passages, Benjamin suggests that we appropriate aspects of the past because those aspects succeed or fail in being topical in our own time – because these slices of history of history gratify or resonate with forms of perception and thought that are constituted in our contemporary social context. Benjamin is not fully consistent on this point, even in the passages quoted above: where the second thesis strongly implies that the emancipatory, as well as the unfree, dimensions of social life colour our perception of the past, the fourteenth thesis suggests that only domination shapes our perception of history, while emancipation is expressed in the “leap into the open air of history”. Whatever tensions still run through these passages, I believe Benjamin does succeed in pointing to an important standard for a consistently historical critical theory. Whether Benjamin had time fully to grasp the implications of that standard and apply it consistently in his own work, we can nevertheless benefit from his concepts in working out our own approach to historical social critique.

Turning back to Flyvbjerg: if we wished to support Flyvbjerg’s appropriation of Aristotle, in a manner consistent with historical social critique, how would we go about it? A partial example of what might be involved is provided in Marx’s own examination of Aristotle, in the first volume of Capital (part 1, section 3, 3).

In this passage, Marx meticulously unfolds a series of distinctions between concrete labour (particular forms of labouring activities), and abstract labour (labour in general). Up to this point, Marx has voiced his writing in a logical, deductive style, making reference to apparently trivial, mundane examples (linen, weaving, etc.) and spending what appears to be a remarkable amount of time and text arriving at some quite obvious conclusions. The reader has long been wondering when Marx will move on to a more interesting topic, when Marx makes a curious detour to examine Aristotle’s analysis of exchange relations. I will quote Marx’s argument at length (part 1, section 3):

The two latter peculiarities of the equivalent form will become more intelligible if we go back to the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or Nature, and amongst them also the form of value. I mean Aristotle.
In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further development of the simple form of value – i.e., of the expression of the value of one commodity in some other commodity taken at random; for he says:

5 beds = 1 house – (clinai pente anti oiciaς)

is not to be distinguished from

5 beds = so much money. – (clinai pente anti … oson ai pente clinai)

He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed, and that, without such an equalisation, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities. “Exchange,” he says, “cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability”. (out isothς mh oushς snmmetriaς). Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is, however, in reality, impossible (th men oun alhqeia adunaton), that such unlike things can be commensurable” i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes.”

Aristotle therefore, himself, tells us what barred the way to his further analysis; it was the absence of any concept of value. What is that equal something, that common substance, which admits of the value of the beds being expressed by a house? Such a thing, in truth, cannot exist, says Aristotle. And why not? Compared with the beds, the house does represent something equal to them, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the beds and the house. And that is – human labour.

There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth” was at the bottom of this equality.

This passage, I would suggest, provides an intriguing example of how a socially-grounded critical theory might go about appropriating an historical text. Marx’s reasoning in this passage is quite distinctive, and worth a careful examination.

First, he has previously drawn his reader through pages and pages of reasoning about commodities and labouring activities – pages in which he appears to be arguing that he has arrived at his conclusions (and expects his readers to arrive at their conclusions) through strict logical deduction. Those earlier sections of Capital appeared to operate within a thoughtspace that would claim that anyone who disagreed was the victim of faulty reasoning – a defect that could be corrected through rational argument that would communicate the better logic.

Against this backdrop, the passage on Aristotle forces a complete reinterpretation of what the earlier passages: if the first sections of Capital suggested that proper deduction would carry the reader inexorably toward an inevitable logical conclusion, this section suddenly claims that Aristotle – whose logical acumen no one would doubt – nevertheless was incapable of drawing the same conclusions as Marx previously has because his society was founded on very different forms of social relations.

Marx seems here to be suggesting, not only that we can interpret Aristotle’s thought in social and historical terms, but that we must also interpret our own thought – those conclusions that “natural” and “logical” to us – as equally historically and socially specific. And, among those apparently natural and logical deductions, Marx includes the critical value universal human equality – a value that was perceived at the time as a “natural” right, but which Marx here suggests is grounded in a specific dimension of our shared social experience – and, moreover, is grounded in a dimension of social experience that we do not share with Aristotle, hence Aristotle’s rejection of the possibility of universal human equality, in spite of his intellectual rigour.

Marx points to the labour market as a modern social innovation in which, in this one dimension of social practice at least, we act out the universal equality of humankind, by acting out the universal fungibility of the products of the wide variety of labouring activities in which humans participate. The forms of perception and thought that underlie this dimension of social practice are, however, potentially portable – and potentially corrosive of the forms of inequality that may characterise other dimensions of social practice. Thus Marx provides an historically and socially specific explanation for what he calls the emergence of the belief in universal human equiality as a “popular prejudice”, a prejudice which does not, however, require that people be equal in all dimensions of social life in order to be passionately felt and believed.

Whether Marx provides the best possible social and historical explanation for the popular resonance of values of equality, whether equality is the only or the best critical standard, or whether Marx consistently follows this line of reasoning in his works: these issues are beside the point of the current analysis, which is to suggest that a fully consistent, thoroughly historical form of social critique is viable, and can provide a means of meeting Flyvbjerg’s challenge: to ground the morality that informs our social critique within our own society and history. Meeting this challenge, however, would require going beyond Flyvbjerg’s own approach – beyond viewing domination as historically specific, and reaching outside our society to discover potentials for emancipation. Instead, I have argued, we need to understand the historical and social roots of the forms of freedom whose fuller realisation we desire, as well as the forms of unfreedom whose existence we protest. Only in this way can we fulfil the promise of a socially and historically embedded critical theory.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Social Science

Making Social Science Critical

4 Comments Posted by on March 11, 2005

I’ve been reading Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. It’s one of several works I’ve been looking through as I begin to think about my own research methodology, and this post represents the first of four examining different aspects of the work.

This book, however, ranges far beyond the mechanics of social science method, touching on core epistemological issues in defence of a goal that I also share: the construction of a grounded ethics that accounts for its own value judgments in terms of the historically and socially specific forms of perception and thought that characterise our own shared social experience. Discovering in Foucault a model for this project, Flyvbjerg contends (p. 101):

Our society and history… is the only solid ground under our feet. And this socio-historical foundation is fully adequate.

In many ways, this statement captures what I think must be an essential characteristic of a contemporary critical theory. I question, however, whether Flyvbjerg’s work follows through on this insight – whether Flyvbjerg fully grasps what would be required to construct an historically-embedded approach to grounding the ethical standards we use to judge contemporary institutions, forms of thought, and forms of social practice. In the next few posts, I will try to unpack the ways in which Flyvbjerg may fall short of his goal. In this process, I will suggest some of the standards a self-reflexive critical theory would need to fulfil, if it seeks to account for its own ethical standard – for the critical judgments it makes about the social world – without appealing to a transhistorical “view from nowhere” as the purportedly objective basis for its judgments.

The basic stock in trade of social theory – critical or not – is the claim that significant dimensions of our shared practices, institutions, forms of thought and perception, and other collective dimensions of our social experience are shaped in fundamental ways by our own social practice, and are therefore historically specific and can change over time. Social theorists may differ over how much is “social”, and how much therefore can change over time. Those elements of human practice that can be demonstrated to change over time, however, are the special concern of the social sciences.

This stance, however, poses particular challenges for a critical social theory. To be completely consistent, a critical social theory bears the burden of explaining why the theorist – who is, after all, as much a part of society as anyone else – can come to be critical of aspects of the society into which the theorist was socialised. While this goal may seem relatively straightforward, it has proven elusive in practice.

Instead, critical social theory has often taken various other routes to account for the critical judgments it makes about contemporary society – from claiming that the theorist possesses a special objectivity immune from socialising influence, through to claiming that the theorist’s normative standards are “natural”, while the society being criticised is perceived as artificial. Muddying the issue even further, appeals to personal objectivity or “natural” norms are not always explicit, and can lurk in the background, even where theorists explicitly proclaim a commitment to the historical and social specificity of social theory.

Flyvbjerg is conscious of these potential pitfalls – and is valuable precisely for his efforts in drawing our attention to them. Flyvbjerg’s analysis, however, operates at the level of a theoretical stance, a kind of a priori declaration: thus he asserts, for example, the historical specificity and social embeddedness of the critical judgments we express about our society, but he doesn’t close the circle by explaining what it is about our society that promotes these forms of critical thought – or, for that matter, what it is about our society that also works against the realisation of our critical insights. Without recognising that this final step would be required for a self-consistent, historically-specific, critical social science, Flyvbjerg falls short of providing an adequate theoretical basis for making social science matter.

This is an issue I will explore in the next few blog entries, in which I examine more carefully: Flyvbjerg’s attempt to appropriate Aristotle for contemporary social science; Flyvbjerg’s understanding of the distinction between science and social science; and how Flyvbjerg approaches the opposition between Habermas and Foucault.

Critical Theory, Social Science

Weberian Ethic and the Analysis of Capitalism

Leave a comment Posted by on February 27, 2005

I’ve just been reading R.A. Wild’s Heathcote: A Study of Local Government and Resident Action in a Small Australian Town (1983). This work operates within a more traditional concept of politics than does Richards’ book, about which I wrote below: it focuses on “classical” political conflicts between governmental institutions and organised citizen political movements, and operates largely within a classical Weberian framework for understanding the trajectory of political institutions. Among other things, this approach leads to some strange anachronisms: it sounds historically out-of-synch, even for a book written in the early ’80s, for an author to relate with confidence that (p. 57):

Generally the modern state has become more bureaucratic, interventionist and centralised. Bureaucratic expertise has become necessary to administer the complex tasks of the state. Intervention has become increasingly positive and directive and has encompassed what were traditionally private areas of economic activity. Centralisation has occurred partly as a result of the need for national and international long-term economic planning.

The book therefore occupies a thought-space that is historically just on the cusp of the powerful reassertion of the market that would undermine the way in which sociologists had for decades conceptualised the secular trends of politics, economy, and society. This historical tension is evident in the economically liberal views the book documents in the Councillors, which Wild explores in relation to constraints on local government, without, however, calling into question Weber’s essentially linear historical narrative of the sweep of rationalisation through history, culminating in the dominance of formal, procedural rationality in the bureaucratic service of elite interests under the planned capitalist economy (see p. 59-63).

I tend to think it is quite important to keep Weber’s narrative in mind in attempting to develop a critical theory – although I would strip from that narrative its world-historical dimensions, and reinterpret those as a projection back into time of dynamics that are specific to capitalism – thus opening the path to reclaiming Weber’s work as a critical analysis of oppressive trends within a particular society, rather than an analysis of the unavoidable consequences of rationality per se. (Habermas has approached this same issue in another way – reinterpreting the essence of the world-historical process, and distinguishing the potential logic of that process, from the actual historical realisation of that process under capitalism – I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity to comment more on his narrative over time.)

Leaving aside the issue of how to appropriate Weber’s work for critical theory, I think that it is particularly important to remember his insights now, in the wake of a period of market triumphalism in which many analysts have forgotten the ways in which capitalism is not the opposite of state planning and bureaucracy, but instead generates its own pressures for planning, bureaucratisation, and regulation.

At the same time, in my opinion, Weber’s epistemology hinders his analysis, and often strains against the critical logic of his own analysis. I’ve mentioned the world-historical dimension of his narrative – the notion that the trends he is describing are on some level transhistorical – as one potential epistemological problem. Another – and one more central to Wild’s book – is Weber’s notion that his analytical categories are “ideal types”. As Wild explains the concept (p. 19, ftnt 1):

As ideal-type models and analysis are sometimes the cause of confusion, I shall comment briefly on the approach. Elsewhere I defined ideal-type modes as ‘hypothetical constructs developed from empirically observable or historically recognisable components with the aim of making comparisons and developing theoretical explanations’. The basic assumption behind ideal-type analysis is that a total reality in all its complexity cannot be known – cannot be objectively grasped by the human mind. In observing reality we are confronted with a chaos of sense impressions. Ideal types are used to help us abstract from this chaos and thereby make knowledge of the world possible through a framework of prior conceptualisation. Ideal types themselves do no generate knowledge or provide explanations, rather they are a framework for research and point us towards asking paticular questions and formulating useful propositions.

The method of reasoning used in this passage is actually quite common in the social sciences, and is not limited to sociologists who use ideal types, or even to social scientists who invoke relativist concepts. The passage is worth unpacking, to draw out its assumptions and non sequiturs.

Wild starts with a statement that would be quite difficult to disagree with, regardless of the reader’s epistemological or normative stance – namely, that “total reality in all its complexity cannot be known”. This very strong claim provides an aura of authority that can make it easy for the reader not to realise that the statements that happen to follow sequentially in the passage, nevertheless do not actually follow logically from the initial claim.

So Wild moves from “total reality in all its complexity cannot be known”, to the much more controversial and contestable claim that “in observing reality we are confronted with a chaos of sense impressions”. A wide variety of perspectives, from sociobiology to theistic approaches to critical theory, would disagree with this second claim, albeit for different reasons, while having no real difficulty with the first claim. Wild then argues that ideal types “help us abstract from this chaos and thereby make knowledge of the world possible through a framework of prior conceptualisation” – a statement whose logic suggests that our most fundamental analytical categories somehow pre-exist and are unshaped by our interactions with the world around us, but are also fundamentally random. In this formulation, there is no check – whether social or natural – on the ability of a particular anaytical category to arise, to appear persuasive, or to succeed in orienting our actions in the world. Analytical categories in this approach are “mind play” – all approaches as intrinsically plausible as one another, with only convention dictating which categories pique our interest at a particular time.

In practice, very few social analysts – and least of all Weber – actually practice their academic work in a manner consistent with these philosophical claims. Instead, they procede very much as though they are making interpretive claims about a non-chaotic reality: they make arguments in favour of their interpretation, and against others’; they refer to supporting evidence; they even occasionally cede ground to a more convincing analysis. Where the explicit epistemology would seem to support an “I’m okay; you’re okay” relativism, analytic practice suggests an awareness of shared normative standards to which we can appeal when assessing the worthiness of our analytical categories. This is indicated quite clearly in the passage quoted above, where Wild also describes ideal types as “constructs developed from empirically observable or historically recognisable components” – a formulation that invokes a common ability for empirical observation that sits in clear tension with a “chaos of sense impressions”.

So why does practice suggest a tacit non-relativist epistemology, while the explicit theory talks in relativist terms?

I think there are several levels of answer to this question and, as always, I won’t be able to do full justice to any of them here.

One issue – on which I have written before – is that Wild (and other social scientists invoking similar explicit epistemologies) has a very absolutist concept of truth. Reading between the lines of his passage, to be “true”, something must be “objective”, “total”, and, a bit more tacitly, it must be abstract and sit outside the chaotic detail of the real world. While some approaches might appeal to religious or natural truths that claim to meet these criteria, a social theorist who posits that profound changes have taken place over time in the structure of human society, culture, and even fundamental categories of perception and thought, cannot logically aspire to truths that are objective, total, and abstracted from concrete historical experience.

There are several ways social scientists try to thread their way around this dilemma.

Possibly the most common approach is simply to ignore the issue – to continue to analyse the forms of perception and thought that characterise earlier eras as historically specific, culturally determined, etc., while not turning this same lens on our own analytical categories. When asked, most historically-sensitive social scientists would claim that they are as historically and culturally embedded as their objects of analysis – but there is nothing internal to their analysis itself that explains how they could potentially escape the relativist trap and make, to use Habermas’ vocabulary, truth claims about their work. There is also the minority who do seem to maintain that, while the object of analysis is culturally and historically determined, the social scientists’ own categories represent “discoveries” that transcend social, cultural, and historical limitations. I believe it was Marx who described this approach as the claim “that there used to be history, but now there is none”.

Another is the approach adopted in Weber’s explicit epistemological statements, as well as in a variety of other (sometimes far less sophisticated) relativist approaches: to accept that historically-sensitive social scientific research cannot attain objective, total truth – and therefore to repudiate the notion that social science is in the “truth game” at all. This position is seldom consistently maintained – tensions between explicit epistemological expositions, and the actual logic of the social analysis (such as in Wild’s passage above) are more the norm than the exception.

A third is most recently expressed in Habermas’ work (although many of the social scientists who draw inspiration from Habermas seem loathe to follow his line of reasoning to the end). Habermas provides a sweeping historical/evolutionary narrative of the emergence of reason in history – effectively, a very sophisticated way to explaini why it could potentially be the case that “there used to be history” – people used to think and perceive the world very differently from how we do – but “now there is none” – we can make and assess potentially valid truth-claims about the individual, social, and naural worlds.

A fourth – and this is what I would like to work toward, and what I believe a fully self-reflexive critical theory would actually require – would seek to embed our analytical categories within our own social experience (would move beyond the claim that there is no longer history), and would explain how to move beyond the notion that we perceive “a chaos of sense impressions” without, however, appealing to biological or theistic understandings of how perception and thought come to be structured. This approach would bear a number of analytical burdens, among them moving away from the concept that valid truth claims can be made only with reference to timeless, abstract, transhistorical, asocial, absolute values, and moving equally away from the concept that no truth claims can ever be made (e.g., because timeless, abstract, etc., valules are impossible) – and moving toward a concept of “truth for us” – of socially-generated and shared forms of perception and thought that can validly perceive and make judgments about our society precisely because these judgments are integrally related to the society we create.

There are many other criteria a fully-self-reflexive critical theory would need to meet (not least among these, providing an analysis of why relativist and absolutist approaches to truth are so common in this historical period), but proposing an alternative concept of truth is a pivotal step. Understanding truth as the non-random, but still socially-embedded and non-absolutist, collection of things we are collectively teaching ourselves at this historical moment, begins to overcome the subject-object divide that haunts most analyses, and points to the need for a theory of how our subjectivity – our forms of perception and thought – are constituted by, constitute, and are in many ways coterminous with the various “objectivities” of our society – the nature of the economy, the state, civic institutions, gender relations, race relations, family structures, etc.

It’s always a bit disappointing not to be able to “walk the talk” in this blog, but there are limits to the medium, as well as advantages. I’m sure this theme will recur, and I’ll hopefully be able to give a clearer sense of where I would like to go, and how I might attempt to get there, in future entries.

Critical Theory, Political Economy

What Theorists Do

Leave a comment Posted by on February 25, 2005

I haven’t posted much this week, as classes have begun, and I always require more preparation time when I haven’t seen my students yet, and am preparing lectures or tutorials for an unknown audience. The first teaching and tutorial sessions are always a mixed bag – some flat moments; hopefully a few successful interactions to build on over time. But I did enjoy some of the exchanges in a Planning History and Theory tutorial in which the goal is to assist the students in thinking more theoretically about their planning practice – which necessarily means first getting them to think more practically about their planning theory.

In this case, I started the tutorial with the question of whether the students (who have all completed at least a work experience stint to provide them with some practical background in the planning profession) could provide an example of planning theory in relation to their professional work. I would have been happy if someone had provided an example, but I was much happier when no one did – the best reaction, from a pedagogical point of view, is the one I received: students looking back and forth at one another, laughing out loud at the thought that planning theory could have some immediate resonance in their workplace.

We moved fairly quickly to a discussion of actual practice stories – what is right, what is wrong, what they would improve if they could, who (if anyone) had the power to make improvements, and how. Once in this realm of the familiar, the students were articulate, incisive, and insightful. They were also theoretically-savvy – although the trick is to get them to see this.

The goal of the session – which will continue to be the goal of the course – is to communicate that theory isn’t something that philosophers do behind ivory towers: it’s a general proclivity, for which “professional” theorists have developed a specialised vocabulary and set of shared concepts to assist them in elaborating and communicating theoretical ideas.

So, every time a student says, “This is how x works”, they have generated a theory.

Every time one says, “This is how x ought to work”, they have generated a critical theory.

(Self-reflexive critical theory is probably a bit more specialised – it’s a bit harder to find a spontaneously-generated practice story where someone says, “I believe that x ought to work this way, and my belief can be explained by the following historical or social potentials generated within my own social context.” But anything is possible… 😉 )

The goal will be to keep pushing that theory really is this basic, and to get the students to keep this in mind as they read academic theorists, so that they grasp how these theorists are actually engaged with their own practice stories (however technical and abstract their descriptions of them), and so that the students can then interrogate the usefulness or shortcomings of these theorists with reference to practice stories and counter-theories of their own.

City Planning, Courses, Critical Theory, Teaching

Forced Relations

Leave a comment Posted by on February 18, 2005

I have been reading Manuel Castells’ The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., 2000. In this post, I don’t intend to undertake a systematic and comprehensive review of Castells’ ambitious work, but I would like to comment on Castells’ historical periodisation, and the theoretical presuppositions that appear to underlie it.

Early in the work, Castells outlines his basic theoretical framework, distinguishing it from post-industrial theory, and situating it against a broadstrokes account of the historical relationship between the state and technological development. I’ll quote Castells’ description of his project at length (p. 14-15):

This book studies the emergence of a new social structure, manifested in various forms, depending on the diversity of cultures and institutions throughout the planet. This new social structure is associated with the emergence of a new mode of development, informationalism, historically shaped by the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production towards the end of the twentieth century.

The theoretical perspective underlying this approach postulates that societies are organized around human processes structured by historically determined relationships of production, experience, and power. Production is the action of humankind on matter (nature) to appropriate it and transform it for its benefit by obtaining a product, consuming (unevenly) part of it, and accumulating surplus for investment, according to a variety of socially determined goals. Experience is the action of human subjects on themselves, determined by the interaction between their biological and cultural identities, and in relationship to their social and natural environment. It is constructed around the endless search for fulfillment of human needs and desires. Power is that relationship between human subjects which, on the basis of production and experience, imposes the will of some subjects upon others by the potential or actual use of violence, physical or symbolic. Institutions of society are built to enforce power relationships existing in each historical period, including the controls, limits, and social contracts achieved in power struggles.

So here we essentially have three very familiar categories – translations of the economy-civil society-state triad that seems to permeate the self-understanding of capitalist societies and, not coincidentally, appears as a core analytical concept in the works of many social theorists (Habermas’ three orientations for communicative action provide another example). After defining these concepts, Castells continues in a more explicitly Marxist vein (p. 15-16):

The product of the production process is socially used under two forms: consumption and surplus. Social structures interact with production processes by determining the rules for the appropriation, distribution, and uses of the surplus. These rules constitute modes of production, and these modes define social relationships of production, determining the existence of social classes that become constituted as classes through their historical practice. The structural principle under which surplus is appropriated and controlled characterizes a mode of production.

So here we have them: the forces and relations of production.

Castells uses these concepts to explain why he believes the emergence of new forms of information technologies *should* yield a qualitatively new historical period (which he analyses under the term “mode of development”), as well as to explain divergences between states and regions within historical periods. Castells thus tries to account for technological influence on society, and especially on culture, without invoking a reductionist technological determinism. His path is nevertheless a very familiar one within Marxist theory, relying on the concept that technology serves as a driving force within history, generating potentials that are then either hindered or facilitated by social relations.

There are a number of paths into a critique of these concepts – Castells is a nuanced and thorough theorist, and he raises and address many potential problems himself. In some ways, for me, it was watching the ways in which Castells strains against the limitations of the forces-and-relations-of-production framework – the ways in which he makes points that surpass what his analytical framework can easily grasp – that prompted me to write this post.

I have to admit that I always find the forces-and-relations-of-production rubric very frustrating – not that there aren’t interesting things that have been done, and could still potentially be done, with it. But it still misses what I believe were the most interesting questions Marx posed. I realise that it’s always problematic to attempt to divine Marx’s “true intent”, and I realise that the forces-and-relations-of-production approach is probably the dominant way to read Marx’s work. But it seems to me the forces-and-relations-of-production reading entails a really unfortunate flattening of Marx’s work – a flattening that is problematic, not because it misinterprets Marx, but because it sidesteps what seem to me to be fundamental questions for any contemporary critical theory.

Leaving Castells aside for the moment, the forces-and-relations-of-production account assumes that what motivated Marx’s theory was the desire to reveal the existence of class domination – that the primary critical goal of Marx’s work was to demonstrate that, in spite of its idealistic rhetoric of equality and freedom, bourgeois society was in fact characterised by its dark underbelly of class domination. In this reading, Marx’s intellectual achievement was to reveal the existence of class domination that bourgeois society denied – thus empowering the working class to grasp its true historical potential and achieve emancipation. This is the textbook reading of Marx (usually supplemented by the claim that Marx believed that bourgeois class domination would necessarily be overthrown by the workings of capitalism itself – with or without “agency”, depending on the theoretical tendency), and has made its way, with variations, into a wide range of Marxist-inspired theories. What interests me for present purposes is the vision of social critique inherent in this interpretation.

This vision of social critique – one that sees the primary purpose of social criticism as revealing that domination exists, and demonstrating how dominant discourses and ideologies can work to conceal awareness of domination – is actually quite common in various theoretical traditions, from the forms of Marxism discussed here, through to postmodernist approaches. I don’t contest that this sort of critical unveiling or deconstruction is an important task – I argue only that this is not the only possible way to approach social critique, and that it risks a systematic blindness to certain kinds of critical questions that can be important for a social critic to ask.

Moving back to forces and relations of production: while this reading of Marx has been incredibly productive for political movements and academic analysis, I think it misses a central point: I believe that what interested Marx was not revealing the *existence* of class domination (I suspect he thought the existence of class domination was rather self-evident), but instead explaining how, *given* the self-evident existence of class domination, bourgeois society could still find the *rhetoric* of liberty and equality *socially persuasive*. In other words, I suspect that Marx was primarily trying to explain how you could get these very strange, self-contradictory statements like the classic formulation by Rousseau: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains!” If empirical observation so easily reveals the ubiquitous existence of the chains, then isn’t it peculiar that there is such a widespread belief in the existence of “natural” freedom?

It may be that I am wrong in this reading of Marx – certainly I wouldn’t be the first to read something into his text that isn’t there… But I will say that, if this *isn’t* the question Marx was trying to answer, it should have been 😉 More importantly, I believe that similar questions should be at the top of the agenda for critical theorists today. And, unfortunately, while theories grounded in analyses of the forces and relations of production may be useful for many purposes, I suspect very strongly that they cannot take us to the root of these kinds of questions…

Critical Theory, Political Economy

Public and Private

4 Comments Posted by on February 15, 2005

The past few days, I’ve been reading a set of sociological studies of new suburbs – mainly trying to get my head around methodological issues relating to the use of qualitative data. I’ve found Lyn Richards’ Nobody’s Home: Dreams and Realities in a New Suburb (1990) particularly helpful in clarifying some of the methodological issues with which I’ve been wrestling.

Methodology aside, however, I was struck by a particular passage in which Richards grapples with the issue of how researchers ought to deal with dichotomies such as the notion of public and private spheres. Her summary of the issue, and of the conceptual and methodological quandaries that remain even after critiques have been taken into account, is worth quoting at length, for the analytical frameworks she considers, as well as, I would argue, for a significant alternative framework she does not pursue.

Richards summarises the historical application of the concept of public and private spheres by both conventional and feminist researchers, and then notes (p. 97-98):

This dichotomy has become a fascination in the literature, and the number of references questioning it must surely now exceed those applying it unquestioningly. Indeed the sources most commonly cited and criticized for the promotion of that dichotomy never presented it as an accurate description of anyone’s worlds, let alone women’s. Thinking in terms of ‘two worlds’ has been attacked as a myth obscuring the reality of the state’s invasion of the home, the real and changing interpenetration of family and work in women’s lives, women’s vulnerability in private ‘havens’, and the reality of make power. Critics have questioned the application of the dichotomy to the understanding of urban space: ‘The idealized opposition of female, domestic, private, often suburban worlds and male, productive, public, usually urban worlds does not really describe the works of many people.’ Nor does it assist in understanding the no-man’s land between family and paid work, the ‘non-residential domestic sphere’ that occupies much of women’s lives and is also always changing, or the ways ‘her’ privacy was always experienced in interaction with the public world. Rather, some have argued, women are ‘positioned at the intersection of two social worlds’; the ‘boundary role’ is hers, not his. Empirical studies of women’s ‘incorporation’ in men’s work and of rural settings have clearly shown the dichotomy just does not make sense of the data.

So why do discussions of the dichotomy persist? Three reasons seem likely, all themes that will recur throughout this book. First, while the distinction of public and private spear-headed a critique on the traditional family, there have been few critical studies of that family form. The studies that query the assumption that the family is a private world are all of anomalous families – mothers on welfare, black families, ministers’ wives and rural town life! A suspicion remains that the hard core of the nuclear family is still home to the private haven, and that suspicion is maintained in the critique of suburbia.

Secondly, the dichotomy is seen as not only misleading but dangerous. Like the 1960s debate over conflict and consensus approaches in sociology, it risks becoming an attack on straw theories. Nobody ever seriously suggested that society was characterized only by consensus. But there was growing concern that this ruling theoretical approach made it much easier to see consensus than conflict, and that at least some of its proponents in the social sciences and in places of power, might want society to be like that. Somewhat similarly, critics of dualist images of women’s and men’s spheres point to the tendency of dichotomies, even when critically used, to obscure the crucial areas of confusion and change that fit neither sphere. Those who use dualisms to describe women’s place may confirm that placement, especially by policies allocating care for the dependent young or old to ‘the community’, which means women at home.

Thirdly, whether the world is in fact so divided and whether the researcher is helped or blinkered by looking at it that way, some people do. While dichotomies oversimplify women’s experience, they appear in women’s accounts of their lives, and they do make a lot of sense of men’s. However distorting and inappropriate to the patterns of social change, the division of private and public worlds remains the background to family life, the way we interpret its demands. Ideas about women’s and men’s places, duties, opportunities and options seem to confirm the assumption that the private world of the family is and should be segregated from that other real, hard world of work, and that it is and should be maintained by women.

Richards’ account raises an interesting question – to me, one of the most interesting questions about the… anthropology of capitalist society, and one that is not limited to the public-private dichotomy, but can be extended to a series of other dichotomies that characterise capitalism and differentiate it from other forms of social life.

Richards points out that enormous amounts of research demonstrate that the concept of public and private sphere is really not all that good at characterising the fine grain of men’s or women’s everyday life. For many families, the concept obscures far more than it reveals; even families whose lives conform more closely to the concept, still violate it in countless particulars.

And yet, the concept persists. Not simply as an academic concept – although its recurrent appeal to at least some academic researchers is part of the puzzle – but also as part of the self-understanding of the very men and women whose lives the concept seems to fail to decsribe.

In my opinion, Richards asks an incredibly useful question, when she asks to know why this should be the case – why a concept like the division of the world into public (male, paid work) and private (female, family) should persist and appear meaningful, when it apparently corresponds so poorly to the everyday fabric of most men’s and women’s lives.

Richards’ answers, however, suggest that she perceives this question to be about an *imaginary* category – that the issue is one of why we persist in perceiving things a certain way, why we have created and continue to reproduce a discourse of a particular kind, when the “real world” doesn’t really correspond to that category. Having posed the question in this form, she then argues essentially that there are internal academic and political reasons the category persists (explanation #2), and that the category may also persist because it’s a reasonable approximation in broad strokes terms of the lives of many families (explanations #1 & #3).

I would argue that there is another, unexplored alternative: the possibility that elements of the public-private dichotomy are *real abstractions* – that elements of the public-private dichotomy actually are real, (albeit historically generated and therefore potentially able to be transformed) *social* dimensions of capitalist society. Understanding which elements of the dichotomy are real abstractions can then assist with better understanding the more ideological aspects of the public-private dichotomy – identifying ideological elements that are more easily contested and criticised from within a capitalist context, from elements that would be very difficult to transform without a fundamental reorganisation of our society.

This is not a point I can possibly develop in full here, but I can give a general indication of how I’m thinking of the problem.

For those not familiar with the concept of a “real abstraction”, there are a few ways of getting into the concept. Some of Richards’ explanations for the public-private dichotomy rely on the notion of a conceptual abstraction, or a generalisation, from everyday experience – where the argument is that people look at all these instances of an object – say, a horse – and, from those diverse and individual and variable experiences their minds generalise an abstract concept – like, “horseness”. “Horseness” then might be seen as representing a truer (ideal) reality than our everyday world, or as a rough, imperfect, conceptual approximation good enough that we can “make do” with it, e.g., to navigate through social situations or, alternatively, as cultural constructs, where “culture” is tacitly understood as random or arbitrary. The key issue is that, in such a framework, conceptual abstractions are formed in the mind, and are only generalisations from or approximations of what is (tacitly or explicitly) perceived as the more concrete reality of the “outside” (social or natural) world.

A “real abstraction” is a form of perception or thought that, while historically and socially specific, is not arbitrary and does not reside solely in the mind, but is instead necessarily suggested by some aspect of how society has organised itself – it reflects that fact that there is some dimension of social practice that really does function in the way that the abstraction describes (even if the abstraction can then take on a bit of a life of its own, being adapted to describe dimensions of social life that are not necessarily related it, becoming laden with implications that are not socially inherent to it, coming to be perceived as naturally human and transhistorical, when it has a definable social and cultural basis, etc.).

In the case of the public/private dichotomy, I would suggest that the “real abstraction” is the real (social) difference within capitalism between value-producing labour – work that participates in the cycle of production-for-accumulation – and (without becoming more precise for the moment in this blog) “everything else”. There is a real (social) distinction acted out between these “two spheres”, a distinction that means, with reference to the drive for accumulation, it is socially plausible to distinguish between the world of work in the sphere of production-for-accumulation, on the one hand, and, for example, the worlds of leisure, of those who (for whatever reason) don’t work in the circuit of accumulation, etc.

Because these sorts of dichotomies are grounded in essential characteristics of capitalist society (essential in the sense that they are definitive – capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism without them), I would argue that they will continue to be generated as long as that social form persists. They are not purely conceptual distinctions; they are socially meaningful – they are the forms of perception and thought that correspond to the forms of practice that characterise an important dimension of our shared social life.

However, because this real abstraction entails social practices of perception and thought – which are still available to us when we perceive and interact with all dimensions of our social and natural experience, and not limited to those dimensions of capitalist practice that entrain them – these forms of perception and thought tend to be… portable. They are thus available to be applied to other areas, to be misrecognised as a natural characteristic of human consciousness (there is more to this last, but I can’t develop the point fully here), to be reinforced and overdetermined by other forms of perception and thought, to be laden with moral or practical “baggage” that, while nonessential to capitalist reproduction, derives a broader social plausibility precisely because it rides, parasitically, on the forms of perception and thought that are integral to capitalist reproduction, etc.

I’m very conscious of how ungrounded I’ll have to leave this discussion. For the moment, I’ll have to make do with pointing out that I believe this line of analysis can be expanded into a productive exploration of the way in which concepts like the public-private dichotomy can combine forms of perception and thought that do inhere in capitalism and are reproduced by and through the perpetuation of that social form, with other elements that are more “parasitic” on these core forms of perception and thought, and therefore, depending on the state of historical contestation *within* capitalism, may wax, wane, be created, or disappear entirely.

What I’m calling here “parasitic” discourses interact with capitalism in complex ways: they articulate capitalism in specific ways and can help to disguise its essential and nonessential aspects (think, for example, of the vast sociological literature on how the separation of the workplace from the home was an essential feature of capitalism – confusions like this then encourage the recurrent premature death-knells of capitalism, as nonessential features fall away over time, and this falling away comes to be perceived as fundamental transformation).

Finally, it’s possible that a number of both progressive and “regressive” discourses become successful, under capitalism, precisely because they manage to align themselves with sensibilities engendered by capitalism – to articulate social experiences shared because of the overarching capitalist social context, but in a way that resonates with their own ideological drives (drives which would be, reciprocally, shaped through the constant interaction with forms of perception and thought more inherently embedded in capitalist social practices). Exploring this analytical option would provide a way to explore the relationships between capitalism and ideology, while transcending a traditionalist attempt to reduce political viewpoint to class status (and then the inevitable follow-up tomes trying to explain why political viewpoint doesn’t seem to align all that closely to class status – it is possible that this question is… iatrogenic, a problem generated by the limitations of traditional class-based analysis).

To get back to the public-private dichotomy, this kind of analysis would suggest, for example, that there *is* a real (social) distinction made between different types of work (and between work and various non-work activities). This real social distinction relates to the social practices involved in the reproduction of capital, and it does not intrinsically “need” to be gendered, or to have implications for how socially “important” specific activities are regarded in other respects, etc. Yet other kinds of discourses – about gender relations, moral judgments, etc. – may express the forms of perception and thought that arise from capitalist social practices, because these forms of perception and thought are “always already” available. The “familiarity” of these forms of perception and thought may make a gendered, moral, or other discourse seem more plausible at face value. At the same time, these discourses whose plausibility is increased by their resonance with capitalism, may inflect how capitalism itself is perceived, articulated, and understood – clarifying some aspects of capitalist social practice, while obscuring others.

So, for example, the gender role difference between men and women comes to be articulated in light of the real social distinction between labour-for-accumulation and “everything else”, and the “naturalness” of sex difference is reinforced by the “always already” familiar social distinctions (and their associated forms of perception and thought) acted out in the course of capitalist reproduction; the pre-existence of sex difference, in turn, can assist in naturalising and transhistoricising social distinctions that are historically grounded in capitalist social practice… (While at the same time, other dimensions of capitalist reproduction may entrain practices of perception and thought that denaturalise or call into question these discourses – while supporting and engendering discourses of their own…)

But I suspect this is really all too much for a blog entry… so I’ll stop here.

Critical Theory

WWJD???

Leave a comment Posted by on February 12, 2005

Last night I read Marion Maddox’s For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics 2001. Maddox researched the work in 1999, during her time as an Australian Parliamentary Fellow, and her work include interviews with a number of federal politicians in the 38th and 39th Parliaments, discussing their personal religious beliefs and the relationship between those beliefs and their understanding and performance of their political duties, as well as the relationship between religion and specific political issues.

The book is worth a longer discussion than I’ll provide here – Maddox provides some subtle and interesting readings of how religious and secular discourses interact in complex ways in several recent Australian political debates, and I’ll no doubt want to examine some of those readings more deeply in the near future. While Maddox is respectful and earnest in her conduct and presentation of her interview results, I couldn’t avoid a certain jaw-dropping reaction to the following comments from Ross Cameron.

First on the GST (p. 142):

People are entitled to the fruits of their labour, so we need minimal taxation… Every impost on capital reduces the opportunities of those with the least, so we need to remove restraints on capital. Most church leaders are slaves to defunct economic thinking — and those who suffer most are the poor. At the deep inner core of the left is the belief that profit is morally wrong. But the two most offensive parables are the talents and the labourers in the vineyard. The parable of the labourers is challenging the view that says, ‘You shouldn’t be allowed any more than me, especially if you got it on the basis of a privilege I don’t enjoy’. I was giving a talk to secondary students a while ago, and one of them asked a question to the effect, ‘Isn’t it immoral that Company X posted Y billion dollars profit this year?’ They were saying, ‘Shouldn’t there be a limit on profits?’ That’s the kind of thinking that Christ was challenging.

I have to confess that it hadn’t previously occurred to me that unlimited corporate profits were what one might call a New Testament priority. The New Testament parables he cites (I’ve linked to translations for those interested) are, I think it’s fair to say, frequently interpreted in a different light… And I suspect that Cameron’s interpretation would have intrigued Max Weber. But, as Cameron says, perhaps that’s just another example of the kind of thinking Christ was challenging…

The other exchange that caught my eye was the following, initially on indigenous rights (p. 273-74):

Cameron:

There probably is some interventionist role for government. Two hundred years of suffering – and when Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall you can’t unscramble the egg. It’s the hardest policy area and greatest government failure since settlement… Indigenous leaders want their values respected – but they are values based in a nomadic economy with no room for the accumulation of capital. So, under their values, there can be no public hospitals, no public health, no literacy, no numeracy –

Marion Maddox:

But you told me earlier you don’t want us to have public hospitals?

Ross Cameron:

Well, no, it’s true that I see public ownership as the less desirable option. But what I mean is, the Indigenous leadership has selected land as the ground on which to fight – largely successfully – but is reliance on land empowering in the 21st Century?

Religion

Tilting at Castles

Leave a comment Posted by on February 10, 2005

Reading through different local histories of the City of Whittlesea, I’ve found an interesting constellation of issues running through competing accounts of the construction of this strange structure called “Bear’s Castle”, located near what would become the Yan Yean Reservoir:

Some rumours existed that the old ‘castle’ was the scene of conflict between the whites and the blacks but it never was. There was never any mention, at any time, by my parents of any trouble.

They were treated very kindly by Mr Bear and they loved him. He marked out a portion of land for a burial ground and several graves are there. My mother knew the exact spot, but as it has no mark it cannot be located.

When the work began on Ryder’s Swamp and the reservoir began to take shape, the blacks gradually went back over the hill towards Toolangi and Lilydale.

in E.M. Duffy Reminiscences of Whittlesea 1971 p. 5

Michael Jones’ Nature’s Plenty: A History of the City of Whittlesea (1992) provides a hint of what the “rumours” might have been (p. 11):

Henry Harrison referred to John Pinney Bear as having built Bear’s Castle in the early 1840s, claiming that it was built to protect the pastoralists from the Aboriginal threat. Harrison certainly provides evidence of substantial fear of Aborigines in this early period.

Aside from the cryptic reference to rumours, EM Duffy’s account effaces this potential explanation for the construction of the castle. Instead, Duffy provides a more frivolous reason for its construction (p. 4-5):

In the early 1840s, John Bear came to Victoria and took up a tract of land, including some of the area which is now the Yan Yean Reservoir. On his death, the land came to his son, Mr Thomas Bear and he had sheep and cattle which he brought from his other holdings at different periods. He was very rarely in the district, as his time was fully taken up by his other interests. On one of these occasions he left his sheep, etc., in charge of a shepherd he had brought with him. And on leaving, was asked by the shepherd what he could do in his spare time. There were no neighbours to visit or any recreation to be had, and he was beginning to feel very lonely. Mr Bear jokingly said, ‘Find the highest hill and build me a castle’. Whether the shepherd was really lonely or took the remark literally we will never know, but he did start to build, for when Mr Bear returned he found the ‘castle’ a building of mud and daub half finished. Mr Bear was greatly amused and he told the shepherd that he may as well finish it. And finish it the shepherd did.

So we have two accounts of the original motives behind the construction of Bear’s “Castle”: that it was built as a folly (an account repeated by other local historians, and cited by the Heritage Council of Victoria, or that it was built with a specific purpose – one which continued to be “rumoured” even in periods when this purpose might provoke some guilt, particularly for someone like Duffy, whose own family worked for the owner of the castle and even lived in the structure for a time.

Both accounts rely on testimony from earlier times: Duffy is presumably relying on family tradition, and rests her faith on the fact that her parents would have said something if the (unstated) “rumours” had been true. She then goes out of her way to argue that, far from being hostile to indigenous interests, Mr Bear was a friend to the local indigenous community – although her example (providing grounds for a graveyard) doesn’t quite seem sufficient to explain the apparently overwhelming emotional reaction of that community (who “love” Bear in her account). Her account does raise interesting questions about whether there was any sort of ongoing relationship between Bear and an indigenous community: employment? acknowledged right of movement through the land? It also raises the question of the impact on indigenous communities when the reservoir finally covered over existing lands and they “gradually went back over the hill towards Toolangi and Lilydale”. (J. W Payne cites sources indicating that the area covered by reservoir would have been an initiation site – see his The Plenty: A Centennary History of the Whittlesea Shire 1975 p. 8. The construction of the reservoir would have destroyed this activity.)

Jones takes his information from an autobiography written by Henry Harrison in 1923 (The Story of an Athlete), as well as from a series of travel articles published in The Age on 21 May 1887 (p.11). His sources are therefore a bit closer historically to the time the building was constructed, and at the least reflect the perception of an indigenous threat in the popular imagination.

Bear’s Castle aside, the local histories quote several significant passages that testify to the psychology of European perceptions of the indigenous population. In this vein, there are a number of passages that follow the general structure of: a large number of indigenous people assemble near a white settlement for an undetermined reason; the white family becomes afraid; something happens (often a noise generated by a technology that could be constructed as alien to the indigenous population, but sometimes just a child crying out or any other loud noise), and the crowd disperses. These passages have a ritualistic quality about them – a talisman that both expresses and wards off fear of the indigenous Other in European communities. An example is presented in the following account from Payne (p. 8):

In 1854, a large crowd, including many Aboriginals, gathered at Morang for the opening of a flour mill powered by steam. All went well until someone pulled the whistle cord. The Aboriginals fled in panic, convinced an evil spirit haunted the place.

Jones provides a similar cite (p. 9, quoting Harrison):

The blacks in that district belonged to the Yarra Yarra tribe, and were considered dangerous at first. But only on two occasions do I remember our having an alarm through the blacks. The first time, hundreds of them surrounded the house – the quadrangle was full of them – and, as all the station hands were away for the day, my father was the only man about. At first it was thought best for the household to keep perfectly quiet, and we all assembled in the nursery, as it was the largest room in the house. The blacks evidently thought there were only women and children at home, for they became very cheeky, knocking on the doors with their waddies and sticks. My father, who was rather hot-tempered, could not stand that, and suddenly rushed out on them with his gun in his hand; and they were evidently so surprised at the sight of him that they disappeared in the most miraculous manner. In two or three minutes there was not one of them to be seen. But we could hear a great jabbering down at the potato patch (a short distance from the house), and there we could see some of the lubras digging up potatoes with their yam sticks. These were always carried about by them, and were six or seven feet long, about as thick as a man’s wrist, with a sharp point at one end.

In both passages, the initial fear is one of being outnumbered – of masses overwhelming the isolated settlers. Once this fear is discharged by a loud noise or startling sight, the indigenous are represented as comical figures – fearing something no European migrant would fear, “jabbering”, etc. (Although the second passage testifies to some residual fear remaining – ending on the threatening image of the yam sticks – “as thick as a man’s wrist, with a sharp point at one end” – a somewhat evocatively gendered image, which one can’t help juxtaposing with the earlier framing fear that the danger seemed greater when it appeared that only women and children were at home…)

Miscellaneous

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