...blog purpose here...

symbolic v. interested action

Wed, 3 Aug 2011 12:49:18 -0600

For a moment there, I thought cultural sociology had been led into a trap. If the same “democratic codes” are used both for and against the same referent, then don’t interests triumph over values and symbols. Culture actually doesn’t influence the motivation of actors, rather it used selectively by them for whatever purposes they may already have.

But Alexander’s answer to this objection was in a footnote:

The indexical relation between the codes as “signs” and the world of “things” is thus as conventional as the link between Saussaure’s “acoustic image” and “concept.”

The relationship between symbols and referents is itself another cultural convention not strictly derived from economic, political interests. Perhaps, “interests,” i.e. the practical strategies of actors for achievement are framed themselves.

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national feelings

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:58:22 -0600

As I have slowly realized through my three years in graduate sociology, the word ‘nation-state’ is a loaded term. The state is an administrative police apparatus but the ‘nation’ is a collective imagined self-representation of the population. This is the main legacy of Benedict Anderson’s book on the nation as an imagined community.

Silly me for not realizing this sooner, but the ‘nation’ would be one of the best examples of a collective cognitive-affective complex. The nation creates feelings of pride, feelings of worth toward sacrosanct values, and feelings of solidarity with strangers among the population. It is a collective representations, socially shared and socially felt.

In other words, I have an easy empirical example to back up a theoretical dissertation on cognitive-affective linkages in culture. If Wayne Baker is right, the culture war debate leads directly into the emotional needs of America to sustain its national image. A collective psychology of American religious exceptionalism just might work.

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American anti-institutionalism

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:05:34 -0600

American modernity is one complex bundle of tensions and contradictions. Law is secular, as in the Constitution, but American politics and civil society is infused with religion. It is commonly noted that the secularization thesis of the modernization paradigm does not apply to the United States. The state subsidiarism of the U.S. is likewise very distinctive, and perhaps closer in spirit to India than to European states. Sovereignty is shared in America according to federalist, not national principles. The result is strange legal inconsistencies across states, like some legalizing same-sex marriage while others continue to prohibit it. The legacy of state sovereignists is being invoked for every social issue in the current Republican presidential campaigning.

There are also contradictions between American democracy and the police state, though these may be more widespread in Europe as well. Here I am thinking of combining Foucault’s history of police governmentality with the remarkable public sphere of dissent in American civil society. The latter would indicate a profound socialization of democracy, qua vocalizing disagreement with the say, federalist administration in the 1790s, while at the same time, the Sedition Laws were being passed and the Whiskey Rebellion was being used as an excuse for centralizing the military.

The Whiskey Rebellion exposes another tension at the heart of American modernity since the ratification of the Constitution. The vibrant social movement of anti-government re-incarnates itself through American history, from populist anti-Federalism in rural discontent, to arguments for abolition surrounding the Civil War, to the current death of socialist/welfare democracy thanks to a anti-government fundamentalist power bloc in the House. It would be hasty to dismiss the potential of the antigovernment thread for good or evil though. Deriving its resonance from the radical spiritualism of the Second Great Awakening, anti-government inspiration became aligned with the anti-slavery abolitionists, thus a moral force of progressive social change.

Whether or not the anti-government impulse of American civil society is progressive or not most likely depends on the legal circumstance. In cases where de-legalizing and anti-litigation campaigns serve a moral cause, as in abolishing slavery, the impulse is much more radical than when it is devoted to abolishing the last remnants of an economic democracy. In cases like theses, it is clear that the animosity toward any government social intervention fuses with a hatred of democracy itself. Not because they prefer a different regime, but because they resent any intrusion into their privatized enclaves of personal religion and defensive individualism. Another axis of American modernity then, first articulated by Tocqueville: between individual retreat and democratic responsibility.

What we are witnessing today in the latest rotation of American civil society and public discourse, is the merging of the anti-government spirit with the increase in privatization-configured psyches. The result is an angry anti-institutionalism that flows into civil society, speaks collectively, only for the sake of an imagined anarchic atomism they claim as their preferrable world.

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in bello #5

Thu, 7 Jul 2011 14:31:09 -0600

Inspecting a copy of Kimberly Hutchings’ Global Ethics as a possible textbook, I was refreshed on the just war tradition and its contemporary advocates and turns. Reading the ethics of war was made vivid by a truly timely documentary last night called The Tillman Story, on the most likely accidental death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan by friendly fire and its cover-up.

Being interviewed, the director Amir Bar-Lev elaborates on one of the in bello ethical realities of contemporary military conflict:

Interviewer: Another disturbing fact for me, was this notion that if the soldiers are gun crazy, they'll fire at anything. It explains the high level of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, which in turn has caused the opposition to grow stronger.

Bar-Lev: Right. What about the compound? They run out of bullets firing which is a violation of the Geneva Convention to fire at the civilian houses. In my mind what this film is about is the myths we tell ourselves to make war more palatable. One of the myth that has been around, not so long ago was the myth of precision warfare since the last Gulf war. This smart bombs that go into a window and killing only the terrorists. You can sit back and blame the government for it but they tell us and we want to hear it because it makes us feel better about ourselves. That's part of the story that it's a myth.

A floating explanation of the manslaughter throughout the documentary is the psychology of guns. Namely, the recklessness and irresponsibility that results from scenes of fire-power chaos, and the bio-physical-emotive acceleration of violence. Surely, the psychology of gun-power and gun-usage must be a part of any ethics of war. Interesting that the just war tradition doesn’t take this into account except for its call for the virtue of the intervening belligerent. Or, perhaps just war theory never had to deal with 19-year old hyper-masculine Americans when it was theologizing back in Constantine’s day.

Hutchings talks about care ethics and the feminist critique of gender assumptions/coding in war, but she doesn’t mention the over-violent cultures of masculinity that cannot maturely control the usage of guns. Perhaps the cultural-technology of masculinity is the riskiest weapon of all. These are some need reflections to accompany this country’s July 4th festival militarism.

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the problem with millenarians

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:18:00 -0600

It is not irrational to be a millenarian today. Science confirms that the human species is in deep shit due to human-caused global warming, which many think to be more and more apparent in the weather events of today, an open book of our impeding doom.

We may all be millenarians, but what is not necessary is the fatalistic worldview that often accompanies this. Many scientific millenarians can avoid the fatalism because they are deeply committed to technological and policy solutions to climate change problems. Fatalism is the belief that environmental destruction is inexorable and irremediable. Fatalism is religious, it puts the human destiny out of human hands.

And in doing so it misunderstands how society works. For one, it under-estimates the institutional response to environmental perils, or perils of any kind for that matter. Its existential nexus is the raw individual facing problems too large to fix, an individual who well realizes the futility of individual solutions. Modern society however is a complex organization of organizations, some delegated to measure, predict and prepare for possible threats against human life. Governments, for instance, are held responsible for warning citizens of coming risks to life, and they have a variety of departments and centers for research committed to just this (c.f. Wuthnow).

Furthermore, the nature of society is its unpredictability: doom or salvation may come from unforeseen sources. Just by being millenarians we may contribute to eliminating the cause of the our millenial anxiety. Society is creative because humans are creative animals inclined to problem-solving. Opinion polls go to show that Americans are not in denial about global warming; if anything, they carry out their normal lives, like most people on the globe, because they trust their organizational contexts and are well aware of the futility of individual solutions to global problems. This should make us millenarians sociologists, not fatalists.

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social substitutes

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 08:59:01 -0600

Our generation has grown up with social substitutes as best friends. We learn how to socialize through movies, how to build community through facebook, and how to become an influential person through e-mails and blogs.

The critics of social technology are wrong to ground their judgment on a Heideggerian dismissal of techne. The introduction and infiltration of new technologies throughout our social lives should not be morally upsetting; it is not even new.

Social substitutes are how new technologies are used cognitively and emotively by individuals to feel connected and to learn customs and habits that they then deploy in case of face-to-face interaction. It is a way of socializing and maintaining a minimal co-presence without actual face-to-face communication. Instead, the communication occurs through a podcast while driving, youtube videos before falling asleep, watching more movies as their convenience of access increases (2 AM? no problem if you got streaming).

My worry is that social substitutes are an especially pernicious trap for those of us who have detached from local social ties, as migratory capitalism requires. Like a priest, we have cut ourselves off from family and community, face-to-face social communication/connection, but we transcend the likely handicap of this action thanks to social substitutes. You can talk news, sex, and weather with digitally available voices and a set of headphones. We respond to our voluntary yet structural capitalist anomie with a heavier emotional reliance upon social substitutes. They are genuinely social sources of social information, yet they are more addictive and available than face-to-face interaction. Digital socializing can become an affective drain that corrupts our psyche’s ability to resist (it is not necessarily so though as if ‘digitization’ were an inherent evil).

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cultural psychology of taxation

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:57:58 -0600

I love this quote by Catherine Rampell in a New York Times article from 2010 on how states were resorting to sin taxes to raise revenue:

“But even if sin taxes exist primarily to balance the budget, they have social value. The debate over enacting a new tax, or hiking an old one, is a window into the country’s changing psyche.”

Isn’t crazy to think that this country actually banned alcohol once? And one of the reasons they legalized it again was the federal revenue from taxing it.

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economic affects

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:13:10 -0600

Making the front page of the New York Times today is an article about debt collectors who have become the emotional perpetuators and victims of flared-up remarks, racial slurring, and aggressive assaults from both parties.

I was struck by the detested figure of the debt collector as the modern day revival of the hated tax collector. Even after the American Revolution, government tax collectors were stalked, extorted and the victims of collective tar-and-feathering on the frontier. Taxation was a political contested tactic for the submission or resistance of newly federal citizens.

Besides the ‘obnoxious’ duty of taking poor peoples’ money, the commonality between then and now is the affective charge of economies: the intensity of resentment and hatred of the debtors; the fear and shame of the collectors. Such economic affects have a level of intensity that can affect the course of political events (the whiskey rebels of 1794; the role of poverty in the Arab spring). Economic desperation is not just an objective class condition. It is also an experience, a shared feeling, an affective energy with building tension that needs release. Events have economic-emotional stimuli, which require a hybrid criticism to avoid bifurcating emotions from economies, property from affects. How can we construct a model of the social objects properly understood as economic affects, perhaps some kind of species of wider affective economies?

In other words, economic action is as emotive as rational. This seems intuitive in a notion of ‘class struggle’ but it applies much more generally to tax compliance or resistance. Besides challenging the dominance of rational action and game theories in economics, this insight also halts a tendency in sociology to separate and categorize entities in such a way to obscure their hybrid nature. The affective dimension of social reality is not a call to deny that reality of class structures or economic recessions (as postmodernists like to do), but rather a call to return to the inseparability of social things.

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The critique of philosophy

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:02:02 -0700

The following need to be carefully distinguished:
Universalism as making defensible claims about human nature, ontologically or pragmatically. From a pragmatic perspective, the project of a human anthropology is defensible when its fallibility is recognized.
Naive Realism as a theory of representation, namely that our ability to make references is unproblematic, that the bridge between language and reality is transparent and not threatened by properties of signification.
Realism lacks a temporal perspective on language (c.f. de Man), i.e. that all statements are always after the fact. We are constantly referencing, but our references do not cross a temporal bridge to the referent. Rather, all references are a creation, or of a new event with a new referent, or better put, a new ‘referencing.’ Critical Realism after Popper is more complex since it acknowledges a gap between description and ontology, thus understanding some of the dilemmas of representation after the linguistic turn.
Foundationalism as the philosophical attempt to legitimate intellectual or political activities. ‘Legitimating’ involves the construction of a meta-discourse or a first-philosophy which is capable of categorically subsuming the social activity to be explained.
Logocentrism as the particular biases of the Western philosophical tradition to objectivist cognitive propositional truth-claims, excluding the performative and emotive dimensions of language and truth-events (c.f. Habermas’s rebuttal to Rorty).
The key question then is whether Habermas’s universalism of inter-subjectivity can be saved from foundationalism and realism. This seems to be the direction of more recent German social thought toward a pragmtically formulated universalism of recognition, needs, creativity, or any other omni-historical feature of the human being (especially in Honneth and Joas).

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Useful Klein

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:40:20 -0600

With Melanie Klein, we again see how profound psychoanalysis can be. From Lacan’s philosophy of difference in castration, from Freud’s overcoming omnipotence as a step in maturity, Klein adds to this resignation toward loss, the need to recognize complexity in the world—i.e. the integration of good and bad in objects, and thus in the self—and the theory of reparation behind sublimation where are play and symbolization can be seen as an attempt to restore the primal good object (of the mother).
Problems? Certainly her theory leads into mother-blame (as with D. Winnicott). She also finds incredibly complex emotions with deep philosophical nuances in the first months of the infant, which seems a little silly. The depressive-position seems incredibly autobiographical, but becomes important with Kristeva’s theory of abjection and feminine despair. On the other hand, the language of ‘positions’ does seem like an improvement over ‘stages’ in Freudian theory for anticipating a more contemporary post-structuralist view of subjectivity as a spatio-temporal position that can be occupied…
In regards to a theory of subjectivity, her account of internalization offers more detail. The baby introjects the good or bad object and this is the basis of subjectivity. One defense toward the introjection of a bad object is splitting, where the bad is then again externalized through the mechanism of projection. Introjection, projection, and then even projective identification, which occurs when the split between good and bad parts of the self is narcissistically project on a love-object and then internalized again in a sort of self-confirmation (I believe even Adorno uses this idea when he writes about the ego-morphic projection of narcissism).
Klein’s’s theory of introjection moves beyond the strictly negative forms of internalization in Sandor Ferenczi or Anna Freud on the introjection of guilt or identification with aggression. Goodness can be internalized and constitutive of the development of the self just as can aggression, absence, and so on. Furthermore, her theory of projection—qua idealization or denigration—could offer a psychic basic for cultural sociology of binary oppositions, especially when constituting in-groups or out-groups.
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