I enjoyed reading Eva's selection from Arne's past postings that do seem
quite relevant to some of the themes that concern us all, especially how
too naive theories can spawn politics that is likely to go awry and fails
to support effective political action.
The original and continuing motivation of all my theoretical work has been
to figure out the possibilities and limits of democratic social
engineering. I have been trying to discover what weaknesses in the
scientific paradigm prevent predictive social theory and to what extent it
is possible to act politically with any reliable sense of the larger scale
and longer term consequences of one's actions. Social movements are not
held together by ideals and goals; people act with them only so long as it
is plausible that our programs of action will produce results. No theory
can long command loyalty if it keeps screwing up. Excuses on its behalf do
not build support, they only comfort diehards and slow attrition.
Good theorists do not buy into Grand Theory, nor do they jettison
everything at once. We try to salvage the bits that still seem viable and
look for new combinations that redefine and bring them a new lease on
usefulness. Good theory is eclectic and opportunistic, like successful
biological systems on all scales.
What struck me most from the reposting of Arne's analysis was the issue of
totalities. Its importance derives from the question For Whom? is this
theory, who is/are the subject/s of and for which social knowledge has
value? It is not just, in Arne and the marxist sources he quotes, for
individual human subjects, but for the proletariat as a collective subject.
And the issue then becomes whether there is, or should be, one totality
(cf. Eugene's note also), on the model of the coherent rational bourgeois
subject (One Truth, One right way to reason, One Unified Self), or many
non-identical, diverse, partly incommensurable collective subjects for whom
and with whom we make theory and history?
I would add that it can't just be about humans; our collective humanity
depends on far more than just our interactions with other human organisms,
as does our collective future.
In chapter 7 of _Textual Politics_ some years ago I pointed to the need to
better theorize a post-democratic politics, by which I mainly meant (1)
confronting the contradiction between the numbers of people with a stake in
the outcome of any decision and the numbers of people who have the time,
interest, and training to carefully examine the alternatives, and (2)
considering the possibility that mass societies are already beyond the
scale at which our present technologies of social organization -- basically
bureaucratic hierarchies -- break down, and that we need some way of
allocating decision-making to the smallest-scale units feasible, and a
separate means of articulating across divergent local policies when needed.
I was arguing against the politics, right and left, of the last two
centuries, which have sought to increase the scale of social organization
with our present technologies by increasing cultural uniformity. I am a
long way yet from having an adequate analysis, much less a political
program, but I do think we need to change both the goals and the strategies
for large-scale social organization. We need to be asking new questions.
It is simply not true that we need to have uniform decisions on matters of
policy for vast numbers of people. That assumption, it seems to me, is just
a cover for the ambitions (whether for power or for honor) of those who
fantasize politically on a scale far larger than is desirable or feasible.
It is not true that societies are held together by common beliefs,
attitudes, and values; we are held together by the fact that we need each
other, and we need diversity far more than we need uniformity. We do not
need new mass movements, we need to break down existing mass institutions.
We need more mosaics and fewer pyramids. We certainly do not need to
replace an ugly pyramid with a pretty one.
Manuel de Landa, in his recent _Thousand Years of Nonlinear History_, cites
a fairly substantial literature which compares the historical effects of
different mixes of pyramidal (control hierarchy) and mosaic (webs, informal
networks) structures, both economic and political in European history, with
some comparisons to non-European cases. It is in some respects fairly
persuasive as a revision of views which have previously seen capitalism as
monolithic, and it emphasizes mixed modes where large-scale organized
control structures, whether cartels, guilds, or states are balanced in
different historical proportions in different sites with more loosely
organized emergent 'market-like' networks for trade and social cooperation
on larger scales. The characteristic contributions of both sorts of
structures are analyzed, and while people may differ in assessing optimal
mixes, there seems to be a fairly robust conclusion that too much
pyramiding ossifies a social system, while increases in the relative
importance of mosaics or loose networks increases adaptability to changing
conditions. There are also timescale effects, not fully analyzed that I
have seen so far, regarding internal and external rates of change, and the
rates of flows of goods, money, ideas, people, and practices. (The spirit
of these analyses -- which are not just de Landa's, I am referring more to
the sources he cites -- comes much closer to Braudel than to Wallerstein.)
I will be interested to see how well de Landa can integrate his
neo-materialist political economy with a theory of the role of culture/
semiotic artifacts in ecosocial systems. He certainly seems to be following
a parallel track in some respects to what I am trying to do.
I don't think marxist political theory can be fairly evaluated solely on
the basis of its failure to foster either longterm mass political movements
based on class alone or effective and progressive large-scale social
change. I think its critique of capitalism was brilliant and remains in
many respects relevant, and that its philosophical shift towards
materialism, historicism, and an emphasis on the role of practice has
flowered throughout the social sciences in the past century. Meanwhile
history has not stood still; the social conditions of women in advanced
societies and of non-European people globally have changed enough that
their perspectives can now be used to radically reform social theory.
Scientific analysis of complex systems has provided new tools and concepts,
revealing qualitatively new organizational possibilities and problematizing
previously unchallenged assumptions. Semiotic analysis enables us to trace
the role of discourse and representation in social processes precisely
enough to find new ways in which it is linked to political economy and
everyday practice. Political theory is applied social science; it must
mirror its changing object as it changes to serve the evolving and
emergently new collective subjects of history. Old evils remain, but new
theoretical tools are needed to guide our struggle against them.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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