We take this paradigm so much for granted. Stanton Wortham made
some comments here before about the use of a notion like
'commodification' in social-cultural analysis. We all have a sense
of what the commodification of labor means, and how it becomes
alienated from the laborer, the producer ... but Eugene's sentence
put me in mind that it is doubly alienated from the consumer or
the employer. Somehow the 'division of labor' crosses a threshold
in large-scale, institution-mediated societies like ours ...
we are no longer closely enough connected to all the others
with whom we 'collaborate' (not in Eugene's sense, but 'objectively'),
so as to feel that we are even indirectly participants in their
activities, their communities. We benefit from the labor of so
many others, and we 'compensate them' through our labor (in an
unfair market, of course), but we are no longer 'comrades'. On
the scale of our society there are many face-to-face communities
where people _can_ co-engage as persons (and usually do), but the
labor effects on which we depend have grown so massive that
the whole is too big to function as this kind of community. Instead
it has institutionalized itself. Now we have a kind of 'doubling'
of social relations: direct and role-mediated, often occurring in
the same places and at the same times.
What disturbs us, I think, is our dilemma: we don't real feel
quite right about treating people just as occupants of roles
in our institutions, especially when we are face-to-face and
_could_ engage with them more fully as people, but if we did
that we believe that our institutions would no longer function
as designed, and without them we would be deprived of the
benefits of the many labors of distant others.
There seem to be
degrees of alienation in institutional social interaction.
A family is after all an institution, there are conventional
roles and responsibilities, and even married people can treat
each other as 'role-incumbents' in the stereotypes of the
modern family rather than fully engaging with one another
'collaboratively' (in Eugene's sense). Even lovers can fall into
this trap. But as we are socialized into participation in
ever-larger scale institutions (elementary schools, high schools,
universities, global corporations, national governments, etc.),
we find relations within them more and more extremely alienated
(official relations, that is; we overlay these with informal
relations to make life tolerable, and grease the poor design
of institutional operations).
While within institutions some tend to have the power to direct
the collective labor of the whole (and so opportunities to
exploit the labor of others), all of us who benefit from
institutions and especially to the extent we are dependent on
them, are locked into the dilemma of scale-and-alienation.
If this is suggestive of a cultural-historical-developmental
view of socialization into institutions and alienated participation
in activity, it might also be a piece of the puzzle Peter
Smagorinsky posed about militias. While I have no doubt that
many members are the dupes of people entraining their labor
into smaller-scale institutions (militia groups), and some of
the leaders are just driven power the need for more power (i.e.
by fear and insecurity), and the followers by a different
need for security (a leader to take responsibility for me),
still I suspect there is a core of truth to their ideology.
They oppose the alienated political forms of our largest-scale
institutions (the US government), which they see as tyranical
because it cannot operate on a human scale, cannot engage with
us as real people, human to human, cannot be trusted therefore.
I really don't doubt they are right in this, and a part of me
agrees with the authors of the US constitution that the right
to keep and bear arms (i.e. to defend yourself against a
tyrannical government, not to shoot deer or chase trespassers)
really is important. Of course the technologies of force have
changed a lot since 1790, and political will more than force
of arms is at stake in confrontations between modern governments
and their people. The farmer with his rifle is now more a
romantic symbol than a real bulwark against tyrrany. But still,
there is a certain symbolic value, in the eyes of a government,
of an armed populace, a prickly populace, touchy about our
liberties.
So I don't wonder too much how someone could develop into a
militia member or sympathizer. They are a reaction-formation,
as most modern social movements are, created by the ever-
increasing scale of modern institutional alienatingness. They
focus on the biggest target, and their suspicions may be
misplaced this year, but may not be misplaced in all years.
But unfortunately they do not in this way escape from the trap.
When they bomb a government building, they are treating it, and
the people inside, purely as a role-occupant in their own
institutional practices: an enemy, The Government ... not real
people, with families and hobbies, who might agree with many of
their goals, or who are children, playing, sleeping ... And if
they went into the building to 'engage' with people, to offer
them love and fellowship (we get movements like this too, less
often)... and persuade them to stop being burocrats ... what
would happen? and why? A very few would listen and agree, most
would slip behind the shield of their institutional roles and
disengage ... because they are dependent on the institution,
and maybe occasionally because they think they are doing good
in their jobs (directing institutional effects to good ends).
Among them would be security guards and administrators, who
would engage only as role-occupants, and that is how the
institution defends itself. Otherwise it wouldn't have
survived this long.
Peter wanted a moral dimension to the analysis. I think my last
posting was more than long enough on the subject of how to
evaluate our values. I would apply that analysis here, but in
perhaps a surprising way. One might think that institutional
values, whether of governments or militia groups, would represent
those of a 'higher level' organization relative to the individual,
and so take precedence ... except that they don't meet the
conditions I set out. Militia groups tend to be very socially
homogeneous, and sample only a small range of the diversity of
the ecosocial system. Governments are more diverse in the
membership of all those doing burocratic work, but they are not
allowed to act according to this range of habitus. They have
to conform to institutional roles, and those roles have generally
been defined out of the values and dispositions, again, of a
very narrow range of total social diversity.
So one has to look, in both cases, to a really larger system for
values ... this is a kind of limit of 'relativism' for a cultural
approach. We can believe that every community that lasts very
long has some value as a 'culture' and that its internal values
make good sense to its members, equally good to what ours make
for us. But we do not have to believe that every community of
practice, every system of practices engaged in by some community,
every set of values informing those practices, is equally functional
and 'good for' the still larger ecosocial systems in which these
communities and practices are embedded.
I suspect that if one tried the approach in my last post for
leveraging oneself in/through a group 'outside' the limitations
of one's own point of view, and evolving through the diversity of
the group, an emergent point of view that was sensitive to more
of the whole of the larger system, then one could indeed judge
miltias and governments and ruling ideologies. Not trans-historically,
not absolutely and universally, but also not exactly according
to the values one started out with. Militia members should participate
in the 'evaluation team', and klan-watchers, and an FBI agent,
et al., but allowing themselves to be pulled out of limited
institutional roles, yet inevitably contributing the viewpoints
from their lives to the shifts in values all of us would make,
eventually, from full engagement in such a group.
Of course this is not meant as a practical procedure, a sort of
trial by jury. The process needed would take a long time, it
would not happen for many selected individuals at all. Such a
group could not be considered in isolation from the total
social system, it would have to have an existence in the system,
continuing ties with it, etc. But in principle it allows us a
fulcrum on which to balance our moral lever, and strain. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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