Zygmunt Bauman and Eric Hobsbawm on identity and community

“As Eric Hobsbawm recently observed, ‘never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life’: and he commented, ‘Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain.’ Jock Young supplied a succinct and poignant gloss on Hobsbawm’s observation and commentary: ‘Just as community collapses, identity is invented.’

‘Identity’, today’s talk of the town and the most commonly played game in town, owes the attention it attracts and the passions it begets to being a surrogate of community: of that allegedly ‘natural home’ or that circle that stays warm however cold the winds outside. Neither of the two is available in our rapidly privatized and individualized, fast globalizing world, and for that reason each of the two can be safely, with no fear of practical test, imagined as a cosy shelter of security and confidence and for that reason hotly desired. The paradox, though, is that in order to offer even a modicum of security and so to perform any kind of healing or pain-soothing role, identity must belie its origin, it must deny being ‘just a surrogate’ – it needs to conjure up a phantom of the self-same Community which it has come to replace. Identity sprouts on the graveyard of communities, but flourishes thanks to the promise of a resurrection of the dead.

A life dedicated to the search for identity is full of sound and fury. ‘Identity’ means standing out: being different, and through that difference unique and so the search for identity cannot but divide and separate. And yet the vulnerability of individual identities and the precariousness of solitary identity-building prompt the identity builders to seek pegs on which they can together hang their individually experienced fears and anxieties, and having done that, perform the exorcism rites in the company of other similarly afraid and anxious individuals.”

What on earth? USA/UK foreign policy and domestic politics

The war in Iraq was a very significant historical event. Who went to war with Iraq? Well, if you had to narrow it down to two people: Tony Blair and George W. Bush. But they had a lot of political backing. For our purposes keep in mind that both Hillary Clinton and David Cameron—prime minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016—voted to support the war early in their political careers. Clinton voted as a US senator and Cameron as a member of parliament.

After the USA invaded Iraq it descended into sectarian conflict. Despite the Iraq experience though, in 2012 the same type of people—lets keep following Cameron and Clinton as significant representative characters—thought they had the answers for Libya. Cameron—at this point PM of the UK—was particularly eager to get involved and Hillary Clinton— oversaw the USA’s participation as Obama’s Secretary of State.

But Libya turned out badly as well. Muammar Gaddafi—Libya’s longtime strongman leader—was killed and an anarchic division of the country followed. The situation hasn’t yet been as violent as Iraq, but the basic picture of outside intervention creating a power vacuum is the same.

Crucially for the purpose of this essay, post-intervention Libya—a North African country on the coast of the Mediterranean—became a staging point for desperate people from all over Africa and the Middle East to attempt passage to Europe by boat. This so called “migrant crisis” would come back to haunt both Cameron and Clinton. In addition, it’s said that the intervention in Libya greatly angered Vladimir Putin, deepening the chasm between Russia’s leader and the Western political elite.

Now we’re back to 2013 and ISIS hits the scene, at least in terms of Western attention. Remember those guys? ISIS itself—with its media savvy, brutal stunts and worldwide recruiting base—was a disturbing precedent, and cause for much apocalyptic handwringing at the time. ISIS was a creature bred by the invasion of Iraq mind you—only the hell of war could create an absurd monster like ISIS. Specifically and tellingly, the leadership of ISIS coalesced in a US army jail.

That brings us to Syria. It was a complicated situation—and genuinely beyond my understanding at this time—but in 2013-2014 ISIS, Syria and Iraq were one sprawling disaster. In the USA and UK there was a huge debate about what to do. David Cameron wanted to get heavily involved but was held back by “backbench” Conservative MPs who voted against him after a dramatic parliamentary debate. Interestingly, some parts of the right-wing media like the influential tabloid Daily Mail also sided against Cameron.

In the USA there was a similar thing happening. Republicans like John McCain hosted “townhalls” where they were shouted down by old white conservative guys who didn’t want another foreign entanglement. In both countries it was the “moderate” political establishment—people like Cameron, Clinton and McCain—facing anti-war opposition from a pacifist left and an isolationist right.

Back to Syria itself. Bashar al-Assad—who is still president—got crucial support from Vladimir Putin. Putin’s intervention in Syria stabilized the country and kept Assad in power. With Syria, Putin got a sneaky upper hand on the Western political establishment—undoubtedly a historic moment. The unhinged debate about whether or not Assad used chemical weapons can certainly be seen in light of Iraq’s non-existent WMD’s.

That brings us to 2016—a year when countless chickens came home to roost. The “migrant crisis” peaked in 2015 and—if you take a long comprehensive view—was fueled by Syria, Libya and Iraq. David Cameron was forced to be very defensive about the UK’s open borders within the EU as the “Remain” leader during the 2016 Brexit battle. Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” was a theatrical response to this same context of public perception.

During a Republican primary debate in South Carolina Trump trashed none other than Jeb Bush—brother of the original Iraq invasion guy—by breaking the longstanding “taboo” in the Republican Party on questioning the whole Iraq episode. It was a brilliant move. Remember those old white guys who yelled at John McCain about Syria? Trump was just echoing them. And who did Trump go on to beat? Hillary Clinton of course—she of Libya and Iraq.

In the UK the same political forces that defeated David Cameron over Syria—backbench conservative MPs and right-wing tabloids—made his life hell during the Brexit debate, eventually retiring him. Even Tony Blair returned to the political scene in the context of Brexit and offered up sage commentary about the “migrant crisis” and its contribution to public feeling. Thanks Tony!

The whole story has a slightly uncanny feel to it. Figures like Cameron and Clinton did lots to bring about the political context that would eventually dispose them. The debate over intervention in Syria is particularly informative in hindsight as it immediately foreshadowed Donald Trump’s appeal and Brexit.

The politics of foreign policy over the last twenty years seem to have been coloured by a weird “triple game” wherein the Anglo political establishment created chaos “out there” in the world—with consequences increasingly encroaching on the “over here”—all the while offering themselves as the “moderate” response to that same instability.

Chris Bickerton on Technocracy

  • How do you define technocracy? It means different things to different people but the consensus core is “rule by experts.”
  • Plato is often cited, Plato rejected the distinction between polis/politics and what the ancient Greeks called oikos/household. Plato said that we can think about them in the same way because both are a matter of craft/skill. “Philosopher king” rulers have that capacity, combining expertise and power.
  • From the end of the 19th century into the 20th century “technocracy” is associated with modern technology, engineers, and technological developments. It’s a movement within modernization with engineers and technical know-how at the center.
  • Is technocracy opposed to democracy? The Platonic conception is opposed to democracy. In Plato’s formulation specialists should rule over others. Closer to the current day it’s more complicated.
  • Silicon Valley boosterism is a form of post-political technocracy but that’s not the main notion of technocracy at work today.
  • People tend not to go so far as saying it’s an alternative but rather a compliment to democracy with the aim to identify realms best staffed by experts.
  • It’s accepted that central banks are the domain of the experts, ie. a legitimate realm for the technocrat.
  • But who decides? In many cases it’s technocrats themselves, the state or outside experts.
  • At one time pre-2008 there was consensus in economics on models for policy makers. Economists were vested with independent technocratic power for this reason.
  • If there is consensus it becomes easy for politicians to say “let’s hand it over to the experts.” When there isn’t consensus the technocratic model breaks down.
  • If there isn’t a consensus view the technocratic model breaks down—even in terms of appointments—and the situation is back in the realm of political debate.
  • The more leftwing economics vision—Keynes and skepticism of the price system—lost out in the late 20th century and the outcome was consensus.
  • In the UK politicians have left decisions like quantitative easing to the Bank of England. Politicians are happy to foist responsibility onto the BoE where there is ambiguity about who should act.
  • Some politicians see themselves as technocrats.
  • The emphasis on “competence” and the “CV” demonstrate a technocratic element in UK politics.
  • Tony Blair said “my ideology is what works.”
  • The above is a technocratic statement because it’s an either/or frame that doesn’t acknowledge another view. The other more democratic position is that views represent different values. More recently the values view has given way to right or wrong and right or wrong turn in politics is dangerous.
  • The Micheal Gove statement “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts” was against the notion that claims to expertise should be decisive.
  • Trump is a populist but a clear “what works” person. His supporters used a “plumbing” metaphor. Trump emphasizes “my business has been successful” etc.
  • There is a wonkish side to the technocratic view of politics as opposed a deal making or populist political strain in the current day but they are opposed to the same thing.
  • Both views oppose the sclerotic political class, excessive partisanship, interest groups, rent seeking etc.
  • If you accept that technocracy doesn’t want to replace democracy then it’s in a weak position vs. populism as populism has a democratic mandate.
  • There haven’t been many technocratic governments in Europe since WW2.
  • Macron is technocratic. In terms of what he says, his great emphasis on expertise, how he has brought state administration into his office and the fact that he came to power without much of a party structure. His party En Marche is new and top down. Macron is an “I get things done” or “what works” person. A “voice of people” who are tired of French politics.
  • Is technocracy straight-forwardly opposed to politics? Yes. Party politics is not premised on a right or wrong answer. There is an in-built relativism with party politics.
  • The sense of right and wrong is really important to the technocratic view.
  • Is the current Chinese political system basically technocratic? There is no democratic political competition and party rule rests on a claim of “what works” ie. market economy and prosperity.
  • The problem when legitimacy rests on “what works” is what happens when it stops working? In a democracy if something doesn’t work the system isn’t challenged you just vote the party out.
  • Who are the technocrats in Britain today? The UK is a front runner in terms of the “regulatory state” ie. investing power in independent institutions. The element of technocracy in British politics is shown in the competence/CV view.
  • The British state as a whole over the last 30 years has increasingly oriented to institutions run by experts. This trend is very powerful and present in UK politics and undermines what people think parliament can do. That said, increasingly people are questioning this tendency.

Gilles Deleuze on passwords, data and “dividuals”

Quoted from “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 1990

“The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. . . . In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.'”

William J. Mitchell on mass media, context independence and facilitated immersion

“…the mass media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the global information dissemination system by radically separating the contexts of message transmission and reception. Novelists writing for thousands of readers, musicians in recording studios, and radio performers at their microphones could not know all of the potential reception sites for their productions, and could not assume uniformity among these sites, so they could not count on site features to help clarify or elaborate their meaning. This condition favored the production of works that were not only repeated exactly at different times or in different places, but were also as self-contained and independent of the context of reception as possible.

A closely related outcome was a growing demand for places and devices that masked the consumer’s immediate surroundings in order to facilitate immersion in standardized, modular, mostly self-sufficient information structures: quiet places for undistracted reading; darkened movie theaters where all attention is focused on the screen; the white-walled, minimalist art gallery; the Walkman or iPod that plugs into your ear; and—at the logical limit—the immersive virtual reality installation. Open a book, enter a movie theater, or dial up a track on your iPod and your attention is instantly shifted to another place or time. The dense embedding of these discrete media spaces in the urban fabric yields a city that, like a film with jump cuts and flashbacks, is experienced and understood as a sequence of spatially and temporally discontinuous scenes—some of them expressions of the current, local reality, and others ephemeral media constructions.”

Notes: with smartphones, endless media spaces of one? (Williams’ mobile privatization?) “Addiction by Design” the ultimate immersive media space?

Paris, 1968: “1968 and the Struggle Against Technocracy”

These are notes from a lecture by Andrew Feenberg. The lecture was found by searching “Technocracy” on YouTube.

  • A French student revolt provoked a general strike in May 1968.
  • We have a false image of the whole New Left, they were actually serious political movements challenging the notion that we have to live with a technocratic consumer society.
  • It was about an alternative social model, the inheritance from the New Left is anti-technocratic struggle.
  • Paris 1968 started out as a small student revolt, students were arrested and locked out of the university and gained a new target in the police as a result.
  • Students began to build barricades in part as a reference to history like the Paris commune. Barricades became more and more numerous.
  • At this point a huge police attack was organized but the violent attack mobilized many people against the government.
  • Students were let back into the university and had talks about revolution.
  • At the arts school the students seized the studios and made posters like the famous poster of a fascist policeman wielding a baton.
  • “We want to build a classless society.” (student statement)
  • Scenes: Workers and students seized a factory and were jubilant, saluting each other.
  • “We must destroy everything that isolates us from each other (habits, the newspapers, etc.)”
  • All this was as a trauma for business executives and civil servants who saw themselves as doing a social service.
  • A strike movement began to appear in the middle class.
  • Even civil servants from Finance were involved. Also the ministry of housing, white collar postal service workers etc.
  • The protests/movement contained the notion of self-management vs. the planned economy of the Soviet Union which was more so supported by the Communist Party. Workers “by and for themselves.”
  • De Gaulle consulted with generals and implied the possibility of civil war.
  • Sartre said “you have enlarged the field of the possible.”
  • “refuse profit, progress and luxury.”
  • “Do not confuse the TECHNICAL division of labor and the HIERARCHY of authority and power” (the first is necessary, the second is not)
  • “all power to the imagination”
  • “ni dieu, ni metre” (neither god, nor meters ie. measurement)

“Karen”: a Mass Projection in the Psychological Age

Yep, we’re living in the “psychological age,” and the psychological age serves up psychological figures like the “Karen.” What’s a Karen? A middle-aged, middle class white woman caught on camera making a scene of managing others behaviour, at worst being racist and calling the cops.

One strange feature of the psychological age: we’re entitled to make an amateur diagnosis of other people on the fly. Yes, Karen can be outright racist and harmful, but is more often simply entitled, passive aggressive, dysfunctional, sad and pointless. What’s going on in her head?

Resentment certainly plays a role in the Karen phenomenon. As “middle class white women” any given Karen has got to be part of established or “privileged” society and therefore a legitimate target for scorn at the level of pop perception. In the age of mental health acceptance, this is one group it’s OK to gawk at as they break down.

Is it true that “white women are in crisis” as the Twitter joke has it? One quarter of middle aged women in the United States are on antidepressants. You’d think that would be cause for greater concern, generally speaking. The endless advertisements for psychotropic medication on American TV often feature a Karen type who can’t quite manage anymore.

When you go door-to-door as I have for various job’s and talk briefly to many strangers, you start to notice household “subtypes.” One very distinct variant is the lonely middle-aged white woman gripped by nervous breakdown.

And there’s a political angle to the Karen. As everyone knows, a majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016 and there was talk in the aftermath of “holding white women accountable.” In 2020, Trump pleaded, “Suburban women, will you please like me?”

Combine resentment, peaked politics, psychological projection, public spectacle and some element of genuine harm and you have the Karen. The Karen is a negative identity (everything it’s cool not to be), a “meme” figure willed into existence in the psychological age. Karen seems to have legs, what new characters slouch forward?

Harold Innis on “decentralization” way before Bitcoin

“The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone…. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade….Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character. Large-scale political organizations such as empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time. Empires persist by overcoming the bias of media which overemphasizes either dimension. They have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium, and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium towards centralization.”

Immanuel Wallerstein on the origins of sociology

“…the dominant liberal ideology of the nineteenth century . . . argued that state and market, politics and economics, were analytically separate. . . . Society was adjured to keep them separate, and scholars studied them separately. Since there seemed to be many realities that apparently were neither in the domain of the market, nor in that of the state, these realities were placed in a residual grab-bag which took as compensation the grand name of sociology. . . . Finally, since there were people beyond the realm of the civilized world, . . . the study of such peoples encompasses special rules and special training, which took on the somewhat polemical name of anthropology.”

Simone Weil on “roots,” and community

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future … Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”