Peter Emmerson

Equality is a concept derived from theometaphysical techniques that have become conventions in what might be termed ‘western’ thacting.  Equality is a noun that makes a human experience look like an object.  Using such a concept concomitantly disengages us from our mundane experience creating a distance sufficient to allow us to thact in ideal, scientific ways and dream up all sorts of fantastic possibilities that can never be realized.  If we keep to verb-oriented language we get a very different impression – how can a person be equal with another?  Verbal analyses engage us with down to earth, mundane, engineering ways of judging: height, weight, money, housing ………  Sociologists are too often working with implicit scientific theometaphysical notions such as equality, justice, modernity, democracy etc. that automatically disengage them from those mundane situations they are trying to analyse.  If they were to abandon these conventions and use verb-oriented language they could engage much more effectively with that evidence they are seeking to engineer.

We are bound to ancient metaphysical conventions that privilege object-oriented language.  Using ‘the’ definite article is a significant part of that style of thacting which I argue obscures much of what we want to understand about psychosocial processes.  Such psychosocial processes need language that will engage with those processes: a verb-oriented language.  This latter point I picked up from Norbert Elias.  In an attempt to extend his project I have been developing a style of writing for some time that does not use ‘the’.

Foucault was for a time a Marxist. His work was also influenced by structural philosophy (structuralism) that focused on universal forces beyond a person’s control, whether it be language that is guided by rules, de Saussure, binary opposites that determine day to day social experiences, Lévi-Strauss, or, class structure, Marx.

Much structuralism was a rejection of phenomenological arguments such as those of Husserl that placed human subjective understanding at the centre of everything, privileging deep reflection that removes anything that could corrupt truthful experience, even language, which is socially conditioned and corrupts any search for perfect meaning.

Foucault adopted Bachelard’s structural argument that historical change did not occur in a continuous developmental flow controlled by powerful heroic/demonic individuals. According to Foucault history is punctuated by schisms that occur when a time-period governed by certain dominant discursive practices, an episteme, comes abruptly to an end.  Such a view of history emphasizes how pointless a pursuit of perfect meaning (hermeneutics) is: it is impossible as Husserl explained, to understand perfectly a person speaking directly to you, never mind if they are writing 500 years ago from a different episteme.  We can never know an author’s/speaker’s mind.  Concomitantly, we can only pick up fragments of history from what they have left behind; documents must be treated as ‘things’ scattered across a past landscape, which are to be organized and interpreted not understood according to present-time discursive conventions.  We must do ‘archaeology’ says Foucault not history.  Archaeologists dig around in historical sites re-constructing past people’s lives using tools manufactured nowadays.  Accordingly, there can only ever be histories, as many as there are people doing them.

Speaking/writing is governed by rules which change abruptly when an episteme ends. Foucault argues that there have been three epistemes in recent European experience.  ‘Renaissance’ people deployed discourses that facilitated speaking of fantastic beasts and spirits.  Mad people at this time were said to be in touch with death, able to inform us of what was in store.  Cervantes’ book, Don Quixote, signals a break with these discursive rules as people start to use rational methods to manage their lives: Foucault terms this episteme ‘Classical’.  Relatedly, 17^th century mad people are shut away with criminals in buildings vacated by lepers because they are seen as irrational.  A later 18^th /19^th century historical schism heralds ‘Modernity’.  Modern people use scientific method to research time and origin to assess causes.  Modern people focus on getting maximum benefit: from ‘life’ by applying disciplinary technology: death is used to understand life – pathology.  In such discursive practices normality is paramount.  People are trained in minutiae, exercised and examined.  Those who resist such training in docility are watched closely and stigmatized abnormal.  They are locked away for re-training in prisons and mental hospitals until they learn to control themselves.  However, they may only need to be labelled abnormal (ill, disabled) to be excluded and controlled.  This is ‘panopticism’; control by total surveillance – you think your being watched even if you’re not.

Before writing Discipline & Punish Foucault went through a crisis which he dealt with by using Nietzsche.  Foucault realised that his archaeology was too structural such that people and their activities were largely irrelevant to explaining historical change, which was plainly ridiculous.  Nietzsche had argued that our bodies were marked by our historical struggle: war was a permanent occurrence, even during so-called peace-time was permanent.  According to Nietzsche words are weapons in our search for dominance.  Nietzsche spoke of genealogy; historical descent through bodily struggle: as an integral part of genealogical descent knowledge is designed to dominate others.  Foucault revised his archaeology to include this approach as he wrote about prisons and sexuality.

As Foucault’s genealogy emerged during 1960s struggles, it signalled another historical schism as an episteme governed by ‘power-knowledge’ arrived. It has been called post-structural, postmodern because disciplinary authority is challenged as nothing more than power-knowledge, nothing more than a technique for domination.  In post-structural, postmodern discursive formations there is no absolute truth!  Thus, any interpretation is valid, no matter how personal or different.  Foucault’s histories are as valid as are anyone else’s.  The difference is that they are attempts at resistance, challenges to dominant people who impose their opinions on others through discourse: power-knowledge.  There is no point challenging their domination on a large scale where they are all powerful.  All resistance needs to be local where there is less control.

Whilst Foucault offers some interesting insights into domination and control, he could not go far enough. In using Nietzsche, he deploys philosophical arguments that get very close to sociology and social scientific analysis.  However, Nietzsche was a philosopher and a purveyor of ideals.  Whilst genealogy does facilitate a better engagement with real people than did archaeology, it never allows Foucault sufficient engagement with reality to include them properly in his analysis; a situation which is absurd.  Interdependently, we have very little detail of those who deploy power-knowledge.  If you compare Foucault’s histories with Elias’s civilizing process you see what I am getting at.  In Elias you read about vibrant figurational life-like experience.  I wouldn’t mind betting that changes in fashion will see Foucault’s philosophical history fade from view, whereas Elias’ more scientific analysis will prevail.

Giddens

Giddens wrote in part to explain theoretical failure in sociology. Parsonian and Marxian sociologies privileged large structural forces such as common values and class and were seen as too inflexible and unresponsive to change.  Such structural models ignored to a large extent real people’s lives in terms of their personal, diverse and mundane experiences.  Alternatively, Weber’s more individualistic approach could not explain adequately structural forces that pattern everyday mundane experiences.  Sociologists needed to clear out this ‘structure-agency’ dichotomic road block and find ways of analysing and explaining real people’s lives in more adequate, scientific fashion.

Elias had advocated a properly sociological, process approach where change was automatically accommodated.  Giddens however took a different tack, incorporating aspects of Elias’ emphasis on process, his concept of ‘structuration’ being a prominent example.  However, in order to ensure that his model had credence, he sought support in philosophical logical discourse: philosophers find credibility by using idealistic techniques of logic to establish absolute truths.  Such discourses find expression in our everyday language – to be logical is to be correct.  Giddens saw this as a means of guaranteeing scientific status in his work: logic=science.  In so doing, I would argue he made a big mistake because in using idealistic philosophical method he could not achieve sufficient engagement with any social reality he tried to describe and explain.  If you read The New Rules of Sociological Method you see a series of attempts to reject Marx, Weber, Durkheim et al. in favour of philosophical models according to 1960s’ fashion, especially hermeneutics and critical theory.

In trying to sort out structure and agency he moves from a position of ‘dualism’ to one of ‘duality’.  Structure is joined to agency in this discursive sleight of hand and is transformed into what at sounds like a process concept – ‘structuration’.  In fact, it is just a re-jigging of what was previously described as a dualism.  This is what happens when adopting a philosophical modus operandi – realities can be ignored as long as rationale is preserved.  Giddens cannot disentangle himself from sufficiently from idealistic discourse to engage with what is really happening; to do science.  He analyses institutions by looking at their rules and resources and unsuccessfully tries to fit people in as structuring agents.  This style of analysis is not that different from either Parsons or Marx who built a logical models and proceeded to apply them to experience no matter how they disagreed with facts.  Such an approach is philosophical and doomed to failure because it privileges logic over reality congruence.

After dealing with social systems Giddens fits in people  calling them ‘structuring agents’.  This idea emanates from existential philosophy.  Most of our daily experience is routine, unexceptional, unquestioned actvity or what he terms ‘practical consciousness’.  However, from time to time we encounter unintended consequences as our routines fail and have to deploy our ‘discursive consciousness’ to think or ‘reflect’ upon unexpected occurrences.  Whatever conclusion is reached by such reflection, restructures our routine systems and so on: structuration.  This is neat, logical process of outcome and feedback, society as cybernetics not unlike Parsons.  It however, totally underestimated social complexities: what about emotional responses for example?

Giddens also embarks on an analysis of our modern condition.  He is aware that business is operating more and more beyond state boundaries and control, as globalization facilitated by technological change gathers pace in a search for cheap labour and improved profits.  Pre-modern experiences were for most people local.  Such comparatively small spaces were habitually understood and time passed as a shared experience for locals: land changes as seasons come and go.  Such experiences become disembedded as global forces grow in magnitude changing our understanding of space and time.  Two variables that were at one dependent on one another are quickly separated as local knowledge becomes comparatively insignificant.  We can have salads in mid-winter, have sunny holidays during December.  People are moving globally and exporting their habits: curry has become a staple in British people’s diet rather than Yorkshire pudding.  We converse across time zones, across massive spaces to loved ones down-under.  Our experiences are carried out by proxy using money, we consult experts, we communicate using technology such as mobile phones.  Our lives take on an appearance of being controlled by forces beyond our control – it’s a Runaway World!  Such experiences require greater levels of reflexivity as face to face to relationships decline and trust is more difficult.  Everywhere there is risk where once there was predictability.  In such conditions of insecurity we look for fundamentals, things in which we can believe.  We are confronted with choices about who we live with, who we want to be.  We look for relationships that are ‘pure’, we change our bodies to promote our needs etc.  Even our basic identity is available to change: our ‘self’ becomes a project to meet whatever a world where rates of change are high demands – high modernity!

Lecture 2

Marx

Marx was trying to engineer a model to explain human exploitation as class conflict. However, in so doing he developed and applied Hegel’s dialectical method as a heuristic, a piece of philosophy.  Hegel had revized dialectical technique by building into it an historical dimension such that everything is in a state of ‘becoming’.  Dialectics implies that for anything to exist it must have a contrast or opposite: we know about day because it contrasts with night; we know about right because it contrasts with wrong.  At a general level Hegel argued that for every idea (thesis) there is an opposite idea (antithesis).  These beliefs play themselves out in people’s lives through argument and potentially violence.  History is thus driven by conflicts which are resolved (synthesis) into new theses which in turn automatically generate new antitheses and so on and so on.  Hegel argued that ideas such as justice/injustice drive people to change history.  Dialectics, he argued, are in turn underpinned by spirit (geist) says Hegel, as far as I can see, another word for what Aristotle called ‘the unmoved mover’, or as Descartes put it, God who guides everything through rationality.

As an engineer such an idealistic model was unacceptable to Marx who wanted to examine more realistic economic forces.  However, he did accept, mistakenly from my perspective, Hegel’s argument that dialectics drive historical change, thus investing his model with damaging levels of idealistic influence that undermined what he engineered.  Concomitantly, he argued that 19^th century British people can trace their circumstances through a series of dialectical convulsions or revolutions triggered by economic exploitation not differences of opinion: history is driven by fights about work and survival resources, not political differences.  Marx as an engineer privileges work over thinking and emotion!  Living is a dialectical experience in which mundane, practical experience and thoughts interrelate: base and superstructure.  Social structure is also dialectical: there are two classes of people, the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.  Slavery was dialectical – slave owners (Romans) and slaves; feudalism was dialectical – lords and peasants.  These social structural arrangements were exploitative and ended in class war and revolution.  He argued that more recently we have seen capitalistic systems emerging characterised in similar dialectical terms – ruling class (owners of capital) and working class (owners of nothing).  All these social structural arrangements are dialectical systems of exploitation which are resolved by class war.  This is a materialist approach that explains change using an idealistic dialectical model of conflict.  In so doing Marx gathers up all other forms of dispute and characterizes them as issues of class, totally under-estimating forces involved in all other forms of exploitation – sexual, ethnic etc.  Such a model falls short of sufficient realistic engagement to engineer viable solutions to social problems.

Marx’ was so confident that his ‘scientific socialism’ had provided a true analysis of horrendous 19^th century exploitation and deprivation in new industrial cities like Manchester that he committed himself to a political programme designed to inform workers of their plight and offer them a collective way out through class war: hence The Communist Manifesto.  He believed such a manifesto and programme of education was necessary to counter systems that conditioned people into a capitalistic way thinking and acting.  Marx was very aware of how difficult it would be for large numbers of proletarians from very disparate backgrounds to identify with one another sufficiently to join together as a class ‘for itself’, and take revolutionary action to get rid of privately owned capital.  There are two important concepts that Marx developed to explain just how difficult generating class solidarity will be: ‘ideology’ and ‘alienation’.  Living in a capitalist social system, is exploitative and alien to human beings.  Marx made this unequivocal judgement because of his belief that Rousseau’s version of human nature was right as opposed to that of Hobbes.  Rousseau argued that ‘natural man’ was essentially kind and sensitive to others needs whereas Hobbes believed that we are naturally selfish brutes in need of control.  However, both Rousseau and Hobbes were philosophers: neither model uses much realistic evidence.  Here again we see Marx building untested philosophical ideals into his model.  Taking Rousseau’s view, living in a capitalist system dehumanizes all people: if he had taken Hobbes’s view exploitation is natural and needs to be curbed by government.  Accordingly, Marx has to explain why people become nasty.  ‘Natural people’ to paraphrase Rousseau, are abused and dehumanized by capitalist exploitation.  However, they do not resist because they are made docile and uncritical by lies (capitalist ideologies) that condition people to adopt capitalistic values and attitudes, argued Marx.  These conditioning systems are reinforced by our practical experience of living in capitalistic systems such as fear of unemployment.  To survive people need work.  However, capitalistic work is alienating: we work like machines; there is no end-product, we are in competition with our fellows, we lose ourselves in false needs such as shopping.

There are significant problems with his model of historical change through class conflict.  For a start, Max Weber argued that capitalist practice did not result from feudal revolution but was driven by religious, Protestant ideals.  Perhaps more importantly, Weber argued that Marx’s model of class and class ownership was too simplistic.  Weber showed that business development needed enormous amounts of capital investment that could only be financed by shared ownership.  To run these large joint stock companies we needed bureaucrats; a middle class.  He was correctly forecasting significant growth in middle class occupations and middle class identities.  Bureaucratic growth has not been a temporary phenomenon in mature capitalistic countries such as Britain and is accompanied by a related significant decline in so-called manual, working class jobs.  These changes have serious implications for Marx’ predictions of class war: if there are no proletarians who will revolt?

However, Marx’s notions of ideology and alienation are of real importance even though they are in need of re-formulation into more realistic heuristics.  Nevertheless, too much of his analysis is governed by philosophical dogma such as ‘dialectics’ and ‘natural man’ for his model to make a viable, realistic contribution to understanding contemporary human experience.  Thus, Corbyn may become Prime Minister because Marxist influenced views give outsiders hope, and outsiders are a majority.  However, deployment of such idealistic, socialist heuristics will fail to give his supporters what they need because they lack reality congruence.

Lecture 1

Introduction: European Modernization.

I hope you find what follows readable and understandable – if not we can discuss any of the following in next Monday’s seminar. I apologize for any linguistic errors in what you are about to read – it was done quite quickly.  Also, if you spot me using ‘the’ or an ‘ism’ in what follows, don’t hesitate to let me know.

This module’s theme is interconnectedness, process and change. With this in mind I am going to write these blogs in process language.  What I mean by process language is that I will rely on verbal language that emphasizes what we ‘do’ so as to avoid using ‘thing’ words such as ‘the’ which as far as I’m concerned objectify and stultify sociological evidence, removing all life’s energy from those we study.

Unlike Durkheim I don’t believe there are any sociological ‘things’ or what he termed ‘social facts’ such as ‘the family’ or ‘suicide’. Unlike Marx I have no reason to believe that there is anything that we can identify as ‘the ruling class (bourgeoisie)’ or ‘the working class (proletariat)’.  In using ‘social facts’ and ‘class’ as concepts, both Durkheim and Marx imposed a rigid philosophical grid that severely limited their capacity to engage with and understand processes as diverse and dynamic as those corresponding to real people’s lives.  Our use of philosophical techniques in this manner is endemic in our culture and is quite well described by Foucault as ‘dominant discourse’.  In other words Durkheim and Marx were doing what everyone else did at that time in ‘classifying’ social evidence according to discursive rules dictated by Descartes’ philosophy that demanded things be named and structured.  Whilst I’m not certain that Foucault is right about dominant discourses (I prefer heuristics – see later in this paragraph), episteme etc., I think there is plenty of evidence that we adopt certain ways of speaking, writing and so on that are designated correct by those with authority, the criminal law being a prominent example: anyone needing to use legal knowledge will be seriously disadvantaged if they cannot translate what we call legalese: hence the enormous fees charged by many lawyers.  Similar patterns occur in academic life.  In using philosophical method Durkheim and Marx were following an established trend which is still in use today developed by natural historians such as Linnaeus, who ordered botanical/natural things according to reproductive system etc.  Our knowledge is handed down to us from forebears.  As with everyone else Durkheim and Marx were philosophically conditioned: Durkheim heavily influenced by Kant, Marx by Hegel.  Philosophical heuristics (ways of doing; heuristics are like an app on your phone) are ingrained in our experience – for example, it is taken for granted that being rational or logical is best.  This conditioning is so deep that we assume such ideas are ‘natural’: religious and mathematical discourses have equivalent status in our culture.  Why are religious, philosophical and mathematical heuristics so important that we teach them to our children as a matter of course?  They all have one thing in common; they are methods for discovering absolute truths.  These truths have enormous force, in part because they get of rid doubt, they are incontrovertible!  As such they and are seen to exist above and beyond ordinary, mundane existence, not susceptible to human interference: if you are a Christian then whatever Jesus taught is true; Pythagoras’ theorem is still as true now as it was 2500 years ago.  It is argued that these principles of certainty are seminal to all that we are; they structure our habituses (personalities) and in so doing provide us with a feeling of control.  Without such feelings of control we would arguably, as Durkheim usefully drew to our attention, be very vulnerable to disorientation, suicide and social breakdown.  This belief that philosophical, religious and mathematical absolute truths structure our experience was challenged by Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber & Parsons but not rejected.

One other very important feature of philosophical, religious and mathematical heuristics is that they are human self/mind oriented and seriously idealistic. To put it another way, they are comparatively short of realistic content.  I believe that all three techniques are designed to develop absolute truth heuristics to provide us with enough certainty to take control of our debilitating capacity for cognitive dissonance (mental anguish) and fear: they steer us away from comparative uncertainty.  However, absolute truth heuristics contrast starkly with our daily, reality-oriented, comparatively uncertain experiences such as going shopping – who wouldn’t be able to justify keeping something that was stolen accidentally? – only getting my own back on companies that exploit cheap labour!  In everyday life situations idealistic and realistic heuristics work interdependently structuring how we operate.  However, a habitus dominated by idealistic heuristics being heavily influenced by absolute truth heuristics is correspondingly less engaged with daily sensory experience: an interesting example would be a nun who according to religious principle spends long periods contemplating God, shunning material wealth and shopping.  People whose habituses are structured by absolute truths are authorized to ignore and contradict dissonant realistic experiences and plough on regardless: we call it conviction or being dogmatic, depending on whether or not we agree.  Such people are less sensitive to realistic influences.  Nonetheless, people with habituses structured by seriously idealistic absolute truth heuristics are able to develop heuristics capable of useful engagement with realistic problems such as finding a means of talking to people beyond hearing distance: I am thinking of physicists, chemists and the like who deploy mathematical heuristics to engineer remarkable technologies such as mobile phones.  Even so, a mathematically structured habitus seems less useful for biologists, and more pertinently for our purposes, sociologists.  Why is this?  I think mathematical absolute truth heuristics allow sufficient engagement with problems that can be explored systematically, planetary movement and chemical reactions being good examples.  However, when you tackle more complex and dynamic problems such as weather forecasting such heuristics are much less useful: meteorologists have needed non-systematic, non-linear mathematical heuristics to improve our ability to predict our weather.  It is, I believe, reasonable to argue that life-forms are at least as complex and dynamic as weather.  To explore biological or sociological problems will require mathematicians to develop non-linear heuristics capable of modelling life processes rather than systems.  It may well be that sociological problems are too complex and dynamic to allow useful engagement even using non-linear mathematical heuristics.  Nevertheless, analysing sociological evidence using processual heuristics, does offer a way out of our sociological block.

A lack of viable mathematical heuristics has serious implications for sociologists because it means they are much more reliant on philosophical (logical) absolute truth heuristics, and to some extent, theological (supernatural) truth heuristics. My argument is that philosophical heuristics are far too idealistic and systematic to engage adequately with non-linear, dynamic social data, and concomitantly, get in the way of sociological development.  Accordingly, we are stuck in 1960s sociology still overwhelmingly dominated by philosophical systematic heuristics as were Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber & Parsons.  Elias, and to a lesser extent Bourdieu, is different.  He has provided a platform for developing a processual sociology that dispenses with damaging philosophical and theological approaches.  However, to date there has been much resistance to extending Elias’ platform as sociologists generally remain inextricably committed to ancient academic habits.  Accordingly, I felt it necessary to include Foucault in this module even though he was a philosopher (historical), not a sociologist at all.  However, I believe his profound influence on sociologists including Giddens and Bauman has been damaging because in promoting a continuation of old idealistic habits, it has stopped sociologists developing more realistic process heuristics that may facilitate better engagement with sociological problems.  Using notions pre-fixed by ‘the’ or suffixed by ‘ism’ such as ‘the class system’ or ‘racism’ imposes an idealistic, rigid philosophical way of seeing.

Too many influential theoretical sociologists seem to have forgotten that Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber were developing an engineering (scientific) approach, that was side-lining philosophers. Not unsurprisingly, as with all pioneers, they could only distance themselves and sociology so far from ancient habituated philosophical heuristics that until they came along had been seen as sacred, unquestionable facts.  They pointed out in their various ways that these unquestionable facts actually emerge from our day to day experience of living, not from some supernatural influence, or its secular alternative; a universal, underlying, rational algorithmic system.  In developing a more realistic, engineering approach to human problems they were taking us in a very radical and precarious direction, away from ancient idealistic, absolute certainties and undermining those who prospered by them: a hundred years or so earlier, Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber may well have been burned alive as heretics for their explanations of religious behaviour.  Rates of changes were occurring that challenged certainty heuristics, especially those of a theological and philosophical kind.  These were documented in this lecture.  Sociology developed interdependently with stupendous changes concomitant with a decline in feudalizing processes.  Trading and exploitation took on global proportions.  Democratizing processes accompanied religious reformation, republican government, state formation, commercialization, industrialization, urbanization.  All these developments involved engineers in partnership with mathematicians.  On present evidence here in Britain, priests have lost out big time as supernatural heuristics seem less and less useful to our way of life.  Philosophers and their heuristics still have significant influence as Giddens and Bauman testify.  It is my belief that unless we as sociologists can adopt a process approach we will doomed to continue a philosophical dialogue that began in ancient Greece, stuck in idealistic debate, perpetually discussing racism, sexism, the class system, capitalism, socialism ad infinitum.