The Fable of the Bs: Subaltern
Learning and the Constitution of
Power
Peeter Selg, Senior Research Fellow,
UTA, IASR
Four loops of Power. Source: shower
Four loops of Power. Source: shower
Bashing (meta)theory
Randall Collins, ‘Is 1980s Sociology in the
Doldrums?’, American Journal of Sociology 1986 (91),
p. 1343
It is not surprising to me that metatheory does not go
anywhere; it is basically a reflexive specialty, capable
about making comments on other fields but
dependent on intellectual life elsewhere that it can
formalize and ideologize ... or critique. That is why so
much of the intellectual work of today consists of
commentaries on works of the past rather than
constructions that are creative in their own right.
Bashing (meta)theory
Jonathan Turner, The Structure of Sociological
Theory, 5th edn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, p.
24
...meta-theory often stymies as much as
stimulates the theoretical activity because it
embroils theorists in inherently unresolvable
and always debatable controversies.
Bashing (meta)theory
Theda Skocpol, ‘The Dead End of Metatheory’,
Contemporary Sociology 1986 (16), pp. 11–12
... may the good lord protect other political
sociologists [besides Alford and Friedland] from
wandering into the dead end of metatheory.
“Why are you terrified, O ye of little faith?”
(Matt. 8:26)
Bashing (meta)theory?
Gabriel Abend, “The Meaning of ‘Theory.’”
Sociological Theory 2008 (26), p. 176:
...how one ought to use the word ‘theory’ is to a great extent a
political or practical-reason problem.
Peeter Selg, The Politics of Theory and the Constitution of
Meaning, Sociological Theory 2013 (31), p. 19
Provided that theorists acknowledge that part if not the major
part of their job is, strictly speaking, politics, they might even be
more prone to acknowledge the contingency and hegemonic
aspirations of their and their fellow sociologists’ activities. And this
would provide the basis for their agonistic engagement with each
other without bracketing their crucial “genuine” disagreements
when taking on the political constitution of the meaning of theory.
THEORY
Into love and out again
Thus I went and thus I go
Spare your voice and hold your pen
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung
All the words were ever said
Could it be when I was young
Someone dropped me on my head
(Dorothy Parker [1893-1967])
„Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses“
THEORY
Into love and out again
Thus I went and thus I go
Spare your voice and hold your pen
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung
All the words were ever said
Could it be when I was young
Someone dropped me on my head
(Dorothy Parker [1893-1967])
“
ORIENTATION
PROCESS
REASON
Prof. Risto Heiskala
Causal IEMP model of organized power
Causal IEMP model of organized power
THEORY
Into love and out again
Thus I went and thus I go
Spare your voice and hold your pen
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung
All the words were ever said
Could it be when I was young
Someone dropped me on my head
(Dorothy Parker [1893-1967])
“
ORIENTATION
PROCESS
REASON
Four loops of Power. Source: shower
Four loops of Power. Source: shower
Four loops of Power. Source: shower
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
MUSTAFA EMIRBAYER, Manifesto for a
Relational Sociology, American Journal of
Sociology Vol. 103, No. 2 (September 1997), p.
281:
Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental
dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world
as consisting primarily in substances or
processes, in static “things” or in dynamic,
unfolding relations.
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
MUSTAFA EMIRBAYER, Manifesto for a
Relational Sociology, American Journal of
Sociology Vol. 103, No. 2 (September 1997), p.
281:
Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental
dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world
as consisting primarily in substances or
processes, in static “things” or in dynamic,
unfolding relations.
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
MUSTAFA EMIRBAYER, Manifesto for a
Relational Sociology, American Journal of
Sociology Vol. 103, No. 2 (September 1997), p.
281:
Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental
dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world
as consisting primarily in substances or
processes, in static “things” or in dynamic,
unfolding relations.
substantialism vs relationalism
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
FRANCOIS DÉPELTEAU, Relational Thinking: A Critique of
Co-Deterministic Theories of Structure and Agency.
Sociological Theory 26:1 March 2008, pp 59-64.
“five basic principles of relational sociology”:
1) Principle of Trans-Action.
2) Principle of the “Primacy of Process”;
3) Principle of Dereification;
4) Principle of Relational Perspective;
5) Principle of Emergency.
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
My thesis: Relations between “entities” are
CONSTITUTIVE of the “entities” themselves
à relations DEFINE “objects,” not just
characterize “objects”;
à relations are ENDOGENOUS to “objects,”
not exogenous to “objects”.
CONSTITUTIVE? ENDOGENOUS?
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
A SOUND BITE VERSION OF RELATIONALISM:
1) “Reputations” and “chairs”:
Reputation is not a thing or property but a relation within a
network through which reputation circulates. A reputation
exists not by itself but only in relation to other reputations.
Reputation is just this difference or relation, making it a
network, not a personal, possession. Networks grant or
withdraw recognition and bestow or strip someone of
reputation. It is networks that make some reputations higher
than others; a person who is alone in claiming a reputation
for him- or herself has no reputation at all. .... In reputational
networks, no one is completely without reputation, and one’s
own reputation is what it is only relative to someone else’s
reputation. Reputation is not a “thing” but rather this
difference. (Fuchs, Stephan. "Beyond agency." Sociological
Theory 19.1 (2001), pp. 36-37)
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
A SOUND BITE VERSION OF RELATIONALISM:
1) “Reputations” and “chairs”:
“imagine that a world is inhabited only by
phenomena that resemble reputations and
senses of humour, rather than chairs or
tables.”
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
A SOUND BITE VERSION OF RELATIONALISM:
2) Respond to a stupid question:
„does the relational perspective entail that only
reputations and senses of humor (mental phenomena)
exist and chairs and tables (physical phenomena)
don’t?“
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso,
2001, p. 108:
An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly
exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of
my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in
terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’,
depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied
is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather
different assertion that they could constitute themselves as
objects outside any discursive condition of emergence.
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
A SOUND BITE VERSION OF RELATIONALISM:
3) Ask yourself:
Are social relations and statuses more like chairs
and tables or like reputations and senses of
humor?
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
Example: relationalist vs substantilist
understanding of „the political“
Adrian Leftwich. Thinking Politically: On the
Politics of Politics. In: Adrian Leftwich (ed.)
What is Politics? Cambridge: Polity Press, p 13.
„whether [to] define it primarily in terms of a
process, or whether [to] define it in terms of the
place or places where it happens, that is in
terms of an arena or institutional forum.“
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
WHAT IS RELATIONALISM?
Quantitative vs Qualitative research?
„To know absolutely nothing about absolutely
everything“
(Large-N: Przeworski, Vanhanen etc)
„To know absolutely everything about absolutely
nothing“
(N=1 [or less J])
The distinction is analytical, not ontological.
Is Bourdieu a relationalist sociologist? Yes and no!
Is Bourdieu a relationalist sociologist? Yes and no!
FRANCOIS DÉPELTEAU, Relational Thinking:
A Critique of Co-Deterministic Theories of
Structure and Agency. Sociological Theory
26:1 March 2008, pp 59-64.
Bourdieu is a „co-determinist“ not a
„relationalist“
Is Bourdieu a relationalist sociologist? Yes and no!
Pierre Bourdieu
Sociology,
Centre de
Sociologie
Européenne,
Collège de
France
Cited by 308938
Source: Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. Translated
by Peter Collier, Stanford University Press 1988, p. xiv
The tendency to forget to programme into the complete theory
of the world analyzed the gap between the theoretical and the
practical experience of this world is compensated for by the
inevitable reflexive view imposed by the sociological analysis of
the social conditions of sociological analysis: the objective
analysis, or even the objectivist or structuralist analysis, of the
structure of a world in which the scientist responsible for the
work of objectivication is himself ensconced, and of which he
has an initial representation which is capable of surviving
objective analysis, will then reveal its own limits in its turn by
calling attention, for instance, to its own individual or collective
defense mechanisms, which often take the form of an operation
of negation, and through which the agents aim to maintain in
being, for themselves and for others, representations of the
social world which clash with the representation constructed by
science through a totalization which ordinary existence
precludes, in spirit and in letter.
Two logics: violence and reciprocity
Two logics: violence and reciprocity
Two extremes in which it is unintelligible to speak about
power or learning:
Pure violence: “Power is exercised only over free
subjects, and only insofar as they are free. … Where the
determining factors saturate the whole, there is no
relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship
when man is in chains.” (Michel Foucault, “The subject
and power.” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): p.790)
Pure reciprocity: “Learning IV would be change in
Learning III, but probably does not occur in any adult
living organism on this earth” (Gregory Bateson, Steps to
an ecology of mind.University of Chicago Press, p. 293)
Two logics: violence and reciprocity
Four loops of learning
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of mind.University of
Chicago Press, p. 293:
Zero learning is characterized by specificity of response,
which—right or wrong—is not subject to correction.
Learning I is change in specificity of response by correction of
errors of choice within a set of alternatives.
Learning II is change in the process of Learning I, e.g., a
corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice
is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience
is punctuated.
Learning III is change in the process of Learning II, e.g., a
corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from
which choice is made.
Four loops of learning
Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” model of learning:
Zero-loop learning:
Hush now baby, baby don’t you cry./ Mama's gonna check out all
your girlfriends for you. / Mama won’t let anyone dirty get
through. / Mama's gonna wait up until you get in. / Mama will
always find out where you've been. / Mama's gonna keep baby
healthy and clean. / Oh baby, oh baby oh baby, / You'll always be
baby to me. (Mother)
Single-loop learning: “How should I complete the wall?”
(Empty spaces)
Double-loop learning: “All in all it’s just another brick in the
wall” (Another brick in the wall pt 2)
Triple-loop learning: “Is there anybody out there”? (Is there
anybody out there?)
Zero-loop power
SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE, docile citizenry, dogmatism, false
consciousness, phatic communication, stereotypes,
rituals, myths, thought-terminating cliché, palliative
function of ideology, dominant ideology, fetishism,
practical consciousness, tacit knowledge, reification etc.
George Orwell’s B-vocabulary, especially, “Duckspeak”:
“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue
from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres
at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak
word duckspeak, meaning to “quack like a duck”. Like
various words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was
ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which
were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing
but praise” (George Orwell, 1984. New American Library,
p. 308).
Zero-loop power
An exchange in an oral exam on Marxism-Leninism:
QUESTION: “What is the difference between Western
capitalist system and our communist system?“
ANSWER: “In the capitalist West people are exploited
by people. But in our system it is exactly
the other way round.”
“Honestly, I think we should just trust our president
in every decision he makes and should just support
that, you know, and be faithful in what happens”
(Brittney Spears on CNN, September 3rd, 2003)
General George Patton
STEVEN PINKER, Harvard College Professor and the
Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of
Psychology at Harvard University
Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family
Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University Steven Pinker says „FUCKING“... four times
A Story about a soldier who said:
„I come home to my fucking house
after three fucking years
in the fucking war,
and what do I fucking-well find?
My wife in bed
engaging in illicit sexual relations
with a male!“
Source: Authors@Google: Steven Pinker
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU)
37:00-37:09
Family Guy (written, produced, performed
etc mostly by Seth MacFarlane)
Family Guy (written, produced, performed
etc mostly by Seth MacFarlane)
BRIAN GRIFFIN:
Peter, you didn’t
even know what 9/11 was
until 2004!
Lock, Stock and... 500 years of Anglo-Saxon
understing of power... in 5 minutes.
The first „face“ of Power:
(from Hobbes to Dahl):
Power as decisionmaking or public
dominance.
LOCK, STOCK AND TWO
SMOKING BARRELS.
Lock, Stock and... 500 years of Anglo-Saxon
understing of power... in 5 minutes.
The second „face“ of
Power: (from Machiavelli
to Bachrach and Baratz):
Power as „non-decisionmaking“ or domination
„behind the scenes“
LOCK, STOCK AND TWO
SMOKING NOSTRILS.
Lock, Stock and... 500 years of Anglo-Saxon
understing of power... in 5 minutes.
The third „face“ of Power:
(from Marx to Lukes):
“is it not the supreme
exercise of power to get
another or others to have
the desires you want them
to have – that is, to secure
their compliance by
controlling their thoughts
and desires?” (Steven
Lukes, Power: A Radical
veiw. 2nd. Ed, Palgrave,
2005, p. 27)
LOCK, STOCK AND TWO
SMOKING HOT CHICKS.
Single-Loop Power: winning the game
„LOCK, STOCK“ model
entails single-loop learning
for the B-s or „change in
specificity of response by
correction of errors of
choice within a set of
alternatives.“ (Bateson)
„Are we doing things
right?“ vs
„Are we doing the right
things?“
Clientelist systems.
Bureaucratic organizations.
Former Governor of California, famous for signing the
„Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006“... Just kidding J
Double-loop power: constituting the game
The learning perpsective:
Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization, Sage, 2006, p. 91:
For successful double-loop learning to occur, organizations
must develop cultures that support change and risk taking.
They have to embrace the idea that in rapidly changing
circumstances with high degrees of uncertainty, problems and
errors are inevitable. They have to promote an openness that
encourages dialogue and the expression of conflicting points
of view. They have to recognize that legitimate error, which
arises from the uncertainty and lack of control in a situation,
can be used as a resource for new learning.
„The right answers“ vs „the right questions“
„The right question“ vs „the right mode of addressing“
Double-loop power: constituting the game
The power/governance perspective
Facilitative power; steering of self-steering; governing the
governing (metagoverning, epistemic governing); conduct of
conduct.
Symbolic power as „world-making“:
"World-making" consists, according to Nelson Goodman
(1978), "in separating and reuniting, often in the same
operation," in carrying out a decomposition, an analysis,
and a composition, a synthesis, often by the use of labels.
(Pierre Borudieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power.
Sociological Theory, 7(1) 1989, p. 22, quoting Nelson
Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing.)
Triple-loop power: embracing the contingency
of constituting whichever game
The agonistic ethos of contingency:
„each participant in a social order should view both that
order as a whole and everybody’s position within it as
contingent and not natural or fixed“
Peeter Selg, „Justice and Liberal Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Reading of Rawls.“ Social Theory
and Practice, Vol 38 (1) 2012, p. 84
„A free society is not one where a social order has been
established that is better adapted to human nature, but
one which is more aware of the contingency and
historicity of any order.“
Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution in
Our Time. London: Verso, 1990, p. 211
Triple-loop power: embracing the contingency
of constituting whichever game
Bob Jessop’s „the law of requisite irony“ in
metagovernance:
„Irony is required to avoid the temptations of fatalism,
stoicism, opportunism, and cynicism in tackling the often
daunting problems of governance in the face of complex,
reciprocal interdependence in a turbulent environment“
(„Metagovernance.“ In The Sage Handbook of Governance.
Mark Bevir (ed), Sage, 2011, p. 118)
„In contrast to these other responses to the prospect of
failure, the [public, not private or Rortyan] ironist is a sceptic.
If one is likely to fail, one can at least choose one’s preferred
form of failure“ (Ibid)
Triple-loop power: embracing the contingency
of constituting whichever game
The donwside of embracing contingency:
Bateson’s non-linear view of the loops of
learning:
- higher orders of learning are not inherently superior to or
more desirable than lower levels.
- Learning III is potentially destructive.
- Embracing the contingency of order?
- Or embracing the contingency of change?
- Change without substance?
PETER GRIFFIN (Family Guy): Brian, are you suggesting that
9/11 didn't change everything? ... Because 9/11 changed
everything, Brian!!! 9/11 changed everything!!!
9/11 Changed everything
9/11 Changed everything
Dick Cheney form December 22nd 2003:
„In a sense, 9/11 changed everything for us.
9/11 forced us to think in new ways about
threats to the United States, about our
vulnerabilities, about who our enemies were,
about what kind of military strategy we needed
in order to defend ourselves“
9/11 Changed everything
Four loops of Power. Source: shower