meaning and knowledge

1. The stranger, therefore, approaches the other group as a newcomer in the true meaning of the term. At best he may be willing and able to share the present and the future with the approached group in vivid and immediate experience; under all circumstances, however, he remains excluded from such experiences of its past. Seen from the point of view of the approached group, he is a man without a history.

2. Every word and every sentence is, to borrow a term of William James, surrounded by 'fringes' connecting them, on the one hand, with past and future elements of the universe of discourse to which they pertain, and surrounding them, on the other hand, with a halo of emotional values and irrational implications which themselves remain ineffable. The fringes are the stuff poetry is made of; they are capable of being set of music but they are not translatable. There are in any language terms with several connotations. They, too, are noted in the dictionary. But, besides these standardized connotations, every element of the speech acquires its special secondary meaning derived from the context of the social environment within which it is used and, in addition, gets a special tinge from the actual occasion in which it is employed.

3. In any culture the highest rank is accorded to one of the three types of knowledge distinguished by [Max Scheler]—knowledge for the sake of domination (Beherrschungswissen), knowledge for the sake of knowing (Bildungswissen), knowledge for the sake of salvation (Heilswissen)—and therewith to one of the three types of men of knowledge: the scientist-technician, the sage, the saint. The social acceptance of this rank order determines the whole structure of the particular culture.

Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations

tolerance

A group's tolerant attitude toward, and encouragement of, the efforts of another group to raise its power and social standing requires that the first group's secure social status is not endangered by these efforts. There is something smug about tolerance, despite best intentions, since it implicitly asserts one's own superiority ... Intolerance is an admission of weakness that acknowledges the power of another, just as tolerance is a sign of strength that confirms the other's inferiority.

peter m. blau, exchange and power in social life

the container for the thing contained

Whereas nation states have always distinguished themselves from others by means of a thick exterior boundary on the perimeter of a territorial 'container,' they have also maintained the illusion of an interor without borders, a national space kept open by the political public sphere where differences are subordinated by the constitutional state. With the rise of the contractualization of citizenship, an interior border now duplicates that of the exterior. Only those who have borne the burden of internal social exclusion for centuries--first from slavery, then through racial apartheid--are immune from the compensatory allure of the nation.

margaret somers, genealogies of citizenship

this makes me think of hugh of st. victor, quoted by edward said:

the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

self, expanding #4

some folks in missouri have found a neurophysiological basis (or at least response) to a state of selflessness. would be interesting to see if the same reported decrease in activity in the right parietal lobe occurs when individuals experience a state of inclusivity or big-heartedness (as described here) whether through art or pharmacology.

a desirable plasticity

i wrote this in 2005, and found it again by chance today while attending a conference on organizational design. apropos now, given the degree to which incomprehensible instruments have devastated the economy (john lanchester has a nice new yorker essay about how postmodernism features in said devastation). thus:

it is only when the "4" key on your thinkpad breaks down that you realize how many things require typing either a 4 or a $. spent the morning going through miscellaneous and numerous credit card and service accounts to make payments and/or close them. more than ever before, the growing influence of service providers allows them to penetrate where the conditions of their service are not fully understood by their customer base. clearly, there should be some obligation to ensure a full disclosure but i cannot help feeling that overextension of development is partly culpable. it is not unreasonable to expect someone who grows up in the age of credit and electronic banking to understand the benefits, disadvantages, and conditions governing the extension of credit to private individuals (for example) yet credit card companies routinely are forced to conduct credit education for students who have dramatically overspent on their shiny new credit cards or who do not understand the detrimental side effects of not making a monthly payment. perhaps the complexity of these financial systems are beyond those who did not grow up with them? i certainly keep my accounts as streamlined as possible, and even then they frequently perplex and frustrate.

this is ultimately a question of how plastic human high-level behavioural patterns actually are, and whether or not a high level of plasticity is in fact desirable. the oft-quoted hugh of st. victor--who only became oft-quoted after edward said quoted him in Orientalism--argued that "the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." (he was talking about something else, but in these meta-times of post-post-modernism everything is evidence.) hugh (and said) are describing the tactical immersion and flexibility of michel certeau's bricolage and james c. scott's metis, the quality that odysseus has ("o! many-sided hero"). we could take this reading to imply a normative prescriptive path that edmund burke would doubtless criticize--essentially a glue-factory approach for the outmoded. i advocate rigorous segregation, for the new is always invasive, and the old seldom has the tools to fight back. like nietzsche and tocqueville both observe, segregation allows the joint existence (and slow replacement) of two (or more) systems where combination would rapidly dilute or destroy all but one.

the question now, of course, is whether or not to let the previous system persist and gradually be replaced, or to let it crumble. this week, richard hackman mentioned something connected: the idea of partial eradication, in which whatever you don't fully eradicate generally returns, stronger than before. this is the "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," antibiotic-resistant bacteria argument, and i find myself increasingly convinced.

the atlas of true names

from the atlas of true names

oh, the romance. recall ursula le guin, the international barcode of life, and the true names of things.

ann cooper and polycausality

i like to say that everything is polycausal. one example, obviously, is food. in 2005, we ran a tutorial in the biology department here (bio95hfy, no longer offered) on biology, agriculture, conservation, and ecology. one of the core ideas of the class was how the patterns of human food-consumption are multiply-determined: culture, location, transportation, genetics, industry, among many other factors, influence what we choose to eat.

for north america, there may be no more important influence than agricultural subsidies. direct subsidies to the agricultural industry, in the form of payments made to farmers or purchases of commodity crops like corn and milk, have averaged $19 billion a year for the last 5 years. EWG maintains a database of the distribution of american agricultural subsidies (here is their 2007 database) which is interesting to poke around in. they've also done some analysis on the concentration of the subsidies, and estimate that the top 20% of subsidy recipients under the farm bill absorb 84% of the funds (based on distributions from 2003-2005). more than a third of the subsidies go to feed grains--including corn. these subsidies corn-growing economically feasible in the US (though obviously not fully) accounts for the presence of high fructose corn syrup and corn-derived ingredients in large swathes of commercially-produced food.

in addition, there are slews of indirect subsidies to agriculture that distort how we eat. oil, gas, and coal subsidies make synthetic pesticides and fertilizers derived from oil or manufactured in energy-intensive processes (such as the haber-bosch process for fixing nitrogen) cheaper than they otherwise would be (or should be) and thus increase the rate at which we use them. the subsidised federal interstate system makes it cheaper to transport food from across the country than it otherwise would be (or should be).

(this article about the food complex is not bad either.)

which is all a long, winding way of explaining how it is that school districts in many parts of the country are able to feed children on a food ingredient budget of just a few dollars a day per child: much of the raw material (meat, milk, corn-based products) comes either from federal crop purchase programs or is inexpensive by federal subsidy, and is implicitly subsidised by cheap transportation and cost of production. the food is cheap (cheaper than it should be) and so it makes economic sense to use it even though it's crummy. ann cooper, executive chef of the berkeley public school system, is trying her best to make it make economic sense to use good food and cook it well (she's not the only one; sCool Food in santa barbara is approaching it from an institutional perspective as well). burkhardt bilger wrote a detailed feature on her work in the new yorker (in the sept. 4, 2006 issue; only the abstract is online). but you can get a sense of what she does in her TED presentation:

* alice waters and josh viertel, new president of slow food america, were just here this week. their panel was facilitated by, of all people, homi bhabha. he didn't seem to have much background on the interconnections between food, culture, and the machinery of production that exists here and in the rest of the world. he cited repeatedly, in fact exclusively, from last week's new york times magazine.

power in the north

this week, we read from various writers on inequality in power. (and also from marx's capital and the grundrisse, but of those two densities let no more be said.) rhetorical imperatives seem to drive at least most of the classical social theorists to propose strongly monocausal explanations for phenomena like class and inequality, even though that kind of explanation is singularly unconvincing under the least scrutiny. having read for weeks about how there is an ineluctability to the rise of the proletariat, it's refreshing to read mills and see acknowledgment that there are conditions under which agency gives rise to major change.

The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. ... When knowledgeable journalists tell us that 'events, not men, shape the big decisions,' they are echoing the theory of history as Fortune, Chance, Fate, or the work of The Unseen Hand. For 'events' is merely a modern word for these older ideas, all of which separate men from history-making, because all of them lead us to believe that history goes on behind men's backs. History is drift with no mastery; within it there is action but no deed; history is mere happening and the event intended by no one. The course of events in our time depends more on a series of human decisions than on any inevitable fate. The sociological meaning of 'fate' is simply this: that, when the decisions are innumerable and each one is of small consequence, all of them add up in a way no man intended -- to history as fate. But not all epochs are equally fateful. As the circle of those who decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized and the consequences of decisions become enormous, then the course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles. This does not necessarily mean that the same circle of men follow through from one event to another in such a way that all of history is merely their plot. The power of the elite does not necessarily mean that history is not also shaped by a series of small decisions, none of which are thought out. It does not mean that a hundred small arrangements and compromises and adaptations may not be built into the going policy and the living event. The idea of the power elite implies nothing about the process of decision-making as such: it is an attempt to delimit the social areas within which that process, whatever its character, goes on.

c. wright mills, the power elite

mills proposes to identify the social areas within which the power elite emerge, but i'm much more interested in figuring out their morphology, the signals that identify their presence. this is interesting because i've always contended that the US has an elite that's hidden in plain sight -- the result of a country founded on a deep-rooted belief in equality of individual and opportunity. as in many other countries that have bought into the western intellectual tradition of means-ends rationality and of equal opportunity, virtue and normative value has attached itself to what we become, not what we are. where then does the morphology of elitism hide? i spent some time writing about one place where i thought it might go.

others, of course, have located signals in the construction of the canon of general knowledge, which is general only in creating a distinction between those who have it and those who don't. e.h. gombrich has a great essay on the topic called "the tradition of general knowledge." systems of education and egalitarian access frequently are walled around by barriers that are difficult to see.

Even when academic degrees, scientific training, special aptitudes as tested by examinations and competitions, open the way to public office, there is no eliminating that special advantage in favor of certain individuals which the French call the advantage of positions déjà prises. In actual fact, though examinations and competitions may theoretically be open to all, the majority never have the resources of meeting the expense of long preparation, and many others are without the connections and kindships that set an individual promptly on the right road, enabling him to avoid the gropings and blunders that are inevitable when one enters an unfamiliar environment without any guidance or support.

gaetano mosca, the ruling class

power and decision-making

not what you might think; more a disquisition on the value of complete data in decision support.

example 1: whenever we consider strategies that individuals can implement for reducing carbon emissions, the first thought seems to be to throw on a bunch of solar panels. this particularly because, in california, of tax rebates and solar installation subsidies. the reality is that the first thing to do is increase energy efficiency in the home rather than change the means of energy generation. household energy consumption could be reduced by between 15% and 25% -- an immediate savings that is significantly out of proportion to the cost of an efficiency audit and the usually inexpensive fixes that they recommend (a heater blanket, auto-off power plugs, properly sealed windows and doors, etc).

example 2, and similarly: biofuels (particularly corn ethanol) have become fashionable as environmentally-friendly substitutes for miscellaneous petrochemicals. only recently has systematic research been published on the degree to which biofuels reduce net greenhouse gas emissions -- and the indications appear to be that biofuels may actually harm rather than help. why is this? several reasons, all associated with absence of full-cost accounting when evaluating biofuels:

• land-use patterns changed dramatically when biofuels became popular. two articles (here's one, and the other) in the feb 8 issue of science argue that increased demand for biofuels changes land-use in ways that were difficult to predict and which liberate greenhouse gases. (a gross oversimplification of one of the cited causes: converting US corn production to ethanol production causes, among other things, land in the tropics to be deforested for other grain and seed production to compensate. no good.)
  
• nitrogen-based fertilizers used in producing biofuel increase the amount of nitrogen dioxide, also a greenhouse gas, liberated into the atmosphere. (the reference is from crutzen's recent paper in ACPD.)
  
• moreover, the amount of energy required to produce ethanol from raw biomass only infrequently reduces total energy use. corn ethanol is an instructive example. to grow and produce 1 calorie of energy from corn grown in the US generally requires 10 calories of petroleum-based energy (the variation in the input-output ratio varies, but is never even close to 1:1). part of this is due to the general inefficiency of the corn plant as an ethanol producer. most of the biomass of a corn plant -- the stalky, leafy part -- is not amenable to ethanol conversion. we spend a lot of energy growing an annual plant, about 85% of the biomass of which cannot be used for ethanol. new processes for converting what is currently waste cellulose to so-called cellulosic ethanol may change this, but are still only in initial pilot phases.

whether implicitly or explicitly, we make decisions about complex systems using models that have far fewer degrees of complexity. sometimes that just doesn't cut it.

manufactured landscapes

the high line wasn't open to the public when i was in new york in june, so i spent a saturday morning walking around the galleries overlooking the west side highway. i went into the charles cowles gallery purely to escape the heat, but was lured deeper by an enormous book-matched live-edge table. most of the art was pretentious and second-rate, but one room was dedicated entirely to large-format photography by edward burtynsky, who won the TED prize in 2005.

manufactured landscapes is a documentary retrospective of burtynsky's work, showing additional background footage from his visits to quarries, shipyards, and other places where industry has re-shaped the physical and social landscape. we saw it on monday night at hammer's. apart from the music (which was egregious, needlessly oppressive, and almost entirely in minor keys) it had a light touch for a 90-minute film about several places in the world where human activity has either created stultifying social environments or left enormous blights upon the land. doubtless this is because the photos are stunning and gorgeous.


shipyard #12, zhejiang, china: shipbuilding is making a hole in the sea and surrounding it with material. from the outside, once the hulls are complete, even large ships look like light envelopes, an illusion enhanced by their ponderous but ineluctable progress. this photo of the hull structure before the skin is riveted on, reveals the light envelope to be surprisingly hefty. compare this with the hull structure of a wooden boat, which is skeletal by contrast -- wood is stronger than steel by weight.


stilgoe used to say that progress is often misunderstood to necessarily be improvement where it frequently is only change.


shipbreaking #9, chittagong, bangladesh: the more massive the ship, the more it costs to disassemble -- in most countries, it costs more to break a ship than the parts are worth. old ships come to die on the shores of chittagong. usually pointed perpendicular to the shore and then abandoned with the engines running, these ships grind ashore and are taken apart for salvage. most sea-going ships of this vintage have hulls painted below the waterline with antifouling compounds -- toxic biocides designed to inhibit the growth of barnacles and other marine life on the hulls -- which are ground off as the ships slam into the sand. it looks a little like an overimagined collection of ancient greek warships.

if you are intrigued by this, you may also enjoy rustfetish, a photographer committed to exploring, up close, the pleasures of rust.