What is development about?

“…weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.”

Is habitus actually Karma? Bourdieu through the Indic and psychoanalitical lenses

As quoth the poet:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

                                      Philip Larkin

This is, sans doute, a poetic account of habitus transfer on the subjectivity level. I imagine, Bourdieu would be nodding approvingly.

Social studies only observe and comment on that state of affairs, with no suggestions as per how social change would occur here (aka the trap of Post-Structuralism). The Indic and psychoanalytical traditions, however, take it that there is a way out of it and beyond it, it just takes the right kind of concentration, awareness and effort. Whether psychotherapy or yoga and mediation, ultimately it is about trying to stop that karmic buck or to shed the luggage of life scripts passed on generation after generation.

Or, as good wise Karl would say, a technological change in the material base (relations of production +  mode of production)  would cause a shift in the superstructure of values and ways of biding time until we die.

Would you go  into a yoga retreat/psychotherapy or rather wait until post-industrial society changes your lifestyle?

Truth in a technological society

Science is ''the extension of civilisation's technological core. In the scientific sense, 'true' means that which has the chance of being employed in effective technological procedures.'' (Kolakowski 1966)

That makes a lot of sense wherever you look. Whatever/whoever has no technological/productive utility is cavalierly discarded as irrelevant: spirituality, the unemployed,  bees, depth psychology, clean air - until it too get commodified and sold like bottled water these days!

By the same token, things only get noticed when they become properly commodified/monetarised, that is, when a technology of extracting a monetary value becomes apparent, codified and replicable in a way understandable to low-level business management, the inadvertent foot-soldiers of capitalism. Thus, compassion is acknowledged when it can generate profit by way of charity. Love - when it can be sold through a bride catalogue. Whatever does not yield to technological measurement and then market commodification remains on the fringes, and that is truly a blessing!

Erratic excess vs. normalising discourse

Brian Massumi apparently made a claim that capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalising normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess: 

"The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normality starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening is part of capitalism's dynamic."

I think normalisation goes hand in hand with erratic excess though, the latter legitimises the former. In fact, the latter happens within the limits of the illusion of choice offered by the former.

Besides, the Weberian rational bureaucracy was more a wishful project than a totalised reality. Anyone who has ever had to deal with it can confirm that it is mostly anything but rational.

I feel though that Baudrillard must have written that long time ago... :-)

A handy term at any rate, erratic excess...

History

History. Hi-story. A story souped up with scientoid belle-lettrism, highly educated stereotypes and a fat list of references to other hi-stories. Commonly peddled as the factual depiction of reality.

Bogus "science" alert!

Most published research findings are false. 

Ioannidis (2005) goes into a deep and nuanced argument to show how that keeps happening time after time again. However, more often thant not, it simply glares straight into your face.

For example, a recent article on the scholarly debate about the minutiae of the Neanderthal diet includes this passage.

"Many hunter-gatherers, including the Inuit, Cree and Blackfeet, eat the stomach contents of animals such as deer because they are good source of vitamin C and trace elements," said Stringer. "For example, among the Inuit, the stomach contents of an animal are considered a special delicacy with a consistency and a flavour that is not unlike cream cheese. At least, that is what I am told."

So first, we are told that the prime drive behind hunter-gatherers' consuming some very iffy foodstuffs is their anachronistically enlightened awareness of the health benefits of vitamin C. And then we discover that that insight is based on unconfirmed hearsay. Keeping in mind that 2/3 of what fieldwork informants tell you is a lie (source: H. Russell Bertrand, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches), if this is not downright random inconsequential bogus nonsense peddled as scientific truth by an ostensibly liberal media outlet, then what is?

the culture of instant gratification

What is Lacan's mirror stage?

What is Lacan's mirror stage?

1. Many invited, few chosen
2. Borges and mirrors
3. Koans and duality
4. Empirical knowledge vs. intellectual knowledge

Occupational hazard in anthropology

Occupational hazard in anthropology: losing faith in humanity, and then picking it up again.

Briidging the irreconcilable in earthling studies

Bridging social and psychological studies is notoriously difficult. First of all, the two realities they explore are based in two fundamentally different planes of existence: social life is spread over time and space and subject to constant change, whereas the primary thinking process is timeless and spaceless. Caught up between the twain is the human being with their limited conscious mental capacity, to which the mechanisms of both the social and the psychological are mostly beyond comprehension.

As opaque and incompatible as the link between the two may appear, as long as skirting this most fundamental issue continues, no social sciences research can hope to offer any satisfactory results. 

That said, we need to be wary of attempts made to marry the two on a superficial level, like in uncritical sociology and behavioural psychology, where observable facts are taken for their face value. That way, we only end up with a deeply misguided, epistemologically shaky, analysis prone to gross ideological biases.

Endeavours to go deeper, which are fortunately, rather prolific, then run into methodological challenges: quantitative vs. qualitative and staged experiment vs. various varieties of participant observation. The former approach is theoretically linked to the quantitative approach: two traits are painstakingly isolated to be expressed as a dependent variable and independent variable, which would later allow to quantify that relationship. The hard to bear truth that all social as well as psychological phenomena are overdetermined (re. Freud and Althusser) and hence cannot be reduced to two variables is conveniently shoved under the carpet in the process of operationalising (turning concepts into numbers). The main motivation here appears is trying to come across as a "proper science" with "hard data" (i.e., numbers) -  the patently obsolete, if sadly persistent, positivist slant, that many people just can't seem to kiss goodbye.  

Participant observation that results mostly in qualitative research is hard to produce and as hard to consume. It requires time- and effort-consuming training in understanding complex issues by way of mastering abstract principles of analysis that are much harder to get under your belt than maths. It also brings in philosophical and epistemological concerns that cannot be decisively resolved, only accepted as paradoxes at the heart of human existence. That leap into uncertainty proves too much for most people, so they stick to tossing numbers and flashing PowerPoint presentations. 

Another leap, from analysis to synthesis, that Weber refered to as Verstehen, turns out beyond what many are prepared to deal with, too.

The simulachra of sex: the tyranny of media images in your bedroom

 


















"Body-perfect earthlings look for other earthlings looking exactly like themselves to fornicate with media-created images in their own heads." If that does not paint a mental picture  for you, then I don't know  what will.

Now for a bit of theory.

The earthling's social persona in the symbolic order of their mind, the perception of oneself as perceived by the Other, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: the méconnaisance of taking the Ego for one's Self, of which Lacan (1931) wrote. Amazing how many people only get the letter of the Mirror Stage, but not at all its  spirit.

The frame of reference for the building and maintenance of that social persona, both symbolic and material, is taken from the social environment: parents, family, peers, and, to an ever-increasing extent, the media. The dynamic here is two-fold. Firstly, the earthling learns of the available/possible choices for assembling its identity, consisting of multiple extensions on top of the Ego. Secondly, s/he looks into the society as if into a mirror, picking on and learning from the reactions/feedback towards his or her social persona. 

The physical re-enactment of mental pictures, often media-created, then becomes a major life pursuit. Mutual masturbation into each other, aroused subliminally by those mental pictures is the sex simulacra (Baudrillard 1981) that, unbeknownst to most earthlings, is supplanting human sexual interaction with its glossy vapidity.

* The present analysis is a result of a long-term multi-site fieldwork project undertaken by the author.

Related sources: Lacan's sexuation formulae. 

Photo by Mehmet Turgut

Big boys, big toys

After many years of diving deep into social theory and psychoanalysis, I feel that I have re-emerged at the other side of simplicity. So many things in life are simple. Never simple the way they explain to you though. Let's illustrate this with a couple of real-life examples.

Two recent events made a click somewhere in my brain. First, Tokyo winning a bid to stage Olympic games 100 miles from a leaking nuclear reactor on the seashore in a seismic zone. Second, the USA's manic sword-flailing in Syria. In both cases, the course of action pushed on by presumably responsible and educated grown-up men is not dangerous and destructive, but also counter-intuitive, counter-logical and irrational. In fact, the word that lends itself the best here is satanic. Knowingly putting lives and livelihoods of millions of people in harm's way sure can't come across as anything but that.

I am not using "satanic" for the sake of a mere hyperbole though. Psychoanalytically, "satanic" implies coming from the Shadow aspect, which all humans have. In fact, it's part and parcel of who we are, albeit mostly unbeknownst to most of us. To what extent we are aware of it and to what extent we are able not to act on it, is in many ways dependent on the pressure society and culture put on us (Freud 1923). Empathy is one of those socially constructed personality traits. Children need to be taught empathy in a certain time window, lest they grow up to be inconsiderate and cruel. 

However, it is hardly ever perfect, the extent of the empathic function of the mind varies from individual to individual and is prone to  variation. Given a chance to be inconsiderate or cruel, most earthlings would act on their Shadow impulses. (When given free reign, earthlings go out of hand). Once empathy-free or empathy-light children grow up to occupy positions in power, especially unaccountable power, such as the top echelons of government, army or business, they  will  do exactly that: only this  time they won't tear fly's wings or torture a kitten, but choose a phallic display of power or a huge vanity project at the expense of  everyone else's good.

Although, for understandable reasons, we see mostly men doing that, the glass-ceiling-smashing career effort turns women into exactly that too, so these days we never run out of examples like Hilary Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Condoleeza Rice, or Dilma Roussef presiding matter-of-fact-like over mayhem and havoc.

Individual agency vs.social structure

The more I delve into psychology and anthropology, now on the PhD level, the bigger the temptation to become cynical on account of the human race. One thing for sure: there will be no mass salvation by any means: revolution, religion, alien invasion. Each decides for themselves.

Innit vs. jus chillin: a socio-inguistic analysis

"Innit" signifies an urge to belong, to confirm group membership by making sure that you're understood and by using the same language as the rest of the group. There's some social function to "innit".

"Jus chillin", on the other hand, conjures images of utter social alienation as Marx wrote about it, of mindlessly biding time until one's death by way of gobbling up multi-coloured snacks plopped in front of a plasma screen splashed with glamour, violent deaths and other mental pollution.

Daniel Bell's The Economy of Desire (review)

Programmatic and original books on social theory are always far and between. Much of what is published out there are elaborations and interpretations on those few. Well, that's how science works, quoth Thomas Kuhn (1962). A shocking bulk of what is published in arts, humanities and social sciences is based on nicking poorly understood flashy concepts from adjacent disciplines and bloating them into published volumes. 

Daniel Bell's The Economy of Desire is basically an amalgam of a couple of concepts that Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari came up with 30 - 40 years ago, this time with a Christian spin. While concurring with the grand three on most points, Bell plugs in his religion as a possible saviour from the capitalist economy of desire. Coming out as a religiously-inclined scientist is not as shocking as it was in Evans-Pritchard's time, so Bell goes on freely with many rather plausible, as well as not so much ruminations on Catholic alternatives to capitalism. None of those is, however, examined critically, as a social scientist worth their salt would do. They simply end up taken for its face value and exalted for their ostensible moral superiority: fair trade is great because it is fair. Right. By the same token, green-washing would  be great because it is green. No surprise then that what we get from Bell is that Catholic morals are great because they are Catholic. But  then again, what would you expect from a professor of theological ethics at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary?

I, for  one, would be the last to decry incorporating spirituality into scientific method. What I strongly object to is, however, is sugarcoating unexamined social practices with unexamined religious spin, particularly coming from an organised religion, which is a patently social constructed human organisation that needs a bit of social deconstruction itself.

The phrase that caught my attention amongst all that do-goody Catholic anti-capitalism was this: "Christianity... is a counter-discipline that heals desire of its sin-sickness". For me, it was like a wolf momentarily dropping its sheepskin. Creeps. In other words, we are advised to replace the capitalist super-ego with Bell's favourite Christian super-ego to let it control our life and everything we do. Rephrased once again for those unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, what we are dealing with here is a mere competition of rival prescriptive systems eager to worm into your mind and reign you from there, one hegemony for another. So how is swapping one psychic parasite with another going to benefit the humankind? There is actually a historical precedent: Jesuit Reductions for natives in South America. Who knows, filling the jungle with Baroque cathedrals may be a better option than the modern slavery-consumption cycle (aka, "work hard, play hard").

Simulacra sex

Recently, earthlings have been living under the tyranny of images imposed on them through various media outlets, which shape their expectations of life. When it comes to sex, for example, they keep looking for an exact match of such an image in their brain: the right abs, the right breasts, etc. When they've found a match, they then proceed to fucking that image in the brain, masturbating into or with the help of the other person. Enacting the right sequence of image-induced actions, as Baudrillard's attributes of visible  happiness, is supposed to achieve the prescribed jouissance, and, perhaps, it does. However, to someone outside that tyranny of images, it simply comes across mechanistic and, well, masturbatory.

Frog-boiling: sound familiar?

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

Taste and class: fieldwork delivers a blow to theory

The other day, during a lunch break in an inter-collegiate training seminar in central London, Bourdieu's Distinction, my favourite manual for understanding life on Earth, revealed a gaping chink in the armour.

Just when I thought that I had a good cover and was blending in just right, tucking in my home-made organic brown rice and free-range piperade, two of my lunch buddies, very high-rolling international PhD students from uppity families, went down their candy bars and cola with a child-like gusto, exactly the kind of  food that I, in my ignorance, deemed the staple of the less-educated earthlings. What's more, my declining to partake in this veritable feast of high fructose corn syrup, xantam gum and flavourings identical to natural, was met with gasps of sheer surprise.

- I've never met anyone who would turn this down.

What I learnt today: although class is sure a handy principle of macro-level analysis, individual cases of protein-based social life will defy it, time and over again.

Grabalization

A concept of anything being up for grabs for anyone who knows how to bring down trade barriers or melt down financial markets.

Where is the "invisible hand" pushing us?

It may not be fashionable these days to quote John Sydenham Furnivall, however, when the Euurocentric tinge, the air to breathe of his era, is ignored, his is pure wisdom of a scientist and a hands-on administrator. 

"Everyone would pay twopence rather than threepence for the same thing; that is rational, a matter of universal common sense....but at the same time, unless kept under control, it reduces costs by eliminating all human qualities that are not required to maintain life."

Man and profit

Profit maximisation cannot be the sole objective of the humankind. Man* does not survive on profit alone. However, man without profit does not live to find that out. 

Striking the balance, the Middle Path, is the true objective, as far as materiality concerned anyway. 

*  I am using 'man' here in its original Saxon meaning of 'human being'.

Breaking news

"BREAKING NEWS!" 

It's not "breaking". It's a sensationalist factoid pandering to the emotional voyeurism of the bored masses.

No link to stop smut from spreading.

Emotional pornography: talent shows and the division of labour

The division of labour, a revolutionary labour management solution, pioneered in early manufactures of the Cordovan Caliphate and later on in the Northern Italian city-states, has freed us from having to single-handedly in order . It has provided us with a constantly expanding range of ever-more affordable commodities, which have, no doubt, have our lives more comfortable.

On the other hand, it has made the work lives of most of us a bit of a senseless drudgery, whereby we are divorced from the purpose, or the final product of what we do Monday to Friday. With at least one third of our waking hours spent so, our life routine is boring and predictable. We have traded our lifetime on this planet for creature comforts and a promise of stability. 

However, humans cannot sustain on material welfare alone. Emotional consumption is at least just as important as consumption of market commodities. In fact, the two are two sides of the same medal: e.g., in retail therapy we seek an emotional high, the purchase itself being merely instrumental.

This is where very cunningly barges in the entertainment industry. Talent shows like X-Factor and [Fill In The Country] Has Talent shrewdly extract genuine emotions from starry-eyed hopefuls to peddle close-up images of ecstatic or devastated contestants and awed audiences alike to the jaded masses glued to their plasma screens. As shielded from this kind of psychological pollution as my largely media-free life is, I briefly found myself gawking at one after another YouTube clip of talent show stories, devouring the cleverly packaged emotional trips with an addictive gusto.

Scientist's analytic streak however quickly kicked, and I started pondering over possible repercussions of what this industry of emotional pornography does to earthlings. 

Firstly, this vicarious enjoyment of someone's cynically hijacked and broadcast emotions provides a powerful emotional kick to those whose lives are largely void of that. In some ways, it is not unsimilar to the common-and-garden masturbation to porn videos, except here one is exempt from any kind of effort to obtain gratification: it is delivered ready-made, pre-chewed and pre-digested, straight to your senses by a devilishly professional TV production team.

Secondly, it upholds an illusion of meritocracy, of a society with a speed lift of social mobility for the gifted. Never mind that most winners fizzle out into oblivion a few months after the show, abandoned to their own devices to deal with the aftermath of falling down from so high.

Thirdly, it also contributes to a culture of instant gratification, an illusion that success can be achieved if you only hit the right button at the right time, no effort required on your side. A generation of youngsters is tricked into believing that having a great voice or good looks will automatically promote you to the highest rungs of showbiz. The fact that such big-time entertainers as Beyonce and Brittney Spears have effectively had no childhood having to work non-stop to achieve their present position is conveniently glossed over, while the superficial trimmings of success - fancy clothes, shiny cars and glamorous lifestyles - enjoy a disproportionate, voyeristic coverage.

The neurotic conflict between the simulacra of the media-manufactured delusional desire and the reality of structural violence and social immobility is what one of the major drives of the 2011 urban riots in the UK. Simon Cowell and the Co. are most certainly among the actual culprits.

Fractional reserve banking: the actual secret of Western prosperity

A lot of  talk - by academics, journalists and laymen alike - goes on about "successful economic models". Inspired by Max Weber's largely misunderstood and misquoted The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, economic success has first been attributed to White man's supremacy, then Japanese diligence, presently to Chinese Confucian ethics. 

Elaborate models show how this or that factor made or broke a particular country. Economists in particular can't get enough of singling out that elusive dependent variable that will couple perfectly with their fetish variable of economic growth. Back in the halcyon days of universal fascination with "development", anthropologists too used to look for magic secrets of  prosperity, e.g., Clifford Geertz in the conclusion to The Agriculutral Involution in Indonesia ruminated poignantly on "how come Indonesia is not more like Japan?"

Looking beyond the quality of Javanese volcanic soil and delusions of meritocratic world economy, at, as Arjun Appadurai put it, the "the promiscuous flows of global capital", reveals that access to cheap money by way of fractional reserve banking is the actual secret of Western prosperity.  Tempted with this giant carrot on a stick, whole countries jump up and embark on economic miracles. The fin-de-siècle Argentina used to be world's 3rd richest country, thanks to the British banks - until Evita ousted them, wherefore that coveted prosperity never returned to the land of tango and giant steaks. Oftentimes, it is the overspill of Western military expenses that proves an unexpected economic side-effect. The Korean War money fuelled Japan's skyrocketing to the top of world's pecking order. Thailand hugely benefited from serving as the US bulwark in the Vietnam War. The cases that superficially appear exceptions, in fact, rest on the same principles: for example, China's stunning rise owes a great deal to its unprecedented control of its finances that allows it to create its own giant carrot on a stick outside the reach of the so-called "world's financial institutions". The collapse of the Soviet Union may be partially attributed to its failure to develop a fractional reserve banking system.

Money is the blood of economy. The more you cook up, the more material prosperity people will produce, chasing that very carrot on a stick. However, crasheth that Ponzi scheme, crasheth the whole shebang. Among the structural factors that can bring about the eventual demise of this model are:

1. Oversaturation of the market: there are limits to how much stuff people actually need. The ceaseless "oversize me" drive can only lead to a fate similar to Mr. Creozote's.
   
2. Uncontrolled cooking up of money not backed up by any assets: the trillions allegedly hoarded in offshore accounts are exactly that, digits in the computer, in whose purchase power everyone happens to believe.
   
3. Unchecked wealth distribution will effectively deplete mass consumers' purchase power: the goose that lays golden eggs will bite itself on the ass to death. Palliatives like limitless credit extension to every Tom, Dick and Harry has proven highly toxic as we witnessed in 2008.

The credit-based economic model did bring about a level of unprecedented material prosperity to the Golden Billion. At the same time, it has peaked out around the First Oil Crisis and has required an enormous effort and expense to sustain by way of creating fake stock exchange bubbles (dot com, prime mortgage, green technologies, carbon trading, etc.). It has also decisively changed the relationship between the nation-state and corporate capital. It has also brought up a obscenely staggering wealth gap both between the "developing"and the "developed" world as well as domestically in the West. To secure that gap a variety of highly destructive measures has been taken: waging wars around the globe, initiating ans sustaining perpetual wars on "drugs" and "terror", mass control through mass surveillance and culture of fear.

What kind of system will come in place of the current one is beyond any social engineering attempt or wishful prediction. On thing clear is that the contradictions that will bring it down are already present and will serve as cornerstone for a new emerging reality. Another clear thing is that no amount of wiggling and huffing-puffing within the framework of monetary economy will remove you from its morbid grip: attempts like the Brixton pound are sweet but deeply naive.

Post-Humanism

Post-humanism really drives at how intelligent protein-based life on Earth got tricked into spending their lifetimes serving the Machine.

A related insight from Zen Buddhism:

"The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robes at the sound of a bell?" Zen Master Unmon

Koan in social sciences

Kōan in Zen-Buddhism is a story or sometimes an action that is used to instigate enlightenment. The closest equivalent in Christianity would be Christ's parables.

In social sciences, as in theology, we need to deal with complex intangible phenomena that nevertheless profoundly affect our lives. Often there are no names for them, or some kind of names need to be introduced to help the conscious mind deal with such a complexity. Good examples would be culture of fear,  structural violence or governmentality. They may come across as self-important inscrutable gobbledygook to those who have never pondered over complex process that make up our social life, but should quickly make sense to those who have. I've seen people having those lightb-ulb moments many times.

Sometimes one name is just to small to contain the whole web of relevant meanings, so we resort to parables or metaphors. The point is not in them per se, but in the truth at which they hint at. One of my favourite ones is about the all-too-oft misunderstood Lacan's mirror stage. Just like Budhist kōans it helps overcome binary thinking, analysing realities by way of binary opposites.

It seems to work for some and for many the spark just never ignites. We get answers to the level of our questions, forsooth.

Four best socio-psychological experiments

The four most beautiful and tale-teling experiments that combine the best of experimental science and participant observation are:

The Third Wave experiment

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Stanford Prison Experiment  
Milgram Experiment

They all paint a rather bleak picture of the most of the humanity, however. Apparently, when given the chance most earthlings will turn into monsters. It is only their own pain or the fear of authority - God, government, parents - that keep most of them from that.

Interestingly enough, all the three experiments are considered controversial. All had to be terminated by emergency, as they, nearly or very much so, went out of hand - quite like actual life outside the ivory silo always does.