What are social facts and why we need to bother

Social facts to society are like grammar to a language, a higher level of abstraction that is nonetheless real, as it governs the way things/words are ordered. You can speak a language without knowing anything about its grammar.  Perhaps, that may affect the higher level of your command but you should mostly get by.

It is possible to deny the existence of social facts because they are not real in the sense of how physical things are real. It is never having been told about that that enabled Margaret Thatcher to claim, with a beady-eyed aplomb, that "there is no such thing as society". (The same woman insisted that a country finance is just like someone's purse: a deliberate lie  or a misguided naiveté, we shall  never know.) Some professional academics I know told me, very seriously, that identity, values and post-liberalism do not exist. They doubtlessly live according with their middle-classes values and various identities (class, gender, race, religion, etc.) in a very Neo-Liberal reality of latter-day London, yet since they have not been taught the grammar of (their own) social existence, they cannot quite put their finger on it. There is no vocabulary to talk about it and therefore it exists not: out of mind, out of sight. It is just like some of my students, very bright and eloquent young adults, who do not know a subjunctive clause from a parenthesis, because someone long time ago decided that teaching grammar at school is a waste of time, innit.

Learning grammar and learning social theory can and often do open up people's mind to a realisation that there is more to reality than just what is visible to the naked eye. As Castaneda's Don Juan wisely said, 'The true essence of the tree is between its leaves.' Without such an insight, one won't be able to see, metaphorically, the forest for the trees. Which automatically should disqualify anyone from any discussion about social matters. Unfortunately, that is still not the case, particularly where it matters: in politics and academia. Hence, we end up taught and led by people whose ability for mental abstraction and educated discussion does not exceed that of your average teenager.

Teeming humanity and hyper-social reality

At times, especially upon a peak into the news, it feels like the world has gone mad. But looking back, it becomes obvious that it has always been the case. However, this time around it's with a difference. I am the last one to bring forward scientism or biologism to explain humanity, but now it seems, to a point, justified. Social facts exist externally, i.e., beyond the control of the society's members. Compared to Durkheim's times, the latter-day rising interconnection of the humanity and its increasing density start bringing about a hyper-social reality: we start living as one global entity with new realities even less within our control than before. There are too many of us now and humanity start behaving like a hyper-chaotic system, acquiring certain characteristics of a physical entity with the critical mass of components having reached a certain saturated level.

With increase in numbers, the quality of the system changes. There are too many of us, the chaos, that has always been there as in any other system, has taken on a different level.  Overall, the interaction is more intense, magnified by technology. Inside, we start feeling crowded, annoyed by our exposure to the different: it particularly comes to head where the population density is high and the influx of foreigners is highly visible. There are more explosions of violence, state-sanctioned and glorified like drone attacks or democracy export wars, or spontaneous and publicly reviled like rape and xenophobia. Perhaps, the only reason keeping it all from building up into another world war is, not Ban Ki-moon benevolent, Mona Lisa-like semi-smile, but another fear, that of the nuclear deterrent. 

Governments and bureaucracies, the supposed rational actors that have never been such, even as far back as in Weber's, are too part of the chaos and subject to it, and also, consisting of live perceiving feeling actors, reacting to it emotionally, psychologically, irrationally. Do we need GM crops to feed all? Do we need mass surveillance to keep it all stable? Will "green technologies" actually save the envrionent from the exponentially growing excreta of the "thinking mold"? What do we need to keep in line with the growing demand for energy to sustain our increasingly unsustainable lifestyles and those aspiring to have those too? Those questions are answered with quick, unreflexive institutional knee jerks, reflexive spasms of bureaucratic systems, rather than any meaningful strategies addressing the underlying causes.

In the meantime, the corporate world and its driving engine, the global financial system, keep growing and operating according to their own logic, largely inconsistent with the highest good of everyone and everything else concerned: people, society, nature. Turning everything into the only language it can understand, that of the bottomline, money. The former "externalities" assumed to be subservient and subdued to the needs of economy -  humans, society and environment - are given a monetary value that can later be traded, exchanged, made into financial derivatives, all to support to the constant expansion of credit, i.e., the fractional reserve banking system clocking up trillions of digital money out of keyboard clicks and electromagnetic signals on server hard drives. 

This drive to monetarise everything, express everything through money, was presciently described in Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1927 novel We, where the entire society works to build a kind of super-spaceship, the Integral, that, when launched, will fly across the universe and calculate it all, "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation".  These days, even human emotions, dutifully recorded by everyone into the various apps of their smartphones, are smartly monetarised to create mega-profits for the likes of Facebook, Amazon and their creditors and investors. Billions of human souls' minutest moves all channeled into one powerful stream to propel the wheels of the world's banking - at least, we have one organised, rational, purposeful response to deal with

Deindividuation and deindividualisation in racialised context

Deindividuation, in plain English, is when individuals turn into a mob. Deindividualisation is when you paint a social group as a homogeneous slab whose members allegedly have no individual characteristics, like "Muslims", or "African-Americans", or "gays", or even "women". 

Neither is a pretty thing. The herd instinct is behind Nazi rallies, lynching, and Black Friday stampedes. Ostracising social groups is Divide and Rule 101, an age-old technique of cynical mass control.

The two can cross-pollinate selectively. That's when it turns really ugly. Thus, London riots of 2011 became racialised as "ethnic minorities going out of hand", and the perpetrators get meted out 1800 years of prison sentences.  On the other hand, drunk college jocks rampages or the Bullingdon club's violent antics are written off as "boys going wild". The class, race and increasingly religion-centred prejudice make out essentially the same events as if radically different in nature.

In essence, that's what anthropologists do too, just from the other (left-wing) side of the same paradigm. The psychological aspect of mob behaviour often escapes social scientists, who look for all answers in social contexts, as if individuals do not exist. Unfortunately for anthropologists, the tireless paeans of cultural difference, some things are just really "universal human nature". Dismissing that fact precludes any meaningful understanding of social events: humans are reduced to the reductive Homo Anthropologicus, a perennial cultural group actor, put into action by collectively shared beliefs and rituals differing based on class, gender, or ethnicity.

Markets are not a natural, impersonal force like rains or earthquakes

From a recent article by the Economist on what happens to countries when they default on their debt: "As punishment for default, capital markets will either impose punitive borrowing rates or refuse to lend at all."

It is made sound as if it were a natural force, a kind of passive tense without an actor, a force majeure of impersonal justice. We must, however, remember that what is made out to be an "invisible hand of the market" is in fact a bunch of people who by arbitrary controlling the value of the main exchange currency, the US dollar, hold nearly the entire world hostage: the 55 trillion that the world owes, as if to an impersonal natural force, is not even paper. It is digits in a computer, whose value is created out of nothing by the fact of borrowing. 

When Russia has recently lost half of its currency value, nothing happened to its real, physical assets, instead an imagined value went down RELATIVE to another imagined value controlled not by some impersonal and disinterested forces, but by a number of private profiteers, seeking nothing but personal gain at the expense of the welfare of whole nations. However, because the imagined value of digital money is used to measure the value of physical assets, control of the former allows a full control of the latter. It is as if someone had the right to decide, at their will, how many grammes are in the kilogramme: today 800, tomorrow 1200, and then buy and sell gold according to those values.

What is identity?

... an illusionary habit of an unawakened mind and reaffirmed by a collective belief in its reality, somewhere between the minimum group paradigm and the mirror stage..

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?

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.

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.

Green-washing

It takes A LOT of energy to develop and implement green technologies. As environmental costs are always disregarded in economic calculations, the madness of shipping Prius batteries twice around the globe for their production-assembling-sales cycle never registers in the mind of environmental activists. The so called green technologies are, in fact, another artificial "bubble" to sustain the growth of the credit-based economy, which exactly IS based on growth for the sake of growth. There is a name for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

Now for a bit of constructive input: solutions cannot be found from within  the system that causes the problem in the first place, although the contradictions that arise in the process always contain the seeds of the gradual change that eventually will bring about a new system. 

In this particular case, no amount of updating the basic concept of an ever-more-complex mechanical vehicle will ever get us anywhere close to the much fanfared "zero carbon impact". It  is as an unattainable pipe dream as perfect elective democracy or the American Dream. Both are ideals taken out of their context and with their actual cost disregarded.

In this particular case of "green technologies", we are to ignore the energy necessary for extracting minerals to produce steel, glass and plastic, moving them around the globe and building facilities to produce, store and sell the products made of them. The impact of later releasing most of the energy, previously bound in carbon fuel, into the atmosphere as heat, is never calculated into the environmental impact of "green technologies" either. It is as if wind turbines and hybrid cars fall ready-made from the sky and, upon the completion of their usage cycle, are miraculously absorbed back into where they came from without a trace.