Through the meandering tributaries of my stream of association reading lists, I’ve hit upon what I find a fascinating book, which is going to warrant having a whole series dedicated to it. I continue to work on that project. In the meantime, I didn’t want you getting bored, or wandering off to flirt with other bloggers, so I thought I ought to post something. It has been a while. After originally writing this, I thought I might not post it, since not only does it have pretty much the same leaping off point as the last post, but it arrives at pretty much the same conclusion. But, hey, there’s something to be said for reiteration. Plus, the conclusion arrived at by both this and the last post, as it happens, complements rather nicely the core lesson finally derived from the book that is the object of that forthcoming series. So, it kind of does all fit together. Hope you find this of interest, and that it whets your appetite for that new series, coming soon, to a screen near you.
Last post, I invoked some interesting thoughts arising from Alvin Gouldner’s evocative book, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology. I had a few additional thoughts arising from that book that didn’t seem to fit comfortably into that last post, so I thought I’d address them in a second, briefer one, here.
In general, Gouldner is an intriguing read through the lens of the phenotype wars. He clearly is a spatialist but seems to really want to be as impartial as he can reasonably be. He explicitly aspires to a form of “reflexive sociology,” and as noted last post, also explicitly defines himself as an “outlaw Marxist.” His thinking goes along these lines. Sociology (and science in general) considers itself to be cognitively superior to ideology – the latter defined as the intellectual mobilization of social action through a construction of (usually rationalist) ideas. On the other hand, ideology considers itself to be morally superior to sociology (and science), with the latter’s claim to value-free explanation. And Gouldner seems to largely agree with both considerations. For him, the job seems to be a constant toggling, back and forth, between the positions, so that each is never free from the constant critique of the other.
The thing is, of course, that both sociology and ideology are responses to the decline of traditionalist/temporalist society. Indeed, at least in part, they likely contribute to – if only through providing an acceleration of – such decline. Still, for all that, there are some interesting juxtapositions between these (French) Enlightenment approaches and how they differ from traditional society or authority.
For instance, I found this description of the state’s rise to social supremacy to be beautifully concise: worthy of Nisbet. Though, we should note, Gouldner is using “socialism” in the colloquial sense, with none of Michéa’s nuance:
In one part, modern socialism is an effort to take production, productive property, and work, away from the control of the private sphere and to reconstruct it as a public matter. With this, however, the property basis of the bourgeois family collapses. The family now becomes open to direct manipulation and intervention of the state. As a private sphere for the repair and maintenance of social identities, especially male egos, the family is undermined. The monopolization and the execution of the public interest is now appropriated by the state. The "public," as something linking but also buffering the family system and the state, is thereby crippled. With the destruction of the public as a quasi-autonomous network of discussion, the family system becomes increasingly a direct medium of the state apparatus, and is less and less able to serve as an ego repair station and identity-forming group. The family has less and less of a social function; is now less able to serve as an enclave silently supporting the resistance of individuals and helping them to say "no" to the demands of the state and the media. The crippling of the family-grounded sphere of the private, together with the decline of the property-based sphere of the public, means that the surviving force in control of that pulverized social field becomes the state; becomes its mobilizing instrument in the community, the "vanguard" party; and the institutional fusion of the two, the party-state, the "integral state" in Max Horkheimer' s terms.
It is odd though that Gouldner makes these observations in relation to what he calls the bourgeois family, seemingly blind to the fact that this has been the continual story through the gradual rise of the spatialist ethos1, beginning with the traditional family. Fair enough point – and I’ve acknowledged this too – that the bourgeoisie did attempt to resurrect the family, at least to some degree. But only a spatialist would focus on detailed dissection of this state encroachment upon the family without acknowledging that it was a long historical process, initially directed at the family as a form of Weberian traditional authority. This is a struggle playing out in a largely gesellschaft context. Odd to have ignored that it was this very process that gave rise to that largely gesellschaft context.
In any event, it was another observation by Gouldner which seemed so rich to me, in its evocation of conceptual absence, that I thought it warranted a post of its own. Here, he’s distinguishing between traditional groups and liberal publics. First, the quotation, then I’ll comment:
Traditional "groups" are characterized by the association and mutual support of both elements; by the fact that their members have patterned social interactions with one another which, in turn, fosters among them common understandings and shared interests which, again in turn, facilitates their mutual interaction, and so on. A "public," "refers to a number of people exposed to the same social stimuli," and having something in common even without being in persisting interaction with one another.
A public for Gouldner was the product of specific processes associated with the industrial revolution. Population growth incentivized the mass production of clothing, which drove the textile industry – engine of the industrial revolution. Increased access to clothing though also led to an increased volume of discarded clothing. And as at this time paper was primarily produced from rags, the clothing boom resulted in a downstream boom in paper production. Gouldner notes that it is precisely in these early decades of the 19th century that we then also see an explosion in literacy. There’d been little incentive for widespread literacy while written materials were scarce. Mass literacy, then, arose in response to a supply-side increase in the availability of literary materials: books, newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, etc.
Gouldner’s public then is this aggregation of recently literate individuals, living in a mass mediated gesellschaft. They may not have the tightly bonded common experience of the gemeinschaft, but their common immersion in the mediated world of symbols, messages, and what today we’d call memes, nonetheless, binds them into another kind of common world. All he sees distinguishing these two types then are the sources and channels of their discourse.
In most traditional societies, however, markets and holidays constituted the basic specialized structures periodically – information to the larger community, among strangers or members of different families; and this, of course, was transmitted by word of mouth, in a context-sustained face-to-face conversation that allowed clarifying feedback and questioning. With the growth of the mass media, exemplified at first by printing, numerous persons were now exposed to a continuous flow of information, at more or less the same time. Information becomes decontextualized, for it must be made intelligible, interesting and convincing even to persons of diverse backgrounds and interests, persons who do not know one another and do not meet and interact.
And a little further on he observes that publics are constructed “by stimulating face-to-face conversation. Talk was intensified to resolve uncertainties about the meaning of the news, whether uncertainty was fostered by lacunae or by conflicting accounts.” Again, here, it seems to me that Gouldner has made a fascinating and valid distinction, but his own spatialist disposition prevents him from recognizing what is essential for understanding his own insight.
Though aspiring to vigilant caution over lapsing into an exclusively rationalist paradigm, here, it seems he can’t help himself from doing exactly that. I’m not disputing the fact that discourse, dialogue, or communication takes place differently between traditional communities and liberal, rationalist publics. But what Gouldner seems to be missing here is that traditional society, unlike liberal rationalism, is not ultimately rooted in discourse, and in fact (at least in principle) could arise pre-verbally, and probably, historically in fact to some degree probably did. There are plenty of non-human animals who live at varying levels of sociality that do not possess highly abstract, symbolic language.
As I argued in Not for the Common: Evolution and Human Communication, one must parse this stuff carefully. Human language capacity did not emerge sui genesis. But the rationalist assumption – captured in the commonly invoked though preposterous idea of a founding social contract – that sociality must be the product of human communication elides that traditionalism is rooted not in the rational discourse of a social contract, but rather emerges through trial-and-error experiments that are fitness-filtered at an extra-rational, extra-discursive level. What promotes fitness survives and maybe thrives; what does not promote it fails, and probably disappears. Indeed, even rationality and discourse themselves only emerge to the extent that they pass the test of such a fitness-filter.
And of course, this extends to Gouldner’s higher level concern about the constitution of reality itself. The rationalist, spatialist in him can’t avoid seeing reality as constituted through communication, so that differences in modes of discourse become of paramount importance for distinguishing between traditional and “post-traditional” society. But in traditional society, especially in its early or maybe even pre-verbal phase, reality was not determined by some rational consensus – as in Gouldner’s liberal public – but rather it was constituted through practical life, filtered for fitness benefits, in the pre-discursive world of raw animal experience. And long after this first evolutionary emergence, long after traditional society has evolved language – and given the presence of discursive sociality that has characterized all time-biased society since – nonetheless such traditional society always remains rooted in this generally unacknowledged extra-discursive sociality rooted in practical life.
This is what Gouldner, despite his best efforts, seems incapable of recognizing. It’s the telltale sign of the spatialist who can never quite escape the structural assumptions of his phenotype: endlessly doomed to tumble down the rationalist rabbit hole. It is this recognition of traditionalism as intrinsically extra-discursive (in fact, recursive), though, that is essential for understanding the eventual rationalist implications of spatial hegemony, with its Weberian crisis of rationality, investment in Sowell’s unconstrained vision of human potential, and embrace of the resulting positive feedback loop which endlessly pushes the spatial world ever further away from the extra-discursive lessons of traditional, temporalist society. This dynamic is what makes the psychorium possible and becomes the breeding ground for the spiteful mutants, bringing us to the current twilight of the Atlanticist empire.
And, if you’d like to understand all that even more, you’ll definitely want to read my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. And, if you haven’t already, please…
And if you know any kindred spirits, who’d be interested in this kind of thing, please also…
Meanwhile, be seeing you.
New readers, unfamiliar with this spatialist/temporalist vernacular I use, probably should read my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.