THE DISCURSIVE QUAGMIRE

ON THE FORMS OF SOCIAL ACTION

Yes! The promised historical series is still coming. But it occurs to me that it would be easier to discuss, and the implications I see in the historical example involved more effectively rendered salient, if I first took a little time to clarify some conceptual, theoretical issues which I’ve been mulling over these last couple months. Such clarification will benefit a deeper understanding of the conflicting temporal-spatial worldviews and ethos. And that is ultimately what the forthcoming historical series will be about: a case study in the phenotype wars.

What I’m up to here is putting some theoretical flesh on the bones of the distinction I was attempting to make over the two recent sociology of knowledge posts (see here and here). I’ll quote from the second one to get to the central point quickly.

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 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. (See here)

Then a bit further on in that post I also observed:

…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.

Then very much in passing I acknowledge the value in recognizing traditionalism “as intrinsically extra-discursive (in fact, recursive)…”

In this latter remark I was invoking a conceptual distinction which I first encountered in the work of Anthony Giddens, way back in my grad school days, and which honestly, I don’t think I’ve given much thought again in decades. But as I was working out this distinction in the ethos, and relevant forms of social action, between temporals and spatials, I found myself drawn back to Giddens’ distinction. These, to be clear, are Weberian ideal types. It’s not that there’s a pure form of either kind of social action manifest in history or the world. Though, there certainly could be – and as I suggested above, probably was. But most human societies are going to be more leaning one direction or another, rather than a pure manifestation of either. This is reminiscent of Innis’ distinction between time-biased and space-biased society, from which I originally drew the designation for the phenotypes at war across human history. (It might be worth mentioning at this point, newer readers unfamiliar with these distinctions, who want to know what the heck I’m talking about, should read my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.)

So, Giddens introduces the concept of recursive social action with this statement.

The routine (whatever is done habitually) is a basic element of day-to-day social activity…The term “day-to-day” encapsulates exactly the routinized character which social life has as it stretches across time-space. The repetitiveness of activities which are undertaken in like manner day after day is the material grounding of what I call the recursive nature of social life. (By its recursive nature I mean that the structured properties of social activity…are constantly recreated out of the very resources which constitute them.) Routinization is vital to the psychological mechanisms whereby a sense of trust or ontological security is sustained in the daily activities of social life.

While I have no intention of taking on the full range of theoretical implications which Giddens invests in his conceptualization, this does strike me as a valuable way of characterizing those evolutionary qualities of traditional, temporal life invoked in my sociology of knowledge discussion. It is pure recourse – doing things over-and-over again – that provides the fodder for evolutionary selection, whether that selection be operating at the level of the individual organism or any social group to which it belongs. Recursiveness passes smoothly from the realm of lineage fitness to that of the socially successful practices that become encoded as tradition.

Moving from pre-verbal to verbal hominin society we find the same recursive nature of social action. If the social action in question is serving the fitness of a sufficient number of the society’s members, it will be selected for and embossed as tradition into the recursive social template. That social template is what we call tradition. Such recursiveness no doubt has both an immediate genetic aspect as well as a less genetically immediate aspect in what we call culture. (The nuances of the distinction there are too involved for discussion here. Those interested might want to check out my book, Biological Realism.)

Once one understands recursive social action, then, the valuable distinction needed is between recursive and discursive social action. Unlike recursive social action, which does not rely upon verbalization, discursive social action is entirely reliant upon the capacity for verbalization (or eventually writing). Though, it also implies a consciousness – a capacity for inner self-talk – which also falls under the rubric of discursive.

Discursive social action is all the speaking, talking, arguing, dialoguing, etc., including, criticizing, coordinating, describing, interrogating, etc., in which humans engage. While obviously elements of this are evident in even traditional, temporal societies, such societies remain overwhelmingly rooted in recursive social action. For them discursive social action constituted the evolution of more complex and nuanced means for solving novel problems outside the established recursive routines.

However, as I’ve discussed in my (must read!) new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, as time-biased societies eventually become more successful in meeting the evolved incentive for optimizing resources, becoming prosperous, previously counter-selected spatial phenotypes (under the older harsh Darwinian conditions), experience a new social opening. Furthermore, in the beginning they positively contribute to the social optimizing of resource marshaling, through enhanced rationalist-informed resource administration. Eventually, though, for reasons discussed in the book, which I won’t repeat here, certain contradictions in the spatials’ relation to temporalist society start emerging; enantiodromia arises.

An important aspect of these developments is the spatial’s predisposition to discursive social action. Once spatials become the dominant phenotype in a society, that society begins to become much more focused on discursive social action. Tradition, community, custom, and ritual are replaced by notions of liberalism, democracy, the marketplace of ideas, and the social contract. This of course is the domain of rationalism: it is not sufficient that something has worked adequately to be passed on by prior generations (or genetic disposition), now everything must be rationally explained, its axiomatic grounding made transparent and rational.

And all of this is manifest in the current leading edge of the contemporary spatials, the managerial class. Like all spatials before them, they undermine independent intermediary institutions – e.g., kinship, family, church, guild, trade union, neighborhood association, mutual aid or fraternity clubs – which might provide people some collective protection against the managerial class’s relentless regime of social engineering and bureaucratic paternalism. Always, this process of social colonization of gemeinschaft is justified under the virtuous banners of rationality and individuality. Traditions and customs are dismissed as irrational: not sufficiently justified in discursive terms.

Yet, as I’ve emphasized in a prior book (The Managerial Class on Trial) as well as the more recent one (A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars), this world of discursive social action is the natural habitat of the managerial class, with their characteristic verbal dexterity and manipulative ventriloquism. In the absence of a hegemonic emphasis upon discursive social action, the managerial class (nor spatials in general) could not thrive. When they promote democracy, liberalism, the marketplace (or war) of ideas, the social contract, etc. – regardless of whether they are living up to purported theoretical ideals – what they are advancing is their own conditions of dominance in relation to the temporals.

That though is only half the problem, for the more heavily reliant a society becomes upon discursive social action to inform legitimacy, law, and norms, the more untethered it tends to become from recursive social action’s constraints of natural limits. Since, as I noted Gouldner explaining in a recent post (see here), rationalism assumes the blunt epistemological factuality of autonomous argument, but autonomous argument must dissolve into an infinite regress of axiomatic justification, then discursive social action — even though it initially helps improve the prosperity of a society — ultimately contributes to society’s deterioration as all manner of rootless, denatured propositions ultimately can be advanced and defended within the parameters of discursive social action. Discursive social action, from the temporalist’s perspective, eventually devolves into an epistemological and moral quagmire.

To fully explore the implications and explain the mechanics of this last claim, what it means and why it’s so impactful, I’d have to delve deeper into what, in future posts, I’m going to characterize as living life adrift in an ocean of symbolic signifiers. That is the analysis which logically follows from this distinction in kinds of social action. However, I do still have that historical series that I want to present to you, and what has been said here is sufficient to flesh out the lessons I’d ultimately draw from that series. So, next up will be the historical series, followed by some more theoretical posts that tie together the ideas here, those in the forthcoming historical series, and of course those of my thesis in the recent, new book.

So, if you’d like to keep up on all of this, but haven’t yet, please…

And if you know of others interested in these kinds of topics, please…

Meanwhile, be seeing you!