Thoughts have become concepts. Concepts are called objects. Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers. Contracts are called instruments. Banking has become an industry. Politics and economics are called science. Rationalism has become empiricism. Metaphysics has become physics.
1— Coming Soon Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society
The shift from the sale of physical computer hardware, frst to packaged software and then to web services as the basis for success in Silicon Valley, fostered a frm belief that “code” could and should solve most problems facing society. For the region’s “technological solutionists,” disregard for legal rules, hierarchies of knowledge, and existing organizational forms was the price of progress. There were echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who also acknowledged capitalism’s astonishing power to rip up the world and replace it with something new and almost incomprehensibly dynamic. “All that is solid melts into air”: capital discards obsolete technologies and flls up junkyards; it sheds the chrysalides of antiquated social structures, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake; it mocks ideas whose time has passed and incites the laity to pray to new idols. The metamorphosis is painful for everyone, even capitalists. To survive, they too must undermine their own production base. Joseph Schumpeter, himself a fne reader of Marx, termed the process “creative destruction”: the opening of new markets, the creation of new capacities, and product innovations, which “incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, forever destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”27 While the new revolution was made of code rather than coal, scripts rather than steam, its language and im- agery was curiously and inescapably industrial. Code was made, it seemed, in forges, with engines, through pipelines, by foundries—an entire metaphorical world of intensely physical production was conjured up to represent the activities of people who spent their days in front of screens, typing. They were not writing; they were building. Soon they would be mining also.
2—Something almost as annoying: Alberto Tuscano, "Undoing Oslo", NLR
Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.
Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.
"'Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo...
Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught"
As I said elsewhere, if a rebel has a gun and uses it while also writing poetry I might want to read the poems. If a man with a pen and a foundation grant writes poems and calls them bullets, odds are I won't.
Mashal on Charlie Rosein 2014. Politics is a practical business.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
DD
Well, I think people, people have stopped asking me what's a bailout ? You know, I keep giving them the wrong answer. Yeah, it's a bailout and bailouts are good. Bailouts are almost always the right thing to do. A bailout just means that the state steps in and provides insurance so that something economically destructive doesn't happen. And lots of people who did economics degrees start talking about moral hazard, but I noticed that there's very few people who work in the insurance business whose first concern right now is about moral hazard. I also very much doubt that anyone involved with Silicon Valley Bank, even those that are getting paid back at a hundred cents in the dollar, will look back at this last week and regard it as a case of moral hazard where they got looked after really well. In a crisis, you just need someone to stand in and show that they are managing it. And there's a lot of, to my mind, really quite silly rhetoric about bailouts because when it happens, it's kind of easy to do a political speech about how you are against bailouts and how you are in favor of saving money for the taxpayer, but it doesn't actually solve anything.
Saturday, March 04, 2023
Jack Balkin's decline and Henry Farrell's... I don't know. It's all sad.
Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism"
Algorithms—especially machine learning algorithms—have become major social institutions. To paraphrase anthropologist Mary Douglas, algorithms “do the classifying.”1 They assemble and they sort—people, events, things. They distribute material opportunities and social prestige. But do they, like all artifacts, have a particular politics?2 Technologists defend themselves against the very notion, but a lively literature in philosophy, computer science, and law belies this naive view. Arcane technical debates rage around the translation of concepts such as fairness and democracy into code. For some, it is a matter of legal exposure. For others, it is about designing regulatory rules and verifying compliance. For a third group, it is about crafting hopeful political futures.3
The questions from the social sciences are often different: How do algorithms concretely govern? How do they compare to other modes of governance, like bureaucracy or the market? How does their mediation shape moral intuitions, cultural representations, and political action? In other words, the social sciences worry not only about specific algorithmic outcomes, but also about the broad, society-wide consequences of the deployment of algorithmic regimes—systems of decision-making that rely heavily on computational processes running on large databases. These consequences are not easy to study or apprehend. This is not just because, like bureaucracies, algorithms are simultaneously rule-bound and secretive. Nor is it because, like markets, they are simultaneously empowering and manipulative. It is because they are a bit of both. Algorithms extend both the logic of hierarchy and the logic of competition. They are machines for making categories and applying them, much like traditional bureaucracy. And
Understanding this helps highlight both similarities and differences between the historical regime that political scientist James Scott calls “high modernism” and what we dub high-tech modernism.4 We show that bureaucracy, the typical high modernist institution, and machine learning algorithms, the quintessential high tech modernist one, share common roots as technologies of hierarchical classification and intervention. But whereas bureaucracy reinforces human sameness and tends toward large, monopolistic (and often state-based) organizations, algorithms encourage human competition, in a process spearheaded by large, near monopolistic (and often market-based) organizations. High-tech modernism and high modernism are born from the same impulse to exert control, but are articulated in fundamentally different ways, with quite different consequences for the construction of the social and economic order. The contradictions between these two moral economies, and their supporting institutions, generate many of the key struggles of our times.
Both bureaucracy and computation enable an important form of social pow er: the power to classify.5 Bureaucracy deploys filing cabinets and memorandums to organize the world and make it “legible,” in Scott’s terminology. Legibility is, in the first instance, a matter of classification. Scott explains how “high modernist” bureaucracies crafted categories and standardized processes, turning rich but ambiguous social relationships into thin but tractable information. The bureaucratic capacity to categorize, organize, and exploit this informa tion revolutionized the state’s ability to get things done. It also led the state to reorder society in ways that reflected its categorizations and acted them out. Social, political, and even physical geographies were simplified to make them legible to public officials. Surnames were imposed to tax individuals; the streets of Paris were redesigned to facilitate control.
Yet high modernism was not just about the state. Markets, too, were standardized, as concrete goods like grain, lumber, and meat were converted into abstract qualities to be traded at scale.6 The power to categorize made and shaped markets, allowing grain buyers, for example, to create categories that advantaged them at the expense of the farmers they bought from. Businesses created their own bureaucracies to order the world, deciding who could participate in markets and how goods ought to be categorized.
We use the term high-tech modernism to refer to the body of classifying technologies based on quantitative techniques and digitized information that partly displaces, and partly is layered over, the analog processes used by high modernist organizations. Computational algorithms–especially machine learning algorithms– perform similar functions to the bureaucratic technologies that Scott describes. Both supervised machine learning (which classifies data using a labeled training set) and unsupervised machine learning (which organizes data into self-discovered clusters) make it easier to categorize unstructured data at scale. But unlike their paper-pushing predecessors in bureaucratic institutions, the humans of high-tech modernism disappear behind an algorithmic curtain. The workings of algorithms are much less visible, even though they penetrate deeper into the social fabric than the workings of bureaucracies. The development of smart environments and the Internet of Things has made the collection and processing of information about people too comprehensive, minutely geared, inescapable, and fast-growing for considered consent and resistance.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke. The movie streaming platform Netflix will slot you into one of its two thousand–plus “microcommunities” and match you to a subset of its thousands of subgenres. Your movie choices alter your position in this scheme and might in principle even alter the classificatory grid itself, creating a new category of viewer reflecting your idiosyncratic viewing practices.
Many of the crude, broad categories of nineteenth-century bureaucracies have been replaced by new, multidimensional classifications, powered by machine learning, that are often hard for human minds to grasp.7 People can find them selves grouped around particular behaviors or experiences, sometimes ephemer al, such as followers of a particular YouTuber, subprime borrowers, or fans of ac tion movies with strong female characters. Unlike clunky high modernist categories, high-tech modernist ones can be emergent and technically dynamic, adapting to new behaviors and information as they come in. They incorporate tacit information in ways that are sometimes spookily right, and sometimes disturbing and misguided: music-producing algorithms that imitate a particular artist’s style, language models that mimic social context, or empathic AI that supposedly grasps one’s state of mind.8 Generative AI technologies can take a prompt and generate an original picture, video, poem, or essay that seems to casual observers as though it were produced by a human being.
Taken together, these changes foster a new politics. Traditional high modernism did not just rely on standard issue bureaucrats. It empowered a wide variety of experts to make decisions in the area of their particular specialist knowledge and authority. Now, many of these experts are embattled, as their authority is nibbled away by algorithms whose advocates claim are more accurate, more reliable, and less partial than their human predecessors....
At the end of the day, the relationship between high modernism and high-tech modernism is a struggle between two elites: a new elite of coders, who claim to mediate the wisdom of crowds, and an older elite who based their claims to legitimacy on specialized professional, scientific, or bureaucratic knowledge.32 Both elites draw on rhetorical resources to justify their positions; neither is disinterested.they are self-adjusting allocative machines, much like canonical markets.
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1 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 91.
4 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
5 Robyn Caplan and danah boyd, “Isomorphism through Algorithms: Institutional Dependencies in the Case of Facebook,” Big Data & Society 5 (1) (2018): 1–12.
6 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
7 Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market,” Socio-Economic Review 15 (1) (2017): 9–29.
32 William Davies, “Elite Power Under Advanced Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (5–6) (2017): 227–250; and Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade, “The Society of Algorithms,” Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021): 213–237.
Norman Geras: What is your favourite song? Henry Farrell: My Bloody Valentine, 'Soon'.
Atomization: modernist technocracy—bureaucracy not as necessary as but as utopia—dumbs down both managers and managed. Connoisseurs are replaced by experts—Healy is the author of "Fuck Nuance"—it passed review.
Everything is overlap: scroll down for James C. Scott; connoisseurship, like anarchism, is a hobby for rich tenured technocrats.
What Farrell's still too stupid to see—still too much the academic tempted by libertarianism—is that government bureaucracy is authoritarianism out of the academy, of priests and shepherds, and the bureaucracy of the market is the bureaucracy of wolves. Academic libertarianism like academic radicalism in every form, is an oxymoron: a strict hierarchic elite engaged in collaborative, soi-disant disinterested reason, calling for... something else.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke.
Bespoke bread and circuses. Narcissism is bad for democracy, yes? But that was never the goal.
Further down this parenthetical
(The irony is that while high-tech modernist firms are happy to turn the market screw on everyone else, they strive to establish monopoly for themselves).22
I had my first drink in a bar—not my first drink—at 15, in the back room of a bar owned my a man who ran guns for the IRA.
The irony is there, but Farrell doesn't get it.
Monday, January 10, 2022
Kieran Healy
Something that's happened to me several times when teaching social theory to undergrads at various places is we start reading Weber and then I have to back up and explain what the Reformation was and then one or more students discover to their surprise that they are Protestant.
Noting the failure of American secondary education, ancillary to a discussion of the sociology of American religion.
The lead character and her husband, modeled on Hanson-Løve's parents, are referred to as "philosophy professors" in American reviews, because of the subplot involving her publisher. They're high school teachers. That's unimaginable in the US.
"I wasn’t hostile to May ’68, but whereas the people who participated in it saw it as a beginning, I saw it rather as an end. May ’68 was the first stone thrown into the pond of Marxism. The ideological collapse of Marxism began in ’68. Because I believe that May ’68, paradoxically, cured many people, including perhaps me, of communism and anticommunism. I think that the kind of Marxist fever that took place after May ’68 carried within it its condemnation and its end, it was a last flare-up. That’s how I saw May ’68, and that is why, personally, I remained absolutely indifferent, serene, with regard to what might happen. I continued with my work."
I'd love to see some bourgeois self-awareness in this country. But self-awareness is pessimistic, and here even comedy, pessimistic by definition, is used to reinforce the optimistic imperative. Laughter is nothing but a symptom of denial.
"You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness...."
There is also the conservative case (from @SWGoldman fair) that the actual function of Harvard etc is to inculcate appropriate values in elite. On the one hand, those values might include solidarity with ordinary people in hard times.
I wonder when potential interviewees are going to start picking up on the fact that Chotiner's column is called "Interrogation" and that he's really very good at it.
The same response from Amia Srinivasan, an earnest, hip, young Oxbridge philosopher.
@IChotiner's interview with Ian Buruma on the NYRB's publication of Jian Ghomeshi's mea culpa is so deeply telling
This on the same day The Economist had a polite sit-down with Steve Bannon. The New Yorker was forced to cancel; The Economist stood on principle, principles identical to the principles that govern academia.
On twitter I tried to connect people responding to Bannon to people talking about Buruma and Ghomeshi. It didn't work. I added my usual points, except I used the word phenomenology.
Isaac Chotiner interrogated Ian Buruma as Marie Henein interrogated the victims of Jian Ghomeshi.
It's a messy business and it needs to be. As I said a few times, if Bannon were questioned as he needs to be he'd walk off the stage. And since people were paying money for the privilege of sitting in the audience that wasn't going to happen. But that's not the reason they used. They take themselves far too seriously to be so honest.
The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.
Lawyers are craftspeople; craft is empiricism: watching, responding, pushing, digging, even into the minds of others against their will. Interrogation is not a dialogue. Dialogue is for elites; democracy is adversarial. "Lawyers, not judges, are the rule of law."
An interesting question concerning forensic linguistics is making its way through the appellate courts: When the police use an interpreter during an interview (or interrogation) of a suspect who later becomes a defendant in a prosecution, and the defendant’s words in her original language are not recorded, does the defendant have a constitutional right to confront the interpreter? As a cost-saving measure, more and more law enforcement agencies, and some courts, have been retaining services that interpret the interview over the telephone. One of them, Language Line Solutions. http://www.languageline.com/, has found itself in the middle of this constitutional question.
...In United States v. Aifang Ye (No. 12-10576 (9th Cir. 2015)), the Ninth Circuit ruled that there is no right to confront the interpreter under the Sixth Amendment standards set out in Crawford, since the interpreter’s statements are not testimonial – rather, they are merely a conduit from one language to another. Ye was convicted of aiding and abetting in providing false information for a passport application. Some of the evidence against her came from what she said in an interview conducted by an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. Questions were asked in English, answered in Mandarin Chinese, and interpreted over the phone by Language Line, an agent of the U.S. immigration service. The interpreter then reduced the interview to a written statement. Ye claimed that there was a mistranslation because she never would have said that there had been a forgery, a word used by the interpreter.
However Ms. Ye’s case is resolved, courts should be more realistic in their understanding of what interpreters and translators can do. First, courts should stop relying on the “conduit” theory of translation. Compare two reputable translations of any work of literature. They will be similar in some ways, different in others. To the extent that word choice matters in the context of a criminal prosecution, nuanced differences may affect a case’s outcome. Second, interpreters make errors. The legal system should recognize this. Third, courts should not accept as accurate representations that the entire professional staff of a private firm retained by the government is dispassionate and of high professional character. Surely the defendant need not accept such representations.
"Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate."
etc. etc.
SSRN: Founding-Era Translations of the Constitution
Abstract
Before its ratification, the United States Constitution was translated into
German and Dutch for the German- and Dutch-speaking populations of Pennsylvania and New York. Although copies of both the German- and Dutch- language translations have been preserved, they have largely escaped analysis — and public awareness — until now. For the first time, this Article examines the text of the founding-era translations of the federal constitution and explains how the translations can clarify the meaning of the original text.
Christina Mulligan, Michael Douma, Hans Lind and Brian Quinn have recently shown that during the ratification of the Constitution in 1787-1788, German and Dutch translations of the Constitution were distributed to non-English speakers in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and New York. These translations differ from the English text in interesting and important ways. As a result, English speakers may have understood the proposed Constitution in one way, while non-English speakers may have understood it quite differently.
This essay uses this example to show why original public meaning is not a set of facts that lawyers simply discover and report. Rather, it is a theoretical construction that lawyers fashion in order to do the work of constitutional interpretation. There is no single way to construct original public meaning from the materials of the past. What we do construct depends in part on what we think constitutions are for and how they are supposed to work. It also depends on the practical needs of lawyers in search of a distinctively legal meaning that they can employ in legal argument.
As alleged virtues go, nuance is superficially attractive. Isn’t the mark of a good thinker the ability to see subtle differences in kind or gracefully shade the meaning terms? Shouldn’t we cultivate the ability to insinuate overtones of meaning in our concepts?
As conservative societies modernize the women are the first to adapt.
Healy's the only writer at CT who's on good terms with Leiter. He still runs the numbers for his rankings, etc.
Rakesh Bhandari as usual when he shows up makes a good comment.
It doesn’t make much sense to argue against the idea of nuance per se. What counts as nuance depends on whom you’re speaking to, and why. Instead I have a specific phenomenon in mind: the tendency to demand more detail, insist on a more-sophisticated approach, or assert things are more complex than has been said — without having anything much to say beyond that. In particular, it’s the tendency to think doing so makes you a deep thinker.
but he still misses the point:
It is not the job of theory to verbally reproduce the complexity of the world.
Any theory that isn't seen as modeling the complexity of the world, even the social world that made it, will be forgotten. Theory is not science. Any theory will become historicized or vanish.
The biggest problem is that academics in the social sciences want to be theorists, seen as original thinkers. They all want to be soloists and not orchestra players. They indulge in artiness and call it art, and they want to think of themselves as scientists in the most technical sense. See the annoyed responses of statisticians and others in Quiggin's post who are happy to think of themselves as technicians or cogs in the scientific machine.
Monday, June 15, 2015
6/18 It's getting worse and worse.
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A simple explanation of why the "seminar" is sinking like a rock.
The titles of four posts, the first and last are in response to Danielle Allen's book.
Reading Our Declaration in Support of Black Radicalism
To help poor people, give them money (Draft excerpt from Economics in Two Lessons)
Justice for Janitors Day
The craft of interpreting the Declaration of Independence
Theorizing at Crooked Timber is rigorous even of the formalism is only that: they're skillful engineers of air castles. When they get down to practical matters they like to keep things simple. They want to help. And why would you want to undermine the good intentions of the best and brightest? The first post above is getting the drubbing it deserves. At the same time the whole thing reminds me how the language of concern at CT is almost always the language of us and them. And although I've used many different examples of where their self-described enlightenment is illusory, the best example, for them as for liberals in general, is the relation of Zionism and Palestine.
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A political theorist discovers constitutional law. And Henry does too?
Heather Gerkin (Yale and Balkinization)
In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen writes neither as a philosopher’s philosopher, a historian’s historian, nor as a textualist’s textualist. She writes instead a dazzling scholar in the midst of a full-blown academic obsession. And, strangely enough, she writes like a lawyer.
Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to this extraordinary conclusion when she was teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. But it was not the young bright-eyed undergraduates whom she taught by day who inspired her. Instead, it was the much older, life-tested adults whom she taught by night who created “the single most transformative experience” of her teaching career.
A philosopher changed by experience. I thought of linking to to Healy's wife directly, but roundabout is better
Also relevant to recent discussion of research vs teaching.
Also this: "Not the idea of democracy, or the meaning of democracy, but democracy."
The geek rediscovery of humanism continues apace.
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more, 6/24
Sunday, March 15, 2015
a repeat from 2010, this time with a video, which may not last.
Wilson's theater is called a "theater of images", part of a history of abstract non-representational art made in the context of representational means; think the formalism of Eliot going back through James, through the decadence of Huysmans and the aestheticism of Pater (as always I repeat myself). This modernism is distinct from the modernism of the abstract ideal; it's the formalism of stifled desire, of representation sought, denied and affirmed in an absence that the form itself is constructed to describe. It's the bowl and the water that dare not speak its name.
The distinction between the two is ignored by much modern criticism, at least in English. Even those who've tried to bring Surrealism into the discussion argue from idealism if not regarding form than intellect, and the second formalism is transformed into a critical and philosophic art. In the language of critics the first formalism replaced conversation with silent and ideal form, while for critical supporters of the second, grammar itself or ideal politics are central. The actions of the speaker speaking are elided, communication is depersonalized, seemingly disembodied. But in criticism the shadows are removed, and later in the hybrid Critical Theory they're replaced by ideology.
In a perverse way, James and Eliot, through Duchamp, all conservative formalists of sex, have been devolved from poets into critics. In the minds of theorists of speech acts, acts themselves are secondary. The primacy of form has become the primacy of "content". The first modernism is performative and silent; the second, once loquacious and evasive, diffident, coy, ironic, but deeply emotive, has become talkative and anti-social. Conceptualism renders practice functionalism and results, output; the heuristics of the physical and of performance are denied. The ironic distance from, not denial of, emotion has become the defense of bureaucracy; the mass-singular noun "individual" replaces the description of individual experience. And rationalist idealism ignores history (see the second note here on the history of the European anti-bourgeois). It's interesting to see the faux-aristocratic high bourgeois critique of vulgarity transformed into the moral philosophy of the super technocrat in the age of instrumental reason, to see how Henry James became Max Weber.
I've rarely been so simply struck by all this as I was yesterday. The formalism of Deafman Glance is the reenactment of trauma transposed, overlapping the before and after into the timelessness of an eternal present. It's the poetry of formalism as pathology. And yet it's moving. It evokes and denies as Eliot does. It makes sense that Louis Aragon would recognize this: "[Wilson] is what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.” (see the top link)
The relation of abstraction to representation in art begins in the relation of abstraction to representation in language, which in politics and government is the relation of the letter to the spirit of the law. To argue from the spirit in law or language is subjectivism and subjectivism is inarticulate, in-formal, isolate: the end of the social. But to argue only from the letter can be cold, inhuman: unjust:
"He's just a boy! He didn't mean it! He's my son!"
"It doesn't matter. It's the law."
To communicate is to translate emotion into form: the description of a scream is not a scream. Our emotions themselves are locked in: truth is private. Our audience reads only performance, as courts of law refer only to "facts". Articulated communication is possible only through the use of an indifferent medium manipulated in performance towards a desired response from others, either an intellectual agreement or a seemingly parallel but independent expression of emotion. We argue on a case by case basis the relation of formal language to the private truths of interior life, and of law to the informal truths of "Justice". This begs the question of whether a society can have an interior life or whether justice is a category with a reality outside of language, outside of what society decides that it should mean.
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"It is now time to ask why Pippin thinks that his discussion of these films actually amount to doing political philosophy."
Imagine an economics professor asking if studying the actions of businessmen is doing economics.
Apparently, studying off the cuff "intuitions" regarding philosophical questions is philosophy while studying complex but indirect intellectual activity based on the same questions might not be. That, even though there are more "ideas" in John Ford's movies than in anything written "about" them.
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In reference also to Kieran Healy's wife, the philosopher, and her book on "Transformative Experience". I've been thinking about it again since I read some praise for it from someone who should know better. Yes; time changes you. Robert Wilson in 1980 and 2013.
I understood Wilson in 1980, and I understood that he would change; that his work was about change, changing as coming to terms.
Jill Johnston covers similar ground in a recent article on Robert Wilson. (Family Spectacles, Art in America, Dec. 1986) Although she does not take it quite as far as I have, she nonetheless is aware of the implications. Wilson grew up in a strict world that he has internalized. The obsession in his work with 'wounded' figures and 'great men' (Joseph Stalin, Frederick the Great, the Shah of Iran); his early denial/refusal of the narrative of theater and his interest in autism, is layed out very clearly. All of this relates him closely to Duchamp, Warhol, Morris, and Koons.
and Wittgenstein, before and after: from Russell to Proust.
The Boston Review have just put up a piece I wrote on Ireland’s internal Cold War, which wasn’t about politics, but religion. My generation (and Kieran’s; and Maria’s) grew up in an Ireland where the Catholic Church’s control of politics and society was visibly rotting away from inside, but still strong enough to foreclose the alternatives. It was like Brezhnevism – a dying system, but one strong enough to make it difficult to imagine what life would be like if it were gone.
One vignette from the piece, describing the moment when Bishop Eamon Casey was revealed to have had a long term relationship and child resulting from same.
The day the news broke, I met one of my professors, who had a sideline as a scrupulously evenhanded television host, wandering across campus in dazed delight. “It’s over,” he said. “They’ve lost.” He was right.
The Union Jack came down in Camp Bastion today, marking the end of the UK’s combat role in Afghanistan and its misconceived campaign in Helmand Province; the campaign with no strategy, less chance of success and a gossamer-thin plan.
...Nineteen billion pounds. Twenty thousand Afghan civilians. Four hundred and fifty three UK soldiers. More Afghan National Army killed last summer than UK troops throughout the whole war. More poppy seed than ever growing in Helmand, but lots more children in school, too.
Was it worth it? Well if you’ve figured out a workable and not-obscene calculus of human pain and worthwhile profit, let the rest of us know.
I knew one of the four hundred and fifty three, but only superficially. He was deputed one autumn evening to squire me around the officers’ mess when E was already gone. He made sure I had drinks and was warm enough, saw me into the dining room, flirted chastely back and manfully ignored the younger women. It was like something out of Thackeray. Beautiful manners on the eve of battle.
...Later, driving through the gold-tinged dusk of a Wiltshire summer evening, I rounded the corner of B-road to see the flag again, flying in someone’s garden. I had to pull over.
That’s not my flag and never will be. It’s just something someone I slightly knew died for.
She cried for a British soldier, not for the Afghans.
Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, “a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.”
...A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.
The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did.
Ugh, I feel ill. I had been mellowing on Pope Benedict. It’s hard (not to mention wrong) to keep hating on someone you pray out loud for every Sunday.
I've always associated libertarians and libertarianism—absent "civil" libertarianism—with people, mostly sons, born into and frustrated by "backwards", tradition-bound societies, born also after the failures of communism. It's the last "scientific" prescriptive theory of culture.
...my mental model of Tyler often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments..."
If the Farrells were Muslim, Henry's sister would be in Hijab. If they were Iranian, she would be a religious liberal reformer; if they were Jewish they'd be Zionists.
---
I'd written that in all cases I'd be more sympathetic to her blindness than his, but I'm not sure. As it is she's chosen the life not of a married woman but a wife, and a military one at that. And given the context, not of religion or even conservative religion but global politics and power, that choice, as Jim Hoberman said in the last sentence of his review of Zero Dark Thirty, "leaves an aftertaste of gall".
Evidence of the fading of Henry's interest in libertarianism, nine months after the reference to Cowen: his discovery of Gambetta and Hertog. And I'd used the earlier quote before, but hadn't remembered others' reactions. He was behind the curve even among his peers. They've come a long way.
---
I forgot about this.
Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim’s point more pithily – "the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one."
“I notice that all the blokes opining away that everyone ought to do their own housework (and that housework is qualitatively different from any other form of labour; personally I think it’s disgraceful that people are too lazy to manage their own mutual funds or write their own novels) are …well…blokes.”
You noticed wrongly since I am not a bloke .
I also said housework should be equitably shared by household members not made to be a woman’s responsibility.
in public spaces of commerce, industry, or civics it is appropriate to have people employed to do the housekeeping and cleaning. In domestic spaces people should do their own housekeeping unless they have a disability and need assistance.
i hope with your argument that domestic housekeeping is a field suitable for paid labour you also think housekeepers should be paid the same as managers of mutual funds?
dsquared
"In domestic spaces people should do their own housekeeping unless they have a disability and need assistance."
… Because blah blah blah Thoreau. Apologies for getting your gender wrong but really, this is so much gasping rubbish that I can’t believe people don’t notice they’re mistaking a personal aesthetic preference (or more likely, a half remembered childhood rule) for an insight into morality
Every major mistake I've watched Daniel Davies make has been a mistake of social -intimate- empiricism. This was linked in the previous post. It ends with this. If the link ever dies I've saved a copy of the page.
Wiping piss stains off your own bathroom floor is not the same as wiping the shit off your own ass, but it's closer to it than most other jobs.
See also, Doormen. The reference on that post to "petty bourgeois" is funny, since it's clear now how little they know (the exchange between Farrell and Bhandari). I'm embarrassed by my own ignorance. Theirs continues to amaze me.
Krugman: "Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem."
If you have servants you'll have serious conversations about the servant problem.
I've linked to it twice before but somehow ignored the fact that he was linking to DeLong.
...you have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.
Healy: repeats [he now has a tag] which includes this. Healy quotes approvingly:
”He took the job because it was a dream job for him, a chance to do something exciting, fun and interesting. He was “owed” in our relationship because he had already moved twice for my job. His first choice would have been for him to have the good job without the travel, but that wasn’t an option. To be honest, I’m selfish enough that I would have preferred that he keep his bad job and make my life easier, but I cared about him, agreed he was owed, and knew why he really wanted to do it, so I signed off.”
It still amazes me that I ended up getting into an argument about the implications of the passive voice.
[The ghost of Panofsky: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need"
"What's the se…?" "Timing."]
Serendipity:
George Scialabba, Catholic moralist, and CT's in-house literary critic, defends Christopher Lasch. Responding to Vivian Gornick: In Defense of Narcissism.
Two narcissists debating, two pots, two kettles. Individualism and bureaucratism are two sides of the same coin. Klub Kid Kollectivity
Scialabba is Henry Farrell's favorite literary critic; his favorite band is My Bloody Valentine
Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload.
My comment to Scialabba at The Boston Review: "How do you respond, as a moralist, to Henry Farrell's taste in decadence?"
Monday, October 21, 2013
Repeating myself, answering Julian Stallabrass at the LRB blog.
All the arguments are in the paper linked on the right side of this page, or on the this blog. All are obvious.
I just received a polite - four paragraph- rejection letter from the senior editor of a major university press, polite and encouraging but arguing that perhaps I'm a little behind the curve. In the NYT today Raj Chetty says, Yes, Economics is a Science, and in referring to those who say otherwise, he points to Kieran Healy, Safe to say I still think I'm a bit ahead of it as least as arguments go. But intellectuals qua intellectuals are always behind the curve. Philosophers and "theorists" will always argue otherwise, but historians don't. The curve is in decision-making, in actions, not ideas. Intellectualism, distinct from intelligence, is and needs to be retrospective. If someone is an artist and an intellectual, or a lawyer and an intellectual, they're wearing two hats. Philosophers and others who see themselves as intellectual engineers follow the model not of observation but invention; they wear only one hat and look forward. Formal and speculative reason are the most fragile forms of thought, and the most politically suspect.
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Corey Robin writes again about "disruption" and the moral, philosophical, and esthetic culture of capitalism. I tried somewhere to remind him, without disagreeing, that disruption is a central tenet of modernism.
Unrelated to that I've been told to read Ranciere.
L.A. Paul: Strangely, I don’t really know what caused it. I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this.
...I do think that metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration, in the sense that philosophers and scientists are both developing models of reality, and furthermore that we all rely to a significant extent on the idea that models which provide elegant, simple and satisfying explanations are more likely to be true. The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don’t, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience.
...The idea behind the paper “What you can’t expect when you’re expecting” has two dimensions. The first dimension is that there is a paradox at the heart of the modern romantic sense in which prospective parents are supposed to decide whether or not they want to have a child by thinking about what it would be like to have a child.
The idea comes out most clearly when we consider it from a woman’s perspective. If you are female, and conditions are otherwise apt, you are supposed to decide whether you want to become a mother by thinking carefully about whether you really want to have a child of your very own, what it would be like to be a mother, whether this is something you really want and will be happy with, etc. In general, you are supposed to evaluate whether you should have a child largely on the basis of what you think it will be like for you to have a child.
The paradox arises from the fact that, until you’ve had a child, you cannot know what it will be like to have one. And moreover, the experience may change you in ways that you cannot predict or even understand before you have the child. This means that you can’t rationally choose to have a child on the basis of what you think it will be like, because there is no way for you to know what it will be like. Even worse, the same is true if you choose not to have a child: since you can’t know what it would have been like for you to have a child, you can’t know the value of what you are missing. And so there is no way to rationally choose whether or not to become a parent.
"Philosopher" Laurie Paul:You can't predict the future and the effect it will have on you.
No shit.
Leiter at least links to "philosophers" who know people who know something. It has to work its way down the chain of prestige, and they're all white, but it's something.
Tom Harkin: “I have just attended a classified Congressional briefing on Syria that quite frankly raised more questions than it answered. I found the evidence presented by Administration officials to be circumstantial."
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Though I added it later, to this post and others before it, I think this was the first post in the series that led me to create the tag for the discovery of experience.
Friday, June 07, 2013
PRISM
by KIERAN HEALY on JUNE 6, 2013
Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. … This consists on the one hand of technical knowledge, which, by itself, is sufficient to ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves. While not particular to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of “official secrets” is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as commercial secrets do to technological training. It is the product of the striving for power.
Dan Nexon 06.07.13 at 2:45 am
Weber.
seth edenbaum 06.07.13 at 4:00 am Your comment is awaiting moderation.
“I have been a lawyer for many years, and then got a chance to teach at a non-lawyerly academic institution. I loved it; I loved playing in the garden of the mind. Eventually, however, it became clear to me that academics and non-academics have very different approaches to ideas. Academics, though it sounds odd to say it, don’t take ideas seriously. For academics, ideas are games,”
All the above without a single mention of US foreign policy, no more anti-democratic now than before. You can’t support freedom at home while opposing it abroad, especially not in the age on electronic communication.
Healy responds to events with in-jokes and glib affectations of superiority; Nexon seconds, closing the circle. "They then chuckle..": Farrell's sardonic take on McGinn. The creepiness is the same. The only difference is the sex.
repeats: Healy, Nexon, McGinn. Rationalists rationalize; superiority to politics is anti-politics, laziness, decadence. Marfrks like Greenwald is an advocate. If you're paid to be biased you understand what it is and how it creeps in. Objectivity does not exist; self-awareness cannot be naturalized.
Old discussion of Farrell, Greenwald, and Kerr, here and here.
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McGinn contra Judt.
And I'd forgotten about Bertram
QS 06.03.12 at 9:58 am
You’ve turned sexual harassment into an intellectual game, that is where the “creepiness” originates. How do you moderate that? You don’t. You realize that your ability to treat the issue so dispassionately, playing the game of Find the Universal, probably has something to do with your maleness and position outside this particular terrain.
Sexual harassment was banned not because we found the Universal Principle Against Harassment but because women and men who believed it to be wrong fought successfully for prohibition. These people were likely motivated by a variety of ideas and experiences. The way we keep the libertarians marginalized is not by abstract philosophical games but by appealing to this concrete history.
Chris Bertram 06.03.12 at 10:06 am
QS: your latest tells me that you see political philosophy as it is usually practised as involving a profound mistake. You are entitled to that opinion. It is not one that I share.
It's all there. Idiots.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Quiggin
On the one hand, in the US as elsewhere, higher incomes are correlated with voting for the conservative/rightwing party, which seems to cut against the thesis. On the other hand, I’ve read that the average income of the US working class is the same as that of the population as a whole, which goes against the whole idea of “working class” as I understand it.
It's not only how much money you make, it's how you make your money.
What an asshole. What a fucking idiot.
[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. Opponents, including Johnson, raised the same arguments that would be marshaled against affirmative action programs a century later, but well more than the necessary two-thirds of Congress concluded that the 13th and 14th Amendments authorized race-conscious legislation to ameliorate the social condition of blacks.
"to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts."
[D]oormen generally don’t have racist beliefs, but because their tenants are disproportionately white, and white people tend to have many more white than black friends, black visitors to the building will be checked or questioned more often than white visitors.
...All in all, well worth your time to read. Especially if you need to give your Doorman a bonus in the near future.
I missed the first quote the first time around (in 2005), even if I tried to explain the issue to Kieran Healy and the rest. This is Healy more recently.
"...All in all, well worth your time to read. Especially if you need to give your Doorman a bonus in the near future."
If "doormen generally don’t have racist beliefs" regarding blacks, then generally they themselves are white, in a city where 56% of the population is not.
I never read the book but I looked through the index; I thought I'd mentioned that somewhere at the time. There's no reference to the stark differences in ethnic makeup of doormen on the the upper east and upper west side. As I explained in a comment, on the east side doormen are white, Irish or Eastern European. On the west side it's more of a mix. This is common knowledge to anyone who works in or around residential buildings in Manhattan.
From Publishers Weekly
[Bearman] tends to spend too much time examining the obvious questions (e.g., why do doormen find their jobs at once "boring and stressful"?), while barely touching upon others that seem deeper and more fertile, such as the ways in which tenants tend to see their doormen as "socially dead."
Tenants and college professors.
I really thought I'd mentioned all of this but can't find it.
A good definition of the working class now is the subset of the community that technocrats and intellectuals never meet on social terms. A plumber who makes $150,000 a year is closer socially to a plumber's assistant than to a college professor. These assholes read that dumbfuck Bourdieu but still don't get the point.
There's only one use of the term "petty bourgeois" by any of the authors at Crooked Timber, though it defined Thatcherism: the end of noblesse oblige (though 30 years later it's come back).
Liberal professionals claim concern for the poor and disenfranchised, though without intimate contact concern devolves quickly into pity or its functional equivalent. For the strivers just below themselves, or even above them financially, the professionals show open contempt. That contempt is returned. Which came first?
This is a modern world - This is the modern world
What kind of a fool do you think I am?
You think I know nothing of the modern world
All my life has been the same
I've learned to live by hate and pain
It's my inspiration drive -
I've learned more than you'll ever know
Even at school I felt quite sure
That one day I would be on top
And I'd look down upon the map
The teachers who said I'd be nothing
Punk wasn't a rebellion against capitalism. It was capitalism, rebelling against both liberalism and the hereditary aristocracy.
5th Ave. 2005
"Whites out the front, Niggers to the basement."
I'm in the elevator with the electricians: two Puerto Ricans and a Pole.
"So how do you get out?"
The Russian pauses.
"I'm Superman, I leave from the roof."
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addendum years later. Earnest liberals are now concerned about minorities and "microaggressions". It's applied within the middle class: the bourgeoisie redefining itself. The same behavior towards the working class majority goes unnoticed. Piketty's graph amused me. We're well beyond the idiot petty bourgeois Bourdieu, but they still don't get the point.
5
seth edenbaum 12.02.07 at 4:10 pm
"He took the job because it was a dream job for him, a chance to do something exciting, fun and interesting. He was 'owed' in our relationship because he had already moved twice for my job. His first choice would have been for him to have the good job without the travel, but that wasn’t an option. To be honest, I’m selfish enough that I would have preferred that he keep his bad job and make my life easier, but I cared about him, agreed he was owed, and knew why he really wanted to do it, so I signed off.”
Communication as contract: between the selfish and self-conscious (but not un-self-aware). All the grey areas in a relationship described as lines. I’m sure she feels the children were “owed” too. It was unreadable.
6
s.e. 12.02.07 at 4:51 pm
The use of the passive voice
11
seth edenbaum 12.02.07 at 6:28 pm
Kieran, try reading the paragraphs as if they were the words of a narrator in a work of fiction. Don’t read the words as content, read them as form. Then think about what they might imply about the narrator’s relation to her role and to others.
12
LizardBreath 12.02.07 at 6:53 pm
think about what they might imply about the narrator’s relation to her role and to others.
Hrm. I’m coming up with “She’s attempting to communicate the difficulties with managing the conflicting demands of her family, her own career, and her husband’s career without sugarcoating her own role or presenting herself as a flawless martyr.” What do you come up with?
13
seth edenbaum 12.02.07 at 7:04 pm
I’m coming up with “he was owed” among other things.
Ideas are not implications.
Or is the point to only look for subtext in things you disagree with?
14
LizardBreath 12.02.07 at 7:21 pm
I’m coming up with “he was owed”
What conclusion are you drawing from this? Does it illuminate your understanding of the writer’s character, or of the quality of her relationship with her husband, or your opinion of her veracity? I understand that you think this is interesting and informative, and I might agree if I knew what you thought it meant.
17
[George Scialabba] geo 12.02.07 at 8:04 pm
An affecting piece. But it’s true, as others have noted, that her conclusion—“Perhaps we can both make better choices for ourselves and do better sociology if we take the complex interdependency of our system as a starting point, and then attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it”—is lame. Not to be drearily ideological, but isn’t it all capitalism’s fault? Aren’t Ruskin and Morris still the starting point for any solution to the contemporary epidemic of stress, overwork, and drudgery, with the resulting cultural and environmental blight?
18
seth edenbaum 12.02.07 at 8:27 pm
I had to come back for one last comment. I never made it to the end of the post. That quote from the conclusion is amazing.
She certainly became what she does.
There’s a Gordian Knot that needs to be cut. She’s just pulling it tighter.
19
LizardBreath 12.02.07 at 8:53 pm
There’s a Gordian Knot that needs to be cut.
Yeah, there’s nothing more annoying than someone who complains about a situation when there’s a simple, obvious solution staring them right in the face. Clearly, she should have… huh. I’m stuck. You?
21
Bill Gardner 12.02.07 at 9:30 pm Yeah, there’s nothing more annoying than someone who complains about a situation when there’s a simple, obvious solution staring them right in the face. Clearly, she should have… huh. I’m stuck. You?
Perhaps the only escape from this kind of situation is a kind of grace. I was, for several years, an untenured, divorced man who had my kids half time. An easier situation than a single mom with no man on the scene, and perhaps easier than what the author faced. I fell head over heels in love with the kids. That saved me. I’m not saying she ‘should have done’ this, because I didn’t do it. It just happened.
26
MissLaura 12.03.07 at 6:13 am
I know that was a very good post because it made me angry, and then reading many of the critical comments here made me equally angry.
It’s a dilemma with several sides that make me angry, and peculiarly so given it’s not a dilemma I’ve yet faced and it’s one my parents dealt with quite adeptly.
28
seth edenbaum 12.03.07 at 8:18 am
It’s not a dilemma, it’s a decision. You can’t do it all. Pick a few things and let the rest go. Children are first and foremost a moral responsibility. You either want that or you don’t.
#26 [#25] “If someone else is paying for 24/7 nanny coverage, sure.” Then they’re not your children anymore. Let the servants take them home. They have kids too: that they can’t take care of while they’re taking care of yours.
#25 [#24] “We do not speak honestly of class, but we like to sometimes use gender as a substitute.”
I have no sympathy for anyone, male or female, who can afford to hire servants. I have no sympathy for people with “careers,” only for people with jobs.“We do not speak honestly of class”
No, you don’t.
This isn’t the life “of the mind” it reads like the life of the over-worked and self-absorbed bureaucrat. There’s not an ounce of emotional sympathy for another human being in the language of the post or in most of the responses. It’s not about you it’s about the kids. All your store-bought expertise and you end up where you started: adolescent/academic narcissism.
“He was owed”
No…
“I owed him” But even if she’d had the guts to write it straight she’d be incapable of attaching any irony.
33
c.l. ball 12.03.07 at 5:08 pm
#26 [#28] “If someone else is paying for 24/7 nanny coverage, sure.” Then they’re not your children anymore. Let the servants take them home. They have kids too: that they can’t take care of while they’re taking care of yours.
24/7 nanny coverage means hiring three full-time (8 hour shift) nannies, down to two when your kid is able to sleep through night regularly. Having a nanny on shift does not mean you never interact with the kid. It can mean that while your playing outside he or she is doing the kid’s laundry. It means that when a colleague returns your calls while your playing or feeding your child, you can take the call without yelling for your spouse to stop what she’s doing to watch your child. I’ve seen the stress-levels that dual professional couples with dual-nannies display around the house. It’s a lot less than the stress-levels at mine, where there are no nannies.
Why assume that nannies still have kids at home? Some have adult children or have not yet had children.
I'll add this on its own.#32. "The more we privatize caregiving" Amazing
32
KC 12.03.07 at 3:35 pm
Many of these posts overlook the structural constraints on her choices. Her story perfectly illustrates the fact that parents and children suffer the more we privatize caregiving. When both partners are active parents, when employers allow flexibility (in academia things like on-site childcare & stopping tenure clocks for childrearing), and when governments provide supports like universal preschool & after school programs, parents are less likely to be torn b/t kids and work and resort to the TV as caregiver for 10 hours a day. (Janet Gornick & Marcia Meyers’ excellent book Families that Work shows how U.S. kids are by far the worst off on all kinds of measures, due to our turbo-capitalism and privatized view of caregiving.)
I think her post also shows how these dilemmas are often particularly difficult for women. We get more education now, are expected to have careers,… then once having children are confronted with an intensive mothering ideology (see Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Mothering) that extorts us to lavish time & attention (& money) on our kids. It seems men suffer in particular ways too—from all kinds of institutional constraints that prevent the majority from reducing work hours for childrearing. These phenomena exist in North America—other CT posters can speak more to other countries.
So, while many of her parenting decisions might seem questionable, let’s remind ourselves of the structural conditions under which she lives—and that these similarly affect other employed mothers in North America. (And that those without partners or other folks to help out and those with low incomes are clearly the most disadvantaged in our privatized system of caregiving.)
39
Mark 12.03.07 at 10:55 pm
“…the structural constraints on her choices. Her story perfectly illustrates the fact that parents and children suffer the more we privatize caregiving.”
These seem like odd thoughts: human caregiving has always been “privatized” i.e., done first and foremost by kin of the one being cared for as opposed to strangers. Thus, it makes no sense to say “the more we privatize” it.
And, the phrase “structural constraints” is one of those massive generalities that just sweeps so much under the rug. Laments about ” no universal preschool” etc are irrelevant to the original post, most of which deals with events that occurred once the kids starting going to school. It is a structural constraint that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too. One person’s “structural constraint” is another’s “real world.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Crooked Timber. Kieran Healy from 2007, in re: their discussion of old roomie's book in 2012.
The post and comments: the defense both of socialized caregiving and the caregiving of servants. The defense of 24/7 nanny service. The worries about increasing privatization of caregiving (meaning the caregiving of family) as if families care for each other more now rather than less.
The source: the post at Scatterplot
My first 3 comments, out of 6.
#5
”He took the job because it was a dream job for him, a chance to do something exciting, fun and interesting. He was “owed” in our relationship because he had already moved twice for my job. His first choice would have been for him to have the good job without the travel, but that wasn’t an option. To be honest, I’m selfish enough that I would have preferred that he keep his bad job and make my life easier, but I cared about him, agreed he was owed, and knew why he really wanted to do it, so I signed off.”
"He was owed", not even "I owed him".
Communication as contract: between the selfish and self-conscious, but not un-self-aware. All the grey areas in a relationship described as lines. I’m sure she feels the children were “owed” too. It was unreadable.
#6
The use of the passive voice.
#11
Kieran, try reading the paragraphs as if they were the words of a narrator in a work of fiction. Don’t read the words as content, read them as form. Then think about what they might imply about the narrator’s relation to her role and to others.
Many of these posts overlook the structural constraints on her choices. Her story perfectly illustrates the fact that parents and children suffer the more we privatize caregiving.
These relationships are inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships can exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the duty, to further one another’s interests. To give scope to these relationships is to limit what may be done in pursuit of equality. Samuel Scheffler calls this observation (when made in an appropriately hostile manner) the ‘distributive objection’ to special responsibilities: ‘the distributive objection asserts that the problem with such responsibilities is not that they may place unfair burdens on their bearers, but rather that they may confer unfair benefits...special responsibilities give the participants in rewarding groups and relationships increased claims to one another’s assistance, while weakening the claims that other people have on them’. Participants in these protected relationships benefit twice over. They enjoy the quality of the relationship itself, and they enjoy the claims that the relationship enables them legitimately to make on one another, at the expense of those excluded from the relationship.
24/7 nanny coverage means hiring three full-time (8 hour shift) nannies, down to two when your kid is able to sleep through night regularly. Having a nanny on shift does not mean you never interact with the kid. It can mean that while your playing outside he or she is doing the kid’s laundry. It means that when a colleague returns your calls while your playing or feeding your child, you can take the call without yelling for your spouse to stop what she’s doing to watch your child. I’ve seen the stress-levels that dual professional couples with dual-nannies display around the house. It’s a lot less than the stress-levels at mine, where there are no nannies.
Why assume that nannies still have kids at home? Some have adult children or have not yet had children.
[Krugman, now famously: "Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem." At the beginning of that post he links to DeLong. of all people]
In the discussion of Graeber's book, this passage quoted in comments, from elsewhere (not David), stands in well for many of the arguments:
Our belief in negotiated commitment – that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose – is like one of those devastating European germs that white settlers spread throughout the world three centuries ago. We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment – as long as we can maintain the social safety net….
Liberals have a vision of how the world should be. I believe in that vision. It is a fairer, more just world than has ever existed before. It is better adjusted to the realities of modern life. And it is, in my opinion, the only vision of the future that does not eventually lead to competing fundamentalisms fighting a world war.
"Our belief in negotiated commitment – that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose". The fantasy of the end of community and the triumph of the individual free will. If contracts are between strangers, liberalism has turned even our partners and our children into strangers.
David's book seems as sloppy as his political arguments: his failure is that he's an individualist with fantasies of community.
The point is to understand the constitutive function of community and the fantasies of individualism—a community of individualists is a herd of independent minds—without having fantasies about anything.
Comments at the 2007 thread at Crooked Timber are reposted above
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Absurd or amusing, the author of the passage above is a Unitarian
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2014. Wolfgang Streeck makes my argument. I read it for the first time in 2022
In the order that seems to be emerging, social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation, making communities appear as voluntary associations from which one can resign if they require excessive self-denial, rather than as ‘communities of fate’ with which one either rises or goes under.
