Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive

You vs. the world

Posted by moses @ 09:26 • , , , , • 0 comments


When cornered, many animals fight back. We should probably do the same. Compromise becomes impossible when there is no middle ground. The only options are capitulation and confrontation, and at times only the latter offers a chance at survival.

When people talk about confronting an issue or a problem, they sometimes mean capitulating to it. Catchphrases like "change your mindset" or "adapt to the situation" may conceal a sense of helplessness that has prompted the speaker to give up without actually admitting as much.

Indeed, surrendering may often seem the easier option. Sometimes, the world seems hostile to our ideas and our aspirations; sometimes, it defeats us. However, even if we haven't lost, it's so much easier to give up without a fight. Let the world consume us rather than resist it. After all, isn't defeat inevitable?

It's true that, chances are, going against the world will be a tough long slog. And you're often alone in that struggle. But it may be your only chance at achieving freedom when everything conspires to bind you. The more remote the possibility of compromise, the more you have to fight.

If we do choose to fight, we shouldn't expect to survive, much less to win. But perhaps, by the time we are done fighting, a path towards compromise would have opened. Or perhaps we would indeed have to surrender in the end. But you will certainly never find out for yourself if you give up from the start.

And that I think is a fitting message to think on as the new year rolls around.

Simplicity/sophistication

Posted by moses @ 21:50 • , , , , , • 0 comments


What is the simple life? Traditionally, it is understood as a thrifty life lived without pretensions. But what exactly does that entail? Are you thrifty as long as you don't buy yachts or mansions or don't live a jet setting lifestyle? Can you be free of pretensions even when you chase the latest trends and fashions?

Of course, the simple life, in the traditional sense of it, still exists. But in the developed part of the modern world, it is increasingly rare. In everyday life, the urge to consume—to spend and to be wealthy enough to spend—is overwhelming. Through constant exposure to various media whose function is to encourage consumption, we have been conditioned to desire and even need extensive material comforts.

Consumption is also about status and a social-psychological need to earn one's place in modern society. Simply being able to consume and being 'sophisticated' enough to know how to consume confers upon us identities that are compatible with the self image of modern society. And what falls outside of the latter is at best unconventional.

Thus, society exerts a pressure on individuals to conform to a consumerist lifestyle, and this pressure increases as more and more people embrace that way of life. Mass exerts its own gravity; popularity may well correlate with conformity.

One result of this trend is the engendering of a pervasive inertia among the expanding middle class—we have become much more productive over the past century, but most of our time and energy goes into the furious cycle of production and consumption, leaving us perpetually exhausted and, in our spare time, desiring only to enjoy the material comforts that our labours have bought. So despite the great degree of empowerment that human beings have enjoyed over the past century, most of us remain content to let the world take shape around us, to let the powerful and influential push society in whatever direction they desire.

Hence, while the simple life would help bring us out of the passivity induced by the consumerist lifestyle, the simple life is by no means simple to live. And so we drift.

How much to consume education?

Posted by moses @ 15:44 • , , , • 0 comments


Let's face it, adults as a group are pretty bad at giving advice to young people. For example, if young people aim low, adults tell them to aim higher and have more ambition; on the other hand, if young people aim high, adults tell them to be realistic and to pay their dues first. Basically, a lot of advice actually boils down to "do/don't do what I did" or "be/don't be like me".

Then there are those who assume that people think or should think they way they do, and this group certainly includes young people as well.

In times of great uncertainty, the advice and words of wisdom become especially loud and numerous, as everyone chimes in on what they think people should or will do. And I dare say that most of them haven't got a clue.

Now, on the Guardian's question of whether the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000 will inevitably turn students into consumers –this is a silly question and those who are happy with it are quite inevitably going to come up with silly answers. I mean, it implies that students haven't always been consumers. Does the price of a good determine whether you are a consumer? Or is there some kind of a consumer continuum? Shoppers at cheap Tesco are not as much consumers as shoppers at Waitrose?

Of course, this doesn't matter to those who wish to use the question as an excuse to air their self-righteous opinions and advice. In particular, I'm thinking of those who would take this opportunity to remind young people of the value of education, of which they are themselves naturally and keenly aware.

But instead of rushing to tell people what they should or will do, let's address the question carefully. Aside from the fact that it seems to be predicated on the strange idea that students aren't already consumers of education, there is a related question that we must first ask: What qualities can we objectively attach to consumers as a group? Certainly, there are examples of consumers behaving both rationally and irrationally. At times, they are able to make pretty good cost/benefit calculations and drive the market in a way that benefits them; at other times, they consume almost mindlessly. The diversity of consumer behaviour means we cannot assign any particular quality to consumers in their capacity as consumers and argue whether students will be more or less like them.

It also suggests that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict how students will generally behave due to the fee increase, beyond invoking a basic economic maxim and saying that demand for higher education will almost certainly go down to some extent.

So there really isn't a good answer to the question of whether university students will become consumers, not even if we interpret it as one that is concerned with the value that future students will place on university education.

Is that a boring answer? Well, I think it certainly beats the millionth musing on how students don't value the education they are receiving enough.

Don't think like a manager

Posted by moses @ 18:37 • , , • 0 comments


It is often said that knowledge is power. Is it? Or does knowledge simply avail us to the means of power, if that?

There are criticisms to be made of the naive view that knowledge can automatically solve the world's ills, but we do not even have to venture there. In the first place, we should ask what kind of knowledge is regarded as power.

It stands to reason that not all kinds of knowledge can be associated with power. But aside from the fact that some knowledge is obviously of limited use, there's a particular kind that is foremost in the hierarchy of knowledge, being perhaps the only kind that is really recognised as empowering in the minds of many: Actionable knowledge.

In a way, this is apt when we consider the naive belief that knowledge is automatically empowering. Obviously, actionable knowledge is valuable because it allows us to take actions that would otherwise not have been possible or as effective without it. On the other hand, the notion that only actionable knowledge is empowering leads to the idea that only knowledge that is actionable is worth pursuing. That is why we hear rants, such as the one in New York Times recently, about the amount of time and money spent pursuing 'useless' knowledge.

Such complaints do have their points, but they often leave us with the distinct impression that people expect a lot from the knowledge they pursue. They expect it to pave the way to good jobs, to yield financial profit, to save time—in short, knowledge is expected to have tangible benefits, measured in terms that people are already familiar with and fully expect.

There are two criticisms that can be made. Firstly, such expectations are contrary to the nature of discovery. Whether the discovery is unprecedented or personal, whether the knowledge gained is completely new or already known to others, gaining knowledge entails learning something you didn't know before. It is therefore strange that we think we know what we can expect out of gaining some knowledge. While we can perhaps guess at or imagine its possible outcomes, the process of learning is likely to entail learning more than just actionable knowledge. In any particular body of knowledge learned, perhaps only a small part of it is actionable knowledge. Yet such 'wastage' is an unavoidable part of the learning process, a consequence of not knowing what exactly to expect, and this is especially true when engaging in cutting-edge research that seeks to break new ground.

This brings us to the second point, which is what the New York Times article seems to overlook when it rehashes old complaints about the academic ivory tower: A lot of the knowledge gained through research in institutes of higher learning is 'useless' because research is not an entirely predictable process. Important discoveries are often unexpected and made when pursuing lines of inquiry that might initially seem esoteric and of limited practical consequence. Even if a body knowledge seems to be full of information that is of little use outside of academia, the discourse it generates may have a cumulative effect that could be instrumental to making important discoveries within that body or outside of it. Thus, research is not made up self-contained projects that either yield useful results or not—research can be seen as consisting of discourses that together form the ground from which new knowledge germinates, not necessarily as a result of any single effort.

That is not to say that research need not be directed by practical goals. However, we should not be surprised that only "around 40 percent" or whatever proportion of academic research proves to be immediately useful in practical contexts. These circumstances are part and parcel of the process of research, and perhaps it is a gross misunderstanding of the way knowledge is gained that leads to the kind of cynicism that demands that knowledge yield tangible rewards or be deemed not worthwhile.

Don't give up on English to oppose it

Posted by moses @ 11:08 • , , , • 0 comments



Illustration by Don Daily

As a debate plays out this weekend regarding the use of Singlish, let us recall the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. It's a story that is familiar to us, in which a fox, unable to reach some grapes, disparages them as sour grapes.

The term 'sour grapes' has come to signify envy, but there is an element of the pathetic in the fable: Unable to obtain something, the fox takes refuge his rejection of that thing.

Those who entertain thoughts of replacing English with Singlish should remember this tale. The idea of replacing English entails doing away with it altogether, and, if they have resistance in mind, that would not constitute a gesture of resistance.

Why is that so?

An act of resistance without a centre or a point to which it is opposed is untenable. While it might seem clear that communicating in Singlish can be conceived of as an act of resistance that is externally directed against the officious imposition of standard English, it would—recalling the fable—be reduced to a desperate cry if it does not arise from an internally-directed conflict.

This argument is motivated by the mirror-image of the maxim that external opposition is inevitably a reflection of internal contradiction—that a deliberate work of art must be internally coherent to project a meaningful opposition externally. The act of speaking Singlish, if it is to be a performance that mimetically mocks or deconstructs official language, must achieve this internal coherence through the act of conscious and deliberate resistance by the speaker, who has the capability to communicate in standard English and yet chooses not to do so. Without this capability and the actor's power to choose to begin with, the act loses its strength.

It seems eminently foolish to oppose centres of power by reducing what power you have to enact gestures of resistance. Even if those who are for replacing English do not intend it as an act of resistance, their position would still be tantamount to advocating the weakening of the power to resist standard English as a symbol of coercive authority. That would certainly impoverish any speak Singlish movement.

Art and its media

Posted by moses @ 11:26 • , , , , • 0 comments


The difficulty of praxis in art is compounded by the intrusion of the empirical or the purely practical. The definition of art is a political matter; it is bound up with the power to dictate or influence what is considered art and what is not. Perhaps the philosophy of art can exist in parallel with the power structures that, in our reality, define art and the beautiful. However, one gets the feeling that praxis should still entail the reconciling of aesthetic theory with aesthetics in practice, if not overcome the latter altoghether.

The trouble for aesthetic theory is, even if it has revealed the secret of the beautiful and why art is art, it frequently does not account for the practical preoccupation with the medium as a crucial determinant of what can be considered art. A digital image is at most 'art' in a much more qualified sense than is a painting on a canvas. This is because it does not in itself (without relying on the reputation of the artist or on physical installations), by virtue of its medium, typically garner the kind of recognition as an artwork that comes with socially-bestowed value and that can provide the artist with the material means to continue his work.

A way of dealing with this reality is to call for an anti-elitist view of art that disregards or devalues the importance of the art establishment, the respected institutions that serve as gatekeepers for universally-recognised art. Such a view would not discriminate between career artists and those who are not or between one medium and another.

Yet, as suggested earlier, this conception of art would only exist in parallel with the politics of art in practice. Praxis becomes viable but constrained, maintaining itself only by the act of a splintering, by taking itself away from dominant trends.

What is needed is an aesthetic theory that critically engages with the politics of art and, in a dialectical fashion, brings theory and practice together under an all-encompassing praxis. If the medium indeed plays a part in deciding what is art and what is not, such a theory would, as is done in Hegel's philosophy of art, explore the essential elements of art and show how they create qualitative differences between different media. However, it would also have to be cognisant of and explicate the power relations that mediate social perceptions of art.

In this sense, only a synthesis between aesthetic theory and the sociology of art can provide an all-encompassing praxis for art.

Education

Posted by moses @ 09:56 • , , , , • 0 comments


Every year it's the same. I would be lulled into thinking that there are possibilities here, that things will be different. This year, I actually convinced myself that I think positively now, that I will see things differently. I was even beginning to think that I may prefer to stay here instead of leaving again. But, in the end, I still feel the same way

The people are still the same. People might change since you've got to know them, but they'd never change again. Here, they are still indifferent. You can't rely on them to make the simplest of gestures unless they can see what's in it for them. In general, old friends tend to become nothing but a tiny blot in the paper of the mind, a memory of people who exist but who are of little concern to you now.

Every year, I learn a little more about how to live a largely solitary existence. When family became lost to me emotionally, I had friends. Now friends are merely a collection of acquaintances. You don't leave a place and expect to pay no price. Maybe some people can, but such are my blessings.

Each time, to stave off bitterness, I have to know that I've become better. I have to be able to say that I've become more self-sufficient. To achieve that, I have to turn again to philosophy. Only philosophy can teach you how to live alone and nonchalantly.

The strong person is an essentially solitary person. I have no need for friends, as they have no need for me.

The Commodification of Leisure, Part II: Mass Culture and Social Disorder

Posted by moses @ 07:26 • , , , , , , , • 1 comments


Part I

In the second part of this discussion of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, I conclude by building on the key observations made in the first part regarding mass culture and capitalist relations of production, sketching out a slightly different theory of mass culture. The latter is subsequently applied, partly with reference to Slavoj Žižek's Shoplifters of the World Unite, to a brief analysis of the social problems facing contemporary British society (although it applies similarly to many other contemporary societies) that culminated in the disturbances that occurred in the summer of 2011.


It has previously been postulated that mass culture celebrates both consumption and success within the capitalistic paradigm, the latter which revolves around its particular social relations of production. Success in this context, however, has to be seen in relation to consumption, for the market for status and identities in a capitalist society demands equivalence, which in turn demands objective measurability. As such, success is measured by what is called 'purchasing power' and its instantiation in the form of the consumption of goods and services.

At the same time, the association between consumption and success also has its implications on consumption—while it has been suggested that consumption promises an inauthentic easy form of happiness, it is only always easy in a metaphysical sense, inasmuch as happiness as a concept, as Adorno conceives of it, is always being sought rather than readily found. In practice, consumption is by no means always attainable, particularly in forms that are socially valued and identified with success.

Yet, in spite of the relative difficulty of socially-valued consumption, mass culture must nevertheless persist in tempting audiences with it in order to maintain their interest and, consequently, the industries that depend on it. This creates a harsh paradox in which consumption is sold as an easy and attainable pleasure that is, on the contrary, more difficult to accomplish than it is made out to be, and must be so in order to maintain a degree of exclusivity that upholds the social value of consumption.

The contrast between the expectations generated by mass culture and economic realities in turn leads to social tension, as segments of society are continually being seduced by the promise of socially-valued consumption without the means to engage in it to substantial extent. And this phenomenon may have serious practical consequences for society: For example, the violence and the looting that occurred in London and a few other English cities can be understood as at least partly the result of the frustrations engendered by mass culture in its celebration of consumption and of success as measured by consumption.

That is not to say that there is a simple causal relationship between mass culture and social unrest in contemporary capitalist society. Discontent may, at least initially, emerge as movements of resistance, some of which express themselves in benign ways.

Yet what Žižek calls the "impotent rage and despair [that is] masked as a display of force" and the "consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way" (2011) seems manifestly connected to the influence of mass culture. The latter's power may not be as absolute as the Frankfurt School asserts. However, unless we choose to regard the looters simply as human beings who became "beasts" (Žižek, 2011) on their own accord, we must see that mass culture, in wielding significant influence over the modern psyche through the pervasiveness of mass media and through its relentless and seductive celebration of consumption, helps to create an impetus for them to go out and take what they want. Moreover, on a fundamental level, the 'anti-social' act of looting is partly one of lashing out against the fundamental tenet of capitalist society that is property rights, the legal framework that maintains the exclusivity of material ownership and socially-valued consumption.

In light of this, as a famous revolutionary once asked, what is to be done? There seems to be no option other than to continue resisting, but in a different way. While capitalism, presented to us by the messenger that is mass culture, "represents truth without meaning", giving us the freedom to choose only "between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence" (Žižek, 2011), we have to return to what is perhaps a less novel and less cynical way of thinking—we need to adopt a teleology of social and personal life that is both meaningful and lucidly aware of its humanity. We must become aware of the centrality not of particular things or even of transcendent things that may cloud our vision, but of human life itself and the importance of realising it in the fullest capacity possible.

I believe that this is the essence of the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture, or indeed of the Marxist critique of the capitalist relations of production. And this is a point that is not undermined by the dispute over facts about audience reception.

The Social Waxwork

Posted by moses @ 13:55 • • 0 comments


I wanted to write something about the riots and looting that happened in London recently, but at present I don't have the time to compose such a heavy piece. Besides, I've just realised something that I feel I need to write about.

One is never too young to complain about technology. After all, everyone knows that sometimes it's more of an inconvenience than an aid. On my part, I've realised just how bad social networking sites are for me.

There's been a lot of talk about the impact that social networking sites have on productivity and efficiency, but that's not the problem that I have. I don't spend much time on Facebook—the only social networking site I use regularly—although I do have it open most of the time so I can occasionally glance at it for a tiny relief from the boredom of work (or of trying to do work). The longest time I spend on it is at the beginning of each day when I catch up with what has been happening in my social network while I was asleep.

But that's where the problems begin. My so-called social network is an illusion. I know most of the people whose names appear in my newsfeed, but I barely know some of them, and many of them I've simply lost touch with. If this is a social scene, it's the most distant social scene I've ever seen. Here are people constantly telling me something about their lives in which I have absolutely no part and no stake. Why do I even bother reading? Social networking sites may be useful for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, but this isn't a way of keeping in touch with them.

It might satisfy my curiosity sometimes to read the newsfeed, but more often than not I have no real idea about what is happening in these people's lives. What people display on social networking sites is merely what they choose to display. So in terms of finding out about the ins-and-outs of others' lives, it's not very rewarding either.

This leads me to the reason why social networking sites are actually bad for me: Reading all about the fun that people are having is not good for my psychological well-being at a stage in my life where it's largely uninteresting. Maybe people go on Facebook and talk about or show how interesting their lives are because they're looking to enhance their status. Maybe it's just that at any one time, some people in my social network are bound to be having a good time. Maybe people do complain as much about how much their lives suck, but selectively I tend to pay attention to the positive things they show because people's problems aren't interesting. Whatever the reason for my seeing it, evidence of people having a good time intensifies disappointment with my own circumstances and reduces the satisfaction I feel with what I have.

The effect is to make me feel less happy than I think I could be. I start looking for reasons why my life is not as great. The truth is, of course, layered and complex, but I'd blame my school, my work, my luck—I've blamed various things for my relative misery. Then I'd start thinking of doing something about my life so I could be like one of those people I read about in my newsfeed. But if anything is clearly ineffective at helping you improve yourself, it's the rather vague, incomplete and sometimes misleading information about other people's lives that you see on social networking sites.

The irony is, the more uninteresting my life is at the moment, the more I need to look at Facebook for relief from boredom. And thus I would sometimes experience a downward spiral in which boredom becomes unhappiness and unhappiness leads to the loss of interest in my own life. I think I know by now that sometimes we just need to close the browser and go about living our own lives, but it remains to be seen whether I can resist the temptation of looking.

I suppose that's what social networks are—a collection of waxworks of human life. It's unreal, yet you can't resist looking in order to compare it with the real.

If this sounds perilously close to our obsession with celebrities, maybe that's because it is. So here's one more thought: Maybe a social networking site functions like a tabloid, but one that affords ordinary people the chance to be celebrities in their own right through the gossip mill that is the newsfeed.

Now that's an idea—people don't only worship celebrities; they also like to see celebrities brought down to earth in the tabloids. So I guess I have two options: I could simply close the browser; or I could pay more attention to the whining I see on my newsfeed and feel the schadenfreude. I have to say, that's a tough choice.

Living death

Posted by moses @ 16:03 • • 0 comments


I think there are exists two broad ways of tackling life in the middle class consciousness. Both are geared towards consumption, but both go about achieving it differently. The first and more traditional way is associated with the 'Protestant ethic' and involves delaying consumption. It looks at the economic rewards of doing so, namely interest earned by money saved or invested and, more importantly, the accumulated material wealth that can be enjoyed without worry after retirement.

The second way seeks instant or near-instant gratification through consumption. This younger and more hedonistic approach stands in opposition towards the older way, seeking to rebuff the latter's firm demeanour and re-evaluating life as something that is lived moment-by-moment and not (entirely) towards some final end.

Those who subscribe to the first approach disapprove of the other's foolish and unrestrained ways, while those who subscribe to the second approach regard the former in return as boring and straitlaced people who do not know how to live.

As I am more familiar with the first approach, having been brought up in a household that subscribes to the Protestant ethic, it forms the locus of the following thoughts.

Those who prefer the hedonistic lifestyle are absolutely correct. Although the general pre-eminence of a 'Protestant ethic', as described by Weber, is questionable, it exists at least in a hyperreal sense as a kind of personal ideology to some. The Protestant character of the ethic stems from what Nietzsche derided as a preoccupation with the afterlife, whereby one spends one's life in preparation for an eternal life that is to come—a teleology of death, so to speak. In a similar sense, some would focus a large part of their earthly efforts on preparing for the future, namely for the time of retirement, when one is no longer as capable of hard work.

Little or nothing else matters beside this goal. Little else is of value. All their lives they look for that elusive final happiness. When their plans have finally come to fruition in this life, when they can show off their hard-earned wealth and berate other people, they may seem to be a picture of success. But a life of misery may well belie that exterior.

Perhaps they are just incredibly patient people who are always contented along the way. But it seems more likely that they are simply unhappy people. It's no surprise—a teleology of death tends not to bring life to its believers.

Authentically false

Posted by moses @ 11:48 • • 0 comments


I'm sure we have, as consumers, critics and individuals, expended effort, time and money to look for the authentic. As tourists, we sometimes look for the authentic experience of a place; as gastronomes, we look for authentic cuisine; as individuals, we look for authenticity in matters of identity. These are but a few of the myriad instances in which we search for authenticity.

Yet, what do we mean by 'authentic'? Does authenticity exist at all? Sometimes we may even be sure that we have found it; but have we, really?

I believe that the notion of authenticity can be deconstructed or demythologised in the manner of Barthes. But why stop at revealing the class influences behind it? Studies on diasporas and postcolonial theory have also shown that the notion of authenticity is fraught with difficulties. But is there nothing more to it than the workings of ideology or a kind of collective consciousness?

Here, I want to explore the meaning of authenticity as it is cognised by the individual, to find out more about what authenticity means to each of us, if it actually means anything at all.

To a significant extent, the search for the natural parallels the search for the authentic, providing a reference with which we can understand the latter—we simply have to substitute the goal of a natural state with the goal of the original state of a human activity or creation. Hence, when we look for the authentic, we are looking for the original condition of something man-made.

The search for an original condition indicates the existence of a history. If something that we use or adopt is in its original condition, we would not need to find its original condition. However, in addition, if the history of the type of object or the practice being considered is a short one, then it is likely that we would merely be conservative in choosing to stick to the original—in other words, the notion of authenticity is not likely to be involved at all. Hence, something has to have a relatively long history or, more precisely, has to have undergone many transformations before we would be interested in rediscovering its original form.

But how often can we find the original state of something that has undergone many transformations? Human beings modify and reappropriate the things they create to fit their environment and their own uses. After numerous transformations, the original condition of something may not be knowable or recognisable to us. In instances where we think that we have found something authentic, chances are we have not found something that is in its original condition. So does authenticity have anything to do with the original condition?

To answer this question, consider the fact that some people object to the conducting of major restoration work on ruins on grounds that the ruins would lose their authenticity. It does not seem to matter that restoration work might, ironically, bring a ruin closer to the condition of its original structure. In this light, what is so authentic about their 'authentic' unrestored forms? The quality of authenticity, therefore, has a curious tendency to be unrelated to the original condition of the object concerned.

If so, what can authenticity be reliably said to describe? I think it is precisely that authenticity is a vague and to some extent illusory concept that it is so conveniently used. While there might not be sufficient reason to be loyal to originals as simply originals, there are reasons to prefer the authentic when authenticity also connotes superiority. In fact, my contention is that the condition of being original only matters insofar as it provides a reason for claiming the superiority of an object—it is in claiming the superiority of an object that people are actually interested. Authenticity is thus another label that is frequently used as a means of distinction without necessarily denoting an innate characteristic of objects. In other words, the notion of authenticity is quite arbitrary.

In this light, I think we can certainly afford to be less concerned about authenticity. The next time you are tempted to go further for something authentic, think about saving your resources for something really good.

Death to the patriot!

Posted by moses @ 15:59 • • 0 comments


Often, I would read about things that make me embarrassed of even downright ashamed of my country. I'm aware of its rather dirty history, and I don't have such faith in it to be certain that it's not involved in some reprehensible business today. In this light, is there any place for patriotism?

I find it amazing how people get up in arms over criticism of their country. Some of them do not even care if the criticism holds some truth. That or they are simply convinced that it is false. Perhaps to them, their country can do no wrong. What is the source of such touchy pride?


I'd like to say that it's because these people are aware of the historical significance of their statehood, because they truly understand how it compares to the alternatives. But that is a distant knowledge, if it can be grasped at all. Rather, I suspect the source is found in 'education' and propaganda, in the meanings they imbue through symbolic power and in the paranoid alternative scenarios that they plant in people's minds.

It is patently ridiculous that the paraphernalia and icons of national identification are treated with such reverence, so much so that acts that indicate disrespect towards them may be subject to legal sanction. These symbols are said to have a unifying function, yet in affording them true iconic status, the real things that they might have stood for become overlooked, relegated into the obscurity reserved for complex ideas that seem difficult for the minds of the brash to hold.

Thus we have the flag, the lion and what-not, symbols that are regularly wheeled out to summon feelings of pride and attachment so the masses can cheer as they did for kings. These are closely associated with the conception of the nation, together with and sometimes more prominently than real things such as community and solidarity with your fellowmen. They are mere noise, the pop of party poppers and the drunken singing of anthems before the wars that kill citizens in the name of the fatherland.

Far from being its defender, the unthinking patriot who is swayed by these icons, by pithy calls to augment the glory of the nation, is a danger to the community. It is the patriot who gives strength to hegemony and oppression. In his blindness, he may allow all manner of evil and political deception to come to pass. What's more, he may play the role of a soldier and marshal for them, actively aiding them and coercing his countrymen. Hence, if there is one slogan that we must have for patriotism, let it be "Death to the patriot!” 

Patriotism in peacetime is as useful as anger is while one is resting.

The Last Man

Posted by moses @ 02:11 • • 0 comments


Life is beautiful—so much so that there's little need to change it in any significant way. Such is the sentiment that I feel is predominant in the middle class public sphere, to the extent that, apart from a handful of disparate issues on the agenda, there is little prospect for active participation in social transformation.
"We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby.
This Nietzschean imagery seems particularly apt if we conceive of modern consumer society as the endpoint of a grand enlightenment project, namely that of turning human beings into masters of their own fates—beginning with mastery over nature through scientific progress (which is still ongoing), and arguably taken to the fullest extent in the Marxist vision of the human mastery over its own labour power.

This endpoint does not mark the fulfilment of the project, however. It seems that while science is still moving irresistibly forward, there is no longer much impetus to expand this project into other domains of human life. We have stopped, it seems, because life is good enough. Material conditions for the large middle classes in wealthier societies are sufficient for the pursuit of individual happiness; so what else do we need?

With the notion of success measured primarily in terms of the accumulation of material goods and perhaps influence, and now that pleasure as a chief mode of happiness is easily attainable, 'structural adjustment' is only used in a macroeconomic and financial sense. The drive for revolution dissipates in the humdrum of daily work and entertainment, drowned out by television and music. It's an uneventful and perhaps even blissful death.

Thus, it is perhaps the case that human agency can only, at least in present times, play but a small part in historical change. Mass action is generally precipitated by external changes and not vice versa. I think this certainly has implications on participation in social organisation, implications that are, unfortunately, less than inspiring.

The Culture Industry revisited

Posted by moses @ 15:57 • , , , , , , • 0 comments



While cultural studies has today succeeded in appearing to undermine the Frankfurt School critique of the Culture Industry, the machinery of commodification steams ahead, more productive than ever. The intellectual world is powerless before this trend and continues to concede its influence. Numerous scholars of culture are striving to make their field at once more obscure and more accessible. They toil to create a happy vision of a world that is poised to reap the benefits of new communications technology, promising a cosmopolitan future of choice and enlightened consumption.

This vision is constructed through discourse that is sprinkled with an ever-growing list of newly-coined terms. Yet it is, at the same time, one that people can readily identify with—for who isn't ready to believe in the prospect of a brave new world, especially when the media has just informed them of the exciting new products available in the market?

Admittedly, Critical Theory does not often fare well in today's intellectual climate, a circumstance that I feel is attributable to its underpinnings in the labour theory of value, or at least in varying degrees of economic determinism. Popular conceptions of value no longer hold it as something objective or cardinal. Value is something that is purely relational and manifested in actual preferences. In other words, that people value something more than another cannot often be explained in terms of natural and tangible causes. Valuation is often a subjective affair.

In a powerful way, this undermines the Marxist critique of exchange value, not only by dispelling the labour theory of value on which the critique is based, but also by replacing the concept of use value with ordinal utility. Now we have another conception of value that is also Subject-determined and correlated with exchange value but is not equivalent to the latter. And the concept of use value seems cumbersome and obsolete beside one that is able to account for all Subject perceptions of value, including the intangible, instead of being mired in the materialist paradigm. Moreover, this conception of value is seductively democratic. After all, what can appear more empowering than a view of value that privileges people's preferences and decisions?

What this means for the Frankfurt School critique is its effective isolation as an elitist view of culture that presumes to tell people what they ought to value. If preferences are subjective, what right does anyone have to proscribe any as long as no actual harm can reasonably be alleged to result?

It is difficult to defend the Frankfurt School from such a charge. Yet I maintain that its critique of the Culture Industry still rings true, albeit in a way that may necessitate some distancing from Marxist discourse. My proposition is to look at the critique from a particularly modern perspective that revolves around expectations and hype.

If there is anything that we have learned from the last global financial crisis, it is that expectations may diverge from a more tangible reality of a situation, whatever the latter may be. Perhaps this can be seen in terms of the divergence between short-term and long-term confidence, the latter which is dependent on a stricter or more complete procedure of reasoning. But regardless of what exactly we should compare expectations to, the evidence seems to point to the existence of hype.

Hype can be understood, in that sense, as the inflating of expectations of returns relative to a more tangible measure of actual returns. Even under conventional ways of looking at the market, hype is rarely a good thing—it implies that buyers are ultimately losing out in terms of expected versus real returns to their spending. And since hype is paid for by marketing costs that are likely to figure in pricing decisions, hype also represents a potential deadweight loss.

What does this have to do with the Culture Industry? It is my contention that the Culture Industry is a major source of hype. It deals in feelings, manufacturing them in order to generate interest in things—a process that is typically subsumed under the goal of making profit. It thus becomes the primary source of trends that influence people's preferences in goods. To grasp the commercial importance of the Culture Industry under late capitalism, simply witness how advertising thrives on the products of the Culture Industry.

Moreover, this principle does not apply merely to the products of various industries, but also to more general things such as lifestyles and even happiness—the message is that spending our money on something or adopting a certain attitude or lifestyle can bring us happiness or a sense of fulfillment.

But can hype not become real if it proves to be permanent? After all, there are still many people who would be very happy to buy, for example, the latest Apple products simply on the basis of the expectations that have been generated through marketing. Thus, it would seem to be the case that these people continue to get what they expect.

Yet it remains true that no one really knows how long the ephemeral expectations that are associated with hype can last, especially on the level of the individual. All it takes is for the realisation to come, in one fine moment, that there is no basis for believing that something is as good as it has been made out to be. Much of the perceived returns would be lost in that moment, just as the perceived values of certain financial instruments evaporated a few years ago.

The lie that Culture Industry sells us does not, therefore, have to depend on a highly contentious philosophical analysis of value. Whatever the exact nature or typology of value may be, hype as the commodification of feelings can be observed in our everyday experience; and it stands clearly a means of extracting profit through the inflating of expectations.

The perpetual requiem

Posted by moses @ 19:32 • , • 0 comments


Those who wish to hold on to dreams should also be prepared to give them up. One cannot be uncompromising about dreams, for dreams have power over us. They have the power to reveal our mortal limitations, unclothed by the delusions of power that flights of fancy bring. For dreams are always a few steps ahead of us—the more we are able to realise, the fancier they become. Confidence often leads to our undoing, and the moment when we see the precariousness of our situation, the potential futility of our efforts, is the moment of despondency; a moment of lifelessness and regret for failures past.

To dare to dream is to dare to give them up. Yet, on the other hand, can we do without them? As dreams give meaning to our lives, they may also take them away. Thus, it is not having dreams or giving them up that is most crucial. Most importantly, accept the passing of dreams. Old dreams die to be replaced by newer, often less exalted ones. As we age, so do our dreams decay. But still you must hold on to them, to give them up later or perhaps to even realise them. That is what we really live for—the chance, however small, to see some of our dreams realised, or to fight again another day until we breathe no longer.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Big picture, small picture—who the hell knows anyway?

Posted by moses @ 20:18 • , , , , • 0 comments



More technocratic or elitist discourses on governance often bring up concepts like 'the big picture' or the 'the long view'. I won't dispute the fact that these terms have meanings (albeit relative ones). But they don't seem as clear as they are made out to be in those instances. It's always worth asking what the big picture or the long view is, and how anyone knows what it is. Otherwise, it would only serve as a cover that allows the powerful to explain things away with a wave of the hand.

The problem in thinking in terms of the big picture becomes clear when there are competing claims about the same reality, typically with some grounded in experienced reality and others in more abstract or socially-constructed terms. For example, it is possible to enjoy a period of posted economic growth and rising nominal (or even real) wages while having people report decreasing standards of living in their everyday experience. Of course, facts grounded in experienced reality are often fragmentary and contentious—they are typically anecdotal and it is easy to find examples that contradict each other. To the rationally-minded, such facts might therefore be unquestionably devalued.

However, this does not mean that they are necessarily untrue or unreal. Everyone sees reality through the veil of a particular (and partly self-imposed) perspective. However, this reality is also the reality that each of us knows. It's cold comfort to be told that some abstraction or another person's reality can free our perceptions from the constraints of the experienced. What we experience is necessarily treated as true because we experience it. That is a fundamental tautology in epistemology.

Of course, ontologically this is a problematic position. Yet in practical matters, the empirical is the most directly relevant to the individual. Small epistemologically-determined problems can culminate in an ontological crisis. After a certain point, we just don't know if a claim that has been 'proven' to be ontologically true is indeed true. It becomes increasingly difficult, for example, to hold on to a traditionally held view that something is good when we are finding so many little things that are wrong with it.

The epistemological/ontological divide translates into a small picture/big picture divide in the socio-economic realm. What I call the 'small picture' is obvious enough to each individual, as it concerns the present and immediate reality around him. But how do we derive the big picture? Are we able to see how all the small things, consisting as they are of an insurmountable mountain of conflicting data, form the big picture? The long view is even more complicated as time constantly introduces change.

What people wind up doing is simplifying the reality that they see. They abstract reality, deriving theories, numbers and indicators to allow them take stock of it in a convenient and concise way. When they need to think about the future, they make projections based on these abstractions. This is a powerful and useful method, but it's not without its risks. If experienced reality is affected by perspective, what exempts our visions of the big picture from the same influence? In fact, most if not all attempts at abstracting reality are acts of interpretation—we are interpreting reality according to a certain framework or paradigm.

In governance, the tendency to abstract and derive the big picture for policy purposes has led governments to pursue numbers. They rely on indicators to measure the effectiveness of their policy, the welfare of the people and virtually everything that pertains to their business. This is often a necessary measure in their position, yet the problem with these indicators is that they are interpretive. The real problem, however, comes when people are not aware of this. Numbers and abstractions become totalitarian teleologies, imposing an "iron cage", as Max Weber put it, of rationalism on the lives of individuals. And worst of all, they become held as 'truth'.

The elitism regarding the big picture is a manifestation of this rationalist arrogance and its obliteration of the hermeneutic. What individuals think and feel is completely unimportant beside the data. Unfortunately, the people who champion the big picture often neglect to ask how the data is derived. Emptily they claim to be bastions of reason and lovers of wisdom, and those who disagree they declare to be contrarian or oppositional. Hence, the position of the unthinking rationalist is readily assumed by the most dangerous ignorant people of all—the pseudo-educated, the body of the reactionary middle class.

A note on the elections and on change

Posted by moses @ 12:17 • , , , • 0 comments


I don't care much for procedural politics in general. My aspirations for social and political change are a little bit on the 'pie-in-the-sky' side. This is not to say, though, that I don't care to vote. Voting is important for some rather obscure reasons to do with the technicalities of particular representative democratic systems, barring some really exciting circumstances—and this comes from someone who normally likes pretty obscure stuff. Real life seems rather too important and straightforward for obscure reasoning, but in the absence of strong reasons to believe otherwise, citizens should exercise their voting rights.

So that is to say that I am normally pretty agnostic towards voting, but I am leaning more for it than against it. Now let me explain why I don't think voting is anywhere near the limit or the be-all-end-all of the exercise of one's capacity as a political (in the bona fide classical sense) individual.

In order to do so, it looks like I have to first explain why I have little faith in the electoral process as a mechanism for social and political change anyway. Perhaps I live under somewhat exceptional circumstances, but I have seen the election of new governments fail spectacularly to institute much meaningful change. In a country like Singapore, where institutions can be expected to be particularly sticky or conservative, the electoral process certainly doesn't inspire me with much hope.

I am not familiar with comparative and more empirical theories of democracy, and so I turn to bigger narratives to find reasons why it is the case that elections are not normally game-changing. There is a myth defended by the older stuffy liberals (sometimes known as conservatives) that voting is the ultimate exercise of one's capacity as a responsible political agent. This is the myth we are brought up to believe, which may explain the religious seriousness with which some attend to the matter of voting in elections. However, reflecting Habermas' narrative of the decline of the public sphere, elections constitute a dated procedure handed down from ages past, an old gentlemen's game that has been massified but nevertheless expected to retain the same significance for each individual voter. Meanwhile, as the actualisation of the sovereign will of the people, it is actively being circumvented in modern times by influential political organisations with direct access to policy makers and by purported political exigencies that are subject to little public scrutiny. In other words, your votes as individuals pale in significance to how much power and influence is wielded by a political elite, whose mandate to rule over you is ironically affirmed by your votes.

The only way forward, under present constraints of the prevailing democratic systems, seems to be in trying to match the direct policy-making influence of powerful organisations. We are in need of a large civil society consisting of citizen activists who would fight for the causes they believe in. The only way forward is through citizen advocacy groups, unions and active everyday participation in politics. The days of waiting for elections and for your representatives in parliament to make your voices heard are over, if they were ever there. Only then can the public put itself on the same playing field as elite organisations in determining the character of governance.

In a sense, the conservatives have it right: Don't trust the authorities. But that does not mean we should minimise government—the government does many beneficial things after all; it means we should have a civil society to match. This, if anything, is the true meaning of a big society.

For this to happen, however, there must be a lively as well as a quality culture of political participation in society. It takes a certain amount of awareness, political wisdom and community spirit amongst citizens to institute a strong civil society. Unfortunately, the current state of Singapore's society and its public discourse does not inspire me with much hope in this either at present. Nevertheless, the stirrings in the public, if rather too naively focused on the electoral process, might be a sign of the beginnings of change. This may also be somewhat 'pie-in-the-sky', but, ultimately, I think one should be optimistic and look forward to real change.

The Commodification of Leisure, Part I: Art and the Culture Industry

Posted by moses @ 18:35 • , , , , , , • 0 comments


Here I present a reading of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, with reference to Frederic Jameson's essays on Adorno in Late Marxism and Amresh Sinha's Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory.

So where should we begin? The first thing to note is the fact that there is more to Adorno and Horkheimer's theory than the suggestion of mass culture as fundamentally characterised by passive consumption. That is really only a symptom (though a very important one for Adorno and Horkheimer) of the general 'malaise' of mass culture, and one that has received far too much emphasis in media studies to the detriment of the discussion of its other aspects. In light of this, I will endeavour to present a more contextual reading of this essay.


I am looking at Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of mass culture from the perspective of their critique of pleasure as it is associated with mass entertainment under late capitalism. It should be noted that Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of pleasure "takes place within a framework of the theory of the alienated labor process" (Jameson, 1990: 145). This entails the analysis of mass culture as the colonisation and the commodification of leisure time—amusement is the prolongation of the working day insofar as it merely functions as a period of relaxation that demands no effort (hence the passivity of the consumer), which is sold to the individual worker so that he/she can continue working contentedly the next day. Pleasure is therefore seen not only as a flight from reality but also as the flight from "any last thought of resistance" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1998).

The full implications of commodification will be brought out later. Presently, we will attend more closely to the notion of the colonisation of leisure, which involves the mechanisation of culture that reflects the mechanisation of modern economic production: The enjoyment of culture is schematised for a passive audience so that, as mentioned above, no effort is required on the part of the latter. This entails the presentation of "repetition and the familiar" (Jameson, 1990: 148) in order not to tax the audience's minds. Thus, the familiar character of the labour process is ironically reproduced in entertainment, which indicates that the monotony of "standardised operations" that characterises the working day "can be evaded only by approximation to it in one's leisure time" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1998).

This is where media scholars' criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer are typically focused, with their rather belaboured emphasis on the examination of the link between media consumption and power (sometimes in an effort to deny that the media wield power over the audience). As stated in the beginning, such a perspective is sorely inadequate, and this will become evident as we examine the other aspects of Adorno and Horkheimer's theory on mass culture, beginning with its aesthetic critique of pleasure.

Adorno and Horkheimer hold that pleasure/happiness is found in what is yet to be, and their charge is that the Culture Industry offers 'inauthentic' pleasure that is purported to already exist and is ready for consumption. Furthermore, Adorno postulates a conception of the artistic mimesis as pure expression, which is antithetical to the notion of 'expressing something' (Sinha, 2000). Artistic expression is hence self-identical (Sinha, 2000) and thereby incompatible with the notion of equivalence, which is so important to the process of commodity exchange. Like the mystical in Wittgenstein's philosophy, in other words, it cannot be substituted by something else. Therefore, unlike the products of the Culture Industry, it cannot be subsumed under the mechanism of substituting means for ends (Sinha, 2000), being thus quite apart from the market for identity and leisure that under late capitalism are treated as just more commodities to be exchanged.

One important insight that we can derive from Adorno's conception of art is that, for Adorno and Horkheimer, reception is identified with the capitalist mode of production, particularly in the context of commodification. This means the reception of the products of the Culture Industry has to be understood in relation to their production. The most common criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer are heavily invested in the critique of their claims regarding reception, emboldened by evidence indicating that audiences are not passive. Thus, a good way to uphold the Frankfurt School critique, without explicitly invoking theories of power, is to bring production back into the discourse.

Equivalence is, as stated earlier, crucial for commodity exchange, and it is created through abstraction—the Marxist account of commodity exchange involves the abstraction of the use values of goods into exchange/monetary value, "allowing comparable and measurable quantities to be manipulated" (Jameson, 1990: 149). This forms a vital part of the commodification of leisure as it is the need to conform to the principle of equivalence and create monetary value that drives the production of cultural products in a manner that is similar to the production of consumer goods, leading to the creation of what Walter Benjamin calls the mechanically reproducible work of art.

But what implications does the nature of production in the Culture Industry have on consumption? Questions of quality come first to mind, but this is, understandably, shaky ground on which to stake a critique of mass culture. We need look above and beyond, at the implications of the relations of production on the consumption of mass culture as a whole and not as discrete cultural products. 

Roland Barthes asserted, mirroring Adorno's critique of pleasure, that mass-produced culture under late capitalism serves to conceal or obscure the capitalist mode of production, thereby eliminating resistance. However, this line of argument is once again susceptible to the criticism, born of audience studies, that audiences are not simply passive recipients. Indeed, I think the exact opposite is the case: Far from hiding it, the Culture Industry revels in the capitalist mode of production, showing us the promises that await us should we acquiesce to the system, namely all manner of consumer goods and the status and identities that come with them—rewards that are, however, readily available. It tempts the audience with these prizes, rather than compelling or co-opting them directly. But, crucially, it also promises the more elusive, yet-to-be prospect of success itself, embodied most vividly and blatantly by the stars it churns out as the human end-products of its capitalist mode of production. It is therefore unsurprising, though ironic in light of Adorno's linking of pleasure to readily achievable ends, that audiences are so preoccupied with stars.

Continued in Part II

The Subject of Pipe Dreams

Posted by moses @ 18:38 • , , , , , • 0 comments


Postmodern approaches to social theory emphasise multiplicity and de-centring, and these themes find their natural articulation in cultural analyses. Such analyses focus on the richness of cultural interaction and the reproduction of identities in non-linear ways, and where they concern themselves with politics and social organisation, they seek to realise this vision of cosmopolitan society—a society consisting of empowered and complex Subjects. Some theorists have even gone so far as to announce that we live in the age of the Subject.

Is this true? The last claim is especially dubious; our everyday experiences are enough to cast serious doubt on it. There are structural and physical limitations that ensure that Subject-Object relations continue to exist in force and often dominate the social terrain. Thus, trying to establish the existence or even plausibility of pure Subject-Subject relations in mass society amounts, at least under present conditions, to an exercise in wishful thinking.

Such limitations can be observed most clearly in political processes. Indeed, politics may be said to define these limitations insofar as it is considered as the necessary framework of social organisation. Politics, therefore, exercises a restrictive rule on the freedom and the pure reciprocity that would give rise to a society consisting only of relations between empowered Subjects.

The agents that enforce this rule are institutions. Institutions impose their decisions on Subjects in non-negotiable ways, and this happens every day in processes of governance. Democracy and dialogue fade away when individuals are faced with institutional decisions made under the guise of systemic necessity. Dreamers might continue to insist on the democratic possibility of changing such outcomes, but as Marx said, "Between equal rights force decides."

The will of individuals as Subjects and systemic concerns (as they are treated by institutions) are thereby locked in a Hegelian moral opposition—the dialectic is a forceful one. Even Subjects with dialogic aspirations for society need to be able to resort to confrontation in order to assert themselves in reforming or recreating institutions to carry out the vision of a cosmopolitan society.

It is no wonder, then, that non-violence and compliance are attributes that are often considered highly desirable, if not the most desirable, in liberal democracies—institutions may depend upon them to survive when there is potential conflict with the will of the demos, the collective body of Subjects.

Hence, democracy as an ideal exists only in its immutable form in a theoretical revolutionary moment, when the will of the demos is able to assert itself without institutional restriction. Echoing the structuralist critique of the metaphysics of presence, the ideal of democracy is not actually present in everyday procedures of governance and planning. There is typically only the reality of individuals acting as economic units under systems that often vaguely recognise their status as free and equal beings.

What about dialogue? Is there more that can be said about it? Indeed, the critique of dialogical interaction can be expanded from an institutional focus to the relations between Subjects within the demos or the public sphere itself. Some of these relations are no doubt power relations, but the existence of Subject-Object relations can be established beyond the influence of power and as the product of necessity as well. Once we move from small-scale interpersonal relations to mass society, it becomes difficult to avoid the constitution of Subject-Object relations. Mass communication is inherently objectifying because it is depersonalised—in addressing a mass of individuals, Subjects communicate without the ability to recognise particular and distinct Subjects as the recipients of their messages. As such, they must necessarily generalise about and even essentialise their audience, moulding the latter's image according to their messages. While dialogue is possible, it is nevertheless unable create a public sphere consisting of Subject-Subject relations as long as the whole of the mass is considered. The conversation will not be able to take into account every individual in his/her full complexity as a Subject; nor will it empower every Subject by allowing his/her unique voice to be heard fully.

So where does this leave postmodern approaches that try to construct a rhizomatic web of non-essentialising relations between Subjects? The pessimistic answer is "Nowhere"—there will always be Subject-Object relations and they will continue to have great relevance in social organisation. However, to give a more optimistic assessment, postmodernists may take a cue from modernist approaches and seek to address the actual existence of centres, instead of pretending that the Subject has got the better of them. Otherwise, like the proverbial ostrich, they can only make themselves more vulnerable to objectifying processes.

On the relative unimportance of the relativity of truth

Posted by moses @ 18:02 • , , , • 0 comments


I wonder how often the pronouncement that "It's all relative anyway" is accompanied by the knowledge of why exactly that is so. Perhaps utterance without precise understanding is somewhat apt within a relativist paradigm. In any case, it would certainly be apt to draw upon one philosophical tradition, which grounds beliefs on a particular theoretical basis, in order to explain and mitigate the notion that truth is relative. Hence, I want to look at structuralism and its take on the crisis of foundationalism.

The structuralist critique of foundationalism and the metaphysics of presence revolves around the arbitrariness of the link between the signifier and the signified. Essentially, it denies that inherent ideas or mental states accompany the utterance of words such as to supply the words with fixed and unmistakeable meanings. The arbitrary nature of the signifier/signified connection, however, does not imply that individuals simply decide what they mean when they say something. Meanings are decided, subject to perpetual change, through the relations of words with one another, governed by principles that constitute a language (by which I mean langue or a system of signification) and that are beyond the simple agency of individuals.

The implication is that truth claims are problematic insofar as the instability and arbitrariness of meaning make the communication of claims about objective or universal truths impossible—meanings and the truths they are supposed to convey do not necessarily translate from language to language or, depending on which philosopher you are reading, between communities that speak different languages based on the respective forms of life that characterise them. And if thought is a form of internal communication insofar as it is constructed linguistically, then it seems to follow that it is impossible to apprehend objective truths that must by nature correspond perfectly in the minds of all individuals.

Thus, there appears to be two aspects to the problem, one communicative and the other epistemological. In downplaying the practical implications of relativism, I will focus on the communicative aspect as it seems more directly applicable to our everyday lives. This seems, at any rate, appropriate in view of the linguistic orientation of the structuralist critique. Moreover, communication that is not crippled by relativism may help address the epistemological dimension to the problem, so it might be useful to deal with the communicative aspect first.

What indications are there that meanings are not hopelessly relative and mutually unintelligible when we communicate with each other? For one, there is the interesting fact that individuals who may be regarded as belonging to different communities are capable of being ‘on the same page’ while communicating to each other, even when they are making truth claims. This may be attributed on a broader level to experiences that are common to all human beings, which may, for example, make certain ethical propositions more or less universally acceptable. Even if we were to narrow down the scope of our analysis, we would find that shared experiences that constitute what is called ‘intersubjectivity’ do not permit us to neatly categorise people into distinct communities that draw on exclusive pools of meanings. We often share experiences with one another and thereby establish common grounds of shared meanings that cut across all divisions that traditionally delineate communities.

As part of our daily experience, communication in turn helps us find and perpetuate such common grounds. The act of communicating the structuralist critique of foundationalism itself presupposes shared meanings that are communicated in an effort to create a larger common ground with a potentially vast group of individuals from a range of different communities. Hence, intersubjectivity is arguably an inevitable outcome of communication.

This suggests that even if the epistemological side of the problem proves intractable, even if we can never really know whether objective truths exist, we can get by pretty well without being mutually unintelligible to an extent that cripples communication. And part of our process of getting by would undoubtedly involve having beliefs in ‘objective’ truths that we share with others who are able to empathise with the reasons for those beliefs.

Furthermore, communication can help us to come to know more about objective truths through processes of discourse, as theorists of communicative rationality might argue. In this sense, as I have mentioned earlier, the communicative aspect may be said to precede the epistemological.

Most importantly, however, the fact that we are able to communicate with a diverse range of individuals from different communities means that the relativity of truth, whether it is itself objectively true, is almost irrelevant to our daily practices in a modern liberal society. And in times when the notion of multiculturalism is under sustained attack, it reminds us that there is likely no water-tight philosophical reason for not being able to coexist and communicate with each other.

Politics as tacit knowledge

Posted by moses @ 18:12 • , , , , • 0 comments


The world of experts is a perplexing one. And that's partly because you wouldn't know what it's really about unless you are an expert yourself. 

One might think that the role of the expert can be democratised in the modern world, devolved to a larger base of 'common man' experts in a context where knowledge is widely available, thanks to a trend that can perhaps be traced from the invention of the printing press to the advent of mass literacy and most recently to the development of information technology. Apparently not.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to "that whereof we cannot speak", a tacit kind of knowledge that agents draw upon in order to interpret meanings in a language, knowledge that can only be apprehended in its instantiation as part and parcel of practices that comprise social life. This knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be codified and read off the pages of a book or passed through any communicative medium. It has to be lived.

A field of expertise may be regarded as a kind of language, if we apply principles from structural linguistics to the wider realm of social theory. And it makes sense in this instance. Experts are experts not just because they have read a large number of texts on a subject, though that certainly helps; they are experts because they have been extensively engaged in a body of knowledge and have participated in the social activities that are central to the production and reproduction of the knowledge and the field. They literally know it inside-out.

I find the field of politics especially interesting because, rather than just interwoven with power relations in the Foucauldian sense, most knowledge pertaining to the field deals directly with power. It is therefore very relevant to everyone's lives. Are there experts in politics? Michael Oakeshott certainly thought so. Politicians, people who know the 'art' of politics through extensive experience in it, are supposedly the experts, notwithstanding their dodgy reputations and their sometimes alarming ignorance of basic facts. However, taking a cue from the title's reference to Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation, we have to be slightly careful: Are politicians the experts, or does the label more accurately apply to the political bosses?

Oakeshott seems to have had in mind the statesman rather than the campaigning or vocational politician, although the ability to acquire and retain power in a democratic context is certainly implicit in his conception. So let us treat politics in the sense that relates to governance and whatever political manoeuvring is necessary to govern a society. 

A kind of elite theory of democracy that this notion of political expertise implies is consistent with a rationalisation of representative democracy. Representative democracy is held to be superior to direct democracy because 'a government by the people' is mediated by the people's representatives, the politicians, who presumably know more about what governing is really about.  

I don't wish to argue for or against the notion of politics as tacit knowledge here, although I think it's undeniably true to some extent. Instead, I want to offer a critique of expertise as a myth, whereby the expert becomes a high priest of knowledge who is to be consulted and heeded, as augurs were, in an uncritical and almost superstitious manner. In other words, we sometimes think too highly of experts. And with their own interests in mind, they seldom want to correct us. Rather, they readily assume the robes of the high priest. 

I've talked about instances where experts treat a given subject matter in isolation, causing them to draw bad conclusions. Here, I have in mind experts who do not even understand what they are talking about. We can have a significant amount of certainty about their ignorance when it comes to very recent political events, as insufficient time has passed to allow for an extensive body of reliable knowledge on it to emerge. 

The Harvard professor who was dead wrong about the North African/Middle Eastern political upheavals comes to mind here. Yet we still see experts coming forward to offer their expert opinion on this very topic, even as events are still unfolding. It might not matter so much if they were merely at risk of being wrong, but they are also party to the framing of the present struggles of real people as political theatre, as a spectacle for entertainment or as a commodified platform for making a point. And these experts congregate or belong altogether in the media, eager to broadcast their messages to a wide audience partly because this may further their careers.

Therefore, I much prefer the historian's perspective—at the very least, the intervening dimension of time allows for observation that is more respectful and accurate. This notion has some implications on the question of whether politicians can be trusted as experts. 

Not having the luxury of dealing with content that is mediated by time and yet (unlike many experts in the media) having to deal with it all the same, politicians are frequently engaging in necessary guess work. Tacit knowledge could certainly help in making ‘educated' guesses, but given the incentives involved, we don't always know whether they want to make guesses for the benefit of the public. This suggests that while it's generally pretty stupid to tell scientists that they are wrong about things like climate change, this is not the case with politicians. Experts in the natural sciences are in a completely different class compared to experts in politics when it comes to certainty in their knowledge, as well as when it comes to their integrity, occasional scandals notwithstanding. 

Hence, for the sake of a publicly-oriented participatory democracy, we should feel free to take up the role of the common man political expert. It's only for our own good.