bourdieu | Digifesto

March 18, 2017

ideologies of capitals

A key idea of Bourdieusian social theory is that society’s structure is due to the distribution of multiple kinds of capital. Social fields have their roles and their rules, but they are organized around different forms of capital the way physical systems are organized around sources of force like mass and electrical charge. Being Kantian, Bourdieusian social theory is compatible with both positivist and phenomenological forms of social explanation. Phenomenological experience, to the extent that it repeats itself and so can be described aptly as a social phenomenon at all, is codified in terms of habitus. But habitus is indexed to its place within a larger social space (not unlike, it must be said, a Blau space) whose dimensions are the dimensions of the allocations of capital throughout it.

While perhaps not strictly speaking a corollary, this view suggests a convenient methodological reduction, according to which the characteristic beliefs of a habitus can be decomposed into components, each component representing the interests of a certain kind of capital. When I say “the interests of a capital”, I do mean the interests of the typical person who holds a kind of capital, but also the interests of a form of capital, apart from and beyond the interests of any individual who carries it. This is an ontological position that gives capital an autonomous social life of its own, much like we might attribute an autonomous social life to a political entity like a state. This is not the same thing as attributing to capital any kind of personhood; I’m not going near the contentious legal position that corporations are people, for example. Rather, I mean something like: if we admit that social life is dictated in part by the life cycle of a kind of psychic microorganism, the meme, then we should also admit abstractly of social macroorganisms, such as capitals.

What the hell am I talking about?

Well, the most obvious kind of capital worth talking about in this way is money. Money, in our late modern times, is a phenomenon whose existence depends on a vast global network of property regimes, banking systems, transfer protocols, trade agreements, and more. There’s clearly a naivete in referring to it as a singular or homogeneous phenomenon. But it is also possible to referring to in a generic globalized way because of the ways money markets have integrated. There is a sense in which money exists to make more money and to give money more power over other forms of capital that are not money, such as: social authority based on any form of seniority, expertise, lineage; power local to an institution; or the persuasiveness of an autonomous ideal. Those that have a lot of money are likely to have an ideology very different from those without a lot of money. This is partly due to the fact that those who have a lot of money will be interested in promoting the value of that money over and above other capitals. Those without a lot of money will be interested inn promoting forms of power that contest the power of money.

Another kind of capital worth talking about is cosmopolitanism. This may not be the best word for what I’m pointing at but it’s the one that comes to mind now. What I’m talking about is the kind of social capital one gets not by having a specific mastery of a local cultural form, but rather by having the general knowledge and cross-cultural competence to bridge across many different local cultures. This form of capital is loosely correlated with money but is quite different from it.

A diagnosis of recent shifts in U.S. politics, for example, could be done in terms of the way capital and cosmopolitanism have competed for control over state institutions.

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January 23, 2017

update: no longer think “hacker class consciousness” is important

I’m going through old papers and throwing them out. I came upon an early draft from my first year in graduate school titled “Hacker Class Consciousness”. It was the beginning of an argument that those that work on open source software needed to develop a kind of class consciousness recognizing that their work bears a special relationship to capitalist modes of production. Open source software is a form of capital (a means of production) that is not privately owned. Hence, it is actually quite disruptive to capitalism per se. A la early Marxist theory, a political identity or “class consciousness” of people working in this way was necessary to reform the government to make it more equitable, or environmentally friendly, less violent, or whatever your critique of capitalism (or neoliberalism, if you prefer) is.

I didn’t get very far past this basic economic logic, which I still think is correct. I no longer think that class consciousness is important though. And I don’t think there’s an inevitability to capitalism containing the seeds of its own revolution through the eventual triumph of open source production.

I think it’s a good practice to make oneself accountable when one changes ones mind. There’s lots of evidence to say that when people publicly commit to some belief, they wind up sticking to it with more confidence than they ought to. Shame related reasons, I suppose. A good alternative habit, I believe, is publicly admitting when you are wrong about something, with the reasons for the update.

So why did I change my mind on this? Well, one reason is that I took some shots at formally modelling the problem several years ago and while it showed the robustness of open source software as a way of opening a market that had previously been dominated or locked in by a proprietary vendor or solution, there isn’t the profit motive driving open source production as a first mover. So the natural pressures of the market make open source coexist alongside proprietary systems, providing a countervailing force to privatization but never dissolving it entirely.

Another reason I changed my mind was a more general shift away from Marxist to Bourdieusian modes of thinking, which I’ve talked about here. A key part of this change in perspective is that it sees many kinds of capital at work in society, including both economic and cultural forms, and populations are distributed across the resulting multidimensional spectrum of variation, not stratified into a one-dimensional class structure. In such a world, class consciousness is futile. This futility may explain the futility of the Marxist project in general, as there was never really the kind of global collective action of the proletariat that he predicted would end capitalism. There’s always too many other kinds of population difference at work to allow for such a revolution. Race, for example.

It is good that a matured attitude has left me less eager to engage in a futile revolutionary project. There’s nothing like pursuing a doctorate for grinding that kind of idealism out of you. Now I can scintillate with cynicism, and would like to be much better at it. Which is to say, I’m beginning to regret ever turning away from the dismal science of economics, which now seems much more like the doctrine worth pursuing and improving.

One nice thing about economics is that it is quantitatively rigorous. This is not simply an intellectual gate-keeping statement designed to box out the innumerate. It’s rather a comment on how such a field has strictly more expressive power because of its capacity to represent a statistical distribution of variation. It’s not enough to say there’s black and white when there are shades of gray. And it’s not enough to say there are shades of gray when the particular variation in density of light across the field is what’s important.

A grayscale raster, from the OpenGeo Suite

It’s this kind of expressive power that gives computational social science much of its appeal. I forgot to even make this argument in my paper about the subject. That may be because this notion of the expressive power of different representational systems is part of what one learns in the course of ones computer science education, and that argument was written primarily for people without a computer science education.

Which really brings the discussion back around to where I come down to on the revolutionary economic potential of software development. Which is that really, it’s about educating people in the concepts and skills that allow them to make use of this incredible pool of openly available technical capital that gives people the “class consciousness” to act with it. Since late modern software development depends for its very existence on the great open wealth of collectivized logic already crystallized into free code, the “consciousness” is really just the habitus of the developer. I suppose I occasionally meet somebody who says they’ve been coding in .NET for their whole careers, but they are rare and I think are not doing well in the greater information economy.

It no coincidence that technical education and skills diffusion are, for Thomas Piketty, the way to counteract the inequality the results from disparate returns on wealth versus labor. This is a position one simply converges on if one studies it for long enough. Kindly, it stabilizes the role of the education system as one that is necessary for correcting other forms of societal destabilization and excess.

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January 12, 2017

habitus and citizenship

Just a quick thought… So in Bourdieu’s Science of Science and Reflexivity, he describes the habitus of the scientist. Being a scientist demands a certain adherence to the rules of the scientific game, certain training, etc. He winds up constructing a sociological explanation for the epistemic authority of science. The rules of the game are the conditions for objectivity.

When I was working on a now defunct dissertation, I was comparing this formulation of science with a formulation of democracy and the way it depends on publics. Habermasian publics, Fraserian publics, you get the idea. Within this theory, what was once a robust theory of collective rationality as the basis for democracy has deteriorated under what might be broadly construed as “postmodern” critiques of this rationality. One could argue that pluralistic multiculturalism, not collective reason, became the primary ideology for American democracy in the past eight years.

Pretty sure this backfired with e.g. the Alt-Right.

So what now? I propose that those interested in functioning democracy reconsider the habitus of citizenship and how it can be maintained through the education system and other civic institutions. It’s a bit old-school. But if the Alt-Right wanted a reversion to historical authoritarian forms of Western governance, we may be getting there. Suppose history moves in a spiral. It might be best to try to move forward, not back.

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May 23, 2016

discovering agency in symbolic politics as psychic expression of Blau space

If the Blau space is exogenous to manifest society, then politics is an epiphenomenon. There will be hustlers; there will be the oscillations of who is in control. But there is no agency. Particularities are illusory, much as how in quantum field theory the whole notion of the ‘particle’ is due to our perceptual limitations.

An alternative hypothesis is that the Blau space shifts over time as a result of societal change.

Demographics surely do change over time. But this does not in itself show that Blau space shifts are endogenous to the political system. We could possibly attribute all Blau space shifts to, for example, apolitical terms of population growth and natural resource availability. This is the geographic determinism stance. (I’ve never read Guns, Germs, and Steel… I’ve heard mixed reviews.)

Detecting political agency within a complex system is bound to be difficult because it’s a lot like trying to detect free will, only with a more hierarchical ontology. Social structure may or may not be intelligent. Our individual ability to determine whether it is or not will be very limited. Any individual will have a limited set of cognitive frames with which to understand the world. Most of them will be acquired in childhood. While it’s a controversial theory, the Lakoff thesis that whether one is politically liberal or conservative depends on ones relationship with ones parents is certainly very plausible. How does one relate to authority? Parental authority is replaced by state and institutional authority. The rest follows.

None of these projects are scientific. This is why politics is so messed up. Whereas the Blau space is an objective multidimensional space of demographic variability, the political imaginary is the battleground of conscious nightmares in the symbolic sphere. Pathetic humanity, pained by cruel life, fated to be too tall, or too short, born too rich or too poor, disabled, misunderstood, or damned to mediocrity, unfurls its anguish in so many flags in parades, semaphore, and war. But what is it good for?

“Absolutely nothin’!”

I’ve written before about how I think Jung and Bourdieu are an improvement on Freud and Habermas as the basis of unifying political ideal. Whereas for Freud psychological health is the rational repression of the id so that the moralism of the superego can hold sway over society, Jung sees the spiritual value of the unconscious. All literature and mythology is an expression of emotional data. Awakening to the impersonal nature of ones emotions–as they are rooted in a collective unconscious constituted by history and culture as well as biology and individual circumstance–is necessary for healthy individuation.

So whereas Habermasian direct democracy, being Freudian through the Frankfurt School tradition, is a matter of rational consensus around norms, presumably coupled with the repression of that which does not accord with those norms, we can wonder what a democracy based on Jungian psychology would look like. It would need to acknowledge social difference within society, as Bourdieu does, and that this social difference puts constraints on democratic participation.

There’s nothing so remarkable about what I’m saying. I’m a little embarrassed to be drawing from European Grand Theorists and psychoanalysts when it would be much more appropriate for me to be looking at, say, the tradition of American political science with its thorough analysis of the role of elites and partisan democracy. But what I’m really looking for is a theory of justice, and the main way injustice seems to manifest itself now is in the resentment of different kinds of people toward each other. Some of this resentment is “populist” resentment, but I suspect that this is not really the source of strife. Rather, it’s the conflict of different kinds of elites, with their bases of power in different kinds of capital (economic, institutional, symbolic, etc.) that has macro-level impact, if politics is real at all. Political forces, which will have leaders (“elites”) simply as a matter of the statistical expression of variable available energy in the society to fill political roles, will recruit members by drawing from the psychic Blau space. As part of recruitment, the political force will activate the habitus shadow of its members, using the dark aspects of the psyche to mobilize action.

It is at this point, when power stokes the shadow through symbols, that injustice becomes psychologically real. Therefore (speaking for now only of symbolic politics, as opposed to justice in material economic actuality, which is something else entirely) a just political system is one that nurtures individuation to such an extent that its population is no longer susceptible to political mobilization.

To make this vision of democracy a bit more concrete, I think where this argument goes is that the public health system should provide art therapy services to every citizen. We won’t have a society that people feel is “fair” unless we address the psychological roots of feelings of disempowerment and injustice. And while there are certainly some causes of these feelings that are real and can be improved through better policy-making, it is the rare policy that actually improves things for everybody rather than just shifting resources around according to a new alignment of political power, thereby creating a new elite and new grudges. Instead I’m proposing that justice will require peace, and that peace is more a matter of the personal victory of the psyche than it is a matter of political victory of ones party.

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