Digifesto

Tag: pierre bourdieu

September 9, 2018

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) and the sociology of martial knowledge

Maybe 15 months ago, I started training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ), a martial art that focuses on grappling and ground-fighting. Matches are won through points based on position (e.g., “mount”, where you are sitting on somebody else) and through submission, when a player taps out due to hyperextension under a joint lock or asphyxiation by choking. I recommend it heartily to anybody as a fascinating, smart workout that also has a vibrant and supportive community around it.

One of the impressive aspects of BJJ, which differentiates it from many other martial arts, is its emphasis on live drilling and sparring (“rolling”), which can offer a third or more of a training session. In the context of sparring, there is opportunity for experimentation and rapid feedback about technique. In addition to being good fun and practice, regular sparring continually reaffirms the hierarchical ranking of skill. As in some other martial arts, rank is awarded as different colored “belts”–white, blue, purple, brown, black. Intermediary progress is given as “stripes” on the belt. White belts can spar with higher belts; more often than not, when they do so they get submitted.

BJJ also has tournaments, which allow players from different dojos to compete against each other. I attended my first tournament in August and thought it was a great experience. There is nothing like meeting a stranger for the first time and then engage them in single combat to kindle a profound respect for the value of sportsmanship. Off the mat, I’ve had some of the most courteous encounters with anybody I have ever met in New York City.

At tournaments, hundreds of contestants are divided into brackets. The brackets are determined by belt (white, blue, etc.), weight (up to 155 lbs, up to 170 lbs, etc.), sex (men and women), and age (kids age groups, adult, 30+ adult). There is an “absolute” bracket for those who would rise above the division of weight classes. There are “gi” and “no gi” variants of BJJ; the former requires wearing special uniform of jacket and pants, which are used in many techniques.

Overall, it is an efficient system for training a skill.

The few readers of this blog will recall that for some time I studied sociology of science and engineering, especially through the lens of Bourdieu’s Science of Science and Reflexivity. This was in turn a reaction to a somewhat startling exposure to sociology of science and education, and intellectual encounter that I never intended to have. I have been interested for a long time in the foundations of science. It was a rude shock, and one that I mostly regret, to have gone to grad school to become a better data scientist and find myself having to engage with the work of Bruno Latour. I did not know how to respond intellectually to the attack on scientific legitimacy on the basis that its self-understanding is insufficiently sociological until encountering Bourdieu, who refuted the Latourian critique and provides a clear-sighted view of how social structure under-girds scientific objectivity, when it works. Better was my encounter with Jean Lave, who introduced me to more phenomenological methods for understanding education through her class and works (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996). This made me more aware of the role of apprenticeship as well as the nuances of culture, framing, context, and purpose in education. Had I not encountered this work, I would likely never have found my way to Contextual Integrity, which draws more abstract themes about privacy from such subtle observations.

Now it’s impossible for me to do something as productive and enjoyable as BJJ without considering it through these kinds of lenses. One day I would like to do more formal work along these lines, but as has been my habit I have a few notes to jot down at the moment.

The first point, which is a minor one, is that there is something objectively known by experienced BJJ players, and that this knowledge is quintessentially grounded in intersubjective experience. The sparring encounter is the site at which technique is tested and knowledge is confirmed. Sparring simulates conditions of a fight for survival; indeed, if a choke is allowed to progress, a combatant can lose consciousness on the mat. This recalls Hegel’s observation that it is in single combat that a human being is forced to see the limits of their own solipsism. When the Other can kill you, that is an Other that you must see as, in some sense, equivalent in metaphysical status to oneself. This is a sadly forgotten truth in almost every formal academic environment I’ve found myself in, and that, I would argue, is why there is so much bullshit in academia. But now I digress.

The second point, which is perhaps more significant, is that BJJ has figured out how to be an inclusive field of knowledge despite the pervasive and ongoing politics of what I have called in another post body agonism. We are at a point where political conflict in the United States and elsewhere seems to be at root about the fact that people have different kinds of bodies, and these differences are upsetting for liberalism. How can we have functioning liberal society when, for example, some people have male bodies and other people have female bodies? It’s an absurd question, perhaps, but nevertheless it seems to be the question of the day. It is certainly a question that plagues academic politics.

BJJ provides a wealth of interesting case studies in how to deal productively with body agonism. BJJ is an unarmed martial art. The fact that there are different body types is an instrinsic aspect of the sport. Interestingly, in the dojo practices I’ve seen, trainings are co-ed and all body types (e.g., weight classes) train together. This leads to a dynamic and irregular practice environment that perhaps is better for teaching BJJ as a practical form of self-defense. Anecdotally, self-defense is an important motivation for why especially women are interested in BJJ, and in the context of a gym, sparring with men is a way to safely gain practical skill in defending against male assailants. On the other hand, as far as ranking progress is concerned, different bodies are considered in relation to other similar bodies through the tournament bracket system. While I know a badass 40-year old who submitted two college kids in the last tournament, that was extra. For the purposes of measuring my improvement in the discipline, I will be in the 30+ men’s bracket, compared with other guys approximately my weight. The general sense within the community is that progress in BJJ is a function of time spent practicing (something like the mantra that it takes 10,000 hours to master something), not any other intrinsic talent. Some people who are more dedicated to their training advance faster, and others advance slower.

Training in BJJ has been a positive experience for me, and I often wonder whether other social systems could be more like BJJ. There are important lessons to be learned from it, as it is a mental discipline, full of subtlety and intellectual play, in its own right.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Science of science and reflexivity. Polity, 2004.

Chaiklin, Seth, and Jean Lave, eds. Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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March 10, 2018

the economic construction of knowledge

We’ve all heard about the social construction of knowledge.

Here’s the story: Knowledge isn’t just in the head. Knowledge is a social construct. What we call “knowledge” is what it is because of social institutions and human interactions that sustain, communicate, and define it. Therefore all claims to absolute and unsituated knowledge are suspect.

There are many different social constructivist theories. One of the best, in my opinion, is Bourdieu’s, because he has one of the best social theories. For Bourdieu, social fields get their structure in part through the distribution of various kinds of social capital. Economic capital (money!) is one kind of social capital. Symbolic capital (the fact of having published in a peer-reviewed journal) is a different form of capital. What makes the sciences special, for Bourdieu, is that they are built around a particular mechanism for awarding symbolic capital that makes it (science) get the truth (the real truth). Bourdieu thereby harmonizes social constructivism with scientific realism, which is a huge relief for anybody trying to maintain their sanity in these trying times.

This is all super. What I’m beginning to appreciate more as I age, develop, and in some sense I suppose ‘progress’, is that economic capital is truly the trump card of all the forms of social capital, and that this point is underrated in social constructivist theories in general. What I mean by this is that flows of economic capital are a condition for the existence of the social fields (institutions, professions, etc.) in which knowledge is constructed. This is not to say that everybody engaged in the creation of knowledge is thinking about monetization all the time–to make that leap would be to commit the ecological fallacy. But at the heart of almost every institution where knowledge is created, there is somebody fundraising or selling.

Why, then, don’t we talk more about the economic construction of knowledge? It is a straightforward idea. To understand an institution or social field, you “follow the money”, seeing where it comes from and where it goes, and that allows you to situated the practice in its economic context and thereby determine its economic meaning.

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January 9, 2018

The social value of an actually existing alternative — BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN BLOCKCHAIN

When people get excited about something, they will often talk about it in hyberbolic terms. Some people will actually believe what they say, though this seems to drop off with age. The emotionally energetic framing of the point can be both factually wrong and contain a kernel of truth.

This general truth applies to hype about particular technologies. Does it apply to blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies? Sure it does!

Blockchain boosters have offered utopian or radical visions about what this technology can achieve. We should be skeptical about these visions prima facie precisely in proportion to how utopian and radical they are. But that doesn’t mean that this technology isn’t accomplishing anything new or interesting.

Here is a summary of some dialectics around blockchain technology:

A: “Blockchains allow for fully decentralized, distributed, and anonymous applications. These can operate outside of the control of the law, and that’s exciting because it’s a new frontier of options!”

B1: “Blockchain technology isn’t really decentralized, distributed, or anonymous. It’s centralizing its own power into the hands of the few, and meanwhile traditional institutions have the power to crush it. Their anarchist mentality is naive and short-sighted.”

B2: “Blockchain technology enthusiasts will soon discover that they actually want all the legal institutions they designed their systems to escape. Their anarchist mentality is naive and short-sighted.”

While B1 and B2 are both critical of blockchain technology and see A as naive, it’s important to realize that they believe A is naive for contradictory reasons. B1 is arguing that it does not accomplish what it was purportedly designed to do, which is provide a foundation of distributed, autonomous systems that’s free from internal and external tyranny. B2 is arguing that nobody actually wants to be free of these kinds of tyrannies.

These are conservative attitudes that we would expect from conservative (in the sense of conservation, or “inhibiting change”) voices in society. These are probably demographically different people from person A. And this makes all the difference.

If what differentiates people is their relationship to different kinds of social institutions or capital (in the Bourdieusian sense), then it would be natural for some people to be incumbents in old institutions who would argue for their preservation and others to be willing to “exit” older institutions and join new ones. However imperfect the affordances of blockchain technology may be, they are different affordances than those of other technologies, and so they promise the possibility of new kinds of institutions with an alternative information and communications substrate.

It may well be that the pioneers in the new substrate will find that they have political problems of their own and need to reinvent some of the societal controls that they were escaping. But the difference will be that in the old system, the pioneers were relative outsiders, whereas in the new system, they will be incumbents.

The social value of blockchain technology therefore comes in two waves. The first wave is the value it provides to early adopters who use it instead of other institutions that were failing them. These people have made the choice to invest in something new because the old options were not good enough for them. We can celebrate their successes as people who have invented quite literally a new form of social capital, quite possibly literally a new form of wealth. When a small group of people create a lot of new wealth this almost immediately creates a lot of resentment from others who did not get in on it.

But there’s a secondary social value to the creation of actually existing alternative institutions and forms of capital (which are in a sense the same thing). This is the value of competition. The marginal person, who can choose how to invest themselves, can exit from one failing institution to a fresh new one if they believe it’s worth the risk. When an alternative increases the amount of exit potential in society, that increases the competitive pressure on institutions to perform. That should benefit even those with low mobility.

So, in conclusion, blockchain technology is good because it increases institutional competition. At the end of the day that reduces the power of entrenched incumbents to collect rents and gives everybody else more flexibility.

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July 6, 2017

Capital, democracy, and oligarchy

1. Capital

Bourdieu nicely lays out a taxonomy of forms of capital (1986), including economic capital (wealth) which we are all familiar with, as well as cultural capital (skills, elite tastes) and social capital (relationships with others, especially other elites). By saying that all three categories are forms of capital, what he means is that each “is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.” In his account, capital in all its forms are what give society its structure, including especially its economic structure.

[Capital] is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

Bourdieu is clear in his writing that he does not intend this to be taken as unsubstantiated theoretical posture. Rather, it is a theory he has developed through his empirical research. Obviously, it is also informed by many other significant Western theorists, including Kant and Marx. There is something slightly tautological about the way he defines his terms: if capital is posited to explain all social structure, then any social structure may be explained according to a distribution of capital. This leads Bourdieu to theorize about many forms of capital less obvious than wealth, such as the symbolic capital, like academic degrees.

The costs of such a theory is that it demands that one begin the difficult task of enumerate different forms of capital and, importantly, the ways in which some forms of capital can be converted into others. It is a framework which, in principle, could be used to adequately explain social reality in a properly scientific way, as opposed to other frameworks that seem more intended to maintain the motivation of a political agenda or academic discipline. Indeed there is something “interdisciplinary” about the very proposal to address symbolic and economic power in a way that deals responsibly with their commensurability.

So it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words – but only in the last analysis – at the root of their effects. The real logic of the functioning of capital, the conversions from one type to another, and the law of conservation which governs them cannot be understood unless two opposing but equally partial views are superseded: on the one hand, economism, which, on the grounds that every type of capital is reducible in the last analysis to economic capital, ignores what makes the specific efficacy of the other types of capital, and on the other hand, semiologism (nowadays represented by structuralism, symbolic interactionism, or ethnomethodology), which reduces social exchanges to phenomena of communication and ignores the brutal fact of universal reducibility to economics.

[I must comment that after years in an academic environment where sincere intellectual effort seemed effectively boobytrapped by disciplinary trip wires around ethnomethodology, quantification, and so on, this Bourdieusian perspective continues to provide me fresh hope. I’ve written here before about Bourdieu’s Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004), which was a wake up call for me that led to my writing this paper. That has been my main entrypoint into Bourdieu’s thought until now. The essay I’m quoting from now was published at least fifteen years prior and by its 34k citations appears to be a classic. Much of what’s written here will no doubt come across as obvious to the sophisticated reader. It is a symptom of a perhaps haphazard education that leads me to write about it now as if I’ve discovered it; indeed, the personal discovery is genuine for me, and though it is not a particularly old work, reading it and thinking it over carefully does untangle some of the knots in my thinking as I try to understand society and my role in it. Perhaps some of that relief can be shared through writing here.]

Naturally, Bourdieu’s account of capital is more nuanced and harder to measure than an economist’s. But it does not preclude an analysis of economic capital such as Piketty‘s. Indeed, much of the economist’s discussion of human capital, especially technological skill, and its relationship to wages can be mapped to a discussion of a specific form of cultural capital and how it can be converted into economic capital. A helpful aspect of this shift is that it allows one to conceptualize the effects of class, gender, and racial privilege in the transmission of technical skills. Cultural capital is, explicitly in Bourdieu’s account, labor intensive to transmit and often done so informally. Cultural tendencies to transmit this kind of capital preferentially to men instead of women in the family home become a viable explanation for the gender cap in the tech industry. While this is perhaps not a novel explanation, it is a significant one and Bourdieu’s theory helps us formulate it in a specific and testable way that transcends, as he says, both economism and semiologism, which seems productive when one is discussing society in a serious way.

One could also use a Bourdieusian framework to understand innovation spillover effects, as economists like to discuss, or the rise of Silicon Valley’s “Regional Advantage” (Saxenian, 1996), to take a specific case. One of Saxenian’s arguments (as I gloss it) is that Silicon Valley was more economically effective as a region than Route 128 in Massachusetts because the influx of engineers experimenting with new business models and reinvesting their profits into other new technology industries created a confluence of relevant cultural capital (technical skill) and economic capital (venture capital) that allowed the economic capital to be deployed more effectively. In other words, it wasn’t that the engineers in Silicon Valley were better engineers than the engineers in Route 128; it was that the economic capital was being deployed in a way that was less informed by technical knowledge. [Incidentally, if this argument is correct, then in some ways it undermines an argument put forward recently for setting up a “cyber workforce incubator” for the Federal Government in the Bay Area based on the idea that it’s necessary to tap into the labor pool there. If what makes Silicon Valley is smart capital rather than smart engineers, then that explains why there are so many engineers there (they are following the money) but also suggests that the price of technical labor there may be inflated. Engineers elsewhere may be just as good at being part of a cyber workforce. Which is just to say that when Bourdieusian theory is taken seriously, it can have practical policy implications.]

One must imagine, when considering society thus, that one could in principle map out the whole of society and the distribution of capitals within it. I believe Bourdieu does something like this in Distinction (1979), which I haven’t read–it is sadly referred to in the United States as the kind of book that is too dense to read. This is too bad.

But I was going to talk about…

2. Democracy

There are at least two great moments in history when democracy flourished. They have something in common.

One is Ancient Greece. The account of the polis in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1, cf (2 3) makes the familiar point that the citizens of the Ancient Greek city-state were masters of economically independent households. It was precisely the independence of politics (polis – city) from household economic affairs (oikos – house) that defined political life. Owning capital, in this case land and maybe slaves, was a condition for democratic participation. The democracy, such as it was, was the political unity of otherwise free capital holders.

The other historical moment is the rise of the mercantile class and the emergence of the democratic public sphere, as detailed by Habermas. If the public sphere Habermas described (and to some extent idealized) has been critiqued as being “bourgeois masculinist” (Fraser), that critique is telling. The bourgeoisie were precisely those who were owners of newly activated forms of economic capital–ships, mechanizing technologies, and the like.

If we can look at the public sphere in its original form realistically through the disillusionment of criticism, the need for rational discourse among capital holders was strategically necessary for the bourgeoisie to make strategic decisions about how to collectively allocate their economic capital. The Viewed through the objective lens of information processing and pure strategy, the public sphere was an effective means of economic coordination that complemented the rise of the Weberian bureaucracy, which provided a predictable state and also created new demand for legal professionals and the early information workers: clerks and scriveners and such.

The diversity of professions necessary for the functioning of the modern mercantile state created a diversity of forms of cultural capital that could be exchanged for economic capital. Hence, capital diffused from its concentration in the aristocracy into the hands of the widening class of the bourgeoisie.

Neither the Ancient Greek nor the mercantile democracies were particularly inclusive. Perhaps there is no historical precedent for a fully inclusive democracy. Rather, there is precedent for egalitarian alliances of capital holders in cases where that capital is broadly enough distributed to constitute citizenship as an economic class. Moreover, I must insert here that the Bourdieusian model suggests that citizenship could extend through the diffusion of non-economic forms of capital as well. For example, membership in the clergy was a form of capital taken on by some of the gentry; this came, presumably, with symbolic and social capital. The public sphere creates opportunities for the public socialite that were distinct from the opportunities of the courtier or courtesan. And so on.

However exclusive these democracies were, Fraser’s account of subaltern publics and counterpublics is of course very significant. What about the early workers and womens movements? Arguably these too can be understood in Bourdieusian terms. There were other forms of (social and cultural, if not economic) capital that workers and women in particular had available that provided the basis for their shared political interest and political participation.

What I’m suggesting is that:

  • Historically, the democratic impulse has been about uniting the interests of freeholders of capital.
  • A Bourdieusian understanding of capital allows us to maintain this (analytically helpful) understanding of democracy while also acknowledging the complexity of social structure, through the many forms of capital
  • That the complexity of society through the proliferation of forms of capital is one of, if not the, main mechanism of expanding effective citizenship, which is still conditioned on capital ownership even though we like to pretend it’s not.

Which leads me to my last point, which is about…

3. Oligarchy

If a democracy is a political unity of many different capital holders, what then is oligarchy in contrast?

Oligarchy is rule of the few, especially the rich few.

We know, through Bourdieu, that there are many ways to be rich (not just economic ways). Nevertheless, capital (in its many forms) is very unevenly distributed, which accounts for social structure.

To some extent, it is unrealistic to expect the flattening of this distribution. Society is accumulated history and there has been a lot of history and most of it has been brutally unkind.

However, there have been times when capital (in its many forms) has diffused because of the terms of capital exchange, broadly speaking. The functional separation of different professions was one way in which capital was fragmented into many differently exchangeable forms of cultural, social, and economic capitals. A more complex society is therefore a more democratic one, because of the diversity of forms of capital required to manage it. [I suspect there’s a technically specific way to make this point but don’t know how to do it yet.]

There are some consequences of this.

  1. Inequality in the sense of a very skewed distribution of capital and especially economic capital does in fact undermine democracy. You can’t really be a citizen unless you have enough capital to be able to act (use your labor) in ways that are not fully determined by economic survival. And of course this is not all or nothing; quantity of capital and relative capital do matter even beyond a minimum threshold.
  2. The second is that (1) can’t be the end of the story. Rather, to judge if the capital distribution of e.g. a nation can sustain a democracy, you need to account for many kinds of capital, not just economic capital, and see how these are distribute and exchanged. In other words, it’s necessary to look at the political economy broadly speaking. (But, I think, it’s helpful to do so in terms of ‘forms of capital’.)

One example, which I just learned recently, is this. In the United States, we have an independent judiciary, a third branch of government. This is different from other countries that are allegedly oligarchies, notably Russia but also Rhode Island before 2004. One could ask: is this Separation of Powers important for democracy? The answer is intuitively “yes”, and though I’m sure very smart things have been written to answer the question “why”, I haven’t read them, because I’ve been too busy blogging….

Instead, I have an answer for you based on the preceding argument. It was a new idea for me. It was this: What separation of powers does is its constructs a form of cultural capital associated with professional lawyers which is less exchangeable for economic and other forms of capital than in places where non-independence of the judiciary leads to more regular bribery, graft, and preferential treatment. Because it mediates economic exchanges, this has a massively distortative effect on the ability of economic capital to bulldoze other forms of capital, and the accompanying social structures (and social strictures) that bind it. It also creates a new professional class who can own this kind of capital and thereby accomplish citizenship.

Coda

In this blog post, I’ve suggested that not everybody who, for example, legally has suffrage in nominally democratic state is, in an effective sense, a citizen. Only capital owners can be citizens.

This is not intended in any way to be a normative statement about who should or should not be a citizen. Rather, it is a descriptive statement about how power is distributed in nominal democracies. To be an effective citizen, you need to have some kind of surplus of social power; capital the objectification of that social power.

The project of expanding democracy, if it is to be taken seriously, needs to be understood as the project of expanding capital ownership. This can include the redistribution of economic capital. It can also changing institutions that ground cultural and social capitals in ways that distribute other forms of capital more widely. Diversifying professional roles is a way of doing this.

Nothing I’ve written here is groundbreaking, for sure. It is for me a clearer way to think about these issues than I have had before.

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May 6, 2016

the end of narrative in social science

‘Narrative’ is a term you hear a lot in the humanities, the humanities-oriented social sciences, and in journalism. There’s loads of scholarship dedicated to narrative. There’s many academic “disciplines” whose bread and butter is the telling of a good story, backed up by something like a scientific method.

Contrast this with engineering schools and professions, where the narrative is icing on the cake if anything at all. The proof of some knowledge claim is in its formal logic or operational efficacy.

In the interdisciplinary world of research around science, technology, and society, the priority of narrative is one of the major points of contention. This is similar to the tension I found I encountered in earlier work on data journalism. There are narrative and mechanistic modes of explanation. The mechanists are currently gaining in wealth and power. Narrativists struggle to maintain their social position in such a context.

A struggle I’ve had while working on my dissertation is trying to figure out how to narrate to narrativists a research process that is fundamentally formal and mechanistic. My work is “computational social science” in that it is computer science applied to the social. But in order to graduate from my department I have to write lots of words about how this ties in to a universe of academic literature that is largely by narrativists. I’ve been grounding my work in Pierre Bourdieu because I think he (correctly) identifies mathematics as the logical heart of science. He goes so far as to argue that mathematics should be at the heart of an ideal social science or sociology. My gloss on this after struggling with this material both theoretically and in practice is that narratively driven social sciences will always be politically or at least perspectivally inflected in ways that threaten the objectivity of the results. Narrativists will try to deny the objectivity of mathematical explanation, but for the most part that’s because they don’t understand the mathematical ambition. Most mathematicians will not go out of their way to correct the narrativists, so this perception of the field persists.

So I was interested to discover in the work of Miller McPherson, the sociologist who I’ve identified as the bridge between traditional sociology and computational sociology (his work gets picked up, for example, in the generative modeling of Kim and Leskovec, which is about as representative of the new industrial social science paradigm as you can get), an admonition about the consequences of his formally modeled social network formation process (the Blau space, which is very interesting). His warning is that the sociology his work encourages loses narrative and with it individual agency.

IMG_20160506_160149

(McPherson, 2004, “A Blau space primer: prolegomenon to an ecology of affiliation”)

It’s ironic that the whole idea of a Blau space, which is that the social network of society is sampled from an underlying multidimensional space of demographic dimensions, predicts the quantitative/qualitative divide in academic methods as not just a methodological difference but a difference in social groups. The formation of ‘disciplines’ is endogenous to the greater social process and there isn’t much individual agency in this choice. This lack of agency is apparent, perhaps, to the mathematicians and a constant source of bewilderment and annoyance, perhaps, to the narrativists who will insist on the efficacy of a narratively driven ‘politics’–however much this may run counter to the brute fact of the industrial machine–because it is the position that rationalizes and is accessible from their subject position in Blau space.

“Subject position in Blau space” is basically the same idea, in more words, as the Bourdieusian habitus. So, nicely, we have a convergence between French sociological grand theory and American computational social science. As the Bourdieusian theory provides us with a serviceable philosophy of science grounded in sociological reality of science, we can breathe easily and accept the correctness of technocratic hegemony.

By “we” here I mean…ah, here’s the rub. There’s certainly a class of people who will resist this hegemony. They can be located easily in Blau space. I’ve spent years of my life now trying to engage with them, persuading them of the ideas that rule the world. But this turns out to be largely impossible. It’s demanding they cross too much distance, removes them from their local bases of institutional support and recognition, etc. The “disciplines” are what’s left in the receding tide before the next oceanic wave of the unified scientific field. Unified by a shared computational logic, that is.

What is at stake, really, is logic.

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January 5, 2016

programming and philosophy of science

Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy largely devoted to the demarcation problem: what is science?

I’ve written elsewhere about why and how in the social sciences, demarcation is highly politicized and often under attack. This is becoming pertinent now especially as computational methods become dominant across many fields and challenge the bases of disciplinary distinction. Today, a lot of energy (at UC Berkeley at least) goes into maintaining the disciplinary social sciences even when this creates social fields that are less scientific than they could be in order to maintain atavistic disciplinary traits.

Other energy (also at UC Berkeley, and elsewhere) goes into using computer programs to explore data about the social world in an undisciplinary way. This isn’t to say that specific theoretical lenses don’t inform these studies. Rather, the lenses are used provisionally and not in an exclusive way. This lack of disciplinary attachment is an important aspect of data science as applied to the social world.

One reason why disciplinary lenses are not very useful for the practicing data scientist is that, much like natural scientists, data scientists are more often than not engaged in technical inquiry whose purpose is prediction and control. This is very different from, for example, engaging an academic community in a conversation in a language they understand or that pays appropriate homage to a particular scholarly canon–the sort of thing one needs to do to be successful in an academic context. For much academic work, especially in the social sciences, the process of research publication, citation, and promotion is inherently political.

These politics are more often than not not an essential function to scientific inquiry itself; rather they have to do with the allocation of what Bourdieu calls temporal capital: grant funding, access, appointments, etc. within the academic field. Scientific capital, that symbolic capital awarded to scientists based on their contributions to trans-historical knowledge, is awarded more based on the success of an idea than by, for example, brown-nosing ones superiors. However, since temporal capital in the academy is organized by disciplines as a function of university bureaucratic organization, academic researchers are required to contort themselves to disciplinary requirements in the presentation of their work.

Contrast this with the work of analysing social data using computers. The tools used by computational social scientists tend to be products of the exact sciences (mathematics, statistics, computer science) with no further disciplinary baggage. The intellectual work of scientifically devising and testing theories against the data happens in a language most academic communities would not recognize as a language at all, and certainly not their language. While this work depends on the work of thousands of others who have built vast libraries of functional code, these ubiquitous contributors are not included in an social science discipline’s scholarly canon. They are uncited, taken for granted.

However, when those libraries are made openly available (and they often are), they participate in a larger open source ecosystem of tools whose merits are judged by their practical value. Returning to our theme of the demarcation problem, the question is: is this science?

I would answer: emphatically yes. Programming is science because, as Peter Naur has argued, programming is theory building (hat tip the inimitable Spiros Eliopoulos for the reference). The more deeply we look into the demarcation problem, the more clearly software engineering practice comes into focus as an extension of a scientific method of hypothesis generation and testing. Software is an articulation of ideas, and the combined works of software engineers are a cumulative science that has extended far beyond the bounds of the university.

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December 28, 2015

Jung and Bourdieu as an improvement upon Freud and Habermas

I have written in this blog and in published work about Habermas and his Frankfurt School precursor, Horkheimer. Based on this writing, a thorough reader (of whom I expect there to be approximately zero) might conclude that I am committed to a Habermasian view.

I’d like to log a change of belief based on recent readings of Pierre Bourdieu and Carl Jung.

Why Bourdieu and Jung? Because Frankfurt School social theory was based on a Freudian view of psychology. This Freudian origin manifests itself in the social theory in ways that I’ll try to outline below. However, in my own therapeutic experience as well as many more informal encounters with Jungian theory, I find the latter to be much more compelling. As I’ve begun reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols, I see now where Jung explicitly departed from Freud, enriching his theory. These departures are far more consistent with a Bourdieusian view of society. (I’ve noted the potential synergy here).

Let me try to be clearer about what this change in perspective entails:

For Freud, man has an irrational nature and a rational ego. The purpose of therapy is the maintenance of rational control. Horkheimer’s critique of modern society invoked Freud in his discussion of the revolt of nature: society rationalizes itself and the individuals within it; the ‘nature’ of the individuals that is excluded (repressed, really) by this rationalization manifests itself in ugly ways. Habermas, who is less pessimistic about society, still sees morality in terms of social norms grounded in rational consensus. “Rational consensus” as a concept angers or worries postmodern and poststructural critics who see this principle as a basis for social ethics as exclusionary.

For Jung, the therapeutic relationship absolutely must not be about the imposition of the therapist’s views on the patient; psychological progress must come from within the individual patient. He documents an encounter between himself and Freud where he discovers this; he is very convincing. The Jungian unconscious is a collective stock of symbols, as an alternative to a Freudian subconscious of nature repressed by ego. The Jungian ego, therefore, is a much more flexible subject; at times it seems that Jung is nostalgic for a more irrational, perhaps primitive, consciousness. But more importantly, Jung explicitly rejects the idea of a society’s sanity being about its adherence to shared rational norms. Instead, he opts for a more Durkheimian view of social variety:

Can we make any sort of objective judgment about the final result [of therapy]? Only if we make a comparison between our conclusions and the standards that are generally valid in the social milieu to which the individuals below. Even then, we must take into account the mental equilibrium (or “sanity”) of the individual concerned. For the result cannot be a completely collective leveling out of the individual to adjust him to the “norms” of his society. This would amount to a most unnatural condition. A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.

A diverse society of habitual disagreement accords much better with the Bourdieusian view of a society variously inflected as habitus than it does with a Habermasian view of one governed by rational norms.

…

There’s a subtlety that I’ve missed again and again which I’d like to put my finger on now.

The problem with the early Habermasian view is that ethics are determined through rational consensus. So, individuals participate in a public sphere and agree, as individuals, on norms that govern their individual behavior.

Later Habermas (say, volume two of Theory of Communicative Action) begins to acknowledge the information overhead of of this approach and discusses the rise of bureaucracy and its technicization. In lieu of a bona fide consensus of the lifeworld, one gets a rational coalescence of norms into law.

Effectively, this means that while the general population can be irrational in various ways (relative to the perspective of the law), what’s important is that lawmakers create law through a rational process that is inclusive of diverse perspectives.

We see a similar view in Bourdieu’s view of science: it is a specific habitus whose legitimacy is due to the trans-historical robustness of its mathematized formulations.

The conclusion is this: scientists and lawmakers have to approach rationality in specific trans-personal and trans-historical ways. In fact, the rationality of science or of law are only achieved systemically, through the generalized process of science or lawmaking, not through the finite perspectives of their participants, however individually rational they may be. But the general population need not be rational like this for society to be ‘sane’. Rather, individual habitus or partial perspective can vary across a society that is nevertheless coordinated by rational principle.

There is bound to be friction at the boundary between the institutions of science and law and the more diverse publics that surround and intersect them. Donna Haraway’s ‘privilege of partial perspectives‘ is a good example of the symptoms of this friction. A population that is excluded from science–not represented well within science–may react against it by reasserting it’s ‘partial perspective’ as a viable alternative. This is a kind of refusal, in the sense perhaps originated by Marcuse and more recently resurfaced in Michael Dumas’ work on antiblackness. Refusal is, perhaps sadly, delusional and seems to recur as a failed and failing project; but it is sociologically robust precisely because in late modernism the hegemonic rationality allows for Dukheimian social differentiation. The latter is actually the triumph of liberalism over, for example, racist facism; Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround is a nice historical work documenting how this order of scientifically managed diversity was a deliberate United States statebuilding project in World War II.

If a top-down rationalizing control creates as a symptom pathological refusal–another manifestation perhaps of the ‘revolt of nature‘–a Jungian view of rationality as psychic integration perhaps provides a more palatable alternative. Jungian development is accomplished through personalized, situated education. However, through this education, the individual flourishes through a transcendence of their more limited, narrow sense of self. Jungian therapy/education transcends even gender, as the male and female are encouraged to recognize the feminine “anima” and masculine “animus” aspects of their psyches, respectively. Fully developed individuals–who one would expect to occupy, over the course of their development, a somewhat shared habitus–seem to therefore get along better with each other, agreeing to disagree as the recognize how their differences are based on arbitrary social differentiation. Nothing about this agreeing-to-disagree on matters of, for example, taste precludes an agreement on serious trans-personal matters such as science or law. There need not be any resentment towards this God’s Eye View, since it is recognized by each educated individual as manifest in their own role in the social order.

Societal conditions may fall short of this ideal. However, the purpose of social theory is to provide a realizable social telos. Grounding it in a psychological theory that admits the possibility of realized psychological health is a good step forward.

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December 21, 2015

Habitus Shadow

In Bourdieu’s sociological theory, habitus refers to the dispositions of taste and action that individuals acquired as a practical consequence of their place in society. Society provides a social field (a technical term for Bourdieu) of structured incentives and roles. Individuals adapt to roles rationally, but in doing so culturally differentiate themselves. This process is dialectical, hence neither strictly determined by the field nor by individual rational agency, but a co-creation of each. One’s posture, one’s preference for a certain kind of music, one’s disposition to engage in sports, one’s disposition to engage in intellectual debate, are all potentially elements of a habitus.

In Jungian psychoanalytic theory, the shadow is the aspect of personality that is unconscious and not integrated with the ego–what one consciously believes oneself to be. Often it is the instinctive or irrational part of one’s psychology. An undeveloped psyche is likely to see his or her own shadow aspect in others and judge them harshly for it; this is a form of psychological projection motivated by repression for the sake of maintaining the ego. Encounters with the shadow are difficult. Often they are experienced as the awareness or suspicion of some new information that threatens ones very sense of self. But these encounters are, for Jung, an essential part of individuation, as they are how the personality can develop a more complete consciousness of itself.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

I propose a theoretical construct: habitus shadow.

When an individual, situated within a social field, develops a habitus, they may do so with an incomplete consciousness of the reasons for their preferences and dispositions for action. An ego, a conscious rationalization, will develop; it will be reinforced by others who share its habitus. The dispositions of a habitus will include the collectively constructed ego of its members, which is itself a psychological disposition.

We would then expect that a habitus has a characteristic shadow: truths about the sociological conditions of a habitus which are not part of the conscious self-indentity or ego of that habitus.

This is another way to talk about what I have discussed elsewhere as an ideological immune reaction. If an idea or understanding is so challenging or destructive to the ego of a habitus that it calls into question the rationality of it’s very existence, then the role will be able to maintain itself only through a kind of repression/projection/exclusion. Alternatively, if the habitus can assimilate its shadow, one could see that as a form of social self-transcendence or progress.

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December 7, 2015

Bourdieu and Horkheimer; towards an economy of control

It occurred to me as I looked over my earliest notes on Horkheimer (almost a year ago!) that Bourdieu’s concept of science as being a social field that formalizes and automates knowledge is Horkheimer’s idea of hell.

The danger Horkheimer (and so many others) saw in capitalist, instrumentalized, scientific society was that it would alienate and overwhelm the individual.

It is possible that society would alienate the individual anyway, though. For example, in the household of antiquity, were slaves unalienated? The privilege of autonomy is one that has always been rare but disproportionately articulated as normal, even a right. In a sense Western Democracies and Republics exist to guarantee autonomy to their citizens. In late modern democracies, autonomy is variable depending on role in society, which is tied to (economic, social, symbolic, etc.) capital.

So maybe the horror of Horkheimer, alienated by scientific advance, is the horror of one whose capital was being devalued by science. His scholarship, his erudition, were isolated and deemed irrelevant by the formal reasoners who had come to power.

As I write this, I am painfully aware that I have spent a lot of time in graduate school reading books and writing about them when I could have been practicing programming and learning more mathematics. My aspirations are to be a scientist, and I am well aware that that requires one to mathematically formalize ones findings–or, equivalently, to program them into a computer. (It goes without saying that computer programming is formalism, is automation, and so its central role in contemporary science or ‘data science’ is almost given to it by definition. It could not have been otherwise.)

Somehow I have been provoked into investing myself in a weaker form of capital, the benefit of which is the understanding that I write here, now.

Theoretically, the point of doing all this work is to be able to identify a societal value and formalize it so that it can be capture in a technical design. Perhaps autonomy is this value. Another might call it freedom. So once again I am reminded of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of science, which has been correct all along.

But perhaps de Beauvoir was naive about the political implications of technology. Science discloses possibilities, the opportunities are distributed unequally because science is socially situated. Inequality leads to more alienation, not less, for all but the scientists. Meanwhile autonomy is not universally valued–some would prefer the comforts of society, of family structure. If free from society, they would choose to reenter it. Much of ones preferences must come from habitus, no?

I am indeed reaching the limits of my ability to consider the problem discursively. The field is too multidimensional, too dynamic. The proper next step is computer simulation.

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