Practice as Foundational

This post will continue the blog’s habit of taking N Pepperell’s ideas and rephrasing them in a Brandomian idiom. I really can’t stress enough the debt to N Pepperell here; I’m not sure how best to emphasise this other than by repeating it; I’m dead serious: reader take note.

I discussed in my last post the variegation of the social field. What does this understanding of the social give us, in our work of analysis? Here I want very briefly to discuss two things that this approach enables.

First – and here, again, N Pepperell has written about this more incisively and knowledgeably than I can, so I’ll be brief – it gets us out of a set of problems associated with many other forms of social theory, where the social is (tacitly or overtly) understood as homogeneous. I’m basically going to defer entirely to N Pepperell’s work on this issue, and move on – I may return to this at some later date.

Second, this approach allows us to short-circuit a set of oppositions around the appropriate level of analysis for social analysis. On my former blog, Praxis, I posed the problem in the following rambling terms (in a post called Between Totality and Individualism):

There’s a big problem with the sort of Lukacsian stuff oriented toward a general (hypostatised) social entity, which has, apparently, powers of agency…. How the fuck is the identity and nature of this social being determined – is it just a Durkheimian social apriori big blob of jelly, floating around, influencing individual actions? Obviously some kind of ‘social’ needs to be posited if you’re not going to end up with wacked up monadic individualism – but a lot of the political-economic stuff I’m looking at seems to alternate between either wacked-up monads or frankly mystical Hegelian-Durkheimian hypostatisation of ‘Society’.

The way out of this opposition, I now suggest, is to take not individuals but practices as the basic unit of analysis. The framework I was discussing in my last post begins ‘below’ the level of the individual – it takes the individual not as a simple unit, but as a complex entity made up of practices that are potentially contradictory in their implications. These practices can, further, only be understood (as normative practices – their normativity being the (emergent) feature that makes them practices, associated with some or other agent, rather than ‘simply’ natural events) in their relation to a broader (and similarly variegated) social field (itself of course composed of practices). This approach doesn’t deny the existence of individuals, obviously (it’s individuals doing the practices). But it doesn’t take individual intentionality as simple or pre-given; the approach is, instead, capable of tracking the emergence of such intentionality from a larger set of complexly interacting (scientifically analysable) actions. This approach allows us to, in principle, give enormously detailed microfoundations to our social (and economic) analyses, without those microfoundations privileging individualism as a theoretical approach (even methodologically). The approach gives us ‘microfoundations’ that are capable of talking about the formation of the individual by a larger social field, without that larger social field being understood in any even slightly mystical (or hypostatised) way.

The Variegated Social Field

So I’ve been talking about the centrality to Brandom’s framework of alternative interpretations of the content of a given commitment. I say ‘interpretations’, but of course these acts of taking-as can themselves be tacit, rather than consciously self-articulated. Maybe it’s worth expanding on that slightly. What makes an act of taking-as into an act of taking-as, on Brandom’s account, is that this act is normative – which is to say that it can be done right or wrong. I’ve already outlined how Brandom (rightly) thinks he can derive such normative statuses as emergent effects of complexly interacting reliable differential responsive dispositions (an act is an act of taking-as if it is rightly taken as an act of taking-as), and I’m not going to go through that argument again. But taking an act as an act of taking-as means judging it to be an act that can be done right or wrong. This judgement is itself, of course, a normative one, and it differentiates the social from the ‘purely’ natural as we understand it within a contemporary natural- and social-scientific context. So, if we believe in the base lack of agency of a natural world, then we judge that an earthquake that causes suffering and deaths is horrific in its consequences, but is not a bad deed. The institutional actions that failed to propose or enforce an adequate safety regime in a given organisation, by contrast, can of course be judged blameworthy. Further, such actions can themselves be unintended, to a greater or lesser extent (they could be sins of ommission, for example). (There are stronger forms of unintended consequence than these, but we need a larger scale of analysis to talk about them.) An action can be an act of taking-as without being taken as such by that actor, just as the content of other commitments or judgements can be understood better by others than by those undertaking the commitments. Institutional or community networks of reward and punishment, endorsement and disapproval, can operate without any individual intending to endorse or condemn any given action. And such endorsement can, also, be the endorsement of an act as an act of taking-as, without anyone having an overt self-conscious opinion as to whether this is the case or not. This network of normative endorsement of actions as normative will involve conscious propositional articulation of perceived normative content, at times, but this need not (indeed, on Brandom’s account, cannot) be a feature of all or even most such acts of taking-as within a given community – overt propositional content is dependent on a complex set of tacit norms exhibited only in practice.

So anyway we have rival takings-as in relation to any given action – rival senses of what an action commits us to. And despite the centrality of the implicit nature of many norms to Brandom’s system, it is this rivalry of (explicit or implicit) interpretations that does the hard theoretical work in establishing the possibility of normative and conceptual objectivity. For Brandom, the possibility of objective reference is conditional on the possibility of disagreement about any given normative content.

This means that if Brandom’s apparatus is to work, the social field must be doubly variegated. Any given action must be capable of being interpreted in multiple different ways, from different social-perspectival locations. So my statement p can be interpreted as having, as a corollary, x, y, or z by different social-perspectival actors, where x, y and z are incompatible – or at least are judged so by myself, and by the other social actors doing the judging (an additional actor might of course come along and explain how x, y and z are actually compatible, and then this would be an additional rival sense of the conceptual content involved in p.) Additionally, however, the self must be variegated enough to be capable of both a) inhabiting multiple alternative social-perspectival locations, in order to assess them, and, further, b) bringing to bear rival normative commitments within the self itself, in order to reject a given commitment or set of commitments from the stance of another. The self must be capable of self-contradiction if it is to be capable of being a self, on Brandom’s account. (Brandom takes his account to be a broadly Hegelian one in this area, albeit filtered through a pragmatist and non-metaphysical set of commitments. This seems plausible – there are obvious parallels, I think – but I won’t be ready to address Brandom’s relation to Hegel for some time.) The self must be capable of thinking mutually incompatible things – or at least things that it takes to be mutually incompatible – if it is to be able to do the work of self-assessment and self-transformation that is involved in making commitments to conceptual content in the first place. (Making a commitment to a conceptual or normative content simply means undertaking certain actions, including actions of self-transformation – e.g. revision of beliefs – if the right conditional circumstances are taken to be met.)

The variegation of the social field and the variegation of the self are thus two sides of the same coin. The former is a pre-requisite of the latter. (This is true, trivially, even in the limit case where the ‘social field’ is nothing other than the self.) I’ll talk about this is slightly more detail soon – for now I’ll refer again to N Pepperell’s work on Marx as a major influence on my thinking here, especially (of course) its emphasis on the internal differentiation of the social.

The Content of Commitments

One of the ideas that does a lot of work in Brandom’s system is that of commitments – and, specifically, the idea that one can commit oneself to something without realising that one has so committed oneself. Thus, I can say “that man over there is wearing a green shirt”. Since that man over there is Bill, I am thereby committing myself to the idea that Bill is wearing a green shirt – but I don’t know this, because I don’t know that that man over there is Bill. Similarly, Oedipus can commit himself to the idea that the murderer of Laius should be killed or exiled, without knowing that he is the murderer of Laius, and that he is thereby committing himself to his own self-exile. (A fair amount of tragedy has this structure, of the unknowing and apparently reasonable undertaking of commitments that have dire consequences. [Specifically, the unsustainability of the coherence of self given the discrepancy between incompatible undertaken commitments.] This is also what a lot of ‘post-structuralist’ discussion of the non-identity of the self and the non-possession of full authorial intent of the acting subject, is getting at. One undertakes a commitment using one’s intentionality and agency, but the content of that commitment is not fully determined by the self, and may be unknown (or even unknowable) by the self (to a greater or lesser extent). There’s nothing paradoxical, or intrinsically anti-rationalist, about this idea (as Brandom’s work demonstrates), and it’s really rather unfair that the concept that we can’t fully determine or control the content of our own intention or meanings, but that such determination is, rather, the product of complex and shifting social context, is so often condemned as irrationalist.)

Brandom wants to do a lot of work with this idea of commitment, however. Specifically, he takes this idea to be central to the possibility of leveraging a difference between actual beliefs and true beliefs. That’s right, but it’s right in a specific sense: the reason this idea can be used as part of a derivation of normative and conceptual objectivity, by Brandom, is that it opens the way to his formal concept of objectivity – the ever-present possibility of a difference between what one does think and what one ought to, given a certain (implicitly privileged – just how we’ll see in a bit) subset of one’s commitments.

However, the identification of an unrecognised content of a commitment is dependent on the taking of that commitment as having that content by some other social agent (whether explicitly or implicitly). Brandom’s formal concept of objectivity is opened by the possibility of this identification – but for that possibility to be cashed out in an actual assessment (and, potentially, transformation) of belief or practice, someone needs to be doing the taking-as. I may think that the man standing over there is Jim, but you know that really he is Bill, heir to the royal line of Corinth, and you can correct me about my misapprehension, leading me to realise that my earlier commitment that “that man over there is wearing a green shirt”, unbeknown to me committed me to the claim that Bill is wearing a green shirt.

That’s all well and good. The point I want to make for now is that there is nothing intrinsic about an implicit and unknown commitment that makes it more correct than an overt and consciously believed commitment. It’s tempting, if we’re working with this model of witting and unwitting commitments, to believe that the unwitting commitments are the real ones, and the witting commitments are errors. But the assessment of witting and unwitting commitments must always come from a specific social-perspectival location (on Brandom’s account), and that social-perspectival location may simply be wrong on this or any given matter. Thus you may be wrong that that man over there is Bill. Actually he is Polynices, unwept, unburied, a toothsome morsel for the birds of heaven, and my own sense of my commitments may for that reason be better than your sense of my tacit commitments.

The point I’m trying to make is this. I endorse Brandom’s account of tacit commitments, and the possibility of the content of those tacit commitments in fact differing from what I personally take my commitments to be. But this idea doesn’t in itself do any work w/r/t the issues I’m aiming to talk about in this post. What is doing the hard work in this account is, rather, the contestation between the attitudes of rival social-perspectival locations – and the difference between tacit and conscious commitments is a location in which this contestation is playing itself out. It’s important for Brandom’s account that the same action be multiply interpretable – interpretable as, potentially, involving the actor in multiple quite different and incompatible commitments – but the tacit / overt distinction here (the difference between implicit and explicit commitments) is not carrying the real weight of this contestation, it is merely channeling it.

Training, continued

Apologies for the long gap between theoretical posts – l’ll pick things up where I left off.

In my last theoretically-oriented post, I discussed the concept of training, in relation to the foundational role of Test-Operate-Test-Exit systems in Brandom’s work. I enumerated three core categories that are important for the Brandomian pragmatist analysis of social practice I’m aiming to elaborate here – I called them pragmatic projection, pragmatic spandrels, and pragmatic mediation (only the lousy ‘spandrels’ term is not Brandom’s own). I discussed very telegraphically how these categories allow us to talk about pragmatically mediated relationships between different conceptual and normative contents (and, also, between practical capacities), as opposed to ideal relationships, such as direct conceptual or normative implication or association.

In this post I want to do two things: first, pick up on a loose thread I left in the middle of that previous post, concerning the possible ways in which dispositional shifts can be generated in a sapient Test-Operate-Test-Exit-cycle-governed organism. Second, begin to elaborate the ways in which these categories allow us to talk about some of the phenomena I ultimately want to be talking about here: those of economic practice.

First, then: in the earlier post I was talking specifically about deliberate training – practices that are intentionally oriented to generating a particular behavioural or dispositional shift (whether successfully or not). As sapient organisms we are strongly receptive to such training – there is a high degree of cultural variation between social sub-groups within the human species, and there is a strong requirement for socialisation into many practices that are quite fundamental for the survival of the human organism (as opposed to many – though obviously not all – non-human animal species, where many of the specific reactive dispositions required for the organism’s survival are, it would appear, rather more ‘hard-wired’ – though more research could stand to be done on this issue, and I could stand to have read more of the research that’s been done.) The set of dispositions that make us receptive to training, however, also make us disposed to react to many stimuli with behavioural shifts even where those behavioural shifts are not intended by either the organism doing the reacting, or by those (if there be any such) responsible for exposing the organism to the relevant enivornmental stimuli.

So, for example, a fair amount of training works to some extent by dint of simple exposure to a situation, or repetition of an action. But exposure to a situation, or repetition of an action, of course happens every day in situations that aren’t in any way oriented towards ‘training’. The Humean (or behaviourist) principle that repetition and experience produce habit, which in turn is formative of the implicit principles organising thought and experience, applies to many actions and experiences, not just those directly (or indirectly) oriented to generating dispositional changes.

Thus the environment we inhabit, and the kind of practices we participate in as we navigate that environment, can have dramatic effects – via the mechanisms I’m calling pragmatic projection, pragmatic spandrels, and pragmatic mediation – on a host of dispositions (practical, normative and conceptual) that are not in any direct way ‘trained’ by the environment (as they are in training situations).

What does this mean? This takes us to my second point: these categories, and the (Brandomian) explanatory apparatus that can be built up out of them, allow us to articulate an account of how everyday experience – the social practices that make up day-to-day human endeavour – can in principle have significant (and, potentially, difficult to trace) impacts on conceptual and normative content, as well as on practical dispositions, that are not in any obvious way related to that everyday experience. So if my day-to-day life involves a specific set of practices, the development and repetition of those practices will, potentially, via the mechanisms enumerated, have far-reaching consequences in other aspects of my life.

This in turn means that the pragmatist account I’m aiming to elaborate here, of the relation between on the one hand conceptual and normative content, and on the other hand social practice, can allow us to connect specific conceptual and normative content to specific social practices that may at first glance appear not be directly related to that content. The relationship can be one of pragmatic mediation, pragmatic spandrels, or pragmatic projection – or some combination of the three.

And – here’s my point – this allows us to give a quite complex and micrological account of many different ways in which (to quote Marx)

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

As usual, here I want to acknowledge my profound debt to N Pepperell, who is elaborating in great detail, among other things, the way in which Marx’s tacit metatheory deploys an analysis of the relation between thought and social practice that’s somewhere in this general space – though I would advise those interested in this general set of issues to read N Pepperell’s work for a better sense of the argument.

Brandom, of course, is interested in linguistic practice – indeed, he spends very little time, across his corpus as a whole, on any other kind of social practice. But I am not interested in linguistic practice – I’m interested, in the first place (like Marx), in economic and political practice. I don’t want to move into discussing that just yet (or probably for quite some time). But I want to highlight now that these same resources I’m unpacking at the base level of Brandom’s system (where they are deployed for purposes of linguistic philosophy) can likewise be applied (indeed should be applied) to the impact of economic practice on forms of thought, habits of perception, and normative frameworks. The things we do in ‘economic’ practice (buying and selling our labour power; buying and selling commodities; saving and investing; estimating monetary value; interacting with colleagues, bosses and subordinates in the workplace; etc. etc.) can be pragmatically projected, can produce pragmatic spandrels, and thus can and do have a pragmatically mediated relation to a wide variety of non-economic attitudes, practices, modes of perception and normative stances.

Again, I don’t plan to pursue this line of thought or inquiry for quite some time. Again, those interested in this set of issues should really read N Pepperell’s work on Marx. But I want to highlight that this is one of the areas that the Brandomian apparatus I’m currently unpacking should allow me to get to, in the end.

Mashed Potatoes

My good friend Martin Jolly has recorded some new music. Some of you might want to listen to it.

Here.

Brandom Thesis Plan

[I'm going to be talking from now on as if I'm writing a thesis on Brandom - this may very well of course not actually be the case, but I can't be bothered to write 'thesis-length-document' every time I refer to the thing, so I ask you to bear with me.]

My own interest in writing on Brandom is related to social-theoretic (ultimately political-economic) analysis of contemporary society. Writing about Brandom is obviously drawing a rather long bow in order to address that issue, and I think one of the principal challenges that will be involved in writing this document will be doing so in a way that maintains its argumentative unity while also drawing some of the connections I want to between different disciplinary spaces. This shouldn’t be impossible – it’s obvious, just googling, that plenty of people have written about neopragmatism in relation to the meta-theoretical aspects of social science, so I should be able to slot into that discursive space without causing anyone to wig out too much. Still, in an ideal world I want the document to achieve a number of different things. At a first schematic pass:

1) Situate Brandom within a tradition that includes not just pragmatism and neo-pragmatism but also the canonical texts of the social theoretic tradition.
2) Articulate some of the problems that the social-theoretic tradition has classically faced, and position Brandom’s work as providing resources that can help resolve some of these issues.
3) Give an exposition of the structure and – in many (though not close to all) areas – detail of Brandom’s system. (This is a contribution to the interpretive debate around Brandom’s work – and will be the core of the document.)
4) [Maybe - if it fits] Argue that Brandom’s normative pragmatics is more dissociable from his linguistic philosophy than it is often taken to be (including, I think, by Brandom).
5) Show how the Brandomian resources expounded in the core of the document can resolve some of the problems set up in (2).

This is all subject to change – it may be too ambitious, and I’m mostly just trying to get my head around the general conceptual space the document needs to slot into, and its possible structure. If this is the general plan, though, there are several areas of reading I need to dig down into.

- The social theoretic canon. As I’ve said, I’m already ploughing through this in the out-of-sight blog boiler room, so this isn’t too vexing.
- The philosophical pragmatist tradition – 19th century to present day. This is a bit more troublesome, since I’ve not read most of the key figures here. But this is something I will have to address eventually, evidently.
- Brandom. The man has written heaps, and I’m obviously going to have to read lots and lots of it.
- Brandom-related stuff. The literature here will I think be acceptably small. Brandom’s a significant and frequently-discussed figure, but it’s not as if he’s Kant, and his major work was only published in 1994 – there’s only so much that can have been written on him.
- Stuff referred to in, and necessary to understand the context of, all of the above.

That sounds about right, I think. Not sure how I’ll approach all this as yet – I’m just articulating the ballpark of what needs to be done. I may yet heavily modify the plan.

~~

With that articulated, I’m going to call an Official Brandom Break on the blog. I seriously need to attend to other things for a while. This stuff’s like crack.

Regularism Revisited

I’ve now unpacked a fair few of the Wittgensteinian issues that are important to the early stages of Making It Explicit‘s argument – so I want to return to the issue of regularism, to expand on the problems that Brandom’s practice-theoretic account of the origins of normativity needs to resolve.

In the earlier post Regulism and Regularism I distinguished two problems that Brandom identifies with regularism as a philosophical position – the Epistemological and the Ethical/Political. The Epistemological problem is also a ‘seeing-as’ problem: granted (for the sake of argument) that normative standards can simply be identified with a given regularity of practice, such that conformity to the regularity is obeying the norm, and deviation from the regularity is going against the norm, it is possible to find multiple regularities in the same set of practices, such that those practices cannot themselves dictate which regularity we take as identical with a normative standard. This is related to, but not quite the same as, the Wittgensteinian rule-following problem of being able to interpret any regularity (given a chosen regularity) as compatible with any future practice, provided our interpretation of the generative principles underlying the empirical regularity is rococo enough. Really, then, there are two epistemological problems for regularism: the problem of selecting which regularity counts as the norm-determining regularity; and the problem of deciding which future practices would count as compatible with that regularity, once selected. Each of these questions involve an act of interpretation, or at least of taking-as (taking-as-the-important-regularity; taking-as-compatible-with-that-regularity) – and the practices under analysis cannot themselves determine what interpretive act, or act of taking-as, we use as our prism for selecting a regularity and determining what counts as conformity to it.

This set of issues is central to what Brandom means when he says that his position is not a naturalistic one. I already discussed this point briefly in my post on Sanctions, but I think we are now in a position to cash out in more detail the sense in which Brandom’s philosophy is ‘non-naturalistic’. When Brandom criticises ‘naturalism’, he generally has in mind a position that believes that simple description of a set of practices is capable of communicating the same conceptual content as the articulation of a normative demand. Such ‘simple description’ (on the ‘naturalistic’ account that Brandom opposes) would be non-normative – it would not be influenced by the describing subject’s own social location or commitments, but rather would be part of a (probably physicalist) metalanguage that can a-normatively record the objective states of affairs obtaining in the material world.

Brandom opposes such a picture on two counts. In the first place (for reasons connected to but not fully covered by the issue under discussion here) Brandom does not believe that there could ever be such a thing as a non-normatively descriptive language (short reason why: truth is also a norm). I’ll expand on this point in more detail in future posts. In the second place, for the reasons discussed above, Brandom does not believe that any descriptive language (even if such a perfect a-normative descriptive language could in principle exist) would be able to determine which regularities out of those observable would be determining of normative standards; nor would it be able to determine what future compatibility or incompatibility with such standards would involve. For this reason, the idea of a ‘naturalistic’ account of what norms are established by regularities of practice is, Brandom believes, in principle impossible.

It’s important to keep distinct these two (related) critiques of the possibility of a ‘naturalistic’ account of norms – I’ll try to separate them out further, and give a fuller account of each, in future posts. For now I just want to emphasise that Brandom’s target, in his critique of ‘naturalistic’ accounts of normativity, is narrower than I think it is often taken to be. Brandom’s critique is essentially directed at a quite specific set of positions – one that involves a fantasy about the possibility of a non-normative metalanguage. I am going to argue that Brandom’s own position is in fact a naturalistic one as that term is commonly used, and that one of the things Making It Explicit does is demonstrate how a naturalistic account of the origins of normativity is possible that does not fall into the theoretical traps Brandom here identifies. Brandom’s argument will aim to demonstrate that a set of interpretive and intrinsically normative acts of ‘seeing-as’ are required in order to establish reference to any given set of objective regularities in the first place; but that these interpretive, normative acts of ‘seeing-as’ can themselves then be understood in the naturalistic terms made available by such objective reference. The argument’s more complicated than that, but I want to at least gesture at the general ball-park of the position being defended.

Backing up a little – we’ve covered the first set of problems with the ‘regularist’ position. An act of interpretation is required in order to choose which regularity counts as a normative guideline. Which act of interpretation – and thus which regularity – we select is not itself determined by the regularity under examination – therefore the regularity itself cannot be determining of normative standards. This argument, in a way, parallels the ‘regulist’ one, in that it hinges on our ability to concoct multiple rules compatible with the same empirical phenomenon.

There is a solution to this problem within a broadly regularist framework. We can say that the act of interpretation is itself guided by a regularity of practice (which, indeed, it will be) – we can then acknowledge the ‘seeing-as’ difficulty while incorporating the normative act of seeing-as within an account that understands normativity in terms of regularity of practice. Of course, we then are faced with the parallel difficulty of how we choose which regular practice of interpretation counts as the one that ‘correctly’ picks out the regularity of practice determining of normative standards. And if we pick a second set of regular interpretive acts that make that decision for us, the problem again presents itself one stage of interpretation further down. Nevertheless, we can imagine (at least for the sake of argument) that these difficulties are resolvable – for instance, by fiating an regularity of interpretive practice that also, in its interpretive practice, validates that regularity as the correct one to pick out. Would this be an acceptible conclusion from a Brandomian point of view?

I need to take some care here, because the position just sketched is in fact very close to that which Brandom ultimately adopts – I am going to end up arguing that with sufficiently complex amendments, this position can indeed be seen as a Brandomian one. However, it is important to understand why such amendments are necessary, and why many versions of this position are unacceptable. This issue hinges on the Ethical/Political objection to regularism.

Let’s say, as an example, that we decide that the regularity of practice generative of binding normative standards is the most common set of sanctions at work in a society. Or, let us say (if we wanted to complicate the picture marginally) that we decide it is the most respected set of sanctions, where degree of respect can itself be analysed by looking at regularities of practice associated with approval and disapproval within the social space under examination. Any number of different versions of this basic approach can be imagined, but they all have in common the fact that (putting the epistemological objection to one side) we are identifying binding or legitimate norms with some regularity of practice within the social sphere.

The problem here is quite a simple one: It feels like an absolutely essential component of normative or ethical demands that they be capable of differentiation from actual practice. If we identify binding ethical demands with some regularity of practice, it seems as if we are identifying, in however complex a way, what ought to be with what is. We are not just transgressing the Humean injunction that one can’t get ought from is. More importantly, we seem to be opening ourselves to the apparent ethical monstrosity that what ought to be can be determined by the manipulation of actual practice. This move seems to open whatever ethical theory or ethical attitudes we assemble from such a starting point to an intense vulnerability to power. If, for example, we identify normative or ethical attitudes with the most common (or, for example, the most esteemed) regularity of practice in a given society (even global society), we are permitting that society to determine not just what people do, but what they ought to do. The limit case here is often taken to be a (rather heavily fantastised) idea of a totalitarian state, in which an entire society adopts a monstrous ethical-political set of beliefs and practices. In such a scenario, we want to believe, it does not matter that truly ethical beliefs and practice are opposed by the entire society in question – what’s truly right is still truly right, and what’s truly wrong is still truly wrong. (Orwell’s 1984 is often the go-to text for the articulation of this theoretical dilemma, with the final submission of the protagonist’s resistance even in his innermost subjectivity to the injunctions of the totalitarian state taken as exemplary of the ethical-political reason for requiring a stronger foundation for our norms than social-perspectival practice. A reading of 1984 is used to challenge a pragmatist understanding of the origins of normativity (in this case Richard Rorty’s) by James Conant in the Brandom-edited volume Rorty and his Critics. Rorty gives, to my mind, a rather good response; and I see Brandom’s work as, among other things, concerned with the greater elaboration of the position Rorty articulates there.)

It seems of great importance, then, not to understand normative demands in terms of regularities of practice. We can locate two extremes of this difficulty: on the one hand the identification (just discussed) of binding norms with the regularities of practice of society at large (however understood). On the other hand, we could choose to grant the interpretive act of seeing-as (that must form a component of any solution to the epistemological problem of regularism) the ability to determine which regularities of practice – however unusual or atypical – we take as generative of binding norms. The difficulty then becomes that we have apparently granted the agent who makes this interpretive action of ‘seeing-as’ the ability to choose whichever possible regularity of practice they like as normatively binding – and this ability seems to be identical with the ability to choose whatever norms they wish as binding upon them. We then find ourselves in a situation that precisely parallels the ‘sovereign self-determination’ moment of the rule-following paradox associated with regulism. That is to say, we have made the move from explicit rules to rules implicit in practice, but only by reinstating an act of interpretation at the moment of identification of those rules. Even if we then make this act of interpretation an implicit practice, by saying “this is simply what we do” in response to the regulist dilemma associated with interpretive acts, we have still granted the (perhaps ‘blindly’) interpreting agent absolute sovereignty over which regularities count as generative of binding norms. (We have, as it were, pushed the ‘sovereign power’ moment of the regulist paradox back into implicit practice.) Which is to say, we have apparently granted this agent absolute sovereignty over the normative demands that impinge upon them. We could call this latter scenario the ‘Nietzschean’ possibility – the supposed ability of social actors to create their own normative frameworks through sheer act of will in their interpretation of society and history. This contrasts with the ‘totalitarian’ possibility in which those with power over a society physically and psychologically enforce a set of practices that then automatically determine what is (supposedly) ethically admirable. On the one hand these two possibilities seem at opposite poles – but they are, in fact, different manifestations of the same ‘regularist’ dilemma. (This conceptual closeness may be symptomatic of a real social closeness between the political-ethical ideal of the self-willed norm-generating individual, and fascist/totalitarian politics – though obviously I’m not aiming to discuss that now.)

We are faced, then, with a dilemma. How to articulate an account of the emergence of binding norms from social practice that does not resolve itself into one of the ethically unpalatable (not to say epistemologically implausible) positions associated with ‘regularism’? How to avoid collapsing what should be into what is, while still giving a naturalistic account of normativity? I will begin to try to elaborate Brandom’s answer to this question in my next set of posts.

Innocence

Paul Krugman notes a curious phenomenon: any number of economists and pundits calling for fiscal austerity – in the U.S., in the U.K., in Germany, in Greece – hell, everyfuckingwhere – even though such policies will straightforwardly and directly inflict suffering on the citizens to whose rulers such wise men address their advice. What could possibly be the explanation for this misguided thinking?

What’s going on here? I don’t think you can resort to class-warfare arguments. What I think is happening is that we’re seeing the deep seductiveness, for many economists (and others), of taking what sounds like a tough-minded position in favor of inflicting pain on the economy — and the people who make up that economy.

Don’t go resorting to class-warfare arguments, now: this is really a matter of innocence. It’s just so seductive to policy advisors, this assault on the working class. No need to inquire about the source of this seductiveness, its motives or purpose, whose interests it serves or what power promotes it. It’s just one of those things! Policy advisors finding fucking over ordinary people seductive! End of story! Move on!

Take the situation in the U.K., for example. We know, if we consume media commentary, that reducing the deficit is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for any U.K. government (because continuing debt-financed spending in a recession is of course unthinkable – impossible). And we know that reducing the deficit must mean SPENDING CUTS. We know, therefore, that we are entering a new age of austerity. Britain’s whole way of life will have to change!

Now we might reflect that there are TWO ways of reducing a deficit: cutting spending; or increasing revenue. Increasing revenue means, for a government, increasing taxes. So it seems that if the government were to increase taxes instead of cutting spending, that would also reduce the deficit. As it happens, there’s an entire capitalist class with a fuckload of huge corporations making obscene profits – perhaps taxes could be raised there?

No; don’t be silly. Serious people think that welfare should be cut and jobs should be lost. Why do they think this? Who knows – it’s just something in the air, an inexplicable and innocent collective sadism on the part of paid analysts, almost as if these pundits and advisors were children, too gentle for the world.

Krugman quotes Keynes on Ricardian economics:

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue.

Somehow Krugman forgets (this time) to reproduce the rest of the quote:

That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.

Even Keynes gets it, more or less. Why can’t Krugman? What could be the explanation for that?

A Formulation of the Problem

As part of my preliminary research for the Brief History of Capitalism project, I’ve been reading (among other things) Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System. To cut a long story short, I’m extremely impressed. There are some things in the book that strike me as problematic, so I’m not signing on the dotted line to endorse every one of Wallerstein’s positions here – but I would unhesitatingly recommend his work as an unusually acute analysis of capitalism as a global dynamic. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Wallerstein’s stuff is the best published analysis of capitalism-as-system that I’ve read outside of Marx. (And I’m also a bit puzzled as to why Wallerstein isn’t more widely used or praised within the recent Marxist tradition. He has some noteworthy disagreements with prominent Marxist theorists (e.g. the Brenner school, w/r/t the transition), and he’s obviously no activist; but still, he strikes me as both quite orthodox and very good, so I’m a bit puzzled as to why he’s not more popular in Marxist circles.) I’m planning to read more of the world-systems folks (Arrighi next), and will report back as and when. [NB: Preliminary assessment of Arrighi - nowhere near as good.]

Anyway, this post isn’t really about Wallerstein, but is about a line of thought that Wallerstein’s stuff helped me to pin down more cleanly. Apologies if the following is a bit simplistic & schematic – as I say, this post is really just the jotting down of a thought, and more detailed analysis will hopefully one day follow. But: one of the simple but extremely useful schematisations in Wallerstein’s book is the distinction between an empire and a world-system. Wallerstein points out that there have been plenty of extremely large-scale and tightly interconnected economic structures in the world before the European economy turned capitalist and starting swallowing up everything else in the 16th century (by his periodisation). Wallerstein is of the opinion, however, that large-scale and tightly interconnected economic systems prior to capitalism tended either
- to be unified as a single political entity;
- to become unified as a single political entity pretty sharpish; or
- to fall apart pretty sharpish, because they weren’t unified as a single political entity.
What’s historically unique about the capitalist world-system, in Wallerstein’s opinion, is that it functions as a single tightly interconnected large-scale economic system while being composed of a great many different (and generally antagonistic) political entities (= nation states).

This is central to capitalism’s ‘success’ as a social form, Wallerstein argues. I’m not sure quite how much of the following is Wallerstein and quite how much is my own opinion / reconstruction. But I at least would make the argument that one of the most significant events (or series of events) in the history of the development of capitalism is the creation of national debts (which was a long and pretty troubled process), because this subordinates (at least in one extremely significant way) the political decision-making of sovereign political entities to a global economic dynamic that cannot be controlled by any given political entity (or even by a number of such entities acting in concert). [On all this see the quote from Marx below the fold.] (And of course we can see this playing out now, w/r/t the ongoing economic crisis.) The ‘political’ is subordinated to the ‘economic’ here in a way that has had massive ramifications. (Not that national debts are the only way this happens; more straightforward global competition for economic resources between state actors is another notable way in which capitalist dynamics influence political decision-making, for instance.) (Of course, what the ‘dynamic’ of capitalism consists in matters a lot here – none of this is meant to be a real analysis, just gestures towards one; I aim to elaborate this stuff more adequately in the series of historical posts I’m planning (though hopefully it’s mostly obvious and intuitive).)

Anyway, one of Wallerstein’s points, I take it, is that given the way the capitalist system as a whole functions, if any given political entity aims to set itself up in opposition to the imperatives imposed by the system as a whole, sooner or later it’s probably going to get bulldozed. Mostly it doesn’t come to that, of course, because the powerful political actors in any given political entity see which way the wind’s blowing, make policy accordingly, and suppress dissent from those within the political entity who’ll be hurt by the consequences. There’s a double class dynamic, in Wallerstein’s schema – a global opposition between core and periphery (with semi-periphery in the middle); and an opposition within political entities between those who call the shots and those who suffer the consequences. It’s important w/r/t the way the system works, however, that even the ‘core’ political entities are subordinated to the general dynamic – made ‘core’ by their participation in this dynamic. A failure of the core to play its coercive and exploitative role adequately is likely to result, under capitalism, not in the collapse of the system (as it would if we were dealing with a truly centralised empire), but in a (slow but powerful) reconfiguration of the system, and a shift in the location of the system’s ‘core’. (Though of course like all historical processes this is anything but inevitable.)

So far so blah. The noteworthy point for me, in all this, right now, is what it means w/r/t the possibility of non-capitalist political alternatives: how to get them, and what they might be. W/r/t the former, we’re dealing with the old problem of the apparent long-term untenability of ‘socialism in one country’; these are the features of the capitalist system that lead so many communists to insist that a world revolution is necessary for the project to work. I’m going to bracket questions of what forms of political action are best suited to emancipatory transformation, however, to ask the related question: what’s the goal? What are we actually envisaging that could be a global economic system of comparable complexity and productive potential to capitalism (which isn’t what every critic of capitalism wants, of course – but it’s necessary if a lot of people aren’t going to starve), without capitalism’s coercive dynamics and constant recreation of poverty?

To begin to answer that, I think, you’d need a better analysis of how capitalism actually functions than anything I’ve offered on this blog so far (and this is hopefully what I’m working towards in the historical project). I think Wallerstein is right, however, to suggest how difficult it is to envisage anything of this sort being implemented simply via sovereign political entities making policy decisions applicable only to their own spheres of ‘legitimate’ political action. The same applies, but even more so, to more local political change. (Which obviously isn’t to denigrate either national government policy or, especially, local political battles; I’m just saying that you also obviously need a global transformation if you’re going to get a non-capitalist system out the other side.) One of Wallerstein’s central points is: if you’re part of the global capitalist dynamic, you’re part of capitalism – the dynamic itself needs to be transformed, and that’s going to mean a transformation of the economic institutions that bind together political entities at the level of the world-economy (along with a corresponding transformation of the nature of those entities themselves, perhaps).

Wallerstein’s answer to this problem is straightforward (and may be one of the reasons he’s not better liked): he wants a single world government. I’ve got enough anarchism in my Marxism not to find that intuitively very appealing. But Wallerstein’s thinking is, I think, pretty clear: under capitalism, political decision-making is subordinated to a global economic dynamic; we need to reverse that, and make our economic activity subordinate to political decision-making (which could be driven by social need rather than the drive to accumulation); ergo, we shift from capitalist-world-economy to non-capitalist world-empire. Bing bang bosh.

This serves, I think, to frame the question of political alternatives quite clearly. Assuming we don’t want a single world government, what global economic institutions can keep the world economy functioning while not reproducing capitalist dynamics of exploitation and poverty-production? (Alternatively, if we choose to go with Wallerstein on the world government thing – how would such a world government be achieved and democratically structured such that its policies are egalitarian and not tyrannical?) This seems to me to be a question the answer to which would require a lot of detailed analysis. I’m not planning to even try to answer it any time soon. But I think this is a formulation of the problem that I’ll probably return to.

Proposed New Long Term Project: A Very Brief History of Capitalism

When I started blogging a few years ago, I did so with a double intention: to educate myself in the discipline of economics; and to articulate critical kickback against the falsehoods that are so common in the discipline of economics. The two tasks were connected, psychologically: I found it more or less impossible to actually sit down and read any economics without my mind becoming a stew of inchoate fury, which made reading very difficult. The expression and externalisation of that fury eased further study, while also producing a set of counter-texts – in the form of blog posts – which could in turn be examined and critiqued and built upon, as I tried to achieve a more adequate understanding of economics and the economy.

This remains the project – I am committed to it – I expect it to remain the principle focus of my intellectual work for the rest of my life. As projects tend to, however, this one has warped and twisted as its grown, such that my sense of the tasks required along the way have changed.

A couple quick stock-taking points, then, before getting on to the main things. First: the most important unexpected time-sink so far has certainly been Marx: as readers can confirm by clicking across to the early posts of my original blog, I initially (based on popular repute) expected Marx to be a somewhat naive, simplistic and outdated theorist of capitalism, whose work needed to be updated and/or superseded in order to bring some long-overdue fresh insight to critical left discourse. That turns out to be completely wrong – Marx is an at times brain-hurtingly complicated and sophisticated theorist, with a to-my-knowledge-unmatched grasp of many many many social/economic minutae; large-scale historical changes; and the connections between the two. Reckoning with and learning from Marx has occupied the bulk of my studying time so far – and there is plenty more still to be done. Here, also – as in many other areas – I’ve been immeasurably influenced by the work of and by conversations with NP, whose important re-interpretation of Capital is still unfolding at Rough Theory.

Second, my sense of the material – theoretical and empirical – that needs to be mastered as part of the general project has grown and solidified as things have progressed. My studies of economics began, as it were, largely ‘immanent’ to the discipline. Since I had, in part, adopted deconstruction as an interpretive practice, I was interested in discovering the flaws and aporias of economic discourse through examination of the discourse itself, and in a re-purposing of the different parts of mainstream discourse to alternative ends. Again, this aspect of the project still stands; but I now have an expanded sense of the extent to which economics as a discipline cannot, in fact, be adequately mastered without considerable use of resources that fall altogether outside its modern disciplinary boundary. Specifically, economics cannot be understood except in the context of social science more generally; and it cannot be understood without some knowledge of the larger-scale historical narrative of which the phenomena the discipline aims to analyse are part.

This brings me to the main point: immediate ongoing work. In the out-of-sight blog boiler-room, I’m reading a fair bit of social theory, which generally doesn’t seem worth posting on. (Zygmunt Bauman is sinister; Erving Goffman is prim; Talcott Parsons is boring.) Going forward, though, I also want to considerably expand my historical knowledge. I’m therefore proposing a conceivably unmanageable sub-project: a (very) brief history of capitalism, to be presented in installments on the blog.

To head off various objections, internal and potentially external, from the start, let me be clear what I’m not proposing: I’m not proposing an adequate history of world capitalist society. I am not a historian; I am not trained as a historian; I have no intention of becoming a historian. What I’m after is essentially a bare minimum (plus whatever additional information and/or understanding falls in my lap as we go). There is, it seems to me, a bare minimum of historical knowledge one can reasonably be expected to have if one aims to hold informed views about capitalism – capitalism being, fundamentally, a historical phenomenon. This bare minimum of knowledge is, it seems to me, in fact possessed by a tiny fraction of those people who actually hold, and insistently disseminate, strong views about capitalism.* I plan to myself attain that bare minimum of knowledge.

What I’m proposing, then, seems to me at least from one perspective as both unmanageably large, as a project, and more or less obligatory. It’s also something I won’t even be able to get started on for any number of months – what with the social theory, and various other commitments. My plan is to eventually – and I think I’m talking years here, though I’d be happy for things to go quicker – produce a pamphlet-length piece of writing that summarises the historical development of the capitalist system in a way that I consider both to be passably accurate, and to hit the key analytic points that should be at the core of any good theoretical analysis of presently-existing capitalism.

* There are some caveats here that I’m not clear I want to work through properly now. Basically I’m not aiming to stop or criticise anyone discussing capitalism, whether or not the discussion is even minimally historically informed. That would be elitist and also silly, I think. On the other hand – actually knowing what you’re talking about does help. There are an interesting set of issues here about different discursive spaces and the kinds of conversations appropriate to them, but I’m not going to address those now.