Fig 1
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Some of the ideas in this paper are further developed in:
John Schostak
Jill Schostak
Presented at BERA Conference, Warwick University 2006
What’s fair?
Looking around, what can be said about the world, about the way in which lives are lived, wealth allocated, services provided? How people are governed is central to the question of fairness. The judgements they make depend on how open their society is, the degree to which information is made freely available, the extent to which research can be undertaken to explore issues, the nature of their education, and the extent to which they can participate in decision making at all levels. The question of what’s fair is the radical heart of emancipatory research methodologies and educational practice. Asking about what is fair is an act that questions prevailing social, cultural, political and economic conditions. The questioning is of two kinds:
The choice can be illustrated in relation to the inequality of power vested in individuals as workers in relation to multinationals as employers. The great multinationals that dominate the world scene are able to move their sites of operation easily from one country to another in order, for example, to seek the lowest costs of labour, or a better tax regime. However, for labour there are strict immigration controls. Hence, when a major company pulls out of a particular region, communities can be devastated finding it difficult to move from country to country in search of work. All this is well known. If this is considered unfair, there are two opposing strategies in response. The first accepts that the current market and political framework, while problematic in its details, is nevertheless right in its overall rationality and thus strategies need to be employed to correct the mistakes and so reform the market and its political frameworks. The second, judges that the current market and political framework is fundamentally wrong and needs to be overturned because it inevitably reduces the complex, needs, demands and interests of people to measurable, market values as well as reducing people to being functions in a system. Both strategies can claim to be based on a notion of fairness. The first deems that the market philosophy correctly applied and the political arrangements that support the market most fairly allocates resources to people’s needs and demands. The second seeks alternatives to the market precisely because it is judged incapable of allocating wealth fairly and contributing to the full humanity of people
If all is fundamentally well with the current vision of society, then schools and research methodologies need only learn how to implement that vision. However, if that vision is to be fundamentally challenged in order to be overturned, what kinds of schools and methodologies could perform such a revolutionary act? Methodologies and knowledge predicated on all being well cannot logically find within themselves the way of critiquing this fundamental assumption without which they could not exist. This is what is at the back of Kuhn’s (1970) notion of scientific revolutions. A scientist who sees the world according to a particular paradigm is incapable of seeing it radically differently, that is, according to a new paradigm. Hence, Kuhn’s example of scientists who saw the world within the paradigm of phlogiston theory could not see the world according to Dalton’s atomistic theory. The former disappeared when its last proponents simply died.
The Iron Cage
If all is not fundamentally well, then changes need to be made. But how is this
to be done? It might be easy if the world were controllable like a laboratory
and if variables could be precisely measured and varied to deduce exact cause
and effect relationships. However, human beings unlike quantities of raw materials
dug from the earth cannot be radically altered through chemical processing into
metals or plastics to be engineered and used. Yet, there has been and continues
to be a way of seeing the world that seeks to subject all – both inert
and living – to the will of reason. Weber (2001) described its emergence
in terms of the puritan work ethic:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into evervday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
(Weber 2001: 123)
This iron cage is everywhere tightening. Current information technologies have the capacity to track and record the movements and behaviours of millions through CCTV, bankcard transactions, mobile phones, personal data encrypted passports and identity cards. Social reality is everyday mimicking the science fiction dystopias that can be seen in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Orwell’s 1984, Gibson’s Necromancer or the recent Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy of films. Of course, the technology is not there yet. However, billions are being spent and are projected to be spent on ensuring such progress as for example in Europe under the shortly to be finalised for Framework 7 of the European Union’s Research and Development Programme. Globally, national governments, local public services, and the major corporations are constructing the world so that it can be increasingly tightly administered for social control and the accumulation of wealth.
The ideal of a rationally produced society dedicated to producing the good life is as much in the minds of the powerful today as it was when Plato produced his vision for the Republic. Here the Philosopher Kings were to rule over a population categorised according to their roles in society. Instead of Philosopher Kings, in his book Walden II, Skinner (1976) imagined a society engineered by scientists employing his behaviourist principles. Whether it is a society constructed through reason or through the fear of power as embodied in a tyrant or the fear of an enemy the problem has been to formulate the strategies for managing people, constructing and planning built environments, controlling resources and allocating goods and services.
Fukyama in his1992 book, adopting an Hegelian theme, proclaimed the end of history. That is to say, with the fall of the Soviet States and the globalisation of capitalism underpinned by liberal democracy, there is no where else to go. Like Kojève (1969) before him, the argument is that the Hegelian vision of a rationally ordered society where, in terms of the big political and social ideas, there is nothing left to struggle for is close to fulfilment. Without the dramatic political struggles there is in effect no history, that is ‘history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times’ (Fukyama 1992: xii). Only the details are to be worked out. In short, the basic design of the good society and the “final form of human government” has already been produced. As such it is a globalised market that has been constructed as in the image of MacDonald’s to provide ‘the best available means of getting us from a state of being hungry to a state of being full’ (Ritzer 1994: 9). In the perfect market imagined by classical economics there is a perfect coordination between what is effectively demanded and what can be supplied. In this market no one person or corporation dominates – all are dominated by the market mechanisms. However, markets are not perfect. And it is the market that provides the mechanisms that both produces ‘hungers’ or desires and places value on goods, services, labour. This market logic imposes its rationality upon populations. For financial institutions it transforms communities into those with bank accounts. credit cards, loans, mortgages and those without – the unbanked. The banked are visible, the unbanked are not. Market strategies will be applied differently to each grouping. Populations can be further categorised according to wealth, income level, spending patterns, kinds of employment, where they live and so on. In such a system identity and addresses become the key organising factors. For such a system to work perfectly, for each individual to count as part of the system, engage in a contract and undertake an exchange the identity and address of each individual must be definable and locatable. The rational structuring of life, the iron cage as Weber called it, could be further witnessed in the rational planning of cities whether in the monumental vision of Haussemann’s Paris which focus the attention of individuals on the great monuments to power and glory or the flattened grids of Modernist architects who sought to eradicate perspective where:
The endless orthogonality of these systems was encapsulated by Hilberseimer’s simple assertion of 1923: “Developing the plan of the city on lines corresponds to the fundamental principles of all architecture. The straight line, the right angle have always been its most elegant elements. Does not the clearness of the straight line better correspond to our current sensibility, to our organising spirit rather than the arbitrariness of the curved line”
(Whiting 2003: 98)
These are worlds where :
with regard to matters of space and time, the modernist reduction to a radical subjectivism means that all objects, including our environment, are set up in opposition to a thinking subject, that is to say our perceiving and experiencing mind. Precisely this oppositional and dichotomous way of constructing our world would lead to a general consideration of all objects outside of ourselves as “other” with the resulting problem of communication with those exterior objects. Obviously this modernist approach thought of man in contradistinction to his environment, setting up an opposition – perhaps unintentional, yet persisting to this day – viewing disparate objects in space existing only to be measured, tied down, and ultimately controlled.
(Kavanaugh 2003: 116)
This organisation of subjects, space and time has as its paradigmatic metaphor
le Corbusier’s ‘machines for living’ (1923) through which
people are to be organised in their public, private and indeed, intimate lives.
At its ultimate there are the algorithmic ‘machines’ of search engines
which have as their function the search for ways of organising information produced
globally on the internet. As a metaphor for the fusion of the virtual and the
actual there is Google Earth, mapping the earth in relation with roads and street
addresses. To take it one step further there is the concept of the Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses currently assigned to every web address. The most advanced
versions are capable of generating an infinite number of addresses. These IP
addresses can not only be assigned to every individual person on the planet
but also to every part of each individual’s body and possessions. Theoretically,
at least, total surveillance is possible, tracking both public and intimate
events in a person’s life. The iron cage can be infinitely tightened.
The Organisation of Power
Whether reason becomes an iron cage in Weber’s sense, or used to further
the variety of human interests and potential depends on how power is organised,
for what reasons and in whose interests in a given society and between societies.
There are different ways of defining who and how the real is imagined and thus how power is organised and for what agendas. Spinoza distinguishes two kinds of power: potestas or Power as a top down organisation of the whole; and, potentia, the local organisation of power. That is to say, the State can be conceived in two ways. In Hobbesian terms, there is the awesome Power of the sovereign expressed as the Leviathan through which absolute Power is expressed. The Power of the sovereign could be that of the tyrant who controls through sheer terror, or it could be the monarch whose power is legitimated by God, or it could be a ruling group as in the Platonic Guardians, the philosopher kings, or an aristocracy that supports a monarchy or some other form of elite grouping, an oligarchy whose only commonality is the protection of their private wealth and power from the multitude, the poor. In Spinozian terms, the Power that rests with the King or oligarchy is imaginary. This is the Power of domination and mastery from the point of view of the Subject at the top of the pyramid. The real power is the power that rests with the multitude at ground level. It is only by each member of the multitude giving up some part of their rights in return for security and participation in a wider richer cultural world than can be obtained alone that the power of the leader is produced. The leader is the symbolic focus for the satisfaction of the multitude’s needs and hopes. However, unless the state acts in such a way to recognise and meet the diversity of needs of its members it will become unstable. Zizek (1991) describes the fall of Ceaucescu as a stripping away of the illusions that had kept the tyrant in power. MacGregor (1998) describes the sudden falling away of the apparent solidity of the Soviet State after the failed August coup of 1991. Ironically, it could have just as easily been the melting away of the Western market economies. The Communist countries were in debt to the West and:
had debtor regimes refused the definitions imposed from without – had they united to to default simultaneously on their Western loans (which in 1981 stood at $90 billion) – they might well have brought down the world financial system and realised Kruschev’s threatening prophesy overnight. That this did not happen shows how vital a thing was capitalists’ monopoly on the definition of social reality.
(Verdery (1996) in: MacGregor 1998: 24)
There is thus an inherent instability in any social organisation that does
not in some way control the definition of social reality and that definition
of social reality is always open to threat if it is not organised around the
sovereignty of the ‘people’, that is, in Spinoza’s terms,
the multitude. The forms of organisation so far sketched can be diagrammatically
represented as:
Fig 1
In each case, whether from the point of view of the King/Planner in a totalitarian or oligarchic society, or that of people in a democracy, to be successful, that is effective, power has to be organised in its details, driven down to the smallest units. If, at the slightest whim, people reject the categories into which they are placed, or choose to change identities at will or have fluid notions concerning property ownership then the bonds between political and market categories and the content they are meant to address is broken and control cannot be assured. The task is to ensure that the correlation between categories and their defined content are maintained through the everyday and institutional practices by which spaces are mapped, bodies are managed and attention controlled or manipulated in public, domestic and intimate places. Whether through coercion, socialisation or more formal forms of instruction and education people are to behave ‘properly’, aspire to and defend ‘our way of life’. without maintaining a strict relation between categories and content, knowledge cannot be amassed and used by the powerful to manipulate the powerless. The more rigid and comprehensive a system becomes in terms of check lists of appropriate behaviours, goals and forms of expressions, the more it sees as a threat any form of non-compliance as can be seen in the various religious and political ‘witch hunts’ that have taken place over the centuries. In contemporary terms, allying Power with the technical knowledge and accomplishments of information technologies poses real and dramatic challenges to how freedoms are to be safeguarded. Imagining the nightmare scenario, at least provides a way of thinking about what is at stake and how to stop it from happening.
Drawing upon Schatzman’s (1973) account of the education of Judge Schreber by his father in the nineteenth century provides a way of thinking about the extent to which the control of the body can be managed. From birth Judge Schreber’s father had rigorously controlled all aspects of his bodily movements using the technologies of the time. Rather than being seen as a cruel and eccentric action, Judge Schreber’s father was an influential German educationist, publishing widely. It was a scientific rational approach to education, exact in all its details. Think how much more rigorous and rationally evidence based this can be through contemporary technologies. Sadly, the process drove the Judge mad and led to the suicide of his brother. Judge Schreber wrote a book on his mental illness (published in 1955) which later provided Freud, and still later Lacan, with insights into paranoia. It is perhaps the most extreme consequence of Weber’s iron cage where the details of ‘rational’ control were driven to the smallest details of a child’s everyday life. Rational control and power alone without some understanding of what it means to be human are insufficient to bring about the good life. If no one individual has the full insight into what all people want and need, and if no single individual can be trusted without reserve to legislate for all individuals, then there needs to be some way of organising power to ensure that the multiplicities of views are included. However, globally, this is far from being realised:
The surface of the earth is covered with a diversity of landscape conditions, only 2% of which is an urban density. In addition, satellite coverage for mobile telephones constitutes less than 20% of the earth’s surface. Of the now 6 billion people populating the earth, 1.2 billion live in abject poverty in circumstances of mere survival mode. So, in spite of the fact that the majority of people in a post-industrial society live in an urban or suburban environment (70% of all Europeans live in cities of 200,000 or more), a sizable portion of humanity falls outside of the consideration of most architects and planners. Here the problem is not density, but poverty and its causes …
(Kavanaugh 2003: 114)
Most people in the world fall outside the gaze of rational planners. And within each State there are boundaries between those who have wealth and those who do not, those who are ‘banked’ and the ‘unbanked’, the protected and the unprotected. For those who are not fortunate, wrongs and injuries pervade their lives as described by some girls growing up in an economically disadvantaged community in the North West of the UK:
(They … start talking about the teens who hang around the streets, how they’re always asking for cigarettes, threatening people, doing graffiti, making noise late at night and fighting and so on.)
Girl: and like bonfires, that’s the worst thing round our street, cos once there was a car that was in front of um there’s our house and there’s a pavement there, so then the car’s there and someone stuck um a firework in there and it started blowing up (…) but the fire brigade came just in time.
Girl2: and then there’s like, near our fields where they ride their motorbike there’s like these little blue pole, bollards I think, and they’ve like got robbed cars and they’ve like smashed into it so that they can still get (…) And the police are all there and you can hear it like so you wake up in the middle of the night you can hear police sirens all the time. And I don’t know why. We used to live in (another place) and that weren’t even worse, it was a little bit better. But then there was this family who threatened my mum and then they put our windows through so we moved away from there. Then they followed us to (the new place). So we’re going to move again. But it’s just teens and like people that, are like bad influences. We ‘ad a really good school but we had to move about six times just because of people round it. And every time we’re like playin’ outside all happy and then the boys come down the road. It’s just like they rule when they don’t, they don’t live near there. They’re always playing loud music and its just not on, I don’t think anyway.
(CAPE project 2005)
Whether it is the streets of a particular neighbourhood or the political regions of the world, whoever has the strength rules. Where the official structures of a State’s power fails to reach, alternative powers arise in the ambiguous, shady ‘interstices’ as Thrasher (1927) called them when studying gangs in the Chicago of the early twentieth century. When an individual looks around and sees that some people are safe and wealthy whereas their own life is poor and precarious the question of what is right and just arises. It can be suffered in relative silence; or it can explode in violence perhaps like the riots that occurred in the 1980s in the UK or those that occurred in France during 2005 or the hundreds of others around the world that periodically occur. States have a fear of such riots. It is a fear of the multitude, a fear that unleashes the powers of the State to control it whether through police or military force. It is an image that was immortalised in the film La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz in 1995, a film that frightened the then prime Minister Alain Juppée and was later seen to be prophetic of the riots of 2005.
On Oct. 25, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited Argenteuil, a low-income suburb west of Paris. “Sarko” is a controversial figure in France. Last summer, he infamously vowed to “Karcherize” — i.e. sandblast — la banlieue’s criminal elements. At Argenteuil, he was greeted by a hailstorm of stones and bottles. The minister dismissed his attackers as “rapaille,” a word that’s often translated to English as “scum,” though “rabble” comes closer. Either way, the fuse was lit.
Two days later in Clichy-sous-Bois, another Parisian banlieue, three teenagers were electrocuted as they tried to evade police. (The cops were searching for break-in suspects, and had wanted to inspect their identification. The boys, who’d been playing soccer at the time, fled inside a power substation to avoid questioning. Police have denied chasing after them.) Two of the boys died, the third was hospitalized. “[Clichy-sous-Bois] has three principal communities, the Arabs, the Turks and the blacks,” one of their friends told reporters. “The three victims each represented one community.”(Mathew McKinnon, 2006: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/hangthemcday3.html#content)
Places burn, property is destroyed, people are injured and killed. And yet the political, as a real act that brings radical change throughout society, as Rancière (1995, 2004) has argued, is a rare event. He distinguishes, therefore between what he calls the ‘police’ and ‘the political’. The police does not refer to police offices but to an earlier meaning of police in terms of the way in which every element or part of a society relate to every other part. The political is an eruption in the system, it is that point at which those who are not included as a part of the system, the marginal, the poor, the illegal immigrants who work for unscrupulous employers break through and voice, or perhaps scream their grievances. If the grievances find a voice under such universal categories as liberty, equality, fraternity that draw together a wide range of discontent or ambition throughout society then a revolution might be born, as in the case of the French Revolution. The multitude, thus, as a source of the political generates a fear of crowds, the rabble, the mass by the powerful. It is a fear that translates into laws against assembly or laws that enable the police to move people on, or stop and search those who fit certain categories of people who are held in suspicion. Yet, at the back of this there are questions that States cannot fully define: who are the people? What is humanity? What are their ‘rights’? And how should one person behave towards another?
Fear of the other is an essential founding motive for the development of societies where people associate in order to have protection through numbers. However, when they gather together, it means that they also have to give up some of their powers in order to live together – they can’t have everything they want when they want it. They have to negotiate, debate. But people do not come together just for protection. There is friendship, love and the experience of life being richer in the company of others. Indeed, it is not unusual for people to feel protective of others. When others are seen to be in danger there is fear for the life of the other. It is a question of humanity that arises in fear for and thus care of the other. It is why people risk their lives for others, even when they are total strangers. There are times, however, when fear of the other and fear for the other clash in ways that are irresolvable for the individual. Most tragically it was expressed by 19 year old Jason Chelsea whose words were headlined on the front page:
'I can't go to Iraq. I can't kill those children' - Suicide soldier's dying words to his mother
(Cahal Milmo, The Independent: 25 August 2006)
What is expressed here in these haunting words is what Levinas (1998) calls
fear for the other, a primal fear that in recognising the other is constitutive
of the self not cognitively as an idea but as an ethical being grounded in its
relation to the otherness of the world – given no perceived way of challenging
the military commands, the only alternative for this young man seemed to be
suicide. In the name of the children, he took his life. There was no other escape
that he could see from the iron cage of military command.
Working the Radical Edge
If democracy works to include the voices of all people, the tragic is born in
a criminal absence of democracy at every level. Mouffe (1993) calls democracy
the unfinished revolution. It is unfinished because it has yet to be driven
down into the deepest recesses of institutions and everyday life. Such a democratic
programme is radical in all respects for politicians whose desire is to administer
the heterogeneous, the multitude that is other to its rational bureaucratic
logics. However, the truly heterogeneous cannot be reduced to homogeneity under
an absolute system of control; there is always difference, something outside
the system that cannot be brought within, or escapes, or is rejected. Hence
there is always the basis for disagreement (Rancière 1995) and conflict,
fear of as well as fear for the other. States and rulers in general, of course
take advantage of the two motivations, both fear of and fear for – whether
fear of terrorism, the evil axis, or fear for ‘our way of life’,
or our ‘brothers and sisters in faith’. In the global context, it
would be convenient for State’s and rulers if they could claim to be acting
in the name of humanity, or the people. However, what if a particular ‘class’,
‘nation’, ‘faith’ claims to be acting in the name of
humanity? There is an inevitable reduction to that particular class, nation
or faith’s interests and thus the exclusion of those who do not fit. This
is particularly evident in fascism (Laclau 1996, 2005; Norval 1996). In its
generation of an ‘outside’, the ‘inside’ is always under
threat. The inside is haunted by an outside as when at the edges of consciousness
the shadows at night make shapes which may be glimpsed only when looking awry
(Zizek 1991). It is when being at home there is a sense of unfamiliarity, a
sense of the uncanny (Royle 2003) that is, not feeling at home in the world.
It is this disjunction between a world that is ‘our home’ and a
world that is somehow beyond it and threatens its unity, its order, its sense
of safety that unsettles the clear and distinct relation between categories
and their content. In the perspective of class struggle, a working class individual
has the same interests as any other working class individual regardless of race,
gender and faith. However, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argued individuals are
split between many potential alliances. An unmarried unemployed mother may see
her allegiances not with the trade union movement but with feminist demands
for equality. But a wealthy married mother may feel no sympathy for her ‘sister’,
instead seeing her as a social problem. In short, those who are labelled ‘working
class’ have as many dissimilarities as similarities. At every point where
Power seeks to keep its categories in order, there is the potential for drift.
Close observation threatens the imagined perfect correlation between category
and content
No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept; it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds.
(Adorno 1973: 14)
Adorno’s illustration of the art object, provides a way of seeing how the work of art has no single category that can contain it, or even a complex of categories through which ‘explanation’ may be elaborated. Objects in their being escape representation:
In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature. What conceptualisation appears to be from within, to one engaged in it – the predominance of its sphere, without which nothing is known – must not be mistaken for what it is in itself. Such a semblance of being-in-itself is conferred upon it by the motion that exempts it from reality, to which it is harnessed in turn.
(Adorno 1973: 11)
There is an infinite sliding between concepts constructed through the work of the thinking subject, the cogito and the ‘non-conceptualities’, the reality and its ‘being’ - or ontology - about which they attempt to speak. Methodologies work at this edge between cognition and ontology. If you stare too hard, if you scan the elements in too much detail, you might see the ragged edges, the poor fit, the frame itself and get to see the tain itself, the silvering at the back of the mirror that provides the necessary conditions for images to be reflected (c.f., Gasché 1986). The imaginary is our tie to reality, it is both bondage and power to bring about effects. It is the way in which particulars coalesce into images of some whole, some generality some relationship. It’s in that moment when attention strays, when the forced coordination between category and ‘thing’ waivers. It is the moment of critique. The radical emerges at the dynamic moment when the drift between categories and content makes Power call out to its ‘subjects’ to bring everything back into place and that instance when ‘subjects’ interrogate the grounds under which Power exercises its rights of control. It is that moment when an individual claims a universal right to be treated like everyone else as a basis for social and political order:
The rights which form the content of equal liberty, and lend it material form, are, by definition, individual rights, rights of persons. However, since they cannot be granted, they have to be won, and they can be won only collectively. It is of their essence to be rights individuals confer upon each other, guarantee to one another.
(Balibar 2002: 4)
These are rights forged both in the multitude where each individual has no more power than another to dominate and at that moment when individuals realise their vulnerability one to another but also realise their strength as a mass. Indeed, alone, face to face:
NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.
(Hobbes 1914: 13)
It is the experience of fear of another that leads to what Hobbes calls the war of all against all and from which arises a concept of natural rights:
And because the condition of man (as hath been declared in the precedent chapter) is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can to defend ourselves.
(Hobbes 1914:14)
This right can only be laid aside by the individual ‘either by simply renouncing it, or by transferring it to another’ (Spinoza, 2004: 207-8). It may be renounced in an act of submission if the other wins a fight or if by joining others an enemy can be overcome or some greater good can be achieved through friendship, love, working together to produce both necessities, luxuries and cultural riches. Thus it is not only fear as in the Hobbesian sense but also a care for the values of freedom and equality that enables the expression of a humanity, that like Adorno’s art object cannot be reduced to its individual elements, a category or some axiom of fear. For Spinoza it is by banding together as equals that people overcome their fear of each other. The totality only has power because of the aggregation of powers of each individual acting together. The most natural totality, for Spinoza is a democracy because it is ‘the most consonant with individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural right so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs, he only hands it over to the majority of a society, whereof he is a unit. Thus all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals’ (p. 207). Where one group in that totality achieves a greater power than other groups, the democracy is in danger. When a democracy stops including others within its sphere, then its sense of being a universal democracy slips away, its boundaries harden and the other as enemy arises and the totality itself is in danger. The urgent question is thus not how to harden the boundaries but how to soften them through increasing the inclusiveness of democracy. This is the radical edge of democratic practices edging always towards other ways of seeing, other ways of making connections, other ways of forming relations between people that do not include exploitation. The radical return to democracy is to drive the conception and debate about the ‘fair’ to the multitude which with every new birth increases and renews itself with new viewpoints and away from the monopolising, oligarchic interests of the few, the elites.
Education and Methodology across the Edge
Contemporary Western market democracies, it could be argued, are incomplete
expressions of the kind of democracy envisaged by Spinoza. As Adorno remarks
about the success of the bourgeois in overthrowing the constraints of monarchies
the result is an incomplete emancipation:
In the shadow of its own incomplete emancipation the bourgeois consciousness must fear to be annulled by a more advanced consciousness; not being the whole freedom. It senses that it can produce only a caricature of freedom – hence its theoretical expansion of its autonomy into a system similar to its own coercive mechanisms.
(Adorno 1973: 21)
Rather than freedom, there are caricatures of freedom, the freedom of choice in a supermarket is more illusory than real. It is no more than an advertising strategy to promote anything from soft drinks to cigarettes to banks. What methodologies can drive ‘incomplete’ democracies across the edge and into ever increasing degrees of emancipation?
Radical methodologies drive democracy to the ‘roots’ of the relation between concepts and non-conceptualities, between cognition and ontology, between I-think and I-demand/desire in order to bring that which is at the edge of consciousness, at the edge of society into a society that transforms itself to be inclusive. Empowerment is thus achieved not by transmitting conceptual knowledge but by including other forms of expression, other ways of conceptualising the non-conceptualities. It begins face to face with the other and begins anew at every moment. Meeting another is never trivial:
It is a bright Spring late morning, my lunch-guest has arrived and we walk along the narrow path in the university grounds towards the building housing the dining-room. Early daffodils and late snowdrops attract the eye, bunches of colours amidst the winter-wet grass either side of the path. My guest is a Consultant Psychiatrist; someone I have met through an earlier project researching the learning experiences of junior doctors. One of the topics we intend to discuss over lunch is future further research possibilities. We chat as we walk. A young man is coming towards us. If I gave it any thought, which I don’t until now as I write up this event, I would think he is most likely to be a student. The path is narrow, too narrow to accommodate three people. Deep in conversation I start to take evasive action aiming not to step off the path unless I strictly have to. I am on the outside edge of the path and so I step to my right thinking that the approaching stranger can simply keep to a straight line and we will avoid each other. However, the stranger steps to his left and once again we are on a collision course. I have to concentrate. I am now completely unaware of the Consultant’s location as all my awareness is focused on how to extricate myself from impending collision. I step to my left in the hope that this is an appropriate response. I look attentively at the stranger’s face – a sea-change in public body conduct where familiarity is kept to the minimum – attempting to read the facial gestures to get some clues as to how to extricate myself from this strange “dance”. His face is expressionless, his eyes far-away and unseeing of Here and Now. No information is to be found by me there. What to do? Often if such an entanglement happens you look at the other and see laughter perhaps, or frustration, even anger. But not here. The move to my left fails to work either as the stranger moves to his right. This rhythm of my move initiative followed by his seemingly counter-move occurs for several more minutes. The lack of emotions in his face puzzles me and I wonder how we will end this. My inability to extricate myself also begins to cause me some degree of embarrassment inasmuch as the Consultant and I have only begun to get to know each other both on a professional level and on a personal level, and, thus, I begin to worry as to what the s/he might be thinking here. Time to step away, I decide, and so I step right off the path and walk away into the grassy area putting a significant distance between myself and the stranger. The ploy works. The Consultant joins me from her/his witness position on the far-side of the path. I apologise, chuckling at myself and saying how I couldn’t figure out where the stranger was going to go next. Yes, says the Consultant, I saw him walking towards us, noted his “robotic” gait and his body language and thought aha he’s on drug X and will not respond to an other but just keep on walking, so I need to step right away.
(Jill Schostak: a recalled incident, 2006)
How things ought ordinarily to be are somehow out of joint with how things are. Anticipation is essential to the ordinariness of order. It is here in this very ordinariness of meeting another that we find our deepest, most ingrained, commitments. But it’s not just a commitment like when someone says ‘I’m committed to environmentalism’ or to ‘going on a diet’, or ‘giving up smoking’. There is a force in the ordinariness of order, of a sequence to be completed, a direction to be pursued, something that compels but compels without thinking, without submitting, without decision. It is essential to the performance of everyday life and work. It is essential to ‘expertise’. Yet the real has no sense without access to some code. The psychiatrist saw the signs, the symptoms of some ‘real’ condition that led him to take a particular course of action. The author of the recalled incident, however as not-psychiatrist, expected some-thing else in the form of the code whereby two strangers can successfully pass each other on a path with minimal effort by the appropriate conventional avoidance strategies. The failure of these ingrained conventions led to the author actually breaking her code of not looking the stranger in the face, whereupon she saw the same ‘non-conceptualities’, for example, the expressionless face of the other, but was unable to represent them and interpret the resulting ‘signs’ as did the psychiatrist that represent the ‘case’, the ‘event’, the ‘circumstances’ – thus producing different ‘writings’ and ‘readings’ of what had been ‘seen’. Hence the dance of walking awry ensued. These are, therefore, not just words on a page in an attempt to invoke a remembered incident. This process of experiencing the slippage, the awryness, the space between what Adorno calls the non-conceptualities and alternative forms of representation enables the possibility of a radical methodology to be glimpsed. It has its echoes in Derrida’s notion of écriture which refers to and opens up a radical space:
Écriture is writing in a broader sense than the script produced on paper by whatever means, hand or other. It is a metaphor, a figure for ‘an entire structure of investigation, not merely “writing in the narrow sense,” graphic notation on a tangible material’ (Spivak. 1976: ix-lxxxix). Rather it is ‘the constitution of a thick space where the play of hiding/revealing may take place’ (Lyotard. 1971: 75 as cited in Readings. 1991:6). Neither irreducible to a series of rules on the investigations of graphic systems nor a simple opposition to speech in order to invert a binary opposition, it announces a rhetoric of identity situated in some physical context (Wolfreys, 1998). Not only does the notion of writing refer to speech and thought as forms of writing, but it is also expanded along further horizons to include the writing, the written-ness, of the subject’s identity (Wolfreys. 1998).
Schostak. 2005: Vol II: 1-2
Écriture as a structure of investigation and as a spacing for hiding/revealing is a play that is rather like the play of tensions resulting when a bridge or skyscraper oscillates in high winds, or the play of a fishing rod used to reel in its catch that fights all the way:
The act of writing, reading and thinking is ‘always in some sense a response’, to the other (Wolfreys. 1998:5). The otherness of non-correspondence, of the manifestation of the other in the same, haunts identity and thereby splits it, bringing about a transformation between a certain act of looking or gazing and a certain event in writing.
Schostak. 2005: Vol II: 55
This question of the ‘real’ that is to be revealed, reeled in and grasped in concepts reeled in is central to any methodology that seeks to base action upon knowledge. But, the real (the non-conceptuality), in some radical way, always seems to slip away from the grasp.
There is a split between being and its representation in thought no matter how cleverly, professionally or scientifically it has been reeled in. It is here that radical methodologies can drive democracy to every level in the system first by exploring the distance between oneself and others:
… not just from a language, a particular discourse, but from the language itself, as a pre-existing classification of the world. Thus to intervene in the world through writing is not to just add to the existing mass of linguistic production. Rather a working-over of language will detach it from prevailing codes and stop it from reproducing a pre-given structuring of the world, and thereby set going a certain indirectedness, since the world is intervened in only through an intervention in language itself.
Schostak. 2005: Vol II: 2
Working over language involves an intense exploration of the forms of representation,
the rhetorical processes through which boundaries have been constructed, and
edges eroded to create the conditions for new framings. When new framings are
teased into being, tried out, played with, imposed ‘things’ look
and behave differently as in the case of a change of scientific paradigm described
by Kuhn (1970). During the time of a clash of ways of seeing and behaving, a
time of paradigmatic clashes there is the sense of different groups ‘walking
awry’ in the world, until a new style of walking and being in new representations
of the non-conceptualities. It is a process of exploring the rhetorics of the
edge, writing in experimental ways that prepare for the advent of new ways of
seeing, or seek to include alternative views (Schostak 2005; Schostak 2006).
The role of education, in its radical aspect, is to ‘draw out’ (educate)
the possibilities for being different, for challenge, for alternative ways of
seeing, expressing, acting, engaging with others and otherness in order to develop
an approach that conceives the radical and promotes social justice through a
politics that remains open to difference. Hence, attention to and dialogue with
difference is vital to producing democratic inclusion. By drawing upon Rancière’s
notion of ‘fidelity to the disagreement’ (1995), education, radical
democracy and radical methodologies keep open the spaces for dialogue between
heterogeneous views (Schostak 2006). Without such conditions, wrongs, injustices
are either suffered in silence, fester in the dark spaces just outside the reach
of law, or erupt in riots.
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