sennett & cobb set out to argue that "the contradictions of freedom and dignity in America [are] linked to a notion...of self-development thru intellect and rational control" that is, freedom and dignity rest on developing the capacity for rational thought and action, the acquisition of knowledge and time that will enable one to control fate rather than feeling enslaved by passions, prejudices, ignorance, and the accidental circumstances of one's birth. this is what frank rissaro means by education: education isn't merely for technical knowledge or as a means to get a better job, it's about possessing culture and honing one's ability for rational self-reflection, thought, the life of the mind, etc. to him it's a badge of ability that means that one is in control of one's life and it's a badge that appears not everyone can have.
and how do people think of freedom and dignity? what is its content? they seem to believe that 'making it' is about being free from, being independent of the demands of others. why is freedom & dignity about carving out an island unto oneself? why does freedom and dignity seem to be something that one can only have if free from the burdens of society, the demands of social life?
it is the result of "the burden of class" in US society: "the feeling of not getting anywhere despite one's efforts, the feeling of vulnerability in contrasting oneself to others as a higher social level, the buried sense of inadequacy that one resents oneself for feeling* [58, emph. added]. the result is a world in which "ideas about *ability* have transformed "the self" into "the individual".
initially, the notion of ability emerged with the Enlightenment, deployed as part of the bourgeois rebellion against aristocracy. people are naturally talented, it was claimed. and though talent may be distributed unevenly, positions [offices] should be open to talent and ability, not based on the privileges of birth. an aristotelean social metaphysics was replaced by a liberal one and badges of ability become the mark of individual worth, of standing out from, not the 'bad', but the ordinary, the average. the few, the talented are recognized, while the ordinary masses are merely tolerated, rendered invisible
whatever revolutionary impulses were behind this notion of ability, capitalism has rendered them badges of ability that are means to individual ulterior ends rather than ends in and of themselves. capitalism, though, is not some abstract monolithic force but operates in concrete ways: in this case, through judgment as it is embodied in authority.
here, sennett and cobb take issue with a purist marxist notion of class and power as the either/or of propertied v. propertyless. it is not so much that marx was wrong, but that weber and gramsci showed how power became legitimated and operated in other ways. authority makes people obey w/o recourse to brutal violence. the power of capital becomes obscured as power actually asserts itself in much less obvious, more insidious ways: badges of ability legitimate power through the authority of science--the natural and social sciences, medicine, education, managerial science, psychology and psychoanalysis, social work--all of which maintain power by establishing a monopoly on knowledge--what counts as knowledge, who knows, who can know, and why. as sennett and cobb write: "an authority judges freedom and dignity ."
to illustrate, sennett recounts his fieldwork in a school in the neighborhood.
he reveals how the children of manual laborers are defined as among the ordinary and incapable, generally, of being among the talented few. they come to accept this because the teacher as authority, backed by IQ tests, the school, the institutional authority of schooling in general. the teacher, too, has the power to constrain their freedom insofar as s/he discourages them from developing their capacities. because no one questions the legitimacy of the teacher's authority, least of all the students, the students come to believe themselves to be unworthy of being among the talented few and respond accordingly which, most important for s & C, means that they blame themselves rather than the teacher whose authority they cannot imagine might be arbitrary. they are not completely passive here, however. children, they say, turn their anger at powerlessness--at their loss of freedom--on those students who are among the chosen few --the 'suck ups' or 'the jocks' or 'the geeks' depending on local school culture [see also_ jocks and burnouts_, penelope eckert]:
"so they turn on the few who are approved...though [they] do not blame the "suck-ups" for their own position in the classroom. the legitimization of power is like a cloak of secrecy over the origins of one's anxiety. it is this cloak of secrecy that makes these children feel responsible for a situation they did not create" [90].
there is a difference among adults, however, in so far as the intra-class conflict that is between the few and the many in school is internalized as a kind of internal class conflict within individuals. manual laborers feel ordered about by their supervisors who they feel have legitimate authority to do so and yet something is unfair about this. their supervisors aren't "passive judges" as the teachers are for children who must perform for them. rather, their supervisors are active "prosecutors" in their judgment. but worse, sennett and cobb argue, is that they are prosecutors of themselves and one another. they blame themselves; it is their own fault if they don't have the ambition and drive to place them among the few and, so too, it is the fault of others:
"under these circumstances, how much a person has to take orders comes to represent inversely how much ability he has at work, for the more talent a person has the more freedom.... the complexity here is that you can know someone else has made work boring for you by telling you what and how to produce, yet since you are alive those eight or ten hours your feelings are a problem about you; *you* aren't coping. it is in this way that restricted freedom for an adult, leading to feelings of boredom, restricts dignity, not because the worker feels directly oppressed but because he feels existentially responsible for the feelings restricted freedom creates" [95].
so, eric, the hidden injuries are internal. intra-class conflict plays itself out internally and is cloaked by the power of legitimized authority. and, they are hidden from everyone because everyone is involved in this process. they note at one point that they're focusing on manual laborers because, "[w]hat we hope to do is illumine a hidden scheme of values that sorts men into different classes; but we hope to demonstrate this burden of class by exploring its impact on those who lose the most by being classified" (76). the result is that we are both judges and judged. and this is because, though they don't note this as explicitly as they ought to, legitimized authority operates as a hierarchical bureaucratic mechanism. to link this to my comments about the film, working girl, the movement concludes with an interesting scene. she gets to her new job which she's dreamed of. yet, she's not sure what to do and she takes the secretary's comments to mean that she is, once again, the secretary. but she's not! she's actually got a corner office and she's thrilled. the camera pans out from her joyful celebration to reveal an office building. yes, she has a corner office but it is merely in the middle floors of the building. i suspect all of us can identify with this, say my mother, now an RN, judges the work of LPNs and orderlies, yet she is judged by physicians and hospital administrators.
well perhaps chris burford will take over from here. and chris is right to say that this was "incorrect" though i don't think i have the original post, particularly since my email is on the fritz and i'm using webmail--which i detest!--so i can't recall specifically what was said. perhaps you can explain further chris?
kelley
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