----- Original Message ----- From: <JKSCHW at aol.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 10:37 AM Subject: Re: Where was the Color at A16 in D.C.?
> Kelley goes on at some length about how meetings will be different after
socialism, and how people will be different, among other things, in coming
to love meetings. I think this is a projection of a minority taste for
politics and decisionmaking. It is true that this can be fun and fulfilling.
It is also true that it is so mainly for those who are articulate and/or
manipulative, which will always be a minority, even if we can increase the
general level of articulateness. No me, I am pretty articulate and I enjoy
politics more than most people, but really truly I would rather be reading
or writing or playing with my kids of listening to music or having sex, and
I think so would most people.
>
> I have been around the block as a college activist and have had more tha
my share of young people discovering themselves at long meetings. I do
meetings becase I have to, and I want them to be absolutely no more frequent
than necessary and absolutely no longer than they have to be. Moreover, I
don't even want to be the kind of person who goes in for long meetings that
are exercises in self-discovery and self-expression more than they are ways
to coordinate activity and make things hapen. And I think most people would
agree. So even if it is true taht we could make ourselves into, basically,
19 year old college students, why would we want to? I mean, once for a few
years is enough for that.
>
> Finally, apart from the issue of whether a society based on too many
meetings is desirable, there is the point that it favors a different kind of
lack of democracy, favoring those with stamina and big mouths, setting aside
time; we can assume that the four hour day will give us time, but stamina
and big mouths are mere natural gifts. There is no particular reason people
who have them should have a disproportionate say in our society. Maybe Kelly
would say that we can break up the bog meetings and have lots of little
ones. Then we favor those who have patience for lots of little meetings and
big mouths.
>
> I don't find direct democracy to be an attractive ideal. Hurray for
representative government!
>
> --jks
>
> In a message dated Tue, 20 Jun 2000 12:28:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
kelley <kwalker2 at gte.net> writes:
>
> <<
> >
> >If I had a four hour workday I sure as hell would not want to spend the
> >additional hours I saved at a meeting! Oscar Wilde sais that was the
trouble
> >with socialism, too many meetings. And that's the cold truth, no smilies.
> >--jks
>
>
> and you all are looking at from the position of alienated human social
> relations. when i was working on the Centertown project with the Center
> for the Study of Citizenship, you'd be surprised at just how much people
> absolutely *loved* getting together on a sunday to spend a few hours
> talking about what to do about a plant closing. as i wrote elsewhere,
> though, while they conceived of the kind of political talk that occurred
> there as different from the "talking at" associated with bureaucrats and
> politicians and "talking back" associated with the realm of citizen
> insurgency. that is, they understood what they were involved in as
> "talking with" (ken you're such a pain in the ass sometimes!) which they
> saw as the *ideal* of political speech. nonetheless in a close reading
> (ethnography) of their ways of conceptualizing this "ideal" it was clear
> that they wanted to make political talk part of their everyday
> lives. (e.g. they often referred to it as "chatting" and so forth)
>
> what i'm getting at is that there need to be norms of political dialogue
> structured into everyday life rather than making these things big huge
> events. etc. i've posted the below here before but we were in middle of
> gun debate, so maybe folks will be interested now
>
> here i'm wrestling with the problems of the demands of transparent social
> relationships in the idealized realm of what amy guttman calls "conscious
> social reproduction". this, as lefties, is often our goal: the conscious
> understanding of how we order our lives together. ken has an objection to
> it on lacanian grounds, but i flesh it out a bit differently.
>
>
> Many political theorists call for the cultivation of practices which
> nurture citizens capable of autonomous democratic self-rule in which
> practices and authorities are understood as something we must actively,
> consciously agree to and participate in, rather than merely accept them as
> natural or inevitable or the best that can be achived. It is claimed
> that a social
> order might possibly to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. Amy
> Gutmann calls this project 'conscious social reproduction' (CSR):
>
> "For a society to reproduce itself consciously it must be
> non-repressive. It must not restrict rational consideration of different
> ways of life. Instead it must cultivate the kind of character and the kind
> of intellect that enables people to choose rationally...among different
> ways of life."
>
> The politics of world construction encompass those aspects of our daily
> practices in which we ask one another whether what we do everyday
> reproduces the social world as we would wish it to be when we think about
> such things as justice, progress, and the 'good society.' Here, political
> participation is not a choice. It is a fact of life in so far as we always
> already live in and through social institutions. Participation in world
> construction, for example, can be 'privately' justified as earning a
living
> or supporting a family; it can be disciplined by ideological social
control
> or constrained by a technocratic ethos. It is not whether to participate
in
> the politics of world construction that is at stake in many of our
debates;
> rather, what is at stake are the qualities of consciousness
> attending such participation. For those who regard democratic dignity as
> served only by a politics of responsible world construction, that is,
> conscious social reproduction [CSR], none of these private or
ideologically
> driven motives is sufficient.
>
> If there is a characteristic rhetoric connected with CSR, it is that of
> intersubjective social transparency. Here, an awareness of the self as
> socially embedded is necessary for the political dignity of knowing that,
> whatever our formal 'credentials,' we are factually implicated, for good
or
> ill, in how the social world is built through our part in its daily
> reproduction. It should follow, then, that we appropriate that dignity not
> just through an abstract act of voting, but through a politics of
> deliberation.
>
> The naivete that infuses such a conception of politics is due, in part, to
> the under-theorized nature of this political vision applied to
contemporary
> society. If taken seriously, the injunction to participate in this manner
> makes the creation and sustenance of public forums for the realization of
> democratic citizenship an issue that is at the heart of all public policy
> debates. And yet, is this view of politics as world construction
> reasonable? Hopelessly utopian? Perhaps even tyrannical?
>
> Advocates of CSR often dismiss these criticisms as if they could only be
> conservative or reactionary. They may well be; yet, it does not follow
> that we shouldn't attend to the impetus behind these objections in order
to
> ask ourselves what they might mean for the practical work of actually
> creating a politics of CSR.
>
> There is a common theme that runs through the various arguments advocating
> CSR which points to the sociological distinction between formal
> and substantive rationality. In place of the formality of a rights-based
> democratic politics, CSR emphasizes the search for substantively good
> reasons for life's concrete and situated practices. From this standpoint,
> only CSR can save democratic politics from technicism. Only a dialogic
> democracy can redeem interest judgments from the manipulation of images;
> can redeem representation from simple delegation to putative experts; can
> redeem zeal from bureaucratization; can redeem empathy from the demagogues
> of sentimentality.
>
> For many theorists of democracy, a politics of CSR seems the inevitable
> outcome of human progress. And yet, there are dissenting voices implicit
in
> the literatures of the social and political theory which can be typified
> into three classes of argument: the potential for tyranny, the structure
of
> modern society, and the possible violation of human nature.
>
> CSR, it can be argued, carries with it requirements for its implementation
> that are tantamount to tyranny. It reflects a singular vision of the good
> society, one of universal concern for political life and its pre-eminent
> status of citizenship. Given that many, perhaps most, people may not
> possess such an interest, or wish to manifest it only periodically in
> defense of valued ways of life (family, work, ethnicity, community, etc),
> CSR would require standards of conversation and levels of self-scrutiny
and
> disclosure that are, in practice, intrusive and coercive. CSR would be
> perceived by many as a n enforced search for personally intolerable
> standard of coherence between private conduct and public ideals
> including--as has been argued against Habermas-- at the level of
language.
>
> The sheer complexity of modern society is the basis for a second class of
> arguments against CSR. Institutional differentiation and specialization
> means that no one person is capable of envisioning the whole of
> society. Myths, assumptions, trust, values and norms--assumed to mean the
> same things to people who espouse them--these are what hold society
> together. Like Dostoevsky's grand inquisitor, truly worldly people
> understand that bread, mystery and authority are the pillars of order.
>
> Such arguments, often dismissed as elitist and incompatible with
democratic
> freedoms, need not be seen as such. Social complexity allows for a
> multiplicity of selves and a norm of privacy that underwrites
> liberty. True, this is a negative liberty, the right to be left alone and
> free to choose when to enter politics, however defined. The price is a
> principle of legitimacy that is understood as suffrage through periodic
> acts by a 'public' whose life is essentially lived outside of the polity.
> To object to the preservation of an "outside" to politics, or to subject
it
> to a
> standard of constant politicization, is to abandon the balance made
> possible by modern societal complexity, between freedom as illusion and
> freedom as reality.
>
> A third objection to CSR is based on its relentless injunction to subject
> potentially all social practices to the rigors of public articulation.
> Here it is argued that the social world is held together through
> non-contractual solidarity, a kind of non-rational domain of social life
> that must remain unexamined if we are to ever get much accomplished. Good
> outcomes as well as bad are possible precisely because so much of social
> life is left unspoken. The linearity of spoken accountability may subvert
> the poetic simultaneities of practice in which the good that is served by
> practical judgment, is subverted by having to defend it on principle.
> If the risk be taken at all, through forums and deliberations appropriate
> to CSR, they need to be, in some sense, separated from those political
> process of formal administration and decision-making. But how can such
> boundaries be maintained in practice without regulations of Byzantine
> complexity whose legalism would stand in stark contrast to the perceived
> conversational authenticity they are intended to protected?
>
> Finally there is the possibility of arguing against CSR in the name of
> human nature. Perhaps human beings require faith in some unquestionable
> background in order to undertake the risks of action. Perhaps CSR is but
> another name for that presumptuous intellectualism which the Scottish
> Moralists criticized in those who thought the social world was
envisionable
> enough to be consciously planned. Perhaps the human spirit is collectively
> too fragile to bear the ambiguities of perpetually informed consent.
>
> Episodic forums in the form of debates, assemblies, juries, testimonials,
> lectures, and the like no longer satisfy what we mean by the need for
> 'free' or 'public deliberative spaces.' It is both exhilarating and
> agonizing to consider how, in the name of democracy, a social order might
> seek to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. Is that the end point
> of any crusade against a technocratic politics? Should we regard popular
> sovereignty as that radical sense of informed consent appropriate to a
> politics of conscious world construction? These are but a few questions
> commended to our imagination, for they are, I think, necessary in our
quest
> to define democracy more adequately for modern life.
>
> kelley
>
>
>
> >>
>
>