reparations & exploitation

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Mon Mar 12 05:31:10 PST 2001


At 11:14 AM 3/12/01 +0200, Peter van Heusden wrote:
>In turn, this feeds into a
>kind of identification with the job which is exploited by managers,
>what I've called in the past '2nd order Taylorism'.

YES!!!!

but it is the same for academics too, yes? (and probably every other profession -- which is how professionals are exploited in a specific kind of way without ever recognizing that they are). what we write is hard work, yes. but it is dependent on all kinds of other labor: editors, janitors, reviewers, the cashier who makes/sells us our coffee, our students/peers with whom we get into arguments/discussions, the cook who makes our lunches, etc. a preface often reflect this dependence on others and heck it's even got a structure to it as to who you thank first: personal thank yous are last. (always reminds me of the preface to _End of the Line_ [a diss>book] where she thanks her therapist in the "personal" section!!!)

but, in the end, it's the author(ity) who gets all the credit.

more feminist theory is needed, to wit: "the everyday world as problematic"

"...how our knowledge of the world is mediated to us becomes a problem of knowing how that world is organized for us prior to our participation in it. As intellectuals we ordinarily receive it as a media world, a world of texts, images, journals, books, talk, and other symbolic modes. We discard as an essential focus of our practice other ways of knowing. Accounting for that mode of knowing and the social organization that sets it up for us again leads us back into an analysis of the total socieconomic order of which it is part. Inquiry remains within the circumspections of the directly experienced cannot explore and explicate the relations organizing the everyday matrices of experience.

If we address the problem of the conditions as well as the perceived forms and organization of immediate experience, we should include in it the events as they actually happen and the ordinary material world we encounter as a matter of fact: the urban renewal project that uproots four hundred families; how it is to live on welfare as an ordinary daily practice; cities as the actual physical structures in which we move; the organization of academic occasions such as that in which this chapter is organized. When we examine them, we find that there are many aspects of how these things come about of which we, as sociologists, have little to say. we have a sense that the events entering our experience originate somewhere in a human intention, but we ar unable to track back to find it and to find out how it got from there to here.

Or take this room in which I work or that room in which you are reading and treat that as a problem. If we think about the conditions of our activity here, we can trace how these chairs, table, walls, clothing, our presence come to be here; how these places (yours and mine) are cleaned and maintained, and so forth. there are human activities, intentions, and relations that are not apparent as such in the actual material conditions of our work. the social organization of the setting is not wholly available to us in its appearance. We bypass in the immediacy of the specific practical activity a complex division of labor that is an essential precondition to it. Such preconditions are fundamentally mysterious to us and present us with problems in grasping social relations with which sociology is ill equipped to deal. We experience the world as largely incompressible beyond the limits of what we know in a common sense.

Dorothy Smith _ The Conceptual Practice of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge_



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