Category: Social Cooperation

Rom Coles

I have been traveling, so not posting. But I have also been talking some with Rom Coles via email–as he responded to my post some time back on his book, Visionary Pragmatism. Rom is a human of unbelievable energy, having written a number of interesting books of political theory (in fact, “visionary” is the best word to describe his books), while also carrying on a more than full life as a community organizer/political activist. In particular, he is deeply committed to and engaged in democracy on the ground. So here is his description of what he is currently up to in Sydney, Australia, as he works to catalyze community responses to climate change and to the economic devastations of neoliberalism. Everything in quotes is by Rom.

“Thanks for those sharp reflections in your blogpost. I think I agree with basically everything there – including, for sure, the need to work with/in the Democratic Party in order to pull it left in the context of winner takes all election system. Especially when the only alternative is the Green ‘party’ which is a party in name only – or worse, a parody of a party. I also really liked some of your other posts, including the Merlefest one. For all its limitations, I have found Merlefest to be a pretty heterogeneous space of conviviality (yes, all white, but also these festivals tend to be the only places where conservative southerners, hippies, professionals, etc., gather and share at least some overlapping enjoyments…). But then, I’m biased as I just love bluegrass and especially new grass and bluegrass-jazz-classical-blues fusions! We go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival most summers and love it – though it is much less diverse.

The one thing I’m interested in opening further than you may want, perhaps?, is a lot more institutional change in higher ed that is supportive of engaged modes of research and pedagogy. I ‘get’ the critique of that – perhaps most famously from Wendy Brown, and also many others – and I love reading, teaching and writing about great books as much as anyone. But I also think that we are in the last decade (if that) for generating major change to avert complete planetary collapse, widespread neofascism emerging in quite a few spots, etc, and that there is still comparatively a lot of freedom in these spaces we inhabit – though the boxes are shrinking rapidly for sure.

In Sydney, I’m working more on an inter-institutional level right now, helping to catalyse an engaged research and pedagogy movement that so far has drawn scholars from 8 institutions of higher ed in the city. We are working with Sydney Alliance, which is an umbrella organisation of 45+ organisations – ranging from a variety of faith traditions, unions, nonprofits and so forth. We’re cooking up a pretty ambitious ‘pilot’ collaboration around climate justice in migrant communities in western Sydney. The aim is to pull all sorts of capacities together to cultivate green energy, participatory democratic cultures that collaborate across lines not crossed so far (in this case Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese, Indians, Middle Easterners, white progressives, and more), perhaps (still in discussion stage) generating new community-based economic models/platforms, etc. We’re also strategising to ‘flip’ those parliamentary seats, which are pivotal to Aussie politics – sort of like how if you flipped several states in the Southeastern US you would flip the country – pulling the plug on the ’Southern Strategy’ that has held sway for half a century now!

At the same time, something that is very exciting about it is that we are organizing this through the National Tertiary Education Union, so at one and the same time building an inter institutional identity as scholars and a locus of power to intervene on educational issues at the state and national level, and also really trying to shift what the union is, so that it not merely a wage-contracts negotiating unit (important as that is) but also a union that is a locus of voice and organizing power around the craft of research and teaching and how universities are structured. This is super important in AU right now because the form neoliberalization is taking is to abolish departments – leaving faculty as mass anti-associational ‘lumpen’ and creating yet another administrative layer on top that dictates downward. Anyhow, all this is to say we’re up to some interesting stuff, I think.”

Conviviality

Music may be the best thing in American daily life. I guess I could try to expand that to the arts generally. But I am not sure that any of the other arts have as wide an appeal or generate such idyllic communal scenes.

Last week I went on a Tuesday night with some friends to the BlueNote in Durham. It was open mic night, with bands of four to six being formed from the people who sign up to play. Mostly the blues, with the music ranging from passable to surprisingly good. About sixty people in the audience, of all ages and races. Lots of dancing, plenty of beer drunk, and enthusiastic cheering for the musicians. Lots of people out having a good time—with good cheer all around.

Then I spent four days at Merlefest, the huge music festival held each year in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. No alcohol allowed, although the festival is just about totally unpoliced. I saw two security personnel on Sunday, the last day, and realized I had not seen any security or police the first three days. Lots of volunteers, in their bright yellow vests, and some announcement of the rules from the stages, but no one, as far as I could see, was stopped from doing anything. We snuck in some alcohol—and I am sure we were not the only ones. But no visible drunkenness that I could see, while everyone is almost sickeningly polite, and (once again) enthusiastic about the music and about the good time we are all having together. Over 10,000 people there on Saturday and good cheer all around, with the unwritten rules about seats and places at the various stages universally respected. And then there are all those 20 something musicians who are bringing back the traditional music even as they are creating new music. Plus an astoundingly knowledgeable core audience—people who also know and love this music and its history and its old standards.

My rose-colored view does need to be qualified. We ended up at the ER on Saturday around noon (a false alarm, luckily) and the staff there told us how they hated Merlefest because they were fated to see lots of drug overdoses and some alcohol poisonings over the weekend. Back at the festival, I tried to see the signs of these problems–but did not.

Also, the crowd was all white, a mixture of white professionals and Trump voters. (So my wife–who wasn’t there–said, “there’s the harmony. Easy for people to behave well among all their own kind.” Please read that statement with the proper sarcastic tone.) The culture gap was revealed dramatically on two occasions. Friday night the headliner was a country singer named Jimmy Johnson (or some such; I had never heard of him), who has a beard down to his navel, and a beer gut that should not adorn a thirty-something body, singing formulaic Nashville songs that sounded like every country record of the past thirty years. After two numbers, my friends and I were done; but as we walked out, we saw that the reserved seats were about half full while the unreserved seats were completely and totally packed. This guy was a big star, a must see, for a large audience that obviously lives in a different universe than I do.

Then on Sunday morning we were treated to a Christian rock star named Paul Thorn. Had never heard of him either, or really known about the world of Christian rock. And again a huge crowd, much larger than any of the crowds for the banjo meisters Bela Fleck or Allison Brown. Exactly the kind of music I most dislike—chord thumping, drum driven, banging as opposed to note picking—was what really drew in the crowds. And the slick, smarmy Christian preacher, with his little homilies in between his Christian rock numbers, had them in the palm of his hand. Looked him up on google, and he just started out as a rock musician wannabe; the Christian stuff came later, which only heightens my prejudicial conviction that he’s a fraud.

One of my friends was offended by my distaste for Paul Thorn. She thought him a sincere Christian, disliked my immediate suspicion that these Christians are inevitably exploiters of the proles. But it is hard for me to feel charitable toward Christians these days, not when their unflagging support for Donald Trump shows them up in all their mean-spirited bigotry.

But I didn’t sit down at the typewriter to bash Christians. I sat down to reflect (yet again) on the conviviality that characterizes American daily life. My son lives in a DC neighborhood that is 85% African-American and was 100% black five years ago. The street vibe is very friendly—in stark contrast to the street vibe in DC when I first lived there in the 1970s. I don’t fully understand it; if I were black, I would be pissed off all the time. When the police (who are usually black) have any dealings with someone on the street in the neighborhood, there are always five to ten people standing around videoing the encounter on their phones. Gentrification is slowly moving up H Street from Union Station toward my son’s house, two miles further east. It will probably reach his block in 3 to 5 years. Yet everyone on the street—and in the local stores—smiles and says Hello and is invariably polite.

I have the same experience in New York City, where I grew up. When I asked an old friend a few years ago “when did everyone in New York become so nice,” she instantly replied, “isn’t it disgusting?” She knew exactly what I was talking about. A certain kind of macho swagger has lost its cool for large swathes of the population.

And yet . . . We have all the sexual harassment (and worse) even as crime rates are going down. And we have the immigrant hatred and black bashing. Just like in 1968, we want to say that’s just the old folks; that kind of stuff is going to die out. But the kids of 1968 are the old folks now. Our politics is worse than ever; our society’s neglect of large swathes of the citizenry and the rhetorical justifications offered for the state’s and the corporation’s cruelty are more bald-faced than ever. The bile pouring out of the TV and over the internet just doesn’t connect up with the conviviality of face-to-face daily life.

I don’t understand this world I now live in, where life on the streets is so much less mean than I expect, while our public discourse is so hateful that I can’t believe people think that way—or would dare to utter such thoughts in public. I want to run and hide in the music, where a good life beckons.

More on Institutions

I promise to get back to what kinds of institutions the left should aspire to establish. (Although my deferring a discussion on that topic does reflect my not having a proposal that satisfies me.) But first let me say a bit more about institutions in order to clarify what I am talking about when asking the left to be more institution-minded.

Boltanksi’s definition of institution is an odd one insofar as he focuses in on a single function: establishing the terms by which a collective organizes its experiences and constructs a “reality” to which it attempts to provide a stability and determinateness that combats the inherent “uncertainty” of a life in time. That’s an awfully abstract, even metaphysical understanding of institutions. And I doubt it is the function that would first leap to mind for people using the term “institution.” It seems to neglect the concrete things we usually associate with institutions—namely, the fact that they employ functionaries, who exist in an (almost invariably) hierarchical set of relations in order to perform certain specified tasks, which include sanctions for those who violate the institution’s procedure and codes, but also include more positive accomplishments. Institutions exist to get things done; they are sites of organized collective endeavors.

Let’s take the university as an institution. Its grading and tenuring and hiring/firing procedures are all, partly, forms of sanctions. But they also exist in relation to its positive, educational mission. The university exists to get something done: namely, to produce knowledge and to impart that knowledge to the “rising generation.” Its “policing” function, then, covers “policing” in the expansive sense that Foucault has taught us that the term conveyed in the 17^th century. Policing meant all the activities—both the positive ones that provided for certain goods and the negative ones of punishment—by which an institution (not just the state, but certainly including the state as a prime instance) manages to perform the tasks it undertakes—or should we say “the tasks that a society entrusts to it.”

Taken this way, an institution is a site (the preferred site?) for collective enterprises. It is the form that seems best suited to insuring that certain tasks—ones that require extensive cooperation to achieve—are accomplished by a collective.

Boltanski does not neglect these aspects of an institution—but he does try to distance them from institution proper. Instead, he assigns these aspects to “administration” and “organization.” He writes:

“To assign institutions a predominantly semantic role, consisting in stabilizing reference . . . enables us not to confuse then with two other types of entity with which they are invariably associated, but from which they are to be distinguished analytically: on the one hand, administrations, which perform policing functions; and on the other, organizations, which perform coordinating functions. These two kinds of entities refer, if you like, to the means which institutions must be equipped with in order to act in the world of bodies. . . . [I[t must be noted that the conceptual distinction we have just made between institutions, organizations, and administrations becomes blurred when the term institution is employed—as is the case in current usages, for example, when a school or a hospital is referred to as an ‘institution’—in a quasi-reified fashion, where stress is placed on the simultaneously regulatory, accounting and material framework (buildings, credit lines, etc.) In fact, a number of situations inscribed in these frameworks can, when considered in detail, assume highly diverse aspects, more of the order of administrative or organizational work. Everything that occurs in ‘institutions,’ construed in this sense, is therefore far from being of a specifically institutional order, with a large number of situations even unfolding in the register that has been characterized as practical” (79-80).

Lots to chew on here.

1) Is this analytic distinction helpful? I hesitantly say “yes.” Separating out the “semantic” function from the policing and coordination functions is useful for thinking about what institutions do.

2) Does it make sense to confine (in an act of semantic reform) the use of the term “institution” to the semantic function alone? Here I would say “no.” These kinds of attempts to depart from ordinary language to create a specialized usage more often breed confusion than anything else. How are we to expect an audience to keep constantly in mind that when I say “institution” I mean something rather different than what others mean when they say the same word?

3) Is it really possible to have institutions that are confined to only one of these functions? Boltanski has already suggested that the semantic function will usually (always?) be attached to sanctions, which suggests that at least negative policing {in a footnote, Boltanksi makes it clear that he is using “policing” in the expanded 17^th sense} always accompanies semantic construction. And once you go to establish effective sanctions, doesn’t that entail coordination of multiple persons? So it seems better to say that there are “institutions,” that there are recognizable semantic, administration, and organizational functions that institutions undertake to fulfill, and that (at best) certain institutions are more focused on one or two of these functions than on the other ones. Hence, we could say Congress, in writing and passing legislation, is more oriented to the semantic function, while leaving the administrative function to the police, and the coordination function to the various executive agencies entrusted with bringing legislation into practice. But it seems just wrong not to recognize that the way a law is enacted—both administratively and organizationally—will alter its meanings, its semantics. I am tempted to say that the whole point of pragmatism is that meanings are created through practice, in use. (Pragmatics’ and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on how a word’s meaning resides in its use.) So the attempt to divorce the semantic from the administrative and the organizational is to imagine a frictionless world of ideal legislation. Back to the rough ground! Meanings are forged in interactions, in use—and the same should, presumably, be said about the “reality” that Boltanski sees institutions as constructing. In short, administration and organization are baked in; they can only analytically be separated out; they can’t be separated out in practice.

4) All of which leads me to suspect that my real complaint about the left is, to put it in the crudest and most clichéd of terms, that it is addicted to theory and fights shy of practice, that it loves to dwell in the frictionless world of legislating semantics, and never rolls up its sleeves to do the hard, messy work of administration and organization. Armchair critique is the left’s specialty.

Is what I am saying really just that tired complaint? I would hope not. For one thing, there is the issue of the left’s theoretical resistance to institutionalization. That is, the left (besides hating punishment) is extremely wary of “stability,” of hierarchy, and of determinate, non-revisable declarations. Which I guess is a way of saying that the left theoretically desires community, but temperamentally feels deeply uncomfortable with any constraints on an anarchistic individualism, with every person unconstrained by collective demands or orthodoxies. Institutions smell of conformity, of pushing people into molds that also make them better “producers.” We didn’t need Foucault to teach us that institutions work to insure that people are well-behaved, that they follow the rules, don’t disrupt the prevailing order, and make their expected “contribution” to social prosperity within a sacrosanct “order.” Institutions, in all three of the dimensions Boltanski describes, are potentially tyrannical. They lay down the law, and function to get people to obey that law, even to love it.

Yet how does any collective ever get anything done without institutions? Organization gives any collective a huge advantage over those who are not organized. This was to secret of Rome’s success, with its organized legions. And it is the reason why the destruction of the labor unions has been such an unmitigated disaster for wage earners. Organized capital, with its lobbyists, PR personnel, and trade associations, can act with an effectiveness that dwarfs anything individuals can achieve on their own. And it is always useful to remember Will Rogers’s quip: “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” To resist organization is to tie one hand behind your back in a fight that is going to be tough enough, given the discrepancy in resources each side can all upon.

So the left needs to come to terms with the need for organization—for gathering resources, for getting its message out, for coordinating political action and pressure. The question is what forms can/should that organization take. The classic, Leninist answer was “the party.” The more recent answer has been “the movement.” The question I keep worrying is whether a movement is enough. Does a movement have to move toward more organized, institutional forms in order to be effective? To make progress on the economic front, against the organized forces of capitalist exploitation, I think a movement must become more institutional. Does that mean it must have a party? To some extent, yes. But the challenge I have set myself is to try and imagine the other kinds of institutions it needs to have—since it also seems clear that electoral politics in and of itself will not be sufficient to effect the kinds of changes the left desires. A party is good for electoral politics—and electoral politics cannot and should not be abandoned or ignored. But if necessary, electoral victories are not sufficient as the presidencies of Clinton and Obama make clear.

SO: onto thinking about other institutional forms for the left.