The eclectic machines and artifacts we gather around us are ephemeral units - simultaneous supplements and extensions - that feed back and affect us; but no where do they exist without us.Jack Crow on the human foundations of institutional realities:
Read more @ The Crows EyeThe State does not exist. Approximately two and half million people work as civilian employees of the federal government. And another approximately two million persons in uniform.
The corporation does not exist. Approximately one hundred fifty million Americans work for an incorporated, limited liability or other business concern. If asked to show the corporation (or a State), you will find no thing which you can demonstrate. You can show people acting, working, ordering, obeying. You can show the material assets they have made, or collected. You can show the physical locations which they have isolated as "their own," and how those who give the orders enforce that control of space. But the so-called thing - the corporation - does not exist. The corporation, as such, functions only as a faith premise. As a belief that certain conduct, done together or under orders, amounts to a real object with an independent existence.
The gap between the fiction (state, corporation) and the material reality of laboring at the command or behest of another person or persons exists only in the human brain.
More exactly, the fictions for which people labor exist only in human brains. The so-called organizations for which they work do not in fact exist. There is no observable or demonstrable spiritual or etheric connective tissue which exists in between persons, uniting them as members of an institution or organization.
The organization itself exists only as a function of memory. As a false memory, in so much as the organization has no material reality. The organization, as learned behavior.
In discussing so-called institutions and organizations, we speak not of objective entities, of things. What we treat as things, instead exist only as remembered agreements to believe, and to believe wrongly: that a segment of a population exists as an isolated, self-contained, self-repeating entity; that routines of conduct map entities to which we belong; that habits of obedience and compulsion describe the operations of a suprapersonal creation which has its own life or existence; that coordination of tasks and labor engenders a thing which operates at a remove from the material conduct of persons or people.
The organization possesses no more self-evident truth than does any other claim to the existence of an entity which cannot demonstrate itself, but acquires shape in the brain only as a declaration of faith - God, personified fate, ghosts, consciousness, the spirit, souls or the Tao…
Posts
8 comments:
I like it, Michael. It actually sounds very Latourian to me. But do you think it might be a little too reductive? Not to say that there is an "observable or demonstrable spiritual or etheric connective tissue which exists in between persons, uniting them as members of an institution or organization."
But saying that "the fictions for which people labor exist only in human brains" is not the same as saying that those fictions do not exist... right? Perhaps those ideas are the "connective tissue" in a way ... In other words, is the idea of something less real than the material reality of the thing?
Just some thoughts...
My argument, Jeremy, is really just that the idea that institutions and organizations exist outside of human brains is a no-proof assertion.
That's certainly reductive, in so much as I refuse to believe in a thing just because someone has given it a name. I don't believe in Santa Clause. I do believe that a child who believes in Santa Claus is real, and has real thoughts about that durable fiction.
It's a lens I use, not an exact description of human reality.
I find it especially useful, for peering at enduring so-called institutions, like the Roman Catholic Church. Each and every member of the original church is long dead. So dead that no evidence of them really exists. So, how does the "Church" retain continuity?
By training up subsequent generations of people who believe such and such about reality, and the "Church," and then act as if those beliefs inscribe the borders of a material reality.
Remove the beliefs - the memories in the brain - and the "Church" disappears. It's a bunch of properties owned by dudes who don't breed. And, it's the lies those gentlemen tell to each other, and their followers.
Or something like that.
*
Thank you for the treatment, as well, Michael.
*
To answer your final question, Jeremy - I don't think that thoughts are unreal. I think institutions and organizations which people are deliberately trained to believe, in contravention of the evidence of their senses, are unreal. The thoughts may be real - their objects are not.
I much prefer John Searle's latest effort on this topic to Mr. Crow's. Searle has written a tremendously useful book called The Construction of Social Reality.
Who would ever claim the organization, or the State, is a self-evident truth? For Searle, it isn't a declaration of faith that generates institutional reality, it is Status Function Declarations.
Searle utilizes J.L. Austin's work to develop a theory of institutional reality that is hands-down superior to Mr. Crow's. As Searle's text was just published in 2010, it cannot be expected that the academic community should have taken notice. However, I assure you, Searle's text is going to be remembered as a definitive advance in rigorous, systematic views of institutional reality.
I happen to have taken lots of notes when I read Searle's text last year (I just got lucky and searched for 2010 titles at the library the very day the text arrived at Arizona State). Here are some highlights (this way you can know what Searle says without having to read it!)
Interestingly, Searle notes that ground-level institutional facts alter the non-linguistic structure of reality. "In the creation of non-linguistic institutional facts we use meaning, the systematic powers of language, to create a set of deontic powers that go beyond the semantic powers." p.112
To satisfy Crow, brains will have to be acknowledged. Searle writes,
"In sum, for perception and memory we represent how things really are and thus achieve mind-to-world direction of fit only in virtue of world-to-mind direction of causation. For prior intentions and intentions-in-action, we get a match between how we intend things to be and how they actually are, and thus achieve world-to-mind direction of fit, only in virtue of mind-to-world direction of causation." p.39 (The former cases are cognitive self-referential causation, the latter volitional self-referential causation.)
Actually, what Crow calls a "faith object" is similar to what Searle sees to be the result of Status Function Declarations that relate networks of presupposed, mostly unconscious intentional states of various persons, also a background of abilities and capacities and dispositions, to conscious intentions, intentions-in-action, performative and declarative utterances, status functions that carry deontologies that bind persons, all in social spaces that impact non-linguistic reality.
The institutional reality is based upon Status Function Declarations, which are a certain kind of utterance (as formulated originally by J.L. Austin) whose performance has a certain form.
Basically, a person or persons counts an X as a Y in situation C. In so doing, they actually make an X into a Y in situation C by representing it as being a Y in C. The utterance is connected to prior intentions, formalized business plans, an office space, et cetera. The utterance has conditions of satisfaction, and the organization of persons through deontological Status Functions makes the institutional facts reach into and alter non-linguistic brains and spaces.
Searle is a thorough systematizer of these topics. His text The Construction of Social Reality is highly recommended. Why, Jack Crow should read it too!!!
@Jeremy
Agreed. The "fictions" do exist to us, we enact them - we realize them in our imaginations (in the neutral sense of that term).
I think I have mentioned the concept of "imagined communities" before, but I think it is very relevant to this discussion. The core of the idea is that a "nation" is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Pretty common sense you would assume, but it's actually not. You ask people on the street and then tell them that their nation is 'imaginary' and they get quite flustered and annoyed.
But your point is a fantastic one: saying that certain fictions are constructed "is not the same as saying that those fictions do not exist". And, yes, Latour would agree i think.
In fact Latour is, to my mind, one of the best thinkers when it comes to looking at how complex "associations" between "actants" come into being and are maintained.
When all is said and done we need to track the specific details and both the material and semantic (mental, imaginal) linkages beteen things. The whole ecology of civilization is a complex mesh of actants, associations and assemblages which can only be 'understood' (which for me means 'interpreted by hominids') in terms of their actual, affective specificity.
Great comment J.
@Jack
I do think it is important to qualify the claim that institutions only exist by virtue of human mentalities. I think there are a lot of non-human dynamics (like physical processes, ecological networks, built forms, climate, etc.) that play into all social realities.
This is not to say that I disagree with your central claims Jack, because obviously I support it (and strongly), but only to ensure we also don't lose track of the very real and potent affective aspects of the non-mental dimensions of social formations.
All social realities are enacted as well as constituted, or structured.
Great post and great comments Jack, thanks for extending the conversation this way. I know most of my readers will find your words resonant.
@Cameron
Those are some pretty high standards you hold Jack to there Cameron! John Searle!!! (kidding)
I love John Searle’s work. It has been a MAJOR influence on me. And as your comments suggest the term “institutional reality” in the title of this post is stolen directly from Searle. It is a term I use often and apologetically.
One thing, though, I think you are talking about Searle’s recent book The Making of the Social World (published in 2010) and not The Construction of Social Reality (which was published in 1997). I have read the 1997 book (among most of Searle's other books) and the 2010 book is next on my list to read (after my upcoming Heidegger project!). Although from what I understand similar arguments are made in both books – with the 2010 book being a much revised and improved treatment.
Regardless, I enjoyed all your comments and agree strongly that Searle’s perspective should be considered among the best available descriptions of how the social life of humans is “structured” and actually works. Have you read his book Mind, Language, and Society? It’s short, accessible and brilliant. One of my all-time favorites.
Thank you for your contributions Cameron, once again. So relevant. Amazing.
PS – For me:
- “a background of abilities and capacities and dispositions” = embodiment
- Searle’s arguments for the “Background” in general = is the kind of argument that I want to call ground my concept of “ontological intimacy” with. For me, Flesh is the plane on which the ‘background’ bursts forth.
In response to Cameron’s comments Jack posted this on his blog:
“Could the leftist insistence on recreating priestly language explain some of the failure to gain the respect, or even awareness, of the American working class?
Whether its economic jargon, or the manipulation of language to generate "cross-intersectional analysis of the dialectic of social injustice," or Zizekian flights of milky self-aggrandizement - the American leftist discussion distances its adherents from those it purports to serve.
Americans are religious, but not even the American papists are publicly priestly in their choice of words. American idiom is relatively free of the technical jargon which plagues German and French, and the English mimicry of the same. This is not to suggest that it is necessarily more honest or transparent, because that is not the case. We use language emotionally, with a preponderance of mediated symbolic catch phrases employed as markers of fealty and conformity: country, faith, family, values, family values, American way, pro-life, pro-choice, gun rights, family way, cheat, urban, douchebag, faggot, sissy, pussy, gay, girly, troops, the troops, support the troops - et cetera.
And while I'm not suggesting that leftists embrace the vulgar markers of conformity, I do wonder if this sort of misuse of language - priestly in its self-separation, in its claims to its own enlightenment - serves the interests of power more than almost any other indirect concession to its reality.
[Cameron’s] is not language used to reach out to persons. This is language employed in a priestly manner. It isolates its speakers from their objects. It is employed to elevate its users above those they address, in their own eyes (at least as I see it). It allows its users to believe in their own special validity, a priestly possession of divine knowledge and secret keys.
Well, that's my opinion.
So does it work that way, in fact?
Does it isolate its users in pockets of self-satisfaction, while alienating those it purports to address? Does "the left" continue its abject history of comedic failure, especially in the States, because its self-appointed leadership uses priestly jargon?* Because its users sound a whole lot like the practitioners of the contractual legalese of the "bankers and lawyers and merchants of grief"?
I ask this on MLK day, in part, because the genius of the civil rights movement rests in its embrace of the vernacular, the common, even the faith terms of ordinary Americans. It offered a genuine, frightening, effective threat to power, if only for a historical moment, because it was not uttered from beneath a cowled eye.”
@Jack & Cameron
I think 'embracing the vernacular' is a good strategy in some contexts, but I also think more rigorous (formal, technical) theory is also important. If we fall into taking common words and semantic associations only at face value, or only in terms of how they are deployed in wider culture circumstances, we risk the chance of becoming slaves to colloquialisms, ideology and dominant rhetorics. We must carefully analyze language and sometimes become highly technical in our descriptions. Specificity matters, especially with academic claims to adequately describe reality.
I think there is time and space for both forms of discourse/practice. Jack's comments we less technical but more accessible, more contentious (and thus more politically useful), whereas Cameron's comments were more technical and formal (and thus more ‘scientifically’ useful).
I wonder if there is any way to bridge these two discursive strains in order to create ways of communicating (rhetorics) that are more flexible and clear?
Post a Comment