COMMUNICATION AND THE MIND
The “development of the individual’s self, and of his self- consciousness within the field of his experience” is preeminently social. For Mead, the social process is prior to the structures and processes of individual experience.
(...) It is, however, out of the conversation of gestures that language, or conscious communication, emerges. Mead’s theory of communication is evolutionary: communication develops from more or less primitive toward more or less advanced forms of social interaction. In the human world, language supersedes (but does not abolish) the conversation of gestures and marks the transition from non-significant to significant interaction.
(...) However, it is the conversation of significant symbols that is the foundation of Mead’s theory of mind. “Only in terms of gestures as significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking — which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures — take place” (Mind, Self and Society 47). Mind, then, is a form of participation in an interpersonal (that is, social) process; it is the result of taking the attitudes of others toward one’s own gestures (or conduct in general). Mind, in brief, is the use of significant symbols.
(...) The essence of Mead’s so-called “social behaviorism” is his view that mind is an emergent out of the interaction of organic individuals in a social matrix. Mind is not a substance located in some transcendent realm, nor is it merely a series of events that takes place within the human physiological structure. Mead therefore rejects the traditional view of the mind as a substance separate from the body as well as the behavioristic attempt to account for mind solely in terms of physiology or neurology.

THE ACT
(...) There are two models of the act in Mead’s general philosophy: (1) the model of the act-as-such, i.e., organic activity in general (which is elaborated in The Philosophy of the Act), and (2) the model of the social act, i.e., social activity, which is a special case of organic activity and which is of particular (although not exclusive) relevance in the interpretation of human experience.
(...) What is of interest in this description is that the individual is not merely a passive recipient of external, environmental influences, but is capable of taking action with reference to such influences; he reconstructs his relation to his environment through selective perception and through the use or manipulation of the objects selected in perception (e.g., the path of escape mentioned above). The objects in the environment are, so to speak, created through the activity of the organic individual: the path along which the individual escapes was not “there” (in his thoughts or perceptions) until the individual needed a path of escape. Reality is not simply “out there,” independent of the organic individual, but is the outcome of the dynamic interrelation of organism and environment.
(...) The human individual, then, is a member of a social organism, and his acts must be viewed in the context of social acts that involve other individuals. Society is not a collection of preexisting atomic individuals (as suggested, for example, by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), but rather a processual whole within which individuals define themselves through participation in social acts. The acts of the individual are, according to Mead, aspects of acts that are trans- individual. “For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the part or parts” (Mind, Self and Society 7). Thus, the social act is a “dynamic whole,” a “complex organic process,” within which the individual is situated, and it is within this situation that individual acts are possible and have meaning.

SELF AND OTHER
(...) This social conception of the self, Mead argues, entails that individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the (logical or biological) preconditions of that interaction. Mead contrasts his social theory of the self with individualistic theories of the self (that is, theories that presuppose the priority of selves to social process). “The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (Mind, Self and Society 135).
(...) While there is a form of pre-reflective consciousness that refers to the “bare thereness of the world,” it is reflective (or self-) consciousness that characterizes human awareness. The pre-reflective world is a world in which the self is absent (Mind, Self and Society 135-136).
(...) Self-consciousness is the result of a process in which the individual takes the attitudes of others toward herself, in which she attempts to view herself from the standpoint of others. The self-as-object arises out of the individual’s experience of other selves outside of herself. The objectified self is an emergent within the social structures and processes of human intersubjectivity.
(...) Mead’s account of the social emergence of the self is developed further through an elucidation of three forms of inter-subjective activity: language, play, and the game. These forms of “symbolic interaction” (that is, social interactions that take place via shared symbols such as words, definitions, roles, gestures, rituals, etc.) are the major paradigms in Mead’s theory of socialization and are the basic social processes that render the reflexive objectification of the self possible.
(...) The self emerges out of “a special set of social relations with all the other individuals” involved in a given set of social projects (Mind, Self and Society 156-157). The self is always a reflection of specific social relations that are themselves founded on the specific mode of activity of the group in question. The concept of property, for example, presupposes a community with certain kinds of responses; the idea of property has specific social and historical foundations and symbolizes the interests and values of specific social groups.
(...) Mead delineates two types of social groups in civilized communities. There are, on the one hand, “concrete social classes or subgroups” in which “individual members are directly related to one another.”
(...) Mead’s description of social relations also has interesting implications vis-a-vis the sociological problem of the relation between consensus and conflict in society. It is clear that both consensus and conflict are significant dimensions of social process; and in Mead’s view, the problem is not to decide either for a consensus model of society or for a conflict model, but to describe as directly as possible the function of both consensus and conflict in human social life.

TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
The temporal structure of human existence, according to Mead, can be described in terms of the concepts of emergence, sociality, and freedom.
(...) Emergence, then, is a fundamental condition of experience, and the experience of the emergent is the experience of temporality. Emergence sunders present and future and is thereby an occasion for action. Action, moreover, occurs in time; the human act is infected with time — it aims at the future. Human action is teleological. Discontinuity, therefore, and not continuity (in the sense of mere duration or passage), is the foundation of time-experience (and of experience itself). The emergent event constitutes time, i.e., creates the necessity of time.
(...) Like Edmund Husserl, Mead conceives of human consciousness as intentional in its structure and orientation: the world of conscious experience is “intended,” “meant,” “constituted,” “constructed” by consciousness. Thus, objectivity can have meaning only within the domain of the subject, the realm of consciousness. It is not that the existence of the objective world is constituted by consciousness, but that the meaning of that world is so constituted. In Husserlian language, the existence of the objective world is transcendent, i.e., independent of consciousness; but the meaning of the objective world is immanent, i.e., dependent on consciousness. In Mead’s “phenomenology” of historical experience, then, the past may be said to possess an objective existence, but the meaning of the past is constituted or constructed according to the intentional concerns of historical thought. The meaning of the past (”what has happened”) is defined by an historical consciousness that is rooted in a present and that is opening upon a newly emergent future.
(...) Mead’s point is that all such reconstructions and interpretations of the past are grounded in a present that is opening into a future and that the time-conditioned nature and interests of historical thought made the construction of a purely “objective” historical account impossible. Historical consciousness is “subjective” in the sense that it aims at an interpretation of the past that will be humanly meaningful in the present and in the foreseeable future. Thus, for Mead, historical inquiry is the imaginative-but-honest, intelligent-and-intelligible reconstruction and interpretation of the human past on the basis of all available and relevant evidence. Above all, the historian seeks to define the meaning of the human past and, in that way, to make a contribution to humanity’s search for an overall understanding of human existence.
(...) Thus, the principle of sociality is the ontological foundation of Mead’s concept of emergence: sociality is the ground of the possibility of emergence as well as the basis on which emergent events are incorporated into the structure of ongoing experience.
(...) From the standpoint of Mead’s description of the temporality of action and his emphasis on the importance of problematic situations in human experience, emergencies or “crises” in one’s life are of the utmost existential significance. I am a being that exists in relation to a world. As such, it is essential that I experience myself as “in harmony with” the world; and if this proves difficult or impossible, then I am thrown into a “crisis,” i.e., I am threatened with separation (Greek, krisis) from the world; and separation from the world, from the standpoint of a being- in-the-world, is tantamount to non- being. It is in this context that the loss of one’s freedom, the experience of lost autonomy, becomes a real possibility. Encountering a crisis in the process of life, the individual may well experience himself as paralyzed, as “stuck” in his situation, as patient rather than as agent of change. But it is also the case that the experience of crisis may lead to a deepened sense of one’s active involvement in the temporal unfolding of life. From Mead’s point of view, a crisis is a “crucial time” or a turning-point in individual existence: negatively, it is a threat to the individual’s continuity in and with his world; positively, it is an opportunity to redefine, broaden, and deepen the individual’s sense of self and of the world to which the self is ontologically related.

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Historical thought is a reconstruction of a communal past in an attempt to understand the nature and significance of a communal present and a (potential) communal future. Historical accounts are never final since historical thought continually restates the past in terms of newly emergent situations in a present that opens upon a future.
(...) Mead’s description of the Romantics’ reconstruction of self-consciousness on the basis of a reconstructed past is a concrete illustration of his conception of historical consciousness as developing with reference to a problematic present. The Romantic historians and philosophers, confronted with the disruption of experience, which was the result of the early modern revolutionary period, turned to the medieval past in an effort to redefine the historical and cultural identity of European man. The major characteristic of Romantic thought, according to Mead, was an attempt to redefine European self- consciousness through the re-appropriation of the historical past.
(...) The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity are, from Mead’s standpoint, abstract ideals that could not survive the post-revolutionary struggles for political supremacy and the control of property.
(...) The failure of “the revolution” left Europe in confusion. The European’s ties to his medieval past had been severed, but his revolutionary hopes had not been realized. He was caught between two worlds. He could not be sure of his identity. His sense of self was in crisis. The Romantic movement was an attempt to overcome this crisis by returning to and reconstructing the European past. Romanticism, then, was an effort to reestablish the continuity between the past, present, and future of European culture.
(...) The upshot of this point of view, according to Mead, is an activist or pragmatic conception of mind and knowledge. Knowing is a process involving the interaction of self and not-self. Knowledge is a result of a process in which the self takes action with reference to the not-self, in which the not-self is appropriated by the self. In this analysis of the Romantic epistemology, the germ of Mead’s own “philosophy of the act” is apparent. The interaction of self and not-self is the foundation, not only of our knowledge of the world, but also of our knowledge of the self. Self-consciousness requires the objectification of the self. The Romantic elucidation of the polarity of self and not-self makes self-objectification (and therefore self- consciousness) theoretically comprehensible. In action toward the not-self, self-discovery becomes possible.
(...) The idea of evolution is central in Mead’s philosophy. For Mead, experience is fundamentally processual and temporal. Experience is the undergoing of change. Mead’s entire ontology is an expression of evolutionary thinking. His concept of reality-as- process is ecological in structure and dynamic in content. Nature is a system of systems, a multiplicity of “transacting” fields and centers of activity. The relation between organism and environment (percipient event and consentient set) is mutual and dynamic. Both organism and environment are active: the activity of the organism alters the environment, and the activity of the environment alters the organism. There is no way of separating the two in reality, no way of telling which is primary and which secondary. Thus, Mead’s employment of the concept of evolution is an aspect of his attempt to avoid the behavioristic and environmentalist determinism that would regard the organism as passive and as subject to the caprices of nature.
(...)

Far from the working class internationally contracting, it has continued to grow. And the distinctions between this enlarged working class and other oppressed groups, far from becoming marginal, are as central as when Lenin and Trotsky polemicised against the Narodniks.
(...) Filmer concluded that the overall number of employed people worldwide was about 880 million, compared with around 1,000 million people working mainly for their own account on the land (overwhelmingly peasants), and 480 million working for their own account in industry and services. The figure for 'employed people' includes some non-workers' groups as well as workers. There is a section of the bourgeoisie in receipt of enormous corporate salaries, and below that the new middle class who get paid more value than they create in return for helping to control the mass of workers. These groups probably amount to 10 percent of the population.¹⁴ That reduces the size of the employed world working class to around 700 million, with about a third in 'industry'and the rest in 'services'.
(...) But the total size of the working class is considerably greater than this. The class also includes those who are dependent on income that comes from the waged labour of relatives or savings and pensions resulting from past wage labour--that is, non-employed spouses, children and retired elderly people. If these categories are added in, the worldwide total figure for the working class comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion. Anyone who believes we have said 'farewell' to this class is not living in the real world.
(...) Add these 'semi-workers' or 'peasant workers' to the numbers of people completely dependent on wage labour, and you get a figure which must be somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the world's population. In other words around the core of 1.5 to 2 million proletarians there are a similar number of semi-proletarians.
(...) Industrial employment has fallen sharply in a number of countries over the last three decades--in Britain and Belgium by a third, and in France by more than a quarter. But these do not represent a deindustrialisation of the whole of the advanced industrial world, but rather a restructuring of industry within it. The number of industrial jobs in the advanced industrial countries as a whole was 112 million in 1998--25 million more than in 1951 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. There is a great danger of looking at the world through British or French glasses, and not seeing what is really happening on a global scale. So Toni Negri's Italy may not be in the same league as the US or Japan, but the industrial workers have certainly not disappeared. There were 6.5 million four years ago, down only one sixth since 1971.
(...) But that is not all. The usual distinction between 'industry' and 'services' obscures more than it reveals. The category 'services' includes things which are of no intrinsic importance to the capitalist production (for instance, the hordes of servants who provide individual capitalist parasites with their leisure). But it has always included things which are absolutely central to it (like the transportation of goods and the provision of computer software). What is more, some of the shift from 'industry' to the 'service sector' amounts to no more than a change in the name given to essentially similar jobs.
(...) But even Rowthorn's figures considerably underestimate the size of the working class--that class whose labour is essential for the accumulation of capital. Many of Rowthorn's 'free standing services' are essential to such accumulation in the modern world. Two in particular are absolutely indispensable for capitalist accumulation today--health provision and the education service.
(...)There is a widespread myth that the 'service' workforce consists of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist (and former SDP member) Polly Toynbee writes: 'We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class'.³⁷ So Hardt and Negri claim:

The jobs for the most part are highly mobile involving flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy... Through the process of post-modernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.³⁸

In fact, however, any proper breakdown of the figures for 'service' employment provides a very different picture to this. Some of the most important 'services industries' employ overwhelmingly 'manual workers' of the 'traditional' sort.
(...) Altogether there are a minimum of 42 million 'service sector workers' in manual or routine white collar occupations in the US. These, it should be added, are the occupations that have been expanding most rapidly recently with the 'creation' of a mass of low wage jobs. On top of them, many workers in other occupational categories would have been doing work which was little different--for instance, many of the 3.2 million 'sales representatives' and the 4.3 million 'technicians and related support' workers. So would many of the 'health assessment and treating occupations' (83 percent female, unlike the 'health diagnostic' category above them which is 75 percent male), and many of the 5.3 million school teachers (75 percent female). Together these groups constitute well over half the 'service sector'. Add to them the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries, and you have some three quarters of the US population made up of workers. If the 'working class' has 'disappeared from view' for people like Hardt and Negri, it is because they have been looking in the wrong direction.
(...) A central theme of all those who see the working class as disappearing is that the jobs that remain are so precarious that little remains of the permanent working class organisations and communities that used to exist. The argument has been a continual feature of 'post-Marxist' arguments for the last 15 years both from 'Third Way' social democrats and those on the 'autonomist' left.
(...) But this does not mean that in reality capital has been able to destroy workers' resistance to such flexibility, or even that it itself can keep accumulating without continually reproducing relatively permanent labour forces within particular workplaces. One recent study for Britain shows:

Many of the commonly held assumptions about today's world of work need to be seriously questioned. A wide gulf exists between the over-familiar rhetoric and hyperbole we hear daily about our flexible and dynamic labour market and the realities of workplace life. The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'new' kind of employment relations, seen in the 'end of the career' and the 'death of the permanent job for life'.⁴⁸

People often do not see the limits to what capital can achieve in terms of 'flexible labour markets' because they lump together quite different forms of employment: part time employment, temporary employment, employment on short term contracts, and self employment on behalf of firms. But part time employment can also be permanent employment--as it usually is among women in Britain. Similarly, those working on short term contracts can find them renewed month after month, or year after year. They lack long term rights and are the first to go when crises hit, but they do not move into and out of jobs all the time in between. Finally, those in genuinely temporary employment may be indispensable to production and be provided on a long term but intermittent basis by agencies which are themselves large firms and dependent on maintaining a permanent pool of labour to supply to other firms.
(...) Across Western Europe as a whole, 'one out of five jobs has been precarious during the last five years'--but that still leaves four out of five jobs as 'permanent'.
(...) The figures do, however, show that 'average job tenure has remained relatively stable since 1975'. The idea that the working class has been 'flexible-ised' out of existence is completely mistaken. Most people continue to work in the same place, and to be subject to exploitation by the same employers for quite long periods of time. By the same token, they have the time and opportunity to connect up with the people around them to fight back against that exploitation.
(...)

The claim that the 'permanent' worker is a thing of the past is often connected with the claim that employers can move production--and jobs--at a moment's notice.

So Hardt and Negri write:

The informatisation of production and the increasing importance of immaterial production have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory, and capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given local population by moving its site to another point in the global network... Entire labouring populations, which had enjoyed a certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves in increasingly precarious employment situations.⁵⁷

This vastly exaggerates the movement of capital, and the ease with which firms can move their operations from one place to another... As I have explained elsewhere,⁵⁸ capital as money (ie finance) can move at the touch of a computer key from one location to another (although determined governments can still impede its movement). But capital as means of production finds it much more difficult to do so. Physical equipment has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, transport has to be arranged for goods produced, a reliable workforce with the requisite skills found, and so on. It is a process that is usually expensive, taking years rather than seconds. What is more, physical production depends upon transporting goods to markets, and therefore closeness to markets is an advantage. The result is that most of the restructuring of industry over the last three decades has usually been within the world's existing industrial regions.
(...) There has, of course, been a shift in certain manufacturing industries to states which were not industrialised 40 years ago--otherwise the phenomenon of the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) and of certain expanding industries in 'underdeveloped' countries would be inexplicable. But there is little evidence to support the claim that 'advanced countries are abandoning the production of manufactured goods. Many labour-intensive manufacturing activities in the advanced economies, such as clothing or routine assembly, have been put out of business by rising imports from developing countries', but these imports have been financed 'not by the export of services' but 'by the export of other manufactures, especially capital goods and intermediate products such as chemicals'.
(...) Restructuring means that much of this production does not take place in the old industrial centres, such as those in and around Detroit, but in the 'sun belt' states of the west and south. So most US auto workers no longer work directly for the 'Big Three' of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, but for 'trans-plant manufacturers' like Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Daimler Benz, or for new parts manufacturers spun off by GM so as to weaken the union.⁶³ This is a far cry from the picture sometimes presented of all US auto jobs disappearing over the border into Mexico.
(...) But it is not 'fluid' in being able to move effortlessly from one location to another. The general trend for capitalism today is still for production to be concentrated in the advanced countries. Some sorts of production have shifted to a few favoured areas of the Third World--the NICs of east and south east Asia, and eastern China. But capital still finds it more profitable, in general, to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid 20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skills levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure mean they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America has been one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and of most of Africa of absolute decline.
(...) Capitalism has created a world working class in the last century and a half. Industry and wage labour exist today in virtually every part of the globe. The industrial working class has a worldwide presence. But the combined and uneven development of the system means it is very unevenly distributed between regions. Rough calculations indicate that 40 percent of the world's 270 million or so industrial workers are in the OECD countries, around 15 percent each in China, Latin America and the former USSR, around 10 percent in the rest of Asia, and around 5 percent in Africa.
(...) Sub-Saharan Africa is the exception rather than the norm for the world system as a whole, or even for its vast, impoverished regions. In Asia and Latin America there has been a growth of wage labour. But it has often been outside what is usually called the 'modern' sector, and has often been accompanied by an equally rapid rise of self employment.
(...) Most of the self employed are by no means privileged. A survey of Ahmedabad shows only one tenth of the male self employed as having a 'separate business place'. A third worked on the streets, as vendors, rickshaw drivers, cart pullers and the like. There are 200,000 rickshaw men in Mumbai, 80,000 in Ahmedabad, and 30,000 in Bangalore, while Calcutta has around 250,000 street hawkers and Calcutta more than 100,000.
(...) In addition to--and often merging into--those in the informal sector, there are everywhere those denied any opportunities for employment by modern capitalism: the unemployed. Their numbers vary considerably from region to region and country to country--depending, in part, on the ease of people making some sort of livelihood in the informal sector.
(...) Capitalist accumulation is causing the rapid growth of cities across wide swathes of the globe, and of occupations involving production for the market. In most regions (although not in most of Africa) there is also a growth of the number involved in wage labour of a relatively productive sort in medium to large workplaces. But even more rapid is the expansion of the vast mass of people precariously trying to make a livelihood through casual labour, selling things in the streets, trying to survive through working on their own account. At one extreme this mass merges into the petty bourgeoisie proper of small employers, at the other into the desperate poverty of those who can hardly get a livelihood at all--48 percent of the urban population of Brazil live below the poverty line, and two out of five of these below the 'indigence' income needed to satisfy food needs but nothing else.
(...) There is one widespread, very simple, and very mistaken, answer. That is to see the workers with permanent jobs as 'privileged', as some sort of 'labour aristocracy'. This is certainly how it can seem to those driven into the informal sector. In the formal sector there are usually considerably higher wage rates and often sickness benefits, paid holidays, and pensions of sorts as well... Employers have not, however, provided such things out of the goodness of their heart. They need a certain stability to their labour force, particularly when it comes to skilled workers who they do not want to be poached by rivals during times of boom. States often want such stability as well, seeing welfare provision for a section of the urban workforce as a way of protecting themselves against sudden explosions of popular discontent.
(...) It often seems counterintuitive to argue that groups of workers who have better conditions than others do not benefit at their expense--whether the argument is used about Western workers and workers in the Third World, or formal sector Third World workers and informal sector workers. But in this case the 'counterintuitive' argument is correct. In many industries, the more stable and experienced a workforce, the more productive it is. Capital is prepared to concede higher wages to certain of the workers in those industries because by doing so it is able to make more profits out of them. Hence the apparent contradiction--some sections of the world's workers are both better paid than others, and more exploited. It is this alone which explains why capitalists, motivated only by the drive for profit, do not usually invest on any great scale in regions like Africa, where wages are lowest.
(...) That, of course, does not prevent capital from continually trying to hold down what it has to pay--and from seizing on new technologies and restructuring production to reduce its labour costs drastically. Hence the pattern in much of the world for the established 'formal' workforce to remain more or less intact, but for there to be some chipping away round the edges and for many new jobs to be in the 'informal' sector.
(...) [mike davis + a rejoinder to hardt/negri, more or less] The great mass of the informal workforce in 'developing' countries today are people who are new to the urban workforce--either from the countryside (as with the more than 100 million peasants seeking employment in China's cities) or women and young people seeking paid labour for the first time. But the pattern of capitalist accumulation over the last couple of decades means that the labour demands of modern, productive industry have not expanded on anything like the scale needed to absorb them into its workforce. Competition on a global scale has caused capitalists to turn to 'capital intensive' forms of production (with what Marx called a rising 'organic composition of capital') which do not require massive numbers of new workers. As a result, the only ways for most new entrants to the labour force to gain a livelihood are through the most meagre forms of self employment or through selling their labour power at such a low price and under such arduous conditions that small capitalists at the margins of the system can profit from exploiting it.
(...) That is not, however, the end of the matter. Capitalism has one important use for those it refuses to allow to make a proper livelihood. It uses them to put increased pressure on those it does exploit in the most productive areas of the economy. Far from the growth of the informal workforce benefiting the workforce in the formal sector, it has been accompanied by an increased exploitation of workers in this sector--and in many cases by a deterioration. [empirical proof follows]
(...) In both India and Latin America something else has been happening--the shifting of certain jobs in big industry from the formal to the informal sector. This allows management to cut some of their wage costs--and to put pressure on the remaining 'formal' sector of the workforce to accept worse conditions.
(...) It is wrong, as people like Paulo Singer do, to write of 'deproletarianisation'.119 Rather, what is happening is a restructuring of the workforce, with the hiving off by big firms of some tasks (usually relatively unskilled and therefore easily performed by a floating workforce) to small firms, labour-only contractors and the supposedly self employed. It should be added that this phenomenon is by no means new in the history of capitalism. Casual employment has often played an important role in certain industries--for instance, in the docks in Britain until the late 1960s. And forms of contract labour are very old--it was common in the textile factories of the industrial revolution. In the mines in both the US and Britain in the 19th century, overseers or foremen ('buttymen') would recruit workers and pay them out of a sum given to them by the mine owners. These casual groups of workers may not always have felt themselves to be part of the working class. They were often detached from the struggles of other sections of that class for years, even decades, at a time. Yet the potential for struggling with those sections was always there, and when it turned into reality the struggle could be very bitter, with an almost insurrectionary tinge.
(...) [citing engels on dock workers] The point is very important. Internationally we are just emerging from more than two decades of defeat and demoralisation for workers right across the world. This bred a fatalism about the possibility of fighting, which was reflected in a mass of studies which depicted the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, showing them always as victims, rarely as fighters. Thus there are tons of materials sponsored by the International Labour Organisation on 'social exclusion'--a theme which suits the bureaucrats who run such bodies. In these studies themes like the 'casualisation' and 'feminisation' of the workforce become stereotyped, academic ways of dismissing possibilities of struggle--even if some of those carrying through the studies try to escape from the paradigm in which they are trapped. The stereotypes then provide trade union officialdom with excuses for avoiding struggle on the grounds that it cannot work. What begins as a mistaken assessment of the possibility of struggle becomes a real obstacle to unleashing such struggle.
(...) [naomi klein on EPZs] Such accounts provide a brilliant exposure of the greed and inhumanity of those who run the multinationals. But like many orthodox academic studies on the informal workforce (especially those sponsored by the International Labour Organisation) they are too pessimistic when it comes to the possibilities of fighting back. First, the multinationals cannot afford simply to mistreat their workers. It is not as easy as the multinationals would like people to think for them to close down their facilities and move elsewhere if the workforce does explode in bitterness. Setting up the links in a global production chain takes a lot of effort by the multinational... When Henry Ford pioneered mass production, assembly line methods in the auto industry, he saw that the most effective form of exploitation lay in stabilising a handpicked workforce under tight managerial control. Thomas O'Brien has told how some of the first US multinationals to operate in Latin America took efforts to stabilise their workforces by providing minimal welfare facilities--providing accommodation in company towns, health clinics, schools, sports facilities, even paid holidays. The aim was to combine maintaining the workers at a minimal level of fitness with extending managerial discipline over workers to the home as well as the workplace...
(...) This element of stability in the workforce is important because it means such workers can fight back, and win. Conditions in many South Korean clothing and footwear plants in the 1960s were exactly as Naomi Klein describes them. George E Ogle has told of 'the sweat, blood and tears of young women who worked in the export industries during the 1960s and 1970s--textiles, garments, electronics, chemicals'
(...) [strategy matters, in other words] So, for instance, an account of the great Bombay textile strikes of 1982-1983 paints a different picture to that in Korea. The strike began as a semi-spontaneous upsurge from below (workers demonstrated outside the residence of Datta Samant, who was to become the strike figurehead, demanding that he 'lead' them) and developed into one of the biggest prolonged strikes in world history, lasting a year, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and dominating the political life of India's commercial and industrial capital. But it never spread from the 'organised' sector of the larger workplaces to the small workplaces and the impoverished self employed weavers--indeed, many strikers began working in the informal sector without anyone regarding them as scabs. This enabled the employers to hold out for a year and defeat the workers, since they were never short of finished cloth.
(...) [too easy? but important regardless] The victories in Korea show the possibility of organising informal and maquiladora workers, of pulling them behind struggles initiated by larger and more secure groups of workers. The defeat in Bombay showed the dangers for the more secure groups of not going out and bringing the informal workers into the struggle. The dangers are not simply a matter of wage cuts, job losses and deteriorating working conditions. Defeat can have a devastating impact on wider society. During the strike there was unity between the different religious and caste groups that make up the mass of Bombay's lower classes. The aftermath of defeat saw the rise to a dominating position in wide areas of the city of the Sriv Sena, a political organisation based upon turning Hindus against Muslms, culminating in murderous riots against the Muslim population in 1992. Unity in struggle had created a sense of solidarity which then exerted a pull on the vast mass of the informal workers, self employed, the unemployed poor and the impoverished sections of the petty bourgeoisie. The defeat led to the sectional attitudes and communal conflicts of the petty bourgeoisie influencing the self employed, the unemployed and wide layers of workers.

[CONCLUSION]
(...) The overall picture is not one of a disintegrating or declining working class. It is one of a working class that on a world scale has grown bigger than ever, even if the rate of growth has slowed down with the successive crises in the world economy and the tendency everywhere to 'capital intensive' forms of production that do not employ massively new numbers of people.
(...) Neither is the picture one in which working class employment is being transferred on a massive scale from the old industrial economies of the 'North' to the previously agrarian economies of the 'South'. The new international division of labour is developing mainly within the 'triad' of North America, Europe and Japan--with a lesser part being played by the NICs of East Asia and eastern China. There is also an expansion of industrial employment within some of the burgeoning cities of the 'South'--but the expansion is uneven, barely touching whole regions, and is not mainly through transfer of jobs from the North.
(...) A twofold change is taking place now. There is the growing importance of the production of certain 'immaterial' commodities which are often classified as part of the service sector, but involve forms of work very similar to those in industry. And there is the growing importance of forms of labour which do not themselves produce commodities, but which serve to maintain and increase the productivity of the direct producers.
(...) The working class is not disappearing. It is not becoming bourgoeisified. It is not turning into a privileged layer. It is not gaining somehow from the impoverishment of wide sections of the Third World, especially Africa. It is growing even while it is restructured globally.
(...) The anti-capitalist movement itself has some of the same characteristics. Its initial base, like that of the first movement of the late 1960s, has been among people not firmly rooted in the productive process--students, school students, young people not yet trapped into permanent jobs, workers who take part in its activities as individuals without any clear sense of class identity, lower professionals. As a descriptive term for such movements, 'multitude' is not completely misplaced. A disparate coalition of forces has come together to provide a new and massively important focus for the struggle against the system after two decades of defeat and demoralisation. But the glorification of disparateness embodied in the term prevents people seeing what needs to be done next to build the movement. It does not recognise that what was so important about Genoa and Barcelona was the beginning of the involvement of organised workers in the protests. It fails to locate the most important deficiency of the movement in Argentina to date--the ability of trade union bureaucracies to build a wall between employed workers on the one hand and the neighbourhood and unemployed workers' movements on the other.
(...) The mistake is to see movements of disparate social groups as 'social subjects' capable of bringing about a transformation of society. They are not. Because their base is not centred in collective organisation rooted in production, they cannot challenge the control over that production which is central to ruling class power. They can create problems for particular governments. But they cannot begin the process of rebuilding society from the bottom up. And in practice, the workers who could begin to do this only play a marginal role in them. Talk about 'rainbow coalitions' or 'multitudes' conceals that relative lack of involvement in the movement of those working long hours at manual or routine white collar jobs--and with extra hours of unpaid labour bringing up children. It underplays the degree to which the movements remain dominated by those whose occupations leave them most time and energy to be active. Fashionable theories about 'post-industrial society' then become an excuse for a narrowness of vision and action that ignores the great majority of the working class.

jennifer robinson, global and world cities (2002)

(531): thesis: "My concerns in this article extend beyond the poor fit of these popular categories, though. I would like to suggest that these widely circulating approaches to contemporary urbanization — global and world cities, together with the persistent use of the category ‘third-world city’ — impose substantial limitations on imagining or planning the futures of cities around the world."

(532): ok, very important that she has acknowledged this: "Of course, the cities I am concerned with are most emphatically on the map of a broad range of diverse global political, economic and cultural connections, but this is frequently discounted and certainly never explored within these theoretical approaches."

(532): this is where the anti-orientialism becomes problematic (let's look at critiques of chakrabarty, for example): "My contention is that ‘urban theory’ is based primarily on the experiences and histories of western cities — much as Chakrabarty (2000) suggests that the theories and categories of historical scholarship have been rooted both in western experiences and their intellectual traditions. And, like him, I want to suggest that restructuring the terrain on which different kinds of cities are thought within urban studies could enhance the understanding of cities everywhere."

(534-535): seems to be deriding world-cities approach for economism, but debatable whether this is a tenable rejoinder, on principle and in the abstract: "Rather, in considering the dynamics of the world economy in relation to cities, a structural analysis of a small range of economic processes with a certain ‘global’ reach has tended to crowd out an attentiveness within urban studies to the place and effect of individual cities (King, 1995) and the diversity of wider connections which shape them (Allen et al., 1999)... Perhaps more importantly, this methodology reveals an analytical tension between assessing the characteristics and potential of cities on the basis of the
processes which matter as viewed from within their diverse dynamic social and economic worlds (which, of course, always stretch way beyond any physical edge to the city), or on the basis of criteria determined by the external theoretical construct of the world or global economy (see also Varsanyi, 2000). This is at the heart of how a world cities approach can limit imaginations about the futures of cities, which I will return to below."

(536): ok--this point, certainly, seems fairer: "Mirroring the world city emphasis on a limited range of economic activities with a certain global reach, as well as its categorizing imperative, the global city approach has a similar effect, dropping most cities in the world from its vision. If the ‘global city’ were labelled as just another example of an ‘industrial’ district (perhaps it should rather be called: new industrial districts of transnational management and control), it might not have attracted the attention it did. But on the positive side, some of the consequences for cities in poorer parts of the world might have been avoided."

(537): this, too, is far, but we have to be careful about consigning 'universalism' to the dustbin: "But it is the leap from this very restricted and clearly defined economic analysis, to claims regarding the success and power of these few cities, their overall categorization on this restricted basis, and the implied broader structural irrelevance of all other cities, which is of concern. These theoretical claims and categorizing moves are both inaccurate and harmful to the fortunes of cities defined ‘off the map’."

(537): important, but what is the point of an observation like this? is it really in doubt that africa is in crisis (and that even south africa, which is probably one of the countries being referred to, here), is also in severe crisis? it's one thing to argue for the method to be re-applied, better (which may be what she is arguing, in fairness). but we have to agree, at least, that it's entirely another to s5ay that the notion of situating these countries in the context of global economic shifts is inadmissable: "For many, the 1980s and 1990s have been long decades of little growth and growing inequality. It is, however, inaccurate to caricature even the poorest regions as excluded from the global economy or doomed to occupy a slow zone of the world economy. Africa, frequently written off in these large global analyses, has had a very uneven growth record."

(538): agreed--"It is one thing, though, to agree that global links are changing, some are being cut, and that power relations, inequalities and poverty shape the quality of those links (see, for example, Halfani, 1996). It is quite another to suggest that poor cities and countries are irrelevant to the global economy."

(539): this is relevant, even if it might not have the consequence she outlines (are we really trying to dispute the 'power' of the global north? in other words, you can take the question of 'can the subaltern speak?' way too far.): "And most importantly, perhaps, but seldom mentioned, the particular ‘global economy’ which is being used as the ground and foundation for identifying both place in hierarchy and relevant social and economic processes, is only one of many forms of global and transnational economic connection.8 The criteria for global significance might well look very different were the map-makers to relocate themselves and review significant transnational networks in a place like Jakarta, or Kuala Lumpur, where ties to Islamic forms of global economic and political activity might result in a very different list of powerful cities"

(540): here is a problem--is the argument, then, that they are not really as bad as they seem? i am perplexed. "In the same way, then, that global and world city approaches ascribe the characteristics of only parts of cities to the whole city through the process of categorization, mega-city and developmentalist approaches extend to the entire city the imagination of those parts which are lacking in all sorts of facilities and services. Where the global city approach generalizes the successful locales of high finance and corporate city life, the developmentalist approach builds towards a vision of all poor cities as infrastructurally poor and economically stagnant yet (perversely?) expanding in size. Many other aspects of city life in these places are obscured, especially dynamic economic activities, popular culture, innovations in urban governance and the creative production of diverse forms of urbanism — all potentially valuable resources in the quest for improving urban life"

(540): seems to me like there's a confounding going on--you can be relevant to economic growth, with a population condemned to poverty: "But while cities have been seen as distinctive sites for (transnational) interventions in the form of targeted development projects mostly at the neighbourhood level, the city as such has been considered broadly irrelevant to economic growth."

(541-542): i'm very, very confused--is she advocating this? or just observing that this makes the city more important? i think it is the latter, but there is some ambiguity "Urban development initiatives at the end of the 1990s have dovetailed with substantial administrative decentralization in poorer countries to produce a set of policy proposals focusing on promoting urban economic development at a local level... In this case it is decentralization, democratization, tighter aid and policy control by IFIs, as well as new forms of economic liberalization which have contributed to the growing emphasis of development practice in poorer countries on recognizing the city as a significant site of developmental planning"

(542): i can't help but lament that all this has a deeply reformist bent: "This is not simply to more accurately represent and understand cities, but to contribute to framing policy alternatives which can encourage support for a diversity of economic activities with a wide range of spatial reaches, rather than prioritizing only those with a global reach."

(545): see this, also -- are we talking about economic potential that the establishment would love? "Cities thus remain attractive locations for business activity across a range of sectors and offer an environment that enables economic production and innovation. This is to make a case for the broad economic potential of all cities."

(545): and more--to an extent this is fair, but isn't it more appropriate to see this 'social webs' in their larger context, as survival strategies?: "To the extent that it is a form of economic reductionism (and reductionism to only a small segment of economic activity) which sustains the regulating fiction of the global city, this spatialized account of the multiple webs of social relations which produce ordinary cities could help to displace some of the hierarchizing and excluding effects of this approach."

(546): in sum: "From the viewpoint of global and world cities approaches, poor localities, and many cities which do not qualify for global or world city status, are caught within a very limited
set of views of urban development: between finding a way to fit into globalization, emulating the apparent successes of a small range of cities; and embarking on developmentalist initiatives to redress poverty, maintain infrastructure and ensure basic service delivery. Neither the costly imperative to go global, nor developmentalist interventions which build towards a certain vision of city-ness and which focus attention on the failures of cities, are very rich resources for city planners and managers who turn to scholars for analytical insight and assessment of experiences elsewhere. It is my opinion that urban studies needs to decolonize its imagination about city-ness, and about the possibilities for and limits to what cities can become, if it is to sustain its relevance to the key urban challenges of the twenty-first century. My suggestion is that ‘ordinary-city’ approaches offer a potentially more fertile ground for meeting these challenges."

(547): this is the odd theory-practice confounding: "Categorizing a group of cities as ‘global’ on the basis of these small concentrated areas of transnational management and coordination activity within them is metonymic in that it has associated entire cities with the success and power of a small area within them (Amin and Graham, 1997, and as Sassen, 2001, acknowledges). In the process a valid line of analysis has reproduced a very familiar hierarchization of cities, setting certain cities at the top of the hierarchy to become the aspiration of city managers around the world."

(549): are you serious?! this is the positive project? "For example, Benjamin (2000) reports on economic clusters in Bangalore which embrace a range of diverse but interconnected activities. Simone (2001) suggests that ‘ephemeral’ or temporary public spaces enable actors from all sorts of sectors, involved in all sorts of different enterprises to meet together for a while and explore the potential interactions across a range of resources and contacts often kept apart in city spaces. Such studies and examples extend the classic uni-sectoral western industrial cluster model, and extend ideas about how proximity in cities can support creativity. This should offer some significant food for thought for both academics and policy-makers."

But the U.S. Army’s own specialists in Afghanistan’s culture and society are warning that relying on the tribes there may be a waste of time. “Most of Afghanistan has not been ‘tribal’ in the last few centuries,” notes a recent report from the Army’s Human Terrain System at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. “In fact, many scholars are reluctant to use the word ‘tribe’ at all for describing groups in Afghanistan.”

Americans are far less approving of President Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan than they have been in recent months, with 35% currently approving, down from 49% in September and 56% in July.

urban informality, ananya roy (2005)

(1): "My goal is not so much to evaluate these policies as it is to highlight some of the distinctive challenges and paradoxes that they present for planners. Three are of particular importance:

1. how planning modalities can produce the "unplannable"—informality as a state of exception from the formal order of urbanization;
2. how this state of exception can in turn be strategically used by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the urban poor;
3. and how dealing with informality requires recognizing the "right to the city"—claims and appropriations that do not fit neatly into the ownership model of property."

(2): "Such frameworks yield many problematic corollary propositions. The first is the equation of informality with poverty. Neither frame recognizes how informality might be a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion. Second, both frames conceptualize
informality, and poverty more generally, as caused by isolation from global capitalism... Third, within such frames it becomes possible to devolve responsibility for poverty to the poor themselves." [whatever we might want to say about her larger arguments, this second point is particularly important. holism is quite critical.]

(2): "As Jessop (2002) argues, at a moment of neoliberalism, when states are pursuing austerity policies, such models of neocommunitarianism legitimate the agenda of privatization." [absolutely]

(3): "Both forms of housing are informal but embody very different concretizations of
legitimacy. The divide here is not between formality and informality but rather a differentiation within informality." [informality as something that can be used by the wealthy/elite, too]

(3): this, really, is the key point-- informality not something 'outside' the state, but something in which it is wholly complicit: "This in turn means that informality must be understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself... The planning and legal apparatus of the state has the power to determine when to enact this suspension, to determine
what is informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will thrive and which will disappear. State power is reproduced through the capacity to construct and reconstruct categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy— such as in the American welfare efforts to sort out the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor." [recalls the left amendment to popular narratives about neoliberalism]

(4): critique of in-situ upgrading: "I have argued elsewhere that such an emphasis on the physical
environment is an "aestheticization of poverty" (Roy, 2004), one that equates upgrading with aesthetic upgrading rather than the upgrading of livelihoods, wages, political capacities."

(6): on principle, perhaps--but the example given is so obviously constrained by the geopolitical constraints in which it operates, that might as well, itself, be rhetorical: "The shift from aesthetic considerations to the politics of shit, I would argue, is a useful policy epistemology. It recognizes the importance of infrastructure but indicates that the provision and distribution of infrastructure is not a technical issue but rather a political process. The politics of shit also disrupts models of expertise, making it possible to generate knowledge about upgrading and infrastructure from a different set of experts: the residents of informal settlements."

(6): problematizing formalization: "The process of formalization is never as straightforward as simply converting informal documentation into formal titles. Usually there are numerous types of informal documentation, of varying legitimacy, and there are often multiple claims to a single plot of land."

(6): well-put--"But I will underscore Schaefer's blunt statement about the difference between wealth transfer and wealth legalization. De Soto's ideas are seductive precisely because they only guarantee the latter but in doing so promise the former."

(7): "Indeed, following Braudel (1982), it can be argued that capitalism itself is a system of monopolies rather than a free-flowing circulation of capital,'" a point that De Soto misses despite his declared affinity to Braudel."

(7): hmm--is it possible that this is more cute, than meaningful?--"I am now arguing that it
is possible to strategically use the state of exception to frame policy. There are two forms of exception that are worth noting: regulatory exceptions and regularity exceptions."

(8): important point to interrogate: arguing for 'scale-jumping', given that the local is intertwined with the global. but this is more bluster than substance -- it doesn't get to the core point, which is really the revival of radical political practice. "I would like to suggest that the issue of scale jumping is less about particular institutional actors like NGOs and more about a strategic engagement with multiple sovereignties.... Recently, Narmada dam activists have been pressing the World Bank, rather than simply the Indian government, for accountability." [she's aware of the pitfall, certainly. and i don't think she would go so far as to argue, at all, that these are anything more than auxiliary strategies. surely we are not abandoning the terrain of the nation for this petition-driven mishmash?]

(9): clear flaws: "They each require working through rather than against institutions of power—be it the market, or the state of exception, or supranational organizations that supersede national sovereignties. Is it possible to be subversive when there is such complicity with the system?"

(9): yes--"borrowing Krueckeberg's important insight, it can be argued that the more fundamental issue at stake in informality is that of wealth distribution and unequal property ownership, of what sorts of markets are at work in our cities and how they shape or limit affordability. In this sense, the study of informality provides an important lesson for planners in the tricky dilemmas of social justice.

the 21st century metropolis, ananya roy (2009)

(820): assimilating davis into those who see 'first world' cities as the model, and 'third world' cities as the error -- this is what she is inveighing against, but it's not clear, to me, that davis is doing anything wrong in outlining the gravity of the situation that confronts us. at the very least, this critique is way too easy, and meaningless: "Davis’s apocalyptic imagination of the Global
Slum is only the newest variant in the high-pitched narration of the crisis of mega-cities."

(820): a critique of neo-orientalism, she thinks (well, here we ought to bring in aijaz ahmed's splendid deconstruction of said): "As the parochial experience of EuroAmerican cities has been found to be a useful theoretical model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive experiences of the cities of the global South can generate productive and provocative theoretical frameworks for all
cities."

(821): critique of sassen, though not particularly forceful or thoroughly convincing, i don't think...

(822): again--this is a 'sexy' suggestion, but it's unclear, to me, that this gives us very much, that is substantive. "It is not enough for one’s understanding of the 21st-century metropolis
simply to make visible the cities of the global South. It is not even enough to exceed the visibility of crisis and catastrophe. It is instead necessary to view all cities from this particular place on the map."

(822-824): trying to invert area studies, in a sense -- give it a different theoretical spin. but this is not an instructive technique. it is a mish-mash that threatens to eschew universalism, it seems. though it's worth noting she is aware of this danger: "How can regionally produced concepts be deployed as ‘strategic essentialisms’, simultaneously located and dislocated? How can the theories embedded in ‘area studies’ retain their geographic coordinates but also cross borders and travel as dynamic vectors of new theoretical conversations and exchanges?"

(824): important, critique of sassen--"Such forms of ‘worlding’ are crucial because they move urban theory from the mapping of ‘world cities’ to the historicized analysis of ‘world systems’. The global/world cities framework asserts a hierarchy of cities but is unable to account fully for the materialization of such a hierarchy, and even less so in relation tothe long histories of colonialism and imperialism. Space is a ‘container’ in these theoretical reports; its ‘production’ remains unexplained (SMITH, 2002). For example, TAYLOR (2000), following Braudel, rightly
notes that capitalism is a world of multiple monopolies and that global/world cities represent a ‘monopoly of place’. This is a refreshing recalibration of the rather
simplistic narrative of ‘agglomeration economies’."

(825): this, i'm sorry, is just jibberish, and theoretically (and especially politically) nonsensical: "Such forms of ‘worlding’ move one away from simple core–periphery models of globalized urbanization. Instead, one is left with what ONG (1999) terms ‘differentiated zones of sovereignty’. The 21stcentury metropolis arbitrates this geography of multiplicity and differentiation. And in doing so it is, as Abbas would have one imagine, a ‘para-site’. It is dependent on the circuits of global capital and yet it also produces and mediates these circuits."

(825): ok--"This is not to say that this analysis is not applicable to the cities of the global South. Indeed, it is highly relevant. The argument is less about transnational relevance and more about the scope and range of analysis."

(826): coming close to playing native informant--"By being embedded in the EuroAmerican urban experience, this theoretical work bypasses some of the key ways in which the production of space takes place in other urban and metropolitan contexts. Further, this ‘other’ experience has considerable relevance for EuroAmerican city-regions and can provide insights into hitherto unexplained processes in these cities. One such mode of the production of space is highlighted: informality. ‘First World’ urban and metropolitan theory is curiously silent on the issue of informality. Or there is a tendency to imagine the ‘informal’ as a sphere of unregulated, even illegal, activity, outside the scope of the state, a domain of survival by the poor and marginalized, often wiped out by gentrification and redevelopment. But a large body of ‘Third World’ literature provides a sophisticated and rather different understanding of informality."

(826): potentially interesting distinction, between political society and civil society -- "Similarly,
CHATTERJEE (2006), writing about Indian cities, makes a distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ societies. For him, civil society groups make claims as fully enfranchised citizens, a ‘bourgeois governmentality’ if you will. Political society on the other hand are the claims of the disenfranchised and marginalized, what APPADURAI (2002) has termed ‘governmentality from below’."

(827): i really have trouble understanding what is gained by this amendment--"The Africanist debates about agency, subjectivity, and politics defy the easy categorizations of power and resistance. Under conditions of crisis, the subaltern subject is simultaneously strategic and self-exploitative, simultaneously a political agent and a subject of the neoliberal grand slam."

(827): the postborder city?

(828): how is it more than this? this is absurd! she is getting off playing the native informant game. "It is surely an ‘evil paradise’ of ‘fear and money’, a ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’ (DAVIS, 2006; DAVIS and MORK, 2007), but it is also an articulation of an Arab modernity where more is at stake than what DAVIS (2006, p. 53) designates as the ‘monstrous caricature of futurism’. It is the place at which the distinctions between the black economy and global finance capital are erased, where city and nature are violently fused, and where the feudalism of an emirate meets up with an open cosmopolitanism."

the elementary forms of religious life, emile durkheim

translator's introduction (karen fields)

(xix): "for durkheim, religions exist because human beings exist only as social beings and in a humanly shaped world. religion is 'an eminently social thing.'"

(xxiiii): "...the Durkheimian pedigree of Michel Foucault."

(xxv): "religion is the steady, day-in-day-out reality of millions, their routine framework of everyday activity..."

(xxxiii): "to exist at all, all communities must be imagined. what his intellectual descendant benedict anderson has so well shown for large-scale twentieth-century anticolonial nationalism is also true of any face-to-face community and of the smallest Australian clan."

(xxxiv): in sum--"bear three points in mind. first, religion is not defined in terms of anything that would turn a man of science positive away from observable phenomena, or the real--not divinity, the otherworldly... second, the phrase 'unified system' postulates that religius beliefs and rites are not hodgeppodges but are internally ordered. third, the objects of those rites and beliefs acquire their religious status as sacred, or 'set apart and forbidden,' as a result of joint action by people who set them apart and who, by the same stroke, constitute themselves a 'moral community' or 'a Church.' once again, then, religion is social, social, social."

(xxxviii): "...he assumes the Australians to be rationally constituted humans, as are their Parisian contemporaries. there is no question of one's being civilized and the other not, or of the two groups' having different mental constitutions."

(xliii): "...sacredness is eminently a representation collective... as a quality of things--or, rather, as Durkheim insists, a quality superadded to things--sacredness can come to be its real self only within the domain of collective consciousness... sacredness is an aspect of the real that exists only in the mind but cannot possibly exist as the real in only one mind."

(xlvi): "sacredness is not merely a set of peculiar relationships between people and certain designated objects. the very act that constitues those peculiar relationships also relates a designated group of people to one another and sets them apart from others to whom they are not bound and who do not have the same relationship to designated physical objects."

(li): "if durkheim's analysis is right, it suggests that this century's monstrosities in collecitve life arise not from aberrations in human reason but from what is fundamental to it. that analysis also leads to a disturbing suggestion: that the ordinary human agents who serve as raw material for extraordinary abusers of human dignity are, in vast majority, the normal and the the socially responsible... it suggests, finally, that the human nature on which we depend, our social nature, is our uplift and our downfall. the only exit from this dilemma appears to be individualism. but the incompatibility of individualist assumptions with human nature as it can be observed in the real world was chief among Durkheim's discovereies in Formes and throughout his work. what we see, through his theoretical lens of conscience collective, is present in a social world of the real that coannot be arrived at with notions of individual conscience alone... thus, in the end, there is a deep and tragic tension in Durkheim's discoveries."

introduction (1-18)

(1): "i have made a very archaic religion the subject of my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity."

(2): "fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. all are true after their own fashion: all fulfill given conditions of human existence, though in different ways. granted it is not impossible to rank them hierarchically..." [this last point seems different from what karen fields argued earlier--and generally incommensurate with the thrust of durkheim's move, here.]

(8): "if philosophy and the sciences were born in religion, it is because religion itself began by serving as science and philosophy. further, and less often noted, religion has not merely enriched a human intellect already formed but in fact has helped to form it. men owe to religion not only the content of their knowledge, in significant part, but also the form in which that knowledge is elaborated." [form/content -- here begins the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists]

(9): critical--"the principal categories... are born in and from religion. they are a product of religious thought. this is a point that i will make again and again in the course of this book... the general conclusion of the chapters to follow is that religion is an eminently social thing. religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups..."

(10): "it is not my time that is organized in this way. it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization. this by itself is enough to make us begin to see that any such organization would have to be collective. and indeed, observation establishes that these indispensable points, in reference to which all things are arranged temporally, are taken from social life. the division into days, weeks, months, ears, etc., corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals and public ceremonies at regular intervals."

(12-14): where he makes the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists: "faced with these opposite objections, the intellect remains uncertain. but if the social origin of the categories is accepted, a new stance becomes possible, one that should enable us, i believe, to avoid these opposite difficulties."

(16-17): key--"society cannot leave the categories up to the free choice of individuals without abandoning itself... we feel that we cannot abandon ourselves to them without our thought's ceasing to be really human... thus the necessit with which the categories press themselves is not merely the effect of habits whose yoke we could slip with little effort; nor is that necessity a habit or a physical or metaphysical need, since the categories change with place and time; it is a special sort of moral necessity that is to intellectual life what obligation is to the will."

book one

(24): religion cannot be sought in the supernatural, because the supernatural/natural antinomy is emphatically modern. "to be able to call certain facts supernatural, one must already have an awareness that there is a natural order of things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe are internally linked according to necessary relationships called laws."

(27): neither can it be defined by the idea of divinity (see buddhism discussion on next page)

(33-34): important--definition of religion as a "system", which consists of beliefs and rites and a sacred/profane classification, of them [here it is appropriate to raise the concerns about how religions ossify and are cast off--how, in other words, there is development? since this, as a classically structuralist position, explains everything in a state of stasis...]

(38): "sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred."

(41): the Church--"...a society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church..."

(42): important--"a Church is not simply a priestly brotherhood; it is a moral community made up of all the faithful, both laity and priests..."

(44): definition--"a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite into on e single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."

(44): "the second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: in showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing."

(45-67): not animism, as a theory for why religion emerges

(68-83): not naturism

(84-85): "since, in themselves, neither man nor nature is inherently sacred, both acquire sacredness elsewhere."

(91): "first, for the sociologist as for the historian, social facts exist in relationship with the social system to which they belong; hence they cannot be understood apart from it..."

(91-92): "the comaprative method would be impossible if social types did not exist, and it cannot be usefully applied except within the same type." [the place to ask, again, about the 'social type' vs. 'ideal type' method]

book two

(100): two essential traits of the clam: 1. a bond of a particular sort, because they bear the same name. 2. the name it bears is also that of a definites species of material things with which it thinks it has a special relationship...

(118): "thus, while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. in fact, things are classified as sacred and profane by reference to the totem. it is the very archetype of sacred things."

(124): "this sacredness stems from one cause: it is a material representation of the clan..." [even if he means 'literally material' here, this still gives us an opportunity to ask about how his position here, and in general, resembles historical materialism.]

(145-146): e.g., how the idea of 'genus', or 'class' is born as a result of clan organization--"thus we have our first opportunity to test the proposition put forward at the beginning of this work and to assure ourselves that the fundamental notions of the intellect, the basic categories of thought, can be the product of social factors. the preceding shows that this is indeed the case for the notion of category itself."

(148): "in all probability, then, we would never have thought of gathering the beings of the universe into homogeneous groups, called genera, if we had not had the example of human societies before our eyes--if, indeed, we had not at first gone so far in making things members of the society of men..."

(156): "in sum, totemic organization as just described clearly must result from a sort of consensus among all the members of the tribe, without distinction. each clan cannot possibly have developed its beliefs in an absolutely independent manner; the cults of the various totems complement one another exactly, and so they must necessarily have been in some sense adjusted to one another." [here, must interrogate what work is being done by the notion of "consensus" -- this, again, is durkheim's strong (methodological-philosophical) bias in favor of non-contradiction, resolved tensions, etc.]

(191): the 'force'--"totemism is not the religion of certain animals, certain men, or certain images; it is the religion of a kind of anonymous and impersonal force that is identifiable in each of these beings but identical to none of them."

(192): "when i speak of these principles as forces, i do not use the word in a metaphorical sense; they behave like real forces."

(202): "that way of imagining religious things is by no means inherent in their nature. at the origin and basis of religious thought, we find not definite and distinct objects or beings that in themselves possess sacredness but indefinite powers and anonymous forces."

(208): key--"it follows from the same analysis that the totem expresses and symbolizes two different kinds of things. from one point of view, it is the outward and visible form of what i have called the totemic principle or god; and from another, it is also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. it is the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others... thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?... thus the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as totem." [here we have the loose contours of an important contribution, definitely--but i want to know much more about the nature of the link. what kind of a totemic principle is produced by different kinds of society? and isn't it unavoidable that this principle is produced by specific sectors of society? where is the consensus, emile? the fact that people reproduce something does not mean that they produced it? of course he will no accept this as an intelligible question. partly, of course, this entire line of questioning is complicated by his methodology--he is using 'primitive communism' to explain highly stratified societies. surely, stratification will begin to matter as we interrogate the notion of 'consensus'?]

(208): "society in general, simply be its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. a society is to its members of what a god is to its faithful."

(209-211): notion of 'moral authority' -- which we attribute to the 'divine' but is, in actual fact, something that society exerts upon us.

(214): "because we feel the weight of them, we have no choice but to locate them outside ourselves..."

(215): "just as society consecrates men, so it also consecrates things, including ideas..." [what is the nature of this agency?]

(223): "because the religious force is none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan..."

(224): "such moral powers do not express the manner in which natural things affect our senses but the manner in which the collective consciousness affects individual consciousness."

(226): important--again, an exceedingly strong, stable conception of hegemony (and, then, where to for resistance?) -- "each individual carries the whole in himself. it is part of him, so when he yields to its promptings, he does not think he is yielding to coercion but instead doing what his own nature tells him to do." [this is what craig was saying--durkheim will not be helpful if we want to understand rebellion. but if we want to understand restraint/passivity, he's our man. to an extent, of course]

(227): "religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. such is its paramount role."

(229): important, and demonstrates his interesting insistence on seeing the modern and primitive together--"even though purely ideal, the powers thereby conferred on the object behave as if they were real. they determine man's conduct with the same necessity as phsycial forces. the Arunta who has properly rubbed himself with his churinga feels stronger; he is stronger... the soldier who falls defending his flag certainly does not believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth. such things happen because social thought, with its imperative authority, has a power that individual thought cannot possibly have. by acting on our minds, it can make us see things in the light that suits it..." [there is, perhaps, a positive project here, in deconstruction of this social (arbitrary?) authority? though, in durkheim, the tragic would re-assert itself, no doubt.]

(230): "the sacredness exhibited by the thing is not implicated in the intrinsic properties of the thing. it is added to them. the world of the religious is not a special aspect of empirical nature. it is superimposed upon nature."

(233): "we know, in fact, that social phenomena are born not in the individual but in the group. no matter what part we may play in their genesis, each of us receives them from without." [what would it mean to introduce the notion of class, here?]

(238): "we know furthermore that these religious ideas are the outcome of definite social causes... thus, it is social requirements that have fused together ideas that at first seem distinct..." [again, this is society in the abstract, not class society in the concrete. what would it mean to perform that transformation?]

(240): "...there is no gulf between the logic of religious thought and the logic of scientific thought..."

(242-275): inquiring after the soul -- see 265, where he writes, "the idea of the soul is a particular application of the bleifs relative to sacred things. in this way may be explained the religious character this idea has displayed ever since it appeared in history and that it still has today. the soul has always been considered a sacred thing; in this respect it is opposed to the body, which in itself is profane."

(276-279): inquiring after spirits and gods, beginning to track religion as it becomes steadily more complex

book three

(303): role of rites--"by definition, sacred beings are beings set apart. what distinguishes them is a discontinuity between them and profane beings. normally, the two sorts of beings are separate from one another. a whole complex of rites seeks to bring about that separation, which is essential..."

(304): introducing the notion of 'taboo'--"the institution in accordance with which certain things are withdrawn from ordinary use."

(312-313): generally-speaking, we see that sacred and profane life cannot exist at the same time, or same space

(316): asceticism

(400): taking it too far? -- "there is no relationship between the feelings felt and the actions done by those who take part in the rite." [here discussing funeral rites, which seems a classic overstatement]

conclusion

(418): seeing the study of primitive society as the opening phase of an inductive investigation

(420): "the cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically."

(420): footnote william james -- "like a recent apologist of faith, i accept that religious belief rests on a definite experience, whose demonstrative value is, in a sense, not inferior to that of scientific experiments..."

(421): "i have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens that feeling of support, safety, and protective guidance which binds the man of faith to its cult." [here we are deepening the arg re: consensus -- does it serve a personal need, also, and not just a social need?]

(421): "as i have shown, even collective ideas and feelings are possible only through the overt movements that symbolize them. thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source."

(421): "along the way, i have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and thus science itself, have religious origins... in short, then, we can say that nearly all the great social institutions were born in religion. for the principal features of collective life to have begun as none other than various features of religious life it is evident that religious life must necessarily have been the eminent form and, as it were, the epitome of collective life."

(422): interesting--echoes of discipline and punish, without any of the political implications--"in the end, the point is not to exert a kind of physical constraint upon blind, and, more than that, imaginary forces but to reach, fortify, and discipline consciousness."

(424): quite ambitious--the distinction between the real and the ideal can only be explained by my framework, he's arguing--"since what defines the sacred is that the sacred is added to the real. and since the ideal is defined in the same way, we cannot explain the one without explaining the other."

(424): "thus the formation of an ideal is by no means an irreducible datum that eludes science. it rests on conditions that can be uncovered through observation. it is a natural product of social life."

(425): "it is in the school of collective life that the individual has learned to form ideals. it is by assimilating the ideals worked out by society that the individual is able to conceive of the ideal."

(426): key, why my theory is not historical materialism--"in pointing out an essentially social thing in religion, i in no way mean to say that religion simply translates the material forms and immediate vital necessities of society into another language. i do indeed take it to be obvious that social life depends on and bears the mark of its material base, just as the mental life of the individual depends on the brain... but collective consiocusness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological base, just as individual consciousness is something other than a mere product of thenervous system. if collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur... they mutually attract one another... none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality.." [unless i am misinterpreting, this seems at odds with the presentation, earlier. isn't he giving an unreasonable autonomy to the individual, here? and anyway this is theoretical very unsatisfactory--the collective consciousness emerging more-or-less randomly, as product? doesn't make any scientific sense. why is it that, confronted with marxism, these people are afraid to defend themselves properly? he has eschewed the possibility of generalization, neglecting that this is what his study has done, throughout.]

(427): "we can now judge the worth of the radical individualism that is intent on making religion out to be a purely individual thing: it misconceives the fundamental conditions of religious life... the only hearth at whcih we can warm ourselves morally is the hearth made by the company of our fellow men."

(429): "there can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and stregnthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality." [this opens up grounds for a study of 'nationalism' as a durkheimian study of religion, certainly--he does this and more throughout his work]

(429): speaking of unjust inequalities. my my (remember, this is his last work)

(430): french revolution, and why "it instituted a whole cycle of celebrations in order to keep the principles that inspired it eternally young."

(430): "religion is not only a system of practices but also a system of ideas whose object is to express the world..."

(431): science, and religion; the same goal, hence a (limited) incompatibility (see below, also) -- "in this regard, both pursue the same goal; scientific thought is only a more perfected form of religious thought. hence it seems natural that religion should lose ground as science becomes better at performing its task... although the offspring of religion, science tends to replace religion in everything that involves the cognitive and intellectual functions."

(432): science and religion, con't -- "science is said to deny religion in principle. but religion exist; it is a system of given facts; in short, it is a reality. how could science deny a reality? furthermore, insofar as religion is action and insofar as it is a means of making men live, science cannot possibly take its place. although science expresses life, it does not create life, and science can very well seek to explain faigh but by that very fact presupposes faith. hence there is conflict on only a limited point."

(434): "the basic material of logical thought is concepts. to try to discover how society could have played a role in the genesis of logical thought therefore amounts to asking how it can have taken part in the formation of concepts."

(435): change, in concepts (when there is some imperfection) -- can this take us away from what is otherwise a theory of stasis?

(435): the 'concept' is always an emphatically social thing -- "it is common to all because it is the work of the community."

(436): moreover, "concepts are not abstract things that have reality only in particular circumstances. they are [collective] representations just as concrete as any the individual can make of his own environment, for they correspond to the way in which the special being that is society thinks about the things of its own experience..." [again the question of society's agency]

(437): thus, "we can now begin to see society's share in the origin of logical thought. logical thought is possible only when man has managed to go beyond the fleeting representations he owes to sense experience and in the end to conceive a whole world of stable ideals, the common ground of intelligences..." (conditions for truth, he adds are two--impersonality and stability)

(438): here, oddly, a narrative of primitive-to-civilized is re-asserting itself (but it is sort of a meta- realm, so more forgivable, perhaps)

(440): "to say that concepts express the manner in which society conceives of things is also to say that conceptual thought is contemporaneous with humanity."

(441-442): key, answering why and how the categories are social, in origin, through the notion of totality--"above all, there is no individual experience, no matter how broad or prolonged, that could make us even suspect the existence of a whole genus embracing the universality of beings, and in which the other genera would be only species coordinated among, or subordinated to, one another. this notion of the whole, which lies at the basis of the classifications i have cited, cannot come to us from the individual himself, who is only a part of the whole and never comes in contact with more than an infinitesmal part of oreality... since the role of the categories is to encompass all the other concepts, the category par excellence would indeed seem to be the very concept of totality."

(443): "the concept of totality is but the concept of society in abstract form."

(443-444): "there is another reason... the relationships they express could not become conscious relationships except in and through society..."

(444): "society is possible only if the individuals and things that make it up are divided among different groups... and if those groups themeselves are classified in relation to one another..."

(445): "to summarize, society is by no means the illogical or alogical, inconsistent, and changeable being that people too often like to imagine. quite the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life, for it is a consciousness of consciousness. being outside and above individual and local contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in their permanent and fundamental aspect..."

(446): important--to the extent that there is dynamism in his picture, it is geometric--in other words, society will grow grow grow, until these concepts are stretched and need to be re-fit. it is not, though, that there is conflict.

(447): "the mystery dissolves once we have acknowledged that impersonal reason is but collective thought by another name. collective thought is possible only through the coming together of individuals..."

(448): "a new way of explaining man becomes possible as soon as we recognize that above the individual there is society, and that society is a system of active forces--not a nominal being, and not a creation of the mind..."