What did Max Weber mean by the ‘spirit’ of capitalism?

The BASF factory at Ludwigshafen, Germany

Pictured on a postcard in 1881

Courtesy Wikipedia

By Peter Ghosh

Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works regularly taught, mangled and revered in universities across the globe. This is not to say that teachers and students are stupid, but that this is an exceptionally compact text that ranges across a very broad subject area, written by an out-and-out intellectual at the top of his game. He would have been dumb­founded to find that it was being used as an elementary introduction to sociology for undergraduate students, or even schoolchildren.

We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit. Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’. More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West, and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the title would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism.

This modern ‘ethic’ or code of values was unlike any other that had gone before. Weber supposed that all previous ethics – that is, socially accepted codes of behaviour rather than the more abstract propositions made by theologians and philosophers – were religious. Religions supplied clear messages about how to behave in society in straightforward human terms, messages that were taken to be moral absolutes binding on all people. In the West this meant Christianity, and its most important social and ethical prescription came out of the Bible: ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Weber was not against love, but his idea of love was a private one – a realm of intimacy and sexuality. As a guide to social behaviour in public places ‘love thy neighbour’ was obviously nonsense, and this was a principal reason why the claims of churches to speak to modern society in authentically religious terms were marginal. He would not have been surprised at the long innings enjoyed by the slogan ‘God is love’ in the 20th-century West – its career was already launched in his own day – nor that its social consequences should have been so limited.

The ethic or code that dominated public life in the modern world was very different. Above all it was impersonal rather than personal: by Weber’s day, agreement on what was right and wrong for the individual was breaking down. The truths of religion – the basis of ethics – were now contested, and other time-honoured norms – such as those pertaining to sexuality, marriage and beauty – were also breaking down. (Here is a blast from the past: who today would think to uphold a binding idea of beauty?) Values were increasingly the property of the individual, not society. So instead of humanly warm contact, based on a shared, intuitively obvious understanding of right and wrong, public behaviour was cool, reserved, hard and sober, governed by strict personal self-control. Correct behaviour lay in the observance of correct procedures. Most obviously, it obeyed the letter of the law (for who could say what its spirit was?) and it was rational. It was logical, consistent, and coherent; or else it obeyed unquestioned modern realities such as the power of numbers, market forces and technology.

There was another kind of disintegration besides that of traditional ethics. The proliferation of knowledge and reflection on knowledge had made it impossible for any one person to know and survey it all. In a world which could not be grasped as a whole, and where there were no universally shared values, most people clung to the particular niche to which they were most committed: their job or profession. They treated their work as a post-religious calling, ‘an absolute end in itself’, and if the modern ‘ethic’ or ‘spirit’ had an ultimate found­ation, this was it. One of the most widespread clichés about Weber’s thought is to say that he preached a work ethic. This is a mistake. He personally saw no particular virtue in sweat – he thought his best ideas came to him when relaxing on a sofa with a cigar – and had he known he would be misunder­stood in this way, he would have pointed out that a capacity for hard work was something that did not dist­inguish the modern West from previous soc­ieties and their value systems. However, the idea that people were being ever more defined by the blinkered focus of their employment was one he regarded as profoundly modern and characteristic.

The blinkered pro­fessional ethic was common to entrepreneurs and an increasingly high-wage, skilled labour force, and it was this combination that produced a situation where the ‘highest good’ was the making of money and ever more money, without any limit. This is what is most readily recognisable as the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, but it should be stressed that it was not a simple ethic of greed which, as Weber recognised, was age-old and eternal. In fact there are two sets of ideas here, though they overlap. There is one about potentially universal rational pro­cedures – specialisation, logic, and formally consistent behaviour – and another that is closer to the modern economy, of which the central part is the professional ethic. The modern situation was the product of narrow-minded adhesion to one’s particular function under a set of conditions where the attempt to understand modernity as a whole had been abandoned by most people. As a result they were not in control of their own destiny, but were governed by the set of rational and impersonal pro­cedures which he likened to an iron cage, or ‘steel housing’. Given its rational and impersonal foundations, the housing fell far short of any human ideal of warmth, spontaneity or breadth of outlook; yet rationality, technology and legality also produced material goods for mass consumption in unprecedented amounts. For this reason, though they could always do so if they chose to, people were unlikely to leave the housing ‘until the last hundredweight of fossil fuel is burned up’.

It is an extremely powerful analysis, which tells us a great deal about the 20th-century West and a set of Western ideas and priorities that the rest of the world has been increasingly happy to take up since 1945. It derives its power not simply from what it says, but because Weber sought to place under­standing before judgment, and to see the world as a whole. If we wish to go beyond him, we must do the same.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Monopoly Was Invented to Demonstrate the Evils of Capitalism

By Kate Raworth

‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.

The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.

Born in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Taking out a newspaper advertisement, she offered herself as a ‘young woman American slave’ for sale to the highest bidder. Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. ‘We are not machines,’ she said. ‘Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.’

In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership – this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. The inspiration began with a book that her father, the anti-monopolist politician James Magie, had handed to her. In the pages of Henry George’s classic, Progress and Poverty (1879), she encountered his conviction that ‘the equal right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air – it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence’.

Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.

Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.

Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?).

The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a ‘practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences’ and hence to understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. ‘It might well have been called “The Game of Life”,’ remarked Magie, ‘as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.’

The game was soon a hit among Left-wing intellectuals, on college campuses including the Wharton School, Harvard and Columbia, and also among Quaker communities, some of which modified the rules and redrew the board with street names from Atlantic City. Among the players of this Quaker adaptation was an unemployed man called Charles Darrow, who later sold such a modified version to the games company Parker Brothers as his own.

Once the game’s true origins came to light, Parker Brothers bought up Magie’s patent, but then re-launched the board game simply as Monopoly, and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all. Worse, they marketed it along with the claim that the game’s inventor was Darrow, who they said had dreamed it up in the 1930s, sold it to Parker Brothers, and become a millionaire. It was a rags-to-riches fabrication that ironically exemplified Monopoly’s implicit values: chase wealth and crush your opponents if you want to come out on top.

So next time someone invites you to join a game of Monopoly, here’s a thought. As you set out piles for the Chance and Community Chest cards, establish a third pile for Land-Value Tax, to which every property owner must contribute each time they charge rent to a fellow player. How high should that land tax be? And how should the resulting tax receipts be distributed? Such questions will no doubt lead to fiery debate around the Monopoly board – but then that is exactly what Magie had always hoped for.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Why Amartya Sen Remains the Century’s Great Critic of Capitalism

By Tim Rogan

Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the basic relationships are felt to be unjust.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents. Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought. We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies. Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth. But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

But then there is Amartya Sen.

Every major work on material inequality in the 21st century owes a debt to Sen. But his own writings treat material inequality as though the moral frameworks and social relationships that mediate economic exchanges matter. Famine is the nadir of material deprivation. But it seldom occurs – Sen argues – for lack of food. To understand why a people goes hungry, look not for catastrophic crop failure; look rather for malfunctions of the moral economy that moderates competing demands upon a scarce commodity. Material inequality of the most egregious kind is the problem here. But piecemeal modifications to the machinery of production and distribution will not solve it. The relationships between different members of the economy must be put right. Only then will there be enough to go around.

In Sen’s work, the two critiques of capitalism cooperate. We move from moral concerns to material outcomes and back again with no sense of a threshold separating the two. Sen disentangles moral and material issues without favouring one or the other, keeping both in focus. The separation between the two critiques of capitalism is real, but transcending the divide is possible, and not only at some esoteric remove. Sen’s is a singular mind, but his work has a widespread following, not least in provinces of modern life where the predominance of utilitarian thinking is most pronounced. In economics curricula and in the schools of public policy, in internationalist secretariats and in humanitarian NGOs, there too Sen has created a niche for thinking that crosses boundaries otherwise rigidly observed.

This was no feat of lonely genius or freakish charisma. It was an effort of ordinary human innovation, putting old ideas together in new combinations to tackle emerging problems. Formal training in economics, mathematics and moral philosophy supplied the tools Sen has used to construct his critical system. But the influence of Rabindranath Tagore sensitised Sen to the subtle interrelation between our moral lives and our material needs. And a profound historical sensibility has enabled him to see the sharp separation of the two domains as transient.

Tagore’s school at Santiniketan in West Bengal was Sen’s birthplace. Tagore’s pedagogy emphasised articulate relations between a person’s material and spiritual existences. Both were essential – biological necessity, self-creating freedom – but modern societies tended to confuse the proper relation between them. In Santiniketan, pupils played at unstructured exploration of the natural world between brief forays into the arts, learning to understand their sensory and spiritual selves as at once distinct and unified.

Sen left Santiniketan in the late 1940s as a young adult to study economics in Calcutta and Cambridge. The major contemporary controversy in economics was the theory of welfare, and debate was affected by Cold War contention between market- and state-based models of economic order. Sen’s sympathies were social democratic but anti-authoritarian. Welfare economists of the 1930s and 1940s sought to split the difference, insisting that states could legitimate programmes of redistribution by appeal to rigid utilitarian principles: a pound in a poor man’s pocket adds more to overall utility than the same pound in the rich man’s pile. Here was the material critique of capitalism in its infancy, and here is Sen’s response: maximising utility is not everyone’s abiding concern – saying so and then making policy accordingly is a form of tyranny – and in any case using government to move money around in pursuit of some notional optimum is a flawed means to that end.

Economic rationality harbours a hidden politics whose implementation damaged the moral economies that groups of people built up to govern their own lives, frustrating the achievement of its stated aims. In commercial societies, individuals pursue economic ends within agreed social and moral frameworks. The social and moral frameworks are neither superfluous nor inhibiting. They are the coefficients of durable growth.

Moral economies are not neutral, given, unvarying or universal. They are contested and evolving. Each person is more than a cold calculator of rational utility. Societies aren’t just engines of prosperity. The challenge is to make non-economic norms affecting market conduct legible, to bring the moral economies amid which market economies and administrative states function into focus. Thinking that bifurcates moral on the one hand and material on the other is inhibiting. But such thinking is not natural and inevitable, it is mutable and contingent – learned and apt to be unlearned.
Sen was not alone in seeing this. The American economist Kenneth Arrow was his most important interlocutor, connecting Sen in turn with the tradition of moral critique associated with R H Tawney and Karl Polanyi. Each was determined to re-integrate economics into frameworks of moral relationship and social choice. But Sen saw more clearly than any of them how this could be achieved. He realised that at earlier moments in modern political economy this separation of our moral lives from our material concerns had been inconceivable. Utilitarianism had blown in like a weather front around 1800, trailing extremes of moral fervour and calculating zeal in its wake. Sen sensed this climate of opinion changing, and set about cultivating ameliorative ideas and approaches eradicated by its onset once again.

There have been two critiques of capitalism, but there should be only one. Amartya Sen is the new century’s first great critic of capitalism because he has made that clear.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Hiding the Bodies: Geographic Repression in Higher Educational Space

Abstract

This article critiques the way that universities have acquired and developed campus space since World War II. Prompted by the need to increase student entry, British universities grew exponentially, with a demand to expand the campus in order to provide more teaching space and student accommodation. This article looks at the side effects of this expansion by providing a case study that demonstrates that land acquisition can have a deleterious effect on local residents. Using theories from urban studies, postmodern geography and cultural theory, this article presents the case study through a transdisciplinary lens, offering an original analysis of the heritage of an inherited cemetery.

Keywords: campus planning, social history, capitalism, urban regeneration, burial land

You can read and download the article for free here: Space and Culture Journal

Schizoanalytic Cartographies Part 1: Guattari on Psychoanalysis and Religion

Félix Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies has finally been translated into English. I've been waiting for it for a year since I heard it was going to be published. This series of blogs will include some short discussions - or 'tasters' if you will - of Guattari's that are included in the book and you might find interesting. I've deliberately sought out the more jargon-free passages, so as to make them accessible to those of you who may be interested in the title of the blog, but not familiar with Guattari's own work:

Psychoanalysis is not a science; it is not an art, it is not for all that a religion - although it does mobilize powerful phenomena of belief, Freud is venerated like a Father of the Church, his first patients are celebrated like holy martyrs, his writings treated like the Gospel and the congregations that invoke him practise the excommunication of schismatics just like in the good old days of the Inquisition...I have already mentioned the difference in position of religious and psychoanalytic subjectivity with regard to scientific rationality, the first ostensibly separating itself from it, the second endeavouring to absorb it in various ways. Two other different equally deserve to be noted: 1) psychoanalysis requires a more active participation of its users in its rituals; 2) its myths are more deterritorialized that those of religion.

Psychoanalysis and the monotheistic religions have in common that they seek to grip subjectivity in ethical axes in conformity with the requirements of what I will call capitalistic logics, that is to say, systems of judgement proceeding by generalized equivalence, the conjuring and repression of animist intensities, the conversion of singular trajectories, the system of reiteration and circulation of formal entities on deterritorialized 'markets' (those of the economy, of morality, of art...) . Whilst, to achieve their ends, religions act by direct suggestion, by the imprint of standardized representations and statements, at least to begin with psychoanalysis gives free reign to a certain individual expression, the better subsequently to take it over and to submit of its own accord to other, perhaps even more tyrannical, kinds of stereotypes. Whilst religion, dare I say it, straitjackets subjectivity in the open air, psychoanalysis gets rid of some of the ballast of statements in order to concentrate its efforts on remodelling enunciation. (Guattari, page 43)

Part two of this series of blogs is here: Guattari on Enunciation
Part three of this series of blogs is here: Guattari on Postmodernity
If you would like to see a 'methodology' for using schizoanalysis in conjunction with psychogeography, please visit my website: Schizocartography

Space as a Locus of Production

Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space has some interesting hypothetical arguments that he presents as debates on issues arising in his text. One of my favourite ones is a conversation between a supposed interlocutor, who has taken a rather reductionist approach to Lefebvre's concept on the production of space, and a supporter of it. It's worth reading in its completeness, so I've included it all here:

'I am not convinced by your arguments. You talk of "producing space". What an absolutely unintelligible phrase! Even to speak of a concept in this connection would be to grant you far too much. No, there are only two possibilities here. Either space is part of nature or it is a concept. If it is part of nature, human - or "social" - activity marks it, invests it and modifies its geographical and ecological characteristics; the role of knowledge, on this reading, would be limited to the description of these changes. If space is a concept, it is as such already a part of knowledge and of mental activity, as in mathematics for example, and the job of scientific thought is to explore, elaborate upon and develop it. In neither case is there such a thing as the production of space.'

'Just a moment. The separations you are taking for granted between nature and knowledge and nature and culture are simply not valid. They are no more valid than the widely accepted "mind-matter" split. These distinctions are simply no improvement on their equally unacceptable opposite - namely, confusion. The fact is that technological activity and the scientific approach are not satisfied with simply modifying nature. They seek to master it, and in the process they tend to destroy it; and, before destroying it, they misinterpret it. This process began with the invention of tools.'

'So now you are going back to the Stone Age! Isn't that a little early?'

'Not at all. The beginning was the first premeditated act of murder; the first tool and the first weapon - both of which went hand in hand with the advent of language.'

'What you seem to be saying is that humankind emerges from nature. It can thus only understand nature from without - and it only gets to understand it by destroying it.'

'Well if one accepts the generalization "humankind" for the sake of the argument, then, yes, humankind is born in nature, emerges from nature and then turns against naature with the unfortunates results that we are now witnessing.'

'Would you say that this ravaging of nature is attributable to capitalism?'

'To a large degree, yes. But I would add the rider that capitalism and the bourgeoisie have a broad back. It is easy to attribute a multitude of misdeeds to then without addressing the question of how they themselves cam into being.'

'Surely the answer is to be found in mankind itself, in human nature?'

'No. In the nature of the Western man perhaps.'

'You man to say that you would blame the whole history of the West, its rationalism, its Logos, its very language?'

'It is the West that is responsible for the transgression of nature. It would certainly be interesting to know how and why this has come about, but those questions are strictly secondary. The simple fact is that the West has broken the bounds. "O felix culpa!" a theologian might say. And, indeed, the West is thus responsible for what Hegel calls the power of the negative, for violence, terror and permanent aggression directed against life. It has generalized and globalized violence - and forged the global level itself through that violence. Space as locus of production, as itself product and production, is both the weapon and the sign of this struggle. If it is to be carried through to the end - there is in any case no way of turning back - this gigantic task now calls for the immediate production or creation of something other than nature: a second, different or new nature, so to speak. This means the production of space, urban space, both as product and as work, in the sense in which art created works. If this project fails, the failure will be total, and the consequences of that are impossible to foresee.' (page 108-110)

Links:

Henri Lefebvre on NotBored.org

The Perturbed Psychogeographer

Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

'The Burlesque of Psychoanalysis': Walking, Psychogeography and Schizocartography

"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst's couch"

...so say Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their introduction to Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. McKenzie Wark makes reference to this quote in his new text The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011).

McKenzie says of Deleuze and Guattari:

By the time they wrote this, much of what had been critical thought had laid its weary head on that analyst’s couch - depressed, anxious, irritable, neurotic. Obsessed with old wounds. Unable to forget. Unable to get up. At its melancholy end.

Deleuze and Guattari's exemplary walkers were literary characters, but it turns out that Chtcheglov [also known as Giles Ivain and a member of both the Lettrist International and the Situationist International] was that schizophrenic out for a walk, and he already had a theory of his own nomadism. Years before Deleuze and Guattari, he already saw the dérive as a kind of analysis. "The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one." Unlike psychoanalysis, it did not sever language from the continuum of practices in which it is embedded. "The dérive (with its flows of acts, its gestures, its promenades, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language" Chtcheglov writes. The Lettrist International refuse the separation of urban space from urban culture, each assigned to their own specialists. They refuse the separation of the external, social space of the city from the internal, private space of subjectivity. The subjective belongs to the city and can be analyzed experimentally, much as the city is subjective and can be reconstructed to expand our desires. (page 26)

My own psychogeographical practices bridge these spaces: the urban, the psychic, the social, etc. Schizocartography attempts to address the way dominant structures reroute subjective desires while at the same time producing an outlet where heterogeneous voices are encouraged to emerge form the postmodern terrain.

I have developed schizocartography from Félix Guattari's term "schizoanalytic cartography". Schizocartography enables alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in space and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. This is my definition of 'schizocartography':

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that questions dominant power structures and at the same time enables subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

While the term “schizoanalysis” is derived from “schizophrenia” (as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari), it does not promote mental illness; rather, “schizo” is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices, and alternative world-views, amongst other factors. Please see a sample of my other work relating to schizocartography:

A film can be viewed here: Hello! from Hunstanton

An online article is available in this journal: Using Schizocartography as a Method of Critiquing the University of Excellence

The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 2

Below is the paragraph that follows on from my previous post, from Fèlix Guattari's Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972) on the systems and processes of capitalism.

All [capitalisms] 'mystery' comes from the way it manages to articulate, within one and the same general system of enrolment and equivalence, entities which at first sight would seem radically different; of material and economic goods, of individual and collective human activities, and of technical, industrial and scientific processes. And the key to this mystery lies in the fact that it does not content itself with standardizing, comparing, ordering, informatizing these multiple domains but, with the opportunity offered by these diverse operations, it extracts from each of them one and the same mechanical surplus-value or value of mechanical exploitation. It is its capacity to re-order through a single system of semiotization the most diverse mechanical values which gives capitalism its hold, not only over material machines of the economic sphere (artisanal, manufacturing, industrial, etc.) but equally over non-material machines working in the heart of human activities (productive-unproductive, public-private, real-imaginary, etc.). (page 275)

Click here for The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 1

The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 1

Below is an interesting extract from Fèlix Guattari's Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972) on the systems and processes of capitalism:

What capitalizes capital is semiotic power. But not just any power - because in that case there would be no way of demarcating the earlier forms of exploitation - a semiotically de-territorialized power. Capitalism confers on certain social sub-systems a capacity for the selective control of society and production by means of a system of collective semiotization. What specifies it historically is that it only tries to control the different components which come together to maintain its processual character. Capitalism does not seek to exercise despotic power over all the wheels of society. It is even crucial to its survival that it manage to arrange marginal freedoms, relative spaces for creativity. What is of primary importance to it is the mastery of the semiotic wheels which are essential for the key productive arrangements and especially those which are involved in changing machine processes (the adjustments of machine power). Doubtless it is obliged by the force of history to interest itself in all domains of the social - public order, education, religion, the arts, etc. But, originally, this is not its problem; it is first of all continuously a mode of evaluation and technical means of control of power arrangements and their corresponding formulations. (page 275)

Click here for The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 2

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 2

Discarded Phenomena at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

We are not outside the university, we occupy it every day and this is the place from which any considerations for a future university will be made. However, we need to be cognisant of the problems that occur through living in a historical university: a past that refuses to completely disappear, that manifests itself in a contradictory and haunting co-presence, and that needs to be considered, first and foremost, as a place that is occupied by the people of the present. Any new way of living in the university will require an understanding of the complexity of space that the posthistoric university has inherited. We need to explore the university in an attempt to acknowledge its past, a search that may require a form of revealing to occur in order for us to understand what the university of today, and tomorrow, might mean.

What I would like to propose is a critique of today's university that helps to reveal a material life that can easily be forgotten when dealing with the abstracted notions and alienating practices associated with technological systems and knowledge generating processes. The university is a physical body existing in geographical space, occupied by people who traverse its roads, paths and corridors. To fully understand the university of today, and be able to respond to a new university, it needs to be excavated both archivally and topographically.

If we are to believe Félix Guattari, then we need to seek out modes that are counter to the dominant consciousness that appears in the form of power. All dominant powers require a particular worldview to take place in order for the status quo to be maintained. The university presents a particular outward face. This face is a consciously structured one that supports its specific messages. The university does not say everything about itself, in the same way that a business doesn't, because it would not be 'good practice'. The process of representation is a mediated one in which the university attempts to foster a like-minded view in the recipients of its representational medium, whether it be the university website, or how the campus looks.

In order that governing bodies can carry out policy, consent is the optimal reaction rather than opposition. Alternative voices are not encouraged, revolutionary ones need to be crushed or at the very least assuaged through hegemonic means; or, post event, they can be ignored entirely by being written out of history. However, these other voices and histories are still part of the body that makes up the institution as it appears today, even if they might be sidelined, for strategic reasons or otherwise. If the university is not conscious of its past, if it does not acknowledge its shadow qualities, it would be difficult for it to think of itself as a place of community, of consensus or belonging. In order to confront its unconscious the university needs to come to terms with its past-and-present relationships, especially those that stir up a sense of dissonance in the pit of the institutional stomach.

I would like to suggest that this can be done by looking for the hidden university, the one that is behind the veil of the manufactured image. It is the one that appears in the darkest part of the university: in its archives and in its lost or forgotten places. It can be found through a bottom-up method of psychogeographical exploration and archival research which will reveal a more complete university, one that can be traced in the palimpsest layers that form its spatial manifestation, and in its archival attempts at a de-prioritisation of certain data.

While we need to accept that the past still haunts the corridors of the institution, it needs to be acknowledged in its spectral manifestation. Neither should it be seen as something nostalgic, a time when ideas about the university were pure, honourable and righteous. The university always represents a mirror of society. While having the ruined signs of the ghost of university past all around us, the complexity of postmodern space - with its abyssal protocols and procedures - demands a renegotiation of that space. And I think Bill Readings expresses this most eloquently when he compares the university to an Italian city. So I will leave you with his quote:

Dwelling in the ruins of the University thus means giving a serious attention to the present complexity of space, undertaking an endless work of détournement of the spaces willed to us by a history whose temporality we no longer inhabit. Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce. (1999: 127)

Related link: Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

Bibliography
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

The Parkinson Steps at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

During modernity the university's relationship with commerce grew out of a direct response to an economic need, whereby the university reacted to demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, this means that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of the globalised marketplace and in that move adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses. It needs to involve itself in the transfer of capital within society both at home and abroad. The university does this in a number of ways, from its relationship with industry in its vocational courses, to research that directly benefits business and technology.

However, even as far back as 1990 academics were writing about the negative aspects of applying a commercial formula to every aspect of education. In her essay ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline' Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures - terminations and program closures - can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

I provide this illustration not because I think academics do not know this already, but because I wish to emphasise that this current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism. And, not just organisations, but individuals also. We no longer look to the nation-state for our sense of cultural identity, nor the modernist university, but to the High Street. We are first and foremost consumers.

This is how Mark Fisher puts it: "Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems." And Félix Guattari would agree. He believes that while we have many subjectivities available to us, the prevailing consciousness is a capitalist one. He says that capitalism works in such a way as to prevent anything that is antithetical to its project from taking hold. The signs that capitalism creates discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production, and here Guattari situates it in the context of education:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process. (1984: 34)

So what are we to do if this is less to do with the current crisis and more to do with 'the postmodern condition': the restructuring of education under neo-liberlism and the prevalence of a capitalist consciousness?

I think the clues are in the ruins of the university. Not only in those left by Bill Readings in his posthumously published book The University in Ruins but also in the material of the university which we inhabit today, the physical and abstract space of the university behind the spectacle.

Because the university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, what this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." This is problematic for the university because it means it is removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all, etc. Readings believes that the university as a concept no longer has any content: "The University of Excellence is the simulacrum of the idea of a university". And while this might sound negative, or even hopeless, herein also lies the possibility for it to be remade under a different concept; as Readings says "the wider social role of the university is now up for grabs".

In a time where grand narratives no longer hold sway, where culture and ideology is decentralised and where the once autonomous subject can even be argued to be posthuman, we need a different model of consciousness to help us negotiate the postmodern terrain and those institutions that are manifest in them. This is well-noted by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism when he calls for a new cognitive map:

It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment [...] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon1 of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (2009: 44)

This is echoed by Fisher when he states: "To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity'" (2009: 34)

So, if we are to believe that a predictable future is unavailable to us in this simulacra-like university that is inseparable from these global networks, how do we find the university of tomorrow?

Related link: Austerity and the University of Excellence Part 2

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Hardy, Cynthia. ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline', Higher Education, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.
Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

What is Schizocartography?

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Anti-Production

This quote appears in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972). The use of the word 'anti-production' pre-dates the definition developed by Deleuze and Guattari together in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process [...]. (1984: 34).

In regards to the university, the “consumer commodity” would be considered the knowledge that is being 'sold' to the student and which is produced at the end of a course in the form of awarding a degree which can be exchanged for a job, ideally one of capitalist-orientation. It is even the case that the student could be conceived of as the commodity, rather than the knowledge gained which appears in the form of the degree. Guattari is saying that any process that is antithetical to that of the capitalist project will be prevented from emerging (as much as is possible). The signs that capitalism creates, discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production. Although I am reluctant to use dialectical terms like outside/inside when discussing post-structuralist themes, it appears from this definition that anti-production is a process instigated outside the individual, by capitalism.

In the work that Deleuze and Guattari carried out together, anti-production represents a moment in production that occurs as a result of primal repression. For them anti-production appears to be autonomous but is not: it operates alongside production but is liable to being rerouted into the dominant productive processes and becoming recoded into the forms of representation used by that system. This definition, takes the form of an internal process that can become hi-jacked by capitalism.

(I would welcome any feedback from Deleuze and Guattari experts)

Bibliography
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).