Subsistence ethic as a causal factor

In his pathbreaking 1976 book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, James Scott offers an explanation of popular politics based on the idea of a broadly shared "subsistence ethic" among the underclass people of Vietnam and Malaysia. Earlier postings (hidden transcripts, moral economy) have discussed several aspects of Scott's contributions. Here I want to focus on the causal argument that Scott offers, linking the subsistence ethic to the occurrence of rebellion.

Scott's view is that the ensemble of values and meanings current in a society have causal consequences for aggregate facts about the forms of political behavior that arise in that society. Speaking of the peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia of the 1930s Scott writes,

We can learn a great deal from [peasant] rebels who were defeated nearly a half-century ago. If we understand the indignation and rage which prompted them to risk everything, we can grasp what I have chosen to call their moral economy: their notion of economic justice and their working definition of exploitation--their view of which claims on their product were tolerable and which intolerable. Insofar as their moral economy is representative of peasants elsewhere, and I believe I can show that it is, we may move toward a fuller appreciation of the normative roots of peasant politics. If we understand, further, how the central economic and political transformations of the colonial era served to systematically violate the peasantry's vision of social equity, we may realize how a class "of low classness" came to provide . . . the shock troops of rebellion and revolution. (Scott 1976:3-4)

This passage represents a complex explanatory hypothesis about the sources of rebellion. Scott holds, first, that peasant rebels in Indochina in the 1930s shared the main outlines of a sense of justice and exploitation. This is a system of moral values concerning the distribution of material assets between participants (landlord, state, peasant, landless laborer) and the use of power and authority over the peasant. Second, this passage supposes that the values embodied in this sense of justice are motivationally effective: when the landlord or the state enacts policies which seriously offend this sense of justice, the peasant is angered and indignant, and motivated to take action against the offending party. Offense to his sense of justice affects the peasant's actions. Third, Scott asserts that this individual motivational factor aggregates over the peasantry as a whole to a collective disposition toward resistance and rebellion; that is, sufficient numbers of peasants were motivated by this sense of indignation and anger to engage in overt resistance. On this account, then, the subsistence ethic--its right of a subsistence floor and the expectations of reciprocity which it engenders--is a causal antecedent of rebellion. It is a factor whose presence and characteristics may be empirically investigated and which enhances the likelihood of various social events through identifiable mechanisms.

The subsistence ethic may be described quite simply. Scott writes, "we can begin, I believe, with two moral principles that seem firmly embedded in both the social patterns and injunctions of peasant life: the norm of reciprocity and the right to subsistence" (167). Villagers have a moral obligation to participate in traditional practices of reciprocity--labor sharing, contributions to disadvantaged kinsmen or fellow villagers, etc. And village institutions and elites alike have an obligation to respect the right of subsistence of poor villagers.

Claims on peasant incomes . . . were never legitimate when they infringed on what was judged to be the minimal culturally defined subsistence level; and second, the product of the land should be distributed in such a way that all were defined a subsistence niche. (10)

Thus the subsistence ethic functions as a sense of justice--a standard by which peasants evaluate the institutions and persons that constitute their social universe. The subsistence ethic thus constitutes a central component of the normative base which regulates relations among villagers in that it motivates and constrains peasant behavior. And the causal hypothesis is this: Changes in traditional practices and institutions which offend the subsistence ethic will make peasants more likely to resist or rebel. Rebellion is not a simple function of material deprivation, but rather a function of the values and expectations in terms of which the lower class group understands the changes which are imposed upon it.

We can identify a fairly complex chain of causal reasoning in Scott's account. First, the subsistence ethic is a standing condition in peasant society with causal consequences. It is embodied in current moral psychologies of members of the group and in the existing institutions of moral training through which new members are brought to share these values. Through the workings of social psychology this ethic leads individuals to possess certain dispositions to behave. The features and strength of this systems of values are relatively objective facts about a given society. In particular, it is possible to investigate the details of this ethic through a variety of empirical means: interviews with participants, observation of individual behavior, or analysis of the content of the institutions of moral training. Call this ensemble of institutions and current moral psychologies the "embodied social morality" (ESM).

In line with the idea that the subsistence ethic is a standing causal condition, Scott notes that the effectiveness of shared values varies substantially over different types of peasant communities. "The social strength of this ethic . . . varied from village to village and from region to region. It was strongest in areas where traditional village forms were well developed and not shattered by colonialism--Tonkin, Annam, Java, Upper Burma--and weakest in more recently settled pioneer areas like Lower Burma and Cochinchina" (Scott 1976:40). Moreover, these variations led to significant differences in the capacity of affected communities to achieve effective collective resistance. "Communitarian structures not only receive shocks more uniformly but they also have, due to their traditional solidarity, a greater capacity for collective action. . . . Thus, the argument runs, the more communal the village structure, the easier it is for a village to collectively defend its interests" (202).

We may now formulate Scott's causal thesis fairly clearly. The embodied social morality (ESM) is a standing condition within any society. This condition is causally related to collective dispositions to rebellion in such a way as to support the following judgments: (1) If the norms embodied in the ESM were suitably altered, the collective disposition to rebellion would be sharply diminished. (That is, the ESM is a necessary condition for the occurrence of rebellion in a suitable limited range of social situations.) (2) The presence of the ESM in conjunction with (a) unfavorable changes in the economic structure, (b) low level of inhibiting factors, and (c) appropriate stimulating conditions amount to a (virtually) sufficient condition for the occurrence of widespread rebellious behavior. (That is, the ESM is part of a set of jointly sufficient conditions for the occurrence of rebellion.) (3) It is possible to describe the causal mechanisms through which the ESM influences the occurrence of rebellious dispositions. These mechanisms depend upon (a) a model of individual motivation and action through which embodied norms influence individual behavior, and (b) a model of political processes through which individual behavioral dispositions aggregate to collective behavioral dispositions. (That is, the ESM is linked to its supposed causal consequences through appropriate sorts of mechanisms.)

What this account does not highlight -- and what is emphasized by several other theories we've discussed elsewhere (post, post, post, post) -- are the organizational features that underlie successful mobilization. Instead, Scott's account focuses on the motivational features that permit a group to be rallied to the risky business of rebellion.

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,causal reasoning,moral economy,norms,rebellion,social movements,Southeast Asia

Farms in historical materialism

Materialist explanations in history generally attempt to discover fundamental features of technology and labor that impose a very deep imprint on the rest of society. Farming is almost always fundamental in this respect; the forces and relations of production are particularly visible, and the products of the farm system are fundamental to the survival of society. The standard of living of a traditional society is largely determined by agricultural productivity and the nature of the farming system -- nutrition, for example, is essentially determined by the ratio of total grain output to population. Finally, virtually all traditional economies are primarily rural; so farm life defines the conditions of ordinary social existence for the majority of the population. So let us consider a brief analysis of the farm. (A. V. Chayanov's classic treatment of the peasant economy, The Theory of Peasant Economy, written in the 1920s, remains highly valuable. Robert Allen's lifetime of research on the English farm economy is highly insightful (Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850), as is Bozhong Li's work on the farm economy of the Lower Yangzi (Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850).)

A farm is the basic unit of agricultural production. It represents the coordinated application of diverse factors of production in order to produce crops. The factors of production include labor; land; tools, implements, and machinery; fertilizers; and water resources and irrigation techniques. Crops include both foods (e.g., rice, wheat, millet) and raw materials (e.g., cotton, soya beans). And farms may be organized for a variety of purposes: to satisfy a family's subsistence needs, to create a profit within a market system, or to provide employment for the greatest number of rural people.

Farms in different agrarian regimes may be characterized in terms of a set of technical and social features. On the technical side we need to know what the scale of cultivation is (farm size); what techniques of cultivation are employed; what varieties of crops and seeds are available; what types of farm tools and machines are used; what types of irrigation, if any, are in use; what varieties and skills of labor are employed; what types of fertilizers are used; and what forms of agronomic knowledge are available to the farmer. (We might reduce this variety of technical features to a spectrum ranging from low-technology to high-technology farming systems.) On the social side we need to know the purpose of cultivation (family subsistence or commercial profitability); the form of land tenure in place (fixed rent, sharecropping, smallholding, etc.); the forms of labor employed (slave, serf, family labor, hired labor); the forms of supervision employed; and the processes of income distribution embodied in the agricultural system.

These features are the primary subject of research for agricultural historians such as Allen and Li. These features essentially determine the most important economic characteristics of the agricultural system. First, they determine the productivity of the farming system, whether measured in terms of land efficiency (output per hectare) or labor efficiency (output per man-day). For once we know the techniques of cultivation in a given ecological setting, it is possible to form relatively accurate estimates of output for a given input of land, labor, and capital. This set of considerations also determines what we might describe as the net rural product--the total agricultural product over and above the replacement cost of the factors of production. On this basis, Chinese historians such as Dwight Perkins attempt to estimate the overall wealth and income of late Imperial China, including estimates of quality of life for the majority of rural people (Agricultural development in China, 1368-1968).

Second, the full description of the farming system as indicated above will allow us to infer the system of surplus extraction in place; it will be possible to indicate with adequate precision how much surplus is generated and where it goes. Victor Lippit attempts to arrive at such an estimate for traditional China (Land Reform and Economic Development in China: A Study of Institutional Change and Development Finance). This in turn permits us to describe the system of rural class relations that correspond to a given farming regime.

Within this framework we can now indicate a variety of types of farms; and as a working premise, we may postulate that agrarian regimes in which different farm types are dominant will have distinctive patterns of organization and development. The following are advanced as ideal types; variants and mixed examples are possible as well. However, these types are selected as being particularly central in the development of both Asian and European traditional economies. And, significantly for the historian of social change, each farming system creates a distinctive pattern of incentives, barriers, social relations, and modes of behavior that have important consequences for historical change.

• The peasant farm. The peasant farm is small (1-10 hectares), and is organized to satisfy consumption needs of the family. It is managed and run by a peasant family using family labor. Cultivation is divided between subsistence crops and commercial crops with some risk-aversive preference for subsistence crops. There is a very low level of capital available to the peasant farmer, and cultivation is oriented towards labor-intensive techniques. Low-cost traditional techniques and tools are employed in cultivation. The peasant cultivator typically pays rent on the land he cultivates, though smallholding with clear title to the land is also possible.
• The manor. This farm is of medium size (100 hectares). It is managed by a resident lord whose aims are (1) to satisfy the consumption needs of his household, and (2) to produce a marketable surplus to generate cash income. The manor employs a sizable number of bonded laborers (serfs or slaves); it uses traditional techniques of cultivation but benefits from some economies of scale; and it employs foremen as supervisors. Part of the estate is farmed by individual families in circumstances of peasant farming.
• The capitalist farm. This farm is medium to large (50-150 hectares) and is organized to produce a profit. It is therefore located within a commercialized rural economy within which crops may be readily marketed. The farm is organized and directed by the capitalist farmer, who may either own or rent the land. The capitalist farmer has the fiscal resources needed to make capital investments in the process of cultivation; and he is oriented towards cost-cutting in considering various alternative techniques. The capitalist farm employs wage labor, where the wage is determined by local economic circumstances and the minimal cost of subsistence. The capitalist farm represents a rationalization of available techniques aimed at maximizing the profitability of the unit.
• The cooperative farm. The cooperative farm is a large unit (100-400 hectares) owned by the cultivators (75 families). This farm is oriented towards profitability; it uses the labor of the cultivators; and it is organized by a council of the cultivators. The collective has access to investment funds, and is therefore able to invest in new techniques; moreover, the collective farm benefits from economies of scale.

Significantly, this typology of farming units corresponds broadly to the classical Marxist taxonomy of modes of production: feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. The peasant farm, however, represents a form of organization of the productive forces of rural society that is overlooked in Marxist theory: call it the "peasant mode of production." The peasant mode of production may be defined as a system in which agriculture is performed on peasant farms; the bulk of the population consists of free peasant cultivators; and agricultural surpluses are extracted through rent, interest, and taxation.

In short, careful analysis of the circumstances of farming is crucial for large-scale history, including especially the history of economic development, the history of urbanization, and the history of human well-being. And, of course, the twentieth century demonstrated the centrality of peasants in the great political movements of revolution and anti-colonialism.

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Posted in: agriculture,CAT_materialism,food,materialism

Being clumsy

We've probably all been clumsy from time to time -- knocking over the teacup on the desk when reaching for a pencil, dropping a jar when moving from the kitchen to the table, tripping on an uneven bit of sidewalk when walking the dog. We sometimes refer to this kind of behavioral mistake as "maladroit".

Can we give an explanation of clumsy behavior?

Here as elsewhere, a little conceptual work is helpful. We might characterize a clumsy event as "an inadvertent negative result of a series of bodily movements intended to accomplish something else altogether." And, it would seem, we need to add a characteristic of causation into the definition: the negative result came about as a consequence of the agent's series of actions and movements -- not simply an unfortunate coincidence. The actor bears responsibility for the negative result in some way. (We wouldn't call it "clumsy" if I knock over the glass of wine because the waiter has just placed it at my elbow and out of my visual range; rather, this is simply an accident.)

It is also useful to consider the contrast that is intended by the use of the concept. The contraries of "clumsy" seem to include adjectives such as skillful, adroit, agile, graceful, or deft. (And consider whether there are nuances of differences among even these positive valence adjectives.) The idea of the degree of bodily control exercised by the actor comes into all of these concepts, both negative and positive. The agile and graceful person -- an athlete or a dancer -- is praised for his/her ability to place the body in exactly the way she wishes to. The clumsy person trips, drops, smashes, and spills -- that is, he/she lacks the ability to control the results of bodily movements.

So "clumsy" is a feature of bodily performance, in which the intended course of affairs has gone wrong. It is a defect of performance and, derivatively, a defect of competence. A clumsy person is one who is prone to committing more than his/her share of clumsy actions. To refer to a movement or a person as clumsy is to find fault (though perhaps without blame); it is to highlight a deviation between what we expect of normal behavior and the observed behavior.

So what is the standard of competence and performance that we implicitly have in mind when we deploy the standards of "adroit" and "clumsy" when it comes to physical performances? It's something like this. We recognize, first, that every physical action is actually a complex and orchestrated series of component movements. To catch a high fly ball requires the outfielder to predict the destination of the ball; to organize his leg and body movements in order to run to the destination; to prepare for the leap into the air; to extend the glove arm and snag the ball. But more prosaically, to pour a glass of water has a lot of the same complexity of orchestrated movements and calculations. Both activities require "body intelligence" -- an active (unconscious) process of orchestration of sub-movements into larger perfomances.

Second, there is a substantial amount of knowledge gathering, calculation, and projection that is required in order for the actor to form a cognitive map of the arena of action: where the target will be at a particular point in time, what obstacles exist in the environment, and how the bodily movements need to be orchestrated on such a way as to avoid the obstacles and achieve the desired outcome. The waiter approaching the table to refill the water glasses is illustrative: he/she needs to observe and record the placement of the guests, their glasses, the floral arrangements, and the random items on the table; he needs to approach in such a way as to avoid contacting the guest or spilling the water on the guest; he needs to navigate the pitcher past the guest and between the flower arrangements; bring the pitcher adjacent to the water glass; and pour just enough water into the glass to fill it. Mission accomplished, he needs to withdraw the pitcher without knocking over the flowers or spilling on the guest. And, since the guests are in motion, be needs to regularly update the representation of the field of play and be alert to the possibility of sudden movements by the guest.

In other words, we expect quite a lot from the "adroit" waiter from the point of view of active knowledge gathering and skillful orchestration of movements based on the current cognitive map -- representation of the world and management of the body. The adroit person is one who has a reasonably good representation of the physical spaces around himself/herself; has a reasonably good ability to project the future configuration of the space; and has a reasonably high ability to orchestrate the series of movements needed to accomplish a task and a high ability to bring the body to implement the resulting series of steps.

So where does "clumsy" come into this story? Evidently, clumsy mistakes can derive from any of these three sources. The cognitive representation of the field may be incorrect or glaringly incomplete (the waiter may have failed to note that the guest is particularly tall and consequently bumped his head in his forward motion) (faulty representation). Second, the waiter may miscalculate times and distances -- he may think he can just clear the guest's arm gestures as he passes with the water pitcher (faulty calculation). Or he may have a faulty ability to orchestrate his own physical movements. He intends to touch the pitcher to the lip of the water glass, but he over-shoots and breaks the glass (faulty orchestration and/or faulty implementation).

So now we might speculate a bit: a clumsy person may be clumsy in virtue of deficiencies in any of the three areas -- representation, calculation, and orchestration -- and the nature of the clumsy performance is different for each of the three forms of deficiency. The first person may be clumsy because he/she doesn't pay a lot of attention to the field of play; builds up an incomplete representation of the placement of the furniture; and, as a result, bumbles into the footstool or the coffee table. Or there may be another sort of cognitive defect -- for example, a limited ability to remember the features of the cognitive map that has been developed -- he keeps forgetting the footstool. The second person may have a deficient ability to project future states of the field of play based on its current state. He sees the revolving door in front of him, but mis-estimates how quickly it is moving and collides with it. The third person may have a full and sufficient cognitive representation of the field of play; may be fully able to run the dynamics forward in time through mental calculation; but may have difficulty in arranging the movements of the body accordingly. And this deficiency in turn may derive from various causes -- a defective implementation of the routines of motion, an awkward geometry of the body so there is systematic misplacement of the feed, a slow neurological process leading to body movements that aren't quite in synch, ...

And here is one final thing we might observe, based on this treatment. A single clumsy act can be explained as the result of a single moment of bad performance -- lapsing of attention to the environment, failing to calculate carefully the relevant future states, stumbling. An enduring characteristic of clumsiness, on the other hand, invites an explanation based on a feature of deficient competence in one of the areas mentioned above -- a chronic problem in the actor's cognition of the environment, or the actor's ability to project future states, or the actor's ability to orchestrate and control the movements of the body. And, if we were in the "clumsy-therapy" business, we might try to identify where the deficiency lies and then try to find ways of improving the actor's competence in this area.

What kind of analysis is this? Partially it is an ordinary language analysis, along the lines of J. L. Austin. It involves diving into the nuances of meaning that we have in mind when we describe certain actions as "clumsy." But partly it is a phenomenological inquiry: what is the state of mind and body that is associated with committing "clumsy" mistakes? What is the "life world" of imperfect performance? (Hubert Dreyfus (A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition), Samuel Todes (Body and World), and Richard Sennett (The Craftsman) capture different parts of this perspective.) And, finally, it is a bit of speculative cognitive psychology; it is an attempt to work out the structure of the cognitive and motor activities that need to occur in the normal performance of activities like catching a fly ball or pouring a glass of water. And, based on this schematic analysis, it is an effort to see how the mistake of "clumsiness" can emerge from normal skilled performance. This is analogous to Noam Chomsky's inventive use of grammatical "mistakes" as a clue to the underlying grammatical competence possessed by normal language users.

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Posted in: CAT_agency,mental framework,phenomenology

Acting, deliberating, performing

Earlier posts have addressed aspects of action -- particularly the features that align action with purposiveness and choice, deliberation, planning, and improvisation. Here I'd like to focus on the idea of action as a performance -- a series of behaviors meaningfully orchestrated by the actor out of consideration of an expected "script". Here we interpret actions as falling into scripts and roles, created by the culture's history and constituting the actor's behaviors as a performance. The agent is postulated to possess a stock of mini-scripts and role expectations that are then invoked into a "syntax" of performance in specific social settings.

The anthropologist Victor Turner makes central use of this framework in constructing his ethnographies (Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society). He refers to this approach as dramaturgical ethnography. The idea here is that social groups -- cultures -- have created for themselves a set of schemes of ways of behaving that individuals internalize and play out as social settings arise. There is the role of the doctor, the salesman, the librarian, the clown, and the general, and the individuals who assume those roles know the scripts. So when they interact in social settings relevant to their roles, their behaviors reflect the role and the script. The scripts become part of the furniture of "behavioral cognition" -- the routines the players string together in ordinary and extraordinary social settings. (Note the parallel with Erving Goffman's treatment of everyday behavior (post).) And, perhaps, the script governs the social actor so deeply that his/her behavior no longer has its own individual meaning or intention. (It is said that Gary Cooper never saw his role in High Noon as the anti-McCarthyism allegory that most people on the progressive side of the spectrum take it to be.)

What does this framework imply about the actor's state of mind in performing an action? How much agency do actors maintain under this theory? And to what extent is the actor's conduct his own, deriving from his or her own authentic self rather than from an externally created role? Consider as an example, a fire captain's behaviors and speeches during his management of the fire company's handling of a major fire. Let's amplify the story a bit. The captain and the members of the company have a well-rehearsed set of procedures for various scenarios encountered in fighting a fire -- "victim trapped in bedroom", "elderly person inside", "possible toxic materials on site", "roof collapse imminent". As these contingencies arise, captain and company play out the prescribed actions. Second, though, there is probably a prescribed style of command that influences the captain's manner and conduct: be calm, give sufficient attention to the company's safety, keep control of the press and crowd on-site, don't fall into a screaming, cursing rage when things go badly. (Think of Captain Sullenberger's methodical double sweep of the USAir passenger cabin after landing his disabled aircraft on the Hudson River, before exiting for his own chance of rescue.)

So there are fairly tangible ways in which the behaviors of the commander and the company are in fact governed by scripts and roles. The dramaturgical interpretation makes sense here. The actions of these participants are not invented de novo on the scene of the fire; rather, they derive from earlier practice of roles and, more intangibly, carrying out of a certain conception of behavior of a commander under stress. We don't get actions here that derive from unadorned actors, considering a range of choices and choosing the best in the circumstances.

But neither do we get the opposite extreme -- robots playing out their scripts without intelligence or adaptation to circumstance. Instead, each of the players in this story retains his/her own assessment of what is currently going on and what deviations of script may be demanded. The captain retains the ability and the responsibility to break with procedures when there is an imminent reason to do so; and this degree of autonomy extends down the line of command to the junior firefighter. So the routines and scripts guide rather than generate the behavior.

So the performative interpretation of social action is not inherently inconsistent with the idea of intelligent, purposive action. Instead, we can think of the actor in this case -- captain or junior firefighter -- as involving in a complicated series of behaviors that reflect both deliberation and internalized script. I think this interpretation is very analogous to Pierre Bourdieu's position on the subject of habitus in Outline of a Theory of Practice. Conduct that is guided by norms (in this case, scripts and roles) can nonetheless also be intelligent and strategic. Seen in this light, the dramaturgical interpretation supplements the purposive theory of action rather than replaces it.

It is challenging to get the balance right, though, between the compulsion of a set of norms or scripts and the practical freedom the actor maintains at every point to act differently than the prescription. It seems unavoidable that the kinds of scripts, roles, and norms mentioned here have some binding power over the agent in actual social life. Much of the time the behavior simply plays out the script, with no homunculus reconsidering the action from the point of view of other possible choices. And often the role or norm is psychologically compelling to the extent that the actor can't realistically consider breaking it. Today's British newspapers break a mini-scandal in which an environmental activist is pressured by the Scottish police to serve as a paid secret informant (story). They offer a substantial amount of money and immunity from otherwise scary criminal charges for her cooperation. Rather than accepting their terms she bugs her meeting with them with her cellphone and exposes the police effort. Why? Presumably because her understanding of her role as a principled activist with the courage of her convictions made accepting this offer humiliating and impossible. (Think, though, how many people made a different choice in the GDR when confronted by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).)

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Posted in: agency,CAT_agency,Goffman,norms

Creativity, convention, and tradition

images: Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906); Courbet, Burial at Ornans (1849)

Conventions define how to do things correctly -- trim the hedges, choose an outfit for an evening at the opera or the racetrack, how much to tip the server. They also define or constrain productions in the arts -- writing a short story or a sonnet, performing a Brahms quintet, participating in an Andean flute group. We might define a convention as a stylized but unwritten rule of performance. A tradition is an extended set of conventions for a given area of performance. We can refer to traditions of classical German chamber composition, Japanese landscape painting, or hiphop street performance. A conventional act or performance, then, is one that directly and consistently expresses the relevant conventions.

So -- at any given time, a particular set of conventions drive the creation of works of culture and guide the interpretation of the product. These conventions are somehow embedded in the community of creators, viewers, and critics. And innovation, breaking or stretching the rules, creates the possibility of novelty and creativity within the process. It is important to notice, though, that conventions generally don't govern every aspect of a performance. The convention of the sonnet mandates a form and meter and gives some constraint on subject. But it would certainly be possible to write a sonnet in deviant meter in praise of a farm tractor; the audience would be able to make sense of the production. So the artist always has a degree of freedom within the tradition.

I find several specific ideas to be useful in analyzing cultural conventions and their products -- in particular, "idiom", "voice", and "novelty". Within a given medium, there is an existing stock of shorthand ways of expressing an artistic or symbolic idea. We may refer to these modes of expression as "idioms" of the genre. When the stranger in the 1950s western is wearing a black hat, the audience understands he is the villain. When the soundtrack swells in an ominous minor key the audience knows there is trouble coming. These idioms aren't natural signifiers; rather, they are conventions of the B movie. So the idioms of a genre are a particularly direct form of convention within the semiotics of the genre.

"Voice" is a counterpart of originality. It is the intangible "signature" that the individual artist brings to his or her work -- what Eisenstein brings to many of his films, distinctive from Bergman and Kurosawa. Voice represents a kind of consistency over time, but it is not defined by homage to tradition; instead, it is an expression of the specific sensibility of the individual artist, the specific way in which this artist forges together his/her material and vision within the resources of the genre and its conventions. Eisenstein's films aren't formulaic, even though one can recognize a common sensibility running through them.

What about novelty and creativity? Novelty is the break outside of convention that the artist brings to the production in order to express a particular idea or perspective in a new and forceful way -- for example, the transition from sepia to color in The Wizard of Oz. The original and genuinely creative artist or writer finds ways of bringing novelty and his/her own originality into the production, giving the audience new and unexpected insights and ideas. The element of innovation needs to point the audience towards its signification without relying wholly on the existing traditions of reading. (Picasso's portrait above of Gertrude Stein displeased some friends of the writer because "it doesn't resemble Gertrude Stein." Picasso is said to have replied, "It will.")

But here is an apparent conundrum of creativity and convention. Any performance or artistic work that is wholly determined by the relevant conventions is, for that reason, wholly uncreative. It is like a conversation in a Dashiell Hammett novel: no surprises, each gambit programmed by the conventions of the crime novel. Or it is like a string quartet composed by an earnest follower of Beethoven, with no phrase breaking the flow, no note out of place. And for the careful listener, each is ultimately boring; there is no novelty in the work. And there is no opening for the original and creative voice of the creator. Originality and new perspective have no place.

But now the other half of the conundrum: novelty without regard to the frame of tradition is incomprehensible and meaningless. The classical composer of 1800 who somehow heard the world atonally, arhythmically, and to the accompaniment of falling trash cans and who then wrote a symphony in thirty movements on this basis -- this composer is innovating, all right. But he/she is not creating works that any existing audience could hear as "music". There is no bridge of meaning or hermeneutic practice to facilitate interpretation.

It is relevant here that we are led to refer to the audience. Because cultural products require the conveying of meaning; and communication of meaning requires some reference to conventions shared with the audience -- whether in music, painting, literature, or hiphop. Meaning of any cultural performance is inherently public, and this means there have to be publicly shared standards of interpretation. The audience can only interpret the performance by relating it to some set of conventions or other. These may be conventions of representation, structure, or mythology; but the audience needs some clues in order to be able to "read" the work.

There are, of course, periods in art history where it appears that innovation is all and continuous convention is nothing. For example, Courbet and the realist painters were evidently shocking to the viewing public for their dismissal of the classical values of the Salon -- in the Burial at Ornans above, for example. But really, there was a great deal of continuity within the context of which the realist manifesto was shocking to the public. (T. J. Clark does a great job of "reading" the painting for its continuities with previous traditions of painting and the sources of its originality; Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, pp. 80-83.)

So what does all of this imply about "creative breakthroughs" in the genres of the arts? It seems to imply that major and culturally significant breakthroughs occur when talented people fully absorb the semantic (and historically specific) conventions that define the genre at the current time; he/she finds ways of squeezing every bit of new meaning out of these conventions in the production of the cultural product; he/she plays with the limits of the convention, testing them for the possibility of forging new meanings; and sometimes, he/she breaks a convention altogether and substitutes a new meaning maker in its place (presenting Julius Caesar in the garb of fascist Italy of the 1930s, for example).

These topics are relevant to understanding society, because this dialectic of convention, innovation, and meaning-making is virtually pervasive in everyday life. Jokes, business meetings, and street demonstrations all have some elements of this dance of meaning, convention, and originality. So it is important to gain greater understanding of the intersection of convention and innovation.

(There are numerous unanswered questions raised by this topic. How is a tradition of painting or composition related to a scientific or technological tradition? How is a literary or artistic tradition related to a "style" of technology or a scientific research programme? How can we take measure of "radical innovators" in the arts such as Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism, or John Cage and American experimentalism in composition? And how do beauty or aesthetic value come into this equation? What are the qualities of a work of art that lead us to say, "That is beautiful!" or "that is hideous!"? What are the threads of convention, form, meaning, and originality that contribute to great aesthetic value?)

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Posted in: CAT_misc,convention,culture,innovation

Mobilizing a movement

The red shirt demonstrations in Bangkok are very interesting. Throughout March 2009 there were massive demonstrations involving tens of thousands of people. They are mostly supporters of the National United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD; also designated as DAAD), the mass party of former prime minister Thaksin. And generically they are in opposition to the current government and to the yellow shirt movement that brought it to power in street demonstrations in fall 2008. (These demonstrations succeeded in forcing the closure of Bangkok's airports, which was significant because it threatened the tourist economy upon which Thailand depends.)

The social composition of the red shirt movement is loosely described as consisting primarily of poor people, largely from rural parts of Thailand. The media coverage also makes it clear that the red shirt movement is able to call upon the support of thousands of urban Bangkok people, including taxi drivers. Their immediate demand is for the resignation of the current government, which came to power through undemocratic means. But more generally, the movement seems to call for greater social equality in Thailand and greater democracy.

The question I want to raise here is a pretty limited one but theoretically crucial. It concerns the processes of mobilization through which these tens of thousands of people were induced to travel to Bangkok and involve themselves in extended and increasingly risky demonstrations. In general, massive demonstrations don't just happen; they need organization and planning. How did this mobilization transpire? What national, regional, and local organizations brought it about? I don't have the expertise to answer the question, so I'm putting the issue out here, in the hope that some of the commentators on the #redshirt twitter feed will help with some specifics.

There are a number of different ways in which this mass mobilization might have happened.

One is through the efforts of an effective and extended party organization. It might be the case that UDD is a well-organized and well-financed organization with numerous professional activists in the countryside. There may be village- and town-based UDD offices that maintain a regular presence at the grass-roots level. The activists may be experienced at keeping the grievances alive, keeping political sentiments aroused, and -- when the time is right -- they may have the capacity to mobilize bus-loads of adherents for the trip to Bangkok. On this scenario, mobilization is analogous to the "get out the vote" processes through which political parties in the United States mobilize their supporters at the polls on election day.

Here's a second way the mobilization could work. UDD might be an umbrella organization at the urban center with little grasp into the countryside and villages; but it may loosely lead a number of independent organizations that have a substantial presence in rural areas. Then, through coalition politics and a degree of high-profile leadership, the center and the coalition partners may call for mobilization, and coalition activists at the local level may take the organizational steps needed to elicit hundreds of bus loads of volunteers. This is a bit more challenging than the first scenario from the point of view of maintaining political unity -- each partner may have a somewhat different agenda -- but may be more feasible from the point of view of the level of resources needed by the central party. Here is a posting from April 9 in New Mandala that seems to suggest this type of mechanism.

I suppose there is a third logical possibility as well: a reasonably well-organized central party, no regional partners, but a mobilization that results simply from a widely broadcast "call to action". Crudely -- UDD leaders call for large street demonstrations; the call is broadcast on friendly mass media; and tens of thousands of rural people heed the call and make their way to Bangkok.

Naturally, we can ask exactly the same kinds of questions about the yellow shirt movement; and it is possible that the answers will be different in the two cases. I don't have any way of knowing whether any of these scenarios is close to the realities in Thailand today. But it is worth knowing, and there are many smart observers in Thailand who can shed light on the matter. So, Thai tweeters, how does it work?

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,redshirt,social movements,Southeast Asia,unrest

Understanding across generations

Cohorts sometimes have very different formative experiences. Perhaps this means that they form different ways of taking the world in -- different expectations, different paradigms of how things work, different basic reactions about how to behave. And, in turn, perhaps this makes intergenerational understanding difficult; both younger and older may need to engage in real hermeneutic effort to make sense of each other.

This is often said to be the case for the US birth generations of 1920 and 1950. The former experienced the Great Depression, Tommy Dorsey, World War II, and the atom bomb. The latter experienced Woodstock, Jimmie Hendrix, the Beatles, and the war in Vietnam. The values of thrift, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice attached easily to the "Greatest Generation". Questioning authority, personal freedom in all things, and a weird combination of political engagement and personal narcissism formed the nimbus of the sixties generation.

These truly were very different social, familial, and economic circumstances for the two successive generations. But is it clear that these differences amounted to differences in worldview deep enough to make mutual comprehension difficult? Or are these differences overstated in films and novels (Death of a Salesman, The Graduate, Appocalypse Now), but really small beer in actual fact?

Part of the answer depends on what we think is involved in "understanding" the inner lives and external behavior of others. We observe people's behavior in specific circumstances -- how they treat their friends or children, how they handle important social obligations like the draft, or how they react to tragedy and loss; and we try to reconstruct how they think, feel, and reason. We try to form an idea of what they care about, what they value, and what kinds of principles they honor.

Part of what we mean when we judge we just don't understand the other person's actions, is that we can't assimilate their behavior to anything like our own core values and commitments. Likewise, we have the greatest sense of understanding when the other's conduct is compatible with our own values; we judge "she's pretty much like me in a core way."

When the other's behavior deviates widely from our own values and perceptions -- like Darnton's apprentices in their massacre of Parisian cats, or like the war protester pissing on a flag in the view of the sixtyish VFW witness -- we have to get more actively hermeneutic: what is the perception and valuation of the situation possessed by the other, in light of which his action makes sense to him? We have to actively reconstruct an interpretation of the other person's mental framework.

One thing we know from everyday experience: friendship and extended interaction leads to hermeneutic learning between people with very different starting points. So the fact that we begin with little in common doesn't ensure that we'll stay in that place. But this takes effort, and if there isn't a basis of friendship and mutual respect we may not get there. It explains, too, why parents and their children often do succeed in understanding each other in spite of these generational differences: they care enough to try to figure each other out.

But maybe the example of mid-century America is a pretty clear case; maybe it's true that the world of the VFW sixty-year-old in 1970 is different enough from the draft-resisting protester that they are mutually opaque. They each need the skills of a Geertz or a Maslau to have a meaningful conversation with each other.

But what about today? Are there hermeneutic gaps as wide as this between the 1950, 1970, and 1990 cohorts? Is it possible that the experiences of people now sixty and now twenty-five are just as wide? Are the young truly foreign to the middle-aged? And for that matter -- is it true that sixty is today's forty?

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Posted in: CAT_cognition,verstehen