April 2011

Home / Archives for April 2011

Connecting things up

Posted by dasfseegdse Kamis, 28 April 2011 0 komentar

A number of seemingly disparate topics have come up in my blog in recent weeks. I feel it's worth trying to fit things together, particularly in the light of my current project work and deeper thinking about education. The topic are:
1. Sensuality and communication

I feel that feelings are not sufficiently appreciated in our understanding of communication and learning. Dealing with this means...

2. A cybernetic understanding of emotion and the relationship to communication

thinking through the implications of (1) means that an alternative model of communication needs to be proposed. I have attempted this by associating Luhmann's theory with Beer's Viable System Model (see particularly http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/02/luhmann-beer-and-emotion-machine.html) and Harre's Positioning Theory

3. Understanding what the relationship between sensuality and communication means for educational technology

There are a number of aspects to this. In my post on new media (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/04/positioning-and-new-media.html), I suggest that new technology provides new forms of utterance and that these can serve a purpose in boot-strapping more conventional linguistic communications.

4. Understanding the relationship between Risk and emotion and its economic consequences

I've posted a lot about Ulrich Beck, and I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea of the Risk Society. Risk is perceived as anxiety, and it can be managed in a variety of ways. Beck's analysis indicates that individuals chose to manage it by 'trading' risks and that this drives our economy (where we produce little else other than risk). However, there are other ways of managing risk which have to do with individual capability and well-being.

5. Capability, knowledge and education

Capability requires knowledge, and education is a means to knowledge. Education is also heavily laden with Risk, and the trade between anxieties of modern life and the promises of increased learning with large sums of money has dominated the recent transformation of higher education in the UK

6. Illichian anxieties, human dignity and experience

Illich's thought is grounded in Catholic thinking about human dignity and I'm generally sympathetic to this. However, Illich's polemic seems to fall of deaf ears; the world is embarked on a course which in his view would lead to catastrophe. He may be right, but I suspect we'll somehow keep it together. We will learn to live with our anxieties. I think Illich tends to apportion blame to 'the system', and this is misdirected. The issue is with individuals, and it lies primarily in individuals who are not happy, and in their inauthentic and unhappy existence continue the pathologies he identifies. Rather than cast blame on 'the system', I would prefer to come to a deeper understanding of human experience, and how anxiety and risk affects it. Deeper knowledge can be transformative (so back to (1))

7. Knowledge and new ways to organise education

Illichian arguments around deschooling carry a distrust of the teacher and a dislike of the power relations associated with them. I think the word 'teacher' is misapplied because we are unable to make the distinction between a Jesus or a Marx (i.e. great teachers) and a typical insecure and inauthentic employee of the school system. Deeper knowledge and new distinctions about the experience of teaching and what teaching does to society can be transformative. The issue relates to knowledge and its performance in communication with others. Knowledge traditionally has been categorised by subjects; but equally, knowledge performances might be describable through engaging with tools. It is here that I become particularly interested in Scenarios.

8. Tools, knowledge and civil society

I think knowledge and civil society are inseparable. Knowledge has to be maintained and this is the prime purpose of universities. When knowledge is degraded (usually through the perversion of institutions) so civil society is degraded. In the 21st century knowledge rests in individuals who perform it in conjunction with remarkably powerful technologies. These technologies entail risk, and the management of risk is a key element in the knowledge that an individual has and in knowledge that they need to pass on. Paraphrasing Beck, the challenge of the 21st century is not "how can I eat?" but "how can I cope with my anxiety?"

9. Employment, Underemployment, Capability and the Economy

The management of capability to "deal with anxiety" relies partly on "useful unemployment". Unlike Illich's conception of this (where he imagined people building their own houses, for example), I think useful unemployment is not necessarily related to producing goods for the community (a la 'big society') but rather on maintaining inner balance and well-being. In essence this means that individuals must balance employment or underemployment with useful non-employment activity that ensures that they 'maintain readiness'. Drawing on my points (1) and (2), I think communication lies at the heart of this activity. The world of tomorrow and the threats it brings will demand high levels of flexibility, and consequently high levels of well-being to provide that flexibility, as we will have to organise ourselves rapidly to deal with events that occur. My feeling is that this is the closest to what Illich might mean by 'conviviality': living together without killing one another.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Towards Scenario-driven education?

Posted by dasfseegdse Rabu, 27 April 2011 0 komentar

The majority of my time is currently taken up with a large-scale European project called iTEC (http://itec.eun.org). iTEC is interesting in a number of ways, but not least because it proposes to organise education in partner schools around 'scenarios' rather than curriculum topics, and to provide technologies which pertain to those scenarios which will support teachers and learners in realising scenarios.

A scenario-driven approach has become more feasible in recent years because it has become possible to reproduce similar toolkits in a variety of environments which can support the necessary activities which make up a scenario. In curriculum-driven schooling, what was easiest to-hand in the school environment, and what was easiest to reproduce amongst a variety of schools was the curriculum. Teachers specialised in training colleges, schools equipped themselves with textbooks, and inspection regimes could audit whether the curriculum was being 'delivered'. Increasingly, technology is becoming to-hand in schools and universities, and as this happens, instead of organising education around the 'to-handness' of the curriculum, we can think of organising education around the to-handness of tools.

The problem with the curriculum-based organisation of education is that much of the education that is foisted on learners ill-fits their individual needs. Scenario-based education puts the needs of individual learners at the forefront, proposing activities and contexts where differentiated activities within authentic contexts can take place amongst varied groups of learners. In effect, a scenario is a detailed consideration of a lot of 'what if?' questions dealing not just with individual learning activities, but also economic and social trends, opportunities afforded by technology, etc. By taking this approach, issues of assessment and accreditation become more personalised and flexible as learners and teachers immerse themselves in the various activities of the scenario. The tool-focus of the scenarios means that collecting evidence for assessment can be tightly integrated into the performance of the various activities that take place, rather than be an add-on to learning activity.

iTEC aims for flexibility in the provision of tools for the realisation of scenarios. Some tools will work better in different contexts, and different tools may be equally good for the same job. This presents the possibility that individual learners might bring their own tools to their learning. In this way, a scenario might be realisable through personal technology and personal learning environments. However, the scenario approach is not directly related to the Personal Learning Environment. Instead it belongs to thinking about the coordination of education and curriculum design. But because of its tool-focus and the ability of different tools to do the same job, scenarios in the form of 'tool-kits' and 'activities' can be standardised whilst their implementation can be personalised. This is a challenge that other approaches to curriculum design have been unable to achieve. IMS Learning Design, for example, sought to standardise patterns of activities, but the implementation of a learning design insisted on the use of particular technologies and gave teachers and learners little flexibility in the coordination of activities.

But what of knowledge in all this? Scenario-based education is grounded in work on 'situated cognition'. Within any situation, people 'perform' their knowledge. The advantage of the scenario for teachers is that there is nothing in a scenario which ties the teacher down to particular types of 'knowledge performance'; at the same time, it leads teachers away from didactic knowledge performances, so however they do convey their knowledge, it is unlikely to be from the front of the class.

But there's another problem. Using scenarios to organise education may replace the 'curriculum' as the organising principle with 'tools' or 'technical settings'. However, the curriculum is merely a body of knowledge whose reproduction requires a particular capacity alone (even textbooks can be dispensed with). Tools, on the other hand, require capacity, but often they also require a license, or at least an agreement with a technology provider. This, I think, is a problem, and much as I'm drawn to the sense of a scenario-driven pedagogy, moving the education system in the direction of tools raises new questions about the risks of engaging with technology. But maybe that is the crucial knowledge for us all in the 21st century.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Waves

Posted by dasfseegdse Selasa, 26 April 2011 0 komentar

Waves as oscillations and harmonic motion are fundamental to the world. But the use of the word 'wave' covers a range of phenomena, and not just from physics. I'm particularly interested in "waves of emotion", and the extent to which a "wave of emotion" relates to waves of the sea, or transverse waves in a slinky spring. But the real point about this is that we are not 'digital'. Human experience is not really an on-off thing; it is a 'flowing' thing. But if our experience is flowing within us, how does an increasingly on-off, switch-driven world affect us?

Music is the stuff of 'flow' and waves. The phrasing of music is the most obvious example of an 'emotional wave'. Equally however, we might discuss the wave-like sensations of smell or taste, or those sensations that build up to orgasm or the other experiences relating to love and sensuality. I think music is 'easier' (less embarrassing) to talk about, and also it might be easier to study since it's representation as notation and performance is well-established.

What is the wave of emotion that moves through a person on hearing a musical phrase or gazing into a lover's eyes? Thinking cybernetically, I might be tempted to say that the wave passes through our internal regulating mechanisms. All of those mechanisms are connected in some way (as indicated perhaps by Beer's Viable System Model), so what starts in one mechanism will have knock-on effects on the other mechanisms. Each effect, as a change to the state of a person, will have a consequent experience associated with it, and each state will therefore tend to move to another state. In moments of intense emotional experience, like bursting into tears, the physical effects of this rushing through us have real physical side-effects which in turn will effect the wave-motion. This may be a more precise way of the idea that Bataille expressed with regard to erotic experience - that it was "assenting to life, even in death": the wave sweeps towards death but we know it is part of life. And any wave motion through ourselves has a sort of resonance, where one wave is echoed: in states of shock, the moment of shock keeps on passing through us - to the point that it is an uncontrollable resonating loop.

There are questions here about instinct. Not that it's an 'explanatory principle' (as Bateson says), but that what we 'instinctively' do may well relate to this passing through of waves within our regulating mechanisms (so that's just a more detailed explanatory principle!). Sexual behaviour is the most obvious example, but I think there are deeper questions which concern living things other than humans. What does the bee see in the flower that it is moved towards it? How does the flower 'know' how to appear for the bee to be attracted? If the bee experiences a 'wave of emotion', that might mean that it too is subject to the same regulating mechanisms that we might identify in ourselves. Does the bee experience a sweep of emotion towards death? Is it 'aware' of its mortality? Is it this that drives it towards the flower? But then again, why restrict this idea to sentient existence?

What about "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"?

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Verdi's Otello and the Sensuality of Communication

Posted by dasfseegdse Minggu, 17 April 2011 0 komentar

Seeing a concert performance of Otello in Manchester last night brought home to me the fundamental importance of those aspects of communication which we have no words to describe. I think more than in the play, the Verdi/Boito creation lets us peer into the latent passion behind Desdemona's pleas for Cassio (and how Otello might have interpreted them), together with the rabid mood-swings of Otello as he struggles to articulate what is buzzing though his mind. The only character to clearly articulate what is buzzing through his mind is Iago. All the rest are confounded by the sensuality of life, which Iago can only reason about.

I had a conversation with a friend before the performance where we talked about the duality of reason and sensuality in communication. Bruner's "Request Formats" present a way of thinking this through. Harre explains these as:

The famous example which I think demonstrates this most clearly is the mother, playing with a child, places a dolly in front of her and says "here's the pretty DOLLY". Similar phenomena are apparent when children are taught to read. Basically, some sort of sensual game is played.

Of course, in the context of an opera, this sensuality of communication is particularly noticeable. It often makes ordinary language sound ridiculous when it is sung "do you WANT a CUP of t-e-a...?" But opera's power is precisely because of this sensual power that it has. No other art form combines rationality with sensuality in the same way.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Positioning and new media

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 15 April 2011 0 komentar

I saw an interesting keynote by Jabari Mahiri at #cal11 today which has set me thinking about the role of new media in teaching and learning - particularly the use of new media by kids. We talk in terms of "this is cool! Give them a camera and the kids can just express themselves..." and the results of the kids "expressing themselves" can be remarkable: new capabilities, new hope, escape from impoverishment. Of course, it's not that simple - there are remarkable stories, but I suspect it's much messier under the surface, particularly with regard to teacher willingness to allow the kids to express themselves. But I'm interested in this business of self-expression. Is it possible to be more precise about it?

One place to start in thinking about the impact of these video activities is to think about the difference between daily communications in risk-ridden, highly anxious, impoverished settings and the communications in more normalised daily lives that characterise the 'comfortable middle class'. Where there is a limited range of linguistic performances the coupling between what Luhmann calls the psychic system and the communications in the social system is very strained: basically, a limited range of linguistic performances is having to express an intensified range of emotions. It's easy to see that the complexity management doesn't stack-up here, and that escalating anxiety might flare into violence and despair.

Might it be that technologies act as substitutes for linguistic performances? In Luhmann's scheme, there is a selection of 'information' (what is to be communicated) and then a selection of 'utterance' (how it is to be communicated). With a 'technology substitute', it may be that there is an increased range of possibilities for utterances.

But I think there's more to it than that. Making a video is not a linguistic communication. In Luhmann's sense, it is not communication at all, but 'art'. It is the making of a sensual 'object' which works directly with the senses of others. It is ambiguous in its meaning, and it's making and its watching are both sensual experiences (my music videos are much the same for me). But these sensual artistic communications are particularly fascinating because in their making and their watching, they have an impact on the linguistic skilled performance capabilities of the kids too. It's almost as if the media engagements help them to re-wire themselves.

What's in the re-wiring? Where the state of a person whose only communicative acts tended to be part of a pathological social situation, that state can be transformed through the artistic process, whilst at the same time, the artistic object can be used to transform the social context too to a point where less pathological communications become possible.

I can't help think that there's something to do with Positioning Theory here (I mentioned it to Jabari Mahiri). The issue relates to the internal mechanisms of the psychic system, or in Harre's terminology, the 'storylines' together with illocutionary acts. (this is the diagram I sketched a few weeks ago and posted here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/03/property-relations-positioning-and.html)

These interact with the social position or role that the individual finds themselves in. But I think the difference is that we're not just dealing with speech acts here; they are artistic acts too which are transformative of the position and the storyline. I think the question is... HOW?

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Critiquing technological progress in Learning

Posted by dasfseegdse Kamis, 14 April 2011 0 komentar

Beck says of technological progress that "it is legitimated social change without democratic political legitimation." Looking at the Googles, Apples and Microsofts of this world and this observation would seem to be borne out. But in some ways, learning technology might be worse. The social change that Google et al want to create is one where they make bigger profits. They tend not to have 'well meaning' political ambitions other than profit. Learning technologists, however, are driven by their ambition for instigating social change and see technology as a way of realising this. They exploit the fact that their interventions slip under the radar of political processes. Until, of course, those politicans see some expediency in aligning themselves with technological innovation. But that's where the problems really begin. The technology gets the social change in by the back-door, without anyone having a say in what happens, then the politicians exploit the fact that the technological change has occured, pretend that this is "the will of the people". Where does that take us then?

But the thing that's going on all the time in this process is the generation of risk. Technologies create risks for teachers and learners. The emerging situation in institutions creates new risks on a broader political and organisational scale. Some of those risks require reorganisation and redefinition of roles, etc. Those roles require new technogies which introduce new risks, new jobs, etc, etc.

What may be achieved is economic stability, but it is at the cost of increased anxiety. At its worst, the cost is increased social alientation and insecurity brought about through the inability to maintain identity amongst all the turbulence. Only an increase in capabilities can counter this, but the processes of increasing capability also serve to introduce new risks.

There's something slightly depressing about all this. But at the same time, I think it's broadly a fair description of how things are. Right now, I'm struggling to see a light at the end of the tunnel. It reminds me of what a treasury official is reported to have said in 2009: "There's only dark at the end of the tunnel!"

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Underemployment and maintaining readiness

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 11 April 2011 0 komentar

The world of underemployment means that the primary regulation of the relationship between workers and work is no longer maintained by employers. It must be actively maintained by individuals. For individuals this means a greater sense of insecurity and anxiety as they continually have to consider the possibility that their current employment might cease.

I think that between a worker and their work there is a kind of property relation. That means that the practices that one becomes accustomed to in employment become part of one's identity. The loss of an employment is therefore a threat to identity. Flexibility brought about through underemployment therefore can entail uncertainty and risk about ones own identity.

In response to this risk, workers can develop new capacities for establishing property relations not with their particular employment, but rather with the generalised differences they consider themselves to be able to make in a work situation. Increasingly, "this is what I do" is not a statement of the specific social role they play in an organisation (teacher, doctor, etc), but rather an appreciation of ones' impact on a generic work situation. By building these capacities, individuals acquire new skills to maintain identity and achieve flexibility in an environment of underemployment. Fundamentally, they maintain their readiness for employment or unemployment.

However, the capacity to maintain readiness is dependent on high levels of personal reflexivity. These can best be developed through useful underemployment (or useful unemployment) since the objective is to balance internal human goods (wellbeing, etc) with external socially efficacious practice. In essence, "because I am well I can act well". Have universities (particularly technical universities) focused on 'effective practice' at the expense of the internal human goods and useful unemployment? Whilst at the same time academic universities have focused on 'effective academic action' (essay writing, discursive techniques, etc.) whilst also not delivering the necessary personal reflexivities for surviving in a world of underemployment...

What is to be done? Is a new curriculum required? But once again, the instinct to innovate is borne out of authenticity. The simple question is "how do we make the most out of the available means?" In particular, I wonder if it is about how to make the most out of underemployment: by thinking, reading, writing, performing and talking.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

The Right to Useful Unemployment and University Life

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 08 April 2011 0 komentar

There's no doubt that there's a degree of uncertainty bordering on panic setting into most UK universities at the moment: few would risk complacency wherever they find themselves in the pecking-order. That panic manifests itself in individuals' anxieties about their jobs, their futures, their families, the car and the mortgage. Scary stuff.

But their response to this anxiety within many universities is perhaps more interesting. In the face of uncertainty, panic and anxiety, what do people do? They form committees! Within UK HE there must be hundreds of them, sitting in darkened rooms, mulling over "what we ought to do to respond", but none of them really having much success in steering concerted action. Above them sit the executive directors who will make the real decisions in the institution's best interests, and for whom the activities of the committees will be far less significant than anyone in the committees would like to think.

I'm wondering if the real problem is one of "underemployment" in universities, and this is making me think about connections between Ivan Illich's work on "useful unemployment" and the pathology of institutions and Ulrich Beck's work on risk. Beck describes the effects of under-employment as a condition of the Risk Society. Of this, he says:

"If one considers [the] consequences of the destandardization of working hours and work locations in their totality, then one can say that a transition is occurring in industrial society from a uniform system of lifelong full-time work organized in a single industrial location, with the radical alternative of unemployment, to a risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized, decentralized underemployment, which, however, will possibly no longer raise the problem of unemployment in the sense of being completely without a paid job. In this system, unemployment in the guise of various forms of underemployment is 'integrated' into the employment system, but in exchange for a generalization of employment insecurity that was not known in the 'old' uniform full-employment system of industrial society."

I think what the workers in universities are experiencing is the onset of this "generalization of employment insecurity". But what is interesting is that this risk system has generative effects, and its effects seem to be self-perpetuating within the institution through the contributions of risk-exposed underemployed individuals in creating bureaucracy within institutions which itself contributes its own risks and (ironically) creates more employment.

This then beckons to Illich, who in arguing for the right to useful unemployment argues that the institutional barriers to creativity should be removed. Some of these barriers result from the anxiety of underemployment: too many useless meetings! How can this pathology be avoided? I think 'useful underemployment' may be the answer. Illlich's concern was always on the ways of life lived by people, and the forms of life they create. He says:

"instead of attempting to make feasible what is technologically possible, research for a viable future should concentrate on the institutions which foster human life and on rendering them possible with available means"

But the key to 'fostering human life' in a post-industrial world may be to work towards 'useful underemployment'. Useful unemployment deals with the well-being of the individual as well as their environment. Prayer might be one example (which must have been foremost in Illich's mind). Those practices which emancipate the mind so as to negate the damaging effects of risk not only on the individual, but on their institutional context. Heidegger's thoughts on 'dwelling' as a counterpart to 'enframing' also fit into this. Maybe keeping a blog and playing the piano do this for me!

But, importantly for education, balancing employment with underemployment is a strategy that needs to be learnt.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Disrupting Disruptive Innovation

Posted by dasfseegdse Rabu, 06 April 2011 0 komentar

In my last post, I made a strong statement about innovation: "Innovation is always framed by inauthenticity". I want to explore this.

What I mean is that the instinct to make new stuff is part of a pathological process. Stafford Beer complained about this in his 'Platform for Change'. Beer identifies the maker of new stuff as 'homo faber', where homo faber has been the dominant figure in industrialised society. He wants to see the emergence of 'homo gubernator' instead: the steersman who finds the best way to be in the world that exists without creating new 'stuff' to solve individual problems, but instead to find the best ways of organising and coordinating what's already there. By implication, homo gubernator is more 'authentic'. (It's worth saying that Beer's greatest fear is not homo faber, but who he calls 'homo pontificus', the "harbinger of extinction"!)

Whilst it seems crazy to say 'innovation bad', there is clearly a fine line to tread. Innovation enframes: the desperate attempts to deal with the nuclear disaster in Japan at the moment show how one engineering intervention in the world necessitates numerous others to deal with the consequences of the first. It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of dealing with unintended consequences. This, I think is particularly true of educational innovation.

At some point, there is a moment where someone says "But what's it all about? How have we got here? Does it have to be like this? Given what's happening, what does this tell us about the world?" These are powerful questions and demand a return to authenticity to face them. They are homo gubernator questions. They also demand a level of honesty as people retreat from their innovative ways (to which they have become deeply attached) and are forced to look at the world afresh. It would seem that for every innovation, there may be a corresponding "therapy" where the homo faber instinct is counterpoised by the homo gubernator question: "do you want an iPad2 - or do you want counselling?"; "do you want a portfolio system, or do you want to think what matters in education?"; "do you want an electric car or do you want to rethink our attitude to geography and space?", and so on.

I'm uncomfortable with Christensen's work on Disruptive Innovation because what he's sees as disruptive is just another innovation; just another way of continuing the pathology of the enframing, albeit by coming at things in a different way - but that's often the nature of innovation anyway (if you don't even come at things in a different way, then I would have thought it hardly counts as innovation at all!). Authenticity means going for the powerful question, the homo gubernetor questions, which seek to grasp at the causes of the present condition. Grasping the causes of the world is like an artist understanding their material: one would hope that the intentions of an artist emerge in harmony with the nature of the material which is shaped.

But within this movement to authenticity, the inauthenticity of innovation and the pathology it entails is probably necessary in establishing the conditions for asking the powerful question. That's an uncomfortable conclusion, because it means that within the reflexivity of each of us there is a need to balance the energy of pursuing an enframed making, whilst be sensible enough to know when to stop and think. The serenity prayer springs to mind....!

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Risk, Responsibility and Innovation diffusion

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 04 April 2011 0 komentar

To imagine somebody watching the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima and saying "gosh! that's innovative!" seems an unlikely (and somewhat dark-humoured) scenario. But why? Clearly, it was innovative in the sense that we often think about innovation; and it 'caught-on' - it was diffused as 'early adopters' were rapidly joined by 'early majority' users. We may be beginning to see the 'late majority' (although if the late majority gets its way, there's a risk we'll all be 'late'!).

I think this scenario tells us something about how we imagine innovation and frame it within a restricted social setting. Nobody said "gosh, that's innovative' about the atom bomb because I think anybody seeing that terrible event would immediately feel the ethical impact on themselves and the world. They were not apart from the events; they were part of them. It was humankind which had brought this power into being.

When we do say "that's innovative", I think there is an implied separation between ourselves and our human condition and the technology we are commenting on. The separation is created because for most of the time, we have a view of ourselves as humans which is framed by our daily concerns and preoccupations: we face 'problems' in daily life, and often mistake our being for the dealing with those problems. Our 'selves' as 'problem-facing' entities becomes separate from our selves as authentic beings. The problem-facing self sees something in the world created by someone else who is living a similar inauthentic existence, facing similar problems and dealing with them in new ways. We see these ways they deal with their problems, and then we can say "that's innovative!".

Innovation is framed by inauthentic experience.

Innovation in education then becomes problematic, because education, in dealing with human goods, must deal with authentic experience. If it doesn't, it may deepen the sense of alienation. Of course, alienation and inauthenticity may lead to new 'innovation' which in turn can lead to new inauthenticity and alienation, and so on. This is the pathology of 'homo faber'.. a sort of pathological autopoiesis. I suspect it is also a key mechanism in the manufacture of risks in society.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Phenomenology and the risk society

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 01 April 2011 0 komentar

In today's world, everyones' experiences and the actions that arise from them are hard-wired into the things that happen, which in turn feed into our experiences. I'm tempted to say (tentatively):

Experience, maybe more than money, power or class structures, will be a key determining factor in the social transformations of the future (be they good or ill).

This is why my primary concern is phenomenology (the study of experience). Unlike other techniques of phenomenology (e.g. Husserl's, for example), I use cybernetic tools for understanding how experience works. I think a scientific understanding of how experience works is important as we move away from an industrialized manufacturing economy towards a service-based, reflexive economy, which produces risk and where the experience of risk plays the driving role in keeping our society functioning, and the economy going.

I don't think experience has always had such a dominant role in social emergence: Power and Class could over-ride experience. In less equal societies, were the experiences of the poor worth anything? - at least to the rich? Was it only the rich who determined the patterns of social emergence? Yes.. I suspect it was. I think this is not the case now: the experience of the less wealthy is as important as the rich because everybody consumes as part of the risk economy (and the rich need the poor to consume, which they will only do if they have 'good experiences'). However, what is meant by 'rich' and 'poor' here needs deeper definition: it's not about money, but control. The means of production of risk is Capital.

I think that with Capital which is servitised (riskified?), the rich have become adept at manipulating experiences to keep the process of consumption going. I want to understand what's going on here, because it seems to be at the root of some of our deeper social problems - particularly those concerning the experience of fairness.