COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND

Poverty of the Welfare State or: Poverty: construction – de-construction – and losing the battle

20 Maggio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, social quality, works, projects, publications

The following notes had been made in preparation of the contrubution to the Spring Symposium “Conceptualising and Measuring Poverty: methods for the 21st century” at University College Cork – it took place on the 17th of May 2013.

At a later stage an elaborated annd extended version of these catchwords will be published in the framework of the book under the title

Poverty of the Welfare State.

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Surely it is necessary, painting a bleak picture, showing the harsh measures and consequences of austerity policies under the aegis of neo-liberalism.

Sure, I would love to deconstruct now for the next two hours the ideology of neo-liberalism – I think there is much more and something different in it than we usually think about. Anyway, as I am supposed to talk about the EU, I may end right now with reference to just one letter from an official from the European Commission outlining in a very firm and concise form the EU’s privatisation strategy.

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being originally from Germany I may start here pointing out what this potentially means in such a rich and democratic country – of which the constitution has still some obligation to

democratic, social and federal principles (Article 23)[1]

In my view it is hardly possible to justify under such heading a strategy of evicting homeless people.

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It is equally clear that we have to highlight the immorality of such policies.

Having lived for some time in Ireland, I want to refer to Michael Higgins, addressing the European Parliament – see on this also already an earlier post)

There he stated

– Schuman, who was aware of it, reached back to recall the early monastic perigrinatio and declared Columbanus to be “the patron saint of all those who now seek to build a united Europe”.

– The Schuman meeting, and the others which followed it, assisted by such as Jean Monnet, was responding to near and terrible events. But we should never forget, and I emphasize it today, that in their response they recognized its immense value, and drew on, the rich scholarship, philosophy, moral instincts and generous impulses of European thought as they sought, not only to replace war with peace, but more importantly, to construct a vision of Europe’s people working together in an inclusive way. It was not any abstract construction. It was a practical proposal drawn from the head, propelled by the heart, and uniting economy and ethics in its aspiration.

(Higgins, Michael D., 2013: ‘Towards a European Union of the Citizens’. Adress to the European Parliament, Strasbourg, Wednesday, 17th April, 2013http://www.president.ie/speeches/address-by-president-michael-d-higgins-towards-a-european-union-of-the-citizens-european-parliament-strasbourg-wednesday-17th-april-2013-2/ – 10/05/2013)

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Furthermore we should not hesitate to critically discuss the various “approaches” of dismantling the “welfare state”

Coming currently from Hungary Victor Orbán has to be mentioned, of course. He shocked some people by the orientation on a munka alapú társadalmat , i.e. work-based society – mind, there are some issues around translation – the official translation speaks of workfare society though the actual translation is likely “work based”. –

More captivating is in Hungary the shift of social policy issues to the minister of inner affairs – defining relevant issues a matter of control.

And more shocking is the fact that going through Budapest and seeing the amount of people sleeping rough. And it may actually be the contrast I faced actually last Sunday: passing one of the beautiful old buildings, still carrying the marks of the recent renovation and the archway offering shelter, no: a living space for a group of homeless people.

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Criticising such positions: the harsh measures, the rejection on moral and ethical grounds and the conceptual dismantling means not least to defend the welfare state and actually to engage for its formation.

Living now in Italy we still face the challenge of replacing the traditional social protectionism as it had been established by Mafia with a modern welfare state.

But of course, it is then a question if our constitution gets the priorities right.

L’Italia è una Repubblica democratica, fondata sul lavoro.

Actually some may remember the times when the inclusion of the employment chapter into the EU-treaties had been celebrated as major success of social policy on the European level.

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And of course I could go on with this EUropean game. And finally I would return to Brussels.

Well, two weeks ago I had been there again. After about four years I re-entered that stage. A bit strange, having been there for several years, being allowed to walk in and out …; this time it had been more like entering an alien world of a fortress – with external and not least internal borders – discussing clear lines of programs, policy packages … – and knowing: the transparency suggested by the massive glass fronts showing as much reality as the screen saver of our computers.

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Sure, there are reasons to celebrate – the EU as Nobel laureate.

But it had been on the personal level – carrying specific experiences from my Brussels years with me – again frightening to see how the less celebratory parts are forgotten – the memorial by ATD-Fourth World in front of the European Parliament is worn out.

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OK, enough of this little EUropean game

We face some kind of paradox:

Poverty is seemingly a “general condition of socio-human existence – or even a condito humana, rooted in eternal greed and the immortality of immorality? Occasionally reaching unbearable scope, and reminding us of the need of a good life?

Or poverty is a very specific pattern of a very specific formation of society?

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Part of this problem is the difficulty we face when it comes to defining poverty

We see terms that are questionably used to be near to synonyms:

deprivation
social exclusion
disadvantage
exclusion

II.

We find complex approaches towards a definitional framework:

relative income or equality as matter of well-being
subjective and objective criteria
capability approach
human development and human security

And we find with this the different analytical perspectives behind it, e.g.

Human Development Index (HDI)
Human Wellbeing Index (HWI)
Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP)
Social Quality (SQ)

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Two issues are – in today’s debates – somewhat permanent companions.

While we are talking about poverty, we are actually concerned with wealth

for Adam Smith it had been the Wealth of the Nation
implicitly linked to the wealth of individuals, inherently understood as matter of increased availability of goods – SI, QoL
and frequently questioned by the wealth of society –in the pre-capitalist society for instance by an important economist like John Stuart Mill with his notion of the stationary state

I cannot, therefore, regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. It may be a necessary stage in the progress of civilization, and those European nations which have hitherto been so fortunate as to be preserved from it, may have it yet to undergo. It is an incident of growth, not a mark of decline, for it is not necessarily destructive of the higher aspirations and the heroic virtues; as America, in her great civil war, has proved to the world, both by her conduct as a people and by numerous splendid individual examples, and as England, it is to be hoped, would also prove, on an equally trying and exciting occasion. But it is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing. Most fitting, indeed, is it, that while riches are power, and to grow as rich as possible the universal object of ambition, the path to its attainment should be open to all, without favour or partiality. But the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

(Mill, John Stuart, 1848: Principles of Political Economy with some of their Apllications to Social Philosophy; London et altera: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1920 [based on the 6^th edition from 1865]: 748 f.)

Sure, talking about wealth is somewhat breath-taking then 150 billion USD that computer giant apple stores – hording is the proper term, as we know it from Marx.

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II.

It had been also a somewhat unquestioned reference established to capitalism.

Occasionally it meant to criticise capitalism as fundamentally problematic.

More often it had been about a fundamentally affirmative approach, possibly slightly brushed up by looking at the varieties of capitalism (Hall, Peter A./Soskice, David (eds.): Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), the claim of a “good capitalism” (Baumoll, William J./Litan, Robert E./Schramm, Carl J. Schramm (2007): Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity; Yale University Press).

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Sure, as we accepted taking responsibility over from god, we have to look now at The Spirit Level (Wilkinson, Richard G./Pickett, Kate, 2009: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London, Allen Lane) – mind the multiple meaning, linking to bubbles, levelling and spirituality itself. And with this we find of course easily also a link to the mushrooming moral economy.

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What do these two links

wealth
capitalism

actually mean? We have to explore this against the background of a by and large undefined understanding of welfare.

We may translate it into the concern for the nation state as new framework for (re-)production of social and individual existence, defined by the means of production.

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It has to be left to a side remark: this shift to the nation state as framework had been not least a fundamental shift of what (re-)production is about. Coming back to John Stuart Mill we see at the beginning of the chapter from which the quote is taken the actually interesting concern.

The preceding chapters comprise the general theory of the economical progress of society, in the sense in which those terms are commonly understood; the progress of capital, of population, and of the productive arts. But in contemplating any progressive movement, not in its nature unlimited, the mind is not satisfied with merely tracing the laws of the movement; it cannot but ask the further question, to what goal? Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind?

It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this, and that each step in advance is an approach to it. We have now been led to recognise that this ultimate goal is at all times near enough to be fully in view ; that we are always on the verge of it, and that if we have not reached it long ago, it is because the goal itself flies before us. The richest and most prosperous countries would very soon attain the stationary state, if no further improvements were made in the productive arts, and if there were a suspension of the overflow of capital from those countries into the uncultivated or ill-cultivated regions of the earth.

(Mill, John Stuart, 1848: Principles of Political Economy with some of their Apllications to Social Philosophy; London et altera: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1920 [based on the 6^th edition from 1865]: 746)

Of course, this opens an interesting debate not least on utilitarianism – a theory of ethics which surely needs to be seen beyond its translation into utilitarian-based conceptualisations of exchange.

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The main points are then the following.

(1) The development of the “welfare state” had been a differentiated process – giving answers to distinct socio-economic patterns. – This actually explains very much the different analytical approaches and criticisms around problem solving, control, socialisation, productive function of the welfare system (see Pierson, Christopher/Francis G. Castles (eds.): 2006: The Welfare State Reader; Cambridge: Polity Press)

(2) We are focusing now a comparable situation as it characterised the emergence of the different welfare states: the “EU” establishing itself as new national welfare system, but not (sufficiently) recognising the changed objective conditions.

(3) In order to understand these processes we have to investigate the foundation which is given by the link between means of production – mode of production – social system – social policy.

(4) Following classical economic thinking, EU social policies (and also the national social policies) are tied up by the limited understanding of the economic process as production function. The clearest formulation of this is the Cobb-Douglas production function:

Y = AL^ßK^α

Production equals factor productivity multiplied by Labour input defined by output elasticity multiplied by capital defined by output elasticity

At least some of the problems with this have to be mentioned: it does not clearly spell out what the different factors are, and actually attributes productivity to capital, i.e. it supposes that capital would produce anything. It does not! Furthermore, it suggests implicitly that productivity is solely about commodity production – a factor that is not only in the light of more recent debates questionable. Most importantly, it refers to labour where we actually have to talk about labour power.

The latter point is of special importance as it allows us to focus our attention on the cost of the production and reproduction of labour power.

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A brief overview of the analytical – and actually methodological – perspective has to do suffice. The elements will be presented in four matrixes which will lead to a further matrix which presents an analytical tool for welfare systems – they had been introduced already earlier.

	focus of the productive process	consumerism[2]
rationalisation/ technicisation
Demand-supply-side economics

matrix 1: Value Generation

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	high-value production founded in informational labour	high-volume production based in low-cost labour
redundant producers, reduced on devalued labour
production of raw material founded in natural resources

matrix 2: Resource Reference

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	autocentric development	extraverted development
relative economic sustainability
competitiveness

matrix 3: Patterns of Growth

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	monetary policy i.w.s. as means of social integration	monetary policy i.w.s. as means of securing international sovereignty
competitiveness
traditionality

matrix 4: Socio-Political System and Sovereignty

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This taken together provides an analytical tool for looking at development and the welfare system

	resource reference
value generation		patterns of growth

	socio-political system and sovereignty

matrix 5: welfare system – analytical tool

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To some extent this surely reflects the traditional mainstream perspective with the common reference to T.H. Marshall:

I shall be running true to type as a sociologist if I begin by saying that I propose to divide citizenship into three parts. But the analysis is, in this case, dictated by history even more clearly than by logic. I shall call these three parts, or elements, civil, political and social.

(Marshall, Tom H., 1950: Citizenship and Social Class; in: Citizenship and Social Class; Tom H. Marshall/Tom Bottomore; London et altera: Pluto Press, 1992: 8)

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The difficulty of understanding consists of the necessary differentiation between

secular trends
secular capitalist trends
specific developments as they are reflecting the connection between them

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In any case: Capitalism surely had been up to hitherto the main driver of the development of the means of production, thus allowing also a major development of the productive forces (as matter of the production in Department I) and production of consumables (as matter of the production in Department II), thus being also a matter of the Wealth of Nations.

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The fundamental challenge however is the following: This system defines its various borders in a way that contradicts its own conditions

e.g. the costs of labour power vs the need to ensure mass purchasing power
time
space
environment and externalities.

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Then Social Policy and Welfare States have to be understood in a much broader way, including in particular

governance
productivity in economic terms
productivity in terms of social integration and cohesion
global inclusiveness.

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It is surely a complex field we are looking and the actually important point is to accept this complexity. We may briefly come back to the Cobb-Doulas function mentioned above. There the approach had been criticised by the following:

“it suggests implicitly that productivity is solely about commodity production – a factor that is not only in the light of more recent debates questionable. Most importantly, it refers to labour where we actually have to talk about labour power.

The latter point is of special importance as it allows us to focus our attention on the cost of the production and reproduction of labour power.”

And we see marked shift in terms of the latter when we look at the current development not of income but on the source and securitisation. A few examples may do suffice – each of them standing for a specific fundamental problem.

Karstadt, a major trade chain at least of German origin and today surely in various ways internationally and globally braided, plans to withdraw for two-years from collective agreements which can be discussed in the perspective of income and rights
The eviction of people from their homes in Spain which is answered by a law against the banks, limiting their space for action inclusion and rights
The mushrooming of soup kitchens – surely doing good for people concerned but undermining any rest of cohesion and rights
And globally an absurd call for more slums, clearly showing the need to reflect on empowerment and rights

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Seen in such perspective, we should actually not be afraid if social policy is seen as productive factor. The question is – as always:

what do we actually produce?
how do we produce?

This is also important as this perspective allows us to go beyond a perspective that sees social policy as instrument of poor relief and charitable add-on to normal capitalism.

But it faces us with a major challenge, namely linking rights and law – some of you may know from my writing the inherent problem, due to the inherent individualist and individualising character of law.

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In any case we may add another useful tool for the analysis, namely the assessment of control – centrally understood as multiple cumulation of power and property.

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Of special relevance are here

control of means of production
control of processes of production
control of products
control of the distribution of products

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The Social/Welfare Welfare Systems (see in this context also already the blog entry on China and Asia – A New Capitalist Centre or A New Capitalism?)

the social state – von Itzenplitz
the welfare society – Wigforss-Hansson
the welfare state – Beveridge
the familiarist-public welfare state – Leo XIII
the co-operative social economy – Raiffeisen
the harmonious familiarist paternalism – Confucius, Mencius

(see in this context in particular Herrmann, Peter, 2012: Social State, Welfare State and Then? Where to Move from the Welfare state? A Cooperative State of Sustainable Sociability as Perspective for Innovation; in: Heiskanen, Johanna/Henry, Hagen/Hytinkoski, Pekka/Köppä, Tapani (eds.): New Opportunities for Co-operatives: New Opportunities for People. Proceedings of the 2011 ICA Research Conference, 24-27 August, 2011, Mikkeli, Finland; Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Ruralia Institute, 2012: 295- 313).

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EUrope – here we see roughly the development of the following major stages

from basic social security for workers (gender, ESF, social charter)
over marginal poverty relief and experimental good-doing
to employment policies
arriving at social innovation and social investment of the Lisbon competitiveness strategy.

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The overall pattern

from civil liberties – single market
to political rights – crisis of legitimacy and EP-elections
to social rights – as matter of employment policies

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But also – and not least:

All this is systematically caught in the contradiction of

productivist nation state building and
consumerist dependencies

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Seen in this light, the EU is now facing a new competition between systems.

The wealth of nations is not an option for the EU,

being caught in internal and international/global competition
not having sufficient power and resources for inner and external colonialisation

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In consequence we are confronted with a disastrous mine field

several countries “externally bankrupt” as for instance Cyprus and Greece
several countries “internally bankrupt” as for instance Germany
having a “model” and values for social policy that actually evolved from conditions that do not exist anymore
and not having the strength to establish – on its own – a valid socio-economic alternative

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The two main problems and challenges I see:

the lack of suitable social fabrique
the need to reintegrate political economy

I am afraid that technical approaches like those proposed by Gabriele Giudice, Head of Unit, ECFIN.G3: Greece at European Commission and proposals for Social Investment will only provide a mere perspective – this is a nice way to speak of privatised services that are not accessible, and rocketing unemployment rates.

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Moving on seems a bit like a Don Quijoterie ….

But at least it would be wrong to say that we have to worry about money – at least here in Ireland there is still so much money around that it can be literally be put into the waste bin. – on ebay a Quinnsworth-plastic bag had been offered earlier this year for 997 Euro.

[1] Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany; version October 2010; https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf – 10/05/2013

Interestingly he previous version had been different

Article 20 (Basic principles of state order, right to resist).

(1) The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social Federal state.

Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Promulgated by the Parliamentary Council on 23 May 1949) (as Amended by the Unification Treaty of 31 August 1990 and Federal Statute of 23 September 1990); http://www.constitution.org/cons/germany.txt – 10/05/2013

[2] Degree to which the economic process is focussed on extended reproduction

Dimensions of Development and ‘Welfare’ – An Analytical Tool

11 Maggio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, social quality, works, projects, publications

The following emeges from and brings together different views on developmet, focussing on the political economy of processing structures, however taking also sociological, psychological and “governance” aspoects into account. Importantly, it is not least bound to a specific understanding of the relationality in which social processes and the “environment”.

An elaborated proposition will be published under the title “European Policies of Social Inclusion – Fatality of Good-Will”. A major reference for the elaboration had been the teaching of the MA in International Economy and Business at the Faculty of Economics at Corvinus University, Faculty of Economics, Department of World Economy. Thanks go to the students and some inspiring debates during the course work.

	focus of the productive process	consumerism[1]
rationalisation/ technicisation
Demand-supply-side economics

matrix 1: Value Generation

	high-value production founded in informational labour	high-volume production based in low-cost labour
redundant producers, reduced on devalued labour
production of raw material founded in natural resources

matrix 2: Resource Reference

	autocentric development	extraverted development
relative economic sustainability
competitiveness

matrix 3: Patterns of Growth

	monetary policy i.w.s. as means of social integration	monetary policy i.w.s. as means of securing international sovereignty
competitiveness
traditionality

matrix 4: Socio-Political System and Sovereignty

This taken together provides an analytical tool for looking at development and the welfare system

	resource reference
value generation		patterns of growth

	socio-political system and sovereignty

matrix 5: welfare system – analytical tool

An extension can be achieved by considering that this methodological framework is not necessarily limited to capitalist societies. Instead, it is possible to apply the same approach also to non-(“pre and Post”) capitalist societies, focusing on power-relationships (with the two dimensions of property and control).

	capitalist mode of production	non-capitalist mode of production
control of means of production
control of processes of production
control of products
control of the distribution of products

matrix 6: Dimensions of Property

[1] Degree to which the economic process is focussed on extended reproduction

Europe – Quo Vadis?

20 aprile 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, works, projects, publications

Nearly there:

The European Social Model – Chimera or Core of the EU?

Nearly finished the contribution I had been asked to write for a book – it emerges from the work of the scientific council of Attac. And I guess I know now very well what to say when giving the presentation in Cork next month – a follow up from last year’s Poverty Summer School at UCC.

The really relevant part for me, i.e. my own thinking is that the article will help to clearly spell out the myth of the “old welfare state”, thus allowing to clarify the foundation for a fundamental “revolutionary” form that is established on the objective development rather than the hope for a voluntarist to approach towards a renaissance of overcome model. Still, though we truly will need a revolutionary approach we face even within the capitalist framework a rather radical overhaul of thinking when it comes to social policy.

The “welfare state” is as such a not only a multifaceted mechanism, but also historically differentiated, specifically responding to the different phases of the capitalist process of generating value – I approached this issue on the earlier occasion of a presentation in Mikkeli, Finland.

The challenge of any social policy discussion is surely to protect the baby while handling the bathing water. And so it is especially the left that is challenged to “protect” the achievements of what is called welfare state while the more or less general austerity policies are the driving force of the political mainstream. To be clear (i) there had been huge improvements of the living conditions in the widest sense if we look at the secular development; (ii) it has to be equally clear that at this stage we have to search for clear means to simply protect against “system(at)ic rollbacks”.

Nevertheless, we have to be analytically clear about both, the severity of changes and also the actual reason and causes of these changes. As well known from Marx’ studies, the individual capitalist represents the class interest rather than reflecting individual morality. In this light much of the critique – also from positions that claim to fundamentally reject the current structures – are an expression of good will, but also an expression of mal-information. On of the recent examples of such short-sighted approaches had been the official address given by the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to the European Parliament. Sure we may easily agree at first glance with his statement:

They (i.e. “our citizens in Europe”) feel that in general terms the economic narrative of recent years has been driven by dry technical concerns; for example, by calculations that are abstract and not drawn from real problems, geared primarily by a consideration of the impact of such measures on speculative markets, rather than driven by sufficient compassion and empathy with the predicament of European citizens who are members of a union, and for whom all of the resources of Europe’s capacity, political, social, economic and intellectual might have been drawn on, driven by the binding moral spirit of a union.

But as nice as all this sounds, it fundamentally underestimates the “compassion and empathy” of those “technicians” who actually use the guise of technicity to establish a strict rule of something that may even be called a “capitalist tributary world system”.

Austerity is not a moral, ethical retardation of individuals or “groups of individuals” that has to be and can be countered by moral appeals. Strictly speaking, austerity policy is then not an exception but a consequent expression of one of the two souls that characterise capitalism gaining dominance: To the extent and as long as capitalism – made possible by the technical development of the productive forces and expressed by a specific mode of production – could perform reasonably well in terms of production of wealth and could make profit based on the realisation-side of the overall economic process (distribution and exchange, in short linked to an understanding of wages as purchase power), social policy could be grasped by concepts as “productive social policy”, allowing to ask for the Costs of Non-Social Policy, as Didier Fouarge did 2003 in his Report for the European Commission’s Employment and Social Affairs DG.

However, this had been linked to a very specific constellation. Historically such constellations had been given nationally, leading to different development of national welfare regimes – this had been outlined earlier with reference to the Mikkeli-presentation. Although it had been left out of consideration on the occasion of that presentation, each of these distinct national systems had not least been part of a process of international re-ordering.

The thesis is that we find some similar pattern of European social policy development: in short: from a non-social policy with some marginalised measures towards a productivist social policy considering the costs of not having social policy and finally arriving at a new stage: not least (though not only)

under the pressure of changing international constellations (EUrope in the world) and
the changing also technical development of the productive forces, reserves for generating profit from a favourable pattern of distribution had been eroded.

This means (a) now profit has to be generated from production rather than in the sphere of realisation; (b) competition is now increasingly a matter of crowding out, not of performance, as it had been earlier the case (s. e.g. Zinn, Karl Georg, 2006: Mit Keynes zu einer „anderen Wirtschaft“. Zur Langfristperspektive keynesianischer Ökonomie; Beitrag zum Workshop “Keynesianische Ökonomie als alternative Ökonomie?” der Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung (Berlin, 24.-26.2.2006: 18); (c) political power – not least with its arbitariness – regains meaning and reminds fereqently of feudal structures (see e.g. Herrmann, Peter, 2012; in: NewPrincedoms …) and (d) though global centre-periphery structures remain meanigful, we find at the same time and increasingly processes of peripherialisation within the centres.

And it exactly this constellation that leads to austerity policies: we should be well aware of the obvious meaning of privatisation here: it is about “de-socialisation” which is a matter of shifting responsibility back to the “complete individual”, or as we titled it is about Pure Individualism (s. Claire Dorrity: Critique of Pure Individualism; in: Dorrity, Claire/Herrmann, Peter [eds.]: Social Professional Activity – The Search for a Minimum Common Denominator in Difference; New York: Nova Science, 2009). It’s critique needs to take the economic dimension into account that obliges us to recognise that the European Social Model actually only existed as an expression of voluntarism which had been celebrated and maintained as long as it had been profitable. As soon as profit can only be gained from production in the strict sense, or in other words: as soon as the profitability of realisation comes to an end, we find a shift in social policy terms, the trinity of

austerity,
harsh exploitation and
orientation on “social investment”.

But what can the latter mean under these conditions of pure individualism? It means that we come now definitely to the point of an ultimate Critique of Practical Reason: the individual “invests him/herself” – and ironically this is celebrated by the bourgeois press as success of creativity. And although all this is surely not the complete story, it is a major chapter in the book that opens in front of us: self-exploitation, precarity, neglect of long-term personal health in the hope of short-term survival.

Europe – Quo Vadis?

We all know the story, Peter asking Jesus Quo vadis? – The supposed answer had been Romam vado iterum crucifigi.

Europe is on the best way to crucify itself – but not by taking the route Beyond GDP serious. Instead, I crucifies itself by being too serious about the self-set strategic goal, spelled out in Lisbon:

to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.

And Europe crucifies those who dare to oppose or at least do not submit themselves: academics, political activists and those who fall through the loops of the increasingly fragile net.

Much more could be said – and it will be said in the book contribution, on occasion of the Cork event and in a forthcoming article in Social Inclusion

Strategies

14 marzo 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, social quality

Earlier I typed strategy – and a tiny typo in collaboration with the auto-correction made it to “static”. Recent blogs topic, right?
Anyway, the following is actually about dynamics – a very dynamic presentation at the School of Applied Social Studies of University College of Cork. A “Director of Planning & Institutional Research” giving an

Overview of UCC’s Strategic Plan

Now, aren’t we in politics always asked to begin by highlighting the positive aspects? That is what I learned while working in lobbying in Brussels. So, be it then: the outline of the so-called strategic plan (I try since a couple of days to access the website – but it seems to be a strategy that this site remains until the time of writing inaccessible, although I lodged the technical flaw at the mail address of the webmaster) is very simple and open – mind, I’m not writing using “a simplified approach to a complex issue”. And being aware of the fact that I cannot delve into all the valuable aspects and details issued in both, the plan and presentation, I want to continue with another positive moment.

The presentation had been highlighting the importance of strengthening

research, innovation and job creation.

There are frequent debates on the sequence of such features and here we can praise that the strategy is first about research – as it should obviously be the objective for an academic institution. Job creation, without doubt important, is not the ultimate and primary goal … .

But a little hesitation emerges if we think about another aspect of the presentation, the emphasis of financial sustainability. Not that I suggest neglecting the importance of this matter. Still, there are two points that are worthwhile to look at:

Social science is currently discussing the question of sustainability in a more serious and generic way, highlighting that any debate on sustainability has to go beyond “single issue orientations”. There is no environmental and financial and economic and social … sustainability – there is only one complex, genuinely integrated and genuinely relational sustainability or there is no sustainability at all. Having said that there is a wide debate on this does not mean that there is an overall consensus on what this means – I elaborated on some of the issues In a recent article published in the International Journal of Social Quality under the title “Economic Performance, Social Progress and Social Quality”. At this stage it isd important to emphasise that there is some readiness to ask questions and work on elaborating answers.
The point that is crucially implied is less about theorising this issue. Two points are hugely important when it comes to the “pragmatics” of policy making though.

A sustainability strategy of a university has to be oriented on the requirements set by academia – and although this is surely nothing that should be trimmed and protected in an ivory tower, it is equally sure that this is not about any kind of fulfilling needs of a capitalist growth economy.
This brings us actually to the second point: of course, any university strategy has to be part of a national plan – actually another point that has to be positively highlighted in the presentation. It clearly an unquestionably emphasises this need. But … – but this makes only sense if the national plan is worthwhile and can be seen as being positively concerned with sustainability – btw, we speak in our work of the social quality network increasingly about social sustainability, an issue which will obviously employ quite a lot of our strategic thinking in the Observatory on Social Quality, now being established at EURISPES in Rome.

II.

In any case, the national plan – be it concerned with general questions of development or with the area of third level education and research is rather questionable. Only few points will suffice to issue the problematique – and they are all immediately also linked to the presentation.

We find the topic of internationalisation – in this section we hear about recruiting international students but we hear little to nothing about how we aim and put into practice the recruitment of students from financially weak backgrounds: people with working class background from “rich countries” and people from countries of so-called developing countries or “the global south” as it is called today [and actually should (if we take the equator as reference) include parts of the east and west, equally poor]. It is worth a side remark: I remember a student from the “global west”: coming from be USNA, arriving with a generous Lions or Rotary grant – and being a total failure. The only reason that he actually did not fail literally …: he had been “too rich to fail” – if anybody thinks about large banks now …, well this is your thought then. My thought at the time had been: it is strange that this student had been “taken out of my custody”, actually he had been “transferred” to another course, passed successfully and this is surely very different to another student who never made it into my course as he could not afford paying the approximately 16,000 euro fee at the time (the European rate had been approximately 3,000 euro in those years). Sure, this student from an African country nearly got the place: the charity which had been ready to pay his fees announced the decision too late. The “right of the rich” and the “charity for the poor” as national strategy then? A meaningful shift in thinking is required, pursuing the right of everybody to avail of valuable, emancipative education, different to skills training for the upper and middle classes only (and a true knowledge space for a small elite). Every first-year student I am bringing her to legal studies learns that law is not about straight application of legislation but it is still about the Kantian challenge, given with the definition he provided, namely saying that

[r]ight is therefore the sum of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with universal law.

(Kant, Immanuel, 1797: The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. With an Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 24 [In the German original slightly different in its emphasis ‘Recht ist der Inbegriff der Bedingungen, unter denen die Willkür des einen mit der Willkür des anderen nach einem allgemeinen Gesetz der Freiheit vereinigt werden kann’ (Kant, Immanuel, 1797: Die Metaphysik der Sitten in zwey Theilen; in: Kant, Immanuel. Werke in zwoelf Baenden. Hrsg. v. Wilhelm Weischedel; Bd. VIII; Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1982: 337)]

III.

And we findin the presentation of the strategic plan under the heading of internationalisation the orientation on FDI, yes indeed: foreign direct investment. Every first-year student I teach economics learns that – in particular but not only today under conditions of globalisation – two things are not feasible, not sustainable: a strategy that is based on FDI and/or export as sole and main pillar; and a strategy that understands indigenous development inter light of a parochial mindset.

It is actually frightening that the presenter, holding an MBA from Henley Management College, celebrated on one of the university’s websites as somebody who

has over 20 years experience in consultancy, operations, engineering, supply chain management and higher education roles

apparently missed this point too: it had been the orientation on such a wrong strategy that brought (not only) the Irish economy into severe trouble. It is a strategy of statics, degrading a country and its people to supernumeraries on the global scale, actually making a large number of the population to global players by forcing them to emigrate. – sure, individual examples of successful FDI can be found. But to tell us that we should jump out of the window, because some individuals actually survived can only come from a presenter who gets paid for showing off with the lack competence.

– You don’t believe that you can make money from incompetence, even stupidity? I heard the other day for a guy who cut off a branch from a tree. He got 20 grand for it. The reason: he had been sitting on the branch, on that part he cut off. The case went to court and the judge granted compensation mentioned before.

So what is then the contribution of Irish universities to internationalisation. I saw recently a poster from UCC, a good example for expressing visually how such a contribution is u understood: missionaries under the academic and secular instead of the christian gown. – Sure, the hope remains: Christian missions brought us liberation theology, secular mission may then truly liberate liberal economics by establishing a new mode of production, based i collective and social liberties.

IV.

And indeed there seems to be a very limit understanding when it comes to “contributing to the community”. First it’s about commercialisation, the creation of jobs and all this … and then it is about actually “contributing to the community”. The balance act between the bourgeois: the free marketer, and the liberal citoyen. It is frightening to learn another time that people are allowed to ruin societies by simply not understanding and admitting that even after Alfred Marshall economy is still political economy. Any attempt to maintain the Marshallian separation of the economy for the political sphere is meant to fail like any strategy of sustainability is doomed to fail as long as it is understood as technical challenge. Sure, we “need jobs in the communities” and we need highly qualified people in the communities. But we won’t get them there by introducing new PhD courses; and we won’t get there even by simply opening the doors of academic institutions. All this is about understanding with an open mind academia as social force, responsible for emancipation of the majority of the people in their own personal and social growth – the economy and the development of the mode of production have to follow this power-requirement and nothing else. And it is definitely not a matter of the interest of the “corporate universitarian interest”.

The vision:

To be a world-class university connecting our region to the globe.

As said earlier: moving on the stage of politics is supposedly about being fair, highlighting also the positive aspects of the position that one critically investigates. The positive point here is that such statement is so shallow, so empty that it cannot even fail. The strategic goal of Lisbon 2000 claimed to

make Europe, by 2010, the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.

The Lisbon strategy, with this vision, failed – and for many the failure had been visible from the outset. UCC’s strategic plan is not really facing such danger: too many empty words, to much glossy paper to be really relevant – it can only leave us with shaking heads, though some will fall in the meantime and others will fall in the future. And some will remain – those of people who are able to maintain meaningful reputation over time, paradoxically engaged in the fundamental questions of their own era and exactly due to this engagement remaining highly relevant beyond their particular day. Many may remember him: Max Horkheimer; and surely few will oppose what he claimed and what he lived for, a university

that is characterised by the passionate orientation on the complex whole, less occupied than elsewhere by illusions, but especially by the fact that its members – professors and lecturers, students – are in spite of all the differences of their views engaged together in the common belief that against all the odds there is a future, that human beings are able to control the destructive external and internal/personal forces and establish a humane universe.

(Horkheimer, Max, 1952: Akademisches Studium. Immatrikulationen-Rede. Sommersemester 1952; in: Max Horkheimer, 1953: Akademisches Studium. Begriff der Bildung. Fragen des Hochschulunterrichts; Frankfurt/M.: Vittorio Klostermann: 5)

And instead of following the fashionable trend to professionalisation and “presentability” we should acknowledge the deep truth of his reflection:

disappointment and perplexity [are not simply emerging] because students are too weak to learn the technical aspects the instruments of the subject; it emerges because they do not see the bridge between the ‘professional’ and those matters that deserve thge name of truth and that had been the motivation that brought them to the university.

(ibid.: 7)

Indeed, not all bad; especially as I received the other day an e-mail … – yes, from Cork – signed by http://www.attackthetax.com/ and the Common Law Society, talking about FEAR.

it stands for “FALSE EDUCATION APPLIED REPEATEDLY”

Which means, that if you fill a Man or Woman full of rubbish for long enough, constantly REPEATING the same mundane shallow drivvvvvel,,, eventually although in their hearts they know that it is wrong … they will enivatebly start to beleve what they are being told, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The Greatest threat to the State is not groups, crowds, organisations, political parties, movements or collectives … it is the Man or Woman that can think Critically.

That is the Man or Woman that cannot be enslaved … and they will teach others.

May be this is something to think about when it comes to strategic development of strategy development. But then, can we expect this from people who are victims of previous FEAR, now fearing more to loose their well paid jobs rather than loosing the little bit of sense they may have left?

Yes indeed, a lot done – much to be revised …

Variations*: Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium

12 marzo 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, joys - what we usually take for it, thoughts on life and its philosophy

– every entity has a singular essence(Johannes Duns Scotus, Opera Omina [1266 à Duns 1308] quoted in: Suarez-Nani, Tiziana: Pietro Pomponazzi et Jenas Duns Scot critiques de Thomas d’Aquin; in: Biard, Joel/Gontier, Thierry (dir.): Pietro Pomponazzi entre traditions et innovations; Amsterdam/Philadelphia: B.R. Gruener Publishing, 2009: 29-67; here: 33)

or: About Academic Responsibility between Dynamics and Statics.

*****

Recently I had to go to Rome – and if ever possible I take it as opportunity at least for a short visit to the Villa Borghese. It is actually not really about visiting the palace and the multitude of exhibits, most of them surely admirable objects in their own right. My visit there is usually solely dedicated to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue Ratto di Proserpina – the rape of Proserpina.[1]

It surly is the most dynamic statue I ever saw. For me it is actually not about rape or abduction. Instead, I see it as visualisation of abhorrence of power: the questioning of power and apparent superiority. A woman challenging the given reality by facing it and at the same time refusing to accept it – she turns away from it. Of course, it is easy to see the historical newness – in sculpting and also in societal realities. Bernini’s work is the dialectical repeal of earlier sculptures as for instance Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni’s masterpiece David.

Supposedly David had been the first free-standing sculpture: firm, independent, disjointed from the environment …. – the beauty and arrogance of the claim of the emerging new era:

Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium

– every entity has a singular essence

However, paradoxically it had been this new era – the Renaissance and later also the enlightenment – that needed something completely new and even opposing, the upcoming era needed a Proserpina: aware of the abduction, ready to confront herself with this fact because only this allowed to resist. It had been not really about a new moral, about taking a different position. What – in my opinion – Bernini actually expressed is about the opposite: dynamics, allowing the emergence of traction, pulling forces, attraction and surely also the acceptance of possible failure.

In other words the singular essence of every entity is only emerging – and this is the apparent paradox – from the very relationship in which this entity is located and locates itself. And in this light every singular essence is about the dynamic and/or static the entity engages in.

NB: Mentioning dynamics here, I am speaking of statues – not of installations as they are now dominating the arts world. I know that I stand somewhat as a loner in the world of critics, seeing the latter very much as frantic attempt to dynamise the static – frantic like the attempt to use administration as substantial tool. Frantic like using grades and degrees and computerised quotation indices as means of assessing qualification.

*****

Now, something apparently completely different. Recently the German minister for education had been asked to resign – and she even dared to refuse (though finally she had to step back). The background is apparently simple: plagiarism.

But Ulrike Baureithel on the 6th of February in Der Freitag points on a much wider and deeper meaning of the entire debate on an increasing number of leading politicians being caught in comparable scandals – her article is titled Core of the Spectacle. She notes that doctoral dissertations had been for long times already subject to critical disputes. However, in earlier times these disputes had been about substantial matters, highlighting (or searching) political positions that are contestable in terms of political correctness. Baureithel states:

Today politicians do not have to fear to be criticised because of questionable politicial statements they made in works that are already forgotten for long time. Instead, they have to fear the detection of the fact that their statements are not traced back to the original author. This is in an era in which copyrigth is increasingly under pressure and in which blithe transfer of knowledge is advancing to a political flagship rather remarkable.

[Heute müssen sich Politiker nicht mehr vor verdächtigen Inhalten einer längst vergessenen akademischen Arbeit fürchten, sondern davor, den Inhalt nicht auf ihren Urheber zurückgeführt zu haben. Das ist in einer Ära, in der das Urheberrecht wie nie zuvor zur Disposition steht und der unbekümmerte Wissenstransfer zum politischen Aushängeschild avanciert ist, doch immerhin bemerkenswert.]

And indeed it highlights a shift of academic consciousness that marks the fundamental reference of work: it is not about daring ideas, bringing thinking forward, developing original ideas – rather it is about forms. Following this line we easily end in at most positivist research … at most … .

Thus we come now back to the earlier statement:

In other words the singular essence of every entity is only emerging – and this is the apparent paradox – from the very relationship in which this entity is located and locates itself. And in this light every singular essence is about the dynamic and/or static the entity engages in.

And it is exactly here where we find in current academia a new self-localisation. At surface level it is of course about commonly known and accepted matters: the overwhelming influence of management, the financial dependencies and obligations, the constraints within research projects emerging from the conditions for obtaining grants etc.

All this is surely true. But all this is at the end very much about blaming “the other” – a kind of trading indulgences, fading out important parts of our own responsibility as academics – and on this occasion I do not refer primarily to our positioning but to our thinking.

*****

Few of you know me well enough, are aware of the very fact that I am easily getting lost in time, in figures – in general such “hard data” are somewhat meaningless for me. Academically this in some respect of course wanton – isn’t science something “positive”, something that deals with facts as they can be expressed in figures? Sine ira … as Weber said. Still, this “getting lost” has also something that I want to defend – it allows abstractions, something that

separates things out, isolating them from our concerns as social beings immersed in particular cultural practices. As Locke once put it: “Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.” The problem, however, is that we tend to be interested in things as they exist in a context with others. Indeed, the very word “interest” comes from the Latin inter-esse, which means “to be between,” while the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the root of “abstraction” denotes a “drawing away from” and that the root of its opposite, “contextual,” means “woven together”.

(Blattberg, Charles, 2009: Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy; Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 45; with reference to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], bk 3, ch. 3, sec. 6)

Very much the same is stated in the comments of an exhibition, I recently visited in Copenhagen:

On the one hand, details cannot be ignored if one wishes to depict reality in a convincing manner. On the other hand, however, focusing on a detail threatens to impede our understanding of how it fits into the overall whole.

(from one of the explanations on the wall of the exhibition ‘detaljer’ in the Statens Museum for Kunst)

All this allows us bringing things together – matchmaking if you want; matchmaking even if the matches are extremely distant. Distant as the German ex-minister is from the Kunsthistorische Museum Wien. Distant in time as my visit there – and distant as the time with which I had been confronted when entering a special exhibition: I had to walk up onto a scaffold close to the wall pantings which had been presented by one of the most contested artists of the early 20th century: Gustav Klimt. To cut a long story short: I stepped up, the leverage of the scaffold covered by a black cloth. Arriving on the platform of the exhibition “face to face”, I had been forced to turn around – a crossroads of which I took the option to rue to the right. Now, not concentrating on stepping up the stairs, I could also lift my head. I experienced a kind of numbing, looking into the eyes of the work of this artist: a goddess, not despising, not inflicting but sending a chill down my spine. Only once before I experienced the very same awe, standing just on my own in front of Picasso’s Guernica (At the time of my visit even the security guards keeping in the background.)

I said before “to cut a long story short” – and I know that this is a frequent mistake: we cut long stories short, we squeeze complex issues into power point presentations. And as much as we are in danger to loose the ability to read handwriting as we a dominated by computer scripts, we are in danger to loose the ability to listen, to look – be it at others or at ourselves. And we loose the ability to bear somebody looking at us. Somebody as the history of Guernica! Somebody as Pallas Athena.

Of course it is challenging – not so much to understand but to accept that understanding actually means that we are permanently questioning ourselves, our practice. And we have to do this not as academic exercise but as matter of questioning what we are doing, how we are acting. Things and people come back, even if they leave us. I read recently, in connection with the death of one of the examiners of my doctoral thesis, Hans Heinz Holz, a statement, contending that the important question is not

… ob man prinzipiell damit einverstanden ist, dass nicht in erster Linie Ideen den Lauf der Dinge bestimmen, Kopfgeburten, sondern die ökonomischen Bedingungen –

… if one is in general agreement that not ideas determine history, …, but the economic conditions –

Important is

ob man auch bereit ist, im Sinne von Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit Schlüsse daraus zu ziehen

if one is ready to accept practical consequences in the sense of equality and justice

– I write this as something that employed my thinking very much over the last years, a matter that I saw and see as permanent challenge. It is the challenge to develop a truly historical perspective. It is about capturing presence not as such but in a light of history – past, present, future – but as matter of exploring history in the light of the presence and future. It had been exactly this responsibility that I felt while standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica and Klimt’s Pallas Athena. The … – yes, it has been a kind of trauma – this trauma did not come from an explicit or implicit accusation. Instead, it emerged from the implicitly asked question:

What do you do? Are you able to relate or are you only following the relations that are put in front of you? Is your strength about the resisting static self-positioning within a hostile dynamic of the environment or is it about the dynamic movement against a more or less static block as it is characterised by Antonio Gramsci. Stephen Gill, in his work on Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Palgrave, Macmillan – 2002, p. 58) captures it, saying

An historical bloc refers to an historical congruence between material forces, institutions and ideologies, or broadly, an alliance of different class forces politically organized around a set of hegemonic ideas that gave strategic direction and coherence to its constituent elements. Moreover, for a new historical bloc to emerge, its leaders must engage in conscious planned struggle. Any new historical bloc must have not only power within the civil society and economy, it also needs persuasive ideas, arguments and initiatives that build on, catalyze and develop its political networks and organization – not political parties such.

Or, coming back to Hans Heinz Holz: the question of not being

ready to accept practical consequences in the sense of equality and justice

And this surely means to look for new Berninis – for new dynamics that are transcending the given system by openly facing the challenges from within by positi0ning ourselves in a fundamentally critical position – fundamentally critical also meaning: taking positions that may fail but that are open to contest.

*****

Well, nobody said it is easy – and I leave it to you, better: invite you to think about the connection and disconnection between the steady David, supposedly the first statue standing on its own and the dynamics of the Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina – the woman courageously facing the situation in order to draw away not by way of abstraction but by its opposite: inter-esse, drawing things together by tearing them apart.

Still, I do not want to conclude without some reflection on the issue by myself, directing this matter in particular to an academic audience I may conclude by the following – drawing a very broad line. When I studied we had been captured by the idea of a scientific community. Although we had been – part of and inspired by the revolutionary movements of the late 1960s – critical about such elitist community, we maintained the fundamental notion. And we joined in this critical spirit the various movements that engaged for democratic progress. Moreover we joined in this critical spirit the trade unions and the working class. Sure, this had been an imagined community, and it had been a community that had been full of contradictions. But looking back I think it is fair to say that it had been a community that had been by and large a disputatious community. Personally I remember these contests with and against Luhmann, Offe, Kaufmann, …, to name but a few, people that many of you will also know at least by name. Actually it had been an interesting development at the time: a new science developing and claiming to be acknowledged. Though heated debates took place with conservative colleagues, it had been very much about claims against them – the ongoing quest against the “mustiness of 1,000 years covered by the gowns of academics” (Unter den Talaren – Muff von 1,000 Jahren). Part of this contest had been surely successful: positions taken, contests taken into the system and finding a stable foundation. However, the crux of history, like Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ emerged, cutting the dialectical of enlightenment short of the emancipative side.

So, academia replicated the development of modern society: structures, in the beginning surely necessary, became an “independent force”: a structure, obedient to its own rules, having lost out of sight that it can only then be justified if it maintains practice.

Sure, this is the same as a society that maintains a structuralist take on citizenship, perverting it to such an extent that citizens, the original sovereign of the modern state, are incapable to act. And it is even defined by its structural position, any consideration on practice being pushed aside (see in this context for instance Lister, Ruth, 1997: Citizenship. Feminist Perspectives; Palgrave Macmillan; Houndsmills, 2003²: 42; cf. Oldfield, Adrian, 1990: Citizenship and Community. Civic Republicanism and the Modern World; London: Routledge).

Coming back to the two paintings – Athena/Atlas and Guernica: facing history as actual reality, as genuine presence, can hurt – it can severely hurt. Still, it is probably easier to deal with such injuries than to deal with the permanent intoxication, causing a slow death, still leading first to the suicide of social science, then to the suicide of people.

I do not mean this literally. I speak of the danger of accepting to be buried in structures, being battered to death by what had been once necessary, that could claim legitimacy: a steadfast claim of liberty – now perverted into an iron cage of commodification ….: dispute seemingly only possible by taking the form of war. That is the dimension of suicide Carin Holmquist and Elisabeth Sundin do not mention, it can be grasped as discerping the quadriga of social science

self-critique,
critique of the other,
critique of processes and
critique of structures.

In any case we can see a wide bracket: academic performance – and the lack of it – is measured in PhD-cases and the de-recognition of the degree on grounds of formal rules: originality is only a matter of sufficiently and clearly making reference; impact is measured in computerised citation indices rather than in actual debates; and publication-output is in this narrow-minded attitude only relevant if it is squeezed in the suicidal framework of peer reviewed articles. Books don’t count and subsequently contributions to books do not count – and …

… and the murderers a still free, in well-paid positions in academia and parts of the publishing world with its vested interests …

… and fortunately some woke up, repeal their admiration of the form. It is so to say the move from David to Proserpina, the move from a rigid position to the readiness to move again. Many universities are turning their back against rankings, are looking for innovative publications and are demanding the publication of ‘work in progress’, fostering open source software etc. Those stubborn David’s – having concrete blocks where there should be a creative brain, will at some stage have to face the fact that their static version of enlightenment only pretends vision. However, in reality, at the end of a single-line tunnel the light at the end of it turns out to be the light of the train driving towards us.

It should not be a surprise that under these conditions live becomes deception – we find a line from

disavow of historicity to
personal self-deception to
subordination under form to plagiarism to
the loss of responsibility.

With the shift of references to different individualities, thus the loss of social references we loose of course responsibility – not as moral decay but as absurdity of today’s realities. A lengthy statment from Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia (published 1945 – here refering to the 1951 edition to which Adorno addded a dedication, and taken from the dedication) regains importance:

What the pilosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.

But the relation between life and production, which in reality debases the former to an ephemeral appearance of the latter, is totally absurd. Means and end are inverted.

(Theodor W. Adorno, 1951: Minima Moralia. Reflexions from Damaged Life; translated from the German;London: Verso, 1978: 15)

[Was einmal den Philosophen Leben hieß, ist zur Sphäre des Privaten und dann bloß noch des Konsums geworden, die als Anhang des materiellen Produktionsprozesses, ohne Autonomie und ohne eigene Substanz, mitgeschleift wird. Wer die Wahrheit übers unmittelbare Leben erfahren will, muß dessen entfremdeter Gestalt nachforschen, den objektiven Mächten, die die individuelle Existenz bis ins Verborgenste bestimmen. Redet man unmittelbar vom Unmittelbaren, so verhält man kaum sich anders als jene Romanschreiber, die ihre Marionetten wie mit billigem Schmuck mit den Imitationen der Leidenschaft von ehedem behängen, und Personen, die nichts mehr sind als Bestandstücke der Maschinerie, handeln lassen, als ob sie überhaupt noch als Subjekte handeln könnten, und als ob von ihrem Handeln etwas abhinge. Der Blick aufs Leben ist übergegangen in die Ideologie, die darüber betrügt, daß es keines mehr gibt.

Aber das Verhältnis von Leben und Produktion, das jenes real herabsetzt zur ephemeren Erscheinung von dieser, ist vollendet widersinnig. Mittel und Zweck werden vertauscht.]

++++++++++++++++++

* This is very much another approch to questions that had been recently issued in another post.

[1] The translation is not quite clear. It is sometimes also translated as ‘abduction’, not ‘rape’.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL OR SQUARING THE CIRCLE – SUSTAINABLE SOCIAL QUALITY VS SOCIAL POLICY

28 febbraio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, joys - what we usually take for it, social quality

Notes in Connection with a Presentation on Occasion of Retiring from University College Cork, School of Applied Social Studies

Introduction

Social policy arrives frequently at junctures, being a non-discipline, bordering and combining elements from various other disciplines. The presentation will look at two major challenges:

(1) Academic work frequently overlooks that division of labour, i.e. the establishment of subjects in research and teaching is also about disciplining. But is the notion of Spinoza’s time, suggesting that Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium – every entity has a singular essence is true? Who and what is setting the references?

(2) Part of the process of (self-)disciplining is about defining points of references. The ongoing challenge is not least about balancing politics and policies. Sustainable Social Quality is an attempt to integrate these dimensions.

(3) To arrive at the trinity, that we have to look for a definite point of reference in societal practice not (only) as matter of analysis but also by way of taking the role of “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci)

It is another attempt – after many predecessors, and competing with other paradigms. So are we then just reinventing the wheel or squaring the circle?

The presentation will, of course, not provide the answers – but it may be able to put forward some questions that need attention and demand us as collective to thoroughly think about.

Language matters – and it is also important to look at from where language actually comes – easily seen by Norbert, being asked for a power point presentation. Well, yes, here it is …

In general and for the purpose of this presentation we should not establish too high expectations: take things as they are said – and be aware of the fact that they are stated in a very specific socio-historical context. In order to understand this, the presentation will occasionally make some inspiring detours – hopefully allowing also enjoying some beauties of life that carry historical messages about structure and change – be aware: exploring the beauty of history and the meaning of society takes time, requires patience …

Although we may say that it goes without saying, we are frequently forgetting the deep meaning of exactly this fact: In any scientific work we are dealing with both, structure and process.

*****

We may usefully start from Aristotle’s zoon politicon, the human being seen as social being. This does not simply look at the interaction between human beings – surely an important factor. There are already difficulties as it is not clear in which way the politicon has to be interpreted. There is both, the reference to the state, to politics and to a very general understanding of togetherness, interaction.

Importantly it is clear that with all this we are not least acting beings – only our own action, i.e. societal practice actually defines our very existence. Thus includes the ability not to act. Now, we may think of Friedrich Schiller who sees the highest form of existence, as

man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

(Schiller, letters, XV/9)

Here we surely find a complex understanding dealing with regaining power over the will not only by way of control, i.e. oppression, but by way of developed forms of free play.

– What do we commonly think when it comes to these terms: play, freedom …? Children, unhindered in their naïveté is in may cases likely the first connotation. And the second connotation may be the artful play of … – for instance the reasonably uncontested beauty of a harmonious dance.

It is the beauty of clarity, order and balance. It seems to be a self-explanatory approach, allowing us to accept without asking, looking at something that has its own order, being independent. Probably this is part of our tendency to perversely celebrate power: the monuments of past and present oppression – yes, I had been in the German Reichstag not only due to business, and part of the study trips I did with the students here from Cork had always been the admiration of some of these ‘monuments’, the last one the most impressive town hall in Paris.

It is the admiration of something able to stand without support. Supposedly in sculpturing Michelangelo’s statue David is a very early example for such order: the first free-standing statue, the young man standing on his own. As such, standing upright, the statue had been sending a strong – and actually hugely contested – message.

As the Florentine chronicler Luca Landucci noted in his diary, stones were thrown at the collossal sculpture even if it was being transported from the Office of Works, so that a guard had to be mounted to protect it.

Importantly

The stone-throwing youth’s came from pro-Medici families for whom the prospect of a figure with republican connotations being installed in front of the seat of the Florentine government must have been thorougly unpalatable.

(Zoellner, Frank/Thoenes, Christoph, 2007: Michelangelo. 1475-1564. Life and Work; Koeln:Taschen, 2007/2010: 46)

Giorgio Vasari chronicled in this context a little story that has some metaphorical meaning.

It happened at this time that Piero Soderini, having seen it (the statue, P.H.) in place, was well pleased with it, but said to Michelangelo, at a moment when he was retouching it in certain parts, that it seemed to him that the nose of the figure was too thick. Michelangelo noticed that the Gonfalonier was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from the what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, ‘Look at it now.’ ‘I like it better,’ said the Gonfalonier, ‘you have given it life.’ And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those, who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.

(Vasari, Giorgio, 1568: Lives of Painters, sculptors and architects. Vol 2: translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. With an Introduction and Notes by David Ekserdjian; New York et altera: Alfred Knopf, 1996: 654 f.)

From here it takes some steps to the question of the disciplining effects of which I promised to talk. But with a little bit of common sense, putting away the cultural bias it will actually be soon clear.

One of the fundamental demands put forward in science is concerned with the discovery of structures that are characterising any given reality. Methodologically this is a complex process – and speaking of methods it seems to be a rather simple matter of the famous bean counting. And with the latter we usually overlook that even the counting of beans isn’t as simple and without presumptions as we like to see it. On the contrary – and I quote Joe Finnerty

one of the most effective applications of indicators is not merely to describe but also to analyse, thereby sometimes changing the definition of a problem.

(Finnerty, Joseph, 2005: Social Indicators: Pitfalls ad Promise; in: Herrmann, Peter (ed.): Utopia between Corrupted Public Responsibility and Contested Modernisation. Globalisation and Social Responsibility; New York: Nova Science Publ.; 61-76; here: 69)

With this we arrive at the fact that paradoxically a second and simultaneous fundamental rule of science is construction – though analysing reality, this reality isd also constructed by the process if selection and combination. If we focus on elementarity as core moment of the research process, i.e. if we look for what is elementary, we are always applying a histrocial and social (class) dimension.

The story of David and Michelangelo’s presentation captures both, the determination of structure based on some form of de-construction and the construction according to the interest that is standing behind research:

* David stands in front of his colossal enemy, finding the small point of his vulnerability: the gap through which he could throw the fatal stone
* Michelangelo interpreted this: emphasising David’s beauty, virginity and power: a firm independence. However, this translates into some inability to move. It is correct to speak of structure; and it is equally correct to say that this structure follows in some way a rule that is inherent in the person of the David – later in history this is fully spelled out, the early modernity suggesting

Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium (every entity has a singular essence)

(Johannes Duns Scotus, Opera Omina [1266 à Duns 1308] quoted in: Suarez-Nani, Tiziana: Pietro Pomponazzi et Jenas Duns Scot critiques de Thomas d’Aquin; in: Biard, Joel/Gontier, Thierry (dir.): Pietro Pomponazzi entre traditions et innovations; Amsterdam/Philadelphia: B.R. Gruener Publishing, 2009: 29-67; here: 33)

* And finally, the supposedly neutral viewer – the Gonfalonier – is getting lost in all of this: being deceived by falling dust and taking it for change. It is the lack of ability to understand the rigidity caused by looking at isolated ‘facts’. We may take it as metaphor, seeing it as confirmation of Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s stance:

The triple imperative of the Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage.

(Hardt, Michael/Negri, Antonio, 2000: Empire; Cambridge, Mass./London,Engl.: Harvadd University Presee: 201)

Now it is not a major step anymore – David can be seen as anticipated manifestation of modern understanding of Anglo-American social policy as academic discipline: it is a discipline that defines itself by de-contextualising the subject matter; it is a discipline that looks at social administration of the good and the evil, the deserving and the non-deserving … .

Of course, it is a long and winded road …, at the end of which structuralism evolves. We may speak of Davidian social science and can easily see the fatal development: ‘methodological individualism’. Social processes are dissolved, deconstructed. And from here this social science – always being applied social science – supports in real history the emergence of something new, namely the modern individual, reflecting only him or herself. As we know from Descartes, it is the individual that comes only with this reflection to its existence. It is this reification of Narcissus that leads then Adam Smith to look for an invisible hand – power and security standing outside, being seen as independent from the dynamic processes.

However, as much as we are dealing with ideal figures: imagined independent structures, we should not forget that these constructions are not based on free will. They are reflecting societal and eco-technical circumstances as they are given in the social structures: the productive forces and the mode of production – the pedestal on which Davidian thinking stands.

So much on David and the meaning for social science: established had been a figure that expressed

compassion on those, who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.

The Gonfalonier, Michelangelo is facing is manifest in today’s office worker: senior officials and the administrator depending on their instructions, immersed in seemingly neutral rules; rules themselves presenting themselves as technical whereas their essence is substantially about socio-political power: law and administration as presented by Max Weber, speaking of

[s]pecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905,Chapter V, Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism

Karl Marx refers to this in the famous statement from the 18^th Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

(Marx, Karl, 1852: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; in: Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works; Colume 11: Marx and Engels: 1851-53; London: Lawrence&Wishart, 1979: 99-197; here: 103)

The dream of freedom emerges turns into its opposite

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

(Marx, Karl, 1852: The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; in: Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works; Colume 11: Marx and Engels: 1851-53; London: Lawrence&Wishart, 1979: 99-197; here: 103)

And exactly this is Michelangelo’s paradox as much as it is the frequently re-emerging paradox of history: the dwarf, the powerless gaining power and establishing him/herself as giant. I am not talking about the tyrants, emerging for usually brief periods in history. I am talking about the tyrannical systems for which they are only mere backers.

Coming back then to Marx contending that

[m]en make their own history

we have to recognise that this claim stands fundamentally in opposition to structuralism – be it as closed and disciplining scientific methodology or be it as ‘way of life’. It stands against the rigidity of oppression, against the abduction and rape of the freedom of thought.

The most impressive statue I ever came across is Bernini’s Rato di Proserpina.

For me it is an amazing, most powerful expression in sculpturing or even in art expressing the victory of process over structure. Sure, the title still focuses on the old hegemony: abduction and rape. Nevertheless, it also suggests a different focus. At the centre we find Prosperpina: fighting, resisting. Her rejection and aversion is expressing a new beauty: the beauty of action, the beauty of a revolutionary process.

According to Simon Schama in a BBC-feature, this statue, Bernini’s great work, is the first piece in the history of art that dynamises sculpturing in a serious way (Schama: passim). Behind this we find in very broad terms two inventions:

the invention of the now ‘civilised individual’, distanced from nature and distanced from the social

and the invention of the economic sphere as distinct area – a ‘de-socialised sphere of social action’, organised by stratified-functional segmentation.[4]

Of course, this meant not least that the process had been a matter of dialectical development: clearly positioning structures as independent of each other, the escape of the individual from the oppression of the political power had been simultaneously the establishment of new structures. In methodological terms it is what Karl Marx develops, contending that

proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts …

(Marx, Karl, 1852: The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; in: Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works; Colume 11: Marx and Engels: 1851-53; London: Lawrence&Wishart, 1979: 99-197; here: 106)

But importantly we find this as a process of a permanent restructuration and reconstruction – this is only possible by way of fundamentally accepting the ‘blurring of boarders’. With this we arrive at a point not only of questioning given border lines, but also as matter of establishing new points of reference. Processes of change are of course again linked to real processes – at stake is not an intellectual exercise of ‘reordering the world’. Instead we are dealing again with the fact that processes and structures alike are reflecting societal and social structures: the productive forces and the mode of production. Proserpina is, in this interpretation, not just expressing her rejection but she is also expressing part of another world, now being possible. And now also being necessary as matter of developing independence.

The actual challenge for (social) science is to find a way that allows the construction of an ongoing structured processualistion – in actual fact a rather harsh process of open battles, reminding me of Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.

Such quest may replace at least to some extent the dominant discussion of social science that juxtaposes function and structure. Critical realism – for instance being brought forward by Roy Baskar and Margaret Archer – can be an important inspiration for this process. The social quality approach makes importantly reference to this work. At the same time it emerges from the analysis of concrete policy processes, in particular in the area of EUrope – and looking back to art we come at this stage really back to dance – earlier reference had been made already earlier to its beauty.

At the core this new approach in discussing social policy is about a more radical version of dance, not limited top the disciplined form of an academic subject. Even as somebody who had been not only teaching social policy but who had been working for a quite a while in the lobbying industry for changes of social policy I dare to say that the social quality approach is about rejecting the concept of social policy at least in its mainstream understanding. This is not primarily about a rejection by way of criticising certain measures or policy programs. Nor is it about a rejection due to social policy being annexed to other areas of policy making, in particular economics, captured as social investment, the productive role of social policy, the increasing subordination under managerial, legal and financial requirements and regulations. At the core of the critique stands something else: the conceptual framework that is based in two fundamental flaws – with this I come back to matters that had been mentioned already on more general terms.

It is about the definition of social policy as something that is rooted in processes and structures that are seemingly standing outside of society. Although social policy is surely seen as something that deals with issued that ‘emerge from society’, social policy itself is considered to have somewhat different roots: it is about intervention, activities ‘on behalf’ or ‘in the interest’ of certain groups, pursuing certain moral ideas and … – and predominantly at the end society comes into play and social policy strives for a better society. – In short, the social is by and large something imagined, not something real. It is a ‘distinct state’ in some ways similar to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

* To put it on its feet, we would need a clear and explicit understanding of what the social actually is – the proposal by the social quality approach is to understand it as

outcome of the interaction between people (constituted as actors) and their constructed and natural environment. Its subject matter refers to people’s interrelated productive and reproductive relationships. In other words, the constitutive interdependency between processes of self-realisation and processes governing the formation of collective identities is a condition for the social and its progress or decline.

(van der Maesen, Laurent J.G./Walker, Alan, 2012: Social Quality and Sustainability; in: van der Maesen, Laurent J.G./Walker, Alan (Eds.): Social quality: From Theory to indicators; Basingstoke: Macmillan: 250-274: 260)

* Furthermore, the real ground has to be seen in the production and reproduction of daily lives. David Harvey asserts that

[a]t Marx’s conception of the world lies the notion of an appropriation of nature by human beings in order to satisfy their wants and needs.

(Harvey, David, 2006: Limits to Capital; London/Brooklyn, Verso 5)

This brings us immediately to the point Marx himself emphasises. Point of departure is a simple relationality:

[i]ndividuals producing in a society

(Marx, Karl: Introduction (to the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858 [First Version of Capital]); in: Karl Marx. Frederick Engels. Collected Works; volume 28: Karl Marx: 1857-61; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986: 17-48; here: 17)

And he ascertains:

The further back we go in history, the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing individual, appear to be dependent and belonging to a larger whole. At first, he is still in a quite natural manner part of the family, and of the family expanded into the tribe; later he is part of a community, of one of the different forms of community which arise from the conflict and the merging of tribes.

(ibid.: 18)

Now it is important to emphasise that

[a]ll production is appropriation of nature by the individual within and by means of a definite form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a condition of production.

(ibid.: 25)

However, social policy in its mainstream thinking – including approaches claiming radical changes – are lacking a proper reference in this respect. Instead, arguments are brought forward from idealist perspectives. A confirmation is that social policy, at least in its mainstream and especially in its Anglo-American perspective, does look at the exclusion and oppression of the working class – but it hardly recognises that it had been the working class and the relevant movements that led to what we see as social policy today.

The other reason for rejecting mainstream views on social policy is a variation of the first: although the dominance of economic interests is frequently highlighted and criticised – and although it is even recognised as matter of power relationships – the concept of economy is de-socialised. This could be further elaborated; and it could also be elaborated by way of extending the analytical alienation by showing a similar process of de-socialisation in political thinking. In the same way in which Alfred Marshall deprived political economy from the political dimension it can be said that Hobbes (to name just one) the state from the political. The Leviathan is an anonymous institution, bar of a political dimension, reduced on its instrumental and thus technical character of controlling individuals. – And paradoxically we find in both cases the emergence of superpowers that exist as a kind of cloud-castle.

Society is dissolved into three spheres: market, state and communities – and politicians as well as academics fit easily into the role of secular priests, celebrating the economy as father, confirming the state in the role of the obedient son, and hoping for the community and family as emerging holy spirit.

Of course, law plays a role too – presenting itself as a kind of Holy Scripture: a skeleton, keeping things together by way of a seemingly neutral, formal framework – claiming universalism, pertaining particularistic class interests. On the one hand

[a]n understanding of law’s nature is hard to attain because, on the face of things, law seems to possess characteristics that cannot be combined within a single entity: law is an established social institution, but also a guiding ideal for such institutions; an apparatus of organized force, but also the antithesis of force; a product of authority, but also the source of any such authority. It is in this quality that has some theorists to conclude that traditional ideas of law embody a belief in the ‘incarnation’ of the ideal within the realm of the actual, or a belief that law is ‘brooding omnipresence in the sky’.

(Simmonds, Nigel, 2007: Law as a Moral Idea; Oxford: Oxford University Press: 21)

On the other hand

[m]en and women create their moral identities and values as by-product of interaction and mutual acknowledgement, just as they create culture, language and the structures of thought. The relationships in which we associate together can embody values that structure our choices and decisions.

(ibid.: 7)

And in a society in which power is not distributed equally, the meaning is clear: it is about the moral identities and values of the ruling classes.

And to produce then myself such trinity, I come to the next point of rejecting the stance of mainstream social policy: the externalisation of nature – actually we are still dealing with more or less a variation or even the accumulation of the first point, namely the dissociation and idealisation of individual action. From here anthropocentrism is nearly unavoidable

Leaving detailed discussion aside, we find human beings loosing the ability to act – or more precise: they are able to act but there is no space left for developing practice.

For social policy it means that it is fundamentally characterised by especially two flaws:

α) It is highly individualistic, even to such an extent that so-called social rights are only conceptualised as rights of individuals;

β) furthermore social policy is systematically limited by being detached from the socio-ecological causal and contextual foundation, i.e. the (re-)productive existence.

Consequently – and wrongly – social policy as theory and practice – avoids economy (and economics) like the plague. The celebration of noble ambitions, the striving for values that are proclaimed as universal is not simply a quirk of academic thinking – it is in actual fact a dangerous des-empowerment.

– It may be worth a nota bene that it is also undermining academic work: values are stated, remain unquestionable and opposing them is similar to opposing god. A new Alighieri may tell us if Benedict has to go through similar pain, as we know from Pope St. Celestine V, left to ‘gran rifiuto’ – the great refusal (see Alighieri, Dante, 1308-21: La Divina Commedia. Inferno; illustrata da Gustavo Doré, con commenti di Eugenio Camerini; Roma: Fratelli Spada Editori, without date: 36). And furthermore somebody else may show us how this kind of academic dislocation will be end in vein – if we won’t see it already with our own eyes.

I do not want to delve into details of social quality as alternative approach. Shortly, however, one point. I had been asked last week during a debate in Rome as seemingly question: Why don’t you call it socialism?

The initial answer had been straightforward: Personally I call it a socialist strategy.

Nevertheless, there is a more complex answer: we have to look for ways to adapt socialism and the search for socialist policies to the changed conditions. I.e. we have to find sound answers to the questions of the development of the productive forces, the meaning of such development also in a global, not only a national or regional perspective. Only from here we can understand the meaning of these changes for needs and also for governance. Though this surely means claiming socialist orientation it goes also further. It is a matter of analysing contemporary conditions, it is a matter of social practice in a conscious way. Taking the Marxist tradition, it means to use a permanently critical approach.

Critique is the practice of exposing the social basis underlying an argument. Marxist critique is generally immanent critique, that is, critique springing from inside. …

… critique implicitly recognises that the argument it opposes is right, but right in the context of a specific form of social practice which may not be declared.

(Marxists Internet Archive: Encyclopedia. Critique;)

– Another nota bene: It is exactly this approach that is applied in some work by the Centro de Investigaciones de Política Internatioal (CIPI) in Cuba in which I am involved. It is also something that has important repercussions in countries like Bolivia, Venezuela etc. I make this remark as it highlights that we can expect in particular from peripheral countries and regions inspiring theoretical challenges in this context.

Furthermore, the approach of Social Quality Policies instead of social policy is also not simply socialist as it is an approach that still ask for small measures, traditional policies and reforms that may be departure for further and more radical developments.

But having said this, at the end of the day it is a socialist approach to the extent to which it focuses on the social as complex structure of power-based interactions. Here we can briefly look at Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony and the role of the organic intellectual. Important is to recognise first of all that the core of Gramsci’s work is concerned with the structural conflict in society and the need for addressing it as question of clashing class interests – for those who don’t like the term: just refer to fundamental and antagonist conflicts between different interests. Second, Antonio Gramsci speaks of different forms of power – much later Michel Foucault comes up with this as well, transposing it from the Gramscian view on class struggles into a more generic context of different forms of power imbalances on the one side, power struggles on the other side – culminating in the view on the indivisible relationship between power and knowledge. The important point is that for Gramsci power is only real when it is intermingled with knowledge – deep knowledge leading to organic power reflected in and by the organic intellectuals. Briefly quoting the Quaderni

The criterion on which we should base our analysis is this: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A societal group is dominant over opposing groups which it tends to ‘liquidate’ or which it even aims to subdue by armed force and it is leading the allied groups and immediate allies.[7]

With this I am coming to the end by highlighting four points that are in my opinion central for the development for taking responsibility in teaching sustainable social quality.

First, I said in the beginning language matters. It does so in a twofold way: it is about clarity of language and at the very same time about use of language to substantially engage with what is going on around us. Engagement may be about going with the stream of beauty; and it may also require taking up fundamental challenges of disputes.

Second, it is also about the clarity of analysis: only posing an exact question will allow us to find exactly the causalities – and of course the casualities of wrong politics and policies. This is conditio sine qua non for finding therapies: answers to the burning questions.

Third, it requires looking at the realities – not as they appear but as they are. If we then say social policy – to use this term, though not the concept – is predominantly about Social Justice (Equity), Solidarity, Equal Valuation, Human Dignity (the four normative factors elaborated by the Social Quality Theory) and if we see that these values are decomposing, it is because the reality that had been behind them is decomposing. And without falling into relativism, we should not forget that our understanding of Social Justice (Equity), Solidarity, Equal Valuation, Human Dignity is always a historical one. Without this recognition – and without taking firm responsibility for a clear analysis and open dispute, we arrive indeed at reinventing the wheel or squaring the circle.

– Of course fourth: Have look, the little boy, stepping out.

If you ant, this kind of enlightenment is then leading to paradise – referring to another time to Dante, now the third volume, tha Paradiso

Like sudden lightning scattering the spirits
of sight so that the eye is then too weak
to act on other things it would perceive,

such was the living light encircling me,
leaving me so enveloped by its veil
of radiance that I could see no thing.

The Love that calms this heaven always welcomes
into Itself with such a salutation,
to make the candle ready for its flame.[9]

[1] Swan Lake http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/3/26/1238081417847/Swan-Lake-by-American-Bal-001.jpg – 27/02/2013

[2] http://www.arte.it/foto/orig/6e/2897-David_Miguel_Angel.jpg – 27/02/2013

[3] http://www.arte.it/foto/orig/fe/255-Bernini_Proserpina.jpg – 27/02/2013

[4] We can leave the further consideration aside, including the fact that actually globalisation is to a large extent a kind of replication of stratificatory differentiation; see in this context already Herrmann,Peter, 1994: Die Organisation. Eine Analyse der modernen Gesellschaft; Rheinfelden/Berlin: Schäuble

[5] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15463-f08/www/proj2/www/vramakri/images/artwork/PicassoGuernica.jpg – 10/9/09 8:35 AM

[6] http://www.birdnest.org/edensk2/dance4.jpg – 27/02/2013

[7] Il criterio su cui occorre fondare il proprio esame è questo: che la supremazia di un gruppo sociale si manifesta in due modi, come ‘domino’ e come ‘direzione intellettuale e morale’. Un gruppo sociale è dominante dei gruppi avversari che tende a ‘liquidare’ o a sottomettere anche con la forza armata ed è dirigente dei gruppi affini e alleati.

Gramsci, Antonio, 1934-35: Quaderni del Carcere. Vol 3: Quaderni 12-29; Edizione Critica dell’Istituto Gramsci. A Cura di Valentino Gerratana; Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1977: 2010

[8] “Seven Ages of Man” William Mulready, 1838 – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Seven_ages_of_man.jpg. 27/02/2013

[9] Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, Canto XXX, lines 46–54, Mandelbaum translation. http://www.worldofdante.org/comedy/dante/paradise.xml/3.30 – 27/02/2013

Higher Education – Academic Whistle-Blowing

21 febbraio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, social quality

Administrative and Legal Questions of Educational Institutions in the Context of Modernising Education and Social Relations – The Socio-Cultural Perspectives

Notes for a presentation on the occasion of the conference ‘Deviation within the context of transformation of social relations and education.

Moscow, February 21st, 2013

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to address this important event. Thanks to Andrey Lymar my contribution during thesxe conferences can claim already some tradition.

In some sense it is difficult to contribute – I am contributing as outsider to a debate on topics that are very much questions that fully develop their meaning n national or even local contexts. This is true for both: education on the one hand and administration and law on the other hand.

However, there are also general questions and they are surely general in two respects:

law and administration are obviously relevant for everything we do
and at the same time we see an increasing relevance: law and administration taking over, reaching into all pores of life and determining the professional space and our professional activities – it does not really matter much that this is a complain that we can find already formulated for instance by Aristotle and Socrates.

We take it frequently as matter of heteronomy – an external power and rationality taking over.

My thesis will be: Talking about increasing meaning of judification and administration is an expression of the very same rationality that we claim as genuinely our own ‘academic’ mission of Western enlightenment.

This may sound to some a provocative argument – and it will take some effort to develop it in detail. However, in the following some indications will give you an idea from where I am coming. It is at the end a fundamental critique of the path Western modernisation took.

First, this Western enlightenment ideology is very much guided by the idea that progress equals ‘distancing from nature’. This went hand in hand with the development of anthropocentric interpretations of the world. And it went – to some extent paradoxically – hand in hand with a process of de-socialisation. This culminated in the absolutist state and later even in the absolute state.

Second, rather than developing an integrated rationality, we saw with the Renaissance the emergence of understanding rationality as something that is inherent to and in everything:

Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium

– every entity has a singular essence

This doesn’t mean anything else that we are creating externalities: rationality is not genuinely about action but about detecting the rationality and following its requirements. – Actually it is the very consequent conclusion of Christianity.

Third, this way we created not least the methodological individualism – the core of Western social science. At its heart we find the ‘survival instinct’: excessive individualism that is guided by excessive hording of goods and money and that is finally steered by equally excessive means of control.

Fourth, and finally, this is fertile ground for administration and legal systems, taking over according to their own rules. And they do it to such an extent that they even strangulate themselves.

Fifth, in order to end on a more positive note, looking for a re-orientation I see in particular the following four points

the need to re-introduce the social – not as normative concept but as responsible reflection of the means and mode of production in the light of a socio-ecologically sustainable way;
fully acknowledging the public character of educational systems and processes
accepting that education is more and different to transferring knowledge and skills training
not least the orientation on education as process of actively engaging in public spaces and on public issues

Law and administration can then actually play an important positive role – and from various contacts, that to Andrey being an important one here too I know that there is futile ground here in Russia to acknowledge also this direction of thinking.

Thank you for your kind attention.

now available

10 febbraio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in works, projects, publications

Now the book

Nation State and Ethnic Diversity

is available.

Editors: Hurriyet Babacan (The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia) and
Peter Herrmann (The University College of Cork, School of Applied Social Studies and School of Asian Studies, Cork, Ireland)

We hope it is a meaningful contribiution to a wider and onging debate on citizenship which hower, gains in the current era also entirely new dimensions. To quote from the introduction:

One highly important although by no means conclusively defined aspect is the blurring of borders and boundaries in conjunction with increasingly strict closures. Thus, the contributions to this book may also be read as contributions along the line of tension between ‘gated communities’ and the open global village. The question quo vadis? gains a twofold meaning. It is asking where people actually go, where and why they move and where they find some kind of belonging. And the question is also about frames and gains. Where are moves allowed and how is moving allowed and what are the expected outcomes for the different actors? One point can be made at the outset: we have to start from here – this hugely tensional question. And there is a long way to go until we arrive at a position which allows all of us to feel – at least for some time – comfortable in the global village.

It all starts with a form – and a remark by Albert Einstein

1 febbraio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, contemporary socio-economic situation, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

In fact continuing an earlier post)

Well, at least all this shows that things can apparently still be taken with humour – as written in one of the mails

The last time I saw a person from Buildings and Estates in Carrigbawn he told me that the internal building was laughable, it was so poor. That was nearly two years ago.

Sure, never forget to approach things in a humorous way – though some people go even with a smile to the gallows. Of course, the question is then why do in this case the victims go to the gallows – and not the perpetrators? The definition of gallows says that it is

for the hanging of criminals.

The only reason I can imagine for feeling criminal is bringing me back to Plato who said

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

May be that ‘being governed’ by administrators who need to fill in a form to switch on the heating is a gallows-like penalty.

Or it is the good laugh we may get out of it: at least taken from the one mail the state of some buildings seems to be a joke – herfe it is quoted again

The last time I saw a person from Buildings and Estates in Carrigbawn he told me that the internal condition of the building was laughable, it was so poor. That was nearly two years ago.’

– Though I can understand the colleague from buildings I am not entirely sure if the laugh is so good that one comes near to suffocation, thus having another form of gallows … .

There is another thing: all this had been and is an excellent example: My entire social policy teaching yesterday had been based on this little incidence. In class we talk currently about rights and law – you may refer to this concise definition by Kant, stating:

Right is therefore the sum of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with universal law.

(Kant, Immanuel, 1797_E: The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. With an Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 24)

And of course, the problem is the reflexive (or we may say tautological) character, typical for ‘modern societies’ and in very simple terms already criticised by Einstein, saying

we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The challenge then is to overcome the permanent tension, immanent in law of the modern capitalist society, a political system that is characterised by liberality of economic activity based on private property executed by individuals within the framework of the nation state …

Of course, the limitation is already visible in the claim of general moral and intellectual virtues as spelled out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics:

prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, temperance

justice, perseverance, empathy, integrity, intellectual courage, confidence in reason, autonomy.

One of the very fundamental flaws with it can be grasped by the inherent naive individualism and protectionism which then later could serve as fertile ground for individualism – and as such it is about a paralysing effect of a normative system that claims to inform individual, however is reduced to permanently reproducing itself within this idealist gist without being able to emerge as actual social force.

What remains in this perspective as solution is limited: the self-construction of individuals, the justification of the Leviathan as personification of the social and evidencing its individualist stance: the superpower, allowed to do everything, by Weber (in his Politics as Vocation) said to have the

monopoly of the legitimate use of violence

and with all this lacking the fundamental force of genuine relational sociability. The state based on righteousness emerging as state based on law. The state as ré-total instead of being a ré-publique – already outlined in much earlier writing by Emanuel Joseph Sieyes.

And the only legitimate power can then even come along and deny the rights: class education, institutional racism, gender inequality. Of course, it is the social science that occupies the part of the five-start-university’s infrastructure that are in the worst conditions; of course it is the working class that is still hugely underrepresented in third-level education; of course it is gender that plays a role when it comes to the choice of subjects and of positions in the hierarchy of academic positions; of course it is the working class that is still largely left outside of the equation when it comes to reflecting on social policy which limits itself on administration, good-doing and injustice rather than talking about class conflict – and of course we decry the discrimination of individual students on ground of ‘race’ without however honestly contesting the fundamental parochialism of our Western societies that allow capital to move freely within a globalised economy (that is still hugely structured by centre-periphery inequalities), a parochialism that consoles ‘ordinary people’: as long as they adopt the culture of wingless consumers: chicken nuggets, wrapped in tight seats of low-fare airlines, allowing the illusion of also living in the global village. Sure, those who do not adopt the rules have to adapt to other rules: detention, deportation and/or permanent control and oppression … – all part of the of picture which the German writer Bert Brecht once characterised by the words: ‘The lap is still fertile that allowed this to grow …’ (Brecht had been reflecting on fascism – at a time what it had been overcome, but its roots had still been in place). And just while writing these lines I receive the news that some German parliamentarians lost their immunity because they participated in a protest action against a gathering of fascists in Dresden.

All these ‘injustices’ and ‘social imbalances’ remain within the outlined system – legitimate as long as they are geared towards spaces for this self-construction. Surely a painful process – even if self-construction is about self-deconstruction of those victims who are blamed to be responsible for their situation: suicide, addiction, consumerism, criminality, the victims made to those ‘perpetrators’ that become ‘clients’ of social professions. And it is a painful process even if it is only the pain of a cold office, or the pain of

‘part of the roof of Carrigbawn (the decorative wooden bit, complete with nails sticking out) which fell off during last night’s storm’

and which had been picked up by Angela and luckily did not hurt anybody.

Dyl Ulenspegel clould not beat it

30 gennaio 2013 da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

You know, I can gain some pleasure from some foolish acts – and I also think that much of what we are teaching, be it on rights, politics and policies etc. can be literally found in any day-to-day situation within institutions like for instance any university. Finally I still think there is some meaning in making such follies of public services public (you think it is a play with words? – Not really!) [well, all this shows there had been something I learned from one of my teachers, Rudolph Bauer – and I am still grateful for his teaching many years back and his ongoing friendship over the years].

So, here another little story.

***********

I sent a mail to “buildings office” – after suffering in a lecture room and after seeing the students suffering even more (at least I could move a bit around while lecturing). So here is the text of the mail sent on the 24th:

Dear …, I had been teaching today from 11 to 1 in the Distillery, room G01. The students complained about the lack of heating – and I only made the session myself as I had been able to stand and move at least a little bit – not keeping warm but at least maintaining a temperature that allowed me teaching. However, students said as well that they had been over long phases not in a position to concentrate.

Be it as matter of citizens rights to education provided by the Irish state or by way of customers of UCC as service provider, this is an unbearable and unacceptable condition. I am writing not least as this is not the first time it happened, though it had been previously in different venue.

I hope that this issue will be investigated in a sincere way and the issue will be corrected.

Thank you very much,

Peter

I then received on the 28th of January an answer by the Buildings Office Helpdesk – yes, I received one.

Just an attachment – a form

WORK REQUEST/ORDER

NO: 62025

Requested by: Herrmann, Peter

Dept.: … Location: ….

Description of work request: turn on heating in G.01

One page (A4) with different sections:

To be completed by Supervisor

To be completed by Assignee

For Office Use

…

Mind, especially the stuff noted under Safety Notice:

All works is to be undertaken by suitably qualified and competent persons, and in compliance with the Buildings and Estates Office Safety Statement and College Safety Procedures.

Work should be supervised as appropriate by the relevant foreman.

What is said in respect of qualification and competence may be questioned when it comes to the folks that is engaged with defining the admin side of a simple act: switch the heating on before teaching commences.

**************

May be … – if Kafka would be still around, he surely would write another of his famous stories based on this. And this story could surely be sufficient for Erving Goffman, Norbert Elias and the like to get them an hour and more exploring phenomenology of institutions and the Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations of the Process of Civilisation … .

One point may be added: Norbert had been strong believer in the process of civilisation – and although he had been (as Jew) forced by fascism to leave Germany, he had been until the end of his life convinced of such civilisational progress, rejecting any proposals to talk about de-civilisation and even remerging barbarism. Later, such discussions emerged by people who based their arguments on his work. Though I assume he would not have agreed. He had been just too gentle to think that we can step back. And with all conviction I still try to maintain such gentleness that I have had the honour to experience during our meetings, not possibly getting seriously damaged by being forced into such an iron cage (as Weber would have had it).

You see? Such a little story, and so much in it … – Occasionally I feel myself being seen as a very abstract thinker – but there is something I learned from somebody else who had been teacher and somewhat mentor: Niklas Luhmann, showing me that these apparently very abstract terms, categories and relationalities are just in front of us in tiny pieces – and it is up to us to leave it there on the ground: scattered and dangerous with the sharp edges of the heap of shards; or if we draw attention: allowing us to detect the essence of what all this is actually about: simplicity of oppressive hegemonic of which we are all part.

There could be an endless chain of examples we may add:

Grants for conference participation given to full time staff – maintaining establishment – rather than promoting with the meager means colleagues who may be in precarious situations, just starting careers … – sorry, didn’t older colleagues have enough time to establish themselves to be invited and get the conference fees covered by the organizers?
Issues of teaching and learning decided by administrative rules (or administrators as rulers?) rather being assessed in the light of needs of students – and staff that are preparing relevant material, sessions and excursions
publications rated on grounds of quantity and of ‘reviewed’ quality instead of quality and quality emerging from collective disputes

Well, we may leave it with the trinity – sure, in this light we come to the conclusion – taken from Marx’ ‘Grundrisse‘ – that

[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.

PS: in this context perhaps of interest my publication

Person oriented services and social service providers in comparative and European perspective. Current debates on changes by liberalisation in a perspective of a theory of modernisation; New York: Nova, 2006

More recent and relevant:

And finally:

Research on demand. Academics between self-consciousness and self-chastisement; forthcoming in the documentation of the ÖFEB-annual meeting)

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