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I see a lot of (vague) description but I don't see any explanation. In what way does this theory actually advance our understanding of society? How does it compare and contrast to other theories? How can we evaluate this theory compared to competing theories? What predictions does it make?
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Jul 11, 2015 19:01
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:22 |
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You still haven't explained why your theory should be adopted or how it actually tells us anything useful. The fact you've concluded that poor people in Harlem are bourgeois kind of makes you sound like a doofus as well. By the way, what you're describing is a theory of elites. The bourgeois are defined by their relationship to the means of production not how comfortable they are wi institutions.
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Jul 11, 2015 20:15
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glowing-fish posted:I don't think poor people in Harlem are bourgeois. Someone questioned my theory by putting forward the rather dubious example of how comfortable voters in Harlem (who are presumably poor and minority) feel when voting. Since I've never voted in Harlem, I don't know if this is true, but this http://www.healthofstatedemocracies.org/states/newyork.html makes it look like New York is not systematically an easy place to vote. I will ask again: how does this theory actually enhance our understanding of reality? What predictions does it make? How can it be tested? What processes does it illuminate? In short: how is this theory actually useful? The idea that income doesn't correlate directly with class is not particularly controversial since most scholars will agree that class has other facets such as culture or, as I said before, one's relationship to the means of production within society (i.e. a small business owner and a cop might both earn 100,000 in a given year without being considered members of the same class under many scholarly accounts). quote:The Bourgeois are anti-elite. The Marxist view on "Means of Production" ignores what is being produced. The Marxists were naive enough, in an almost charming 19th century way, to believe that what was produced by society came from some sort of absolute, scientific process. It is bourgeois customs and norms that decide what gets produced. The great middle, with their comfort with institutions and processes, is what determines what gets produced, while the "Captains of Industry" just follow along. Can you quote the Marxist scholars you're thinking of here because this doesn't really sound like any description of Marxism I've heard of. I'm also not sure how your claims would square with the invention of entirely new products since obviously there was no demand for iPads prior to Steve Jobs and Apple inventing and marketing them. In fact, let's just be blunt here: you haven't read any Marxism beyond, maybe, the Communist Manifesto or some short excerpts from other works, and frankly I don't think you've read many alternative social science theories of class and production either. Your theory isn't really engaging with any existing body of literature. It's like you just sat down one day, pondered over your personal experiences, and wrote down the first thoughts that drifted into your head. If you actually want to be taken seriously you need to put some time in understanding what previous theorists and scholars believed and then decide how your theory either contradicts or compliments those ideas. EDIT - Ok, I missed the last couple posts in this thread. If you're going to dismiss one of the most influential and wide reaching theories of the last 150 years without actually reading any of its theoretical texts then trying to formulate a new theory of society might be a bit above your paygrade. Also here's a protip: if you're going to try and tear apart Marxism then take the conventional route and critique the Labour Theory of Value. Helsing fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 21:48
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glowing-fish posted:I actually had more theoretical things I wanted to say in my original post, but I didn't want to make it too long. The problem is that if you want people to take you seriously you need to show that you've done your homework so I'm not sure that grand social theorizing and brevity are going to be compatible in this case. quote:This is actually, in my mind, primarily a Heideggerian theory. It taps into the Heideggerian idea of "technology" as being a way to frame "Being". Heidegger believed that Western society was based on a "forgetting" of Being, behind a series of metaphysical constructs that ended in "modern technology". I believe that is true, but I believe that "technology" can include social technologies, as well as physical technologies. Institutions are a form of social technology, and allow the framing/comprehension of Being. But it also allows the forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit). This is too vague to be helpful. For instance, if your theory is basically Heideggerian in nature then why are you presenting it as "your" theory? In what ways are you improving on or deviating from what Hedigger and his followers believed? glowing-fish posted:Here is a concrete example of bourgeois attitudes towards institutions in action: I don't really see how your theory illuminates these events in a way that other theories don't. The fact that people's opinions are molded by the media and by social institutions is a fairly trivial and widespread observation. It's compatible with most mainstream social theories. Since you're trying to convince us to adopt a new theory you need to demonstrate how you're improving or surpassing the explanations provided by other theories.
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Jul 12, 2015 01:23
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glowing-fish posted:So say I meet...a 45 year old lawyer, pretty liberal, works for a timber company, came from a middle-class family, went to a mid-tier private university...and who, while being pretty liberal, kind of uses that background as a metric of what he expects other people's experiences to be? What is the word to describe the expectations and background someone like that would have? What exactly is your objection to just calling this person "Middle class"?
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Jul 12, 2015 19:31
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glowing-fish posted:Would you be happier if I had called this thread "An Institutional theory of the Middle Class", because "Bourgeois" has already been used by some guy to describe the economic and social life of Germany in the 1840s? It would make your argument slightly more coherent. Also, I'm not even a Marxist and I find your criticism of Marxism hilariously shallow and clueless. There are legitimate criticisms of Marxism to be made, but your'e not making them. In fact, your descriptions are really just emphasizing that you're the kind of person who shoots from the hip without really bothering to try and understand the concepts you're dismissing. One of the biggest problems with your theory is that it's riddled with terms that you haven't adequately defined, so it's really impossible to know what you mean. glowing-fish posted:I might read it then. There is a lot of reading for me to do! What does "naturally" mean here? You put it in scare quotes, but so far as I know that's never a description Marx actually uses. quote:But the demand for them is created culturally and only makes sense in a certain cultural context, which is often obvious outside of that system but not inside that system. Marx, for example, didn't really know about Veblen goods. What does "culturally" mean here and what's your evidence that Marx didn't understand it? quote:Although both the author and the book have problems, Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" is very interesting in analyzing why societies continue to produce things that seem to have no objective value. What is "objective" and what is "value" in this context? quote:For example, he writes about how Norse settlers in Greenland spent resources keeping cattle rather than sheep, even though it was counterproductive (they took way more resources than they produced). Cattle represented a source of prestige and a tie to their way of life in Scandinavia, but they probably didn't think of it that way, they probably just assumed that cattle had an "objective" value. Marx's description of value is, explicitly a description of value under a capitalist system of production. He doesn't claim that his description of how value is produced is applicable to the situation you're describing. Also Marx recognized that there's a difference between the "exchange value" of an item and its "use value". It is possible in Marx's analysis for an item with a low or none existent use value to have a high exchange value. quote:In other words, when someone goes to a doctor to get a prescription for naproxen for minor aches and pains, they are doing what those ranchers in Greenland were doing: getting the prestige of institutional power, in a way that objectively doesn't really make sense. Where's your proof for this? This is the actual core of your theory but you haven't supplied any compelling evidence.
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Jul 12, 2015 21:07
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Honestly the more I look at this thread the more it reads like a cruder version of what I see a lot of people with a background in Foucault and Deridda doing. It's a mixture of dismissing theorists you haven't read out of hand and making very bad criticisms of them while making sweeping claims about the nature of everything, but claims that are basically impossible to test and which you don't bother supporting very much. Sure some of the observations are potentially interesting but they're pursued in such a superficial way that you have trouble taking them seriously. Perhaps that's unsurprising given that a lot of those folks take inspiration from Heidegger.
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Jul 14, 2015 19:54
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In my own experience post modern or post structuralist authors can be really interesting and insightful but they also provide their readers with the perfect toolkit for vapid shoot-from-the-hip theorizing. Continental philosophy in general has an attitude toward language and clarity that can be fun in small doses but which also encourages a lot of mediocre thinkers to hide the blandness of what they are saying behind obscurantist language and sweeping claims.
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Jul 14, 2015 23:22
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You're right that a lot of post structuralism comes out of a very Marxist/Marxian milieu and many Post Structuralist thinkers like Foucault had been members of the French communist party and participated in the 1968 student uprising, but the 'structuralism' that they first developed and then abandoned in favor of Post Structuralism was itself an attempt to develop an alternative theory to Marxism, based on developments in linguistic and anthropology. I'm not saying your wrong but trying to develop a genealogy of exactly where these ideas originated and how they developed is a long and complicated endeavor.
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Jul 15, 2015 00:29
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:22 |
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Just for the record glowing-fish I think it's cool that you're thinking through all these ides and I don't even disagree with everything you've said, but I feel like there's no point having a debate like this if you're not being pushed hard to actually justify what you've written. I would want other people to challenge me in the same way I'm challenging you if our positions were reversed.glowing-fish posted:I don't think I was "Making sweeping claims about the nature of everything". You seem to be claiming that the motivations behind a wide range of behaviours operate very differently than most people commonly think that they do. For instance, you said that the bourgeoisie seek out education not for it's economic utility but rather as a strategy for identity formation. Some of your comments about medical treatment even make it sound like you're suggesting that the only real appeal of doctors is that they are culturally sanctioned and that they'd otherwise be no functionally different than a faith healer. If these don't count as sweeping claims then I can't imagine what would. quote:Taking away the continental language, most of what I talked about is just based on my own experience of how people's backgrounds in early life affects how comfortable they are navigating through society. There are a number of number of concrete situations where this background is incredibly important. Say someone has a loud neighbor: do they know how to call the police and make a noise complaint? Or are they so afraid of involving the police that they will confront their neighbor directly? Say someone wants to go to Canada, do they feel confident going through that border crossing and answering the questions, even if they are temporarily unemployed? Someone is renting an apartment, and is unclear what type of responsibilities their landlord has for repairs. Would they feel comfortable going to a local library and asking the library staff for information on renter's rights? I don't think it's controversial to suggest that people in dominant cultural groups enjoy various privileges - many of which are invisible to the in-group - when it comes to accessing resources. This is often referred to as "cultural capital" or "privilege" depending on who you ask. Here's an essay written in 1990 that outlines exactly the sort of invisible but pervasive advantages enjoyed by white people that you're assigned to the 'bourgeoisie'. But I have two responses to your argument. First: the stuff you're saying in this post seems totally different than the claims you made upthread about the bourgeoisie using doctors and educators as tools for identity formation rather than because of their actual use value (at the moment it's not even clear whether you think these institutions have any objective value outside their social roles in identity formation). I can see how these could be two pieces of an over arching meta-theory of society, but right now they seem like two distinct and separate claims that each need to be justified on their own terms. Second: as far as the stuff about invisible privileges enjoyed by society's dominant groups. I don't exactly disagree with what you're saying here but I'm a bit confused about how you're approaching this. You seem, at least in the OP, to be suggesting that there are two big groups in society: bourgeois and not-bourgeois. The bourgeois are the people who are comfortable navigating their social reality, the none-bourgeois are everybody who is not comfortable. But, as most advocates of privilege theory would quickly point out, this isn't how things actually work. This is exactly why questions of intersectionality have become such a fixation for certain segments of the political left. Because depending on your exact positionality you're going to be more or less comfortable with certain institutions. In some cases a black man will have certain advantages because he's a man, while in other situations a white woman might be more advantaged because of her skin colour. A trans-person faces all kinds of difficulties, but Caitlyn Jenner was, you'd probably agree, privileged in ways that Travyon Martin wasn't. These calculations of exactly how you are or are not privileged can get hopelessly complicated. So given how nearly impossible it is to sort out exactly where everyone falls, and given how some people might be more comfortable with certain institutions than others (perhaps I have no trouble calling the police on my neighbours party but I'm deathly afraid of doctors and hospitals, to the point that I'll avoid necessary medical treatments) what exactly is the use of trying to reduce everyone to being either 'bourgeois' or 'not-bourgeois'? In what way would this designation help us to navigate these murky debates? Basically, other people already went down the road you're starting upon, and they mostly gave up on it in favour of an approach that emphasizes the intersectional nature of social privilege.
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Jul 15, 2015 23:52
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