Soundings a journal of politics and culture |
Issue 14 Introduction
Wendy Wheeler (guest editor)
There's something Humpty-Dumpty-ish about New Labour these
days - and it's
not simply the possibility of a fall and the pride which precedeth it.
It's the strange way that, like Humpty, who thought he could make words
mean what he wanted them to ('When I say 'glory' I mean a good knock-down
argument'), New Labour thinks that it can make the word 'shambles', for
instance, mean 'The Dome's millennium night was a great success'; or that
'what Robert Winston meant was that the NHS is still suffering from the
Tories funding cuts'. How is it that, for the great realists in government
- who insist that the country must face, and embrace, the real hard facts
of the modern world and globalisation - reality can so easily slip its
anchor? Or that the relationship between experiences and the words
supposed to describe them can come so strangely adrift? Is there a
radical social constructionist somewhere deep in the bowels of Number
Ten,
telling the politicians that the entire world is simply linguistically
constructed, and that to say a thing is so is to make it so? If George
Orwell were alive today, the word 'newspeak' might well be on his lips.
For, surely, what anchors our descriptions of things and events in the
world is, precisely, the communal back and forth of stories about the
world in which we strive to reach some form of working agreement. And
isn't this why the conversations we have must be as wide, as well-informed,
as inclusive, as multi-dimensional, as democratic as possible?
Many of us would want to say that the intellectual impetus which guides
Tony
Blair is, most clearly, a politically Liberal one; yet the commitment
to
civil society, as the site of an ongoing agonistic, which so characterises
the philosophy of Liberalism, seems curiously absent. Intellectuals, who
might be considered to have some contribution to make to such social
conversations, are damned as having nothing interesting to say. In place
of political commitments, and the on-going process of informed arguments
which should be a part of democracy, we get polls and focus groups
(without, apparently, much attention to the psycho-dynamics of such
resources), and a sense that this government lacks the human richness
which springs from healthy and diverse social and cultural engagements,
exchanges and conversations. Thus the sense of ersatz politics, of
politics without depth, of glittering surfaces, shows and words hanging
unencumbered by any terrific relationship to anything beyond, beneath
or
behind them - of, as our theme names it, an impoverished one-dimensionality.
The essays here address various aspects of this one-dimensionality.
Mike Rustin draws attention to the conflicts within contemporary ideas
of
modernisation - in the Conservative formulation of modernisation under
Margaret Thatcher, there was a conflict between the radical, individualist
free-marketeers and the moral conservatives; in Tony Blair's hands these
conflicts were supposed to be overcome via the notion of the Third Way.
But, argues Rustin, the Third Way is less an attempt to chart a course
between market dogmatism and social democracy than it is an attempt to
thwart conservatism from every quarter, left and right. We might see this
as an attempt to reassert the liberal tradition of utilitarian radical
social reform and sturdy individual independence which has developed since
the late eighteenth century. In practice, at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, what this entails is a wholehearted support for
the
market as economic and social system. But the earlier modernity, and its
political manifestations of reform and change (and the eventual spread
of
democracy which they were inclined to foster), were supported by still
entrenched religious and social values and networks, and recognition that
democracy must be gradually accommodated; in contrast, contemporary
neo-liberalism, as Rustin argues, exists in a very different context.
Here, and lacking any truly political programme, the Third Way draws on
other sources of value - most notably the market, the desires, means and
ends of which then form an electoral programme. This, as I argue in my
essay, is actually political choice masquerading as necessity. This
realism, like all claims to privileged access to reality (which are
inevitably tainted with the stale smell of authoritarianism), must
contain errors - things which the future will judge as foolish. Arguing
that it is the job of intellectuals to point to the possible fantasies
of
the present, by reference to developments in their various fields, I try
to identify what are the follies of today, and find that they lie in the
difference between the 'common sense realism' of New Labour TINA-ism and
the rather different common sense demonstrated outside of the increasingly
out-of-(democratic) touch world of Westminster politics.
'Complexity', says David Byrne, 'seems to be an idea whose time has come'.
Moreover it is an idea 'which not only allows for, but might be considered
to require, political engagement'. Moving us beyond the politically
paralysing value-crisis of postmodernism, complexity does allow us to
know
the world via the extent of our participation in it. Complexity implies
that we know systems locally and by reference to context and history.
We
all know, for example, that, when a new person enters an institution,
one
of the commonest phrases they will hear as they encounter problems,
obstacles or seeming mysteries is 'There's a history to this'. This is
because we know, as actors in a complex system, that it is vital to
understand contemporary pressures (contexts and resulting actions, etc)
via their distinct, local and particular histories. Wide human
communication is necessary because people in different positions within
the system will have different 'takes' on these histories and experience
various pressures in differently nuanced ways. What must be clear - and
this continues the critique of modern managerialism and authoritarianism
made elsewhere in this issue - is that human societies, and the
micro-systems of which they are made up, can only function healthily with
maximum creativity and adaptation when communication and participation
in
processes is maximised. Perhaps the contemporary mini-rash of TV
programmes placing a group of individuals in (island) conditions in which
they must survive on the strengths and communal vitality of the group
evinces our growing interest in investigating the bones and musculature
of
healthy (or morbid) societies. Turning away from the story of 'downward
determination' offered in conventional social science discussions of the
global system, Byrne turns instead to the idea of 'nested systems'.
Understood in this way the relationship between the local and the global
is, more accurately, seen as running in both directions. Here, knowing
how to change outcomes consists in knowing which parts (or groups of parts)
of the whole system matter most in terms of the places where change is
desired. For Byrne, the degree of inequality, and the differences which
that makes right across a social system, is precisely such a 'control
parameter', and it is directly linked to the concentration of economic
power in the hands of capitalist elites.
Gavin Poynter's '"Thank you for Calling": the new ideology of work in
the
service economy' identifies some of the key constituents of the American
model of service sector management theory and practice. The article argues
that the rationalisation and routinisation of work typically associated
with Taylorism and scientific management is being redefined and recast
in
the service sector context. Whilst Taylorism acknowledged the different
(class) interests of management and worker, the new management approach
to
the rationalisation of work tends to blur the distinction. Management
and
workers, for example, are required to assume a common identity as 'service
providers' and the recipients of services (patients, pupils, students)
become customers. Whilst Taylorism concentrated upon the manual labour
process, the new management approach focuses upon mental and 'emotional'
labour, subjecting it to a process of routinisation through the use of
such techniques as Business Process reengineering (BPR) and Knowledge
Management. Finally, whilst scientific management is often associated
with the highly integrated 'fordist' factory, the new management approach
attempts to flatten hierarchies and regulate relations between business
units and work teams through a combination of internal markets and
external audit. Poynter argues that while these new management techniques
ascribe to the values of high performance and reward, in practice they
achieve their opposite, not least - a point also made by Mike Rustin -
because they encourage risk aversion and militate against original and
spontaneous enterprise and innovation. Similarly, as 'managerial competencies'
have displaced specialist knowledges as guiding principles in health or
education, institutions have become driven by the requirements of a culture
of audit, which displaces professional judgements of what is needful for
the
core tasks - whether of making populations healthier, or developing the
intellectual capacities of whole individuals.
Barry Richards's 'The Real Meaning of Spin' sees a new late modern dimension
in New Labour and other contemporary modes of rule, namely in the
incorporation into them of specific techniques of emotional management.
He sees 'spin', and the personalisation of political leadership, as
reflectors of a significant change in the social order, in particular
the
emergence of a therapeutic culture. Whilst some articles criticise New
Labour for its one-dimensionality, it is important to see that several
other contributors, like Barry Richards, are outlining new ways of looking
at the political process - and exploring the complex emotional dynamics
often brought into play. Some of the issues raised by Barry Richards link
with an earlier Soundings issue whose theme was Emotional Labour, and
we
will be returning to them.
There is a high degree of agreement in many of the individual pieces appearing
in 'One-dimensional politics' - and perhaps our readers will share much
of the drift of the analyses offered here; they may also share our sense
of moderated exasperation that anything so foolish as the system and
beliefs currently prevailing in the Anglo-Saxon world of politics and
big
business could possibly have been wrought by human hands. Mario Petrucci
conveys some of this frustration in his succinct fable. An obvious answer
as to how this has state of affairs has come about would involve taking
note of the interests which are served by such systems and beliefs; a
less
obvious one might involve asking more troubling questions about the
nature of the souls for whom material power is so satisfying that their
connections to their less fortunate fellow human beings can be entirely
disregarded and broken. But, in the end, perhaps the best answer to our
collective amazement that things could ever have come to such a pass still
lies with Alistair MacIntyre's analysis - now nearly twenty years old
- in
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. MacIntyre argued that in the
absence of a sense of lived, enworlded, virtue - of ethical commitments
to
what constitutes a good human life and good stewardship of the, always
interconnected, social and natural worlds - we arrive at the goal of
efficiency. When you can no longer state with any authority whether an
outcome is good or bad, all you are left with is what MacIntyre describes
as the managerialist goals of efficient performance - making the trains
run on time: whether they are going to Eden or Auschwitz, and whether
this
is desirable or undesirable, just depends upon your point of view.
In other words, the only counter to the ascendancy of the manager's values
(or 'fictions' as MacIntyre describes them) is the concerted reassertion
of human goods and bads. Managing that - which is to say talking about
that, arguing about that, negotiating that - must be the central task
we
face in challenging a deadeningly one-dimensional future.
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