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Wendy Wheeler
©Wendy Wheeler 2008
Almost twenty years ago (December 1988) Bea Campbell and I wrote an article
for Marxism Today called ‘Filofaxions’ (available on
the MT archive at the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust website: http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm).
In it we argued that while male forms of consumption (Arthur Scargill’s
cars for example) were apparently acceptable, ‘softer’ effete
forms associated with the easing of women’s labour (washing machines,
for example) and middle-class yuppiedom (‘yuppie’: young upwardly
mobile professionals – with a nod at ex-‘yippie’ Jerry Rubin’s
1982 move into business networking) were not. Arthur Scargill had appeared
at the Labour Party Conference that year brandishing a Party Card in one hand
and a Filofax in the other. We suggested that he had ‘thrown down the
gauntlet’ to something, and wondered what it was. That year’s
Marxism Today Christmas Present Offers included a Marxism Today
filofax. I received one in my stocking, and I’m still using it –
although only as an address book; the rest of my self-organisation is based
in my PC and mobile phone.
The Filofax in fact dates back to the 1920s at least. Its burst of immense
popularity in the 1980s may be linked to its capacity to state something significant
about personal identity as that was increasingly experienced during the 1980s
in terms of time management, goal orientation, and general promotion of personal
material success in terms of time maximisation. The latter is often closely
tied to the idea of the Pareto analysis based on the Pareto distribution (80%
of tasks take 20% of your time and the remaining 20% of tasks take 80%, in
the same way that roughly 20% of the population own 80% of the nation’s
wealth, and 20% of a company’s clients generate 80% of its profit).
The Pareto Chart is frequently used in Total Quality Control management –
another 1980s arrival. Pareto rules suggest similarly that 80% of productivity
arises from 20% of any population. It goes without saying that a society run
strictly on economic principles of maximising productivity and profit will
not only not value 80% of its population, but will also generate considerable
anxiety about being one of the 20% of life’s productive ‘winners’.
Perhaps this is what the Filofax darkly signified. Perhaps this – the
strength of collectivity in the face of Pareto distribution inequalities driven
by inheritance or individualistic ambition – is what Arthur meant.
That decade was the first in which we really felt the effects of Thatcherism
and the neo-liberal turn, in which MT, led by Stuart Hall’s
‘new times’ analysis, mounted an attempt to ‘see the new’
in all its difficulty. Bea and I drew on Raymond Williams’ analyses
of the past and future shapes of modernity (Culture and Society and
The Long Revolution) in order to complicate Scargill’s seemingly
simple opposition between the past of Party membership and commitments, and
the awful consumerist ‘Greed is Good’ self-interested future represented
by the Filofax. Mark Perryman told me that ‘Filofaxions’ drew
one of the largest and most infuriated bags of letters in response that MT
had ever received. It seems hard to imagine now; but that was a ‘moment’,
towards the end of a decade when vast tectonic shifts were first felt and
acknowledged in the ways we could envisage a future in which the Left might
have something gripping and politically relevant to say.
Bea and I were arguing that the distinctions, of class and gender in this
case, which had supported the Left imaginary from the 1920s into the post-World
War 2 years, were now insufficient to carry the weight of neo-liberal ‘new
times’. Not only were the shifts being felt from the late sixties and
early seventies in terms of identity politics, but, by the 1980s, these shifts
were, themselves, mutating in ways that rendered those old distinctions increasingly.
The humble technology of the Filofax, we said, signalled a putting together
of lives (particularly for women entering the complicated and multi-demanding
life of working women and mothers as professional wage-earners – often
as not in the absence of supportive partnerships) which were to be communicationally
organised in new and different ways.
The concept of globalisation, as used by economists, was also a 1980s arrival.
In 1989 this took definite technological form in Tim Berners-Lee’s invention
of the World Wide Web – a project he had been working on at CERN since
1980. This latest communicational technology, made widely available via the
desktop PC, was, as we know, both liberating and democratising, but also a
further pressure on people’s uses of time and what (especially via email)
came to be expected of them in terms of responsiveness and efficiency. The
management of efficiency – supposedly tied to creative innovation as
material profitability – was an obsession much strengthened in the 1980s.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about the Web does not lie in some
simplistic idea of communication and trade for immediate profit, but lies,
instead, in what it tells us about ourselves, and in the ways we can truly
profit socially from this knowledge in the longer term.
All communicational technology, from language itself, to the wheel, to the
printing press, to lenses, to telegraph, telephone, radio, film and TV is
(as Marshall McLuhan pointed out) an extension of bodily capacities in the
world. And, as bodies and what they can do are the sources of minds, every
technological innovation is at the same time an innovation in mind and subjectivity.
The Web, though, is the first technology which is, itself, essentially mind-like.
It doesn’t only extend our cognitive capacities by putting a world-wide
library at our fingertips, it also tells us something about how mind and cognition
works. The advent of computers led many to assume that minds are like (or
even are) computers. This is not right – not least because computers
don’t have the wondrous complexity of evolutionarily adaptive bodies-in-environments.
But a world-wide network of computers, with human bodies-and-minds-in-environments
attached, does produce an aspect of mindedness. We can see this techne of
human-mindedness in the way we negotiate and move through the Web we have
made.
Modern Western societies are based on post-Socratic assumptions about the
nature of mind (and knowledge and learning) which are both deeply dualistic
(such that mind is not recognised as dependent upon body-in-the-world) and
also wedded to the idea that human knowing is always potentially self-conscious
and explicit. If you know something, in other words, you must be able to say
explicitly what it is. But, as we all in fact know, we have hunches about
solutions to problems and questions, and it is this that leads us to pursue
certain lines of inquiry in preference to innumerable possible others. But
hunches are intuitions; we cannot be explicit about them. It was this fact
about human knowing which led the philosopher (and scientist) Charles Sanders
Peirce to propose a third form of logical inference in addition to deduction
and induction. He called this third form of logical inference ‘abduction’
or ‘retroduction’. Abductions are the fruit of unconscious (semiotic)
experience of signs and meanings. They are the result of implicit, or tacit,
knowledge in the form of ‘educated guesses’. Similarly, the philosopher
(and scientist) Michael Polanyi developed the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’
in which ‘we know more than we can tell’.
And this, indeed, is how we progress through the Web. Our hypotheses dictate
our search terms, and the ways we progress (and must progress) through all
the innumerable html links which make up the web is, in the end, via hunches
and intuitions. This is how human knowing grows more knowledge. Human rationality
is neither wholly explicit nor wholly a matter of conscious calculation. It
depends, as Polanyi argues, on a fiduciary framework in which we have faith
in the structured nature of a reality about which more can definitely be known.
There seems to be a fit between the structured ways in which minds know and
the structure of the environmental reality in which knowing occurs. This is
just as true for scientists as it is for poets. The reason there’s a
fit between minds, the systems they produce, and reality is that metabiotic
cybernetic systems (psyches, societies, technology) evolve and arise from
biotic cybernetic systems (naturally evolved ecologies). Natural morphologies
evolve into cultural morphologies. A society driven by the idea of self-maximisation
via self-conscious calculation and management alone is not only hopelessly
misguided, it is also obliged to commit countless large and small acts of
violence against the actual affective and intuitive experiential processes
informing the knowing human beings which comprise it.
An apprehension of the world derived from these kinds of understandings about
the tacit nature of communication, systems and minds would at once see the
folly of the idea of ‘rational management’ – let alone micro-management.
It would see, instead, the need for facilitation and general confidence in
systemic process, creativity, and self-organisation. Where system responses
to perturbations grow in ways likely to be injurious, interventions should
be based on the best evidence-based research – as it now is in medicine
– rather than on politicians’ and managers’ fashion-spun
prejudices. The now increasingly spoken about ‘death of New Labour’
should also spell the death of neo-liberal ideas of managed laissez-faire.
The gardener does not let the garden alone; she or he tends to it responsively
– a quite different attitude to that of aggressive and unresponsive
‘management’.
For, finally, it is this question of constant interference and detested unresponsive
management – in politics and in the public services especially –
which seems to be the sorest point of all now in the widespread hostility
towards New Labour and Gordon Brown. The local council elections and the London
mayoral election, followed by the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, have delivered
in unmistakable terms the extent of popular loathing of the government. From
endless hours of reading all the Have Your Says and blogs following the elections,
it is clear to me that the electorate’s hostility is both widespread
and implacable. The themes are consistent: they are both betrayal (over the
symptomatic 10p tax rate specifically and civil liberties generally), and
also the common perception of a self-righteous and disapproving government
that holds ordinary working people and their habits in contempt, and which
constantly seeks to manage and ‘improve’ them. This, too, is a
problem of self-reflexive (rather than hetero-reflexive) recursion in which
too much conscious interference in the system by the system itself produces
inflammatory positive feedback (in the cybernetic sense): too much ‘noise’
results in too little communication. Such persistent self-reference (and failure
to recognise that systems are always ‘ecologically’ embedded in
other biotic and metabiotic systems) is arguably the Cartesian poison at the
heart of western modernity.
The genealogy of this contempt is clear. New Labour under Gordon Brown has
stepped clean into the mantel of sanctimonious Victorian finger-wagging and
temperance movement evangelicals. Indeed, one is tempted to ask this government
what it thinks is so admirable about the working classes which have so long
formed its base, and been the object of its benevolent concern and supposed
esteem. Ordinary working-class people now very often seem to experience themselves
and their ways of life as despised by this government of middle-class reprovers.
Their response is to return the sentiment with knobs on. Under conditions
of class antagonism such as these, rowdy Hooray-Henry toffs from Eton –
who are a bit non-bourgeois in their irregular habits themselves – might
not seem like such an appalling alternative.
The same logic of systemic hetero-referential recursion and re-entry which
underlies Peircean abduction also informs and underlies the logic of cybernetic
information and communication systems. The death of New Labour, as the continuation
of the liberal project of utilitarian management, was inevitable. The success
of the Filofax in the 1980s was both a straw in the wind blowing from the
future of global communication technologies, and also the last gasp of the
technologies (merely personal and print/writing based) whose cognitive end
the Filofax simultaneously prefigured. The first politicians capable of grasping
not only the ways in which systems interact, co-depend, and co-evolve, but
also that these are all cybernetic communication systems – now technologically
manifested in global forms – will be the politicians most capable of
facilitating the future.
From the personal Filofax self-organiser to the Web twenty years on –
and the idea of self-organisation begins to mean something quite different.
From the harassed self-organisation of the hyper-rationalising individual,
we begin to glimpse an awareness of the abducting creative reason of individuals
as mysterious and valuable localised communication ‘systems’ always
emergent from and dependent on larger natural and cultural communication systems.
Each is self-organising (autopoietic, cybernetic) in its own particular biosemiotic
and semiotic ways. This is not a simple anarchist argument; systems small
and large can get sick. But the conditions of health in both are systemic:
communicational and, thus, relational, and forged through the encounter between
identity (me) and difference (not me). The creative freedom of individuals
is enormously important; but let’s not forget that it is dependent upon
the wider web of communicational relational systems of which it is a part,
and from which it arises.
Wendy Wheeler is Reader in English at London Metropolitan
University. Her research interests are in biotic, metabiotic, and abiotic
cybernetic systems, and in the interrelations between all three in and across
culture and nature. She is the author of The Whole Creature: Complexity,
Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence & Wishart 2006)
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