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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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