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Elimination of Uncertainty and the Politics of Enclosure
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beyondthecommons
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[cultstud-l] Thoughts on Tit for Tat 21/04/02
Coming from Northern Ireland, I have never found the 'we have more dead than you' approach
to be particularly helpful. To a murdered person and their relatives, one dead person
is still dead, regardless of race, creed, colour, gender.
Presumably many people on this list are professional thinkers. Surely it would be better
if we tried to work out ways to understand the cycles of hatred and reprisal in ways which
offer hope for something better? Take away the labels that are placed on people and take a
look at any situation. What is actually happening, in terms of people among people? How can
we understand any situation in ways which can leave the door open for positive transformation
at the level of the individual? How can we move away from the gross misrepresentations that are
perpetrated on the basis of grand labels, abstract generalisations, and abstract universalisms?
Why and how is this all happening - not in terms of 'history', but in terms of strategies that
humans adopt in social interaction with other humans. At a very basic level the content of an
argument matters less than the social disposition of the people involved in the argument.
People who live by the disposition to eliminate uncertainty will always find a justification
for their actions. Those justifications are not necessary, natural, or inevitable (that is,
beyond question), though they are often interchangeable.
The less people and relationships are the focus of analysis, the more 'content'
(the visual, the aural, reified entities) is. If there is any situation in which
words matter more than the lives of people, then we need to find ways to ask why,
how, and how can we contribute to a more balanced and humane perspective.
Someone came up to me at a conference recently and suggested that my study of enclosure
might be applied to the Jewish occupation of Palestine. This person was, if you want labels,
a scholarly Jew. From my perspective, the model I came up with can also be used for the
analysis of the behaviour of certain Jews, Palestinians, Catholics, Protestants,
corporate capitalists, governmental apologists, but, most importantly, my own behaviour
at times. The principles in my thesis (http://www.beyondthecommons.com) are an attempt
to find first principles in my own life that allow me to make sense of the world, while
also living with hope that positive change is possible. I invite anyone to take the
propositions in this thesis and see if they offer any help in the analysis conflict
situations with which they are confronted.
This isn't just about Israel or Palestine. There are atrocities being committed all over
the world, all the time. There are people with hate in their hearts around every corner.
This is about being human, about what we can do as humans. This isn't idealistic
communitarianism, certainly not to those who suffer.
Stand in front of a child who has been abused, and tell her that you aren't going to help
her because you don't believe that there is any way out of the cycles of violence.
The urge to violence is addictive behaviour. A cycle of violence is an addictive cycle.
People change, but we have to learn to understand how and why they don't when they don't.
Blessings (in whatever way you understand them)
Anthony McCann
PUBLORE@lists.nau.edu 02/08/02
I don't call officially label myself anything. I am a folklorist among folklorists,
an ethnomusicologist among ethnomusicologists, an Irish language scholar among Irish
language scholars. In my own head, however, I am an independent scholar, an academic
perhaps, who seeks to ask three questions: how is this helpful? If it isn't obviously
helpful, how can I understand it in ways that make it helpful for me? How can I invite
others to consider what I find helpful to see if it might be helpful for them?
Assuming for a moment that no professional or disciplinary job-label is a good excuse
for persisting with concepts and practices that can often be shown to be counterproductive
and unhelpful, why don't we just embrace the responsibility of *always* seeking to do and
think things in ways that are more about less partial representations of particular
circumstances, particular lives (including our own), and less about easy and often outrageous
generalisations, casual throwaway concepts, and terms the import of which we may not even
understand. If we use terminology while being unable to clearly answer, in simple English,
'What do you mean?' (even were it to take three pints to get to the answer) then what are
we doing?
The ways we think, the terminologies and methodologies we use, the generalizations we flaunt,
the false histories we perpetuate, the gross misrepresentations we espouse, all have
implications for the ways we relate to other people, for the ways we treat other people,
and for the ways we relate to reality and to the complexities of our own lives. If we
continually place people and experience at the center of our work, along with compassion,
gentleness, kindness, care, and incisive analysis and understanding, then we will be
continually challenged in our thoughts, terminologies, methodologies, generalizations,
false histories, and misrepresentations. Once we commit ourselves to vigilance in this
respect there is no going back. What discipline we are in matters little if we are
simply in the business of self-perpetuation, organisational survival, and "Ochsureit'lldoism".
Whether we like it or not we are professional thinkers, professional analysts, of life,
of experience, of the way people relate to other people, or the potential wisdoms that
are available to us as human beings. We either do that job in ways that are helpful to
us and hopefully to others, or we do the job half-baked, forgetting the people and the
experience and the wisdom parts of it and focus only on the 'material things', or only
on the abstract stuff, in ways that allow us to shirk the challenges that working among
people tends to present us with. I was watching a movie the other day, Diary of a City Priest,
and there was a mention there of something that Dorothy Day once said, about there
being enough of a job in this life to work on one's own heart first.
Seriously, I think there is something to that. As soon as we forget that we are in
the business of trying to make sense of this experience of ours for ourselves and
others, then I think we lose the plot, we forget that any discipline, particularly
folklore or whatever you want to call it, is a loose assembly of strategies that
facilitates particular ways of making sense of the world. These strategies go from
being based on the scientific principle of the elimination of uncertainty, a drive to
classify, order, enumerate, and, ultimately, control, to being based in the warm embrace
of uncertainty and the nuances of people's lives, including our own. Whatever we call
ourselves, the warm embrace part is for me the importance part. Warm because we have
hearts, hearts that register uncertainty and emotion, emotion from which we cannot
really escape though we might often kid ourselves that we can. If I sideline the
importance of the specifities of people's lives and their complex and particular and
emotional travels through generalization and misrepresentation, the stable diet of
most policy approaches, then I am not doing a good job, and I can do better. If I
collect millions of things and write millions of words and spend most of my life
mistreating the people that I come into contact with on a daily basis then I never
really got it in the first place and my words are largely irrelevant to my own life,
and I have not done a good job, and could have done better. Professional mission
isn't a good excuse for being an ass in the study of folklore any more than it is
in the expansion of business interests.
...
Rarefied academic discourse is not a total reality, any more than the opposite is a reality.
Such generalizations may be accurate for some, but where they are inaccurate they occlude
and erase the lives of those who successfully draw on the work of others from the world of
scholarship while also working with people in communities, drawing wisdom
wherever it can be found. It's not the institutional arenas that determine whether or
not someone leads a life of cold removal from the warmer things of life, but their own
disposition or orientation to life, which can of course be reinforced or undermined by the
institutional setting someone works in. Academic success, in my book, is the ability to
put people first, to get closer to the nuances of how the world actually works, to
challenge oneself at every opportunity to do it better, more compassionately, more
respectfully next time, and to invite other academics and scholars and professional
thinkers/analysts to see if that kind of approach would be helpful to them.
Question: "If authenticity and tradition aren't intellectually adequate foundational concepts,
what is the ground for public folklorists to stand on?". The ground never moved, always moves.
The ground we stand on is still the same ground it was 3 million years ago
- the being-in-common and difference-in-common experience of being human,
each in our own individual negotiation of experience, among other people, in the complex
interrelatedness of everything with everything else. If particular uses of the terms
'authenticity' and 'tradition' lead us to get it very wrong then we should identify
when and how that is the case and excise such uses from our scholarship and analysis.
Take away a term and the challenge of making sense of our experience doesn't suddenly
disappear. However, take away a common academic term, and try to say what you mean in
words that your farming grandfather or a nine year old child would understand, and you are
challenged to remind yourself of the coalface issues of a common humanity, and challenged
to ask yourself 'how is what I am doing helpful, to me, to you, to anyone?', 'Why is this
interesting?' 'What am I doing?' 'What am I doing it for?'
In the field of 'folklore' have access to common wisdoms that allow us to approach discourses
in ways that sweep away the words that really don't say very much at all. If I can train myself
to reduce the rubbish that I often spout then maybe I have a chance to identify when others
work hard to prevaricate and pull the wool over my eyes with vague, overly-general or
jargonistic language that doesn't really mean an awful lot, and probably tells a whole
pack of misleading stories if not lies, but probably nonetheless fuels the fires of some
development project, or some bank balance increase, or some grant application, or some
high-profile event.
Take away the abstract professional and academic labels and terms and what do I actually do?,
if I were explaining my work to a person who doesn't share my conceptual bases, in terms of
people relating to people, in terms of me relating to others. Who do I associate with and why?
How do I deal with them and why? What am I promoting or championing and why? What type of
ethical systems and social dynamics and authority structures am I supporting, or undermining,
and what tools do I have to gauge whether or not what I am doing is harmful in the long term?
How much have I studied about the well-documented dangers of intervention, enthusiastic
anthropology, well-intentioned development, or salvage approaches? Am I blind to what I
might be doing? In acknowledgement of the complexities of moving in and out of different
social situations, registers, and groups, can I accurately speak in terms of 'a tradition',
or is that just an easy way for me to avoid the work implied by the statement 'It's more
complicated than that'?
Question: "How do we further the dialogue with community arts people in such a way that our
intersections of common purpose are fruitful while the unique qualities of the genres,
communities, and practitioners we care about are respected?" The same way we can further
dialogue with most people, by speaking of things that matter to people in ways that are
analytically incisive, people-centred, and helpful. Who am I talking to? What do I want to
say to them? How is what I am saying helpful? Unfortunately, most policy recommendations
(especially at international levels, from where people draw exemplars) are thing-centred,
grossly misrepresentative, and involve the heavy mechanics of persuasion or veiled coercion
of some sort. Little room for respect or subtlety or the acknowledgement of the complexities
of each person's life and environment if that is the case.
Question: "How do we re-examine our disciplinary history and identity to forge renewed and
robust foundational concepts that embrace a more theoretically sound and socially progressive
agenda capable of garnering support for our work?" By returning, for example, to those aspects
of Herder and others that espouse people-centred specificity (and red-flagging those aspects
that go off the track into flatland) , by carefully critiquing the ways in which folklorist
have for decades if not centuries been making all the same mistakes and more that
anthropologists have been making, by increasing vigilance to those mistakes and working out
ways to do things better, drawing on anthropology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies,
postcolonial theory, radical pedagogy etc etc, all those fields where people are dealing
with similar issues of people, experience, power, meaning, representation, and misrepresentation, but also drawing on local wisdoms, looking to those people that you admire as people to live your life by, wherever you find them. Where do you find wisdom? How are those people helpful? Why should we listen to them? What have they got to say to me? To others? If we carefully reinvest our lives as the apprenticeship of wisdoms, as philosophers in the most basic sense of the word, then we have a lot to offer, and many orthodox assumptions to challenge. Every major orthodoxy in every field, as far as I have found, is based on the principle of the elimination of uncertainty, and hence tends to relegate people, experience, emotions, social interaction, particularism, and hence wisdom to the sidelines. We can take these orthodoxies on from where we stand by simply doing what we do. Whatever we call it, what we do has the chance of providing a theoretical wedge in the door to allow people and their lives to come flowing into the worlds of academia. This will not happen if we proceed naively with a disdain of
theoretical approaches, because theory can be a way to make sense of things with more care
and more time and more reflection. Since when was that a bad thing. Some people have more
time than others to reflect, but we should listen to them in the hope they have something
helpful to say, and if they don't we should listen to them in the hope that we can find
something helpful in our understanding and analysis of what they say.
In cultural policy analysis (which I understand generally as an exercise in damage limitation)
I find a few things helpful.
First, I understand 'culture', a term I rarely if ever use, as 'what people do'.
Yes, it's too general to be useful. Funny how that happens.
Second, if I replace the word 'culture' with 'people' or 'what people do' or 'cultural'
with 'people' (adj.) or 'peopled' and there is little new or interesting being said, then
I ditch the term 'culture'. This also allows me to reassess the relevance and/or
generalisation-quotient of what I am reading (or writing). If the term is revealed
as unhelpfully general that isn't time to qualify the term with increasing and even
less helpful definitions, but time to ditch the term and speak in terms that actually
make sense of the particularities of what happens and what people experience, while
also acknowledging the role and effects of power. Speaking in terms of 'culture' and
'tradition' and 'music' and 'language' invites us to anthropomorphize the concepts,
and to totally ignore power and effects and meaning and experiences in social interaction,
to depersonalize our inquiry and, by implication, to disempower ourselves and the people
we work with. I personally have no wish to keep working with terms like that in analysis
(casual conversation is a different matter), because I really don't find such approaches
contribute anything to my understanding of hope in this world that I live in. And an
understanding of hope, that nothing is fixed (though much is experienced as stable),
that nothing is necessary, that nothing has to be the way it is, and that positive
transformation at the level of the social experience of the individual is always a
possibility, is about the most important thing that I work for.
Sorry for this being so long!
All the best
Anthony McCann
IMC-Ireland-editorial@lists.indymedia.org 22/04/02
Hello,
...
Having just been to Seattle to see the IMC there, I am concerned that the Indymedia sites
might get caught up in the assembly line of on-the-spot news. Such coverage is important
to counter misrepresentative reporting from elsewhere, and also to provide access to human
interest issues that are not normally deemed newsworthy among the dominant newspapers and
news outlets, particularly drawing attention to particular issues of misrepresentation.
However, it seems to me, as an ex-journalist, that news for news' sake it can often be very
problematic, to the detriment of more systematic analyses of situations and issues.
One of the reasons I became an academic was that many of the issues I encountered as a
journalist were not going to be decoded in the brief analysis-time I was offered as a
journalist. Being a fulltime academic has allowed me time to think and deepen my social
analyses.
News reporting is often primarily descriptive. Having just been to a conference in
Washington DC on cultural globalization and US Foreign Policy, I found that the term
globalization is primarily descriptive. Description is fine, but *how is it helpful*?
We would be better served if descriptive approaches were accompanied by longer term
explanatory projects. Why do we do what we do? How can we understand social life so
as to leave the door open for positive transformation at the level of the individual?
These are not easy questions, and each of us must face them for ourselves.
I think what I'm saying is that I find that great care needs to be taken. In my work I have
found that most people in oppositional movements tend to replicate the strategies of
misrepresentation that they oppose. This is just the way it works.
It is all too easy to oppose 'Globalization' for example. But what is it that you are
opposing? What exactly? And how are you yourself implicated in that opposition?
If you find yourself placing a general label for a group or practice in the space
for "I oppose ______" rather than specifically outlining the type of relationship
structures or power relations that you wish to see less of, then you can all too
easily take yourself and your own behaviour out of the equation. Take away the
labels you are using. What are you opposing now?
At the DC marches on Saturday I was in the middle of the march where they were
chanting, "We the people are united, we shall never be divided", and I turned
to a student and asked, "Who do you mean when you say "people"?" A little confusion in her
face.
"The Peace People" she answered.
"And where do you draw the line?"
"What?"
"How do you decide who are peace people and who aren't?"
No answer.
"And what do you mean by Peace?"
"Peace ... is ... not War" she said.
Personally, I really don't think this is good enough. This sort of general, abstract approach,
these sort of panaceaic labels do not help us very much to sort out what is actually
happening or how we might make things any better. Many speeches were more sophisticated
than that, but my guess is that quite a few of the people in the march didn't think beyond
directly oppositional approaches.
Descriptive news reporting gets us so far, but vigilance is required: If your cause feels
like an addiction, I find it probably is one, and most likely leads to misrepresentative
analysis. For me, ethical journalism is primarily people-centred not news- or event-centred.
What that looks like? Who knows? I think indymedia worldwide has the opportunity to really
explore *hope* and ways out of the fixity of thinking that so often infects both those we
oppose and ourselves as opposition.
A quote from the Washington Post today: "The indie chroniclers haven't invented any
new ways of telling stories yet. Most of their pieces adopt forms already much used by
the mainstream media, albeit with different content. But in the end, crafting content
requires selection, shortening, simplification and even a mildly authoritarian editorial
brain making decisions - all of which indie media makers resist." It's maybe worth
thinking about.
For me, it always goes back to the questions:
Take away the abstract labels and the justifications, and how can we understand what is happening in
terms of people-among-people?
Why do we (humans-among-humans) do what we do?
How can we understand social life in ways which leave the door open for
positive tranformation at the level of our individual experience?
What place do compassion, forgiveness, and humility have in all this?
...
All the best
Anthony McCann
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