Re: [ox-en] Re: Personal/impersonal concrete/abstract
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 02:51:22 -0800 (PST)
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Stefan,
That pretty much solves my conundrum, as indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that p2p is 'impersonal', as you work in cybercollectives, but it joins your analysis in that the joining is non-coerced, not profit oriented, but rather around common human goals.
I'm adding some of the endnotes to my manuscript, which go in the same direction, the authors are John Heron and Kris Roose:
Kris Roose, a Belgian psychiatrist and founder of the Academy of Integrative Psychology, influenced by the evolutionary viewpoint of the Teilhard de Chardin offers a related interpretation of cultural/moral evolution and the role of authority/hierarchy at various states. I must admit I have a general problem with views of that type, though I tend to agree with them most of the time. The issue is as follows: even if individually, consciousness may have been limited of the consequences of one?s action on others, the social organization itself might have a protocol which might in fact make the earlier civilisational models superior in terms of their awareness of their mutual interdependency.
"a. the major stages. Each group or society passes through three major stages: Chaos, Ethos and Eros, also called the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary stages.
1. Chaos: in this stage there is no order or organization. The "laws" of the most powerful and of the first apply, and there is, as in animal societies, no consideration for the effects upon others, and even not for the effects on the long run upon self. This stage is analogous to the over-adaptation (no-resistance) stage of the Integrative model, or Freud's oral stage, at least form the standpoint of the subjects which undergo the actions of the others. It is the selection funtioning level, because subjects have only the choice to accept the superiority of stronger or quicker subjects.
2. Ethos: in this stage, some "more clever" or "less scrupulous" people start organizing, at an ever increasing scale, the behaviour and lives of other people, imposing some things, forbidding other. The unstructured group dissociates into a minority of rulers, and a majority of subalterns, the multitude (to use a term from Negri). Ethos (fr. Greek) means: custom, law. I comprehend in this word all the factors that regulate the multitude: hierarchies, governmental systems, laws, and, not to forget, myths and taboos, that regulate the group's thinking about the imposed regulation, enhancing the moral pressure and avoiding a too quick discovery of hidden agendas. This stage can be interpreted as the compromise (or partial integration) level of the model, as it uses as well anal as phallic methods, as we will describe below. It is the compromise stage of conflict solving, because the actual situations are always the result of a struggle between the rulers and the multitude.
3. Eros: in the most evolved stage, regulation is no longer imposed by external forces, but spontaneously emerges from the consciousness, the motivation, the selfdiscipline and the very effective communication of group members. There are no more hierarchies, but a peer to peer organization. Myths and taboos are replaced by an open discussion of the real aspects of the system. This stage, of course, coincides with the integrative level of the Functioning Model, Freud's genital phase. A more extensive discussion of tertiary functioning is presented in another article.?
Kris Roose also has a useful subdivision of the secondary stage of human civilization:
?a. Physical Ethos: in this stage, the group or society is regulated by physical coercion: brutality, military force, justice with painful and capital punishment. The Myths sustain the use and the rightfulness of force, the right of taking someone's life, the Divine origin of force, etc. It is the age of Kings and Emperors.
b. Material Ethos: in this stage, brutal physical ruling progressively is replaced by "material" ruling: the force of money, material restrictions or rewards, wages. It is the age of capitalists, bankers and businessmen, largely surpassing the possibilities of Kings and Emperors. It started with the Templars and the Italian Bankers, and continues in nowadays multinational societies, progressively loosed from the control of the political ruler. Laws more and more include restrictions to regulate the power of the Big Business.
c. Moral Ethos: in this stage the imposed regulation more and more uses mental, "moral" tools to organize, limit and stimulate the behaviour of group members. The notion of Minimal Right becomes
important, the influence of press, media and pressure groups is essential. As democracy is installed, it becomes important for candidate rulers to preserve their immaterial name and fame, to be eligible and effectively elected."
(http://noosphere.cc/funclevel.html)
Kris Roose also defines tertiary culture, as contrasted with primary and secondary culture, in this following extract:
"Human culture could be defined as the general principles which govern human interaction, communication, organization, the values in decision making and the elaboration of one's own life project. It is the organizational paradigm. In the evolution of human culture, one can discern several phases, each governed by certain paradigms. Of course, it depends on the aspects one considers, but the way decisions are made seems to be a very central criterion, because it is linked to many other aspects, including the value one attributes to other persons, their needs and feelings.
In a primary culture there is practically no social organization. Each acts for oneself, taking only egotistic and short term consequences into account. The overall situation is chaotic, and many weaker individuals are the victims of the stronger and "fittest". The view of reality is rather superficial and simplistic. The own interpretations are projected as intentions of other people and things. Mythic and anthropomorphic explanations are devised to explain the greater mechanisms.
In a secondary culture, a kind of organization progressively is imposed, either by rulers expecting more profit from a kind of organization, or by victims, trying to reverse the abuse of force. Chaos gradually is replaced by a kind of order. Rulers and/or victims use their strengths, their strategic superiority. Several motives lead to this kind of organization, but probably the intention to make everyone happier is not one of these. Motives leading to transition generally are the insight of the powerful, that order finally better serves their egotistic goals than chaos: economic productivity is better, taxes yield more, stability is greater which leads to their own safety and feeling of grandiosity. The secondary evolution in itself is a succession of little steps and subphases, with a pendular movement between individuals or groups which are quicker in setting up rules that are beneficial for them, and the other, less lucky individuals and groups that eventually resist and,
by
their number or their productive indispensibility, impose some limits on exploitation and manipulation. It's the "eternal" law of action and reaction, kings and rebellious cities, laws and privileges, capitalism and socialism, left and right, oppressor and oppressed. It yields a gradual transition from despotism towards democracy, a socialization. But however important that organization might be, it always is imposed by external factors: moral, financial and juridical coercion, started in education and continued by social control. The view of reality is causal and scientific. Authority is progressively replaced by experimental evidence. The problem with experimental evidence is often that only one aspect, or short term effects, or measurable effects are taken into consideration. Decision making by individuals is gradually replaced by partcipation of larger groups and democracy, i.e. ruling by the majority. Rights protect individuals, minorities and vulnerable elements agains
t abuse
by the powerful. The right not to evolve as an individual is of paramount importance (the "right to be onself").
In a tertiary culture the organization comes from internal factors: consciousness, a motivation towards integration, communication and integration skills to elaborate the best ways of cooperation, and self-discipline to be able to perform one's part of the distributed tasks. The organization is driven by internal factors: consciousness, open communication, responsibility of individuals for the whole. The view of reality is integrative and evolutionary: everything evolves, everything is important, every suggestion is valuable, and conflicts ought to be resolved by constructive and creative solutions leading to a satisfaction of all concerned parties. Self-realization is a universal requirement without which integration most often is impossible. To be oneself means: to develop oneself.
Those three styles of social organization succeed each other: roughly speaking there is a slow evolution from primary to secondary and, eventually, to tertiary sociaization structures. However, this continuous trend should not be expected to be simplistic or linear. Although the general trend is from primary via secondary towards tertiary structures, in practice this evolution moves onwards along rather compliclated ways, the progressions being alternated with temporary regressions.?
(http://noosphere.cc/tertiary.html)
- Relational identity
"In traditional atomistic/mechanistic ontologies, things are construed as having an independent existence apart from their relationships. Things have properties, and some of those properties may be relational. By contrast, the newer relational ontologies that pervade many disciplines from physics to biology, view relationships as part of what a thing is. In this light, a thing not only enters into relationships, but is in fact constituted by them. Relationships are fundamental to a thing's identity, or self."
(http://www.panarchy.com/Members/PaulBHartzog/Writings/Principles)
[1]
- Kenneth Gergen: a view of the relational self and bottom-up social processes
The following view stresses relationships as constitutive of social reality. On a superficial reading, this definition seems not to include the distinct existence of a social field, nor any object-centeredness, but the last paragraph shows a P2P-like understanding of social processes.
Traditional theory of the civil society is built upon an ontology of bounded units or entities - specifically "the individual," "the community," "the state," and so on. Such a theory not only creates a world of fundamental separation, but invites the use of traditional cause and effect models to comprehend relations. One is either an actor, directing the course of events, or is reduced to an effect. How can we comprehend the social world in such a way that it is not composed of entities, but constituted by processes of relationship? This is no easy task for we at once confront the implications of Wittgenstein's pronouncement that "The limits of our language are the limits of our world." Our common language of description and explanation virtually commits us to understanding the world in terms of units (nouns) that act upon each other (transitive verbs). Even the concept of relationship, as commonly understood, is based on the assumption of independent units. If and when such
units
act upon each other we speak of them being related. Thus, for example, we say, "A relationship developed between them," or "They no longer have a relationship." If we turn to relevant social theory, we find that perhaps the most significant candidate for relational understanding, namely systems analysis, is lodged in the view of systems as a collective array of entities linked through processes of cause and effect. Thus, systems diagrams, flow-charts, feedback loops and the like? There is much to be gained by commencing our analysis with a focus on relational processes from which ontologies and ethics emerge, and from which certain actions become favored while others are forbidden. Such processes of creating and carrying out meaning/full worlds are at all times and everywhere under way. In this sense, civil movements are always in the making. As any two or more persons negotiate about the nature of their lives, what is worth doing or not, they are establishing rudimentary g
rounds
for civil life in their terms"
(source: Kenneth Gergen website)
[1]
- Object-oriented sociality
"[There is a] profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term 'social network' by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as 'a map of the relationships between individuals.' Basically I'm defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality' following the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. I'll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don't.
Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.
In my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.
For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centered sociality, see the chapter on 'Objectual Practice' by Karin Knorr Cetina in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Theodor R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001: Routledge.)
(http://zengestrom.com/blog/ )
[1]
- Cooperative Individualism and the 'P2P Self', a debate between John Heron and Ted Lumley:
Lumley quote 1: "We are each unique, and each have a unique and authentic role to play because we are each uniquely situated within and included in, a common hostspace dynamic. When we move, the shape of the hostspace dynamic we are included in transforms... Our individual movement = transformation of the
common hostspace dynamic."
Lumley quote 2: "Rather than having an absolute center of self, our center of self is defined by where our inside-outward asserting meets the outside-inward accommodating of the dynamical hostspace....Our assertive movement is relative to the (simultaneous mutually influencing) assertings of our fellows, together constituting a community hostspace dynamic from which our individual actions push off (rather than pushing off from the 'absolute center of our self')."
JH comment: Lumley has two definitions of the self. Quite rightly, because I think both are necessary and interdependent. In quote 1, the self is defined in term of its unique situation within a hostspace, prior to any assertive movement within it. In quote 2, the self is defined in terms of this assertive movement. In my worldview, the first definition relates to the autonomy of the self in terms of its idiosyncratic appraisal of and response to its unique situation within a hostspace; and the second definition relates to the co-operative mutuality of the self in terms of its interactions with the others in a hostspace. The autonomous and the co-operative accounts are correlative and interdependent.
Lumley quote 3: "A 'peer' is usually thought of as an abstract entity that is capable of behaviour in-its-own-right, and particularly of peer-to-peer collaboration, ...none of which alludes to the common hostspace dynamic as the prime influence in the evolution of the peer-to-peer dynamics."
Not by me and others, e.g. Spretnak. Here's a quote from my book Sacred Science, pp 10-11
"The distinctness of a person is to do with him or her being one unique focus, among many, of the whole web of interbeing relations. Personal autonomy is grounded in this unique presence, participating resonantly in an unitive field of interconnected beings, within the presence of Being, and in the individual perspective necessarily involved in imaging a world. It is manifest as the individual judgement inalienably required for a person to appraise what is valid and valuable; and as individual responsibility in choosing to act. This is not the personal autonomy of the Cartesian ego, an isolated, self-reflexive consciousness independent of any context - what Charlene Spretnak calls the Lone Cowboy sense of autonomy. It is, rather,
The ecological/cosmological sense of uniqueness coupled with intersubjectivity and interbeing?One can accurately speak of the ?autonomy? of an individual only by incorporating a sense of the dynamic web of relationships that are constitutive for that being at a given moment. (Spretnak, 1995: 5)
(Pluralities/Integration newsletter, issue 65, archived at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p )
Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org> wrote:
Hi,
due to being invited so kindly... Unfortunately I did follow the
thread in the past, I just jump in it with this invitation.
On Tuesday 08 November 2005 08:34, Stefan Merten wrote:
The discussion below refers to a analytical problem I am troubled
with. In analysing peer to peer production processes, it does
seem to me that the cooperation is impersonal and loose, rather
than personal as in premodern times. Is there any potential for a
'dialectical synthesis' of both aspects, or is P2P indeed only
impersonal, but than without alienation, as you say below? Has
anyone worked on this, and also, can someone refer me to the work
of St. Mz where he outlines the differences between personal
concrete, personal abstract.
My starting point is the historical development of forces of
production. This term "development of forces of production" describes
very generally, how humans produce their lives. It grasps the
triangle relationship between humans, means, and nature. Each of
these aspects are determining an epoch: first, the "natural" epoch,
where humans predominantly produce their lives via developing the
ways of cultivating the ground; second, the "industrial" epoch, where
humans predominantly produce their lives via developing the means (as
tools, machinary, industry, science); third, the "human" epoch, where
humans develop themselfs as an end in itself. What we currently
observe (my hypothesis), is the transition between second and third
epoch.
The historically different types of producing the humans lives evolve
in a corresponding societal form. The societal forms are the ways, how
humans build relationsships between each other when producing their
lives (when they just *live*). The corresponding forms of the three
epochs above are: "natural epoch" with personal-concrete domination
(different types of personal domination: slavery, feudal domination
etc.); "industrial epoch" with abstract-alienated domination (abstract
domination by the impersonal mechanism of making more money from
money); "human epoch" - personal-concrete non-dominion form of
society.
So the difference is not personal-concrete vs. personal-abstract (I
don't know, what this could be), but personal or abstract types of
domination - and the free society without domination including a type
of societal organisation, which bases on personal relationships. This
does not necessarily mean, that "you know each other" (which is
impossible), but the cooperation is driven by humans and their goals
instead of an abstract impersonal mechanism (what we have in
capitalism).
So do we have in fs/peer production the scheme
from personal concrete (premodern) via impersonal abstract
(capitalism, modernity) to personal abstract
... to personal concrete non-dominion, I would say.
or should the third term be: impersonal abstract but without
alienation or
Doesn't impersonal abstract always imply alienation?
impersonal concrete ??
Ehm, this does not make any sense to me:-)
If anyone feels inspired to detail this again, I would appreciate
it, I intend to talk about it in a new section of my manuscript,
Feel free.
StefanMz is on this list and I'd wish he replies to this. I think
it is an absolutely interesting issue to understand.
Yes. So, sorry for my rough answer to this important topic.
Ciao,
Stefan
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