Short-circuiting ODA aspects (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Personal/impersonal concrete/abstract)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:53:21 +0100
Hi Michel and all!
4 months (134 days) ago Michael Bouwens wrote:
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.
I'm sure that this doesn't even apply to animal social entities. For
instance I saw a documentation on a group of apes in India which
completely contradicts this view.
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.
I think this is the point where nearly all leftists short-circuit two
aspects of ODA leading to the inability to explain a lot of real
phenomenons. In the beginning you wrote that there are a few which
organize. I think you'd agree that organization as such is not a bad
thing. It helps to accomplish tasks and helps to build complex things.
I'd like to emphasize that *this* is absolutely emancipatory and
people even *need* to want this. That's why they accept organization
even if the organization is not completely determined by themselves. I
think this is also the reason why organization can develop at all. If
it would be only bad for people than it would never evolve.
In the later part then those few persons you think create the
organization then abuse their power. Organization suddenly equals
hidden agendas. However, using power to organize and abusing power for
hidden agendas are rather different things. I'm not saying abuse
doesn't exist - sure it does. But I think it even not the rule but
rather the exception. IMHO you can recognize hidden agendas by the use
of force in a ODA system.
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.?
And this is merely the anti-short-circuit: If individuals organizing
things can only be bad in an emancipatory sense than the collective is
necessary and every little piece of organization *must* be done by
each and every one. What a burden!!
Well, I think this type of short-circuiting analysis gets us nowhere.
It neglects important parts of the ODA phenomenon and thus makes it
impossible to analyze or even react to these things.
Once again I think the key aspect is the alienation thing. Hidden
agendas are probably the prototype of alienation. *This* is the point
where IMHO an analysis needs to hook in.
I think Free Software demonstrates this very well. For sure there are
countless ODA phenomenons and most projects are far from everyone
deciding on everything - because they don't want or because they are
not allowed to. Nonetheless people in Free Software projects accept
this ODA. And I think the very reason is: Because this ODA is not
alienated to the project.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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