New Materialism.

Nicolas Jaar, Grizzly Bear - Sleeping Ute Remix, 2013.

Timur Si-Qin : One fascinating thing in your writing is how you debunk the existence of “Capitalism” as a generalized whole, in favor of much more heterogenous, emergent processes at play in the global economy. This seems like a refreshing non-conspiratorial position to take. Is this one of the ways your new materialism stands in contrast to marxist materialism ? Could you talk about this and some other important differences ? 

Manuel de Landa : The author that inspired me in this respect is Fernand Braudel, the main economic historian of our time. His history of European economies from 1400 to the Industrial Revolution is the most comprehensive that has ever been written : he and his disciples actually checked Florentine bank books from the 15th century ; the books from factories in Milan in the 16th century ; the history of the Venetian arsenal, the most important military-industrial complex in the early part of the past millennium. And after gathering all this data, his conclusion was that as far back as the 13th century there have always been at least two economic spheres : wholesale was never like retail (until the 20th century) ; industrial production using economies of scale was never like that based on the agglomeration of talent in a region or city and based on small firms ; and high finance has always been an entirely different world from that of small money lenders. At the end of the third volume of this work, Braudel concludes that there never was a single overall system. To fix this misconception he changes the definition of the term “capitalism” to signify Big Business, with its capacity to manipulate demand and supply, and keeps the term “market economy” for populations of small firms that are in fact governed by anonymous economic forces. Today, in the middle of an economic crisis created by firms that were too big to fail, a crisis in which profits were privatized while losses socialized, Braudel’s words sound deeply prophetic. 

As far as a contrast with Marxist materialism, the answer is two-fold. Against historical materialism we need a new vision of history without teleology, one which avoids a periodization into internally homogenous eras : feudalism, capitalism, socialism (or the Age of Agriculture, the Age of Industry, the Age of Information). There were never such Ages or Eras. Braudel, for example, shows how in the 14th century the areas of Europe that would become France and Spain did have manors ran by feudal lords, but the city-states in northern Italy and northern Germany (the Hanseatic league), as well as Flemish and Dutch towns, were already modern in many respects. Thus, we need to rethink our philosophy of history in the face of historical evidence. On the other hand, dialectical materialism is objectionable for different reasons. Any materialism needs a theory of synthesis to be able to account for the historical identity of mind-independent entities. But Marx took his theory from Hegel, synthesis through the negation of the negation, and this is an a priori scheme, the inadequacies of which were made obvious by Engel’s attempt to apply it to nature. What we need are a variety of a posteriori schemes of synthesis (from physics, chemistry, biology and other fields) to account for all the different morphogenetic or synthetic processes that shape the non-human world, as well as the world of economics, starting with an account of the emergence of prices (when not manipulated via economic power) as a collective unintended consequence of intentional action. 

TSQ : Do you have any thoughts on what a neo-materialist social and/or economic politics would look like ? For example how could issues like privatization versus socialization be approached ? 

MdL : Once we break with the idea of the capitalist system, a system that you must replace as a whole via a Revolution, many options open up. I mentioned before the distinction between industrial production based on economies of scale and that based on economies of agglomeration. The former is typically based on routinized labor (Taylorism) ; the leaders are managers of a joint-stock company (in which ownership and control are separated) ; its actors have pricing power (managers add an arbitrary mark-up to their costs) ; and it typically forms oligopolies, dominated by a few giant firms. The latter uses skilled labor (it depends on the agglomeration of talented people in a region) ; it is led by entrepreneurs (owners with a vision that risk their own savings) ; its actors do not have pricing power ; and it forms large populations of firms in which, unlike oligopolistic rivalry, there is real anonymous competition. Now, this is a rough distinction that needs to be nuanced in many ways but it will serve to make my point. While economies of scale are private, the system resembles that of a government run set of companies. As John Kenneth Galbraith, a great but neglected economist, pointed out half a century ago, oligopolies constitute a planning system, hardly distinguishable from communist central planning. And the fact that large firms are run by hired guns (managers can own stock options but they do not have to) also resembles government run firms in other countries. So, as it turns out, the distinction between the private and the public is a lot trickier than it seems. 

Politically, this matters because if you are, say, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you need to make a distinction between fair competition among small firms ran by entrepreneurs and the rigged system of large corporations in which the impersonal forces of demand and supply are manipulated, and hence, do not allow prices to set themselves. You need to make this distinction because you do no want to come across as denouncing the “system” as a whole. In a study by Annalee Saxenian comparing Silicon Valley (dominated by economies of agglomeration) and Route 128 near Boston (once dominated by economies of scale) she shows that during bad economic times, economies of agglomeration are more robust and “weedy,” while economies of scale are brittle, and hence, must rely on government bail-outs when external shocks bring them down. Hence, there are choices to be made that are not the old choice between “privatization” and “nationalization,” a distinction based on marxism, and one still carrying the stigma that Marx, borrowing from Proudhon, phrased with the ridiculous slogan “Private property is theft.” There are many leftists out there who still believe in that silly slogan.

(...)

TSQ : I think this is another example of locating and dismantling essentialist and transcendent notions in philosophy. Another example is in your writings on species archetypes vs. populations as well replacing the idea of “survival of the fittest” with a topological understanding of ecological optima. Can you talk about the importance of ridding philosophy of transcendental, archetypical and essentialist thinking ?

MdL : In contemporary biology the human species, or any other species, is not considered a higher taxonomic category (as in Aristotle) but an individual entity. Not, of course, an individual organism but similar to it in that a species also has a date of birth (the event of speciation) and a potential date of death (the event of extinction). Hence, just like organisms are unique and singular (not even a clone is an exact replica, since it has a different embryological and ontogenetic history) so are species : once driven to extinction they never come back.

In my book A New Philosophy of Society I tried to create a social ontology that is like this : individual persons, individual communities, individual organizations, individual cities, individual countries. That is, an ontology populated exclusively by unique and singular historical entities. Each individual entity is made out entities of lower scales : thus, communities and organizations are made out of persons, cities are made out of communities, organizations, and persons, and so on. This way, the properties (and tendencies and capacities) that characterize each entity can be explained as the emergent product of the interactions between its components. Emergent properties, in turn, exorcize transcendence: when properties are not explained as a historical result of actual and sustained interactions they become transcendent. When they are emergent, on the contrary, they block reductionism (in that the properties belong to the whole not its parts) but they do depend on there being some interactions between parts, that is, they are immanent to these interactions. 

On the other hand, each of these individual entities always exist as part of a population : a population of people, a multiplicity of communities, a plurality of organizations, and so on. This means that we must tackle these entities statistically, that is, that we must find out how variation is distributed in a population. This is another way of breaking with essentialism : for Aristotle the variation observed in a population of animals of a given species was a smoke screen, a sort of noise that did not allow one to see the eternal archetype of which these animals were but imperfect copies. But when you think statistically, the variation is the key (in biology, no variation = no evolution) as is its distribution. Thus, when you consider the distribution of secondary sexual characteristics in a population of men and women, you do not see two mutually exclusive categories instantiating the essences of masculinity and femininity, but two overlapping statistical distributions with many ambiguous cases in the area of overlap.

Timur Si-Qin & Manuel de Landa, Manuel de Landa in Conversation with Timur Si-Qin, SOCIETE, 2012, p.1-2 & 4-13.

Froide Passion.

 Gang of Four, At Home He's a Tourist, 1979.

Tout ce qui s’est fait de valable depuis deux siècles, dans tous les domaines, s’est fait contre le sentiment romantique de la vie, c’est-à-dire aussi en en tenant compte. Les Poésies de Lautréamont, les Lettres de non-amour de Chklovski, les Dialogues de Deleuze-Parnet, l’album Entertainment de Gang of Four dessinent un front que peuplent la froide passion de Durruti, les meilleures intuitions de Lénine et du féminisme italien, les discours de Huey P. Newton, la guérilla urbaine et l’air qui souffle dans la villa Savoye. Tout cela relève de ce que nous appellerons, par opposition, le sentiment blanquiste de la vie. L’Éternité par les astres et Instructions pour une prise d’armes en sont dans ce volume les plus pures expressions. Partir de ce qui est là, et non de ce qui manque, de ce qui ferait, dit-on, défaut au réel. Mépriser les obstacles comme les personnes. N’attendre jamais, opérer avec ceux qui sont là. S’appréhender soi-même, appréhender les êtres et les situations non comme des entités, mais comme parcourus de lignes et de plans, traversés de fatalités. Saisir le possible non comme un halo qui nimberait les êtres, mais comme le produit d’une collision entre ces fatalités. Pas d’arrière-monde, de rêveries, de récriminations, d’explications. "On ne se console que trop". Renoncer à l’idée de chaos, simple transcription mentale du renoncement – "il n’a jamais existé, il n’existera jamais l’ombre d’un chaos nulle part". Une fois recensé ce qui est là, s’organiser. Ne reculer devant aucune conséquence logique. Ceux qui parlent de révolution sans se soucier de la question des armes et du ravitaillement ont déjà des cadavres sur les bras. Laisser aux métaphysiciens les questions d’origine et de finalité, l’ici et maintenant pour tout commencement, et ce que nous pouvons pratiquement y faire pour seul but sérieux. Si l’état de choses est intenable, ce n’est pas parce que ceci..., parce que cela..., mais parce que j’y suis impuissant. Ne jamais opposer les nécessités de la pensée et celles de l’action. Rester ferme dans ces moments de reflux où il faut tout reprendre, seul, depuis le début : on n’est jamais seul avec la vérité. Une telle façon d’être ne trouvera aucune excuse aux yeux de ceux dont la vie n’est qu’une savante collection de justifications. Face à elle, le ressentiment s’arme d’invectives, dénonce la "prise de pouvoir", la "mégalomanie", dresse ses cordons sanitaires de mauvaise foi, de bêtise et de contentement ; il prononce la mise au ban du monstre qui semble en passe de s’extraire du troupeau humain.

Comité Invisible, Préface in Maintenant il Faut des Armes, Éditions La Fabrique, 2007, p.16-17.

La Fuite.

Henri Laborit, Rencontres (1), 1976.

Henri Laborit, Rencontres (2), 1976.

Il faudra éviter l'affrontement, car de ce dernier surgira forcément une échelle hiérarchique de dominance et il est peu probable qu'elle puisse satisfaire, car elle aliène le désir à celui des autres. Mais, à l'inverse, se soumettre c'est accepter, avec la soumission, la pathologie psychosomatique qui découle forcément de l'impossibilité d'agir suivant ses pulsions. Se révolter, c'est courir à sa perte, car la révolte si elle se réalise en groupe, retrouve aussitôt une échelle hiérarchique de soumission à l'intérieur du groupe, et la révolte, seule, aboutit rapidement à la suppression du révolté par la généralité anormale qui se croit détentrice de la normalité. Il ne reste plus que la fuite.

Il y a plusieurs façons de fuir. Certains utilisent les drogues dites "psychotogènes". D'autres la psychose. D'autres le suicide. D'autre la navigation en solitaire. Il y a peut-être une autre façon encore : fuir dans un monde qui n'est pas de ce monde, le monde de l'imaginaire. Dans ce monde on risque peu d'être poursuivi. On peut s'y tailler un vaste territoire gratifiant, que certains diront narcissique. Peu importe, car dans le monde où règne le principe de réalité, la soumission et la révolte, la dominance et le conservatisme auront perdu pour le fuyard leur caractère anxiogène et ne seront plus considérés que comme un jeu auquel on peut, sans crainte, participer de façon à se faire accepter par les autres comme "normal". Dans ce monde de la réalité, il est possible de jouer jusqu'au bord de la rupture avec le groupe dominant, et de fuir en établissant des relations avec d'autres groupes si nécessaire, et en gardant intacte sa gratification imaginaire, la seule qui soit essentielle et hors d'atteinte des groupes sociaux.

Ce comportement de fuite sera le seul à permettre de demeurer normal par rapport à soi-même, aussi longtemps que la majorité des hommes qui se considèrent normaux tenteront sans succès de le devenir en cherchant à établir leur dominance, individuelle, de groupe, de classe, de nation, de blocs de nations, etc. L'expérimentation montre en effet que la mise en alerte de l'hypophyse et de la corticosurrénale, qui aboutit si elle dure à la pathologie viscérale des maladies dites "psychosomatiques", est le fait des dominés, ou de ceux qui cherchent sans succès à établir leur dominance, ou encore des dominants dont la dominance est contestée et qui tentent de la maintenir. Tous ceux-là seraient alors des anormaux, car il semble peu normal de souffrir d'un ulcère de l'estomac, d'une impuissance sexuelle, d'une hypertension artérielle ou d'un de ces syndromes dépressifs si fréquents aujourd'hui. Or, comme la dominance stable et incontestée est rare, heureusement, vous voyez que pour demeurer normal il ne vous reste plus qu'à fuir loin des compétitions hiérarchiques. Attendez-moi, j'arrive.

Henri Laborit, Éloge de la Fuite, Édition Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1976, p.16-17

Les Confessions.

Professor Bourbaki, Champsaur, 2012.

Fantastic Nobody, About John, 2013. 

Questions originales // Version de Proust // Confessions // Marcel Proust par lui-même

Your favourite virtue. // Ma vertu préférée. // Toutes celles qui ne sont pas particulières à une secte, les universelles. // Le besoin d'être aimé et, pour préciser, le besoin d'être caressé et gâté bien plus que le besoin d'être admiré.

Your favourite qualities in a man. //  La qualité que je préfère chez un homme. // L'intelligence, le sens moral. // Des charmes féminins.

Your favourite qualities in a woman. // La qualité que je préfère chez une femme. // La douceur, le naturel, l'intelligence. // Des vertus de d'homme et la franchise dans la camaraderie

Your chief characteristic. // x // x // x

What you appreciate the most in your friends. // Ce que j'apprécie le plus chez mes amis. // x // D'être tendre pour moi, si leur personne est assez exquise pour donner un grand prix à leur tendresse

Your main fault. // Mon principal défaut. // x // Ne pas savoir, ne pas pouvoir « vouloir ».

Your favourite occupation. // Mon occupation préférée. //  La lecture, la rêverie, les vers, l'histoire, le théâtre. // Aimer.

Your idea of happiness. //  Mon rêve de bonheur. // Vivre près de tous ceux que j'aime avec les charmes de la nature, une quantité de livres et de partitions, et pas loin un théâtre français. // J'ai peur qu'il ne soit pas assez élevé, je n'ose pas le dire, j'ai peur de le détruire en le disant.

Your idea of misery. // Quel serait mon plus grand malheur ? // Etre séparé de maman. // Ne pas avoir connu ma mère ni ma grand-mère.

If not yourself, who would you be ? // Ce que je voudrais être. // N'ayant pas à me poser la question, je préfère ne pas la résoudre. J'aurais cependant bien aimé être Pline le jeune. // Moi, comme les gens que j'admire me voudraient.

Where would you like to live? // Le pays où je désirerais vivre. // Au pays de l'idéal, ou plutôt de mon idéal. // Celui où certaines choses que je voudrais se réaliseraient comme par un enchantement et où les tendresses seraient toujours partagées.

x // La fleur que j'aime. // Je les aime toutes, et pour les fleurs, je ne sais pas. // La sienne- et après, toutes.

Your favorite bird. // L'oiseau que je préfère. // L'hirondelle.

Your favourite prose authors. // Mes auteurs favoris en prose. // George Sand, Aug. Thierry. // Aujourd'hui Anatole France et Pierre Loti.

Your favourite poets. //  Mes poètes préférés. // Musset. // Baudelaire et Alfred de Vigny.

Your favourite heroes in fiction. // Mes héros dans la fiction. // Les héros romanesques poétiques, ceux qui sont un idéal plutôt qu'un modèle. //  Hamlet.

Your favourite heroines in fiction. // Mes héroïnes favorites dans la fiction. // Celles qui sont plus que des femmes sans sortir de leur sexe, tout ce qui est tendre poétique, pur, beau dans tous les genres. // Bérénice.

Your favourite painters and composers. // Mes compositeurs préférés. // Meissonnier, Mozart, Gounod. //  Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.

x // Mes peintres favoris. // Léonard de Vinci, Rembrandt.

Your favourite heroes in real life. // Mes héros dans la vie réelle. // Un milieu entre Socrate, Périclès, Mahomet, Musset, Pline le Jeune, Aug. Thierry. //  M. Darlu, M. Boutroux.

Your favourite heroines in real life. // x // Une femme de génie ayant l'existence d'une femme ordinaire. // x

Your pet aversion. // x // Les gens qui ne sentent pas ce qui est bien, qui ignorent les douceurs de l'affection. // x

Your heroines in World history. // Mes héroïnes dans l'histoire. // x // Cléopâtre.

Your favourite food and drink. // x // x // x

Your favourite names. // Mes noms favoris. // x // Je n'en ai qu'un à la fois.

World history characters I hate the most. // Personnages historiques que je méprise le plus. // x // Je ne suis pas assez instruit.

The military event I admire the most. // Le fait militaire que j'admire le plus. // x // Mon volontariat !

The reform I admire the most. // La réforme que j'estime le plus. // x // x

The natural talent I'd like to be gifted with. // Le don de la nature que je voudrais avoir. // x //  La volonté, et des séductions.

How I wish to die. // Comment j'aimerais mourir. // x // Meilleur - et aimé.

What is your present state of mind. // État d'esprit actuel. // x //  L'ennui d'avoir pensé à moi pour répondre à toutes ces questions.

For what fault have you most toleration ? // Fautes qui m'inspirent le plus d'indulgence. // Pour la vie privée des génies. // Celles que je comprends.

Your favourite motto. // Ma devise. // Une qui ne peut pas se résumer parce que sa plus simple expression est ce qu'[il y] a de beau, de bon, de grand dans la nature. // J'aurais trop peur qu'elle ne me porte malheur.

Voir surtout ici et là.

Marcel Proust, Confessions & Marcel Proust par lui même, 1924 (1) & 1889-1890 (2).

Merci à A.H.

Notes.

1. Cet album fut retrouvé par André Berge, un des fils d'Antoinette Faure, qui publia pour la première fois en 1924 les pages remplies par Marcel Proust. André Berge rapporte que certaines pages comportent des dates qui s'échelonnent entre 1884 et 1887. CS. (voir : André Berge, "Autour d'une trouvaille", Cahiers du Mois, n. 7, 1er décembre 1924, p. 5-18).

2. Le titre est de la main de Marcel Proust. Proust a dû répondre à ce questionnaire à l'époque de son volontariat, ou quelque temps après. (Volontariat effectué du 15 novembre 1889 au 14 novembre 1890). CS.

Questions Dogmatiques E01.

Jean Morin, Memento Mori, Détail de Gravure, d'après le Tableau de Philippe de Champaigne, 1650.

La vanité est ancrée dans le cœur de l'homme qu'un soldat, un goujat, un cuisinier, un crocheteur se vante et veut avoir ses admirateurs et les philosophes mêmes en veulent, et ceux qui écrivent contre veulent avoir la gloire d'avoir bien écrit, et ceux qui les lisent veulent avoir la gloire de les avoir lus, et moi qui écris ceci ai peut-être cette envie, et peut-être que ceux qui le liront...

Pascal, Pensées

Le Jansénisme en France au XVIIe siècle

Aux origines du Jansénisme

Au début du XVIIe siècle, l'Église française se préoccupe davantage de réformes et de renouveau spirituel que de questions dogmatiques. Toutefois, la controverse avec les protestants a ouvert un courant en Sorbonne - alors faculté de théologie - attachée à  l'étude des écrits des pères de l'Église, particulièrement à saint Augustin, pour les questions liées à la Grâce. La publication de l'Augustinus de Cornelius Jansen (1640), son succès en France au moment de la mort de Richelieu (décembre 1642) ouvre une ère de polémique dans les rangs des théologiens française, avec, notamment, la publication, en août 1643, de la Fréquente communion d'Antoine Arnauld, docteur en Sorbonne et frère de la mère Angélique.

Condamnation romaine et polémique en France

À la demande de la Sorbonne, le pape condamne, en 1653, cinq propositions jugées extraites de l'Augustinus. Loin de clore la controverse, la bulle Cum occasione attise une polémique violente, menée par Antoine Arnauld. En 1655, dans sa Lettre à une personne de condition et sa Seconde lettre à un duc et pair, Arnauld accepte la condamnation des Cinq propositions, mais garde sur leur attribution à Jansenius un silence respectueux. Obligée de prendre parti, la Sorbonne choisit d'exclure, en 1655, Antoine Arnauld et avec lui, une centaine de docteurs - le tiers de ses membres. Les débats orageux dans les Provinciales (1656-1657) se font l'écho, font connaître à un plus large public le contenu du "Jansénisme", cette hérésie condamnée par Rome.

Formulaire et "Paix de l'Église"

La première année de son règne personnel en 1661, Louis XIV obtient de l'assemblée du Clergé de France, un formulaire destiné aux séculiers, consignant l'adhésion de cœur et d'esprit à la condamnation pontificale de Cinq propositions. L'édit royal du 29 avril 1664 impose une signature sans restriction du formulaire.

Sous l'impulsion du pape Clément IV, Rome obtient l'apaisement en France en 1668 pour une dizaine d'années. Dès la paix de Nimègue signée en 1679, le roi de France reprend l'offensive contre les protestants en révoquant l'édit de Nantes en 1685, puis contre les jansénistes qui s'exilent massivement.

Auteur non attribué, Musée National de Port-Royal des Champs, s.d.

Symbolic Analysts.

Deutsche Telekom, Overview of Current Cyber Attacks, 2013 (via The New Aesthetic)

Essentially, three broad categories of work are emerging, corresponding to the three different competitive positions in which Americans find themselves. The same three categories are taking shape in other nations. Call them routine production services, in-person services, and symbolic-analytical services. 

(...)

Routine production services entail the kinds of repetitive task performed by the old foot soldiers of American capitalism in the high-volume enterprise. They are done over and over - one step in a sequence of steps for producing finished products tradeable in world commerce. Although often thought of as traditional blue-collar jobs, they also include routine supervisory jobs performed by low- and mid-level managers - foremen, line managers, clerical supervisors, and section chiefs - involving repetitive checks on subordinates' work and the enforcement of standard operating procedures.

Routine production services are found in many places within a modern economy apart from older, heavy industries (which, like elderly citizens, have been given the more delicate, and less terminal, appelation: 'mature'). They are found even amid the glitter and glitz of high technology. Few tasks are more tedious and repetitive, for example, than stuffing computer circuit boards or devising routine coding for computer software programs.

Indeed, contrary to prophets of the 'information age' who buoyantly predicted an abundance of high-paying jobs even for people with the most basic of skills, the sobering truth is that many information-processing jobs fit easily into this category. The foot soldiers of the information economy are hordes of data processors stationed in 'back offices' at computer terminals linked to worlwide information banks. They routinely enter data into computers or take it out again - records of credit card purchases and payments, credit reports, checks that have cleared, customer accounts, customer correspondence, payroll, hospital billings, patient records, medical claims, court decisions, subscriber lists, personnel, library catalogues, and so forth. The 'information revolution' may have rendered some of us more productive, but it has also produced hige piles of raw data which must be processed in much the same monotonous way that assembly-line workers and, before them, textile workers processed piles of other raw materials.

Routine producers typically work in the company of many other people who do the same thing, usually within large enclosed spaces. They are guided on the job by standard procedures and codified rules, and even their overseers are overseen, in turn, by people who routinely monitor - often with the aid of computers - how much they do and how accurately they do it. Their wages are based either on the amount of time they put in or on the amount of work they do.

Routine producers usually must be able to read and to perform simple computations. But their cardinal virtues are reliability, loyalty, and the capacity to take directions. Thus does a standard American education, based on the traditional premises of American education, normally suffice.

(...)

In-person services, the second kind of work that Americans do, also entail simple and repetitive tasks. And like routine production services, the pay of in-person servers is a function of hours worked or amount of work performed; they are closely supervised (as are their supervisors), and they need not have acquired much education (at most, a high school diploma, or its equivalent, and some vocational training).

The big difference between in-person servers and routine producers is that these services must by provided person-to-person and thus are not sold worldwide. (...) In-person servers are in direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work; their immediate objects are specific customers rather than streams of metal, fabric, or data. In-person servers work alone or in small teams. Included in this category are retail sales workers, waiters and waitresses, hotel workers, janitors, cashiers, hospital attendants and orderlies, nursing-home aides, child-care workers, house cleaners, home health-care aides, taxi drivers, secretaries, hairdressers, auto mechanics, sellers of residential real estate, flight attendants, physical therapists, and - among the fastest-growing of all - security guards.

In-person servers are supposed to be as punctual, reliable, and tractable as routine production workers. But many in-person servers share one additional requirement : They must also have a pleasant demeanor. They must smile and exude confidence and good cheer, even when they feel morose. They must be courteous and helpful, even to the most obnoxious of patrons. Above all, they must make others feel happy and at ease. It should come as no surprise that, traditionnaly, most in-person servers have been women. The cultural stereotype of women as nurturers - as mommies - has opened countless in-person service jobs to them.

By 1990, in-person services accounted for about 30 percent of the jobs performed by Americans, and their numbers were growing rapidly (...) In the United-States during the 1980s, well over 3 million new in-person service jobs were created in fast-food outlets, bars, and restaurants. This was more than the total number of routine production jobs still existing in America by the end of the decade in the automobile, steelmaking, and textile industries combined.

Symbolic-analytic services, the third job category, include all the problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic-brokering activities we have examined in previous chapters. Like routine production services (but unlike in-person services), symbolic-analytical services can be traded worldwide and thus must compete with foreign providers even in the American market. But they do not enter world commerce as standardized things. Traded instead are the manipulations of symbols - data, words, oral and visual representations.

Included in this category are the problem-solving, -identifying and brokering of many people who call themselves research scientists, design engineers, software engineers, civil engineers, biotechnology engineers, sound engineers, public relations executives, investment bankers, lawyers, real estate developers, and even a few creative accountants. Also included is much of the work done by management consultants, armaments consultants, architectural consultants, management information specialists, organization development specialists, strategic planners, corporate headhunters, and systems analysts. Also: advertising executives and marketing strategists, art directors, architects, cinematographers, film editors, production designers, publishers, writers and editors, journalists, musicians, television and film producers, and even university professors.

Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. Theysimplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. These manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or to amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles.

Some of these manipulations reveal how to more efficiently deploy resources or shift assets, or otherwise save time and energy. Other manipulations yield new inventions - technological marvels, innovative legal arguments, new advertising ploys for convincing people that certain amusements have become life necessities. Still other manipulations - of sounds, words, pictures - serve to entertain their recipients, or cause them to reflect more deeply on their lives or on the human condition. Others grab money from people too slow or naïve to protect themselves by manipulating in response.

Like routine producers, symbolic analysts rarely come into direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work. But other aspects of their work life are quite different from that experienced by routine producers. Symbolic analysts often have partners or associates rather than bosses or supervisors. Their incomes may vary from time to time, but are not directly related to how much time they put in or the quantity of work they put out. Income depends, rather, on the quality, originality, cleverness, and occasionally, speed with which they solve, identify, or broker new problems. Their careers are not linear or hierarchical; they rarely proceed along well-defined paths to progressively higher levels of responsiblity and income. In fact, symbolic analysts may take on vast responsibilities and command inordinate wealth at rather young ages. Correspondingly, they may lose authority and income if they are no longer able to innovate by building on their cumulative expericen, even if they are quite senior.

Symbolic analysts often work alone or in small teams, which may be connected to larger organizations, including worldwide webs. Teamwork is often critical. Since neither problems nor solutions can be defined in advance, frequent and informal conversations help ensure that insights and discoveries are put to their best uses and subjected to quick, critical evaluation.

When not conversing with their their teammates, symbolic analysts sit before computer terminals - examining words and numbers, moving them, altering them, trying out new words and numbers, formulating and testing hypotheses, designing and strategizing. They also spend long hours in meetings or on the telephone, and even longer hours in jet planes and hotels - advising, making presentations, giving briefings, doing deals. Periodically, they issue reports, plans, designs, drafts, memoranda, layouts, renderings, scripts, or projections - which in turn, precipitate more meetings to clarify what has been proposed and to get agreements on how it will be implemented, by whom, and for how much money. Final production is often the easiest part. The bulk of the time and cost (and, thus, real value) comes in conceptualizing the problem, devising a solution, and planning its execution.

Most symbolic analysts have graduated from four-year colleges or universities ; many have graduate degrees as well. The vast majority are white males, but the proportion of white females is growing, and there is a small, but slowly increasing, number of blacks and Hispanics among them. All told, symbolic analysis currently accounts for no more than 20 percent of American jobs. The proportion of American workers who fit this category has increased substantially since the 1950s (by my calculation, no more than 8 percent of American workers could be classified as symbolic analysts at midcentury), but the pace slowed considerably in the 1980s - even though certain symbolic-analytical jobs, like law and investment banking, mushroomed.

Robert Reich, The Three Jobs of the Future in Frank Webster (ed.), The Information Society Reader, Routledge, 2003, p.205-209.

Comprehensive Design.

Non attributed, Buckminster Fuller, s.d.

Fuller, like Emerson, saw the material world as the reflection of an otherwise intangible system of rules. But unlike Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Fuller linked that system of rules not only to the natural world, but also to the world of industry. During World War I, Fuller had watched his four-year-old daughter Alexandra die of infantile paralysis, contracted in part, he believed, because the family’s home was badly built. At the time, he was working as a contractor with the navy. Earlier, as a junior officer, he had seen how, with proper coordination, extraordinary industrial resources could be mustered to solve military problems. In his view, his daughter had died directly from a disease but indirectly from a failure to distribute the world’s resources appropriately (1). This conviction grew during World War II and the early years of the cold war, when once again Fuller saw the full scope of industrial production at work, as well as the inequality with which the world’s resources were distributed. What humankind required, he came to believe, was an individual who could recognize the universal patterns inherent in nature, design new technologies in accord with both these patterns and the industrial resources already created by corporations and the military, and see that those new technologies were deployed in everyday life.

In a 1963 volume called Ideas and Integrities, a book that would have a strong impact on USCO and Stewart Brand, Fuller named this individual the “Comprehensive Designer” (2). According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness. Unlike specialists, the Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system’s need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a “harvester of the potentials of the realm,” gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. To do this work, the Designer would need to have access to all of the information generated within America’s burgeoning technocracy while at the same time remaining outside it. He would need to become “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist” (3). Constantly poring over the population surveys, resource analyses, and technical reports produced by states and industries, but never letting himself become a full-time employee of any of these, the Comprehensive Designer would finally see what the bureaucrat could not : the whole picture.

Being able to see the whole picture would allow the Comprehensive Designer to realign both his individual psyche and the deployment of political power with the laws of nature. In contrast to the bureaucrat, who, so many critics of technocracy had suggested, had been psychologically broken down by the demands of his work, the Comprehensive Designer would be intellectually and emotionally whole. Neither engineer nor artist, but always both simultaneously, he would achieve psychological integration even while working with the products of technocracy. Likewise, whereas bureaucrats exerted their power by means of political parties and armies and, in Fuller’s view, thus failed to properly distribute the world’s resources, the Comprehensive Designer would wield his power systematically. That is, he would analyze the data he had gathered, attempt to visualize the world’s needs now and in the future, and then design technologies that would meet those needs. Agonistic politics, Fuller implied, would become irrelevant. What would change the world was “comprehensive anticipatory design science” (4).

Both Stewart Brand and the members of USCO were steeped in Fuller’s writings by the mid-1960s. Brand would go on to write to Fuller, to attend his lectures, and, in the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, to claim that “the insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog”. In retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth. Like McLuhan, he simultaneously embraced the pleasures and power associated with the products of technocracy and offered his audiences a way to avoid becoming technocratic drones. Moreover, according to Fuller the proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation. As he put it in Ideas and Integrities, “If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution, it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s spontaneous seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of the total capability of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced living-adequate for all humanity” (5). In Fuller’s view, the Comprehensive Designer not only did not need to don a gray flannel suit when he went to work ; he actually needed to become an artist and an intellectual migrant. To a generation preoccupied with the fear of becoming lockstep corporate adults on the military model of Brand’s imagined Soviet Army, Buckminster Fuller offered a marvelously playful alternative.

Fuller’s vision of the Comprehensive Designer carried with it, nonetheless, intellectual frameworks and social ideals formulated at the core of military research culture. Foremost among these was Fuller’s notion of the world as an information system. In his numerous autobiographical writings, Fuller traces the origins of his ideas about the world as a system to his Transcendental lineage and especially to his time on board ships - which he considered closed systems - when he was a naval officer. Yet his writings also bear the imprint of cold war-era military-industrial information theory. For Fuller, as for Wiener and the systems analysts of later decades, the material world consisted of information patterns made manifest. The patterns could be modeled and manipulated by information technologies, notably the computer. The computer in turn could suffice as a model for the human being. After all, although Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer promises to be psychologically integrated as specialists are not, that integration depends on the Designer’s ability to process vast quantities of information so as to perceive social and technological patterns. Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer is, from a functional point of view at least, an information processor, and as such he is a descendent of cold war psychology and systems theory as much as a child of Fuller’s own imagination.

Even Fuller’s work style echoes the collaborative ethos of World War II research. According to Fuller and, later, his countercultural admirers, the Comprehensive Designer came by his comprehensive viewpoint only by stepping away from the industrial and military institutions in which specialists had long been trapped. Only the freestanding individual “could find the time to think in a cosmically adequate manner,” he explained. Fuller himself lived accordingly : for most of his career, he migrated among a series of universities and colleges, designing projects, collaborating with students and faculty - and always claiming the rights to whatever the collaborations produced (6). In his writings, Fuller offered his travels as a model of the proper behavior for a Comprehensive Designer and suggested that such a life was genuinely new. Yet a quick glance back at MIT’s Rad Lab in World War II would have reminded Fuller’s audiences that interdisciplinary migration and multi-institutional collaboration were key features of the military research world.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p.56-58.

Notes.

1. Fuller, R. Buckminster, Ideas and Integrities : A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall, 1963, 35-43.

2. Ibid, 173.

3. Ibid, 176.

4. Ibid, 63.

5. Brand, Stewart, Buckminster Fuller in Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3, Menlo Park, CA : Portola Institute, 1968, 249.

6. Fuller quoted in Fuller, R. Buckminster & Snyder, Robert, R. Buckminster Fuller : An Autobiographical Monologue Scenario Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, New York : St. Martin's Press, 1980, 38. By the early 1960s, Fuller was traveling more than two-thirds of every year. Kenner, Hugh, Bucky : A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, New York : Morrow, 1973, 290.