Operation: Read Raymond Williams is proceeding apace and I figured I’d write up some notes here on some more bits that struck me, and see if that shakes any thoughts loose.

In his book Modern Tragedy he writes that an “essential point is that violence and disorder are institutions as well as acts. When a revolutionary change is lived through, we can usually see this quite clearly. The old institutions, now dead, take on their real quality as systematic violence and disorder (...) But while such institutions are still effective, they can seem, to an extraordinary extent, both settled and innocent. Indeed, they constitute, commonly, an order against which the very protest, of the injured and oppressed, seems the source of disturbance and violence.” He argues, in this same passage, that this also means there is something strange about how often “revolution should be selected as the example of violence and disorder." That "make(s) nonsense" of revolution, because "violence and disorder are in the whole action, of which what we commonly call revolution is the crisis.” That is: revolutions occur partially in opposition to structural violence; revolutions are in part crises of structurally violent social relations. (This is pages 65-66.) These are good quotes and I’m a little annoyed I hadn’t read them sooner, I’d have used them in my book and/or the stuff I wrote on social murder.
Williams also stresses or at least strongly implies, I think, that revolutions include thought processes. From what I’ve read of him now I think he’d emphasize that this is all extraordinarily complicated and it’s not possible to ‘people’s ideas change then action happen’ nor is it possible to say ‘ideas don’t matter, people just act.’ Instead there’s a complex process of living in various ways patterned by social structure and making sense of all of that in various ways, and the social structure isn’t static but is very dynamic due to tendencies to crisis and class conflict so that the patterns get shaken up into new variations unexpectedly. People think within and against all of that as an element of how they live through it.

Anyway, the point I want to make just now is that social struggles produce new sensibilities, thoughts, habits, dispositions, stories, symbols, etc, at every step of their existence from their, so to speak, prefaces through their conclusions and aftermaths, which in turns influence how people live and make sense of how they life. Hence, in part, the emphasis on revolutionary change making clear the structurally violent character of some aspects of social life. I read this as pressing the point that struggle is in part a process of people changing, and that struggles as they unfold change people such that even people who were late adopters can still end up transformed as a result. Unfortunately, I think this can also run the other direction, in periods of relative reaction - institutions revealed as violent can become re-legitimated, sanitized, laundered; lessons learned can be lost so that future struggles need to re-invent the wheel. None of this should be flattened into a kind of American football ‘which yard line are we at?’ or numerical timeline ‘is the clock moving forward or backward?’ kind of sensibility, though - progress forward and reaction backward are metaphorical terms naming important realities that it’s vital to understand but also the terrain is never the same, progress and reaction a like create different conditions that are relatively novel.

I don’t know what else to say about it at the moment but I notice Williams’s emphasis in this quote on relative perceptibility and cognizability (sorry!) of social phenomena. That is, very simple, shit happens and people who experience know something about it automatically as a result but only to a limited extent: experience is always interpreted in an important sense but definitely not always sufficiently interpreted. The processes of sufficient interpretation are a kind of work that has to be done and if not done, well, it doesn’t happen, and a kind of work that requires resources that are themselves the product of work - which, again, if that work doesn’t happen then those resources don’t exist.

I also recently read some William’s book on George Orwell (I read some of it because I skimmed all the bits that were close readings of works of Orwell’s that I’ve not read). It has what is at least relative to my interests a pretty remarkable discussion of Orwell’s class background and related political sensibilities, which I suspect are pretty clarifying for understanding the history of labourism in the UK, something I want to know a lot more about both for its own sake and for the sake of getting a better handle on the politics and ideologies related to what Simon Clarke calls “institutionalized forms of class collaboration.”

What I want to mention here is in that bit, Williams’s discussion of Orwell’s background. Orwell is from a middle class background and was early on a police officer in India when under British control - a piece of the colonial/imperial state. Williams writes that Orwell’s upbringing and education was “a training for membership in the administrative middle class of imperialist Britain.” (p7.) An important part of that process, normal in the sort of circles Orwell came out of, was boarding school. Williams describes this as a situation where the people who ruled and who did “the dirty work of imperialism” didn’t really belong to or know (“except in abstraction,” Williams adds), the society that they took as theirs. (p9.) For that “administrative middle class” England “was primarily a home base and a network of ruling-class schools.” (p8.)

That sort of pulling out of people from any location and housing them boarding schools together is interesting and I’d like to know more about it. The particulars aside, though, there’s also a process here, I think, of subtracting people from certain contexts of living - which includes affinities, loyalties, sensibilities, forms of perception, ideas, etc - and putting them in another context - which includes a different set of same stuff I just mentioned - where they form a different kind of grouping able to act in and over the people they govern. This reminds me of a passage in Raymond Geuss’s A World Without Why:
“I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories, and arguments. I thereby help turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace that protects it against criticism and change. (...) So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic, and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole.” (p231-232.)

I think it’s worth noting that Geuss’s reference to a job “teaching philosophy at a university” isn’t quite accurate. First off, his career was as a research professor really, which even though such positions do require some teaching simply are not teaching jobs in any ordinary sense of that term (speaking as someone employed at a teaching centered university), and he was employed at especially elite universities in the US and, before retiring, at Cambridge in the UK. Those universities have pretty distinct relationships to “the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite” and the training of young aspiring members of such, relationships that don’t really obtain for universities per se. To put it another way and to get a little pointed, you can’t get more Ivy and Oxbridge than taking the fucking Ivies and Oxbridge as representative of universities as such or as just “a university”, and treating them as such is tedious and annoying. Anyway, the quote’s good and I think it’s reasonable to say that Williams’s claims about the class/stratum experience typifying Orwell’s background applies, in its most general terms (and only in those terms) to what Geuss describes. Elite universities train people to rule societies they don’t really, in Williams’s terms, belong to or know “except in abstraction.”

Williams emphasizes the not-knowing and I appreciate that for various reasons, including the implicit (and I don’t think I’m projecting or reading in here) fuck you to that class stratum (“you don’t know me! you don’t know us!” kinda thing), and this resonates with my interest in the structural production of not-knowing and in agnotology, the study of that not-knowing and its production. That said, Williams’s “except in abstraction” is useful here as well, I think, for drawing out how in important respects the line between knowing and not knowing is blurry and relative to purpose. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before but I dunno where (I don’t read Open Mode! Gross! The very idea!), but I find the idea of a street map clarifying.

Bear with me. I live in a neighborhood that I care deeply about. I’ve been here about ten years, which is the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. There are neighbors who mean a lot to me. It’s been a place where people of modest means could still afford to buy a house and so have some degree of stability, though that’s going away. That means the population is one I experience as diverse and down to earth (neither of which I would apply to populations which I will never be able, even if I wanted to, to stop thinking of as rich kids from the suburbs), qualities I care a lot about and that mean I feel more comfortable here than I do pretty much anywhere else. Another way to put it is that here I feel like I can speak most of the range of vocabularies and micro-dialects I have to codeswitch among in my life, and the ones I care most about, than in any other physical and social location I’m in. Me aside, there’s some nice local architecture here, in that modest midwest brick popular modernist style - little one and two story buildings - in the commercial strip which happens to be a historic district, modest mid twentieth century houses, lots of flowers in people’s yards, some decent murals, etc. Almost none of that shows up in a street map. A street map blanks all of that kind of stuff out in order to represent the space in a way that promotes navigability: it makes the space useful relative to a given set of purposes (at this point map might be an outmoded metaphor, since a lot of people use computers to just give them directions, sometimes in real time like ‘turn left here’ and so on, which even further decontextualizes the space) and the usefulness depends on the blanking out of other qualities.

So, in an important respect, someone who looks at a map or drives through a space/place guided by a computer voice telling them where to turn largely doesn’t know - “except in abstraction” - that space/place but in another important respect they know it relative to their purposes - whatever reason they have for being in/going to/moving through the space, and the abstraction is part of that. That is, the abstracting out of content which is, for some purposes - like a lot of the human purposes involved in my going about my life in this place I care about - to strip away everything about it such that I could say ‘you don’t know this place’ is also another, different way of knowing the place, a way of knowing it specifically to make use of it. I think this is part of what “the administrative middle class” does in its administering work and is tied to their being “pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadre” of “the governmental elite.” That is, the specific kind of knowing which is in other respects not-knowing - not knowing “except in abstraction” - is tied to the doing of governance.

I suspect at its most general this is part of class relationships as such, so that in any class society we’d find elements of institutional life somewhat like this, and that it’s part of capitalist societies maybe to a more intense degree and certainly with a capitalism-specific character. And at the same time, all of these patterns exists in specific concrete forms subject to important variations that are both differences in the how - i.e., different ways of producing abstract (non)knowing - and also differences in degree - i.e., the boarding school system Williams wrote about in relation to Orwell could well produce a group of people more ignorant, more prone to perception via/as abstraction than other groups serving analogous roles in other capitalist societies. What I mean to say here is partly just that as matters for inquiry this stuff branches a little between getting more into the concrete particulars like in historical and social science inquiry, and getting more into the generalities in theorizing, each of which have positive roles in trying to understand the world we’re currently consigned to. Anyway, the institutional life of governance and of the production of ignorance and abstraction is all stuff I’m interested in and finding this stuff in Williams has been exciting, since that wasn’t what I’ve been reading him for (why have I been reading him, you ask? I dunno really, I just think he’s interesting, in part, and in part I’m interested in the British left milieu he was part of) and since it helps me to think about this stuff.

Alright them’s my notes and all the thoughts I have at the moment, and I gotta go wash dishes so I’m gonna split. As a PS before I go, I’ll just mention that I’m very excited at the moment about this track by Adrian Sherwood and collaborators, “Wicked Kingdom of this Earth.” I like the sound - dubby, I think? - and the title and lyrics feel apt just now, though bleaker than I want to fully embrace (feels so right but still is wrong, because we will win! A counterpoint to the bleakness of “Wicked Kingdom” would be Steel Pulse’s Tribute to the Martyrs, the first track of which begins “I survive!” and includes a refrain of “evil - what you gonna do?” Likewise Downpressor Man, covered beautifully by Sinead O’Connor - when she mutters “where you gonna fuckin run to?”, my soul does something I lack words for. But my go-to really for the opposite sensibility is the mighty Dear Landlord: "we're not that hopeless, we're not as fucked as you think, in short lived moments we can do anything! The fucking joke is we're winning when you blink, in short lived moments lousy with victory.” Another parenthetical remark gets out of control. Same as it ever was. Here I stand I can do no other. Anywho, you hang in there, good people! Talk to you later!)