Feb 6th 10 Posted by justin in CCR711

CCR711 – Habermas – Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Outline of Habermas’ Argument:

Thesis:  What are the social conditions for rational-critical debate about public issues by private people who let argumentation, not status, determine decisions?

• Social systems of “public”
  • The Greek Model – freedom is found in the public; however, those who are able to participate in the public must be masters of their private (oikos) (3).
  • The European Middle Ages Model –
    • Characterized by “representational publicity” (8).
    • In this period public is considered something of a “status attribute” (7).
• The “Enlightenment” or 17^th & 18^th Centuries Model –
  • Divided into three separate realms (30):
    • The private realm:
      • Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)
      • Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)
      • Public sphere:
        • In the political realm
        • In the world of letters (clubs, presses)
        • Market of culture products (“town)
      • Sphere of Public Authority
        • State (realm of the “police”)
        • Court (courtly-noble society)

• Habermas’ Themes:  social structure, political functions, ideology

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere:  Economics
  • Social reproduction was a matter of private people left to themselves.  This resulted in the “completed privatization of civil society” (74)
  • Personal freedoms were a result of this freedom of social reproduction and ownership of property (protection) (75)
  • For a brief amount of time – before government intervention in capitalist systems – unmitigated free trade and laissez-faire economic philosophies created a “civil society as the private sphere emancipated from public authority” (79)
  • This new economic situation viewed bourgeois as both homme and citoyen (man as owner of private property and citizen as the person who wants to protect that property order as outside the government)
    • Habermas sees this as one of the fundamental aspects of bourgeois ideology:  this belief in man must be propertied to be man is a false consciousness that Marx also identified (88).

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Codification
  • The family is reconceived as the private sphere where the patriarch participates in the public sphere (similar to the Greek model)
  • The public sphere is constituted in the world of letters – this leads to politics

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Institutional Bases
  • Coffee houses (London)
    • Operated without censorship from the crown
      • Abandoning censorship allowed for a new, non-revolutionary politics.  H. notes on 64 that this signaled that critical debate of the public stopped violence but also “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition”
• Salons
  • Public institutions in private residences because of censorship
  • Changed after the Constitution of 1791 that allowed free communication of ideas without censorship (70).  Napoleon later reversed this policy
• Table Societies (Germany)
  • What makes these Bourgeois public sphere institutional bases special?
    • Disregarded status (36)
    • Rational argument was the basis for all argumentation.
    • There was an openness of topics for discussion (36)
    • The public was inclusive in principle if not in practice – if you had access to cultural products, then you could jump in on the culture-debate (37)
    • The bourgeois rational debate of cultural products resulted in the questioning of “absolute sovereignty” be relying on the idea that public opinion alone could discover the “natural order” (55).
      • Habermas works back to the disagreement between Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Two Treatises) on the role of gov’t.
      • Early in the development of the public sphere by private individuals, critical debate was used to discover laws that were inherent to society (83 – center paragraph)

• The ideological Structure of the Public Sphere : A critique on the conception of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth (Chapter 4)
  • Kant:  the most developed philosophy of the bourgeois public sphere
    • Public discourse is a way to lead individuals to enlightenment (104)
      • This renders communication (read: rhetoric) fundamental in the communalization of the bourgeois subject
      • This new “world” community is really the community of the bourgeois subject and the attendant “mixed companies” that participate in argumentation for enlightenment through rational discourse.
• Hegel:  the “public” created by civil society are an ideology
  • Common sense is actually just mass opinion dispersed among people in the form of prejudices (122)
• Marx: the “public opinion” is actually just bourgeois class interests in disguise
• Mill / Tocqueville:  Develop a liberalism that treated freedom relatively
  • Wondered about the future of public sphere discourse in the face of increasing membership in said sphere
  • What to do with all the new people in the public as a result of expanded suffrage (133)
  • Both authors wondered about whether the critical aspects of public discourse would dissolve into what is “popular” and as such worried about protecting minority populations (134).
    • Is this a recognition of an argument against the public sphere or just the beginning of the disintegration of the public sphere? (135)
    • The Disintegration of the Public Sphere: On the Refeudalization of Society
      • Private organizations began to increasingly assume public power
        • This undermined the value of public discourse because of the class issues brought about by mass industrialization beginning in the 18^th and extending to the 19^th centuries.  The social inequalities eroded the principle of disregard of status (36).
• The state began to encroach on the private realm
• Instead of using rational debate to discover universal / absolute natural orders/truths, public debate began to be used for negotiation (176).  This negotiation occurs between a lot of large, non-public bodies (private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration) and the public is included as something of a stamp of approval.
  • Because of the diminished role of the public in discourse, the movement toward the welfare state comes into being.  Some “social rights” or protections afforded by the state are put into place to counterbalance the obvious injuries sustained by lumpenproletariat and proletariat populations.
• The move away from rational debate toward consumptive models (think Adorno and Horkheimer here) is noted on 162.
  • Similar to A&H’s thesis, H. notes here that individual gratification replaces the rational-critical debate; further, the role of public communication technologies replaced the acts of “individuated reception” that engendered critical-rational discourse on topics (161)
• In essence, in expanding the public sphere, the form of participation by interested parties was changed drastically from a rational-critical engagement of public discourse to a culture of consumption that isn’t critical about it’s work (169)
  • This point is part of the program of the entire critical theory line of thinking that comes out of the Frankfurt School.
• Because the consumption of media is much more intimate and related to financial ability, the status issue that the original bourgeois public sphere dissolved is reintroduced and becomes “unbracketed” and impossible to ignore (172).
• This weakening of the public isn’t perceived by the public as such – in fact, they look back to their previous critical engagedness and believe that they are still practicing critical-rational discourse; rather, they are actually engaging in a recycled form of representative publicity that coerces but doesn’t critically engage (194).
• The diffusion of mass culture also has a couple of deleterious effects:
  • Most folks tastes are met; however, a critical review of those tastes doesn’t take place (174)
  • The diffusion of mass amounts of goods means that the public isn’t ever capable of focusing in on one object for critical discussion (174 – – in the example of Pamela)
• When this mass consumption removes critical-rational discourse, academics and other “thinkers” are put in the position of culture-producers and critics who stand in opposition to the mass of culture (175).
• The Modern Age:  Representational Publicity
  • The media is used to create opportunities for consumers to identify with public personas
  • The public sphere becomes a stage for corporations and other statist/corporatist regimes to develop legitimacy through popularity instead of responding to critical-rational challenges.
  • Parties move beyond critical-rational debate into mobilization regimes for ideological integration into party-lines (203)
  • Interest-groups replace non-rational-critical debating citizens because the politicians no longer have to listen to the voters – just manage the media machine that provides the consumptive qualities.  Interest-groups win (204).
  • Social integration of rational-critical discourse is ultimately the hope of communication in the future instead of mass-culture domination.  Hope for the future? (210)

Feb 5th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – A World Without Bosses? : Distributed Capitalism & Net Work

The first time I read through chapter five in Eileen’s class I became very, very frightened.  I suppose my initial terror was directly tied to my now slowly deteriorating allegiance to Marxist modes of material production and the realities capitalist enterprise in the West’s progressively post-industrial age.  The more and more I read about the changing nature of work in the 21st century – especially with respect to Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (it’s on the reading list ASAP!) – I am left in a bit of a crisis of conscience.  It’s not that I was just longing for a socialist/communist state on the order of China, the USSR, or Vietnam; in fact, I think that their “socialism” and “communism” was really just a state-administered, extremely monopolistic brand of capitalism.  What I’m realizing more and more is that capitalism on the order that Spinuzzi describes in chapter five is a lot different from any proprietary or managerial capitalism that preceded it.  So in this new capitalism – often described as “support econonmy” or “distributed” – is there any more room for self-actualization and liberation from the modes of production that have long exploited labor or does it’s distributed nature  simply increase the deleterious effects and leave consumers ever-questing toward more “authentic” consumption habits?  Well, first I’ll try a bit of recap. . .

Before Spinuzzi demonstrates how networks are “enacted”, he describes the transfigurations that have occurred in the time period between the waning of the industrial age and the development (or negotiation) of what Castells has called “informational capitalism.”  This new brand of capitalism is different from the modular form that Marx envisioned in that the “deskilling” that occurs when tasks are “broken down into easily learnable and repeatable components” is challenged.  No more assembly lines and workers who can’t see the final products.  Rather, in information capitalism the complete net work is interpenetrated, deeply rhizomatic: “it has multiple, multidirectional information flows” (137).  Because of this characteristic, some folks claim that capitalism will move toward a more distributed form.  Distributed capitalism will come to look a lot like shareholders in companies – distributed, desires for “unique support” from vendors, and trustworthy relations among consumers (think Amazon.com’s comment function).  This process of co-configuration – whereby producer and consumers configure one another at all times reciprocally – will disrupt supply chains and create “advocates” or “professional relationship workers” who “assemble temporary ‘federations’ of suppliers for each transaction or service.  In effect, the layer between producer and consumer will have an individualized shim.  While these new ways to describe capitalist paradigms in the information age could be positive, they also have a negative side.

In the move toward this new distributed capitalism, Spinuzzi notes how some negative social practices could come into being.  Working through Deleuze, we get a new picture of social interaction that moves society from a Foucauldian pantopticonicism rooted in systems of discipline from above toward a distributed,  control-based horizontal & vertical social competition between all workers in the capitalist agora.  In this new field of work, laborers who are able to participate in the information economy are in a constant state of competition that renders job security,  benefits, and retirement static for only the most successful or sought-after workers.  It seems natural that champions of neoliberal economic systems like Milton Friedman and his fellow Chicago School economists would eat this hyper-competitive, cream-rises-to-the-top labor model up . . . and as long as Friedmanites continue to occupy influential positions at the IMF, World Bank, and other organizations, this new model will likely be championed as the future of economic Development.

While I’m not naive enough to believe that unions and collective resistance have near the power that they once levied against big-business capitalism, I see distributed capitalism one of the last steps in the progressive deterioration of collective resistance in labor systems.  Once Haraway’s “homework economy” blurs the boundaries between life and work (lifestreaming) and the quest for individual consumptive experiences dissolves mass production (which itself is pretty debatable if you’re a believer in the herd mentality), the consumer is left in a ecstatic state vis-a-vis the instant and constantly individual gratification of extreme commodity fetishism.  All the while the worker – now left without affiliation and only existing in the network as a fluid, constantly re/de skilling cog – moves on to new “opportunities.”

I know I’m being a bit melodramatic here, but I do think that the changes in the way that consumption and production are occurring could have damaging consequences.  I do feel like some capitalist entities are looking to offset the inherent contradictions of capitalism (capitalism can’t produce labor and non-renewable natural resources for example) through partnerships between capital entities and philanthropic organizations – this is a crude, but promising example. ..  anyone know of anymore?  That being said, the future of my work looks a lot different from the sort of things my folks did for a living.

I wonder though, am I as scared as Socrates of the quill & tablet or Zola of the factory?  A little help here! 

Jan 27th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Spilka et.al.

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication:  21^st Century Theory and Practice – ed. Rachel Spilka

Introduction – Rachel Spilka

• The author notes that the collection is valuable because work contexts and modes of production have changes so much over recent memory.  As technical communicators, Spilka notes that the need to adopt evolution is necessary to survive.
• Evolution not only in technical skill, but productive flow and socializing forces are necessary to be a technical communicator now and in the near future.
• She chooses the term “digital literacy” for the text because it “refers a bit more directly to the rise of computer techn0ology, and the introduction of computer technology” that led to the fundamental paradigm shift in tech comm.
• Structure of book:
  • Part I:  Transformations in work due to the digital environment
  • Part II:  New Foundational Knowledge:  What knowledge is important for tech. comm. To learn in order to remain relevant?
  • Part III:  New Directions:  This section is a collection of meditations on how we might revise existing theory and develop new theory to better understand how technology has transformed our work.

Computers and Technical Communication in the 21^st Century – Saul Carliner

• The chapter describes the development of different communicative/publishing technologies and how that has transformed the work of technical communicators.  Specifically, the author considers a couple of time periods:
  • Late 1970s – Large systems, technical writers, field experience for education, wordsmithing tech documents is essential skill, worked on typewriters
  • Mid to Late 1980s – Mid range systems and PCs, called “information developer,” required tech comm. Experience and possible university education, prepared information for end user, used automated text processing systems that resembled HTML
  • Late 1990s to early 2000s – PCs, high-end software for commercial application, called “software engineers” and “technical writers,”  degrees in computer science and wordsmithing experience, prepared information for end user, used web-based authoring systems, desktop publishing, no coding
  • Early 2000s to now – Software for managing networks and information on networks, customization of networks, same names as previous category, required degrees and wordsmithing experience, also experience with CMSs, designing large databases is primary responsibility, used CMSs that work on DITA standards (Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
  • The author grounds the development of technology in the same period of changing technological communication above in 5 phases:
    • Automation of production tasks:  use of typewriters, and more advanced printing mechanisms
    • Desktop Revolution – Desktop publishing addressed issues of output on crappy printing, formatting of documents, and graphics
    • The GUI Revolution – development of GUI to replace text based interfaces (think DOS to Windows)
    • Web 1.0 – static web content is generated through scripting languages like HTML and PHP.  Also the development and adoption of CMSs.
    • Web 2.0 – CMS as a way to manage dynamic content, interactivity, elearning applications and creation, open source software and a strengthening of division between web designers and web coders/producers.

Chapter Two – The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work – R. Stanley Dicks

• First, let me say that I may not agree with the article’s logic, but I LOVED this article.
• The author considers the changing nature of tech comm. In the context of a couple of different aspects:
  • Economics – macro-changes in economic systems of distribution and production have changed the role of technical communicators.
  • Management – new management theories over the past couple of years affect the role of technical communicator in reminding management of their relevance.
  • Methodologies – the nature of “knowledge work” has changed dramatically.  These new production methods have also affected the role of the technical communicator and their respective workspace.
• Economics – A lot of this information is covered in Spinuzzi’s explanation of changing work methods found here (see the section on Chapter Six:  Is Our Network Learning?).
  • The new movement to knowledge work is fundamentally wrapped up in a new value of customer experience and individualization.  New products will be specific to specific people, no copies will proliferate.  Mass production will die in favor of customizable products that meet multiple customer needs.
  • This is referred to as the “support economy.”  Because the customer-corporation relationship is currently poisoned, new modes of customer prioritization will appear (and are appearing).  Web 2.0 technologies are allowing instant feedback mechanisms that will force companies to care about their customer in a much increased way.
  • There are problems with this new model; most notably, because work will become a new experience each time it is performed (as opposed to production models), the knowledge worker will be left looking for new work at the completion of each individual project.  This is a precarious place to be – especially in light of insurance, etc.  Contractor agencies look like a future alternative for knowledge workers in a modular production model (Spinuzzi 2007).
• Management Principles – These come and go; however, tech. communicators need to know how to make themselves relevant in changing management paradigms.
  • Value added – tech. communicators need to demonstrate how they add value to their company by highlighting how they can reduce costs, avoid costs, enhance revenue and by their intangible contributions.
  • Reengineering – Think Office Space.  You remember the mangament gurus that came in to evaluate how successful the company is?  That’s “reingeneering.”  It also goes by names like restructuring – Ford just did a bit of this, so did GM.  The author traces reengineering to the transition from industrial capitalism to knowledge-work capitalism or post-capitalist models of distribution and consumption.
  • To combat outsourcing, downsizing, and rightsizing, tech. communicators should make sure they are doing knowledge work and not commodity work.
  • Globalization is changing things – REALLY? – to combat this tech. communicators need to move away from commodity work toward knowledge work (no filling out forms and getting into coding/design), develop more efficient technologies of development, and understand that translation and localization are the future (other languages, relevant to small contexts).
  • Flattening – layers of management aren’t needed in post-production models.  So, remove management and let teams perform complex tasks together.  Sounds good in theory if everyone is an egalitarian!
• Methodologies – these are the new ways that technical communicators need to engage with their work of production, deployment, and teamwork to remain relevant:
  • Single sourcing – a concept whereby individualized documentation will accompany products in the new support economy.  Databases will query small amounts of information and reassemble them per the end document designers code.  This is the future and highlights the split in workflow between documentation and presentation or writer/interface producer.
  • Agile Development Methods – These are new ways of development that put the end user in the driver’s seat with respect to development.  User-centered design, iterative design, agile development, extreme programming, and scrum all either develop criteria and develop from there (rather than via technical specifications), or use “stories” of end-users to dream new coding.  Tech. communicators need to enmesh themselves in all these processes to remain relevant and be able to fully understand what they are expected to document in a team-based work atmosphere.
  • Distributed work – because of the advance in communicative technologies and contract work, tech. communicators need to understand how to work in non co-located environments.
  • Web 2.0 – This poses an interesting question for documentation specialists.  Why not let the documentation get generated organically instead of exhaustively documenting everything?  You can do this via blogs or user wikis with support.  LOTS of companies are moving in this direction.

Chapter Three – Shaped and Shaping Tools:  The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies – Dave Clark

• This chapter is about “how do technical communicators learn about and assess “broader implications” and “potential influence”?  To answer this question, the author explores what methods and technological approaches have been articulated to consider the ways that technologies structure, shape, and influence the ways we communicate.
• The first section defines technology – or attempts to anyway.  The author wants to get away from instrumentalist (tools to an end) conception of technology.  The author also works hard to differentiate the rhetoric of technology from the rhetoric of science by noting how the rhetoric of technology is primarily concerned with human-made objects whereas the rhetoric of science often deals with “nature.”  To differentiate between the two, Clark notes:
  • Science produces mostly symbols through rhetorical means such as articles or grant proposals whereas technology aims at producing objects and material processes (but doesn’t science also?!?)
  • Scientists validate their findings by outside professionals whereas technologists protect trade secrets and let market forces determine success
  • Science has a “more closely bounded rhetorical terrain” whereas technologies must enlist the help of publics to be functional and carried through to fruition (91).
• Focuses and Approaches to the rhetoric of technology – the author notes that four modes/methods have been used to study technology rhetorically:
  • Rhetorical analysis – a rhetorical perspective for analyzing the problems and issues raised by new technologies through an examination of public discourse.
  • Technology transfer and diffusion – a really diverse field across disciplines, this considers how technologies are transported between populations.  Interested in such things as technology adoption and practice in new contexts.
  • Genre theory – focuses on the rhetorical construction of the writing produced and encouraged by particular tools.  This deals with things like “genre ecologies” (Nardi) and Spinuzzi’s work on the role of genres in technical communication / organizational communication.
  • Activity theory – a form of analysis that can provide a broad cultural understanding because it considers common language, structure, and context in understanding organizational cause-effect relationships.

Chapter Nine – Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations:  Digital Being in the Workplace World – Steven Katz and Vicki Rhodes

• This chapter considers how ethical frames define human-machine operations.  In so doing it asks questions about : What are the relations?  How are they shifting in digital communication?  What are some of the professional implications of the digital relationships of machines and the humans who increasingly depend and exist alongside them in all walks of life? (231).
• Utilizing a successive framing method, the authors describe the following conceptions of technology and ethics:
  • False frame – technology isn’t valuable, it’s just a form of indulgence and entertainment.
  • Tool Frame – Technology is a means to an end – the instrumentalist approach – examples might be a calculator or a hammer.
  • Means-End frame – Technology is both a means and the end of those means.  An example might be something like a website to generate internet sales.
  • Autonomous frame – technology becomes a value system whereby means-ends relationships are conceived as operating unto themselves.  In this sense, technology produces moral codes (productivity, speed, efficiency).  “Societies whose economic goals are the accumulation of material things, wealth, and power, require and enforce the complementary ethical values of speed, productivity, and efficiency as ends as well as means”  (234).
  • Thought frame – technology as rational calculation – In this frame, technological rationality through the assistive technologies of something like Microsoft Word are important because they have become integrated into the composing process.  They are technologically embedded to a really high degree.  Examples are uses of terminology that permeates everything.
  • Being frame – this is when technological thoughts become the dominant mode of consciousness.  Modern technology becomes a way to order nature and our relation to it.  This considers humans as resources or a “standing reserve”  to be harvested.  In this process of Enframing (we only understand being in the world through technological ways – Heidegger), the personal is the technological. . . not just business.  Think of iPhones, Blackberries, Facebook, etc.  We exist everywhere with technology as technology; we stand with resources as a reserve.  Think of the department “human resources!”
• Digital being – This is the accumulation of all frames of being.  It rationalizes the technological order and naturalizes it so that it can only increase.
• To combat these frames, the authors argue for “human-machine sanctity” or the constitution of a new frame that encompasses all previous frames but also values the “I-Thou” technological relation as one based on reciprocity and mutual respect.  This is a reintroduction of the human to the technological.
• “Because human-machine sanctity, ideally, would be based on non-technical relations – not on means-end, but on reverence and caring for the whole – it would directly improve relations between:  employee and employer, employee and machine (equipment), company and clients, and company and nature (conservation).

Jan 25th 10 Posted by justin in teaching

Mason – “The Tao of Pirates: Sea Forts, Patent Trolls and Why We Need Piracy”

• Forms of piracy in this article:
  • Radio
  • Music – origins
  • Film – origins
  • Cable – origins
  • Internet/P2P networks
  • Blogs – origins
  • Journalism – how should we be teaching it?
  • Online media content/web 2.0
  • Free culture movements
  • Tape technologies
  • As a business model?
  • Biotechnologies / biomedical industries and their relation to ethnic cultures
  • Medicine
• Issues of information ownership are central to the HavenCo/Bates family partnership.
• Digital replication is an essential quality of pirate technologies.  The computer age has enabled this.
• Pay special attention to definition C on pg. 4 of Mason’s article.  “A guardian of free speech who promotes efficiency, innovation, and creativity, and who has been doing so for centuries.”
• Problems of definition – who is a pirate and who is an innovator?
• Piracy confronts problems of distribution and ineffeciencies in capitalist markets.  They encourage consumer choice and wait for cooptation.
• Piracy enables free speech (China example) and the unfettered proliferation of information against statist regimes.
• Mason spends a good deal of time talking about pirate radio in this chapter.  Tracing the work of DJ Fezzy, Mason demonstrates how the manipulation of existing media formats creates innovation . . . in this case, radio.
• Most piracies become legitimated and then fight piracies.
• Pirate radio uses:
  • Entertainment
  • Political activism
  • Commercial
• Web 2.0 and piracy are intimately linked.
• The effects of piracy and self-distribution via internet networks might spell the demise for large-scale media conglomerates.
• Long tail economics and niche markets are enabled by blogging.
• Can you “own” culture?  Why/how?
• How is piracy a form of civil disobedience?
• What is the role of net neutrality in the piracy debate?
• “If suing customers for consuming pirate copies becomes central to a company or industry’s business model, then the truth is that that company or industry no longer has a competitive business model.”
• Three characteristics of pirates:
  • Look outside the market – Pirates don’t look for gaps inside the market, but gaps outside the market itself.
  • Create a vehicle – Pirates create new mediums of distribution – vehicles for the transport of media – where none existed before.
  • Harness your audience – Pirates mobilize their audiences to support their position.  Enrollment of the mass culture ensures legislative change.

Jan 23rd 10 Posted by justin in GEO755

GEO755 – Robbins, Peet & Watts

Robbins – Political Ecology

Chapters 1 – 4

Chapter One:  The Hatchet and the Seed

• This chapter serves as a general introduction to the field of political ecology.  Recognizing that the nature-society divide is a Romantic mythologization of the West, the chapter introduced ontology as a complex web of environmental linkages between humans and the environment (5).
• The difference between political and apolitical ecology is that political ecology views ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert (5).
• A lot of definitions of the term.  My favorite is “Illustrating the political dimensions of environmental narratives and in deconstructing particular narratives to suggest that accepted ideas of degradation and deterioration may not be simple linear trends that tend to predominate” (7). 
• Some apolitical ecological theories:
  • Ecoscarcity:  This holds that because human populations are exploding, environmental systems are incapable of supporting them.  This leads to starvation and disease. 
    • Arguments against:  Resources aren’t consumed equally based on population – note the Global south only consuming 20% of resources.
    • The environment isn’t a finite resource constantly depleting.  In fact, resources are constructed (8).
  • Modernization arguments – This holds that ecological crises are the result of native populations not adopting modern “Green” revolution agricultural practices.
    • This position reinscribes colonial practice by assuming Northern knowledge is more valuable than indigenous practice.
  • Both these theories (and other apolitical ecologies) ignore political factors.
• 3 assumptions of political ecologists:
  • Costs and benefits associated with environmental change are distributed unequally
  • These unequal distributions of cost and benefit reinforce existing social and economic inequality
  • This also maintains political implications between actors on both sides of the coin (11).
• Four primary concentrations of political ecology:
  • Degradation and marginalization:  land degradation is looked at in a political context – not blaming local people’s indigenous practices.
  • Environmental conflict:  conflicts about environment are raced, gendered, and classed.
  • Conservation and control:  what happens to local peoples when conservation is implemented?
  • Environmental identity and social movement:  political and social issues are linked to basic issues of livelihood and environmental protection (14).

Chapter Two – A Tree with Deep Roots

• Political ecology has a long history and traces its roots through Kropotkin, early critical approaches of human-environment research (Humboldt) to hazards research and finally cultural ecology.
• Environmental determinism – the idea that humans are a result of their environmental context.  This means that successful populations are found in particular environments and climates.
• Kropotkin argued that the case “for competition as the central component of evolution was product less of empirical observations of natural phenomena than a reading of a social hierarchy into the natural world” (21).  WOW.
• K. also notes that “left to their own devices, subsistence production systems are generally cooperative and sustainable.
• Critical environmental pragmatism:  Posits that man effects the environment, not vice-versa.  Also recognizes the invisible bonds that create ecosystems.
• Hazards research:  takes as its goal the management and amelioration of risk – defined as the calculable likelihood of problematic outcomes of human actions and decisions.
• A flood is a social-natural event, a hybrid human-environmental artifact, no more an act of nature than one of planning (27).  This points to the subjective constructedness of what we often call natural disasters.
• Cultural ecology:  academic exploration of the development and expression of culture, especially on and within the environment.  It approaches human environment issues ecosystematically; however, this approach often ignores the geopolitical reasons for human-environment issues.  By viewing humans as essentially the same as other plant and animal species, basic functional hypotheses could be proposed to explain complex cultural patterns.
• Problems of cultural ecology:
  • Because of a logic of adaptation, reductionist conclusions about “if people do it, it must be adaptive” truncate agency and creative possibility.
  • Focuses almost exclusively on developing peoples or rural contexts.
  • It ignores political explanations about peripherization.
• Scales are essential for understanding political ecology.  Scales seem to be the nesting of one system inside another to try and quantify the complexity of different systems.  Unfortunately, this also seems inadequate.  Consider how things actually happen associationally.  Does scaling make room for inter-scale movement (like D&G’s rhizome) or is it simply hierarchical up/down?

Chapter Three – The Critical Tools

• This chapter serves as a theoretical grounding for the field of political ecology.
• Common property theory – an understanding that all natural resources were managed as collective or common property before capitalist expansion into these areas.
• Green materialism – A Marxist theory, this account understands that any social or cultural system is enmeshed in historical and material conditions and relations – real things.  This is in contradistinction to the idealism that ideas and consciousness are the engines of history.
• Materialist history accepts that different modes of production (combinations of key social and material elements such as labor, technology, and capita) are in flux and create ways for us to make a living from nature.  These modes of production also explain the organization of society across space and time.
• Contradictions in systems that extract surplus value from society and nature create ruptures wherein sustainability is impossible.  During these times, new articulations or hybrid structures take the place of the former modes of production to accommodate changing social conditions.
• Oriental despotism was a classical materialist theory developed by Wittfogel in the height of the McCarthy era that claimed that political organization was a result of the environment.  Though attractive, it wasn’t tenable.  This theory is flawed because collectivities can and do perform the same function of bureaucracies and hence, because of multiplicity and different governmental forms, a direct causation relationship was flawed.
• Dependency thesis:  the marginal status of developing nations was the result of trade terms established during the colonial period – a developed “harvesting” of the developing world – a dependence on them for natural resources.
• Surplus can be derived – in a Marxian analysis – from both humans (labor) and nature (resources); therefore, a response to the unreasonable extraction of surplus deserves a political response.  This field is called the “political economy of nature.”  (51).
• Lessons from materialism:
  • Social and cultural relationships are rooted in economic interactions amongst people and between people and non-human objects and systems
  • Exogenous imposition of unsustainable extractive regimes of accumulation result in environmental and social stress
  • Production for the global market leads to contradictions and dependencies (51).
• Peasant studies refocuses the emphasis of Marxist critique away from the urban industrial masses to the peasant and is achieved in a constantly fluid system that embodies the “moral economy of the peasant” and “everyday resistance.”
  • Moral economy of the peasant – this states that peasants are faced with subsistence risks that create social systems of mutual assistance and tolerable exploitation.
  • Everyday resistance – because of subsistence risks, outright revolution is often not possible in peasant communities; hence, peasants resist capitalizations through small acts of everyday resistance.  This negotiation between the rural proletariat and the rural bourgeoisie is the basis of the peasant economy of the rational producer – a producer who will not attempt to accumulate capital but will allocate labor towards meeting household substinence needs.
• Feminist Development Studies – argues that interactions with the environment are gendered. . . as a result, knowledges about how to cope with environmental concerns is decidedly female; however, the decisions made about these concerns are decidedly male.
• Critical environmental history:  Looking at long views of history to try and counter quick development schemes and an emphasis on the rural aspects of ecological life.
  • A bit controversial because it relies on the sort of speculative history that feminist revisionist historiography in rhet/comp. has confronted concerning figures like Aspasia.
• Knowledge/Power/Discourse – Grounded in poststructural critiques, this recognizes that “othering” of the global south is advantageous for Northern industrialists because discourses of control and authority are put into play in order to deauthorize indigenous knowledges.  Working through Foucault, this strand of political ecology allows ecologists to interrogate discourses to determine who is doing the defining for what reasons and why.  Truth is constructed and an effect of power relations.  Understanding implications of power/knowledge is essential for getting beyond mere scientific panaceas toward real change by manipulation of discourse authority and practice.

Chapter Four:  A Field Crystallizes

• Chains of explanation – these are the threads with which political ecologists trace the development of ecological events across scales.  We might call them networks.  They are, however, constructed and recreated as best serves the needs of the researcher toward what they perceive as the correct social justice.  As Robbins notes, “The problem in assembling such explanations is that selecting the suite of variables and the appropriate scale is difficult and must be driven at least in part by theory.  The chain of explanation is as much art as science” (75).  Well, there’s your rhetoric at work.
• Marginalization – the push of communities at the fringes of social power with little bargaining strength in the market and little force in political process.  These populations are usually pushed into ecologically marginal spaces and economically marginal social positions (77).
• Conservation is on the fore of political ecology today.  There are numerous political implications of closing off areas from both indigenous and outside populations.

Peet and Watts – Liberation Ecologies:  Environment, Development Social Movements

Chapter One:  Development, Sustainability, and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism

• Sustainability has linked together a) global environmental crisis; 2) global demography (populations); and 3) global economic inequality.
• The introduction is broken into three sections.  1) political ecology itself is considered in the contexts of postructrualism and discourse theory; 2) Development theory is considered in relation to poststructuralist philosophy; and 3) environmental politics are considered with an emphasis on environmental social movements.
• Interestingly, P.E. seem to be related by shared sites of inquiry, not by a specific theory (6).  This has a lot of analogs in rhetoric and composition.
• Some weaknesses from P.E. in the 70s and 80s:
  • Undue emphasis on poverty and poor peasants must also recognize that environmental degradation is also equally – if not more so – the result of capital/affluence (7).
  • An eye must be turned toward urban environments as well as rural.
  • In addition to land, other sites like worker environments, air, and other “resources” must be considered if P.E. is going to be a just and equal movement.
• The political arenas of the household, workplace, and state must be considered in total – not on a basis of convenient volunteerism – if P.E. is going to be successful (8-9, top).
• The 2^nd contradiction of capitalism:  there are some production conditions (namely, nature, labor, power, and community) that cannot be produced in a capitalist system; therefore, the state mediates and politicizes conflicts around these conditions to try and maintain capitalist accumulation (9).
• A nice observation on the attempt to incorporate politics into P.E.:  most Western efforts toward environmental health and sustainability are usually thinly veiled efforts to control global resources.
• An interest in civil engagement with the environment is also the territory of P.E.
• The fourth theme of the book – the discursive approaches that confront a plurality of approaches in environmental and resource problems – is where I want to focus! (11)  Specifically, this is concerned with “regulatory knowledge” and the institutionalization of particular forms of knowing.  These power/knowledge relations are important.
• Aspects of an envirograted political ecology (7-12):
  • Definition of political ecology (making connections between capitalism and ecological degradation explicit).
  • Introduction of politics to political ecology
  • Association of political ecology and civil institutions
  • Discursive approaches to tackle plurality in political ecology
  • The creation of environmental histories
  • The interrogation of ecology as a term – is it dates and systems oriented?
• Foucault:  Regimes of Truth – control the political economy of truth which constitutes part of the power of the great political and economic apparatuses:  these diffuse “truth,” particularly in the modern form of “scientific discourse,” through societies, in a process infused with social struggles” (13)
• Working through Foucault, Derrida, and Adorno and Horkheimer, the author notes how “reason” is merely a ideology – a discourse of self-representation that uses European Enlightenment principles to claim global supremacy through military-industrial conquest.
• The position of the subaltern is considered on 15.  For Spivak, the recovery of peasant consciousness – the subaltern – is a Western essentialist notion that privileges European subjectivity – still a dangerous subject-position.  This subject position waits on subjectivities to be assigned. . . in the case of the woman dominations systems of class, ethnicity and gender must be assigned; hence, once these subjectivities have been foisted on the female, she becomes unable to speak – rendered mute in a subjective experience of European subalternarity.
• Regional discursive formations:  modes of thought, logics, themes, styles of expression and typical metaphors that run through the discursive history of a region (16).
• Development strategies  in poststructural discourse analysis often are viewed as efficient colonizers on behalf of the central strategies of power (17).
• Thesis:  Western modernist discursive formation formulated during momentous changes in global power relations, in control over nature, in science and technology, has as its dynamic theme the core concept of “development” (17).
• Though development has been conceived as a relatively modern event tied to Keynesian economics, P&W argue that it is much older.  Here’s a genealogy:
  • The notion of development as an analogue to the unbridled lust for capital is noted in Victorian tracts from the mid 19^th century.
• Development is defined different ways based on the economic system that is dominant at the time be it market-based or state-based.
• Development is currently couched in the context of populist movements against large-scale corporatization schemes. . . I think (26).  Luckily populism goes beyond democracy and politics toward simple consensus.
• To amend classical notions of Marxism, Gramsci recommended two things: 1) cultural strife can be treated by cultural hegemony through tradition, myth, morality, and common sense rather than just state force (38); and 2) material conditions are important, but ideological and political practices are the real basis for change.
• Habermas notes the differences between system (people operate under strategic rationalities and technical rules) with lifeworlds (communicative rationality oriented toward consensus, understanding and collective action (30).
• I appreciate the importance of Scott’s formulation of everyday resistances as more effective than mass protest (34).
• The purpose of “liberation ecologies”:  the intention is not simply to add politics to political ecology, but to raise the emancipatory potential of environmental ideas and to engage directly with larger landscapes of debates over modernity, its institutions, and its knowledges (37).