Dimensions of Prejudice: Towards a Political Economy of Bigotry 3039114239, 9783039114238

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Towards a Political Economy of Bigotry

Peter La

Dimensions of Prejudice

Zak Cope

Dimensions of Prejudice Towardsa PoliticalEconomy ofBigotry

PETERLANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin• Bruxelles• Frankfurt am Main • New York• Wien

Bibliographicinformation published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is availableon the Internet at . British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is availablefrom The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Cope, Zaic. Dimensions of prejudice : towards a political economy of bigotry/ Zaic Cope. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-03-911423-8 (alk.paper) 1. Prejudices. I. Title. HM1091.C66 2008 303.3'8501--dc22 2008034719

ISBN 978-3-03911-423-8 Cover design: Mette Bundgaard, Peter Lang Ltd

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2008

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For Brona, with love always

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Prejudice and Rationality The Problem of Prejudice The Genealogy of Prejudice Science and Critical Realism Conclusion: Rationally Overcoming Prejudice Chapter 2: Prejudice as Ideology Prejudice and Error The Concept of Ideology Marx's Concept of Ideology Conclusion: Ideology and Prejudice Chapter 3: The Psychological Formation of Prejudice The Three Basic Modes of Intellectual Prejudice The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Mind Prejudice and the Neurotic Personality The Prejudicial Personality Prejudice and Reasoning Conclusion: The Social Psychology of Prejudice Chapter 4: The Sociology of Prejudice What is the Sociology of Prejudice? Theoretical Foundations for the Sociology of Prejudice The Societal Bases of Prejudice Conclusion: Prejudice in Society

9 ll 11 16

42 53 55 55 57 59 79

83 83 91 97

101 118 126

131 131 135 160

203

Chapter 5: Political Bigotry Discrimination and Chauvinism The Capitalist Economy Capitalism and the Politics of' Ethnicity' Capitalism and Racialised Society Conclusion: The Psychopolitics of Racism

205 205 210 236 252 275

Chapter 6: The Communication of Prejudice Culture and Prejudice 'Culture' As Ideology Postindustrial Culture and Prejudice Communication Production and Prejudice Conclusion: Fetishised Culture and Bigotry

283

Bibliography Index

359 397

8

284

295 313 334 357

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mother for her lifelong love and support; Dr John Barry in the Politics, International Studies and Philosophy department of Queen's University Belfast for his constructive criticism, insights and encouragement; Dr James Daly for his critical input and teaching over the years; my friends Sean O'Meara, Jonathan Millar, Stephen Downey and Ciaran Murphy for many productive discussions; the Department of Education and Leaming in the UK for funding the doctoral course of study upon which the present work is based; and Alexis Kirschbaum of Peter Lang Publishing for her help and enthusiasm for this book project. Most of all, I would like to thank Drona for being with me.

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Chapter I Prejudice and Rationality

The Problem of Prejudice People have long been aware of the negative influence of prejudice upon the human capacity for rationality. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the question of prejudice has plagued notions of human beings as zoon ratikon, or even Homo sapiens, for millennia. Despite this, the forms human awareness of prejudice has taken have been extremely diverse and often contradictory. Over time, prejudicial thinking has been variously taken to be avoided, overcome, despised, cherished, despaired of, or resigned to. Clearly, defining the nature of prejudice must occupy a central place in the belief systems of thinking people everywhere. As such, the question of how we are to encounter prejudice is not merely one for professional philosophers to ponder. Understanding prejudice is vital to understanding the ways in which we understand the world, and how our knowledge of it develops. Thinking about prejudice also means questioning how we are each to relate to the different cultures and peoples of the world, as well as how we are to relate to what is ostensibly 'our own' culture and traditions. As Andrew Sayer writes: 'In order to understand the world we must simultaneously understand one another.' 1 The history of the transcendence of prejudice has been, in large part, a history of the struggle for the self-knowledge and freedom of billions of individuals, and even of the human species itself. It is one of the strengths of the concept of 'prejudice' that it is by definition both a practical and an intellectual concern. An understanding of the promulgation of prejudice undoubtedly impacts upon the age-old speculative problem, in modem times definitively expressed by Kant

Sayer ( 1992, 24).

11

( 1724-1804 )2 of the limits and conditions of human understanding. Insofar as prejudice is of fundamentally academic interest, it bears directly upon the various fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, historiography, politics and the very possibility of science (or, as I shall consider it, the critical unity of theory and practical experiment) itself. Further, in addition to its extracurricular significance, it cannot be said that prejudice is a purely local, national, or regional concern. The contemporary nature of prejudice is such that it has assumed globalised proportions and vitally affects human relations in every country on every continent. In recent times, we have witnessed serious conflagrations of ethnic conflict, religious extremism, nationalist fervour and war, and a concurrent explosion of intolerance and bigotry on the world stage.3 In no sense has this all been a one-way street, however. There have certainly been many positive signs that this bleak state of affairs will not go unchallenged and, indeed, crucial struggles are taking place against the destructive forces that cause prejudice. Yet before we can understand the nature of these struggles against prejudice, and assess their potential and dynamics, we must take a less jaundiced view. Undoubtedly, prejudice has played a decisive role in some of the slaughter and discrimination practiced in modem history. Yet, at the same time, I believe it is crucial to stress that prejudice is not merely a problem of parochial world-views or 'mistaken' ideas. Prejudices are ultimately part and parcel of real (as opposed to imaginary) histories, real struggles, and real conflicts amongst rival groupings in particular

2 3

12

Kant (1781, 1990). One need only think of the wars in Rwanda in the early 1990s, the national tensions in India and Pakistan, the rise in ethnic and religious conflict in the fonner Soviet Bloc, and the new anti-Semitism of lslamophobia evident throughout Europe and the United St.ates.Contrary to the prevalent reductionist caricature of these and many other recent and contemporaneous conflicts as rooted in deep-seated and ancient 'tribal' and/or 'civilisational' tensions, I hope to analyse in a much more systematic and rigorous fashion the objective causes and conditions for the centrality of the avowal of non-rational social identities to many of these conflicts.

material circumstances. 4 It is in this sense that we must be wary of our use of the word 'prejudice', and be careful not to imply an essential belligerent stupidity as the motive force of social conflict or 'reactionary' social consciousness. We must be wary of a purely intellectualistic contempt for prejudicial thinking, as in the liberal notion that prejudice is merely the mental deficiency of the uneducated, just as we must be wary of the equally intellectualist assumption of prejudice as an essential, that is, irremediable part of a people's existence, as with the theoretical politics of postmodern (and particularly post-Marxist) 'culturalism' (see Chapter 6). In either case, the underlying Mannheimian5 assumption is that the 'scientist' stands over the 'prejudicial' mass, of which the unscientific individuals by which it is constituted are rarely likely to progress beyond their own insular worldview. I believe that many cultural theorists concerned to stress the irreducibility of ethnic/cultural difference6 often apply the same identitarian notions (whether based on a supposed homogenous commonality of religion, race, or culture) in their explanation of society and social inter-action as do, they allege, the abstract rational choice theorists or economistic Marxists they hope to rebuke with their relativism. In line with the analysis of McLaren and Scatamburlo-D' Annibale (2003), by understanding prejudice in terms of culturally-grounded intolerance, or overly narrow 'cultural' horizons, without articulating how these cultural horizons of persons or groups of persons have been shaped by fundamental material inequalities in the division of labour, power, and wealth, the latter to be understood as determined according to the needs and functionalities of the capitalist mode of production and the international geo-political relations based thereon, is to collude in the perpetuation of difference and the hierarchically ordered hegemonies 4 5

6

SeePlatow and Hunter (2002, 195-215). Karl Mannheim claimed that intellectuals were the only 'group' in society, being classless and not attached to any particular community or sectional interest, which could understand it without prejudice. As a consequence of his conflation of objective with subjective knowledge everywhere except the academy, Mannheim failed to understand how the class position of an intellectual organisation itself invariably constrains, delimits, and often produces the prevalent modes of thought it professes an interest in. Seefor example Fuery and Mansfield (2000); or Mouffe ( 1988).

13

of cultural exclusivities practised, often, in its name.7 In order for people to comprehensively grasp the construction of cultural difference in terms of political and productive praxis, that is, to understand difference as it is discursively constructed in and through the institutional media of power and production, it is, of course, necessary that persons or groups of persons understand those ideas and beliefs that are specific to the wider culture of which they are taken to be or take themselves to be a part, as not simply biologically determined, not eternal, and not essentially constitutive of their needs, wants and desires as materially sustained human beings. In my view, it is precisely in and through the scientific comprehension of reality that persons and groups of persons can begin to overcome prejudice and can and do go about the process of rationally changing the world to best meet their own and others' needs and interests. The theory presented in the following chapters is that, in bringing together science and society, in a conscious political fashion designed to practically overcome structurally grounded inequalities of class, gender and race, social individuals are far less likely to indulge in and reproduce prejudicial perspectives on social and intellectual problems. Before proceeding to a short history of the concept of 'prejudice', it may be useful to provide an at least provisional definition here. Commonly, the word prejudice in English, having its root in the Latin word praejudicium (meaning a 'harmful' or 'disadvantageous' prior judgement), means an 'unreasonable or unfair dislike or preference'.8 A prejudice is an unreasonable, though not necessarily unreasoned, claim likely to unwarrantedly privilege or denigrate notions about particular phenomena (things, persons, judgements, doctrines, life-styles, cultures, worldviews or events). Yet, if we are to properly 7

8

14

For other works advocating more class-based as opposed to culturalist understandings of ethnic difference and bigoby, see Bannerji (2000); Marable ( 1995); and San Juan Jr. (2002). Collins Pocket English Dictionary(1999, 389). Evidently, the current meaning of the word, as with all language, reflects the influence of history. The Latin sense of the word, 'harmful' or adverse judgement, has given way to the more ambiguous usage of 'unreasonable' or 'unfair' judgement. The notion that rationality is a good thing for human beings has a long history, some of which I will touch on in this chapter.

defend this rationalist idea of prejudice, and if it is currently necessary to do so, it is essential to examine the ways in which the awareness of prejudice has affected conceptions of knowledge and truth throughout history. By doing this, in outlining the philosophical traditions that have influenced the contemporary epistemological paradigms within which the major conceptions of prejudice/s tend to be formed, we can derive a better sense of the debates surrounding the problem of prejudice in human affairs. The following articulated definition of 'prejudice' should provide a methodological perspective from which we can understand and evaluate and critique much of the more unedifying doctrines and thinking on the political landscape. It is not my intention to present an exhaustive genealogical account of the concept of prejudice. To do so would require intensive research into the epistemologies and social histories of the native tribal societies of the Americas, Australia, Europe, Asia and Africa, and the ancient civilisations and philosophies of China, Babylon, Egypt, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Greece, Mesopotamia, Rome and Palestine, and many others besides. In short, a truly historical exegesis of the trajectories of the idea of 'prejudice' would be a monumental task on a global historical scale, and certainly one beyond the scope of this essay alone.9 As noted above, in its original Latin sense, the word 'prejudice' was strictly speaking a legal term, used to denote a situation where a definite judgement had been made about a defendant, but one which was likely to adversely affect her chances in court. 10 Since then, the meaning of the word has been both expanded and narrowed at different points. In this chapter, I wish to introduce the term as connoting a certain mediational episteme (or epistemological principle) with regard to the possibility or impossibility of 'objective' truth. In other words, for the remainder of the chapter I will treat prejudice, in its various historical senses, not as a technical term with a specific, say juridical, meaning, but as a term related to differing conceptions of knowledge and its acquisition in various 9

10

Such a history has been admirably charted by Collins (2000) with regard to the development of philosophical 'movements' as such, but it is not a genealogical study of one or more 'concepts'. Gadamer (1979, 240).

15

philosophies. Without wishing to hastily anticipate any conclusions, I will suggest some continuity between historically distinct philosophical models of the attainment of knowledge and the limits thereof. Furthermore, without engaging in the conceptual imperialism of which philosophy is so unfortunately prone, I assume that the idea of prejudice has a more far-reaching history than that pertaining to just those societies that have used the word. Thus I am not propounding a nominalist or strictly etymological genealogy of prejudice, but a broader conceptual or philosophical genealogy, writing prejudice in terms of a history of certain common epistemological tropes. The aim of this chapter is essentially to outline and uphold the rationalist philosophy of science, as expressed by myriad philosophies throughout history, in opposition to its detractors and the defenders, both past and present, of a radical sceptical relativism. 11 In short, in this chapter I hope to show that the concept of prejudice is a central point of divergence between, broadly, objectivist and anti-objectivist philosophy of science. 12

The Genealogy of Prejudice Some Classical Conceptions of Prejudice

The desire for knowledge without prejudice has a longer and more international history than many Eurocentric accounts of the history of philosophy, with but a few notable exceptions, would suggest. 13 In opposition to many of the discursive institutions of tribal societies, 11 12 13

16

See especially the works of Feyerabend (1975); Rorty (1991); and Bloor (1991). See Cunningham (1979) for a concise overview of the debates betweenobjectivism and anti-objectivism in defence of the fonner. See Bernal (1987, 1991) for an overview of the historical literature assessing the determining influences of African and Asiatic civilisations on the development of the Ancient Greek model, and a challenge to the spurious notion that 'science' was peculiarly Greek in origin.

wherein the deepest forms of knowledge are the sole preserve of witchdoctors and tribal elders, of which esoteric training is confined to a few, Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha, cautioned the Indian monks of the sixth century BC to guard against prejudice. Buddha said: Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis. when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then 14 accept it and live up to it

Yet Buddha also cautioned against this apparently proto-rationalist philosophy. For Buddha, insufficient regard for faith and its 'universal truth' leads, as in Ivan Karamazov's I s dystopic vision, to a world with no morals where anything and everything is permitted. Buddha nonetheless believed that the presence of prejudice in one's dealings with others would inevitably lead to grave misunderstanding, and place unnecessary obstacles on the path to knowledge (and, also, wise governance in both an individual-ethical and socio-political sense). Clearly, one can see an intellectual precursor in Buddha of those modem European philosophers and theologians who, especially after Descartes' Meditations (1640), stressed the role of self-consciousness and self-doubt in the search for truth and wisdom. 16 Writing elsewhere to and after Buddha, the philosophy of Plato (c. 428--427 - 348-347 BC), his epistemology being strongly allied to his ontology, depicted a strict dividing line between knowledge and opinion, the former reflecting the light cast by the eternal realm of the forms, the latter a product of the demagoguery of the marketplace. 14

15 16

See also Platt (1989). It is worth noting that atheistic scepticism regarding the claims of professional clerics has a long tradition in Indian philosophy. The Carvaka school of Vedantic thought, for example. dating from around 600 BC, was both anti-clerical and favoured the notion of equality between the sexes. See Riepe(1961, 75). Dostoevsky (1912). Carrithers ( 1985).

17

Thus, in his famous simile of the cave, 17 Plato depicts the following scene to illustrate his distaste for the prejudices of unthinking men. A philosopher spends much of his life sitting outside basking in radiant sunlight, contemplating the supernatural 'fonns' of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and so on, which both illuminate reality and enable one to comprehend its eternal nature. This philosopher, whilst taking a walk one day, happens upon a cave, inside of which there sits a small gang of men each chained to the wall. The men, says Plato, are laughing and clapping at shadows cast by the movement of men in the marketplace outside, which flicker across the opposite cave wall. The men have been trapped in this cave all their lives and it seems that they take the shadows as 'real' things, that is, not as appearances but as autonomously subsisting fonns. The philosopher, shocked by their ignorance, admonishes them to break free of their chains and go outside and see reality. The shadow is not reality, says the philosopher; it is merely a pale reflection of a base (superficial) reality. The men, however, fiercely deny that there is any reality other than their beloved shadows and threaten to kill the philosopher if he does not leave post-haste. Despite the supernatural ontology suggested in this parable (Plato's notion that nature itself is not the 'ultimate reality' but only the reflection of the so-called 'forms' emanating from that of 'Good'), it is clear how aware Plato and Socrates were of the illusoriness of much of the perceptions of unthinking men. Plato's Socratic dichotomy between knowledge and opinion has exercised a massive influence on Western thought since its inscription. Friend and foe alike have consistently portrayed Plato as the father of all later philosophy, which, for Whitehead, had been merely 'footnotes' to his great insights.' 8 For Heidegger (I 889- 1976), Plato's theory of forms was one of the central impetuses to the two-thousand-year-old 'forgetting of being', supposedly disastrous for the development of the Western mind. 19 For Nietzsche (1844-1900), Plato's notion of an otherworldly absolute knowledge was 'anti-life' and his hated Chris17 18 19

18

Plato (1987, Book VII, 255-65). Whitehead (1933, 37). Heidegger ( 1998, 155-83 ).

tianity 'Platonism for the masses'. For Plato, at any rate, opinion was counterpoised to truth, the former rooted in irrational prejudices. Undoubtedly, there was no mean between knowledge and prejudice for Plato. Knowledge, as emanating from a rational contemplation of the eternal forms had no place for the apparent contingency of personal or group prejudices. At the same time, Plato's philosophy appears ambiguous, since he does not seem to hold the view that the forms can be fully grasped, in any transparent sense, by the human mind. Direct contemplation of the form of the Good itself, which, at the top of a hierarchy of being, is said to illuminate and propagate all the other forms, seems to have been regarded by Plato as out of reach for the inquiring human mind.20 Nevertheless, Plato was convinced that the only truth available to human beings and philosophers, in particular, is that deduced from reflection on the eternal nature of essential forms (of justice, beauty, roundness or whatever). This can only be carried out by the wholly unselfish, disinterested, unprejudiced mind. Certainly much later claims for the objective status of scientific knowledge have aimed to reflect this disdain for selfinterested conclusions, without thereby defending the idealistic 'navelgazing' of the Platonic methodology. The quasi-mystical abstractions of Platonic metaphysics were to some extent abandoned by later Greek philosophies,21 under the influence of Democritean atomism and Aristotelian materialism.22 The elitism and idealism of Plato was rejected by Epicurus (341-270 BC) who placed greater value on practical ethics and understanding than

20 21

22

Leask (2000). This is not to suggest that the post-Socratic philosophers rejected all of Plato's thinking or above all bis distinction between knowledge and prejudice. Aristotle, in particular, did not. Frederick Engels, Karl Marx's long-time collaborator, defined materialism in a pithy way. He wrote : 'The materialistic outlook on nature means nothing more

than the simple conceptionof naturejust as it is, without alien addition' (Engels 1940, 198). Essentially, what Engels meant is that materialism is that philosophy which aims to describe the natural world (including human behaviour therein) solely with regard to nature itself, and not by imputing causal powers to any 'supernatural' force or entity posited outside the same. As such, materialism is a vital and crucial philosophical linchpin of the sciences.

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did his illustrious forbears. Notably, the practical Epicurean philosophy was opposed to what it considered unjust prejudices, including those that stressed the intellectual inferiority of women and slaves. The Greek and much later Roman philosophy of Scepticism, associated with the names of Phyrro (c. 360-270 BC) and Sextus Empiricus (fl. C. 200) amongst others, was a reaction to the sheer diversity of opinions and interpretations of phenomena of its time. Collins attributes the rapid growth of sceptical philosophies amongst the Greek leisured classes as to some extent a result of the destruction of the Greek City-States of 330 BC onwards. 23 According to Bryant24 whilst the flourishing of Greek democracy in Athens, conditional upon the growth of Athenian power by imperial conquest and massive slavery, encouraged vigorous public debate amongst the privileged Greek upper classes, the 'chattering classes' of Antiquity, the destruction of such by Macedonia resulted in the wholesale curtailment of public dialogue and debate, and the consequent tum to 'privatised' ethics and thinking. For Collins, an additional factor in the burgeoning of scepticism was the sheer proliferation of philosophies in postImperial Athens, some materialist and practically oriented like the Epicureans and some avowedly 'other-worldly' (like the anti-social cynicism of Diogenes). Thus, whilst scepticism was at first a sort of proto-critical philosophy designed to show the flaws in various arguments, it eventually became associated with a metaphysical disbelief in the ability of the human mind to gamer any contact with the truth whatsoever. Scepticism was originally a revolt against the dogmatic, that is, unproven, acceptance or dictation of a belief (and, of course, the society in which such acceptance and dictation is commonplace). One can see in its principal undecidability a certain attack on the pretensions of intellectual prejudice. It is, however, a philosophy totally unwilling to positively challenge a belief from the perspective of another, and is thus, in contrast to Platonism (especially the neo-Platonism of Plotinus (AD 500)), methodically undialectical. Similarly, though from an almost opposite perspective, one can see in Christian Gnosticism (and various other early Christian sects), with its 23 24

20

Collins (2000, I 05). Bryant (1996).

turn away from the uncertamt1es and myriad prejudices of the 'material' world, and its stress on the mystical awareness of the truth available only to initiates, a battle against the arbitrary nature of unreasonable judgements (and the crudity of those who would give and receive them). Yet, as with all 'negative' theology, Gnosticism rejected worldly prejudices from the perspective of absolute knowledge and faith in the one true God and His Word, and thus from a totalising prejudice. With the rise of theocratic Augustinian Christianity in the West, and later Islam in the East by the fifth century AD, the conceptual priority of applied dialectical reason in the proper understanding of nature and humanity was put to rest for a time. This is not at all to suggest that rational, or indeed scientific, inquiry ceased to occur in the medieval era, as is suggested by the European Enlightenment's sweeping characterisation of it as the 'Dark Ages'. In fact, religion in the medieval world clearly did not prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for scientific inquiry. The Islamic 'natural' philosophers, mathematicians, legal theorists and anatomists engaged in valuable 25 and influential research in all of these fields. The Medieval Muslim world generated enduring sophisticated metaphysical doctrines and political laws (encoded in the theocratic Sharia) regulating and administering a vast and complex civilisation . The scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries directly appropriated much of the Muslim scholars' studies for their own purposes. Much of the intellectual endeavours of the time, however, centred on the ideal that rational inquiry ought to supplement, rather than supplant, faith and religious revelation as the ultimate font of truth. 26 Thus, St. Anselm (1033-1109) inaugurated the hermeneutic method when he adopted the Latin phrase credo ut intelligam, 'I believe in order that I 2S

26

Muslims were also active in the initial development of world trade and were very influenced by other cultures. As Christopher Hitchens notes in the foreword to a book on Andalusia, this Islamic state was perhaps the most culturally vibrant and tolerant of the Middle Ages (Menocal 2003). Undoubtedly, Samir Amin is right to see in this apparent capitulation to fideism, the limits of deductivism as based on the objective curtailment of scientific approaches to study appropriate to pre-modem 'tributary' economies. (See Amin 1989, 16, 28).

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may understand', as his maxim. The Islamic philosopher Averroes ( 1126-1198) expressed similar ideas, despite stressing, long before Bacon ( 1561-1626), the necessity of experiment and induction as sources of truth. 27 Much of the scientific method articulated by distinguished thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas ( 1225-1274) was firmly grounded in Muslim-developed Aristotelian realism, the central tenets of which were seriously criticised by Galileo and Copernicus around the renaissance period and, earlier, by distinctly non-rationalistic nominalist philosophers like William of Ockham (1288-1347). 28 Political machinations revolving around the burgeoning power of the European middle classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and economic developments resulting from the industrial revolution, eventually led to the wholesale abandonment of Aristotle's corpus as the basis for scientific inquiry and technological innovation. Before then, to all intents and purposes, any beliefs or inquiries that clashed with the scholastic clerical teachings in the theocratic societies of the Christian and Muslim worlds were deemed 'heretical', and subject to extreme censorship, and personal punishment. Thus the heliocentric views of the great Renaissance scientist Galileo ( 1564-1642) were deemed blasphemous by the Catholic Church of the early sixteenth century as were the views of the radically secular political philosophers Machiavelli ( 1469-1527), and Hobbes ( 1588-1679) by both the Catholic and Anglican Churches. Further, and fundamentally, any serious scientific investigation of the limits of human understanding was structurally precluded by the politico-economic confines of medieval Christendom . Such sociological inquiry as then occurred tended to reveal the 'etemality' of the transparent social bonds of Feudal hi27 28

22

Wahba et al. (1996). See Copleston (1993). Aristotelian realism asserted that the essential being of particular material things, the universal property that makes them what they are, is always the same. He suggested that the development of a thing was entirely adducible from an examination of its essential properties, which must impel the thing to develop in necessary ways. The innovation of post-Aristotelian science was to treat things and their development in their interrelations with other things, according to which changes in things' interrelations would produce changes in their internal properties.

erarchy. The Middle Ages were characterised by a general disdain for serious inquiry into sociological matters and the attendant humanistic research such inquiry would later produce via the Italian Renaissance. The flowering of scientific theories during the Italian Renaissance period and after, as intellectually related to the rejection of Scholastic Aristotelianism 'en bloc', was to have a huge impact on the development of philosophy and, at least tacitly, on the importance of the concept of prejudice. For rather than relying on Aristotelian Church screeds as the fonts of knowledgeable inquiry, Descartes' subjectivist methodological tum represented a characteristically Renaissance attempt to situate the enlightened individual as the locus of scientific innovation.

The Enlightenment Conception of Prejudice

What is called the Enlightenment, and is primarily the product of a wave of intellectual activity in Scotland and France, was fundamentally a political movement. This is not to suggest that most if not all Enlightenment writers were polemicists or political activists, although many of the most distinguished amongst them, the Englishman Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and the Frenchman Voltaire (16941778) for example, were. Many representatives of the Enlightenment tended to be, at least in comparison to the millions of people whose lives their thoughts inspired and were inspired by, relatively apolitical. Thus Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and the historian Gibbon were all fairly conservative men generally quite content with the current trajectory of history. Nevertheless, what is common amongst these thinkers and their more agitational Enlightenment counterparts was a declared distrust of and open disdain for prejudice . It is true to say, with Kant, that the attack on prejudice, on unwarranted dogma, was the defining feature of the European Enlightenment. It is also fair to say that the major transmitter of prejudice for the European Enlightenment was organised religion and the Church. 29 Thus, the Enlightenment in Europe manifested itself as an assault on what it saw 29

Gay (1967, 58-61).

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as religious superstition and theocracy. Although many of the Enlightenment philosophers 30 did try to bring rational, logical argumentation to bear on theological questions pertaining to proofs of the existence of God, 31 the corollary of the abandonment of the notion of faith as unquestionable and the Church and scripture as eminently historical phenomena, was atheism and 'freethinking'. As we have seen, contrary to the claims of philosophers such as Gadamer, this is not an entirely modern phenomenon, since many previous philosophers had declared their opposition to the epistemological veracity of purely religious inspiration. Still, the political content of the Enlightenment stress on individual conscience, in a period of State Absolutism in Europe, was hard to miss, and gave the secular Enlightenment philosophy a popular consciousness-raising character rarely seen in Europe before that time. Paradoxically, however, to its conservative detractors the Enlightenment wished to enshrine a prejudice in favour of the ability of rational argument to give unmediated access to the Truth. This is certainly an overstatement given the anti-metaphysical philosophy of the encyclopaedists, D' Alembert (1717-1783) in particular, and the sceptical conservatism of the likes of Hume (1711-1776). The Enlightenment as such did not necessarily subscribe to any grandiose vision, a la Hegel, of the ultimate conquest of Truth by Man, or of the impending final triumph of 'Reason' in society. Yet Robespierre's justification of the revolutionary French Republican 'Terror' through the writings of Rousseau32 (himself hardly an arch-rationalist), Voltaire, and Diderot, aroused the suspicion of many conservatives in England that it was the very essence of the 'idealistic' Enlightenment attack on prejudice that led to the revolution's executions of aristocrats. From, and in, the conservative condemnation and fear of 30

31 32

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It would not be quite right to call them 'rationalists', since many of them, supportive of the revelatory character of inductive scientific research, were opposed to the cloistered navel-gazing of the Cartesian method. Nonetheless, as I have suggested, most were convinced of the epistemological priority of unalloyed human reason. The deists in particular: John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), being a prime example of significant early deism. Hampson ( 1974 ).

Republicanism, especially by the Irish Tory Edmund Burke ( 17291797) in his seminal Reflections on the Revolution in France ( 1790), and the ultra-Catholic French Royalist and apostate of Reaction Joseph de Maistre,especially in his Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions ( 1809), came the counter-enlightenment rehabilitation of authoritarian prejudice, an apparently corollary disparaging of the power of human reason and, moreover, incredulity towards the propensity of human beings to use it. Perhaps, however, the most intellectually penetrating critique of European Enlightenment philosophy came from Germany. The German Enlightenment, or AuflcJarung, whose major representative was Kant, was obviously less politically ambitious than the French. Certainly, the rationalism of Christian Wolff(l679-1754), for example, aroused the puritanical suspicions of the eighteenth century Lutheran authorities of Frederick I. But German Enlightenment assumed a considerably more literary bent than did the French or American. Thus the major representatives of the German Enlightenment, principally men like Kant, Lessing, Goethe and Mendelssohn, were committed Christians, engaged in philosophy and literary composition. Undoubtedly, this quiescent Enlightenment was related to the political 'stability' (an authoritarianism rooted in relative economic underdevelopment and the concomitant Feudalistic repression of intellectual progress) of eighteenth century Germany. Collins relates the growth of German Idealism and Romanticism, and the detached and speculative character of its major writings, to the development of university-based intellectual networks. 33 Thus, whilst the French enlightenment rationalists tended to be rather more worldly men of science, business and politics, the patronage of the burgeoning German university system, the reformed and secularised institutions of the Medieval scholastic monasteries, tended to produce more conservative and abstract philosophical works. Thus, despite the crucial influence of Kant in the development of its overall theoretical corpus, insofar as that exists, Enlightenment thinking in general never really rooted itself in German burgerlichlceit ('civil society') in the same way it did in France. Any ideological drift towards enlightenment 33

Collins (2000, 618-19).

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philosophical rationa1ism in Gennan society ultimately ran aground on the shores of Gennan Romanticism. It is not quite true to say that Romanticism as such was defined largely by a negative reception of Enlightenment thought. The youthful Hegel (1770-1831) and Schelling ( 1775-1854 ), the latter undoubtedly amongst the most significant of the philosophical Romantics, planted a tree at Tubingen seminary in honour of the French Revolution. The Eng1ish Romanticism of the poets Coleridge, Byron, and especially Shelley was even more politically progressive. However, even in its more radical political manifestations, German Romanticism in particular was characterised more by idealism than by Baylean empiricism. 34 For the Romantics, the Enlightenment's alleged scientistic reduction of all things, including the hopes and desires of men, was intolerable, and a mark of the narrow philistinism of the Enlightenment. In opposition to the objectifying mechanicism of the enlightenment, 35 German Romanticism postulated the organic unity of reason (including science) and nature.36 Clearly, though, 'Nature' was the Romantic 'master signifier' (in the structuralist sense) in marked opposition to the Enlightenment's prioritising of 'Reason.' Thus, fundamentally, the desire for freedom which, in common with the French Enlightenment, most if not all of the Romantics stressed as the ultimate aim of their thinking 37 was couched in the language of natural impulses, natural community, and the 'splendid dynamism' of Nature. It was impossible, according to Romanticism's literati, particularly Herder, Schelling and the poet Novalis, to place oneself outside nature and tradition . Each individual was indelibly marked by his position in nature's maelstrom, and could only rightly make judgements on the basis of his innate yearning for union with the Absolute. In practice 34

35

36 37

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Pierre Bayle (1647- 1706) was an experimental scientist whose methodology in particular, along with that of Sir Isaac Newton, catalysed the enlightenment critique of religion, authority, and tradition as the cornerstones of rational inquiry. Mechanicism is the notion that everything in nature, including the feelings, thoughts and desires of human beings, is the direct and predestined result of the causal force of another thing. Walzel (1966). Schelling (1988, IO).

this meant affinning in one's judgements what seemed most vital and most constitutive of the individual's organic knowledge: poetry, language and community. 38 Undoubtedly, the divide between those philosophies which upheld the calculative instrumental rationality of the isolated individual and those that emphasised the empathic rationality of the individualin-community have tremendous affinities to debates between liberal individualists such as Robert Nozick and liberal communitarians like Michael Walzer today .39 Against the supposedly presumptuous and abstract 'scientism' of the Western European Enlightenmen~ the German counter-Enlightenment, in the form of historicism (to culminate in Dilthey's (1833-1911) proto-Gadamerian notion of 'empathy') defended the traditional beliefs of the community. The peculiarities and national histories of particular cultures were deemed formative of philosophical or scientific judgements of any kind. One of the principal reasons for this historicism was the goal of philosophers like Herder ( 1744-1803) to promote Gennan nationalism, stressing Germany's cultural and spatial continuity, outside of what he and his followers considered the self-interested pragmatism of the various, oft-times crudely theocratic, principalities, and the cultural imperialism of France. It would be reductionist to assume Gennan romanticism's affirmation of prejudice as couched in wholly reactionary politics. Moreover, early Gennan historicism did allow for some appreciation, outside of the colonialist requirements of England and France of the early nineteenth century, of 'oriental' cultures, particularly Indian religion and philosophy.40 Also, many of the Gennan romantics, the young Hegel for example, were quite trenchant critics of faith-based theology. It can be argued that German romanticism provided a compelling corrective to the idealist abstractions 38

39 40

The Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico had come to similar conclusions as to the alleged 'objectivity' of rationalist inquiry in the early part of the eighteenth century. See Farrelly (2004) for a textualexcursusof the currentdebatesaroundphilosophical liberalism . Said (1979, 19). French rationalism, on the other hand, also allowed for principled appreciation of other cultures and traditions, and impelled harsh condemnations of African slavery by Diderot

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of Enlightenment rationalism. Despite its mystical overtones, amidst talk of destiny and volk, there was a strong materialist analysis inherent in German counter-Enlightenment. In their emphasis on the situatedness of all human judgement, the German romantics were to show the inability of individual human beings to adopt a 'god's~eyeview' of the world, and helped to place a very influential and important historical understanding at the base of the Kantian critique of pure reason. In their stress on the inevitable prejudices and limitations of mechanical enlightenment reason, the romantics were to some extent portending Adorno and Horkheimer's 'dialectic of enlightenment'. 41 The Enlightened disillusionment and demythologisation of all things in nature and society motivated by the principle of 'mastery', according to the latter, resulted in the world 'radiating disaster triumphant', through the cultural supremacy of purely technological manipulation. The romantic stress on the indomitability of nature by instrumental reason is surely close in spirit to the critique of scientistic culture both in the Frankfurt School and in later ecologistic critiques of 'Modernity.' In this, however, both in the language they used, and in the concepts they formulated, the counter-Enlightenment philosophers cleared intellectual paths toward a fateful and dangerous philosophical abnegation of rationality, early expressed, for example, in the personality and revelatory mysticism of the 'magus of the north', J.G. Hamann (1730-1788). 42 Certainly, contrary to the liberal idealism of Isaiah Berlin for example, it is not simply mistaken ideas which result in the establishment of prejudicial cultures. Indeed, particular philosophies of both 'rationalism' and 'irrationalism' have been seriously implicated, in Marxian and poststructuralist critiques especially, in the production and propagation of the most active prejudices.43 Still, given 41 42 43

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Horkheimer and Adorno (1973). Berlin (1993). Foucault, echoing Heidegger, remarks that it was objectivistic and calculating instrumental-technical reason that allowed the Nazis to construct concentration camps. On the other hand, it is clear that the mythology evoked in images of the Aryan Race as well as the fascist contempt for rationality and 'rootless intellectuals', were based on distinctively irrationalist political discourses. In this chapter I hope to have outlined a defence of scientific praxis that can show

our current political conjuncture, I believe it is vital for us to fonnulate a clear theoretical program for the avowedly rational understanding, articulation, and overcoming of prejudices. One of the major intellectual descendants of the historical elevation of prejudicial thinking in human relations, from the mysticism of religious acolytes, to the sophistic rhetoricians of ancient Greece, and beyond the counter-enlightenment, is what Christopher Norris calls 'conventionalism', and is called more commonly cultural 'relativism. ' 44 I believe that a concerted attempt to reinvigorate the scientific study of nature and society in political studies must, when diffused throughout society (democratic pedagogy being, itself a condition for the development of science), lead to a decrease in the preponderance of prejudice. One of the philosophical obstacles to such a goal in the academy, where much scientific study is in fact conducted, is the academic political philosophy of culturalism. Much of the hyper-sceptical beliefs of culturalism can be traced back to the major writings of Nietzsche.

Nietzschean Prejudice

Although the anti-revolutionary critics of the enlightenment and the Gennan Romantics testified to the innate limitations of the 'rational' faculties of the human mind, it would not be true to say that they disparaged human rationality to the point where they considered it, as did the ancient sceptics, impossible for us to make any claims to 'objectivity' whatever. It is only with the radical culture critique and disillusionment with the course of 'progress' in the world (especially in Condorcet's (1745-1794) ultra-moralistic sense), of Nietzsche, that the postmodern intellectual affinnation of prejudice is announced. Contrary, however, to Nietzsche's current reputation amongst literary

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the horrific irrationality of Nazi efficiency based on an assessment of the historical alternatives curtailed by Nazi expansionism as related to a realistic understanding of what political processes are detrimental/beneficial for human beings and for the extension and development of reason in society, and the parallel instrumentality of Nazi irrationalism (as based on an analysis of the policy goals implicit in Nazi ideology). Norris (1997a).

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theorists, he was not altogether opposed to science as a discipline uniquely designed and prepared to seek and discover 'truths' about the world. 4s It seems also that Nietzsche went through a number of different phases with regard to a commitment to the possibility of 'objective' apprehension of the truth. In some of his early writings, The Gay Science especially, Nietzsche at times seems quite happy to take modem science at its word, and considers its authentically demythologising character, in contrast to the romantics, as both progressive, in the quantitative sense of the ever-increasing knowledge of laws and physical order, and edifying. In time, however, Nietzsche seems to have developed a serious critique of scientific practice, seeing its allegedly inherent positivism (the position that reality is, or at any rate can only be meaningfully said to be, exactly how the human senses observe it}46 as another example of the nihilism by which Western culture was hopelessly gripped. In fact, Nietzsche's critique of the objectivity of science, is essentially derivative of this changed epistemology, one in which his contempt for the European culture of his time, in particular, the philistinism of bombastic German nationalism, Wagnerian romanticism, and Christianity, merges with his critique of narrow positivism and forces him to take a cynical view of the whole of that culture, including intellectual claims to impartiality and rationality. For Nietzsche, with one foot in the aestheticism of the Romantic tradition, the culture of a time, especially what he considered a decadent and sickly culture, cannot but impact upon writing in general. Undoubtedly, Nietzsche, like Derrida, conceives of science and philosophy as primarily kinds of writing. In one oft-cited passage, Nietzsche seems to altogether rubbish the notion of objective truth:

45 46

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Clark (1990). Positivism tends to fall victim to what Bhaskar refers to as the 'ontic fallacy' . This error of inference occurs when a discovered fact about one or another beings, and its/their interrelations, is 'naturalised' and made to apply to the thing's essential (unhistorical and immaterial) being. Since positivism treats only of the observable facts at any given moment, it is easy for it to hypostatise the appearance of a thing as its essential being.

['Truth' is a) mobile anny of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions ; worn out metaphors that have become powerless to affect the senses,coins which have their obverse (image) effaced and are now no longer 47 of account as coins but merely as metal.

Undoubtedly this, as one of the foundational (!) statements of deconstructive theory, can be taken to imply a radical rejection of any notion of truth as such. One can see the familiar structuralist -and poststructuralist conception of 'truth' as internally relative to a particular literary discourse. Yet it appearsthat Nietzsche like Derrida, as Christopher Norris48 points out, does not strictly hold to the Althusserian and later Foucauldian theory, rooted in the philosophy of science of Canguilheim and Bachelard, that a discourse does not, since it cannot, refer to anything outside itself. It is this idea of the referentiality of scientific explanation, the attempt to describe a thing as having some independent existence outside the confines of that discourse, which is central to the delineation of prejudicial judgement. A very selective reading of Nietzsche, such as the one that Heidegger pursues,49 is necessary to make him into a thinker holding truth as solely an instrument of power.so Such a philosophy is, of course, exactly what Heidegger himself professed in his Nazi addresses to the eager students of Freiburg in 1933s1 and, indeed, long after. The above quotation may in fact be read as a caveat for philosophers not to assume the trappings

47 48 49 SO

SI

Nietzsche (1977, 46). Norris (1997, 21). Heidegger (1990) . In his theory, Michel Foucault totally marginalises any critical realist account of truth as the relative accordance of scientific statements with fact or reality, instead equating 'truth' with the purely political construction of bUth-claims. For Foucault (1980, 133) "'Truth" is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, distribution, circulation and operation of statements [ ... ) "Truth" is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.' Wolin (1991, 29-40) .

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of 'common-sense' in their discourse, rather than as a grand proposal of epistemological agnosticism. It may even be read as a realistic reminder, in an age of imperialism and mass politics, of the cultural context wherein the boundaries of established truth-claims are partially defined. At any rate, it is often a mistake to take Nieusche's aphorisms as evidence of a scrupulously worked out metaphysical system, instead of as critical barbs designed to spur the unwitting reader from his stupor. Undoubtedly, Nietzsche's description of philosophical works as primarily autobiographical accounts of the writer's own prejudices has tremendous resonance in contemporary debates between what I shall refer to as critical theory and conventionalist theory.

Criticism, Convention and Prejudice

Postmodern anti-rationalism has mainly been based on a literary reconstruction of the · recognisably Humean postulate that ostensibly rational human judgements are primarily the product of what Hume called 'custom' and 'sympathy', and what contemporary neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty refer to as 'convention' and 'solidarity'. 52 Fundamental to this idea is the neo-Romantic notion that prejudice is an ineradicable part of human cognition and, further, that it is through our prejudices and their articulation that we garner all of our knowledge about the world. This idea of prejudice as pre-forming all of our knowledge is, I believe, one of the central claims of the hermeneutic tradition, 53 and it is one which seems to have found its 52 53

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Rorty (1989). For particularly influential exemplars of herrneneutical social theory see Dilthey ( 1954); Geertz ( 1973 ); and Taylor ( 1964, 1985). Hermeneutics is the critical theory of understanding and interpreting texts according to the meaning of the text itself. Hermeneutics can and has been applied to the study of all kinds of expressions of human life, including language, art, and even behaviour. The object of criticism in this chapter is not hermeneutics per se. Rather, I use the term 'hermeneuticism' to refer to a theory that assumes that the immanent interpretive understanding of ideas, particularly prejudicial ones, is the only means we have of evaluating and understanding the meaning and origin of those ideas. Undoubtedly, hermeneutics is an enormously valuable critical tool

way into much contemporary theory; even in the nominally rationalist communicative theory of Habermas we can detect the notion of knowledge as the product of inter-cultural dialogue, as opposed to scientific interrogation. To what extent, then, is social science able to identify prejudice, particularly its own? The objectivist philosophy whilst never fully entrenched in Western social science 'laboratories' (other than, for a time, in the form of Parsonian functionalism), has come under increasing strain in the past thirty years or so. Whereas anthropology was believed to involve a more subject-oriented description of social life, the goal of the sociologist was held to be analysis of the structural conditions wherein social phenomena occurred, that is, such conditions as were accorded independent or 'objective' status from the beliefs or prejudices of social actors. To some degree, this approach entailed a determinism that was anathema to the lived experience of all, perhaps, but the most oppressed strata of people. For many, it appears that their lives are governed, not by institutions or 'structures' (whatever they might be) but by their own beliefs and morality and their 'individual' community and inter-personal relations. At any rate, anthropology became synonymous with the study of apparently culturally idiosyncratic practices, such as those of mythology, religion and language, particularly as they existed amongst less technologically advanced peoples. Indeed, it was the very mark of these societies that they had failed to attain the level of objectifying rationality that Max Weber, a central founder of modem sociology (1864-1920), had identified as part of the bureaucratised West. In a sense, the practice of anthropology early on echoed the ideology prevalent in sociology that the more technologically advanced a people was, especially insofar as technology was also applied to 'statecraft', the less prejudice would pertain to the study of their society. In other words, technology and prejudice were inversely related, and it was only in the more in fully understanding the purposive intentionality of human actors, whether they are fanners, manual workers, authors, artists, or priests. But the understanding of discourses, texts, or perfonnances solely in tenns of the meaning the agent of such ascribes to her work is not adequate to explaining why she works for a particular end in a particular way.

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'backward' societies that it was really worthwhile studying 'beliefs' and prejudices as determinant of social structures. s4 It is only comparatively recently that anthropology has begun to study people living in more urbanised societies in the same way as 'other' cultures, and under the impact of Marxian and structuralist research determined the social logic of 'subjective' cultural practices. In part, this change is due to the critiques of anthropological Eurocentrism and racism which have successfully revealed the colonialist ideology of much earlier anthropology. It also results from the extension of the 'sociology of knowledge' itself catalysed, for one, by the 'strong program' in sociology associated with Barry Barnes and David Bloor, ss and the 'underdetermination' thesis associated with the philosophy of (natural) science of Mary Hesse. s6 Drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn, s7 Hesse argues that the 'facts' discovered by science are open to so many interpretations that it is necessary for the scientist to choose a theory in which her further explanation must be based. In other words, scientific explanations and theories are 'underdetermined' by the available facts. In fact, Hesse's underdetermination thesis flies in the face of the reality of actual scientific practice. In most cases, statements of fact are well understood and established long before theories explaining those facts are found. This allows for common descriptions of facts by scientists with rival explanatory theories. From Hesse's perspective, it would be hard to say why there are rival scientific theories at all, since different theories are comprehensible only in self-referential terms. Most

54

55 56 57

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See Maurice Godelier's (1977) pioneering work on the historical and intellectual origins of Anthropology as a scientific discipline (see also Eiss and Wolfe 2002). The dichotomy between the study of non-Western and Western peoples by classical anthropology was ironically noted by Evans-Pritchard when he said: 'We are rational, primitive peoples prelogical, living in a world of dreams and make believe, of mystery and awe; we are capitalist, they are communist; we are monogamous, they are promiscuous; we are monotheists, they are fetishists, animists, pre-animists, or what have you, and so on' (EvansPritchard 1965, 105). Barnes and Bloor ( 198I). Hesse (1980). Kuhn (1970).

scientists will be very reluctant to fonnulate a categorically binding explanatory hypothesis without sufficiently compelling factual evidence with which to substantiate it. Indeed, so-called 'underdetermination' by the facts is nonnally one criterion by which to judge the relative plausibility of rival theories. Instead of considering scientific 'theoreticism' (actually, quasi-Cartesian deductivism) or Humean positivism as being the flawed bases for the accumulation of scientific knowledge, experimentalism, or the belief that scientific knowledge is the historically fonned and accumulated body of experimentally tested facts, is a more plausible position. From this perspective, the growth of science is both integral to and dependent on the development of the technological apparatuses and expertise necessary to appropriately assemble and ascertain the meaning of new experimental data. From this perspective, all scientific knowledge is ultimately the product of practically guided experimentation. As Maurice Cornforth has put it: Before there can be any theories at all, there must always be the initial contact with particular things, from which the theories take off. Before people think any thoughts at all, they must make contact with the particular things around them and gain some knowledge of those things by the exercise of their senses. Any activity of theorising starts from what we have learned by the exercise of our senses; it starts from the salient facts vouched for by practice and observation.51

Part of the strong program in the sociology of knowledge is the sceptical suspicion that 'science' and technology are not as ideologically neutral as philosophers such as Weber and Mannheim, but not necessarily Cornforth and Marxianphilosophers of science, would have it. Far from necessarily deconstructing prejudice, 'science' operates on its own culturally unique bases, which inevitably reflect on the scientists' choice of theoretical and research models. It is this culturalist reading of scientific discourse that has proved most pertinent to the conventionalist critique of objectivity. Through this critique, notions of prejudice have largely become passe. The

expansionof conventionalistagnosticismhas catalysedthe theoretical predominance of cultural relativism. s9 Invariably, cultural relativists 58 59

Cornforth (1959, 47). Sec Rachels ( 1989) for a good outline and defence of cultural relativism.

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slavishly isolate certain aspects of 'Other' cultures as uniquely symbolising whole peoples, histories and nations. Undoubtedly, there is much scientific value in the notion that cultural relativism is a necessary epistemological principle for conducting impartial ethnographic fieldwork to understand the character of distinct human cultures. Yet cultural relativism is by no means a sufficient analytical tool for understanding the developed forms of that culture itself. Indeed, cultural relativism as applied to the study of the latter is hopelessly circular. As noted, despite the apparent reliance on Derridean deconstruction as based in a thoroughgoing rejection of the notion of 'the real' (as opposed to the fictional or metaphorical), the tendency of conventionalists to reduce 'culture' to (cultural) discourse (about culture), goes against the deconstructional tenets of the stressing of difference, anti-reductionism, and attention to that which undermines a given discourse, not only internally but also externally. For the conventionalist or cultural relativist, all concepts or truthclaims are 'true' only according to specific 'paradigms' relative and internal to particular societies or cultures. For philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend 60 and Niklas Luhmann, all science is only intelligible according to the rules and conventions internal to the scientific endeavour itself . For Feyerabend these rules are apparently wholly arbitrary, whilst for Luhmann, science is a relatively coherent body of established rules and norms, which is self-generating or, as he puts it, autopoietic. 61 On one hand, constructivists such as Luhmann argue that science is a closed system, presumably intended to draw out the implications of its own tautologies, whilst on the other, for philosophers such as Feyerabend, it is a technological handmaiden to the whims of individual or institutional agency. In both cases, however, science is said to be a culturally specific undertaking, the development of which is entirely dependent upon the society that patronises it, financially and culturally. In other words, science, contrary to its claims, has no overarching criterion of rationality or validity upon which its myriad theories can be 'objectively' judged. In fact, according to this view, since the various sciences are so culturally bounded and, according to 60 61

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Feyerabend (1993). Delanty ( 1997, 117).

Feyerabend, their interpretative claims so often utterly incommensurable, it seems nonsense to speak of 'science' at all. In direct opposition to what might be called 'naive' realism or pure objectivism, the world does not exist for human beings outside of our 'subjective' or 'theory-laden' interpretations of it. The world we describe, according to post-Heideggerian pragmatic conventionalism, is the world we inhabit. This is as true for science as it is true in our everyday lives. Feyerabend describes his philosophy of science as one of methodological anarchism, implying that, in the analysis (if the word has any meaning from this perspective) of phenomena 'anything goes', since all interpretations are equally valid from a particular perspective. One can see in this avowedly post-empiricism, a revived Berkeleyian idealism where esse est percipi, without God to guarantee the reality of one's perceptions. 62

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Arguably, the ultra-empiricist philosophy of science, from which in part, the underdetennination critique of Hesse et al. derives its strength (if science is merely a collation of sense-impressions, then there could never be enough of them to justify a theory), is an ideological legitimation of the denial of and prohibition on the extension of scientific methodology to the further reaches of human social life in general. The empiricist viewpoint denies the relevance and applicability of science to distinctly human needs as such, leaving the phantasmic imagiruuy of religion and culture to those areas of human life bereft, within certain limits, of the advantages to be brought by scientific endeavour, namely, human society itself. For Maurice Cornforth, J.D. Bernal, Christopher Caudwell, and other English Marxist philosophers of science, the ever more stringent specialisation and parallel separation of particular sciences required by monopoly capitalism and the imperialist state, is not conducive either to the proliferation, propagation or even validation of processes of scientific discovery. In the positivistic, ultra-empiricist philosophy of science, it is not the goal of the scientist to explain the multifold sense impressions of ordinary persons in their everyday lives. For these sense impressions are no less 'real' than the sense data which the scientist uses in her own specialised and isolated field. The sense impressions accumulated, and the 'knowledge' derived from their aggregation, by the average person cannot be said to be produced by any underlying reality, since it is impossible to say that any such reality exists to cause those sense-impressions. The resulting phenomenological sociology is, then, merely the relative exhaustion and narrowing of practical science applied to the social sphere.

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Thus, the fact that would-be scientific claims are bound to the 'social process of production' 63 and the specific discursive context enveloping it is taken to prove that science is not objective and is simply an elaborate fabrication. Many scientists, however, would argue that the entire point of science is to show the contingent and underdeveloped status of hypotheses, explanations, descriptions, and so forth, and develop relatively, and progressively, more cogent ones through dialogue, adherence to standards of relevance, coherence, logical necessity, comparability, the elucidation of counterexamples, mathematical deduction, falsifiability, probability, attention to contradiction and transformation, and the designation and comprehension of experimental projects and factual data, as based on a reality which exists independently of discourse about it. It might be argued that constructivist or conventionalist critics of scientific practice confuse explanatory science with technological expertise. 64 Inevitably, the latter is integrally bound to the conditions of its production, that is, the level of development of the technological forces it is attempting to master. At the same time, it is of course true, as the conventionalist would say that all 'scientific' discourse is bound to the structural conditions of its production, both discursively-genealogically and practically-historically. However, it is possible, within historical limits, to decry conventional wisdom as pseudo-science, as overhasty, overly conformist or overly instrumental, given an analysis of the requisite material evidence. The 'facticity' of a phenomenon or, even more, a generalised hypothesis is always something to be proved . If science cannot show the necessity of a given interpretation of reality, beyond reasonable doubt, given investigation of as much information on the event as is available, and logical consideration of 63 66

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Longino ( 1990). Or, indeed. in Popperian terms, the process of discovery with the process of justification. Even here, noting the dependence of technological development upon a high degree. of adequate and objective explanation, one might sympathise with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' statement, 'Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I will show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work' (Dawkins 1991, 31). One is tempted to extend this amusing analogy to the absurdity of a Christian switching on a light.

as many conflicting and contradictory interpretations of the event as possible, then there is no reason to consider that understanding as factual at all. But in postulating and formulating prejudicial ideas about the world, and in assuming that all of our ideas about the world are prejudicial, we have not even begun to investigate the validity of our claims according to basic scientific method. For the scientifically minded person, we are not interested in empirically and theoretically, critically and dialectically, examining the bases of our claims about the real world, in the real world, if we are engaged in judgement established on prejudicial assumption. The radical constructivist critique of science is trapped in an intellectual playing out of the Sartrean condition humaine. That is to say, the constructivist critic, since she cannot achieve the omniscient position she so desperately desires in order to evaluate anything, ends up, in an angst-ridden fashion, dismissing the possibility of attaining any objective knowledge whatever ('la science est une passion inutile'). This view is neither adequate to the exploratory and tentative nature of rationalistic scientific discovery, nor does it appropriately express the mammoth gains nor relatively conclusive truths discovered in all of the major sciences (including the 'human sciences') over millennia. The constructivist idea that science sees itself as an absolute and closed system upon the basis of which events and phenomena are subsequently explained (that is, the reduction of science to processes of deduction), ignores the reality of much recent efforts, especially amongst cosmologists and quantum physicists, to construct a unifying theory of complex systems between the sciences. This effort has been only partially successful at best and is certainly regarded as a thesis in need of rigorous proof, and not one that is a priori assumed. The conventionalist philosophy of science has undoubtedly impacted upon, and finds much contemporary support within academic cultural and philosophical theory .65 For Hans-Georg Gadamer, prej-

udice in the fonn of our autochtonousculturaltraditions,is part of the conceptual 'baggage' human beings always bring to bear in their hermeneutic comprehension of the world. In particular, deference to 65

As Sokal and Bricmont' s ( 1998) findings indicate.

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the claims of authority is said by Gadamer to be an indispensable part of our capacity to understand; authority, as in Plato's simile of the Ship, being based precisely on its grasp of knowledge. 66 For Gadamerian hermeneutics, 'our' own society and history is the necessary determinant of our understanding of the world. Thus, for example, we may not understand an event outside the prescriptions of our own cultural horizons, especially in terms of the language we use.67 Moreover, if we wish to understand any social event it is sufficient, although difficult, for the analyst to place herself in the mode of thought of the agent therein. Thus, for example, if we wish to understand German Fascism, we must place ourselves in the mindset of a Nazi, perhaps by sympathetically reading Hitler's Mein Kampf or the selected writings of Alfred Rosenberg. It is our prejudices, understood by Gadamer as directly dictated by historically transmitted language, culture, and society that allows us to understand anything. This view seems to imply the exclusivity, perhaps even the eminently untranslatable, nature of particular language forms and a resultant national epistemology or, to borrow Franz Neumann's phrase, ethnosolipsism. Furthermore, hermeneutic analysis seems to entail a conception of the autogenesis of linguistic competency; it is language itself that strives to conform to its cultural horizons. Clearly, this 'linguistic tum' in theory, abnegating logic and scientific endeavour, and the augmentation of prejudice are intimately related. Indeed, a 66

67

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Gadamer ( 1979, 248-9). State power is not, Gadamer explicitly states in contrast to the standard Weberian definition, a matter of having a monopoly on legitimate physical force. Gadamer writes, 'Language is not just one of the many human possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that human beings have a world at all' (Gadamer 1992, 443). This is a typical example of what Bhaskar tenns the 'linguistic fallacy'. He writes: 'Transposed to the social domain and set in a henneneutic, semiotic or otherwise linguistic key, the collapse of the intransitive dimension of the denegation of ontology [that is, the questioning of being in general - Z.C.) .takes the fonn of being as our discourse about being' (Bhaskar 1975, 206). In other words, insofar as criticising reality on the basis of an understanding of its irreducible physical independence from human discourse about it is not considered essential to understanding as such, reality for humanity is automatically conceptualised as discourse about discourse.

refusal to adapt one's 'language' to the facts of the world and acknowledge that language is but one mode of knowledge acquisition related to many is characteristic of the linguistic tum in 'theory' and philosophy. The language people use develops not only, as in the poststructuralist and hermeneutical worldview, through circular (re)interpretation of the world, but through direct social engagement with the world and the transformation of it. 68 Far from acknowledging the possibility of a relatively independent acknowledgement of 'the facts' as leading to judgement based on logical argumentation, and hence a linguistic conception designed to approximate to those facts and their relations, Gadamer's henneneuticism postulates that our knowledge is inextricably embedded in a particular historico-cultural matrix which dictates the meaning, intent and performance of our truth-claims and which we can only possibly and partially escape through inter-cultural dialogue. The hermeneutic heritage, thus articulated, is thoroughly subjectivist and idealist in its understanding of knowledge acquisition. Even in its limited pursuit of objectivity, the hermeneuticist advocates interpersonal dialogue as a means. To thus treat problems of prejudice and understanding purely in terms of linguistic competence and performance, in terms of linguisticality, is to profoundly misunderstand the roots of human language, much of which is reproduced in the practical reworking, and direct experience, of a material reality which lies outside the boundaries of purely linguistic apperception and transformation. Even Habermas and writers influenced by him like Apel, in attempting to defend 'rationalism', with their ideas of 'ideal speech acts' and 'ideal communication communities' respectively, echo the subjectivism so prevalent in post-Heideggerian 'theory'. The 'linguistic tum' in social science, the practise of understanding social behaviour purely through an interpretive understanding of language with regard to the actor's own ascription of meaning to his or her action/s, is based on an overly idealistic and pragmatic metaphysics of

society. As I will argue, given the political realities of modem life, it 68

Hegel notes that even animals 'do not just stand in front of sensuous things as if these po~sed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, fall to without ceremony and eat them up.'

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is essential that the critic take a far less anthropomorphic perspective on reality, and instead question the prevailing ideological divorce of natural and 'social' science. The cultural critic must undertake this task, not in order to superficially impose concepts borrowed from particular fields in the natural scientific examination of nature to the realm of human society, but to apply the central tenets of scientific praxis (particularly the rejection of prejudice and the experimental project/ 9 generally to both human society and nature alike. The defence of such a method is known as 'naturalism' which is the idea that events in nature are explicable in terms of reference to natural laws and processes. More specifically, the most rigorous, coherent and comprehensive philosophical system underpinning the naturalist examination of nature and society is critical realism.

Science and Critical Realism Critical Realism and Prejudice

Realism affirms the independent existence of natural objects from the human mind. Scientific study has shown that the natural world existed before the human mind existed, and realist scientists working on that basic assumption seek to discover how nature develops and comes to be through its own operations. Realist science guarantees the possibility of objective critique and the progressive correction of human understanding . As such, realistic science is a necessary prerequisite for demonstrating the occurrence of prejudice. Those philosophers who seek to rehabilitate, or deny the existence of, prejudice in the critical realist sense (Gadamer, Feyerabend, culturalist and conventionalist theorists generally) are invariably at odds with the scientific project as such. Critical realism, as opposed to naive positivist realism which takes perceptual cognition as the direct reflection of events in the 69

42

See Cornforth (1949, 5); and Sokal and Bricmont (1998).

natural world, implies that all hypotheses, conjectures and statements of fact, in whatever field and about any object, are fallible. This does not entail that they are all equally fallible. It is much more difficult to show that two plus two does not equal four, or that the foreign policy of the British government is guided chiefly by benevolent moral principles, than it is to show the converse. In any case, as Bhaskar puts it: 'To be fallibilist about knowledge, it is necessary to be a realist about things. Conversely, to be a sceptic about things is to be a 70 dogmatist about knowledge.' The realistic analysis of a thing must, in order to be objective, proceed apace with the apprehension of that thing's characteristics. In short, there can be no methodology without a science and no epistemology (determining how we know things) without an ontology (determining what there is to be known). It is through practical engagement with and transformation of the world that knowledge is both revealed and constructed at the same time. Philosophers who attempt to construct a priori methodologies for the study of all things in nature and society are merely fetishising their own practice as though it were that which is the final arbiter of natural and social processes. The basic principles of the realist-rationalist philosophy of science may be listed thus: •

•

•

70 71

In the major areas of science, research has been historically conducted so as to garner a progressive accumulation of knowledge, as manifested in increased powers of prediction and intervention. The increased powers of prediction give scientists the right to claim that the entities under their investigation exist independently of theorising about them and that many of their descriptions are 'approximately correct'. 71 Hypothetical 'approximation' to independent reality entails that scientific claims are vulnerable to refutation in the future, and experience has shown that revision may be necessary. Bhaskar(197S, 43). Philip Kitcher (2000, 34-5).

43

•

•

Typically, views held in the most prominent areas of science rest upon, and disputes are settled by, 'appeal to canons of reason and evidence' .72 These canons of reason and evidence progress temporally as both our method of knowing about the world (methodology) and our understanding of how we know about the world (epistemology) expands.

In contrast, the socio-historical philosophy of science proffers the following principles: • •

•

•

Science is practised by 'cognitively limited' human beings living in social groups in social structures with long histories. 73 Science is practised by persons who bring into play the community paradigms shaped by the history of the social group to which she belongs. The social structures which shape the way scientific knowledge is produced also affect the transmission and reception of scientific research and the way in which it is debated. 'The social structures in which science is embedded affect the kinds of questions that are taken to be most significant and, sometimes, the answers that are proposed and accepted. ' 74

Kitcher argues convincingly that science studies ought to systematically attempt to integrate and 'do justice' to both clusters of beliefs.75 The challenge for prejudice studies is to understand erroneous beliefs' foundations, and the historical manner in which realistic analysis has transformed these and, conversely, to explain to what degree erroneous beliefs have shaped and transformed realistic analysis into its opposite. Prejudice must be seen both as mitigating and mitigated, and false beliefs seen not merely as grounded in unthinking acceptance, but in paradigmatically reflective testimony . 72 73 74 75

44

Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid. Ibid., 37.

The paradigms wherein uncritical ideological and prejudicial misunderstanding appear as accurate or factual are, then, grounded in a measure of relatively, though historically, practically, and socially limited, realistic apprehension. In the conventionalist and culturalist philosophies, however, four dogmas tend to pertain: (I) There is no truth save social acceptance; (2) no system of belief is constrained by reason or reality, and no system of beliefs is privileged; (3) there shall be no asymmetries in explanation of truth or falsehood, society or nature; and (4) honour must always be given to the 'actors' categories.76

Kitcher argues that these dogmatic beliefs are typically founded upon a subjectivist bias. He writes: Convinced by the idea that they can never talk about things 'as they are', some practitioners effectively demand a response to the global sceptical challenge for entities they don't like (the ontologies of the sciences) and then proceed to talk quite casually and commonsensically about things they do like (people, societies, human motives). There is a name for this kind of inconsistency; it is privileging.77

Having accepted highly constrained scienti fie input into the manner in which society is structured, organised, operated, engineered, and founded, conventionalist and culturalist social scientists in the postmodern era tend to tum their back on scientific understanding as though it were intrinsically (as opposed to contingently) dominative, exploitative, and 'Western' . Yet they invariably do so whilst taking for granted the enormous benefits afforded them in their everyday life by the application and development of science. Oft-times, postmodern sociologists of science will tacitly accept the racist and Eurocentric supposition that science is anathema to the more 'spiritual' and philo-sophical orders of non-Western peoples, obscuring the developments in science pioneered by non-European peoples, and at least tacitly denying that science might have a tremendous developmental and liberatory appeal to the peoples struggling against oppression and overcoming prejudice.

76 77

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 40.

45

Discerning Prejudice about Nature and Society

In scientific experiment, knowledge of intelligible causal laws is not only demonstrated, it is applied. In order for this to be the case, things must have potential tendencies or powers, which may be unexercised or (partially) unrealised. As such, it is the underlying generative mechanisms in the dialectical interrelations of things that are the concern of scientific endeavour (theory and practice, experiment and explanation). In other words, not only are patterns of events discerned by science, but also the intrinsic properties and underlying relations of things are brought to light through applied scientific experimentation. As Bhaskar writes: On the transcendental realist system a sequence A,B is necessary if and only if there is a natural mechanism M such that when stimulated by A, B tends to be produced .78

Thus, for example against a positivist account of science which notes a constant conjunction of events between a cockerel crowing and then the sun rising, and concludes that the latter must be 'caused' by the former (the logical fallacy intended by the Latin saying 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc'), the critical realist scientist attempts to explain the underlying causes of the cockerel crowing and the sun rising respectively, and only thus to establish the real independent relation pertaining between the two phenomena. Science in general requires that intransitive processes of cause and effect apply to objects, that is, processes that operate in the world independently of their investigation or even perception by human beings. It is this dimension to scientific inquiry that guarantees that changing knowledge of unchanging objects (namely, the natural laws regulating intransitive processes) is possible. What Bhaskar calls the transitive dimension to scientific inquiry, whereby the history, genealogy and construction of scientific theorems, hypothesis and 'laws'

by scientifically oriented humans are deciphered and explicated, allows us to understand the process of discovering and developing 78

46

Bhaskar(1998, IO).

knowledge. The philosophical assumptions upon which scientific activity (investigation, experiment, hypothesis, verification, falsification, etc.) is premised are themselves 'contingently' (that is, post facto) knowable to scientific inquiry through exploring its transitive dimension. Thus, scientific inquiry about the world is not only concerned with sense-data (as positivism and henneneutic culturalism alike assume it must be), and those entities which, contingently, lie beyond that are not necessarily objects of purely philosophical interest. Against the idealistic canard that assumes that human behaviour may not be studied scientifically, critical realism demonstrates that the fact that human beings are very different from other objects in the natural world (from quasars especially, and gorillas somewhat) does not invalidate the claim to scientific rigour of the social sciences. The social sciences have a different object of analysis to the 'natural sciences' and it is this that determines the nature of social scientific endeavour. 79 Bhaskar writes: [S)ociety is not given in, but presupposed by, experience . But it is precisely its peculiar ontological status, its transcendentally real character [that is, its existence outside direct sense experience - Z.C.), that makes it a possible object of knowledgefor us. Such knowledge is non-natural but still scientific. 80

In seeking to explain particular beliefs with reference to their material conditions of possibility (what must obtain in the real world for a particular statement to have meaning), critical sociology goes against the henneneutic tendency to take subjective beliefs as the given and autogenetic objects of inquiry. The fact that a referent's material being can impinge upon and restructure the meaning we ascribe to our own and other's statements and ideas is anathema to postmodemism and hermeneuticism alike. But it is a truism that the reason a person believes she has for doing or saying something may not be the same as the reason that thing is said or done. As Bhaskar writes, '[W]e do not suppose that the reason why the garbage is collected is necessarily the garbage collector's reason for collecting it (though it depends on the

79

80

Ibid.,3. Ibid.,87.

47

latter). ' 81 There is what Bhaskar calls an 'ontological hiatus' between people and society that enables the sociologist of prejudice to discern the relation between what the subject says about society, and what society as such functionally requires the subject to believe. Society requires human beings to act in regular and relatively uniform ways, both in conformity with particular cultural standards and according to natural necessity. Whatever humans may think about their own and others' actions, the actions are necessitated and required by the prevalent mode of production to reproduce social wealth. The activities necessary to maintain social cohesion may be specified independently of the thoughts and feelings individuals may have of them, although these can and do affect social action. As Alfred SohnRethel writes, 'The socially necessary forms of thinking of an epoch are those in conformity with the socially synthetic functions of that epoch. ' 82 In other words, socially necessary thoughts and thinking tends to coalesce with the active functions that are essential to maintaining the integrity of a particular society and its dominant institutions as a whole. If, as in postmodern and hermeneuticist culturalism, our understanding is pregiven outside the possibility of testing its veracity according to an external standard, then the reflexivity by which our own putative reasoning comes into doubt is negated. Self-criticism is lost along with the possibility of scientific rationality. As Bhaskar writes: [U]nless a reason could function as a cause [of an agent's actions], there would be no sense in a person's evaluating (or appraising) different beliefs in order to decide how to act For either a reason will make a difference to his/her behaviouror it will not Inthe formercase it counts as a cause. In the lattercase it is logically redundant,and deliberation, ratiocination(and indeed thought

generally)becomepracticallyotiose.83

Existential hermeneutics, of which Gadamerian philosophy is progeny, is radically anthropomorphic. It is premised upon the assumption 81 82 83

48

Ibid., 35--6. Sohn-Rethel(1978, 5). Bhaskar( 1998,92).

that the qualities discerned in the natural world are creations of the human mind, and tends to provide exemplary instances of what Bhaskar calls 'the anthropic fallacy', or the 'exegesis of being in terms of human being'. 14 The power of reflection, the human capacity to acknowledge deeper and wider strata of objective reality, is denied. Reduced to grasping only its own thought processes, human being is detached from its natural moorings, which become accordingly difficult to affect. Interpretation quickly becomes positivism when natural history is absent from its internal re-cognition . Indeed, hermeneutical epistemology explicitly rules out knowledge that is not intimately connected to the subjective circular worldview. It is incapable of adapting itself to established scientific findings, insofar as it must posit an uncritical melding of being with thought, nullifying the intransitive and transitive natures of their dialectic. To reiterate, it is crucial to avoid reductively explaining social behaviour and social structures by soliciting or empathically deciphering the intentional rationales of individual actors. The intentional reasoning behind a given person's action/s is not necessarily the same as the rationale behind the structural processes that, through prohi biting, curtailing, necessitating, training, guiding, and focusing specific behaviours, favour one (set of) action/s over another. At the same time, one must avoid explaining individual behaviour solely in terms of the structurally determinant processes by which it is selected and performed. There is conflict between, transgression, and/or relative transformation of socially requisite behavioural norms and individual psychological and material needs and wants. Thus critical realist social science accounts for the autonomy of the social, the psychological, and the physiological as opposed to the various forms of methodological individualist sociology on the one hand (Weberian rational choice theory, q-methodology) and extemalist sociology (behaviourism, structuralism) on the other. Bhaskar writes: The modelof the society/personconnectionI am proposingcould be summarised as follows: people do not create society for it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded

84

Ibid. (197S, 20S).

49

as an ensemble of structures, practices and oonventions which individuals reproduce or transfonn, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism). 85

For culturalist social theory, in contrast, the beliefs people hold about things, whether conceived by the theorist as true, false or truth-neutral, are directly transmitted and received through 'cultural' media and held entirely on the basis of cultural conformity.

Cultural Norms and Prejudice There is no doubt that our particular cultural heritage does influence our appreciation and affect our awareness of other cultural forms. But exercising our capacity to really appreciate other cultural forms partly entails us putting a certain distance between 'our' culture and ourselves. Openness to this experience can be readily achieved both through intercultural contact and cross-fertilisation of cultures. Yet an understanding based on objectivist rationality must be brought to bear upon ourselves and our world as a necessary part of such a process. As Bhaskar writes: The chronic failure of the henneneutic tradition lies in its inability to sustain the oonditions necessary for a non-idealist critique of ideas: viz (I) the possibility of rational oorrigibility; and (2) the possibility of non-ideational causality. Correction of the first error situates the possibility of a critique. Such a critique is both emancipatory and self-reflexive - emancipatory inasmuch as the necessity for false ideas can be explained; self-reflexive inasmuch as social science is a part of the totality it seeks to explain. Such a critique thus assumes the shape of an emancipatory spiral rather than a henneneutic circle; and it oonstitutes an explanatory production, not simply a semantic exchange. 86

A critical realist account of prejudice dispenses with the illusion that bigotry and intolerance can be ameliorated through semantic exchange alone. Rather, through explaining the social necessity of certain 85 86

50

Ibid. (1998, 36). Ibid. (1998, 158).

beliefs given certain relatively intransigent material social structures contextualising and informing human being, the scientific critique of prejudice thus formulated opens up the possibility of the radical transformation of dogmatic and destructive thought processes. Education and instruction which maintains a cognitive dichotomy between hermeneutical understanding and scientific inquiry, or between faith and reason, leaves humans quietistic in the face of an alien culture and natural world, and does not address the human need to comprehensively resolve pressing problems in either. Hermeneutics has exercised tremendous influence upon political and cultural studies in recent years. Charles Taylor has grandly, though quite fairly, spoken of the contemporary 'universal reign' of hermeneutics in sociology. 87 But there are serious limits to hermeneutics as a tool for understanding social behaviour and overcoming social conflict. There is in hermeneutics a constant danger of the reification of culture and of an intellectualist justification for the institutionalisation of narrow chauvinism under the noble auspices of tradition, cultural difference and tolerance. As I hope to show in the following chapters, this can lead to the further promulgation of prejudice and misunderstanding, including the provision of an intellectual apologia for the dissemination and acceptance of virulent right wing and ultra-authoritarian ideology, as 'multicultural' and right wmg conservative terminology converge. A critical materialist and realist account of prejudice, then, stresses that it is possible to describe cultural factors and forces in and of society without discursively reducing these either to subjective beliefs people have about them or, what amounts to the same, subjectifying these factors themselves, from a radically constructivist perspective. 88 In an intrinsically hierarchically ordered society, the determination of beliefs and social structures is no~ contrary to the hermeneutic prejudice, a two-way process. 'Reality', especially 87 88

Bohman et al. ( 1994, 7). Constructivism is the philosophical notion that all human beliefs about the world are discursively constructed according to subjective perception and convention , as opposed to being a reflection of any objectively perceived external reality.

51

(though certainly not exclusively) in an undemocratic society, exists independently of socially constructed conventional meaning. The very idea of a two-way, even an ostensibly 'dialectical', determination between ideas and social structures and traditions is as facile and abstract as a linear causal determination thesis in either direction (ideas determining social structures or social structures determining ideas). Rather, it is the specific degree of freedom or unfreedom involved in any given concrete circumstance that determines the precise extent of and relation between the interpenetration of rational ideas and social structures, and thus the relative predominance of the awareness of their relation. As such, prejudice, the negation of the consideration of an already socially available truth, can therefore be defined as an unfree idea, or as an idea that has its roots in a degree of unfreedom, and has the negation of freedom as its actual content. It is indeed impossible to attain a sense of prejudice without a requisite freedom of communication, as Habermas has claimed. Nevertheless, an emphasis on communicative freedom must not be taken to imply 'dialogism', wherein the sole corrective to narrow group prejudices is through 'intercultural' dialogue, an approach to some extent dominating the 'consociationalist' model of conflict-resolution, for example. A degree of objectivity and objective appraisal of historical facts is an essential part of any dialogue concerned to overcome its own inherent limitations, and the limitations imposed on unfree and oppressed people by autocratic social structures. As Bhaskar writes: For though slaves who fully comprehend the circumstances of their subordination do not thereby become free, such an understanding is a necessary condition for their rational self-emancipation. Conversely, their master has an interest in their remaining ignorant of the circumstances of their slavery. Knowledge is asymmetrically beneficial to the parties involved in relations of domination. Moreover, quite generally, explanatory knowledge increases the range of known possibilities and so ceteris paribus [other things being equal] tilts the 'ideological balance of forces' against conservatism and the status quo (quite apart from its other effects). It is thus quite wrong to regard social

scienceas equallya 'potentialinstrumentof domination'as of 'the expansionof the rational autonomy of action'. 89

89

52

As does Giddens (I 976, I 6, 161 and passim). Bhaskar ( 1998, 77, note 84 ).

The following chapters will examine the ways in which disregard for factual understanding of nature and society plays a major role in the sustenance of modem society, and how that society thus promotes prejudice within its populations. The study of prejudice is the study of the ways in which our views prevent us from acknowledging the truth about our own and others' social being. Prejudice means a fundamental closedness to a truth that has already been made more open and less delimited through scientific endeavour, and which mentally precludes human beings taking rational control of a situation in a way that will open up the possibility of the practical overturning of its social determinants.

Conclusion: Rationally Overcoming Prejudice As concerned individuals thinking about prejudice, we have a number of tasks. The first is to decide of particular judgements whether or not they are prejudicial. This entails a proper investigation of pertinent information (empirical, statistical, theoretical and documentary), which contradicts, elaborates on, adds to, repudiates, or renders the hypothesis problematic. The second is to apply the same standards to one's own reception of the same facts: are the facts being interpreted in ways not consistent with the available information or analyses? A mark of an anti-prejudicial science is not the proclamation of truth, or even a common assent to particular truth-claims, but more of the rational articulation of truths as more or less probable. The third of our tasks is to examine the possible origins of prejudicial ideas. This book aims to uncover the conditions for the dissemination and reception of prejudice, particularly as it is expressed in popular political culture. On the basis of a probabilistic interpretation, according to the logic of scientific explanation, 90 it is possible for the social scientist to effectively disclose certain facts upon which prejudices can be challenged. These facts are uncovered, investigated and assimilated 90

See Btwkar (1975, 143-229).

53

through a programmatic unification of experimental research, intersubjective dialogue, dialectical (in the Hegelian and Lakatosian sense) logic, and, practical transformation, 91 with ideas and concepts becoming gradually both more refined and more comprehensive, both semantically and empirically. 'It is the responsibility of intellectuals', says Noam Chomsky, 'to speak the truth and expose lies' .92 It is imperative that thoroughgoing constructive scepticism, criticism and evaluation be applied to even, if not especially, the highest and most deeply rooted conventions in society. As cultural relativist critics and postmodemists alike have realised, this scepticism ought to apply as much to the work, and prejudices, of the scholar as it does to the subject under consideration. It is vital, however, for the sake of reason and freedom, not to let this scepticism with regard to scientific 'expertise' degenerate into nihilistic cynicism, and a disregard for the potentially liberatory and constructive character of truth and critique. Explanation, if it is to provide the basis for the practical overcoming of social difficulties, must aim towards the internalisation of the values of impartiality and autonomy in the actual process of discovery (although, as Bhaskar notes, impartiality must favour the oppressed in an undemocratic society). The following chapters present an analysis of the dissemination . and acceptance of prejudices as related to the practices and requirements of specific socio-structural relations and polities. The differing conceptions of the psycho-cognitive bases for the acceptance and performance of prejudicial worldviews are examined not simply in terms of the psychology of knowledge acquisition, but as concretely situated in particular politico-economic systems. In the next chapter I will deepen the above epistemological critique of prejudice through an elaboration of the Marxist idea of ideology as an alienated mode of understanding, whilst in Chapter 3 I will consider prejudice as manifested in the mode of psychological rationalisation. 91

92

54

Unfortunately, as this essay will show, the practical transfonnation of erroneous and dogmatic ideas is in many ways foreclosed in modern societies, and is a primary reason for the prevalence of prejudice. Chomsky ( 1995, 60).

Chapter 2 Prejudice as Ideology

Prejudice and Error The previous chapter outlined an epistemological perspective that seeks to uphold the possibility of objective knowledge of the world and our relations to it. Contrary to relativist and subjectivist trends in contemporary political and cultural theory, as evinced by the methodological hegemony of culturalism and hermeneutics in the social sciences, critical realist rationality offers compelling reasons for us to retain the concept of prejudice as a critical tool in understanding and evaluating the thoughts and beliefs people have about the world. Yet in order to further the aim of understanding the origins and conditions of the acceptance and dissemination of prejudice, we need to clarify further what we mean when we understand prejudice as a cognitive process. We must understand prejudice not simply as a mistake or an error of judgement, but as a particular manner of comprehension and perception. In other words, rather than stopping at a purely scholastic defence of 'rationalism' or realism as philosophies appropriate to scientific inquiry 1 we must pursue our understanding of prejudice further so as to better understand the limits any objective apperception of reality faces, both inside and outside the academy. Although oft-times acceptance of a prejudice, whether tacitly or explicitly, will result in error, prejudice, as noted above, is not mere error of judgement. An error is a proposition that can potentially be corrected through analysis and experiment. Is it not the case that a prejudice can also be corrected in the same way? The problem is that it is a mistake to suppose that a prejudice, unlike an error, was itself attained through any form of serious scientific or rational inquiry. A prejudice is an unquestionable and unquestioned 'article of faith', which See Norris ( 1997a); and Bhaskar ( 1975).

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has the effect, if not the aim, of prematurely closing down the possibility of further critical elaboration or inquiry. Imagine I am convinced that people with blue eyes are malicious and lazy. I then encounter a blue-eyed person who is kind and hard-working and, after some consideration, admit I was wrong to hold such a prejudicial belief. What has happened here is a case, not of a prejudice per se being overcome by empirical 'facts', but of a prejudice that in practice has become a hypothesis. Had I never met a blue-eyed person who did not conform to my prejudice, I would probably have tenaciously held on to it (unless perhaps shaken from it by some other alteration in my belief system). Even if I had met a kind and hard-working blue-eyed person, I might still have retained my prejudice whilst justifying his existence as such by saying that he was an exception to the rule, that 'deep down' he was 'just like all the rest', or I might have simply refused to consider the 'positive' aspects of his character at all. In any case, a prejudice, as a binding judgement inferred before due consideration of what is known of its corresponding reality, must by definition deny its own hypothetical or speculative character. This does not imply, however, that prejudice cannot or does not result from any reflection whatever. Prejudice, as we shall see, is not merely the basis of many of our perceptions of the world, but is also very often the outcome of our perceptions, even as these are relatively reasoned or empirical. But . prejudice, whilst not the result of objective, that is scientific, analysis, nevertheless asserts itself as objectively, albeit 'self-evidently', valid or true. The psychological basis for the acceptance of judgements (particularly disparaging ones about other people) as necessary before any proper consideration of their validity will be examined in the following chapter. This chapter examines further the epistemological status of prejudice as such, by relating its meaning to the discursive formation of relatively irrational narratives about the world, particularly those purporting to elucidate human relations. We can begin to prepare the ground to further engage prejudice as a problem of political economy, and hence transformable in those terms, through the following investigation into the philosophical concept of ideology. In explicating the principal means by which much ostensibly objective description and explanation distorts and obscures reality, our aim is to

56

advance the previous chapter's understanding of prejudice as an epistemic category.

The Concept of Ideology In attempting to fonnulate the word 'ideology' as a critical concept, and attach a specific and coherent meaning to such an apparently ambiguous and, for some, outmoded term, the theorist of ideology has quite a task. The difficulty involved lies to some extent with the fact that throughout its history, the concept of ideology has undergone several dramatic shifts of semantic emphasis. At present, it is quite common for most social theorists who wish to use the word ideology at all, to use it in the most neutral and wide-ranging sense, to indicate a 'body of ideas and beliefs of a group, nation, etc.'. 2 As we shall see, it is this neutral definition of ideology that has generally prevailed right across the political spectrum of Western social-theoretical opinion. In opposition to this pragmatist notion of ideology as essentially grounded in political organisation, ideology must be critically understood as a specifically philosophic activity. Against the commonly held position that ideology is any set of interested ideas held by particular groups or organisations, ideology is more appropriately conceived as an erroneous method of comprehending reality. This is not to imply that ideology is purely a result of theoretical misadventure. On the contrary, as will become clear, one of the central tenets of the critical concept of ideology (and the ideology-critique based thereon) is that the dichotomy between theory/method and practice/politics cannot be long sustained from the perspective of dialectical science . At this point, we must further our definition of ideology by tracing the various connotations of the term through its history.

2

Collins Pocket English Dictionary (1999, 249).

57

The Origins of the Concept of Ideology

By all accounts, the concept of ideology was initially used in a nonprescriptive and non-pejorative sense. Coined by the French Enlightenment philosopher Destutt de Tracy (17 54-1836) in the early nineteenth century, the word 'ideology' was assigned a quite specific meaning in the ongoing battle between religiously inspired metaphysics and secular science. In his Elements d '/deologie ( 1801-1805), de Tracy, heavily influenced by the Lockean sensationalism of Condillac, conceived his notion of 'ideology' as 'the science of ideas in genera]'. 3 Rather than treating of political principles in what he and his colleagues (who included fellow liberal republicans like the philosopher Condorcet (1743-1794) and the economist Jean-Baptiste Say ( 1767-1832)) saw as objectionably abstract and moralistic terminology, de Tracy envisioned studying ideas as though they emanated principally from the particular physical sensations of individuals as opposed to natural or God-given intuitions. In meta-sociological terms, de Tracy surmised that all social interactions were fundamentally based on contracts enacted by individual maximisers of pleasure (a la the later writers Bentham (1748-1832) and Hayek (1899-1992)). 4 Upon Napoleon's rise to the position of supreme emperor in 1804, de Tracy used his position in the eminent French . Academy to criticise the dictatorial character of the beleaguered and expansionist regime.5 De Tracy's prominent position allowed him to advance relatively sweeping educational reforms. Ostensibly his system was designed to free the individual from the dictates of undue deference toward ecclesiastical or traditional authorities and aimed for the organisation of strongly individualistic universal public citizenship education. In short, the science of ideology was apparently one quite suited to the burgeoning capitalist society being constructed in postrevolutionary Republican France. The emperor Napoleon, however, was wholly unimpressed by de Tracy's 'ideology'. Indeed, for Napoleon, de Tracy's ideas of 'universal 3 4 5

58

Rossi-Landi ( I 990, 34 ). Bentham( 1961); and Hayek( 1944). Kennedy(1978).

citizenship' and the like were quite as abstract as any of the feudal or reactionary doctrines that it had purportedly superseded . For the practical and military-minded General, such education was wholly superfluous to the State's much more pressing needs . Napoleon deduced that de Tracy and the other proponents of the 'universal public citizenship' education system were misleading the people 'by elevating them to a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising' .6 Thus, Napoleon considered 'ideology ' as essentially a form of indoctrination. It has been Napoleon's disparaging definition of 'ideology ' , until more recent times perhaps, that has bore the lasting significance of the word. Indeed, it was Napoleon's criticism of de Tracy that Karl Marx would have had in mind when he took up the term for his own intellectual purposes.

Marx's Concept of Ideology For Marx, ideology is an explanatory hypothesis , or justificatory discourse which, whilst naively realistic, nonetheless distorts the reality which it purports to understand in distinct ways. Ideology is 'the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence' .7 Bhaskar provides the following diagram to show how Marx conceives of the relation between social existence and the ideas people have about them .1

6

7 8

Quotedin Williams (1976, 126). Althusser (1970, l09) . Bhaskar ( 1998, 69).

59

B. Phenomenal Forms

C. Ideological

RealRelations A

D. Practices

He writes: Real relations, A, characteristically located by Marx in the sphere of production, generate phenomenal forms, B, characteristic of the spheres of circulation and exchange, which in tum are reflected in the categories of ideological discourse, C, which sustain and underpin such ordinary commercial practices as buying and selling, wage-negotiating, etc., at D. These are in tum, of course necessary for the reproduction of the real relations A. The dotted line through BD denotes, as it were, the cut of everyday life. Marx's analysis typically moves retroductively [post facto reconstruction of the development of phenomena on the basis of what must likely have been the case for something to occur as, for example, when a detective reconstructs the events at a crime scene according to an explanation of what must have transpired- Z.C.], from B to A, enabling a critique of C and informing practice at D. Moreover the analysis, in isolating the conditions for the phenomenal forms in a mode of production necessitating forms which are false (as in the case of the wage form (wherein the worker's wage appearsto be recompense for a day's labour but is not, in fact - Z.C.]9 or systematically misleading (as in the case of the value 9

60

Marx (1987, 266) writes: 'The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labor and surplus labor, into paid and unpaid labour[ ...] the money relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer. Hence we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labor power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the

fonn), ipso facto, without the intervention of any value judgments (other than those bound up in the assessmentof the cognitive adequacy of the theory anda fortiriori [with stronger reason - Z.C.) its superiority over bourgeois political economy). issues in a negative evaluation of that mode of production. In discovering that the source of consciousness is such that it is false. Marx automatically discredits that source. while simultaneously showing how that consciousness may yet be necessary.10

Thus the everyday fonns of consciousness that humans develop through engagement in society and its dominant institutions tend to be ideological insofar as they are internally precluded from understanding and controlling their points of reference solely by virtue of the manner in which these are engaged with. There are, as we shall see, four central constituents of ideological discourse. But in order to understand the designation of ideology further, Bhaskar suggests that there are certain criteria by which would-be objective and scientific statements and beliefs ought to be viewed, and their scientificity established. Firstly, critically detennining whether a belief or system of beliefs is ideological must entail the provision of a theory that: • •

Explains the significant phenomena differently from the alleged 'ideology'; and Explains significant relevant phenomena not explained by the alleged 'ideology'.

Secondly, explaining how a belief/system of beliefs 1s ideological must provide a theory that: •

JO

Shows why agents accept it, even whilst there is critical evidence contradicting it, especially in regard to a structure or set of relations that can be described, but is altogether absent from or obscured in the alleged ideology;

actual relation invisible, and. indeed. shows the direct opposite of that relation. fonns the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.' Bhaskar (1998, 69-70).

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•

Is internally coherent, explaining both its own postulates according to evidence, and showing the logical necessity of those postulates to understanding the evidence.

Finally, deciding that a belief/system of beliefs is 'ideological' demands the provision of a theory showing that: •

•

The alleged ideology is not scientific, being unable to meet the 'minimum necessary conditions for the characterization of a production as scientific' (logic, experimental evidence, reference to the canon, etc.). The alleged ideology is unable to conceive of its own subject matter in an expansive and well-rounded manner (as when, for example, a left-liberal critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory considers it sufficient falsification of such to label it 'classist' or 'sexist').

Marx's concept of ideology, which is pivotal to the contemporary understanding of prejudice, directly resulted from his grasp of German Idealism, and his subsequent critique thereof, accounting for all of the above elements of scientific opposition to ideology, led him to formulate the closest he came to a systematic epistemology. 11 Marx became a doctor of philosophy, having studied at Berlin University (where Hegel had lived the last thirty years of his life), in 2 1841.1 For the few used to reading Marx from the Althusserian perspective of treating his early philosophical works as juvenilia, and unscientific compared with the later economic analysis of Capital, this fact may seem unimportant. But I will follow many critics 13 in denying there being any irresolvable essential coupure (rupture), in the original Bachelardian sense 14 in Marx's literary corpus. In fact, it was Marx's 11

12 13 14

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For a rare book-length and systematic embellishment of Marx's epistemological views, see Torrance (1995) and also Jordan (1963, especially Part V •Toe materialist theory of knowledge, theories of truth and of universals', 317-421 ). Mclellan ( 1976, 40). See Meszaros ( 1975); Geras ( 1983); and Daly ( 1996). Cf. Lecourt ( 1975). For Bachelard, the mental categories and psychological perspectives of the individual scientist greatly affected her potential for re-

critical analysis of Feuerbach's philosophy (particularly as in The German Ideology of 184S), which paved the way for his critique of the ideology of bourgeois political economy. How did Marx formulate the concept of ideology anew, and what were its defining features?

Marx 's Word 'Ideology' There are, as most writers on the subject of Marx's concept of ideology point out, at least two distinct difficulties in articulating his thinking on the subject. The first of these is the fact that Marx does not always use the word 'ideology' in exactly the same semantic sense. The second, relatedly, is that elements of Marx's concept of ideology are to be found in writings where the term itself is absent (for example, in his 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'). is Jorge Larrain has usefully divided the development of Marx's concept of ideology into three distinct stages. 16 Firstly, Marx undergoes a period of 'Young Hegelianism', wherein the left-critiques of the followers of Hegel (above all their notions concerning the alienated character of religion and speculative philosophy) 17 are more or less adopted wholesale by Marx. This earliest approximation to the concept of ideology is particularly evident in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The second stage in the formation of the concept of ideology is manifested in Marx's philosophy of historical materialism, sketched in The German Ideology of 184S. In order to show the logic leading to the third development, the scientific ideology-critique of capitalist political economy, it is necessary to appreciate the centrality of the second stage to an understanding of Marx's concept of 'ideology'.

1S 16 17

solving theoretical problems and discovering new infonnation . As such, it is often imperative that scientists' instantiate tenninal breaks or ruptures in their projected work in order, so to speak,to broaden their horizons and deepen their insights. Larrain ( 1991, 8 and 46- 7). Ibid. (2003, 247- 50). For an exposition of modem philosophical atheism, and particularly that of the Young Hegelians, see Masterson ( 1971).

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Marx first used the word 'ideology' in the section 'The Premises of the Materialist Method' in The German Ideology. It is worth quoting this initial usage at length: In direct contrast to Gennan philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we descend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men (sic) say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms fonned in this human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of the material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding fonns of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.18

There is a more or less coherent meaning to be found in the word 'ideology' as Marx uses it, and its central elements are to be found in both the above paragraph and in the book from which it is taken, contra Louis Althusser's dismissal of the latter's ideological 'Hegelianism'. 19 Hereon we shall consider the central components of Marx's designation of ideology as featuring, variously and interrelatedly, the following heuristics: • • • •

History (and more precisely, the problem of ahistoricism); Practice (and the limitations of material existence); Power (and the nature of apologia); and Contradiction (and its evasion in discourse).

18 19

Marx (2000, 180). Althusser (1971, 149-51).

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Ideology and Ahistoricality

In the paragraph quoted above, Marx specifically opposes his own perspective to that of Gennan philosophy as a whole. Whilst profoundly concurring with the historicism 20 of Gennan idealism (although not with the iron teleology of Hegelianism), 21 Marx saw himself as philosophising in a different way, not only from the Gennan Idealists Fichte and Hegel (and other philosophers such as Schiller, Schelling, and Schlegel), but also from the 'materialist' Feuerbach. For Marx, Feuerbach was right to criticise the supernaturalism of Hegel's philosophy. From Feuerbach Marx took the notion that the origin of an idea was not primarily to be traced through the immanent development of another idea, but more fundamentally, more concretely (the tenn is Hegelian), through natural human existence, that is, in the particular 'species-being' of Homo sapiens. Where 20

21

Historicism as used here is used to denote that philosophy which stresses the understanding of being in terms of its historically defined nature. See Reill (1975). For Hegel, the development of the Absolute Idea, or the Truth as such, was bound to follow a logically necessary historical path. People, individuals, groups and nations, may or may not attain to more thorough understanding of the Truth, but if they are to do so, they cannot fail to understand it in specific preordained stages of its dialectical unfolding, characterised principally by adherence to and understanding of certain more or less modem ideas. Undoubtedly, Marx himself generally held to a more or less teleological view of historical development in his writings, one deeply affected by a Eurocentric understanding of history. Marx was certainly correct to stress that particular modes of production engender distinct social contradictions which impel certain temporary resolutions or, indeed, revolutions. However, as Amin (1980, 8~7) writes: •Each mode of production is characterized by its own contradictions and thus by its own specific laws of motion[ ...) But there are no laws of transition. Each transition involves the working out of a historical necessity [...) through the concrete interrelation of numerous specific contradictions within a social

fonnation[...]'. In any case, Marx's somewhat abstract historical teleology was severely tempered by his later anti-imperialist understanding of Irish development, and especially by his studies of Russian society and his understanding of the possible concrete fonns the transition from Feudalism to socialism might take there (see Shanin 1983).

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Feuerbach went wrong, and had in fact reverted to an inferior preHegelian, quasi-Kantian, position, was in assuming that human being was to be defined in 'biological' natural, fundamentally ahistorical, terms. For Marx, with Hegel Mind constitutes the world out of itself as a contradictory and conflictual, that is, dialectical, process. In contrast, with Feuerbach, the Ideal world is constituted by the particular biology of human beings which, by definition (that is, short of the transformation of human beings into a different species), remains static. It was this that prompted Marx to say, 'As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history [since he conceives of history as dictated by ahistorical "human nature" - Z.C.], and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist [since, to him, the history of, for example, religion, is the history of religious ideals - Z.C.)' .22 In both the philosophy of Hegelian Panlogism (in which the world is ultimately the result of a timeless Idea such as might be called 'the mind of God'), and in Feuerbachian materialist humanism (wherein the same mind of God is really the mind of' Man'), Marx perceives an anti-historical foundationalism whereby actual history is thought to conform to certain absolutist patterns of Mind and Matter. The Kantian dichotomy between appearance and 'thing-in-itself is throughout German idealism and Feuerbachian philosophy, transformed into the perennial ontological abstraction between 'Mind' and 'Matter', or the still more abstract 'thought and being', with human knowledge understood as emanating from one or the other in an absolute sense.23

22 23

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Marx (2000, 192). Marx, in my view, relied too much upon Feuerbach in his criticism of Hegel. Feuerbach was wrong to accuse Hegel of 'otherworldly' abstraction vis-a-vis the ideal determination of the human thought process. There is not a strict dichotomy in Hegel between science (and the study of matter) and logical rationality with regard to the development of ideas. As Hegel (I 974, 176-7) wrote: 'In order that [... ) science may come into existence, we must have the progression from the individual and particular to the universal - an activity which is a reaction on the given material of empiricism in order to bring about its reconstruction.The demand of a priori knowledge, which seems to imply that the idea should construct from itself: is thus a reconstructiononly [... ) In consciousness it then adopts the attitude of having cut away the bridge from behind it; it appears to be free to launch forth in its ether only, and to develop

Marx conceives of the profoundly anti-historical epistemology of the post-Kantian period as ideology. In other words, one of the bases for distinguishing explanations and analyses as ideological is in their characterisation as, tacitly or explicitly, expressing historically a priori judgement/s. Anti-historical ideology postulates a hypothesis's meaning, and the object to which it refers, as unaltered and undeveloped through historical time, whether absolutely or, more often, from the perspective of an over-arching idea (for Marx, Feuerbach's 'matter' or 'Man' was such an idea). Real history is expunged from ideological discourse, even while it is nominally present, insofar as it is understood as progressively attaining to, culminating in, or proceeding from, an a priori (ideo )logical principle. Ideological thought conceives historical development, whether of persons, nations or ideas, purely from the perspective of the playing out of 'ideas' or ideals. We can say, broadly, that the ahistoricality of ideological discourse involves abstract (or 'idealist') teleological historiography, invariably '[foisting] onto the past elements which belong solely to the present' .24 In

24

without resistance to this medium; but it is another matter to attain to this ether and development of it.' There is, however, a tendency, directly attributable to his quiescence (or self-censorship) in the face of the bureaucratic autocracy of Prussia at the time, and also his gradually more orthodox Lutheran Christianity, for Hegel to assume, rather than demonstrate, the actual governance of Ideas over 'matter'. As I insist, Hegel's was not the abstract theosophy his detractors, including to an extent Marx, assumed his work to be. Yet, given the circumstances of his time, there were cenain major logical limitations to his system. Most notably, as I suggest, a lack of understanding of the imponance of socially mediated practice in the actual formation of ideas, led Hegel, in the Enlightened Romantic tradition, to overestimate the epistemological centrality of human self-consciousness. In opposition to the pure anthropocentrism of Hegelian rationalism and Feuerbachian humanism, Marx stressed equally what Timpanaro (1975, 34) calls the 'passive' element in the construction of the human subject: 'We cannot( ... ) deny or evade the element of passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which imposes itself on us. Nor can we in any way reabsorb this external datum by making it a mere negative moment in the activity of the subject, or by making both the subject and the object mere moments, distinguishable only in abstraction, of a single effective reality oonstituted by experience.' Larrain (1991, 8).

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opposition to this, Marx stresses the logical necessity of situating any discursive explanation or description of the world within the particular historical juncture it is fonned (illuminating the real differences between historical periods), both in relation to the history of the internal development of its meaning and, more fundamentally and constitutively, in recognising the relation between a particular discourse and contemporary historically fonned practice/s.

Practice and Ideology

Like more recent poststructuralist and constructivist theories, particularly those of Foucault25 and Bourdieu,26 Marxian historical materialism employs a quite specific epistemological conception of 'practice'. For Marx, Hegel was profoundly mistaken in conceiving thought as logically and reflexively reordering apparently autonomous and passive matter.27 For Marx, reflexive human consciousness of nature refers to a material world which has been worked over and qualititatively transfonned by human practice. Marx refers to what he considers the dialectical unity of thought and practice as praxis. Marx's idea of praxis is not simply a demand for the unity of theory and practice; it is far more the case that 'praxis' is the truth of human consciousness from which the word's critical nonnative content is ultimately derived. In other words, human consciousness as such necessarily involves the dialectical unification of both practical pro-

25 26 27

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Foucault (1970). Bourdieu ( 1977). In fact, Hegel himself recognises what he calls 'labour' as a mediating 'essence' between thought and matter (Hegel 1967, 46-52; 1979, 111-19), wherein Hegel understands 'labour' as the moment essential to the development of concrete self-consciousnessin the 'master-slave dialectic'; and Macgregor (1976)). Yet it is precisely Hegel's historically delimited conservative legitimation of private property as the basis of law and right (and its legal institutionalisation in the 'State'), which ensures that he does not comprehend the extent to which practice determines the content of thought and human consciousness.

jection and conceptual theorisation as its naturally unique mode of understanding. 28 9 As Lobkowicz2 points out, Marx was fundamentally opposed to the Hegelian system from its own perspective as a complete or closed system. Yet for Marx, in contrast to Young Hegelians such as Ruge30 and Bauer,31 it is not possible to overcome the limitations of Hegel's Idealist system simply by 'actualising' its postulated requirements. For

Marx: [To] the extent to which the world becomes philosophical, philosophy becomes worldly ; that the actualisation of philosophy simultaneously is its loss. What philosophy fights outside actuality is its own inner shortcoming . It succumbs to the defects which it fights; indeed, it cannot abolish these defects except by succumbing to them.32

Hegel was convinced that the contradictions and conflicts of the world had almost reached the stage (in his own native Prussia) where they could be resolved and determined by the institutionalisation of Ideal Reason . Marx, however, believed that practical human relations were evolving in nineteenth century Germany (as elsewhere in Europe), which would give the lie to the idea that the 'progressive' Absolutist state Hegel (and many of his followers) revered could tame and control the contradictions inhering in post-feudal 'civil society' (Hegel's burgerliche gesselschaft). 33

28

29 30 31 32 33

For a discussion of Marx's ethics, their relation to his ontological characterisation of alienation and his consequent philosophic supercession of the Humean ' is/ought ' dichotomy, see Daly (1996); Brenkert (1983); and Gilbert ( 1992, 303-29) . Lobkowicz (1967 , 243). Ruge (1913). See Moggach (2003) . Marx and Engels (1927, 64). Hegel did indeed perceive, upon his study of political economy, that a certain distance was being created in the normal functioning of capitalist society, between the owners of industry and their employees (Macgregor 1976). However , Hegel could not accurately estimate the extent, or fully surmise the nature , of these contradictions .

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For Marx, then, truth was integrally a product of socio-historical human practice. This is not to say that Marx promoted any crude pragmatism 34 or believed ideas had essentially only 'instrumental' content. 35 Marx was undoubtedly firmly in the rationalist tradition and believed it possible to distinguish between the appearances of reality (generated in the course of human transformation of the world) and the more fundamental reality of the appearances.36 Marx's point against both the positivist identification of appearance with reality, and the pragmatic epistemology that holds that it is human invention that creates our understanding of the material world according to its peculiar needs, was that a material world does exist outside human perception. In this view, our ideas of the material world develop integrally from our dialectical interaction with that world, that is, with our active determination of the world and the world's determination of our activity: Neither thoughts nor language ... fonn a world of their own ... they are only manifestations of actual life. 37

In other words, it is not that the world imposes its design upon our senses, or our senses that impose their design upon the world, but our understanding of reality evolves from our practical relationship in and with the world. As Marx wrote: In no sense do men begin by 'standing' in [the] theoretical relation to 'things of the external world.' They begin like eveiy animal, by eating, drinking, etc., that is, not by 'standing' in a relation but by mastering certain things of the external world by deeds and thus satisfying their needs (that is, they begin with production). [ ... ] At a certain level of development. .. they reach the stage of linguistic baptism for the whole class of these things distinguished from the rest of the external world experientially. [ ... ] But this linguistic designation simply expresses as an image what repeated confirmation has made an experience. 38

34 35

36 37 38

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As Meyer (1970) imputes to him. As in the philosophy of Dewey (1916). On Marx; s use of Hegelian logic in his explication of the essential woridngs of the capitalist economy, see Meaney (2003); Smith (1993), especially chapter five; and Uchida (1988). Marx and Engels (1965, 504). Marx (1972).

Just as according to Hegel it is impossible for human thought to transcend the boundaries of the historically evolved ideas of a particular historical period, it is equally impossible for human thought in general to transcend the boundaries imposed by its historically evolved practical relations with nature. 39 In ideology, then, Marx detects a tendency to detach the development of an idea from its origins in practical human relations whilst expunging any historicopractical considerations from its discourse. Marx suggested that instead of looking to the dominant ideas of the present to detennine the truth or otherwise of our perceptions of reality, it is necessary to examine the historico-practical evolution of those ideas, not on an arbitrary basis, but on the basis of the relation of the formation of those ideas to the ways in which human beings materially reproduced themselves and their society on the most fundamental level, that is, on the level of economics. As Larrain writes: The importanceof practice for the fonnation of ideas derives from the more basic imumption that reality itself should be conceived as practice . If reality is not conceived ' in the form of 'the object', as an already given and external world, but is produced by men's practice, then men and women can only form ideas and acquire knowledge about the world inasmuch as this reality is practically constituted. It is by practically producing and transforming reality that human beings come to know it. They do not contemplate it as already formed; they represent it as they construct it. Hence all forms of consciousness emerge from and are closely connected to social practices. 40

Yet, for Marx, contra the later Niet:zsche,41 there is certainly a necessarily objective component to our knowledge of the world, insofar as our understanding must take place largely within boundaries set by nature (including our own nature and its relation to the nonhuman natural world), and is not simply a relative 'triumph of the will'. Even for human beings to be able to utilise their ideas, they must discover those ideas that reveal truths about that aspect of reality 39

40 4I

On historical materialist epistemology as based on a conception of human being as grounded in its relations with 'nature', see O' Connor (1988, 2948) and Foster (2000) . Larrain (1991, 21-2). Nietzsche ( 1968).

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which is to be transfonned. Marx contends that actually existing human consciousness, in the context of particular materially delimited and historically evolved practices and practical relations, is regularly fonned in its ideal detenninations by the dominant ideas in society. This leads us to the most familiar usage of the word ideology, its conceptualisation as the beliefs and philosophies of the powerful.

Power and Ideology I noted at the start of the chapter how the meaning of the tenn 'ideology' has consistently and gradually become more 'neutral' and less critical since Marx's initial fonnulation. There are a number of historical impetuses for this development to be discussed in the next section. Suffice to say for now, that the concept of ideology has become, in the field of social philosophy, 'politicised'. In other words, the meaning of the concept of ideology has been reduced to that of 'political ideology', a body of beliefs that can be utilised for political purposes by particular interested organisations. The intellectual roots of the reduction of the sociological content of 'ideology' to its political content lie in the semantic signification of 'ideology' as a political doctrine or dogma. Napoleon, who first used the word ideology in a negative critical sense, meant to imply its being implicitly politically oriented discourse. Similarly, Marx believed that ideology contained an integrally political content. Marx and Engels wrote: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.42

Thus Marx considers that the owners of the means of production (the owners of factories, mines, land, labour, machines, etc.) are uniquely 42

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Marx (2000, 192).

placed to be in possession of or control over the means of the production of ideas (for example, through owning the mass media, the educational system, the printing presses, intellectual property rights and as having decisive influence on the legal process, the churches, and the political process). Yet, for Marx, it was not simply that the ruling class cynically manipulated ideas to support their own narrow worldviews; rather, for Marx, the worldviews of the ruling class are themselves necessarily narrow, as based in their own practically delimited reality .43 Thus, it is important to reiterate that Marx does not conceive of ideologies as mere illusions. 44 For Marx: The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance... For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and

43

44

Marx intends, by his concept of ideology, not the articulate expression of deliberate lies or subterfuge, even whilst purportedly universal claims are made on behalf of a particular class or (class) interest. Marx's notion is that the roots of ideology lie much deeper than the self-consciousness of the ideologist. Marx takes the would-be objective character of the ideologists' work seriously and at face value, implying that its author is to some degree unable to view his or her philosophical principles as based on wholly partial, and fundamentally interested, preconceptions. However, I think that Marx's concept of ideology has to be reassessed in the light of modem mass media communications and the political functionality of the information industry. In my view, much apparent 'ideology' is based precisely on conscious and systematic manipulation and disavowal of truth in its descriptions and explanations of events, etc. In the light of twentieth century developments in the mass media, in particular its industrialisation and parallel corporate monopolisation, the line dividing lies and ideology is not as great as Marx and many Marxists believe. It is not always the case that a particular broadcasting corporation inhabits a certain (class) culture wherein it is incapable of seeing 'the wood for the trees', or seeing the real dynamics behind events or actions. Often, it is the case that the truth, of which the media are well aware, is systematically and ruthlessly suppressed, often via state intervention, on behalf of the maintenance of a certain order. The 'inverted' analysis of events, in this case, is not really based in reality itself, but occurs as a deliberate policy of deceptive propaganda, hence the necessity of a conceptual distinction between the latter and ideology. As in Mepham (1979, 141-75); and Althusser (1971, 149-S I) .

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where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an 'eternal law' ... 45

As we have seen ideological discourse expunges both history and practicality from its self-understanding and development, thus 'naturalising' the current, or preferred, state of affairs. Thus, the appearance of reality is taken for reality itself, and the ideas which legitimate 6 the predominance of the historico-practically evolved 'ruling class' ,4 come to be seen as natural, true, and just. Indeed, since real history and practice are ruled out of the development of the ideas of the ruling class, as they are ruled out in the development of ideas in general, the rule of the ruling class, a group of real, historically determined practical individuals, inevitably comes to be seen as the rule of their ideas. Marx's understanding of the political element of ideology was left fairly theoretically underdeveloped, although in his journalistic writings and his analysis of contemporary political affairs, Marx's politicalideology-critique is very prominent. 47 But for now, it will suffice to say that Marx conceived of political ideologies as developing to justify the concrete and systematically ordained interests of ruling elites as determined by their property rights over the means of production in a given society. In this sense, ideology as such generally functions for the benefits of ruling elites. This is not to say that a dominated class cannot reproduce ideology. Indeed, ideologies are often popularised and invigorated through their acceptance by the dominated classes. Only in situations wherein the hierarchical relations of a society are being contested or are in a decadent state, is there a possibility of dominant ideology being produced which does not directly express the interests of

45 46

47

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Marx (2000, 192). For Marx, in a class-based society (wherein ownership of the means of production is concentrated into a relatively few private hands) the ruling class develops out of a particular set of property relations appropriate to a particular stage of development of the forces of production (the technology, skills and division of labour of a social economy), upon which struggle between the classes is ultimately based. For Marx, it is class struggle which detennines social and historical development and provides the basis for new modes of production based on new forces of production to take root See for example Marx ( 1984).

the ruling class . In this case, for the political scientist, the concept of ideology must retain its critical analytic force, whilst explicitly recognising the relative rationality of the ideologies of particular contending classes. In any case, expressing dominant material relations in purely ideological terms as I have outlined them does not permit the ideal representation of real social conflict and contradiction. The socalled 'ideology' of dominated classes, insofar as they are realistically set to achieve the destruction of class society must in fact, therefore, be highly realistic . In particular, anti-ideological activity must be as cognisant as possible of real contradictions in society and in nature.

Ideology and Contradiction The final central component in Marx's concept of ideology is its character as the discursive repression of contradictions. This aspect of ideology is even less theoretically elaborated in Marx than the above conception of ideological explication as idealistic political rhetoric. This is largely due to the fact that Marx considered Hegelian philosophy to contain the most sophisticated presentation of dialectical philosophy possible, despite the crucial differences between his and Hegel's respective philosophies. Insofar as Marx's theory of ideology is methodological it is vital to see its roots in the Hegelian idea of contradiction . Under alienated relations of production, wherein a labourer has no control either over the work process or the product of her labour, Marx considered that in her praxical orientation to the world, representations of reality tending to reflect the appearance of those relations are produced. The immediate apprehension of appearances, for Marx, tends to tacitly, and often explicitly, reproduce in ideal form the dominant politico-economic structure/s wherein we live and work. However, it is also evident that idealised appearances often reveal major conflicts and contradictions in reality. In a negative sense, it is precisely the role of ideology, for Marx, to cover up these apparent contradictions and conflicts in reality . For Larrain:

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Ideology is not simply a cognitive error which can be overcome by a more adequate cognition. Nor does science exhaust the concept of truth. There are errors which are not ideological, and there are truths which may be found beyond the actual cognition of society as it is. The specificity of the ideological error is the fact that it conceals contradictions. The only truth which may successfully defeat this particular error is the practical solution of those contradictions. Ideology cannot be dispelled by simple theoretical means because 48 its roots are beyond the boundaries of mere intellectual mistake.

At the same time, ideology has a more positive significance, as it is intended to provide a cogent satisfactory resolution of the real contradictions and conflicts. Larrain writes: [As) long as men, because of their limited material mode of activity, are unable to solve these contradictions in practice, they tend to project them in ideological forms of consciousness, that is to say, in purely mental or discursive solutions which effectively conceal or misrepresent the existence and character of these contradictions. By concealing contradictions the ideological distortion contrib49 utes to their reproduction and therefore serves the interests of the ruling class.

The psychological bases for individual and group sublimation of cognitive dissonance are examined in the next chapter. But it should be clear that Marx, in marked contrast to Hegel, does not consider contradictions as inhering solely in 'ideal' form. Real contradictions, . which may indeed be grasped in terms of dialectical logic, arise out of human practical material relations in and with natural reality. These contradictions can be 'internal' to an organic or systematic unity in which actual development occurs, or they can be 'external' to this system insofar as an oppositional constraint is placed upon the system's proper functioning. 50 In both cases, the role of ideology is to refute the reality of the contradiction, either by denial of its integrality to a system, by rendering the contradiction more palatable and less painful, or by obfuscating the contradiction altogether. Generally, the erasure (to borrow Derrida's term) of contradiction is normally, and easily, performed simply by 'idealising' the appearance of reality in a 48 49 SO

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Larrain (1979, 173, my emphases). Bottomore (2003, 248). Bhaskar (I 993, 56- 7).

theological, moralistic, or positivist sense, thereby denying the concrete movement of the thing. Marx's understanding of ideology as the 'glossing over' of contradictions is grounded in his belief that there is relative movement in all things. By presenting their analytical 'categories' as static and substantial outside of their specific practicohistorical determinations, ideologists at least tacitly negate the contradictory and oppositional forces inherent in any realistic hypothesis or concept. Marx considered the denial of 'essential contradiction' (a thing being at once one thing and also its opposite, given the determinant forces of oppositional relations which constitute the thing internally) basic to ideological thinking. For Hegel, all forms of thought and being (at least those prior to his own!) are essentially finite and in the process of change. To cognise a thing, then, Hegel considered it necessary to understand it as being relatively internally contradictory and conflictual, since it was this that ensured its development. 51 Any real entity, contra Plato and Aristotle (and most pre-Hegelian philosophers with the exception perhaps of Spinoza), is not simply a substantial thing in itself, a substratum to which predicates and their relations attach, but rather a thing itself is determined by, whilst in tum determining, the relations determining its being in relation to other things. Despite his alleged 'inversion' of Hegel, Marx did not merely dismiss Hegel's dialectic out of hand. He wrote: The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to comprehend its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. 52

In other words, in Marx's terms, 1t 1s necessary to understand contradictions as real material contradictions which ideas reflect in human consciousness. Hegel would not have denied this. Where Marx is opposed to Hegel is in seeing that material contradictions are per-

ceived in the context of the historical development of practical transformative relations with nature (matter) and the articulation of SI 52

Hegel (1969, 439). Marx (1987, 9).

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ideal fonns out of these relations, rather than solely out of the historical development of 'ideas' in relation to ( essentially unhistorical) 'matter'. Thus, and this leads us finally to Larrain 's third stage in the development of Marx's concept of ideology, in order to understand the real contradictions of modem society, one could not simply adjudicate the clash of ideas, one had to understand ideal opposition as rooted in specific practical material oppositions. Thus, to truly comprehend debates taking place around ideas in capitalist society (for example, in Marx's time, the question of Jewish emancipation in Gennany, the question of the proper fonn of Gennan democracy, or in England the alleged morality of colonialism), it was necessary to understand the structural contradictions and material limitations of the economy of that society : Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge ... a period of transfonnation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. s3

In a later chapter, to better show how the mental faculties of capitalist citizens are prejudicially conditioned, it will be necessary to examine the (intrinsically social) 'productive forces' and the 'relations of production' of capitalism. For now, we can say that ideology, for Marx, is rooted in the ideal banishment of contradiction and/or the banishment of contradiction to the ideal realm. The meaning of prejudice, then, is fundamentally coterminous with ideology in all of the above senses. Prejudice necessarily involves a naturalised fetishisation of appearances in the ideological sense. I will conclude this chapter with a clarification of the relation between ideology and prejudice.

53

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Ibid. (2000, 426).

Conclusion: Ideology and Prejudice Prejudice is a positive non-rational judgement on reality based on limited awareness and/or consideration of the available facts and their interpretations. Prejudice is intrinsically constituted so as to preclude the possibility of correction and/or dismissal. With the above articulation of the philosophical concept of ideology, we have made some inroads firstly in determining the character of prejudice as an epistemological principle, and secondly in understanding the possible cognitive sources of prejudice as a mode of knowledge acquisition and exposition. In constructing a concept of ideology that is capable of critiquing the means by which language in particular, as one of the major ways in which our perceptions of reality are formed, is utilised in the systematic distortion of reality, we will have formulated a provisional method for combating prejudice. But how, more exactly, does ideology relate to prejudice? Ideology, in its contemporary popular sense, is a body of ideas held by particular political interest groups. Yet social theorists ought to revive the critical concept of ideology. The latter emphasises that ideology is born of an apologetic naturalisation of the appearance of reality as that is affected by the historically determined and dominant practico-social relations of a period. The relation of prejudice to ideology is twofold. Firstly, it can be said that a prejudice can express the same negative epistemological relation to history, power, practice and contradiction, as ideology. In short, prejudicial thought often reduces the objectivity of the latter epistemic categories to their everyday subjective appearance. Secondly, prejudice is itself developed in relation to ideology. This relation is illustrated in this simple diagram:

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IDEOLOGY

+ I

I

+

I I

PREJUDICE Here, the indented lines indicate indirect influence rather than direct detennination. Prejudice must always affect ideology, though only partially, insofar as ideology occludes from our understanding a reality which may, in fact, be rationally articulated contemporaneously and should be so if ideology is to be resolutely avoided. Ideology must affect prejudice insofar as prejudice must express demonstrably unwarranted dogma, which tends to be (but is not necessarily) expressed through naturalistic, and hence ideological, assertion . But ideology, in legitimating and systematising prejudices about reality, ensures that the latter become further entrenched and attain a gloss of rationality and respectability, so much so, in fact, that the distinction between the two modes of cognition, becomes fundamentally compromised. Prejudicial beliefs are augmented and amplified through ideological discourse, in part initially catalysed by ostensibly 'objective' prejudicial worldviews. It must be emphasised, however, that ideology is not merely a systematic discursive elaboration of prejudice. A prejudice, in fact, can be wholly at odds with ideology, as with reality. Larrain writes that, 'Distortion is not of the essence of the concept of ideology. Thus there may be ideologies based on scientific premises and ideologies based on pre-scientific or non-scientific assumptions', that is, prejudices .54 In the sense outlined above, ideology can be only relatively grounded in objectivistic scientific analysis. Thus, ideology is recognised as explicitly non-scientific in relation to the establishment of a

54

80

Larrain (1979, 172).

wider scientific perspective on reality.ss It is possible to reintroduce the critical content of the concept of ideology by relating it to the detennination and delineation of prejudice as unreasonable assumption. A discourse can only be deemed ideological where prejudices can be identified through scientific analysis. However, as we shall see, it is principally the psychological and practical obstacles placed in the path of the extension of the scienti fie method of overcoming prejudice which ensures the continued social reproduction of an ideological prop to instinctive prejudicial thinking.

55

The word 'wider' here connotes the existence of a more penetrating, more encompassing, and more dialectical objective ascenainment of reality, than the one-sided. abstract and partially interested ideologicalcaricatureof reality.

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Chapter 3 The Psychological Formation of Prejudice

The Three Basic Modes of Intellectual Prejudice In the previous chapters, prejudice was considered predominantly from the side of its ideationaJ content. However, prejudice is not based purely on an unscientific and/or ideological analytic construct. Rather, prejudice formation occurs even before ostensibly reasonable prejudicial opinions are enunciated. This chapter outlines fundamental psychological processes in the formation of prejudice. But before proceeding it is again necessary to clarify the meaning of the major conceptual terminology employed thus far. A new supplementary concept must be introduced to the discussion, namely, the concept of bigotry.

Prejudice, Ideology and Bigotry Prejudice is a definitive proposition proffered as fact which is founded on invalidly reasoned erroneous judgement about an object. 1 Prejudice

We have previously noted three major categories of fallacious thinking derived from Bhaskar's critical realism, namely, the ontic fallacy (see chapter one, note 46), the linguistic fallacy (see chapter one, note 67), and the anthropic fallacy (chapter one, p. 49). Bethlehem ( 1985, 38-9) usefully suggests three categorical errors of judgement which bias judgment These are: Representativeness,wherein judgments are made about a thing or event a on the basis of what people stereotypically presume is characteristic of a category or set A. Availability, wherein judgments are made about things and events on the basis of what image or category comes most readily to mind when thinking about a related (set of) thing(s) or event(s). Much media coverage (see chapter six) operates on the basis of such suggestive short-term thinking.

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does not necessarily imply the explicitly acknowledged influence of an ideology. It is possible for a person to hold or to profess a prejudice without employing the distinctive legitimising tropes of ideological discourse (primarily, concerted pseudo-naturalism and narrow pseudoobjectivism ). Thus a person can profess a prejudicial idea (which, in fact, may well have its genealogically inherited content inscribed through one or more ideologies) without bothering to explicitly justify his or her beliefs ideologically. 2 Conversely, it is hardly possible to conceive of prejudice as some sort of unmediated outpouring of visceral inspiration. The Freudian term 'preconscious' is an entirely apposite characterisation of the internal-mental constitution of prejudice. The term preconscious suggests that a prejudice is neither an entirely unconscious representation of instinctual impulses, nor is it a carefully articulated belief. The linguistic construction of prejudice may or may not be ideologically enforced in the individual prejudicial consciousness. An ideology is a judgement based on the rationalisation of prejudice according to the previously outlined formal and unscientific intellectual operations. An ideological belief system is necessarily always prejudicial, since it involves doing intellectual violence to facts by ascribing a logically and factually unfounded meaning to them. Our third major category of prejudice to be conceived is 'bigotry'. Bigotry is aggressive prejudicial intolerance of belief systems, genders, races, classes or persons different to those with which the bigot identifies. It is prejudicial ideology and ideologically-enforced intolerance. Bigotry can involve both extreme prejudice and ideology, insofar as prejudicial intolerance tends to naturalise and transcendentalise its meaning in light of conflicting ideas. Ideology, however, Prior theories, which unduly influence peoples understanding of the

2

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relations between things and events. Bethlehem notes that prejudicial theories particularly influence mistaken judgments about •cause and effect'. An example of a prejudice, thus conceived. might be that America was the first nation to send men into space. An example of ideological prejudice might be the belief that America was the first nation to send men into space because it is the most forward thinking country in the world, or even that the first man on the moon was American because America is the most forward thinking country in the world.

does not necessarily entail bigotry. Indeed, ideology as such cannot function well as a rationalistic discourse if intolerance is allowed to occupy a central fonnal position in its discursive syntax. Despite its being semantically and symptomatically related to the other principal irrational ratiocinative categories, the concept of bigotry is a qualitatively different one to that of prejudice or ideology. Insofar as the tenn bigotry implies subjective prejudicial-ideological intolerance, we can say that bigotry is an essentially psychological concept. In psychological terms, bigotry is the consequence and cause of the thoroughgoing reception of prejudicial ideology in the individual mind. Bigotry always implies aggression on the part of its protagonist: in the bigoted mindset, an enemy or foe is always intended. Neither prejudice nor ideology must consciously imply this aggressive tendency in their profession. However, the ideological rationalisation of a definitive judgement based on irrational ignorance must lead to tension and anxiety when, in the real world, it is evident that such an ideology is incomprehensible in light of a dynamic reality and others' conflicting needs and perceptions. Bigotry is the instinctual antipathy to thinking that denies the absolute integrity of a person or group's particular ideological grasp of the world, and increases the more absolutely that narrow rationalisation is challenged. 3 The absolute

3

Defending the possibility of relatively objective truth does not, of course, entail obliterating the difference between what might be called 'subjective' and 'objective' truth. What is perceived and how it is perceived is in many ways a product of subjective experience and 'taste'; for instance, what looks and tastes nice to you may not to me. Thus, it would be absurd to call a person bigoted simply because they refuse to admit, for example, that tea tastes nicer than coffee (although that might be inferred by the idea that bigotry is aggressively intolerant prejudice). However, a scientist can certainly establish some of the objective reasons that may underlie 'subjective' or 'personal' tastes and experiences (as when neurologists determine food tastes according to brain chemistry) . Objective science can determine that tea is 'better' than coffee insofar as it does not potentially give you heart palpitations or that coffee is •better' for workers' productivity than tea. In any case, objectivism intends the fact that there can be and are binding judgements which are true for both you and for me, regardless of our subjective experiences and tastes of and in the matter (as when poetry, contra Jeremy

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challenge to bigotry is, of course, by no means itself necessarily bigoted. Nor does aggression or intolerance, even whilst verbally expressed, necessarily imply bigotry. Bigotry results from a person who has no good reason to believe what he does having become very ideologically indoctrinated, and being thus incapable of perceiving the rationality of opposed viewpoints.

Prejudice and Neurosis In understanding prejudicial intolerance as based on psychological affects, we must be clear that prejudice in itself is not some sort of neurosis,4 and is not based on psychological malfunctioning, as bigotry must be. Prejudice is a definitive judgement based primarily on ignorance, wilful or otherwise. Prejudicial ideology, on the other hand, is prejudice that has become rationalised, and thereby legitimised, in the mind of the individual. A neurosis can easily develop, however, if the rationalisation of ideology is allowed to augment the psychological affectivity of prejudice as a principle of organisational

4

Bentham's famous aphorism, is said to have a certain value and raison d'etre which pushpin does not and cannot have). A neurosis is 'A personality or mental disturbance not due to any known neurological or organic dysfunction, i.e. a psychoneurosis' (Reber I 995, 491 ). This definition, in fact, ignores and, indeed, reverses the predominant trends in sophisticated contemporary psychological research. The gulf between the mind as physiologically and the mind as psychologically conceived has been more than less bridged by physio-psychological science in recent decades. This is not, however, to suggest that the workings of the human mind are solely due to the apparently 'internal' neuronal and chemical processes of the body. This would, as Lucien Seve has suggested, be to erase the differences between the naturality of human beings and that of animals. Seve (1978, 182) writes: '[Man) is a natural being but he is a ..natural human being", a being whose essence consists of the ensemble of social relations. To imagine that it is possible to exhaust the knowledge of such a being, to truly reach his essence, to grasp his

soul, in a way that is basically identicalto that which is for anunals, is an extraordinary aberration - a physiologistic aberration.' In the present chapter, I examine the development of human cognitive processes and their outcomes holistically, as to the relations governing the development of human mental life in general.

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ideational hegemony. That is to say, prejudice alone is more prone to collapse in the face of contradictory perceptions of reality when it is not grounded upon pseudo-rational dogmas. Not only does this strengthening of prejudice relate to the social enculturation of strident ideology; it must also be understood in psychological terms as related to ego defence. Neurotic bigotry, or the irrational intolerance of people or views other than those one identifies with, is precisely the result of the sustained ideologisation of prejudice in the service of the beleaguered ego. The construction of ideology occurs as the result of the narrative, semiotic or symbolic naturalisation of the appearances of everyday class-bound social relations and practices, and the regular inculcation of the representative ideas and validations of the ruling class as mediated by the major institutions of cultural communication (see Chapter 6). The process of 'bigotification', or the production of bigotry in individuals is not, categorically, experienced as institutionally, but as psychologically grounded, and occurs as a result of inter and intra-psychological struggle. We have previously identified ideology as an unscientific account of reality discursively articulated through uncritical formal processes that rationalise the ideas and practices of domination. But it would be wrong to suppose that the construction of ideology is the only wellspring of prejudice. In order to further our understanding, we must examine how the prejudicial mind as such is produced in a manner that is not specifically grounded in the promulgation of particular ideologies. This chapter shows how the acceptance of prejudicial beliefs and worldviews occurs in part as an unconscious process. Thus, whilst the next chapter endeavours to produce a concrete understanding of how prejudice is actively and practically reproduced in people's quotidian existence under particular sociopolitical conditions, it is first necessary to deepen the epistemological categorisation of prejudice with a thoroughgoing examination of its psychological and cognitive foundations in the individual mind. The problems examined in this chapter involve attempting to answer how, and in what ways, the reception and propagation of ideology depends upon the support of personality dispositions and types. Since bigotry must be understood as the psychological outcome and predisposition

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of and for the ideological rationalisation of prejudice, we must determine what the affective sources of bigotry in the individual personality are. In understanding the subjective character of prejudice, we will have occasion to consult various psychoanalytic accounts of the development of human cognitive functions. Many readers, particularly those well-versed in contemporary post-Freudian psychology, will question the validity of analysing prejudice from the perspective of its growth within the 'individual personality'. So doing, however, does not suggest that individual psychology is unconnected to, or even a separate realm of being from practical, social life, or social psychology. The atomistic notion, propagated by bourgeois psychoanalysis 5 and sociology alike, that human individuality, including its personal dispositions, is one thing, and society another (as the coming together of these individuals and the external environment to which the individual per se adapts) has been challenged in the critical realist defence of social science of chapter one. Drawing on various realist currents bearing on social science, we can show that the development of personality, and the content of that personality, is developed in and through practical social activity as conditioned by social relations of material production. 6 As Schneider writes:

5 6

See Schneider ( 1975, 63-84 ), for a concise characterisation of such. Doing so will entail pursuing unabashedly a consistently materialist line of inquiry. A broadly Darwinian understanding of the evolutionary naturality of

human beings, stripped of the speculative metaphysical absolutism associated with, for example, Spencer's bourgeois reading of Darwin's concept of the 'survival of the fittest', etc., is essential to an understanding of the conditions for the development of human thought in and about the world. An epistemology based on a thoroughgoing scientific naturalism, which avoids the pitfalls of understanding human knowledge either in purely empirio-pragmatist terms or in the equally idealistic terms of 'knowledge' as relatively approximating to Truth, will enable the social theorist to better understand how prejudices about the world are formed. At the same time, the 'denaturalisation' (insofar as 'nature' is taken to signify unchanging form and implies mechanical determination) of prejudicial cognition must be related to the dialectical relations between nature and the human mind, not in terms, as Timpanaro (1970, 34) cautions, of an identical inter-reciprocal relation between the mind and the

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In The Future of an Illusion Freud demonstrated more precisely how the 'economic structure' of society also influenceswhat remains of sexual freedom. For here he developed the idea that the degree of instinctualand need gratification which a culture can afford its members is dependent not only on the degree of its control over nature, that is. the developmental state of its productive forces. but also on social 'institutions', that is the social organisation of the means of production,the relationshipsthat result from production.7

The satisfaction of instinctual needs is related to the satisfaction of material needs in that the latter provide both the object and the means to satisfy the fonner, whilst the manner in which historically specific material needs are attained, conditions the socio-structural fonn in which the human (especially the sexual) relations appropriate to any kind of instinctual gratification are located. Nevertheless, a sociological and, more specifically, dialectical materialist account of the development of human personality that simplistically and dualistically adheres to a notion of human consciousness as the epiphenomena! 'spiritual' accretion of socio-economic relations, misses the vital point that in order for social relations to be reproduced, they must be apprehended and understood in and through the mind of the living human individual. This is especially true under the capitalist mode of production wherein the worker must produce her whole self principally, and in large part, through her personal qualities and propensities, that is, her labour-power. 8 As

7 8

'external world', but in terms of the reality of both as participating in precisely the same 'material'/natural reality. Schneider (1975, 23). The Italian Marxist autonomist theorist Lazzarato has argued that so-called post-Fordist economic sectors of the contemporary Western world tend to involve the worker's personality in their proper functioning even more than traditional industrial labour practices. As Lazzarato (2004) writes. 'The management mandate to "become subjects of communication" threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual Jabour (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the workers' personality and subjectivity within the production of value'. To some extent. this fonnulation ignores the unconscious detennination of the worker's personality by any and all forms of production, particularly the more servile forms such as slavery. Since her boss under these fonns does not directly interpellate the worker, this is not to say that her personality is elsewhere than

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Friedrich Engels remarks, in a section in Ludwig Feuerbach where he is commenting on Marx's critique of Hegel's political theory: As all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transfonn themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action, so all the needs of civil society - no matter which class happens to ·be the ruling one - must pass through the will of the State in order to secure general validity in the fonn of laws.9

Thus, the essential insights of psychoanalysis should no more be completely dismissed as founded on ideological individualism, as Marx dismissed the studies of bourgeois economists on the same basis. In both 'sciences', the behaviour of the social actor is normally conceived as determined by her inner constitution , and in both, the social relations governing this 'inner core' of the person are relatively ideologically erased. Yet the study of the individual , if detached from its prevalent alliance with bourgeois theory undoubtedly constitutes one initial aspect of a holistic science of the human mind. It is with the project for a coherent and realistic social psychology that any endeavour to study the roots of virulent chauvinism ought to be based. One of the indispensable insights of psychoanalytic theory lies in its understanding that the human mind is not, in and of itself, a neutral arbiter of reality. The cognitive rationality of which human animals are capable, is not an already given facet of our mental life, but must be nurtured and developed if it is to hold sway over our evaluative judgements. For Freud, the development of rationality is dependent on the thoroughgoing comprehension and transcendence of various stages of psychic development and their concomitant personality traits, which, for him (if not for some of his followers) are initially formed in the early years of the individual's life. Freud considered that a serious

9

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'on the job'. Furthermore , Lazzarato ' s formula ignores the enormous impact workers themselves have historically had on techniques and management of production. Part of the need for supervisors in factories, and the development of Taylorism as a supervisory regime of regulation and rationalisation, as Yates (2003, 178) has pointed out, is to monitor the novel ways workers are able to conserve time and energy on the job, and incorporate these techniques into the 'official' production process. Engels (1969, 369).

examination of the development of the cognitive faculties of the individual must necessarily begin with the fonnation of personality. With this in mind, the psychoanalytic understanding of human personality can provide an important point of departure in understanding the growth of irrational prejudice.

The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Mind Psychoanalysis and the Human Mind

For Sigmund Freud ( 185fr.1939), enlightenment rationalism was wrong to conceive of the human mind as inherently rational and naturally predisposed to understand objective ideas of truth, right and justice. Although he undoubtedly and often somewhat paradoxically stressed the ideality of symptomatic neurotic behaviour, Freud considered the human mind a wholly natural organism of which psychic phenomena are understood as fundamentally grounded in wholly biological (for Freud, instinctive) developmental structures . Freud is, then, to some extent in agreement with more recent evolutionary theories of the mind, ' 0 which situate mental and cognitive growth in the species Homo sapiens in terms of their natural development according to historical adaptation, function and purpose, that is, through selection processes common to other animals. However, for Freud, the instinctual formation of the human mind is qualitatively different from that of other animal species. In contrast to earlier nineteenth century psychological theories, Freud did not believe an instinct could be understood solely with reference to internal motor stimuli in the human body.11 For Freud, an instinct must be equally, if not better, understood with reference to its object; the thing in regard to which the instinct is set to achieve its aim. According to Freud, the IO 11

See especially Edelman ( 1987), Godfrey-Smith ( 1996), and Plotkin et al. (1982). Fromm (1977, 38).

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object of the instinct may not necessarily be something extraneous to the human body, but may be a part of it. Nevertheless, the instinct exercises its major influence on the person, according to Freud, in the objectifying mental life of the person, and not merely the physiological life of the body. Freud says, 'An exact knowledge of the sources of an instinct is not invariably necessary for purposes of psychological investigation; sometimes its source may be inferred from its aim.' 12 In other words, to understand the origin and character of an instinct it is not primarily necessary to examine its physiological basis in particular organs or systems of the human body. Undoubtedly, this procedure can and does lead to greater knowledge of the instincts. But, for Freud, given that the major influence of instincts in human beings is in our mental life, and given that the physiological processes of bodily instincts are represented regularly in the human mind, it is possible, and eminently more practicable, to garner knowledge of the instincts from a purely psychological perspective. Thus, the instinct of hunger may well be understood as a physiological process excited by the state of certain bodily organs. Yet, psychologically, the instinct of hunger is represented 'object-ively' to the hungry person in particular ideal and imaginary forms, say, as the form of the breast in early life or of bacon in later childhood or of a vegan pasty in still later life. Alternatively, the objective instinct of hunger can be displaced or transformed into religious experience or political struggle, given the character and circumstances of the hungry person. Thus, despite his apparently thoroughgoing materialism (and vociferous atheism), Freud conceded to the idealists that the human mind could not be represented as the unadulterated psychic representation of natural impulses. In fact, Freud, theorising along the lines of Social Darwinian motifs (more precisely, neo-Hobbesian Spencerian ones), argued that the naturality of the human mind was something to be repressed, lest sexual and social savagery run rife. Thus, said Freud, to attain to a high level of civilisation, human beings must replace instinct with egocentric consciousness. 13 It is this 12 13

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Freud (1991, 202). Of course, were Freud's theory correct, one would expect the more 'primitive' human societies to be seedbeds of massive social and sexual conflict . Yet as

egocentric consciousness, which, in theorising it as an essentially distinguishing mark of human being, led Freud to stress the value and significance of metapsychological concepts at the expense of naturalistic (identified in Freud with purely biological or animal as such), and thus concrete social, explanations for the development of consciousness. Despite Freud's ultimately dichotomous and unsustainable distinction between nature and ego, his thinking nonetheless exposes some of the consequences of human being's transformation or repression of natural impulses in the service of the ego. It is the latter aspect of Freud's ideas that for many of his more politically progressive disciples constitutes psychoanalysis' socially critical edge. Before proceeding to outline some of the psychic consequences for the individual of the taming of the unconscious, a word or two must be said to clarify Freud's general theory of the mind.

The Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind For Freud, the human mind and the individual personality are composed of three major systems. These are the id, the ego, and the superego. As Calvin Hall writes: In the mentallyhealthy person these three systems fonn a unified and harmonious organisation. By working together cooperatively they enable the individual to carry on efficient and satisfyingtransactionswith his environment The purposeof these transactions is the fulfilmentof man's basic need and desires. Conversely, when the three systems of personalityare at odds with one another the person is said to be maladjusted.14

Topographically conceived, the id (the unconscious part of the mind) is at the foundation or the base of the ego (the reflective self), whilst

14

Erich Fromm and others, using the evidence of anthropologists, have conclusively shown. such is not the case. Most of the more 'primitive' human societies, for example the tribal societies of the native Americans or the aboriginal Australians, were largely egalitarian, non-authoritarian, not warlike, and had well organisedcooperativedivisions of labour (Fromm 1977, 181-241). Hall (1979, 22).

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the essentially punitive superego (or conscience) dominates the ego but ultimately forms part of the unconscious through a process of egocentric introjection. The ego is the conscious part of the human mind that cognitively mediates between the demands made by the other two systems (broadly speaking, natural desire and conscience). Each mental system has its own peculiar epistemological fibre according to Freud, so the unconscious part of the mind consists in imaginary representations catalysed by instinctual, predominantly sexual (and in later Freudian theory also destructive), impulses or instincts. The unconscious mind is content to reproduce these mental signs, according to Freud, and does not distinguish their substance from their reality. In contrast, the ego functions largely under the governance of the so-called reality principle. That is to say, the ego designates whether or not the images furnished in the mind by the unconscious have any relation to the reality of the underlying object of desire the image portrays. Accordingly, the ego will adduce by what means the actual attainment of the object of its desire is to be pursued, and will channel the libidinous energy of the unconscious (which would normally be invested or 'cathected' in the mental representation of the object of choice) toward these means. The ego, then, is in large part constructed as a reaction to the demands of the unconscious. 15 Yet the would-be rational ego does not determine in and of itself what desires it is permissible for it to attain to, or by what means it is permissible for the ego to achieve its ends. Rather, these decisions are taken by what amounts to the ego's conscience, what Freud calls the superego. The superego is the externally imposed IS

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This is not so suggest that Freudian psychology contends that the rational faculties of the human mind function merely 'in the service of emotional impulses, as with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, in particular Adam Smith and David Hume. In fact, Freud attempted to overcome the rigid dichotomy posited in the metaphysical philosophy of the mind, and asserted that rationality was as much a necessary element of emotional experience as emotional affects were tempered by, and determined within, the confines of the prevalent rationality of the individual. In recent years, neurological research has lent much credence to this holistic understanding of the relations between emotion and cognition. See Schachter (1964; 1965; 1970; 1972) and Strongman (1978).

authority of the parent, teacher, judge or peer. Like the unconscious part of the personality, the superego is not strictly concerned with what is real and what is not, but rather what the ideal of reality ought to be. As Hall puts it, the superego 'strives for perfection rather than for reality or pleasure'. 16 Freud considered that the development of the human personality conforms to definite stages of psychosexual development. In other words, the desires of the human being at different stages of her physical development accord with different types of personality, as the unifying ego strives to make peace with its unconscious desires both in reality and in principle. It is the personality structure developed and determined thus which, for Freud, is likely to influence the individual's judgement either in a rational or an irrational manner. Despite his having ultimately despaired of the logical competence of the human mind (his later concept of the innateness of human aggression is the death knell of the psychoanalytic Enlightenment), Freud more or less consistently believed the ego could become the rational governing force of the whole human personality. 17 Indeed, it is when the ego is 8 not capable of controlling the unconscious,' in accordance with adequate knowledge and experience of reality alongside the fulfilment of conscious desire that neurotic symptoms develop within the individual's personality. Rather than chart the development of the personality in chronological detail from the Freudian perspective, it is better from the perspective of endeavouring to uncover the roots of irrational prejudice to outline those theories of personality which stress the negative personality effects of particular neuroses and neurotic complexes. In sketching the characteristics of three major types of personality, we will have occasion to emphasise those character structures that are least conducive to rational and realistic comprehension and most conducive to dogmatic and reified cognition .

16 17

18

Hall(l979,31). As Richard Appignanesinotes. 'Freud once said that the highest civilised fonn of the reality principleis Science' (Appignanesiand Zarate 1992, 68). In fact.the relationthe ego has to the unconsciousin the mind is nonnally itself unconscious. This is so even insofar as the ego adapts and transfigures the demandsof the unconscious.

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The Theory of Personality In accordance with its definition by the psychologist and theorist of prejudice G.W. Allport, we can define personality as 'the dynamic organisation within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behaviour and thought' .19 This definition, as Allport suggests, avoids the pitfalls both of characterising personality solely in terms of its environmental affects and effects, as with Skinnerian behaviourism, and in conceiving of personality in terms of some supposedly essential archetypal structure. It must be said, however, that the psychoanalytic taxonomy of personality types has a number of further, potentially serious, theoretical shortcomings. In the first place, the formation of definitive personality types, what I will call characters, must not be taken as an essential constitutive aspect of human individuality. Despite the evident fact that each human individual appears to have his or her own peculiar personal characteristics, the formation of relatively fixed characters, is not a necessary prerequisite for the growth of human personality. Rather, rigid character structures are an impediment to the natural growth of human personality, as Wilhelm Reich recognised. 20 Secondly, as will become clear, the characterologist must take care not to attribute the formation of personality type to the cognitive realities of the individual mind alone. The development of the individual's personality always occurs in and through her social relations, as will be illustrated in the following chapter, and her social activity. With these caveats in mind, we may now proceed to examine the growth of neurotic personality and its relation to prejudicial thought processes.

19 20

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Allport(1961, 28). For WilhelmReich,any characterstructurewhateverwas an infringementof, and an obstacle to, free and creative thought and activity. For Reich, 'civilised Western man was imprisonedin a character-armour,which prevented him [... ] from expressinghis spontaneousfeelingsoflove and hatred' (Rycroft 1971,29).

Prejudice and the Neurotic Personality Personality and Character

In his seminal study, Pallern and Growth in Personality,21 Allport distinguishes the tenn 'personality' from the term 'character'. According to Allport, character is 'personality evaluated', in other words, character is how someone's personality is perceived and judged by others according to its appearance. In the first case, personality is viewed as the aggregate of a person's dynamic mental patterns, desires, perceptions, cognitions and drives. Character is simply how a person's mental tendencies, as a whole, are perceived and evaluated by others. It is certainly vital to distinguish between how a person appears to others, and how she is 'in herself. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in Allport's terminology thus expressed, to consider the development of the personality as it is 'in itself. Yet there can be no doubt that a person's 'character' thus defined, has a tremendous bearing on their personality, and reflects very real personality traits and patterns. For Freud, personality is fundamentally based on one of two psychic realities: healthy conflict resolution or relatively unhealthy compromise-formation. As noted, for Freud, the egocentric human mind must control the authoritarian dictates of the unconscious and its conscience. The extent to which the ego is successful in this has to do, firstly, with the degree of physiological strength the ego has at its disposal. For Freud, failure to adequately deal with unconscious desires may originally be located within the dysfunctionality of particular bodily organs. Freud tenned this failure 'primary' neurosis. Yet Freud considered that only a minority of neuroses could be categorised thus, the majority of neuroses being 'secondary', or the result of specifically mental inadequate conflict resolutions.22 The ego must satisfy the demands of the unconscious and the superego on two 21 22

Allport(l961,22-35). Both Adler and Reich, pupils and disciples of Freud, later suggested that all neuroses ultimately had their roots in bodily dysfunction.

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fundamental levels: on the basis of the reality principle and on the basis of the pleasure principle. If the ego is incapable of fulfilling a person's needs, these having been inappropriately stifled or in some way denied satisfaction, the ego has at its disposal certain mechanisms by which it can attempt to overcome the anxious conflict that results from an unsatisfied and demanding id and superego. Freud called these means ego defence mechanisms, these being the primary channels of mental compromise-formations. Ego defence mechanisms do not entail real resolutions of psychic conflict. Rather, for Freud, they are false resolutions that only serve to hold the conflict off to some point in the future and, in actuality, ensure the neurotic ego is fixated at a certain point of a person's psychological development. The following section considers three major forms of ego defence mechanisms that are most detrimental to the development of rationality, describing the ways in which the augmentation and repetition of these mechanisms can converge with fixed psychic development and produce rigid character structures . It is these character structures that are the psycho-structural accompaniment of 'knee-jerk ' prejudicial thinking.

Ego Defence Mechanisms According to Reber's Dictionary of Psychology, a 'defence-mechanism' is: A tenn applied to any enduring pattern of protective 'behaviour' designed to provide a defence against lhe awaren~ of that which is anxiety-producing ... . For (psychologists of a psychoanalytic perspective), the overt behaviour is treated as merely a manifestation of some underlying intrapsychic process-which they take to be lhe true defence mechanism.21

In other words, for Freudian theory, a person develops certain means of psychologically protecting her self from the ravages of unrealisable but relentless demands emanating from her conscience and her un-

23

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Reber(l995, 187).

conscious. These mechanisms are habitual and come into play whenever the personality becomes anxious (that is, for Freud, a 'secondary' physiological sign that a 'primary' unconscious physiological desire is psychically damaging or 'morally wrong'). Despite some of the principal defence mechanisms being quite normal and functional for most persons in their day-to-day life, psychologically speaking, defence mechanisms can be highly detrimental and lead to serious personality malfunctioning. This is particularly the case the more the defence mechanisms become habitual and the less they evolve into real resolutions of unconscious conflict. A brief description of three of the major ego defence mechanisms follows. Denial

Denial (or disavowal) is: [A] tenn used by Freud in the specific sense of a mode of defence which consists in the subject's refusing lo reoognise the reality of a trawnatic peroeption... Freud invokes this mechanism particularly when accounting for fetishism and the psychoses.24

In short, when a person perceives reality in an unpleasant way, or perceives reality itself as unpleasant or as inducing serious cognitive dissonance, she may, given weak egocentric reflexes, defend her self by refusing to admit the reality of her perception. Denial is closely related to intolerance insofar as the mind in either case refuses to countenance the limitations or real contradictions in its judgmental position. Displacement

The term 'displacement' denotes: The factthat an idea'semphasis.interest or intensityis liable to be detachedfrom it and to pass on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to the ftrst idea by a chain of associations. 24

Laplanche and Pontalis ( 1988, 118).

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This phenomenon. though particularly noticeable in the analysis of dreams.is also to be observed in lhe fonnation of psychoneurotic symptoms and. in a general way, in every unconscious fonnation.25

When a person's unconscious mind represents reality to the ego in an unpleasant or anxiety-inducing fashion, the weak ego regularly idealises this representation into an imaginary or conceptual form, which is more psychically tolerable for it. Thus the libidinous energy invested in primary unconscious mental constructions is displaced onto another idea of a secondary character. Generally, displacement of dynamic unconscious anxiety results in a whole network of anxiety-producing representations being 'objectivised' and 'localised' in one or two more psychologically manageable ideal constructions (what Freud called 'condensations'). These ideal constructions are by no means arbitrary, but are semantically and contextually associated, though normally quite distantly, with the primary unconscious representations in the person's mind. Through displacement, a person is able to protect herself from the potential damage caused by a reality that produces feelings of anxiety and ambivalence within her. In relation to prejudice, the person is likely to transfigure the reality of unpleasant perceptions by refusing to counsel the notion that the meaning she ascribes to reality is not that inscribed in reality itself. Processes of psychological displacement can play a major role in promoting prejudicial beliefs in the individual mind. Projection

Projection is a term: used in a very general sense.. .to designate the operation whereby a neurological or psychological element is displaced and relocated in an external position, lhus p~ing eilher from centre to periphery or from subject to object.26

25 26

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Ibid. (1988, 121). Ibid. ( 1988, 349).

Projection is thus a mode of displacement. However, rather than the unconscious meaning of a representation being displaced from one imaginary object to another, the impulse behind a representation is displaced 'outward' and projected onto a subject or object bearing no conscious relation to one's self. In this way, control of one's own mind is abnegated and felt to depend on the impulses of another. Conversely, a projective person may perceive the environment in a way that wholly accords with her own psychological concerns, projecting her preconscious impulses on all that surrounds her. Commonly, projection, as Freud used the tenn, is a means of disowning impulses and representations that are unacceptable to a person's ego. The projective personality is inclined to attribute her faults and unpalatable inclinations to other groups or even objects, thus ostensibly overcoming the anxiety produced by the inability to egocentrically assimilate or satisfy these impulses. As with the other ego defences, projection is not a real means of overcoming anxiety, but can quite easily develop into a neurosis, as reality is increasingly denied and impulses remain unfulfilled. But under what psychic conditions do these forms of ego defence come to operate and why are some forms of personality more liable to engage in defensive egological behaviour than others?

The Prejudicial Personality As we have considered the mechanisms of the neurotic personality

most at odds with garnering adequate and reasonable knowledge of reality, we may now proceed to determine more precisely the structure of the personalities that regularly engage them. As such, I intend to outline three major personality trends which I believe are most deleterious to rational thinking and which are so rigidly structured as to constitute a distinct personality type. These types are the narcissistic, the authoritarian, and the paranoid. For reasons to be articulated

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in further chapters, such character structures are very prevalent m contemporary capitalist societies.

The Narcissistic Personality

For Freud, narcissism is a norma] and perfect]y functiona] stage in the development of the human personality. Narcissistic identification is necessary insofar as the infant is to form a coherent image of her self, transcend the early infantile stage of polymorphous perversity wherein sexual desire is felt as emanating from uncontrolled and unconnected erogenous zones, and develop the strong ego essential for realising its own desires. For the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, the child's first coherent image of its whole self, and of its own independent stature as a person and not a collection of desires wholly dependent on the actions and approval of others for fulfilment, is in its objective image in the mirror. Lacan called this process of selfidentification the mirror stage, and it is perfectly compatible with Freud's own ideas on narcissistic development. Narcissism is not merely a defensive reaction on the part of the libidinous mind: it is the primary means by which the infant originally overcomes her real dependency and the fragmentary personality enforced by a demanding conscience or superego. For Freud, however, narcissism is only a preliminary stage in the development of the human personality, since the child inevitab]y begins to look outside itself for its sources of identity, finding self-love somewhat inadequate in light of its all-too apparent dependency on external 'objects'. Thus, the narcissistic infant is likely to identify itself with another object that appears capable of meeting all of its needs, namely, its parent. According to classical psychoanalytic theory, in a familial relationship wherein the male chi1d fears his unloving father, he is likely to principally identify with and desire the love of his mother.27 This is an inadequate resolution of 27

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For Freud, the fear of the father, in the male child at least, is the result of the infant's wanting a monopoly on its mother's affection. The primitive understanding in the male infant that the father's jealous rage may be lead to serious physical hann (castration, in fact), is one of the motivating forces leading him

the loveless-child-in-a-patriarchal-family's quandary, however, for it will not prevent the child from fearing its father or from desiring its father's love. Thus, one solution to the problem is for the child to identify with its father, usually at the expense of the love it receives from its mother. Insofar as the child receives no love, no satisfaction, and no ego-nutrition from its domineering father, this is a false solution. Although it appears that the child is investing all of his libidinous energy in an object outside of himself, the child's identification with his father in such a situation is, in fact, entirely narcissistic, and involves him investing all of his energy in his own reflected ego. Similarly, increased dependency on the mother in a familial context wherein the child fears his jealous father's wrath may well be highly narcissistic, since the love apparently directed outwards is little more than displaced compensation for the love denied the ego in the first place. Narcissism, then, is first and foremost a sublimated reaction on the part of the ego to being denied love and affection. Instead of identifying with an object of love, the ego finds that it cannot direct its desires anywhere than towards itself. But for Freud there is an economic balance of libidinal forces within the human personality. In the normal state of affairs, the person can expect to have the energy she invests in the person she loves reciprocated and her own ego can thus be recathected. In many cases, however, no love is forthcoming from the person's original object-choice and the more the ego desires the love of its, to all intents and purposes, absent object (whether her father, her god, or her pet), the less it is able to fulfil its own needs and wants. 28 Thus, the child can either identify with the loveless object,

28

to narcissistic identification with himself or, what amounts to the same in the narci~istic male child, his father. Freud's tendency to universalise the patriarchal family is expressed here, and one might wonder the effects on the child's jealousy and fear were the father himself not jealous and aggressive toward both the mother and the child. An equally loving father and mother together must, then, temper the child's narci~istic aggression. For the religious supplicant, it can be said that abasement before an absent God which provides no real love and no real satisfaction is a narcissistic personality symptom in a number of ways. Firstly, in viewing her whole self in relation to an all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful entity, the believer comes to

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becoming loveless in tum, or it can direct desire inwards and take itself for its love object. In both cases, the effect is the same: narcissism and lovelessness. The apparent 'choice' here is not really such, but depends principally upon the position of the loving parent. If the latter is oppressed by the loveless parent, but appears to approve of his disciplinarian domination, then the child will likely identify with the latter, in order to secure both parents' approval. On the other hand, if the loving parent appears to disapprove of the loveless object's wanton tyranny, then the child will quite likely seek further succour in her arms. The latter 'choice', of course, may also lead to further narcissism as the child will become more ego-dependent on its only source of affection and also potentially alienate the source of its disaffection still further: a vicious cycle of narcissistic introjection thus results. In any case, the degree of narcissism in the child will be tempered by the extent to which her love is unrequited. Her feelings of self-worth and self-respect will depend upon the degree to which she is able to withstand the pain engendered by an unloving love-object. Narcissistic cathection is, fundamentally, an over-compensation for feelings of self-hatred resulting from rejected or denied love.29 The truly narcissistic individual will thus conceive of herself as the only real source of satisfaction and meaning in the world. Thus, Freud's phrase about intellectual narcissism and the 'omnipotence of thought' 30 is a quite accurate psychological expression for the prejudicial mind.

29

30

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understand herself outside of the physical realm of unsatisfied, demanding and unreconciled libidinous demands, thus overcoming the ego fragmentation caused by unsatisfied desires. Secondly, the fulfilment of a person's ego-centric needs is no longer said to depend on one's practical activity in the real world to meet those needs, but on God's grace; the perhaps overbearing reality principle is thus abnegated. Finally, the penitent believer is able to overcome her dependency on the absent love of others by investing all of her energy in what amounts to a complete image of her own self. A religious resolution of internal emotional conflict is not, however, necessarily narcissistic in the sense of 'selfish' or 'possessive', and may, indeed, provide a means for oppressed groups to (re)develop a shared sense of empowering identity . In any case, Lacan's conception of the mirror stage proves an interesting metonymic corollary in the experience of the otherwordly adult religious type. Lasch (1978, 35). Freud ( 1985, 148).

The latter is not essentially developed by reflection on humbling experience, the 'teacher' of the mind in Freud's view, but is absurdly egotistical, deriving its strength of conviction principally from its relation to its own unconscious, which has been wholly invested with the sexual energy the body has failed to expend in relation to the world of objects. Not only has the narcissistic person been unable to invest sexual or loving energy in other loving persons, but she has also an insufficiently developed ego in relation to securing her own satisfaction by dynamically understanding and transforming the external world. The narcissist is relatively incapable of actualising her self-understanding, and submitting it to practical empirical testing (involving projectivity, achievement and failure, and developing from dynamic wants and needs). Thus, in the narcissistic mind, in common with our other prejudicial personality disorders, there is an inadequately developed ego and a concomitantly slim differentiation between the ego and the unconscious. The narcissistic personality may thus be characterised by an original over-dependency or an inability of the ego to fulfil its own needs and wants. Despite it's being originally anterior to the oral stage of psychosexual development, in its later orientation in the so-called oral-sadistic developmental stage (see the exemplary investigations by Melanie Klein (1952)) one can perceive distinctly narcissistic personality traits. The oral stage, and the oral cravings associated with it, is for Freud characterised by the desire of the individual to 'incorporate', that is, to ensure her satisfaction by the ingestion of the object of her desire. According to Karl Abraham, the oral fixation normally gives way to its variant, the oral-sadistic stage, wherein the ingestion of the object is practiced (by the teething child in particular) as the wholesale incorporation or destruction of the object. 31 The total reliance on the ingestion of an object for the satisfaction of one's desires causes ambivalent feelings to develop around it, and if the unconscious is not satisfied when and where it desires, then it will seek to wholly incorporate the object of its desire

31

Laplanche and Pontalis ( 1988,289). Melanie Klein contends, on the other hand, that oral cravings and oral-sadistic desires do not actually constitute different stages in the child's development, but are originally intertwined.

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given the chance. 32 Thus, the narcissistic mind, falling to incorporate thoughts and images within its own fantastic purview (determined by an intense fear of and contempt for 'external' reality, upon which it is, in fact, almost entirely dependent), will likely react negatively to divergent or oppositional viewpoints grounded in science. Thus, the narcissistic personality, as aggressively pseudo-omniscient, is likely to be highly prone to prejudicial understanding.

The Authoritarian Personality

The authoritarian personality has much in common with the narcissistic personality. Just as the latter is initially developed within a familial relation wherein at least one of the pre-narcissistic child's love objects is unfeeling and domineering, so the authoritarian personality is constructed in response to similarly unfulfilling relationships. In fact, the highly authoritarian person, according to the authors of the classic 1950s study of the prejudicial mind, The Authoritarian Personality, is likely to be deeply narcissistic . In both personality types, the constitutive emotional relations are characterised by dependency and dissatisfaction. In both cases there is thus a weak ego and weak egocentric impulses. The major differences between the strictly narcissistic type and the authoritarian personality type lie chiefly in the means by which their primal emotional bonds are cathected. Thus, whi 1st both have a preconscious fear of external reality resulting from their over-dependent minds and their weak egos, the narcissist and the authoritarian defend their selves against this fear in different ways. The narcissist indulges in projective fantasy and imaginative withdrawal from reality, whereas . the authoritarian cognitively reifies the characteristics of reality so that there can be no

32

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Similarly, Western racists or bigots, having got used to considering the unprivileged (and non-Western) working class as little better than slaves whose product is to satisfy their ingestive cravings, even if this reality is only realized after the event of a real breakdown in such relations, develop oral-sadistic attitudes towards this class which, whilst increasingly failing to live up to its passive and repository social role, must now be devoured and destroyed.

difference in how reality appears to her a la 'the facts', and how reality is actually and historically constructed. Thus, the authoritarian personality is characterised by a sort of hyper-empiricism where only 'the facts' as experienced matter. This is the result of a combined incapacity to alter the facts and an unwillingness or emotional inability to query dominant appearances, determined by the authoritarian person's over-identification with an emotionally affective authoritarian love-object Thus, given its disdain for introspection, the highly authoritarian mind is suspicious of imagination and the mental working through of fantasies. This ensures that the authoritarian mind is much more likely to direct its perceptual focus on external 'facts' 33 and, more specifically, to the appearance of these external 'facts'. This is in contrast to the narcissistic personality only in appearance, since the latter's introspection is not genuine self-reflection but is largely determined by the internal pseudo-satisfaction of would-be externally directed instinctual needs. The importance of the ego for mediating between strong instinctual impulses and rationally attaining to the fulfilment of unconscious impulses has already been noted. But what are the major factors in determining authoritarian personality effects as opposed to narcissistic ones given the similarity of their principal psychological determinants? As noted, the authoritarian personality is certainly narcissistic and finds it extremely difficult to countenance views of reality which conflict with its own narrow personal worldview. Unlike the narcissist, however, the authoritarian personality is likely to be far more projective than introjective. That is to say, rather than invest her own self with meaning and desire, the authoritarian is likely to displace the negative aspects of the ambivalent feelings she harbours for her absent love object (hate, fear and anger) onto other objects which are externally situated in relation to her. This is so because the authoritarian personality, unlike the narcissistic personality, (over )identifies with the loveless character of her love-object. As I have suggested, this identification is not a question of an existential 'choice' made by the libidinally frustrated individual. Rather, identifying with a loveless 33

Adorno et al. ( 1982, 289).

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parent has two principal conditions: firstly, that the child does not receive the requisite compensatory affection from a protective loveobject and secondly, that the child is engaged in a highly conditional and morally disciplinarian relationship with the loveless love-object. As Adorno and others write in The Authoritarian Personality: Thus a basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitive parent-child relationship is apt to carry over into a power-oriented, exploitively dependent attitude toward one's sex partner and one's God and may well culminate in a political philosophy and social outlook which has no room for anything but a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong and a disdainful rejection of whatever is relegated to the bottom.34

In other words, the submissive dependency of the authoritarian personality is neurotically 'transcended' by over-identifying with repressive power and rejecting as contemptuous the supposedly weak and docile (namely, those persons or groups of persons who are weak enough, and manifestly so, for the unpleasant impulses of the authoritarian personality to be projected onto). How, then, does the weak ego of the authoritarian cope with her emotions? Insofar as the individual experiences them, instinctive impulses will either be assimilated within the egocentric consciousness, or they will be felt as alien to the ego. 35 As suggested, it is impossible for the dependent and authoritarian personality to have developed a strong ego. The weaker the ego, the less possibility there is of the individual assimilating and controlling her instinctive impulses (in the case of the authoritarian, primarily dependency, aggression and the resulting anxiety about the appropriateness of destructive feelings towards one upon whom it is dependent). In the authoritarian mind, there is less egocentric sublimation of libidinous impulses. That is, there is less transformation and redirection of instinctive energy into acceptable active mediums. Instead of sublimation, there is counter-cathexis, or ego defence. It may be supposed that the more authoritarian the dictates of the individual's conscience, and the less developed her sense, understanding, and experience of 34

35

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Ibid. (1982, 475) . Ibid. ( 1982, 288).

reality, the less hegemonical her ego will be mentally, with the consequence that her perceptions will be largely determined by her instincts . Given the necessity of fulfilling one's own needs realistically, it will be likely that the ego-weak person will be highly dependent on others to fulfil her needs, and therefore aggressive, given her (oral-sadistic) dependence and her submissive capitulation to the repressive dictates of authority. 36 Ultimately, when a person's innate potentialities have been suppressed and denied to a sufficient degree, it is very likely that they will become resigned to this fact, and identify with the repressing forces of reality . An authoritarian mindset is thus the outcome of extreme repression of the individual potentialities of a person. 37 This is also, as we have seen, true of the narcissistic personality , with the important qualification that the narcissist has not yet completely identified with the forces of her repression. It may be supposed, however, that if the dependent and submissive relational bases of the narcissistic mind are continually reinforced, it is only a matter of time before the narcissistic personality becomes instinctively authoritarian. For Reich: The submissive, W1critical,sexually anxious person is drawn to authoritarian ideologies !,\IChas Fascism, first as a means of opposing what are felt as threats to his/her neurotic equilibrium. In Fascist propaganda, Jews are consistently represented as sexual perverts, and oommW1ismas the sharing of women. The widespread mother fixation.. . [a product of the authoritarian aloofness of the father in the patriarchal family - Z.C.] is taken advantage of by frequent com- . parisons of the nation to mother, and of the enemies of the nation (Jews, CommW1ists,etc.) to those who would abuse mother. On the positive side, freedom for the nation and race compensate for personal misery, particularly in the sexual realm.31 36

37 38

Harris, Gough and Martin (1950) found that the children of highly disciplinarian mothers tended to exhibit far more prejudicial attitudes towards ethnic minorities than those children who did not Weatherley (1963) foWld a strong correlation between punitive maternal disciplinarianism and anti-Semitism, and Bagley, Verma, Mallick and Young (1979) found that the most prejudiced respondents in their sample of students considered their fathers distant, hard, and disciplinarian (see Bethlehem 1985). Adorno et al. ( 1982, 290-1 ). Oilman (1979, 191).

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In fact, the authoritarian personality, used to viewing human relationships in tenns of crude political dichotomies of weak/powerful, submissive/dominant, can be very easily persuaded to accept the dictates of power clothed in the rhetoric of tolerance and concern for 'the underdog' or the oppressed. Thus the displacement of extreme punitive morality towards alleged 'bullies' or deviants (for example, 'perverts', 'terrorists', 'tyrants' or 'criminals') is often found as the ideological correlate of the authoritarian dependency complex. 39 One final notable element of the authoritarian personality is its adherence to rigid 'ingroup-outgroup' dichotomies. For those used to viewing human relations in tenns of hierarchical power structures and, at the same time, used to cultivating a submissive attitude towards authority and 'the facts', it is highly likely that one's own group, under competitive and hierarchical social conditions, will be favoured to the detriment of other groups. Erich Fromm decries 'parochialism', ethnic or racial prejudice, and 'fanaticism' as virulent fonns of narcissism.40 Since racial categories are fundamentally constructed as unscientific, asocial, ahistorical and impractical abstractions, Fromm is correct to suggest the predominance of narcissism in their construction. Furthennore, it is a distinctly authoritarian narcissism that 39

40

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See Koenigsberg (1975), Connell (1995) and Franz Neumann's seminal Behemoth (I 943, especially part one, 39-178). All of these three works contain a great deal of valuable theoretical and historical insights into the latent or unconscious meaning implicit in authoritarian political ideologies. Ethnic prejudice may also be viewed from a more ambivalent perspective. On the one hand, extreme prejudicial favouritism for one's own 'group' must involve self-aggrandisement, self-absorption and an inability to relate to other groups, all products of a weak and narcissistic ego. Yet, at the same time, the extensive scope of racial and ethnic categories undoubtedly suggests a desire on the part of the ethnocentric or parochial mind to transcend domestic social conflict, to actively engage in public and community life, and to assert a sense of pride beyond what is normally ascribed to the person's socially (and filially) determined individual merits. For oppressed ethnic groups to display favouritism (but not prejudice) toward their own members is, in fact, entirely natural, laudable and progressive. Despite this, however, it must be remembered that erroneous abstractions regarding ethnic or racial purity, superiority, or otherwise, are forged within the confines of narcissistic and authoritarian personalities and all the destructive and irrational personal tendencies they entail.

leads persons to embrace ethnic stereotypes. Freud's remark on the 'narcissism of group bonds' to the effect that '[it] is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness' is particularly suggestive. Given the absence of strong egos, whose views have been tempered by experience and enforced by reciprocal and fulfilling loving relationships, community cohesion may dissolve through disaffection and open rebellion. This deplorable situation can be well prevented, however, through the ascription of absolute authority to the leaders of said community. The authority of the love-object of choice of the authoritarian personality will prove to be strengthened the more his authority is unquestionable and related, not to his ability or his adeptness at improving his followers' lives, but to something essentially immutable and unchangeable.41 Such a principle can be found both in the ideological worship of the role of the father as also in the essentialist biological taxonomic hierarchy of race or 'ethnicity' .42

The Paranoid Personality

The final character type I will consider conducive to the acclamation of prejudice is that of the paranoid personality. The paranoid personality is characterised chiefly by an irrational preoccupation with persecution based on fantastic projection43 and by a deep suspicion of others and the unfamiliar in general. It is thus a virulent form of narcissism and highly authoritarian in outlook, such that Allport writes, 'paranoia represents the extreme pathology of prejudice' .44 Given the evident similarity between the paranoid personality and the

41 42

43 44

See Neumann (1943, 8S). The cohesion of nationally minded communities is a different matter, it being not necessarily based on imaginary achievements and greatness (as with racial 'cohesion ' , for example) and will be dealt with in a later chapter . Allport(19S4, 422). Ibid.

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other prejudicial character types thus far described, it may seem that its articulation as a separate disorder is somewhat superfluous. Yet there are certain dispositional and originary differences that merit paranoia's being treated as a distinctive motivational psychic force in the prejudicial personality. Paranoia, like narcissism and authoritarianism, is the outcome of emotional dependency on a love-object that does not offer love, affection, support and/or understanding. The paranoid mental state, however, principally results from the loss or instability of a fulfilling emotional bond, that is to say, from the threat of or actual decathection of that bond. A person who is forever wonying about her inadequacy and the impropriety of her feelings for other people, and who persistently seeks the affirmation of others in the face of this inadequacy, is highly likely to seek some means of proving to her self the unambivalence of her feelings by identifying with a worldview that absolves her of guilt, responsibility, and individuality (a la Sartre's 'anti-Semite'). 45 Thus the paranoid character will both project and displace his feelings of inadequacy or his sexual guilt onto supposedly domineering or sexually predatory external forces. The paranoid person looks to an external source for the discathection of her love-object's love. In other words, the paranoiac personality defensively projects her anxiety and also her anger upon an external object that has supposedly displaced the original affection of her love-object. The paranoiac thus suffers from a persecution complex. The anxiety resulting from this persecution complex can be defended against (in the weakly cathected ego), by seeking the love of others who have the same characteristics as oneself, since it is apparently his difference (that is his inability to precisely mirror the character demands of the 45

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According to Bettelheim and Janowitz (1964) a failure to meet the demands of the superego (the group's actually dominant authority in life), and a concomitant resentment against it, can be sublimated into a resentment against particular individuals or groups who are said to either scorn, violate, or unfairly fulfil the superego's demands. In Bettelheim's and Janowitz's example, anti-Semitism generally has this function. Arguably, this analysis suggests that paranoid ideologies such as anti-Semitism provide a typical ideological outlook for those people who are both traditionally subservient to, but also threatened by, the ruling status quo, that is, the imperialist country middle class.

authoritarian love object, especially in relation to an other, a sibling or peer, who apparently does) which has led the absent love-object to disaffection. With the paranoid character, it is precisely difference, or the unfamiliar, which is held in abject contempt. Since the paranoid ego-weak person cannot bear that it is her own character (devalued, repressed and differentiated as it has been by the absent love of the chosen love-object) that is responsible for the discathection, she compulsively looks for an external source for her frustration. The weakness of a person's ego, that is, their incapacity to make decisions by and for themselves combined with their inability to give and receive unconditional love, ensures that such a person will be unlikely to act differently from the character demands of those whose respect and affection they crave. Thus, personality traits and tendencies that diverge from those valued by authoritarian love-objects, occurring as a result of internal ambivalent feelings or self-conscious reflection, will likely be experienced as especially painful or distasteful. A person who fears dispositional differences in her individual personality is likely to feel insecure and inadequate in light of her authoritarian love-objects' (by their autocratic definition) 'desirable' qualities. Prejudicial affirmation of one's love-object's characteristic likes and dislikes is likely to compensate for such feelings of insecurity, and provide the weakly developed ego with a coherent sense of self. At the same time, in the mind of the dependent and insecure paranoid person, any characteristics different from those to which she is accustomed to personifying can come to be seen as a threat to security and affection. The paranoiac will thus tend to project these feelings onto others. This is so, not because the person or group thus projected is a potential rival for the affections of the authoritarian love object, but more because that person or group is a projective representation of the paranoid character's own ambivalent feelings towards the latter. Freud wrote: In the beginningof the disease (dementia paranoides), all object cathexis is withdrawn from the objects of the environment and regression to narcissism takes

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place. In the process of recovery, the libido is brought back to the people it had 46 abandoned. In paranoia, this process is canied out by the method of projection.

The paranoid person's focus is, principally, to rigidly adhere to similarities between himself and others, since that is a guarantee that he himself is not different, and therefore worthy of persecution. Given the impossibility of satisfying unrequited desire for those who are the same as him, the paranoiac denies this desire and considers himself the object of persecution. As such he can fantasise that he is an active agent being persecuted, rather than a passive person who has been rejected.47 Allport persuasively relates this paranoiac persecution 48 complex to the phenomenon of sibling rivalry in childhood. The person who negates his self through absorption into some impersonal identity does so only insofar as this identity is thoroughly differentiated. The adoption of identity, combined with the abnegation of individual personality (as a result of guilt, anxiety, and inadequacy) is thus originally intrinsically constituted as exclusivist. Such identitarian exclusionism is highly conducive to vehement dislike for the out-group. Contrary to those who stress the universality of ethnocentric cognitive categorisation, 49 it is primarily social conditions that 46 47

48 49

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Freud (1965). Alternatively, many persons can become obsessed with the notion that that they really are different (resulting from rejection and competitive frustration), thus valorising the judgement of the absent love-object. Such a person is then likely to displace her frustration, and consider herself persecuted for her difference by others (since she is highly dependent upon and nonetheless emotionally attached to the original love-object, the parent in most cases). Allport ( 1954, 369). Sumner's (1906) concept of ethnocentrism, explaining prejudice as a universally ubiquitous psychological process, has since been questioned. LeVine and Campbell ( 1972) pointed out that ethnocentrism as the basis for in-group acceptance and out-group rejection is not universally present either in individuals or in societies. LeVine and Campbell give three major criticisms of Sumner's conception of the universality of ethnocentrism. Firstly, in 'preindustrial' societies, ethnic groups are by no means clearly demarcated or defined. The authors argue that 'ethnocentrism, as Sumner conceptualised it, may be more characteristic of recently developed societies, specifically of the modem nation state with its sharp and stable boundaries' (Levine and Campbell 1972, 67). Secondly, membership and identification groups are not always

detennine the concrete contours and conditions of membership of an in-group. But the psychological stimulus for rigid in-group identification is necessarily grounded in feelings of personal inadequacy and frustration in one's emotional relations with loved ones. Thus, we can summarise the paranoid character by saying that a certain division of the self is typical. The paranoid person is highly dependent on very demanding (punitive and judgmental) love-objects, from whom he receives his highly conditional 'love'. Thus his personality is self-defined as detennined by others. Such a determination is, of course, experienced as being ambivalent: on the one hand, the child resents and even hates his overly demanding loveobject, and on the other he feels increasingly dependent on it, given the weakness of his own ego (developed through the satisfaction and fonnulation of his own desires). Whenever the love of the 'distant' and disciplinarian love-object is withdrawn, the paranoid person considers that he is not living up to the standards of his love-object, and that it is his own character flaws that are preventing him from receiving love. Under conditions wherein he is not able to affect his chances of getting love from the absent love-object, he will defensively seek to identify sources other than, and outside, himself that are curtailing his fulfilment. As suggested, he will consider himself persecuted, originally by the (relatively) absent love-object. However, it is impossible for the paranoid person to maintain feelings of fear and guilt in relation to their authoritarian love-object for long.so

50

synonymous. LeVine and Campbell note that there are many documented cases of peoples who are territorially, politically and economically ' autonomous', but who neverthele~ have taken another people as their positive reference group. Writers such as Duckitt similarly argue for the naturality of ethnicist favouritism. Yct Duckitt has largely universalised the findings of recent studies conducted in highly prejudicial societies to encomp~ all of human consciousne~. Duckitt does not consider those apparently 'in-group' prejudices or preferences that are based on nothing other than rational evaluations. For example, the desire for close communities. trade unions. or oppressed groups to uplift themselves first and foremost may be, under given circumstances and social relations, entirely rational and not necessarily prejudicial or biased. Furthermore, in-group favouritism that is based on an accurate and objective grasp of reality is, by definition, not prejudicial. Laing (1969, 106).

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Not only does the paranoid person experience such feelings as painful, but also paranoia is frowned upon by others and considered shameful. Therefore, for a person to deal with their personal inadequacy,· their guilt, and their anxiety resulting from sexual and libidinous frustration, it is socially preferable for that person to sublimate her paranoia and direct her fear towards external menaces. As with all of the ego defence mechanisms mentioned, however, the more a person remains content to indulge in fantasy at the expense of engaging with reality, the more threatening and isolated her experience with the real world will become. In order to absolve herself of fear and anxiety in her dealings with the real world, the fantasist must therefore engage her fantasy in the real world, and ground her fantasy in her experience of the real world. In this way, the terror of frustrated desires, wants and needs can be held at bay and the paranoid person's fantastic identification can become reality. Yet the more her fantasy does engage with reality, the less succour she can find in a fantasy that is increasingly real. Thus, paranoid terror cannot possibly subside by indulging in fantasy, but only in engaging realistically and dynamically with the world and others. Paranoia is one of the major dispositional sources of prejudice in the modem world. Its political causes and effects have been well documented. 51 It is important to stress that paranoia is not always unrealistic and may, in fact, be related to actual insecurities and unresolved anxieties (in the fields of politics, economics and society generally). The manner in which paranoia is personally and socially articulated and managed is determined in large part by the organisational means, both linguistic and practical, by which paranoia is systemically articulated as a condition. Whilst paranoia is psychologically predisposed to lead to authoritarianism and thrive on relatively psychotic narcissism, it is commonly the ideological component of paranoia that is the deciding factor in the proclamation of prejudicial worldviews. Indeed, with narcissism, authoritarianism, and paranoia, it is very often the extent to which there is available a relatively coherent ideology within which the dispositional content of the syndromes can be rationalised, which determines the boundaries of 5I

116

See Adorno (200 I), Knight (2000), and Hage (2003).

one's prejudicial beliefs. Thus whilst a narcissistic, authoritarian, or paranoiac personality may be psychically predisposed to feel isolated, fearful, and insecure respectively, the manner in which these feelings are defended against may vary according to their ideological articulation by the subject. A narcissistic, paranoid and authoritarian personality need not necessarily ascribe to fully-right-wing political doctrines, although right-wing ideology is necessarily narcissistic, paranoid and authoritarian,52 and thus conducive to acceptance by such persons. 53

52

53

The characterisation of right-wing doctrine as narcissistic, paranoid and authoritarian is based on an understanding of its basis in what Macpherson calls •po~ssive individualism', entailing an inability to relate to others as equals holding equal entitlements to property and the means to secure life and liberty. Such a philosophy generates paranoia as a corollary of its fear of others involved in the infinitely acquisitive Hobbesian 'war of all against all', and a commibnent to the authoritarian defence of privilege in the face of the struggles of the lower classes to attain equality. The condition and the effect of developing strong instinctual bonds with another person is that person's ability to reflect one's own positive self-image. Ideological dogmatism is strengthened when the emotional relations binding two persons are broken whilst the sense of loss caused by this bifurcation is active in either's consciousness (nonnally felt as a result of conscious disagreement). Anti-authoritarian people with a strong present sense of lost love who base their consciousness in a diametric opposition to that of the alienated object of such, arc likely to be highly dogmatic, that is, prejudicial. They will tend not to see the real movement in things, and instead posit a fantastic ideal to which the real world scarcely matches up. Conversely, persons who forge emotional ties purely on the basis of a submissive identification with an absent love object's avowed consciousness, are likely to be far less likely to recognise contradiction, the intellectual 'labour of the negative', and hence be less critical minded than the oppositional consciousness. In any case, ideological idealism, whether ostensibly of 'the right' or 'the left', in Freudian tenns, is caused by ego defence by, for example, psychic mechanisms such as projection (as when one chastises rebels and rebellion as a means of defending one's ego against ambivalent feelings of rebellion). Prejudicial idealism, idealism without regard to material reality, is caused by instinctual repression. As Adorno said, 'rage is the mark of each and every idealism' (Adorno ( 1990, 23 )). Whether this rage is or is not righteous is a detenninant of whether it is prejudicial, for the struggle against injustice is always the struggle against untruth.

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As I have suggested in the discussion of the Freudian theory of the mind, it is not simply one's emotional relations that detennine the content of one's thinking, but also to what extent one has been exposed to the requisite means of realistically comprehending and practically transfonning one's surroundings. A study of the developmental psychology of Vygotsky, alongside the psychology of intergroup relations, provides invaluable theoretical and empirical insights into the growth of a person's rational capacity, and with it a person's cognitive defences against ideology.

Prejudice and Reasoning Prejudice and Emotion

Whilst narcissism, authoritarianism and paranoia are all neurotic syndromes within which bigoted prejudicial beliefs come to be especially articulated, it is the meaning ascribed by the subject to their original emotional correlates which ensures that reified cognition becomes nonnal for the neurotic subject. As suggested, psychologists have demonstrated conclusively that in all cognition there is a degree of emotional involvement by the thinking person. Indeed the extent to which a person is emotionally detennined to make a given judgement is largely the extent to which a prejudice is likely to be fonned. The affect of moods and emotions in evaluative judgements has come under increased scrutiny in recent years.s4 It has been shown that moods whether experienced as 'positive' or 'negative' can have considerable sway over the content of our judgements. Studies by Bodenhausen,SsMiller and Bugelski,56 and Forgas and Fiedler, s, amongst others, have proven a high correlation between 54

55 56 57

118

Baird and Duck (2002, 127). Bodenhausen (1993, 137--66). Miller and Bugelski ( 1948). Forgas and Fielder (1996).

frustration and the expression of discriminatory behaviour. Psychologists have demonstrated that negative moods in general tend to be conducive to prejudicial cognition, negative symbols proving much more cognitively accessible in such 'moods'. 58 At the same time, 'positive' moods such as pleasure or rapture also tend to produce superficial and prejudicial judgements. Indeed, Bodenhausen 59 has argued that positive moods are even more closely related to prejudicial beliefs than negative ones, since persons in these moods are far less likely to seriously reflect on the external world given their general satisfaction with it, their lack of concern with cognitively overcoming a 'bad' mood, and the prevalence of activating pleasant memories in making social judgements. The effect of mood on memory has been studied by Bower 60 and Forgas 61 amongst others. These studies have shown that strongly affective moods tend to activate mood-related memories, particularly those related to aversion to dissatisfaction, and judgements based on these memories. Studies such as these stress the affective determinacy of strongly felt moods on the formation of prejudice. For J. Dollard et al., 62 I.D. MacCrone, 63 and to some extent Allport 64 in his theory of scapegoating, aggression results from frustration and is displaced onto external sources lest one's own group become dissolved or disaffected. Thus prejudice is conceived as the biologically determined response of aggressive individuals. As Fromm points out, however, frustration does not always result in aggression. Indeed learning or human advancement of any kind would be nigh on impossible if any frustrated desires always resulted in externally directed aggression. Equally, it would be hard to explain the apparent biological universality of defensive aggression, or the cynical operation of instrumental aggression, purely in terms of the frustrationaggression thesis.

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Esses andZanna(1995). Bodenhausen ( 1993). Bower (1981). Forgas (1991). Dollard et al. (1939). MacCrone (1937). Allport ( 1954).

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Fundamentally, the meaning ascribed to a strong emotion, or the manner in which such an emotion is dealt with, is dependent on the past experience of the person in overcoming emotional instability, that is, (a) the personality of the person resulting from the primary mechanisms of achieving emotional satisfaction or stability, and (b) the cognitive standards the person brings to bear in making emotionally affective evaluations. In both of these regards, the primary condition for a person's judgements not being impelled or dictated by emotional impulses is the degree of development and strength of their ego.

The Psychological Development of Rationality

For Freud, as we have seen, the development of a strong ego, a prerequisite of emotional stability and rational competence, is dependent on a person's being able to satisfy and control her unconscious instinctive demands. In order for this to occur, however, the person must be able to objectively apprehend and practically transform reality herself. We have discussed how a person's emotional experiences and the personal relations wherein these are lived can adversely affect a person's ability to make realistic and objective judgements about the world. We have not, however, discussed by what processes a person is able to develop through and beyond emotive-evaluative dependency to open and involved dialogical and dialectical cognition. Thus an examination of the means by which a person learns to form her own judgements, not as largely determined by instinctual representations, but by knowledge and experience of the real world, will prove useful to further understanding the intellectual character of prejudice. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was very much concerned to show the inadequacies both of introspective models of the human mind such as phenomenology and of mechanistic approaches such as behaviourism. 65 In the case of the former, 65

120

Vygotsky's model of the acquired character of rational cognitive processes is not necessarily in contradiction to Freud's understanding of mental processes as they relate to psychophysical development For both men, the infant is largely

the phenomenologists contended that one could not study the cognitive processes of the human mind scientifically, but could only generalise from an elucidation of subjective (whether one's own or another subject's) internal mental processes. In the behaviourist philosophy of mind, it was stated that there was no such thing as selfconsciousness, but merely a series of learned habitual responses to external stimuli. Vygotsky believed that common to both epistemological theories was a methodological individualism. With behaviourism, it was the physical experiences of the person that constituted her own unique behavioural and intellectual characteristics: consciousness itself is a tabula rasa. Conversely, in phenomenological epistemology, each person has a unique grasp of reality that is solely formed through his or her own processes of contemplation. In neither case is the mind of the individual open to objective psychological investigation. In contrast for Vygotsky, consciousness can be observed and studied by proper scientific methods, it being 'the objectively observable organisation of behaviour that is imposed on humans through participation in socio-cultural practices' .66 Thus Vygotsky did not hold a purely behaviouristic theory of language acquisition, but believed linguistic structures could only develop if they were engaged through social interaction.61 Further, Vygotsky disputed the phenomenological interpretation of mind by situating both learning processes and cognitive categorisation within the practical social relations of the personality. Vygotsky did not believe that there is a dichotomy between the social and the cognitive levels of human experience, or between human be-

66 67

detennined by instinct, whilst the development of the strong ego necessary to the control and guidance of instincts is only gradually developed through a process of social learning. Nevertheless. as I suggest, the psychoanalytical neglect of the specific social aspects of personal, emotional and cognitive development, in favour of the allegedly natural basis of the development of the psyche in the life of every child, can lead to a certain fetishised conception (or, better, ideological naturalisation) of the human personality. Vygotsky quoted in Daniels (2000, 7~7) . Nonetheless, Vygotsky certainly believed that complex linguistic structures were genetically predisposed to develop if pedagogically enabled to.

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haviour as it is socially experienced and human behaviour as it is cognitively experienced. As Vygotsky writes: The separation of the intellectual side of our consciousness from its affective, volitional side is one of the fundamental defects of all traditional psychology. Because of it thinking is inevitably transformed into an autonomous flow of thoughts thinking themselves. It is separated from all the fullness of real life, from the living motives, interests, and attractions of the thinking human .61

In this regard, the 'intellectualisation' of social signs results in, and from, a split between individual consciousness and social activity. For Vygotsky, as praxical awareness is reduced to its symbolic representations, society comes to appear static and society's symbols come to appear both transcendent and determinant. Vygotsky's discussion of the false dichotomy between the practico-social and the cognitiveintellectual aspects of consciousness parallels Marx's understanding of ideology as the erasure of historically constituted practical activity from the self-definition of the concept. Thus, even in the apparently realistic psychology of interactionism formulated by the anthropologist G.H. Mead, emphasis is placed on social meaning as semiotically and intersubjectively (in Mead's terms 'culturally') constructed. Yet, agreeing with the Russian linguist Bakhtin, Vygotsky does not consider signs as simply formal instruments for the purpose of communicative interaction between otherwise self-subsisting individuals, but rather as the product of interindividual activity as these individuals are already members of a group or collective social unit. Signs are not merely pragmatically instrumental, but socially constitutional.69 For Vygotsky, as opposed to Mead, as the distance between ~he cultural understanding of the world (as mediated by commonly used and understood symbols and signs), and the selfs active understanding of the world becomes narrower (say from the oppressive nature of the culture or the social inactivity of the individual), the level of selfawareness of any individual within that cultural nexus becomes more slight. The Meadian notion that self-awareness develops solely through the adoption of shared social symbols is detrimental to an 68 69

122

Vygotsky quoted in Daniels (2000, 80). Emerson in Daniels (2000, 124).

understanding of social meaning as it diachronically develops in relation to (productively constructed) facts. The neglect of the importance of facts to the development of cultural understanding, both as that is theoretically expressed and as it occurs in society itself, results from an overly intellectual understanding of culture, as discursively counterpoised to the supposedly 'volitional' experience of culture. In other words, the neglect of the cognitive centrality of factual understanding results from social circumstances that proscribe, thwart and negate the unity of theory with practical transfonnation of the world, from historical decadence . A fact is constructed as a provisional datum in an experiment, whereas an interpretation is culturally construed as a narrative explanation . For Vygotskian theory, a concern for elaboration of facts is indistinguishable from a scientific and critical grasp of the world. For Vygotsky, then, higher cognitive processes (in particular association, memory and observation) result from socially situated activity as well as intersubjective interpretation . Indeed, the historical focus of Vygotsky's method assured him that the latter was in no way a static or passively detenninant force (as arguably in Mead), but must always be understood in relation to its projective and productive dynamic. In short, the social meanings inscribed in signs and symbols culturally available to the individual do not detennine her individuality apart from the meanings available to the individual through her practical social existence. Vygotsky distinguished the knowledge attained through (a) the instructive knowledge provided by institutions and societal organisations at a certain stage of cultural development, and (b) the knowledge understood and grasped by individuals in their 'everyday' lives: 'Hedegaard [ ... ] calls this the distance between understood knowledge, as provided by instruction, and active knowledge, as owned by individuals.' 70 Yet, for Vygotsky, in contrast to the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget ( 1896-1980), the individual does not originally begin to gamer knowledge of the world principally through the individualistic experimentation of the child. In other words, the child's knowledge, for Vygotsky, is not a product of strictly empiricist gen70

See Daniels (2000), and Hedegaard (2002).

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eralisations. Rather, for the child to develop knowledge of the world by and for itself, Vygotsky believed that the child required the assistance and pedagogy of adults to help her to achieve cognitive competence. Vygotsky called this experimental-pedagogical mode of knowledge attainment 'scaffolding.' As Reber defines the term, scaffolding is: An interactivebehavioural process whereby structure is provided by one person in the fonn of behaviours that another person can respond to. As the second person becomes more and more adept at making appropriate contributions, the first individual loosens or modifies the structure, thereby increasing the demands on the second until basically both have learned the full system.71

Scaffolding is one of Vygotsky's central concepts, the other being that of the 'Zone of Proximal Development' (ZPD). This somewhat unwieldy term has quite a straightforward meaning in Vygotsky's writings. The ZPD is: A ( ... ) tenn introduced by Vygotsky to refer to the conceptual space or rone between what a child is capable of doing on his or her own and what the child can achieve with assistance from an adult or more capable peer. As the tenn is used, it carries some of the notions of readiness, in that when the child is prepared to begin to undertake a task he or she can, through a process of scaffolding, be moved to a qualitatively different and functionally more sophisticated level of perfonnance.72

Vygotsky himself illustrates the meaning of his concept thus: Suppose I investigate two children upon entrance into school, both of whom are twelve years old chronologically and eight years old in tenns of mental development. Can I say that they are the same age mentally? Of course. What does this mean? It means that they can independently deal with tasks up to the degree of difficulty that has been standardised for the eight-year-old level. If I stop at this point, people would imagine that the subsequent course of development and of school learning of these children will be the same, because it depends on their intellect [... J Now imagine that I do not terminate my study at this point, but only begiri it (... ] Suppose I show (... ) [these children) have

71 72

124

Reber(l996, 684-5). Ibid. ( 1996, 862).

various ways of dealing wilh a task [... ] lhat the children solve the problem wilh my assistance. Under these circumstances it turns out that the first child can deal with problems up to a twelve-year-old's level. The second up to a nine-year-old's. Now arelhese children mentally the same?73

Vygotsky is here illustrating that the degree of intelligence of a person, young or old, is directly dependent upon their being assisted in the understanding and perfonnance of experimental tasks by people of higher cognitive ability than they, up to the point where they are capable of relatively independent social cognition and practice. It might be argued that given the phantasmic character of prejudice, Vygotsky's conception of language development and learning resulting from interactions with others might be more pertinent than Piaget's egocentrist understanding of learning developing through trial and error interactions in the real world. It must, however, be stressed that Vygotskian psychology in no way opposes social interaction to individual learning. Language, the major means of human understanding for Vygotsky, is never semantically independent of the real world and its vicissitudes. For Vygotsky, words starting as emotional outcries develop into concrete designations of objects that later acquire more abstract significations. 74 The next chapter will reveal that the ZPD (in a cultural, in contrast to an inter-personal scaffolding, interpretation) between the knowledge of everyday life and the knowledge of social institutions is extremely wide in Western society under the prevalent political division of labour. Certainly, Vygotsky 's central idea, that the rational propensities of the human mind develop through experiment and pedagogical assistance leading to self-aware social intellectualisation and transformation of the real world, cannot be lost on people who would seek to reverse or stunt the growth of prejudicial thinking in contemporary society. A prejudice, then, cannot be understood except with regard to its articulation within a system of socially constructed signs. It is not simply the case that a prejudice is a part of a homogeneously

73 74

Vygotsky (1978, 85--6). Gregory (1987, 806).

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constituted or systemically coherent 'worldview' or linguistic framework for the individual to adopt or reject at will. The symbols and signs, linguistic and artistic, allusive and elusive, that are used to represent and articulate prejudices, refer to historically situated and practical concrete realities. Prejudices are not simply natural constructs grounded in prehistoric biology as writers such as Lorenz75 suggest, nor is prejudice an inevitable result of sociological group integration processes. Sociologically speaking, prejudice does, however, arise through wholly natural economic processes, whilst psychologically, a prejudice arises from neurotic emotional dependency, narcissistically fixated personality structures, and underdeveloped cognitive potentialities. A cautionary word or two must now be added in summarising the conception of social psychology enunciated throughout this chapter.

Conclusion: The Social Psychology of Prejudice Rupert Brown76 identifies four major limitations to an understanding of prejudice in terms of differences in individual personalities. According to Brown, the latter analytical approach to prejudice underestimates the shaping of people's attitudes in terms of (a) their social life situation; (b) their cultural milieu; (c) the consensual content of their beliefs; and (d) the historical determinants of a belief/s. In this chapter, we have seen that prejudicial thinking ought not to be understood on the .basis of one or the other pole of an epistemic dichotomy between individual psychology and social existence. Prejudice is characteristically neither the necessary product of individual psychopathology nor the essential determination of the internally coherent social collective. Rather than characterise prejudice as a universal cognitive operation,77 as a result of the flawed 'individual' 75 76 77

126

Lorenz (1966). Brown (1995, 4-5). Sidanius (200 l ).

78

79

personality, or an abstracted monocultural fabrication, it is more accurate to consider it as a mode of cognition produced via the dialectical formation of language, personality, and emotional affectation in the socially situated individual. Yet a prejudice is an objectively narcissistic, asocial utterance. A prejudice is a repudiation of reality and the reality principle: it is what Francis Bacon referred to as an 'Idol of the Mind'. Prejudice is thus a product of the stunted growth of the self. It is clear that there cannot be a sociology of prejudice if one is not capable of showing what relation the propagation and affirmation of a given prejudice in society has to the consciousness of the individual who is relatively predisposed to reflect the influence of such. To assume that society constitutes prejudice outside of the minds and bodies of those who regularly reproduce it is to posit an unacceptable and unreal dichotomy between human beings and their values and beliefs. The French psychologist Lucien Seve wrote that it has long been realised by psychologists that the essential personality of the individual, the object of all classical psychoanalytic study, is not inherent to, but lies outside the centre of the human subject (is, in fact, eccentric in the literal sense of the word). Hence the necessity of all serious psychological study to proceed not simply from the character of the individual as she is found to be an accomplished fact, but rather from her relational development in her world and with other human beings. As Seve puts it: [It] the structure of the personality is const"'cted through its relations with the 'world·, it is clear from the standpoint of psychology alone that one will only be able to move foaward in the scientific investigationof this structure by relying on a scientific investigationof the ego's relations with its 'world', in other words, on the science of social relations: whether one likes it or not one here comes up against the necessity for the articulation of the psychology of personality with a real science of history and economics.80

78 79 80

Adorno et al. (1982). Mead (1934). Seve ( 1978, 139).

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If an understanding of the growth of the human personality, its cognitive patterns and potentials as well as its prevalent character traits, is not theorised in terms of its active historical material development, then the prejudicial beliefs held by human beings can come to be seen as having a life of their own, like the Hegelian Mind ... without reason. It is the development of the personality through enduring alienating and exploitative social relations that ensures its susceptibility or otherwise to prejudicial ideological norms. As such, the regression of society along irrational ideological lines is determined by the fixated psycho-physical wants and needs of narcissistic humans at a particular stage of socio-historical development. The form in which human psycho-physical needs in general are framed and articulated is conditioned by their prevailing ideational definition at a given socio-historical stage, wherein their realisation depends upon the state of the forces and relations of production necessary to fulfilling them. Seve writes, [Everything] in the general historical fonns of individuality is social - except the actual fact of the fonn of individuality, the fact that social relations exist through individual life-processes, i.e. in short, the historical expression of the biological fact that like every species, the human species reproduces and develops through 11 an ensemble of individuals.

Thus, whilst social relations are embodied as a biological necessity in the lives of social individuals, these same social individuals embody themselves in social relations and in the products of these social relations, in industry and cultural artifice. Freud wrote that: Human civilisation ( ... ) presents as we know two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and, on the other hand, all the regulation necessary in order to adjust the relation of men to one another and especially the distribution of available wealth. The two trends of civilisation are not independent of each other, firstly because the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible [both in tenns of 81

128

Ibid. (1978, 132- 3).

human capacity for, and necessity by, which to wort and consume - Z.C.]; secondly, because an individual man can himself come to function ti wealth in relation to other men insofar ti the other person makes use of his capacity for wort or chooses him ti a sexual object [... ).12

The satisfaction of instinctual needs is related to the satisfaction of material needs in that the latter provide both the object and the means to satisfy the former, whilst the manner in which historically specific material needs are attained, conditions the socio-structural form in which the human (especially the sexual) relations appropriate to any kind of instinctual gratification are located. Thus, realistic social psychology must elucidate the individual in her social existence at precisely the same time as it articulates the nature of social existence through an understanding of the concrete individual. In particular, the psychologist must study the objective manifestations of the social human mind. Marx writes: It is apparent how the history of industry, industry ti objectively existing, is the open book of man's essential powers, the observable present, human psychology [... ] We have seenbefore us the objectified essential powers of man in the fonn of sensuous alien, useful objects - in the fonn of alienation - in ordinary industry.13

In the next chapter, we shall begin to examine the historical social relations conducive to the production and augmentation of the prejudicial personality as outlined above.

82 83

Freud ( 1964, 2). Marx, quoted in Schneider (1975, 63).

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Chapter 4 The Sociology of Prejudice

What is the Sociology of Prejudice? In the previous chapter the focus of our attention was on the mind of the individual insofar as it is said to be psychologically susceptible to holding irrational and unreasonable judgements about the world. Firstly, the degree of emotional and affective fulfilment a person has in relation to her loved ones and, secondly, the degree to which her praxical orientation to the world is developed, were shown to be two of the principal factors involved in the cultivation of a rational mind. As was suggested, these two dynamic factors of ratiocinative growth should not be seen as separate existential realms. Rather, the degree to which a person's capacity for genuine unconditional and requited love advances is the degree to which that person is able to understand, to transform, and to recognise (literally to re-think), the world in which she lives. Conversely, the degree to which a person is able to understand, transform and recognise the world in which she lives is the degree to which she is able to genuinely give and receive positive emotional affection. There is thus a psychological dialectic between loving and reasoning. But so far we have only elaborated the position of the human mind as it stands in relation to its relative possibilities. The fundamental problem with a character typology which stresses the role of personality in the adoption of prejudicial ideologies is that, in the real world, there are a number of logistic potentialities open to the narcissist, the authoritarian, and the paranoiac. In other words, to assume that political ideals and behaviour follow from the personality is to posit an unreal subjective unity between them. In opposition to such psychologism, personality types must be understood as produced within the practico-social context wherein predispositions become actualised, modified, or negated. In the face of dynamic conflicting, contradictory and ideologically challenging social and socio-structural 131

relations, the prejudicial personality is regularly fashioned anew. Indeed, outside the concrete experience of social relations, as both Vygotsky and Freud understood in different ways, the personality as such does not exist. In the following chapters, we shall dwell on the actuality of the human mind insofar as it is practically denied the conditions for non-ideological and non-prejudicial thinking. To progress in our understanding of prejudice, the social conditions for the emotional and practical hindrance of the cognitive capacities of the human mind must be assessed. To reiterate the relation between ideology and prejudice in light of the theory elaborated in the previous chapter, a person who is prejudiced, that is, who is unable to synthetically elaborate theories, define facts, and affect reality in realistic terms, is likely to engage in ideological thinking. Since the prejudicial person in our definition is relatively: •

•

•

unable to affect reality either practically or effectively (his/her experience being based on a high degree of impotent dependency); unable to perceive problems, aporias, or anomalies in her own thinking (his/her thinking being overly instinctively conditioned); and unable to observe things as relatively developing (s/he being likely to make a fetish of 'facts', whether phenomenal or ideal)

he will likely respond favourably to thinking that both confirms his own narrow worldview and gives the pleasurable impression of being a common sense and (under social conditions of doxical conformism) respectable belief-system. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, and many others, have effectively shown the extent to which information or news provided by major media outlets in the capitalist-dominated world is 'filtered' through certain institutionalised mechanisms for propaganda.1 Thus, the 'knowledge' people gamer about the world from these media institutions tends, if accepted uncritically, to coincide with the narrow ideological perspectives appurtenant to the overarching social structure that Hennan and Chomsky (1994, 1- 37).

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produces it. Just~ Chomsky and Hennan have shown how prejudice is propagated by corporate media institutions, this chapter aims to show how prejudice is made possible, if not actively fostered, by those social institutions we actively participate in, consciously or unconsciously, in our everyday lives. The major quotidian institutions I propose to examine in this chapter, in relation to their constitution of some of the epistemic bases for the acceptance of prejudices are, in turn, the family, the world of work, and the official political process. In the conventional Hegelian sociological 2 schema, these major social 'life-realms' can be translated ~ The Family, Civil Society, and the State. In beginning this chapter on the social relations (instituted ~ relatively fixed social structures) that are most constitutive of the human personality under capitalism, we must, however, avoid Hegel's abstractive methodology of conceiving the Family~ the first moment of three in the expansion of the internally coherent social totality of the State. 3 Instead, the historical materialist understanding of these institutions advanced herein will

2

3

There is, of course, a real sense in which Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a proto-sociological t.ext, even though the detenninism of much sociological thought would, as Rose ( 1981) has persuasively shown, be anathema to his thinking. For Hegel, the Family and Civil Society are both intrinsically inadequate social manifestations of freedom and rationality. In the family and in civil society, the minds of their respective participants are fonnally limited by the nature and concerns of either social realm (broadly, anti-social sentimentalism and detached individualism respectively). In both the family and civil society, either side of the supposedly two-sided equation which they together compose, has fonnal rationality and formal irrationality (freedom and unfreedom) as its essence. The essential freedoms inherent in both familial and civilian social realms are manifestly conciliated in the fonn of the Stat.e. The State, for Hegel, follows of necessity from the limitations logically inscribed in the selfdefinition of family and civil life. Thus, Hegel speaks of the family and civil society as being fundamentally subordinated to the Stat.e insofar as the latter really exists. One imagines that if there were no Stat.e, for Hegel as for Hobbes, there would be no family and no civil society. Of course, one can equally say that, for Hegel the Stat.e is nothing if not the embodiment of the resolution of the contradictions inherent in and between the family and civil society. Thus, if the Stat.e does not uphold the freedoms inherent in the latter, then it cannot rightly be called a State at all.

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elucidate their respective concrete development and modus operandi alongside their structural (and interstitial and conjunctural) relations. In attempting to elucidate the social conditions for the acceptance of prejudice we must keep in mind that we are not simply attempting to demonstrate the actual social conditions for the rise of particular prejudicial ideologies. Rather, we are attempting to ground our understanding of the acceptance and propagation of virulent prejudicial ideologies on a deeper understanding of the sociological limitations to the spread and affectivity of rational, non-prejudicial, scientific, and open thinking in general. In other words, by the phrase 'the sociology of prejudice' is intended the study of the nature of the social conditions for the fomentation of prejudicial beliefs in the popular imagination. As suggested in Chapter 1, a prejudice cannot be recognised as a prejudice except by and through the application of rational and scientific analysis to the subject being considered. The question for the responsible sociologist of prejudice is thus, 'How is it possible that so many beliefs can be widely, and vocally, accepted by groups of individuals which are both highly destructive of human, ecological, and social goods, and demonstrably false?' We have, in the previous chapter, attempted to show how certain psychological constitutions are highly conducive to the acceptance of prejudices. But prejudice is certainly not a matter of concern solely for professional psychologists. The groundwork for the acceptance and dissemination of prejudice lies much deeper than individual pathology. It is the contention of the following chapters not only that capitalistic social institutions and their networks actively foster and promote particular prejudices according to their own organisational logic, but further, and more fundamentally, that these same institutions are profoundly anti-rational in their organisation. It is the capitalist assault on the promulgation of a vibrant constructive and critical rationality that lays the contemporary groundwork for the poisonous prejudices of bigots. The next chapter (Chapter 5) outlines more concretely the specific socio-economic and political determination of popular prejudices. The current chapter, however, shows how the governing practices embedded in particular social institutions under the overarching class structure of capitalism, act to enforce the psychological conditions of narcissism, authoritarianism and paranoia in the minds of individuals. In other

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words, it is not merely accidents of parentage or peer pressure that induce prejudicial psychologies in social individuals. To this end, we must first introduce some novel concepts to the discussion, which will help us to understand important social processes that we will consider as realising prejudice.

Theoretical Foundations for the Sociology of Prejudice Before elucidating the societal dynamics of prejudice-formation it is necessary to strengthen the theoretical basis of our understanding of how social practices become mental prejudices. The central question of this chapter is 'How do the social relations people engage in predispose them towards the acceptance of prejudice?' In answering it, we will have primary recourse to (a) the theory of practice of Pierre Bourdieu; (b) Marx's theory of alienation; and (c) Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation. Critical elements of each of these theories, and their composite sum, enable the sociological study of prejudice to avoid the pitfalls of both methodological individualism and culturalist structuralism, and help constitute a more thoroughgoing model of the sociology of knowledge deprivation. The sociological model of prejudice outlined in this chapter, consists in the substantiation of three categorical moments, namely:

•

•

•

The quotidian. The description of the habitus wherein prejudices are regulated constitutes the quotidian aspect of the sociological prejudice-analytic; The existential. The description of the prejudicial person's state of alienation and its primary characteristics constitutes the existential element of the sociological prejudice-analytic; and The structural. The description of the forces of ideological interpellation constitutes the structural element of the sociological prejudice-analytic.

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The following three concepts are each designed to capture essential elements in the societal conditions of prejudicial thinking.

The Quotidian Regulation of Prejudice: Bourdieu 's Concept of Habitus As suggested in the previous chapter, the meanings we ascribe to

actions or events often determine our emotional response to and, hence, evaluation of them. In this sense, cultural activity generally involves a high degree of emotionality for individuals. The habitual behaviour of social individuals produces, and is reproduced by, particular views and perceptions of the world in which s/he lives. Such views are invariably emotionally charged. The practicalities of a person's existence, that is, the lived relations s/he has with other individuals, the lived experiences s/he has of pleasure, stress, frustration, fatigue and so on, and the shared cultural symbolism s/he must employ to navigate and articulate her social relations and experiences, all produce emotional and psychological structures, developments, reactions, and transformations within her self. It is essential, then, to elucidate how a person's practico-habitual positio~ her habitus, within certain embedded social structures (in this chapter in particular, the family, the world of work, and State politics), influences the views she holds on particular phenomena. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) defined habitus 4 as: a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.5

Bourdieu's principal aim in formulating his concept of habitus was to develop a conceptual tool with which to understand how human be4

5

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A term coined by the German philosopher Norbert Elias, see Mennell (1992). Bourdieu ( 1990, 53).

haviour can be regulated and performed without conscious obeisance to rules. His concept of habitus is thus intended as a rebuttal of narrowly structuralist understandings of human behaviour and consciousness. At the same time, Bourdieu wished to avoid the methodological individualist sociology that suggests that society is the inevitable end product of individuals' behaviour grounded in individuals' self-interest. 6 Culture is not seen by Bourdieu as a set of disembodied signs and symbols designed with the express purpose of social beings' navigation of their immediate environs. Rather, these meanings themselves are produced by people's activity within these environs. Culture must thus be understood as the dialectical amalgamation of practical realities with semantic categories. As Ostrow writes: [Culture] is not an entity unto itself. It is not merely a set of standards, nonns, or rules followed by behaviour and 'internalised' by values. It goes deeper than 6

Bourdieu considered that the dualism inherent in much social science between those studies situating the individual as the pivotal social unit, and those studies which favour treating society as an impersonal structure 'translates into ostensibly scientific language fundamental political oppositions that pit those favourable to market-oriented public policies against advocates of the welfare state' (Swartz (1997, 97). Clearly academic sociology is not above the political affray of society for Bourdieu. Indeed, one of Bourdieu's best books (Bourdieu 1996) demonstrates how the institutional mechanisms of sectors of Gennan academia,functioning within the wider social fields of the Weimar Republic, tended to produce a peculiarly philosophical form of right-wing political discourse . Understanding human consciousness in terms of the centrality to it of communicative semantics, as do liberals of all kinds, is to idealise reality in the manner of a professional intellectual. That is to say, given that the bourgeois academic social scientist's own practical relation with the world is fundamentally conditioned by a lack of practico-social contact with her object of study, and a concomitant position of largely observational analysis, s/he tends to assume that the nature of human consciousness is detennined by legalistic wrangling over the meaning of the words used to define that object Thus, prejudice is conceived as a problem of misunderstanding (if one is a liberal realist) semantic intolerance (if one is a liberal postmodernist), or a combination of both (if one is a liberal consociationalist) . For the historical materialist, as I have tried to show in outlining the Marxist concept of ideology, prejudice is fundamentally grounded in the practical limitations of class-based existence in relation to its structural restraining of rationality .

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that; it is more inclusivelythatdimensionof experiencethat is habituallyand thereforepreconsciously and anonymously investedwiththe meaninggenerated by the historically developedinteractions between people and their physical 7 environment.

By 'physical environment', Ostrow means that physical situation human beings find themselves in, and in adaptation to which they are compelled to negotiate strategies, meanings, and behavioural norms. Ostrow contends that 'culture', or the set of symbolic meanings human beings share about the world, is a product of the interaction amongst human beings and between human beings and the world. Ostrow further suggests that this 'interaction' be understood as 'historically' based, that is, as grounded in the memory and historical experience of cultured human beings. For a historical materialist sociology, this historical basis of human culture must not be understood in a linear quantitative sense. Rather, history itself is diachronically constructed by the socio-structural conditions of its (re)production, that is, by class conflict within a specific mode of production. 8 For this reason, then, the sociologist of prejudice must be wary of producing a purely behavioural account of prejudice formation. In examining the sociological conditions for the propagation and formulation of evident prejudice, it is not sufficient simply to examine the direct 'empirical' circumstances wherein a particular prejudice is articulated. One must not examine prejudice in simple Humean terms of cause and effect. A person does not voice a prejudice, as I hope to have suggested in the previous two chapters, merely because s/he has been 'forced' or directly caused to do so by any particular force or occurrence. As Ostrow writes: What is missing from the causal account of experience are the structures of the underlying realm of experience which is not directly visible to the observer, or ,

7 8

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Ostrow (2000, 305). As such, it is often fantasy that is produced when an allegedly 'singular' culture delineates its own boundaries on the basis of 'history'. See Anderson (1991), and Hobsbawm and Ranger ( 1992).

indeed, to the consciousness of the subject, but is the contextual basis for properties which shine forth as observable evidence. 9

The quotation from Ostrow is not intended to defend a kind of subjectivism whereby a priori consciousness determines how we experience reality. In fact, the development of our consciousness is determined by the extent to which we are, or are not, detached from the referential content of our thoughts. That is to say, the extent to which a priori consciousness dominates our understanding of concrete reality is the extent to which our consciousness is reified and alien to our being. If we want to explain how it is that our consciousness has become rational or not, we must attempt to determine exactly how it is that our actual existence as social beings conditions the ways in which we understand the world, whether prejudicially or not. Just as I have demonstrated in the previous two chapters that prejudice must be understood in terms of its generalised normalisation, both epistemologically and psychologically, so we must attempt to understand how prejudice is normalised and habituated, sociologically speaking. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is similar in some respects to Durkheim's concept of the 'collective consciousness' (sometimes 10 translated as 'conscience collective'). Like Bourdieu, Durkheim studied belief systems as thoroughly social phenomena, always relating them to the society in which they are formed, as opposed to considering them as having purely divine, deductive, or instinctive origin. Durkheim defines the collective consciousness as 'the set of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a single society [which] forms a determinate system that has its own life.' 11 For Durkheim, the proper objects of sociological inquiry are 'social facts' or social phenomena that endure independently of their reception or expression by any given individual. Social facts are 'beliefs, tendencies, practices of the group taken collectively'. Examples of social facts are 'legal and moral rules, popular aphorisms and sayings, articles of faith in which religious or

9

Ostrow (2000, 302).

10

See Lukes (1973, 4-6). Durkheim (1933, 79).

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political sects condense their beliefs, standards of taste established by literary schools, etc.' 12 Durkheim writes: A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right 13 independent of its individual manifestations.

Thus, the government defines traffic laws before their practical application by an individual, language and currency exist independently of the individuals' use of them and religious beliefs are coded before the believer partakes of their significance. The collective consciousness, as the paradigmatic social fact, is a set of moral and practical principles that assist the individual social actor in acting 'normally' in society. Durkheim essentially argued that it was a person's social identity, ascribed independently of their will and usually pre-dating their very existence, that shaped the individual's activity and temperament. The collective consciousness, for Durkheim, connotes a secularised form of religion whereby society worships itself as a point of order. For Durkheim, it is a religion in the sense of 'a system of collective beliefs and practices that have a special authority'. 14 Collective representations always have a social origin, social reference, and social functionality. However, Bourdieu's conception of habitus is not precisely the same as Durkheim's concept of collective consciousness. 'Habitus' denotes a shared cultural terrain that dialectically develops through practical engagement with the world and the shared experiences resulting from the same. Social activity is not always governed by moral credos, but, rather, by norms, standards, discoveries, necessary imperatives, facts, and values inherent to the practical activity itself. It is not the case, say Mulligan and Lederman,15 that my speaking French to Frenchmen, using legal money, and applying modem technical methods

12 13 14 15

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Ibid. ( 1964,7). Ibid. ( 1964, 13). Durkheim (1969). Mulligan and Lederman (1977, 543).

as an industrialist 16 are activities imposed upon me by moral or supervisory constraints, rather than being 'rules specifying the practice 7 itself .' In other words, it is regularly practical requirements that enjoin me to partake of one course of action rather than another, and not a preexisting moral code. This insight can be upheld using Bourdieu's theory of habitus or Marx's theory of praxis, both of which sustain the materialist understanding of social knowledge's realistic origin in practical human engagement with the world. Equally, for Bhaskar, 'one must insist, against Durkheim, that the range of social facts depends upon (though it is irreducible to) the intentional activity of human beings'. 18 'Nevertheless', Bhaskar rightly adds: in employing a causal criterion to establish the reality of social facts, Durkheim observed perfectly proper scientific practice - though it must be recognized that one is here dealing with a most peculiar kind of entity : a structure irreducible to, but present only in its effects. 19

Bottomore suggests that: Durkheim's sociology is functionalist[ ... ) and is therefore exposed to the kind of Marxist criticism which Godelier2° has brought against functionalism generally; namely , that while it '( ... ) presupposes that the different surface social relationships within a society fonn a system , that is that they have a functional interdependence which pennits them to exist as an "integrated" whole, and which tends to reproduce itself as such - as a society,' it has serious theoretical defects: first, 'that by confusing social structure with external social relations, functionalist analysis is condemned to remain a prisoner of appearances within the social system studied ' and second, that it does not provide any explanation of 'why and under what conditions such and such a social factor assumes such and such a function' .21

16 17 18 19 20 21

Durldleim (1964, 2- 3). Mulligan and Ledennan (1977 , 543). Bhaskar (1998 , 39-40) . Ibid . Godelier (1977, 33--4). Botto more ( 1981, 909 ).

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Therefore, it is not the codes held to govern the relations of a given social group that are the sociologist's proper object of inquiry, but the pre-existing social relations that the codified (or not) behaviour of groups is historically reflective of. The behaviour that is considered acceptable according to one widely held set of ideational nonns will be quite contrary to that which is desired according to another set of such norms, especially as class conflict animates their core principles. In any given society, the interests of different classes as determined by their position within a mode of production (as capitalist, wage labourer, peasant, landlord and all the intermediate grades really approximating to one or the other) dictate culturally 'normal' modes of behaviour for one class that will, in fact, be positively absurd, irrational, destructive and impossible for another class. The dominating 'normal' cultural codes of society must not be seen as being relatively accomplished or perverted by one or another social 'group', but rather as emerging contradictorily out of the actual struggles between different classes and their level of ideological identification. Although Durkheim resolutely distinguished sociology from psychology in terms of its explananda (collective, as opposed to individual, conscience) and also in terms of its explanans (biological analysis of the individual constitution or autobiographical accounting for individual motivation as opposed to measured analysis of collective belief systems), he nonetheless stressed the predominantly mental (linguistic and symbolic) foundations of social behaviour, as opposed to the material social determinants of such. This lends some justification to Sorel's classification of Durkheim's sociology as 'psychologistic'. A further and derivative criticism of Durkheimian sociology is that it is epistemically anthropomorphic. Durkheim claims that the classification of reality, including cosmology, science, morality, and the division of labour, reflect inter-human social concerns and social relations so that there is no difference between how human society is organised and how the world is understood to be. In short, there is a direct correspondence between human perceptions of their relations to one another and the way that the natural world is classified. But, in fact, as Needham stresses:

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Now society is allegedto be the modelon whichclassificationis based, yet in societyaftersocietyexaminedno formalcorrespondence can be shownto exist Different forms of classification are found with identical types of social organization,and similarfonns withdifferenttypesof society(...) Thereis very littlesign of the constantcorrespondence of symbolicclassificationwith social order which the argumentleadsone to expect,and whichindeedthe argument is intendedto explain. 22

Moreover, the Durkheimian conception of the contemporaneous reflection of social relations in naturalistic classification fails to explain how new trends in scientific, moral or philosophical classification can profoundly influence the course of social relations, just as new forms of social order can catalyse new modes of naturalistic classification. Durkheim is quite right to suggest that the classification of the world is inextricably linked to the social relations of human beings. But Durkheim virtually ignores human social relations as a productive power, a power to alethically discover, order, and systematically understand natural forces so as to increase the material wealth that forms the basis of class division, shaping the collective conscience of social groups. Durkheim treats social relations as though they develop ex nihilo. However, social relations themselves have causes that relate in part to the ability of human beings to scientifically decipher natural phenomena. If it appears that the taxonomy of the natural world at times corresponds more or less directly to the prevalent social relations, then that is because the latter correspond more or less clearly to the limitations of a mode of production's engagement with science. Thus, Aristotle justified slavery because the Greece of his time was economically incapable of doing away with slavery, slavery itself being then a curb on the capacity for scientifically and taxonomically developing the forces of production, and thus naturalism generally. The understanding of social relations and the understanding of the natural world in the Aristotelian schema had a certain reciprocity, not just in the sense of Greek social relations justifying pseudo-naturalistic understanding, but also in the sense of social relations constituting a curb on the progressive development of scientific truth. As J.D. Bernal writes: 22

Needham (1963, xvi).

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Because the social order [of Ancient Greece] could no longer advance,the idea that Narure itself was changing and developing was repudiated. Philosophy ceased to be progressive and, as part of the same reaction, ceased to be materialist.23

In short, the stagnant slave mode of production of the Greek empire. led to an ideological view of nature as unchanging and constituted by a perfect hierarchy of order and domination: Aristotle built his physical world in the image of an idea] social world in which subordination is the narural state. In this world everything knew its place and 24 for the most part kept to it.

Aristotelian cosmology was not simply an after-effect of the naturalisation of Greek social relations, but Greek social relations were constituted upon the basis of a distinct mode of production characterised by a limited development of scientific productivity (including experimental apparatus, technology and factual materiel) as appropriate to pre-industrial post-tribal economic life. It is, then, a one-sided culturaJism that holds the view that the meanings which we embody habitually are somehow outside of us, inscribed in some 'commonly held' morality. The normative functionalism of Talcott Parsons25 suggests that 'culture' is a kind of transcendental code common to all 'civilised' people. In actuality, the meanings we embody in ourselves and in society are formed concretely out of our practical experiences within prevalent socio-economic structures. These institutional structures can in no way be reduced to the beliefs people may hold about them, nor are the beliefs people hold about institutional structures one-sidedly determined by the latter's prescribed (instrumental) rationality. As Bourdieu writes:

23 24 25

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Bernal (1969, 207- 8). Ibid. ( 1969, 20 I). Parsons (1968). FunctioriaJism suggests that society constitutes a system of interlocking institutional forms that have been designed to ensure social stability and satisfy social needs. To a great extent, historical social change, conflict and systematic contradictions are both absent from functionalist analysis and unaccountable for within such an analysis.

Methodologicalobjectivism, a necessary movement in all research, by the break with primary experience and the construction of objective relations which it accomplishes,demands its own supercession. In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatises systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to ~ from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, the theory of the mode of operation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimentalscience of the dialectic of the internalisationof extemality and the externalisation of intemality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification.26

Bourdieu's notion of dialectic between the personal internalisation of structural codes and the externalising structuration of semantic systems ought not to be misconstrued abstractly as a two-way determination process. In one sense, of course, a social structure would cease to operate if its individual or group 'operants' did not semantically understand its manner of operation. Yet, in a hierarchically ordered and undemocratic socio-structural form, the objective necessity of abiding by the regulative norms of the system quite strictly predetermines the framework of the individual's behaviour. No doubt the individual personality may react negatively, positively, or indifferently to the demands of the institutional arrangement s/he must live or die within (given his/her relative psychological disposition and concrete habitus), buts/he must react to its demands, whilst it may not determinately respond to her understanding other than, for example, supervisorily. Bourdieu is strongly opposed to any sociological system which would deny the central role human beings themselves have in determining the conditions of their own behaviour. However, Bourdieu 's theory must implicitly maintain that some habituses preclude self-conscious determination of behaviour more than others. 27 A 26 27

Bourdieu(1977, 72). Indeed, Bourdieu's claim that the production of a cultural (as opposed to a strictly economic) identity for oneself increases in significanceaccording to the class position of the would-be 'culture vulture', seems to imply that some classes are more able to transcend their habitus than others. Bourdieu contends that the habituses of the long-term unemployed in communitiesgenerally at the

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habitus grounded in a high degree of human alienation will objectively tend towards the preclusion of human self-understanding.

The Existential Condition of Prejudice: Marx's Concept of Alienation .

The term 'alienation' has had different connotations over time and place. Some of its previous meanings include the objective realisation of human powers (as with Hegel), estrangement from one's friends or family, or another word for madness (as in the French alienation). Following Marx's use of the term, we can say that human beings can be described as alienated insofar as they think and act in ways that negate their powers as human beings. For Marx, there are four principal ways by which human beings may become alienated. They are: Alienation from the products of work and the process of work itself.

The capitalistic decoupling of production from the dictates of use value negates the conscious ordering of labour as a means of meeting human needs, wants and ideals. As Ollman28 writes, 'Man is said to be separated from his own products (he has no control over what he makes or what becomes of it afterwards).' Nor does the alienated person have any control over or conscious grasp of how she produces what she does or, indeed, why. In a non-alienated work environment, Marx contends that production would be truly human: Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private

28

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bottom of the labour market are virtually identical with their economic position. In other words, there is very little difference between the habituation of lowerworking class individuals and their objective material circumstances. The final chapter in this essay outlines the class-based and vocational character of the middle and upper middle class person's suuggle to retain 'cultural capital'. Oilman (1976, 133).

property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.29

This mode of alienation induces the epistemic error of neo-animism. Whereas in human societies with a primitive mode of production, animism is associated with the incapacity of human beings to transform nature in line with conscious design over anything but a very meagre level, in societies with a highly advanced mode of production, neoanimism is a mode of cognition associated with the structural incapacity of humans to apply the scientific discoveries associated with the historical rise in productivity at a general level. Rather, insofar as alienation of the worker from her product and from the production process is predominant within the context of a society at a very high level of productivity, then all the more will nature appear to be a wholly and expansively dominating and mysterious power, apparently inhering in which there are secrets impregnable by the mind.

Alienation from the natural environment . Marx writes: The view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature [of which humanity is essentially a part' 0 - Z.C.] [ .. . ] In this sense Thomas 1 Muntzer3 declares it intolerable that ' all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth - all living things must also become free'. 32

This mode of alienation induces the epistemic error of technologism, wherein nature is consciously grasped only as the bare material by which particular needs are met by human beings . The essential characteristics, internal and external relations, and even subjective perceptions as in the case of animals, of things in nature are reduced to 29

Marx ( 1986, 34 ).

30

Ibid. (1974, 328). Sixteenth century German Anabapti st and leader of peasant rebellions against Feudal oppression. Marx (1975, 239).

31 32

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the level of 'stuff' from which market profit is to be extracted. The stunning incredulity towards reason and carefulness that the technologistic drive towards the total erasure of nature from human consideration produces has yet to be fully mapped by Marxism and critical philosophy.

Alienation from other human beings. Production primarily for profit, entailing the abnegation of production for use value and the corollary conditioning of productive activity according to consciously developing human wants, needs and ideals, ensures that other human beings and their physical, emotional, sensual and existential satisfactions become marginal to the creative life of the individual. This mode of alienation induces the epistemic error of subjectivism. Insofar as the experiences, understanding, wants, needs, desires, and scientific ideas of other human beings do not enter into the teleological strategy of the capitalist production process at the individual level, so much so does the confined worldview of the individual worker become central, paramount and apodictic. Engagement in collective and dialectical labour with other human beings to meet natural human needs and wants as they socio-historically develop allows for dialogue, debate and discussion to transform the worldview of the individual worker. But the privatised mechanicism of the capitalist wage-labourer entails the virtual irrelevance and even nuisance of the subjective perceptions of fellow workers.

Alienation from the 'species-being' of humanity itself. Marx writes: In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life.33

33

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Ibid. (1961, I03).

As opposed to being a species with the capacity to comprehend,

design and transform its relations with nature according to conscious reason, the alienation of human beings from their own species powers ensures that humanity is transformed 'from an active subject to an 34 object of social process'. This mode of alienation induces the epistemic error of cynicism. Alienation of humanity from its species-being encourages the growth of ideological misanthropy and a cynical view of human nature that stresses its shortcomings, its impotence, and its perversity. The concept of alienation in Marx's early writings is underpinned by a conception of those attributes of human nature that can properly be alienated or separated from the real life of the individual human. Marx identifies human nature with the physical constitution of human beings and with the needs and relations by which that is realised. GerasJS writes: In the ( ... ) anthropology implicated in Marx's materialist conception [there is) the idea of general human capacities or powers: in the first place that of production, but also language, as embodying human consciousness. The German Ideology also contains much about individuals' needs. These it explicitly assimilates at one point to their 'nature', when it stares that 'their needs, consequently their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs' have always bound them into relations with one another.' 36 [ ••• ) Beyond those needs implicit in (that) statement, namely, sexual, under the rubric 'relations between the sexes', and the social one itself - as it is expressed elsewhere, 'the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men', 'that men need and always have needed each other' 37 - there is also this, in a recurring phrase, 'first premise ... of all history': 'Men must be in a position to live in order to "make history." But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy those needs, the production of material life itself. 38

Humans are conscious of the world insofar as they engage with it and labour upon it. If humans are prevented from engaging with the world 34 35 36 37 38

Petrovic (2003, IS) quoting A.P. Ogurtsov in the Soviet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Geras (1983, 69). Marx and Engels (197Sa, 437) . Ibid. (197Sa, 44, 57). Ibid. (197Sa, 41-2).

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with the aid of their human powers of rationality, creativity and mutual solidarity, and are confronted by the world as though it were a myst-erious and alien object according to which they must absolutely con-form, then humans are prevented from establishing a dialectical and rational consciousness of the world developing through naturally grounded praxis. A person is not necessarily alienated whens/he neglects to realise his/her potentialities (though neglect of human powers can be a result of alienation). Thus, I am not necessarily alienated when I decide to lie in bed sleeping all day or when, like Mrs Thatcher, I decide to hardly sleep at all. If I have freely decided, in accordance with the free exercise of my distinctly human powers, principal amongst which are the capacity for a high degree of contextual self-consciousness, self-control, rationality and rational communication, upon which of these courses of action is preferable to the other, then my behaviour, and still less my whole being, cannot be described as alienated. What Fromm describes as alienation from 'the human condition' is characterised by the frustration of certain needs, wants and relations specific to human beings as such, both internal to individual development and in relation to the individual and her external world. 39

39

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There are, according to Fromm, five basic psychic needs rooted in the human condition: (i). The need for relatedness. The 'unbearable knowledge of aloneness, disconnectedness and mortality' impels man to build relational ties with other living beings. Submissiveness on one side and dominativeness on the other are a dialectical unity of opposites, wherein the desire for relatedness entails the loss of freedom for all persons therein (Fromm 1941, 141t). Fromm ( 1973, 389-9) writes about sado-masochism, which is a basic disposition of the authoritarian prejudicial personality, 'Sadism and masochism, which are invariably linked together, are opposites in behaviouristic terms, but they are actually two different facets of one fundamental situation, the sense of vital impotence. Both the sadist and the masochist need another being to "complete" them, as it were. The sadist makes another being an extension of himself; the masochist makes himself the extension of another being. Both seek a symbiotic relationship because neither has his centre in himself. While it appears that the sadist is free of his victim, he needs the victim in a perverse way. Because of the close connection between sadism and masochism it is more correct to speak of a sadomasochistic character, even though the one or the

In line with Bourdieu's suggestion that human individuals must be existentiallyconceived as having self-consciousnessthat develops in and through practical engagementwith their socio-physicalsurroundings,an other aspect will be more dominant in a particular person. The sadomasochist has also been called the "authoritarian character," translating the psychological aspect of his character structure into terms of a political attitude . This concept finds its justification in the fact that persons whose political attitude is generally described as authoritarian (active and passive) usually exhibit (in our society) the traits of the sadomasochistic character, control of those below and submission to those above.' (ii). The need for transcendence. The knowledge that one is thrown into and out of the world without one's consent, and subject to a multitude of forces outside one's control, impels the human being to seek to detennine his own fate, either through creation or, failing that, destruction. Fromm contends that 'destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life' (Fromm 1947, 216) . Destructiveness can result from a prejudicial disregard for the reality of a thing, as one seeks merely to negate it, as opposed to transform it. (iii). The need for rootedness. The severance from nature attendant to humanity's conscious need to fend for itself impels humans to seek a new 'rootedness' and homeliness in his own humanity . This 'human habitation' (Schaar 1961, SO) can be sought in one of two ways, through incest or 'brotherliness', the recognition that all human beings are equally entitled to love and justice (Ibid). Fromm (19SS, 60) writes: 'Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world basedon human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world in to a truly human home.' (iv). The need for identity. To achieve transcendence, humans must have a sense of themselves as authors and objects of their own actions (Schaar 1961, SI). 'Herd conformity', whilst actually obliterating the purposive and individuated conscience which makes knowing oneself possible, gives humans an illusory and prejudicial sense of identity. (v). The need for a 'frame of orientation and devotion' (Schaar 1961, SI). Rational human beings are impelled to make sense of the world around them, and understand it according to meaningful patterns. Since human beings are purposive and desirous, patterns of meaning are typically centred on some 'object of devotion which gives meaning to[ ... ) existence and [one's] position in the world' (Fromm 19SS, 60). If this 'system of orientation' is, however, basedon prejudice, then confusion, conflict, helplessness and insanity must result. Thus, 'only a frame of orientation and devotion based on reason and objective knowledge will contribute to happiness' (Schaar 1961, 52).

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alienated person can be conceived of as one who, whilst rendered incapable of consciously effecting these surroundings, is nonetheless effective through his/her praxis. The alienated person is one who has forfeited the benefits accruing from the control of his powers to an institutional agency, person or group of persons outside his conscious influence: he is thus inclined to formulate and accept prejudicial views of himself and his environment. Often, much of peoples' passive acquiescence to preconscious societal norms is grounded in the realisation that there is 'no choice' or 'no alternative', to such tacit or explicit tolerance. Whenever such an alternative presents itself, as for example, in incidences of revolutionary insurgence or through practicopolitical education, individuals and groups of indi-viduals are quite ready to proclaim the relative 'abnormality' of their everyday institutionalised lives.40 At any rate, the recognition of alienation itself has necessary circumstantial parameters, and the self-consciously alienated person is (re)produced in and through his/her own particular habitus. In the quasi-nihilistic idiom of post-structuralism, the concept of alienation is roundly rejected. For post-structuralists (and their struc40

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According to Marxist social theory, revolutions come about as a result of an antagonism between the forces and the relations of production peculiar to a particular epochal mode of production. Author Nelson Peery (2002, 27) writes: 'Revolution comes about as a result of the development of the means of production. An antagonism develops between the new emerging economic relations and the old, static relations within the superstructure.' . For Marx, sociological explanation is predicated upon understanding how society is organised to meets its material needs. This social organisation is detennined by the productive forces on hand to a given epoch. For Marx, each advance of technology detennines a period of historical development with distinctive fonns of social relations of production. A revolutionary break occurs in that mode of production when the forces of production (technologies, organisations, knowledge, and so on) are being held back in their development by certain ergo archaic production relations. Marx ( 1977, 21) writes: 'At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From fonns of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transfonnation of the whole immense superstructure.'

turalist Marxist antecedents) there cannot be alienation because there cannot be a subject who is alienated. Gajo Petrovic counters: Against such a view it has been argued that alienation from oneself should be understood not as alienation from a factual or ideal ('normative') human nature, but as alienation from historically created human possibilities, especially from the human capacity for freedom and creativity. Thus instead of support for a static or unhistorical view of man the idea of self-alienation is a call for a constant renewal and development of man. This point has been strongly argued by Kangrga: to be self-alienated means 'to be self-alienated from oneself as one's own deed (Werk), self-activity, self-production, self-creation; to be alienated from history as human praxis and a human product'. 41 Thus a man is alienated or self-alienated, when he is not becoming man, and this occurs when 'that which is and was, is taken as the authentic and only truth', or when one operates 'inside a ready-made world, and is not active practically-critically (in a revolutionary way)' (lbid.). 42

Capitalism sets very strict limits to the degree to which life and work can become what they ought to be, and ought to be what they are, for the labourer. Alfred Sohn-Rethel 43 suggests that it is the historical separation of exchange and use values that grounds the very possibility of abstract thinking (for example, both in Ancient Greece and in the modem world). Full independence of mental from manual labour occurs in parallel with the total abstraction of exchange values from use values. 44 Capitalism has always over-determined the specialisation of knowledge as separate from the production process, so as to ensure, as Braverman 45 has demonstrated, that worker's knowledge of and over the production process was objectively curtailed. Haug suggests that:

41 42 43 44

45

Kangrga(l967,27). Petrovic (2003, 14). Sohn-Rethel (1978). As especially achieved in the financialisation of global capital from the 1970s onwards, and the disconnection of educational systems from production characteristic of the development of an intra-competitive university system separated from production (see Chapter 6). Braverman (1974).

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A training in self-mastery to the point of indifference, as the preparation of sensuality adequate to the exchange principle [where neither the form of production not the particularity of its use value are determinant criteria - Z.C.] is the prerequisite for the execution of social relations which reverberate from 46 the exchange society into individual life.

The exchange society, through its societal processes of individuation (between individuals, within societies and in objective evaluation and understanding) is concomitantly totally anti-individualistic, erasing individual differences through according abstracted common value to their work and performance just as it reifies them. The individual of commodity society must consider her own powers as largely irrelevant to the constitution of her personality. As such, in her life activity, she can only attain limited affirmation or approbation from her peers or her relatives. This induces an attitude of ignorance towards her self, her relations with others and her society as a whole. Schneider writes: In capitalist commodity society (MCM) [where money is exchanged for a commodity and the commodity then exchanged for more money - Z.C.) the economic motive of human society is thus inverted into its opposite: the actual purpose of production is no longer use value and the immediate satisfaction of needs and instincts, but exchange value and with that the satisfaction of needs now largely if not completely mediated through the abstraction of exchange value [that of the socially necessary labour time required to produce a commodity - Z.C.]; that is, the [perpetual - Z.C .] renunciation of the immediate satisfaction of needs and instinctual satisfaction [in favour of martet competitiveness - Z.C .). By becoming autonomous with respect to every particular commodity object and by becoming the ' driving motive' of production , 47 exchange value has unloosened itself from concrete sensuous immediate need.

This chapter intends to show that the alienation of human beings from their capacity for rational self-consciousness, dialectical social interaction, and creative production extends beyond the world of work into the realm of the family and the state. But before extrapolating the theory of the familial constriction of rationality, it is necessary to introduce the concept of interpellation, or the sociological means by which the normalcy of alienated cognitions is legitimated. 46 47

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Haug (1985 , 148). Schneider (1975, 128).

The Structural Legitimation of Prejudice: Althusser 's Concept of lnterpellation

Althusser used the concept of interpellation to refer to the process by which individuals within a class society are addressed by what he called the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and thus constituted as subjective agents of the dominant politico-economic system. Resch writes: Ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects by means of the pre-existing category of the subject It invariably creates subjects and controls them by recognizing them as subject-objects, subjects in relation to objects (or more precisely, in relation to possible object-directed practices). 41

By necessity, individuals allotted particular roles within the class structure must internalise the ideological rationale and the teleology of the institution that engages their activity. According to Althusser, without the process of interpellation, individuals would not be able to act coherently within the class system at all: [We must] distinguish [ ...] between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although concrete subjects only exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete individual[ ... ] [l]deology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation [ ...] called inlerpe//ation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!'[ ...] [T]he hailed individual will turn around [and] by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that 'it was really him who was hailed' (and not someone else). 49

Althusser's concept of interpellation implies that the individual is always constituted as a 'subjective' agent in society by being placed within an institutional network of social practices which require the inculcation of certain worldviews, perspectives, beliefs and values as directly addressed to her through the ISAs (Church, Media, Govern48 49

Resch ( 1992, 209). Althusser (1971, 174).

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ment, Management, Party, and so on). The views, perspectives, beliefs and values conveyed to the individual by the ISAs are always partial and self-interested prejudices by which the power of the superstructure upholding the dominant mode of production is maintained. Ideology principally exists, then, through its inherence in and propagation by the interpellative activity of ISAs. lnterpellation occurs when the ideologically constructed subject answers the call, expresses the thinking or responds to the demands of the ISAs without his being directly solicited by them. In short, interpellation is an effect of the subject's having internalised the ruling ideology of the dominant mode of production so that there is no subjective conflict or contradiction between the life of the individual and the life of the State/Religion/Party/felevision Channel/School. The confessional ritual of the Catholic Church is a good example of what interpellation means in practice. Having accepted the rightness and propriety of confessing all of one's sins to a Priest who is held to be a Holy Man, the devout Catholic does not need to be coerced into appearing in Church every Sunday, but willingly goes 'of her own accord' (sic). The interpellated individual, then, is both active subject and subjected object. For Althusser, a person's self-conceptions in capitalist society (indeed, according to the philosophy of Althusser, any society) are formed and ordered according to the symbolic signals and discourses we respond to in our everyday lives. Moreover, a person attains a degree of self-consciousness precisely insofar as s/he recognises his/her self in the directives and inquiries of what Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses. Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) are those social institutions that inculcate the rules and values most conducive to the instrumental subjection of persons in the service of dominant class relations. As Althusser writes: [The] reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e., a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression. 50

50

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Ibid. ( 1971, 132).

For Althusser, since human beings require a sense of subjectivity in order to be the agent of their actions/' it is vital for the capitalist system to reproduce its conditions of existence in the minds of the individuals under its rubric. To this end, capitalism instils, through interpellating or 'hailing' the individual, a sense of subjectivity that ensures she understands herself to be the author of her own activity and the determinant of her own place within society. Thus, ISAs systematically misrepresent the real nature of the social system by persuading people that they are both the sole authors of their own fate and that the personal authority of any individual is guaranteed by their consensual participation in the predominant institutional life of their (ideologically asocial) society. Althusser, however, posits an unfathomable dichotomy between the structures of interpellation functionally appropriate to the dominant mode of production, and the organic historical development of ideological mores from the lived culture of social classes in their everyday struggles. For it is the productive activity of living individuals which reproduces the mode of production to which ideological messages must refer. The activity of human beings thus produces the relations of production underpinning Ideological State Apparatuses without their even acknowledging it, such that, for example, a white person living in an imperialist country can be a racist and be complicit in fomenting racial hatred without avowedly professing or accepting 'racism' as a doctrine. In the Althusserian (and, indeed, Chomskyan) schema, racist ideology comes about as the intentional effect of the propagation of 'racism' by the ISAs of imperialism, whereas, in a more properly Marxist sense, racism can be seen as the relatively spontaneous and organic cultural common-sense of relations of production favouring the nationally constructed 'white race' against the equally nationally constructed 'black race'. However, this does not suggest that racism is not indeed a doctrine promoted by the ISAs of capitalism, for it assuredly and historically is. The technical management of mature capitalist relations of production within the context of a shifting and volatile international class struggle necessitates the relatively popular transmission of conservative ideological traditions throughout key SI

Resch( 1992,208).

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sectors of the world populace. The point is merely that, contra Althusser, the life-interests and subjective experiences of the popular targets of ideological indoctrination cannot be made to conform to beliefs, worldviews, perspectives and values that are in direct opposition. Indeed, when the ruling establishment tries to tailor its ideological message to suit the needs of, for example, neo-colonial strategies of political assimilation, it has often faced the stiffest and most aggressive opposition from the hitherto unchallenged and highly interpellated privileged defenders of the status quo. Althusser's Marxism, whilst extremely useful in clarifying the hegemonic role of ideology in capitalist society, suffers from the major defects resulting from its hyper-functionalism. In Althusser, there is no sense that the institutions individuals find themselves acting within and through have developed contradictorily and unevenly, that is, historically. In reading Althusser, one gets the impression that the ideology of the State's instantiation as the singular Subject to its subjects is to be taken literally. That is to say, it appears that all 'subordinate' social relations have been established in line with the omniscient design of the State. Althusserianism arguably maintains a quasi-Hegelian ideology where if it were not for the 'autonomous' ideology of the State, individuals under capitalism would have a direct and unmediated knowledge of their conditions of existence. This is not to say that for Althusser, ideology subsists wholly outside individuals' conscious lives. Rather, ideology is lived by individuals insofar as it enables them to practically exist at all. But for Althusser ideological interpellation is the primary determinant of the individual's understanding of self and society. Since human beings themselves, and their practical, psychological and intellectual responses to their real conditions of existence, have no bearing upon the structure and propagation of ideology, Althusser concludes that ideology is (a) imposed on individuals from without and (b) wholly responsible for their persistent enslavement. Althusserianism is, then, in opposition to both Bourdieu 's and Marx's understanding of the development of individuals' consciousness. For Bourdieu and Marx, consciousness is determined first and foremost by the praxical activity necessary within given material contexts to survive and prosper. For Marx and Bourdieu, 'ideologies' may have comparatively little effect on the behaviour of

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individuals, except insofar as they address intellectual, psychological, or political problems they experience during the course of their everyday lives. Despite the serious shortcomings 52 of Althusser's Platonic Marxism (the idealisation of concepts as subsisting apart from their real social construction), the concept of interpellation is extremely useful in the present context of the investigation of prejudice. The idea that the individual is constantly being addressed ideologically as an atomic individual in class-society is a very important one. When ISAs attempt to gamer support for policies through appeal to notions of Law, Morality, Conscience, Freedom or whatever, they frequently do so by presenting problems and tasks as individual or subjective, rather than as structural or relational. Under the law, in the family, in the field of consumption, in the workplace, and in the education system, the individual is made to feel that the pros and cons of his/her position are fundamentally the product of his/her own aptitudes and attitudes, as opposed to being systematically dictated by the operation of enduring politico-economic social structures. The central interpellative processes of the institutions of the family, the world of wage-labour, and the political establishment will be substantiated in the following section, alongside the habitual and alienative processes of the same. In doing so, we will highlight the ways in which the social structure of capitalism reproduces the psychological conditions most conducive to prejudice, namely: • • • •

Insecurity/Fear Dependency/ Aggression Isolation/Narcissism Reified Thought/Anti-Realism.

52

Not least of which is Althusser's intellectualist inversion of Marxism which, as Rioouer (1994, 54) points out, asserts that theory is scientific whilst practice is ideological rather than, as Marx intended, praxis being scientific and (pure) theory being ideological. See also Thompson ( 1978) for an overly subjectivist and voluntarist 'historical materialist' critique of structuralist Marxism.

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The Societal Bases of Prejudice The Familial Sociology of Prejudice

For Talcott Parsons, the family is sociologically defined as the institution engaged in primary socialisation. That is to say, for Parsons, the family internalises society's culture and thereby structures the individual's personality. Major problems with this functionalist understanding of the family are, firstly, its tendency to idealise the family as a harmonious arrangement productive of stable and normal adult personalities. Such a view flies in the face of well-established psychoanalytic and sociological findings.53 Secondly, it can be argued that Parsons, like Althusser, abstracts from the actual historical development of the family, and simply analyses it from the perspective of what social function it is supposed to or even designed to fulfil. Such a methodology is, of course, very similar to that of Hegel, who also idealised the nature of the family according to its supposedly ideal momentum within the State-centred social totality. As I have suggested, like Hegel, Parsons' early work tended to understand society as a fully coherent organic whole, founded upon 'commonly held values and beliefs'. 54 Parsons, like Freud, imagined that society per se exists, and must exist, literally outside of the family. Parsons claims that the proper inculcation of social beliefs is both the aim and the outcome of nuclear family life. In fact, however, social structures determine the specific nature and form of family-transmitted norms 55 53

See for example Laing (1971). Laing contends that the insular bourgeois family

54 55

is likely to produce a high degree of schizophrenic neurosis within the infant family member. In the restrictive and repressive family milieu the child faces the option of either conforming to his parents' image of him/her, or reject his/her parent's demands altogether . In either c~, the child's self-image will be in constant conflict, and rarely will the child's self-image and his/her real experience coincide . In Sanity, Madness and the Family (1971a), Dr Laing presents a collection of qualitative case studies of his schizophrenic patients to corroborate this theory . Lockwood ( 1992, 7-8). This approach is very well-articulated in Seccombe and Warner (2003).

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and, according to social psychoanalysis, the character of the individuals within them. Thus, it is the dialectic between the personalities tending to be produced by prevalent social institutions and the functionality of their regulative ethos, and the impact of these personalities upon those structures and their relations, that goes to constitute the dominant culture of a given society. The given culture of a society can then be said to be either conducive to the formation and proliferation of rationality or, its negation, prejudice. There can be no doubt that feminist analysis, especially that invigorated and informed by historical materialist understandings of human consciousness, has played a vital role in articulating problems of personal development in relation to politico-economic structures. As Eli Zaretsky writes: By its critique of male supremacy and of the family women's liberation has demonstrated its systematic and social character . The social terrain of personal life is the contemporary family within which men and women share so much, and in which their antagonism is so deeply rooted. The family is an important material basis for subjectivity in this society, and for psychological life generally. If we can simultaneously view it as part of the 'economy' a step would be taken toward understanding the connection between our inner emotional lives and capitalist development. s6

The inroads ma.de by feminist theory into the sociology of personality have generally tended to advance from a study of the effects of male dominance within the patriarchal family upon the personalities of the spouse and her children, and their social behaviour. These effects are understood by feminists to be conditioned insofar as the spouse and her children tend to be structurally forced into particular economic, ideological, and political roles. It is the task of the materialist social critic to examine precisely how these prescribed roles coincide with the interests of the total social system both functionally (according to the interests of the dominant economic class in a class-based society) and historically (insofar as the social system has been shaped over time principally by modal political and economic struggles). Ac-

56

Zaretsky (1976, 34-5).

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cording to Heidi Hartmann, 51 however, patriarchal values predate class factors in detennining the social subordination of females to males. This is a singularly anti-materialist argument, and all but assumes the biological naturality of male social dominance. 58 Since such a conception flies in the face of much research into the historical development of female subordination, 59 Hartmann propounds this antinaturalistic explanation of patriarchy saying (a) that ideology is unconnected to class domination and, in fact, one-sidedly detennines the character of class domination; 60 and (b) that patriarchal ideas are homogenous and in no sense historically conditioned or relative. These notions are disputable. For instance, not all societies have oppressed women in the same ways, some societies have not been patriarchal, and some societies without class divisions, so-called 'primitive' societies, have under certain temporal social conditions not oppressed women as a distinct group at all.61 In contrast to this ideological feminism, Delphy and Leonard62 argue that the family is every bit as socially conditioned as any other human relation. Contrary to physiologistic descriptions of the family (as 51 58 59

60 61 62

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Hartman (1981 ). An argument most influentially advanced by Firestone (1970). Reed describes the transition from matriarchal primitive communist societies to patriarchal agricultural societies. She describes how, as humans moved from being hunters to being cattle-herders and farmers, with the rise in productivity that began with agriculture and stock-raising, there was a concomitant need to protect the surplus generated thereby. As warlordism and its attendant slavery accompanied the increase in private wealth held by rising ruling classes on the basis of the protection and concentration of the same, the productive role women occupied in the old hunter-gatherer societies, and their attendant matriarchal social structures, were reneged in a most spectacular way (Reed 1975, 413). See Coontz (2005) especially chapter 3 for a wide-ranging discussion of the contemporary literature on human sexual relations through time and place. See also Anderson (1993) for a description of the destructive change in egalitarian sexual relations brought about by French Jesuits in Native North American societies in the Seventeenth century. See Wood (1998) on the erroneous dissociation of ideological analysis from class analysis to be found in many post-Marxist authors. For details see especially the classic anthropological studies by Morgan (1964), Hoebel ( 1966), and Briffault ( 1927). Delphy and Leonard (1992, 2).

based principally on sexual desire, love, and supposedly 'natural' human relations), Delphy and Leonard contend that families must also be understood as socio-economic institutions structured 'around the production, consumption, and transmission of property'. 63 Thus, from this historical materialist perspective, feminists like Firestone, identifying male dominance in the family as the root cause of social oppression and exploitation, ideologically naturalise the division between the private realm of the family and the public realms of work and war. Male dominance in the family is theoretically viewed as disconnected from male dominance in wider society, that is, the specific social relations detrimental to the freedom of women. Delphy and Leonard also argue against the apparently common-sense view that the Western family, in its dominant 'nuclear' form, is simply the random coming together of two different sexes in order to offer mutual practical support. 64 In the latter view, the family is portrayed as a wholly natural outcome of human desire for love and companionship. Instead of naturalising the particular form the family has taken in recent centuries, the family is understood by Delphy and Leonard, and the feminist-Marxist tradition, as primarily part of a system of labour relations in which men as a social group benefit from the work of women and also children. As Maria Mies writes, 'Patriarchy thus constitutes the mostly invisible underground of 65 the visible capitalist system. ' Delphy and Leonard do not contend that the manner in which men 'benefit' from the labour of women is identical to the currently predominant system of labour relations in which the capitalist 'benefits' from the labour of his employee. It is not the fact of not being paid a wage that is the crucial issue, or whether the wage that is paid, in the form of the husband's earnings, matches the value of the 66 domestic labour of the wife. Rather, the labour of the wife is one in 63 64 65 66

Ibid. Ibid. ( l 992, l ). Mies (1986, 38). Smith (1978) has rightly argued that it is impossible to ascribe any value to domestic labour insofar as (i) it does not itself introduce any new commodity for (profitable) exchange in the social market, but only •use-values' for immediate consumption, and (ii) it is not itself sold on the social marlcet. The argument that domestic labour 'produces' the labour-power of the employee is incorrect because housework in capitalism is so constituted as to prevent its

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socialisation as abstract labour-power and to render its services available for, precisely, nothing. It is only possible to value labour in tenns of the time it takes to produce commodities for exchange. In other words, capital will only hire labour-power insofar as it is productive of commodities that sell for more than they cost to produce. It would certainly be far too costly for capitalism to give a wage to labour that did not produce, but merely consumed surplus value on the market, since value is not created by the mere act of purchasing commodities. When I purchase products for cleaning, cooking, or beautifying myself, few capitalists will pay me to do so, since I would not be producing any extra commodities for exchange on the market Even if I am a capitalist engaged in hiring and selling domestic servants (such as might, for example, be found in rich parts of Hollywood) or in commercial laundry, I am not producing any extra value on the market In fact, the money I gain from engaging in, so to speak, domestic commerce, is already in circulation. It has been produced by exploiting the social labour engaged in commodity production. Thus, no capitalist worth his salt will pay me to go around eating meals or spending money on luxury items (although the capitalist class as a whole will absolutely require me and many other well-paid workers to do so). No capitalist will hire labour that produces either just its own value as labour-power (precisely the value that some Marxist wages for housework theorists ascribe to housework) or under that (as with the housewife who cannot afford to go shopping). If it is said that housework produces the commodity 'labour-power' then what is to distinguish any fonn of work from any another? Should persons be paid for sex (which not only replenishes my labour power vitality in Reich's view but can produce future labour power)? How can capitalism budget for sexual reproduction? What is to distinguish the housewife's production of labour-power from the baker's (since both produce bread for me to eat)? In any case, it is impossible to say that labour power is the peculiar commodity produced by housework, since there are potentially infinite other sources for the production of labour power. Further, in reality, if domestic labour was to become the socially abstract labour necessary for it to earn a wage, then capitalism would have to industrialise it (providing washing machines, industrial dishwashers, pre-made meals) and ensuring a specialisation and division of domestic labour. This it will not do because domestic labour does not produce anything extra for the market. To say that it produces labour-power for the market is an abstraction since labour power only receives a value according to the price it demands in relation to (total) commodity production. No capitalist will pay me for exercising, for reading Thomas Mann, for attending classical music concerts, or for waxing my coffee-table even though these things may be quite necessary for the reproduction of my labour power given my occupation (as, for example, a writer for the Sunday Times). Thus, asking for a wage for domestic labour is as

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which the issue of wages cannot arise. The reason for this, propose Delphy and Leonard, is that the wife is stuck in a completely dependent and subservient role under partriarchy and wholly unable to alter her subordinate position. In fact, the privatisation of domestic labour within the family unit and the denial of wage labour to the latter are ineradicable sides of the same coin of the oppression of women under capitalism. The following analysis of the modem family outlines the economic and historical roots of the modem nuclear family, and seeks to show that its development coincides with its construction as an antisocial and repressive social I.Dlit.It is these facets of the family that ensure its potential to inculcate the psychic and cognitive foundations of prejudice. According to Roberta Hamilton: After the institution of properly capitalist property relations [in England, after the 1648 revolution) the family ceased to be the economic unit of production. It was this process - the decline of family and domestic industry - which shattered the interdependent relationship between husband and wife, which led to the identification of family life with privacy, home, consumption, dom67 esticity - and with women.

As capitalist social relations advanced, the centre of production moved gradually further away from the domestic sphere, and home life (that is, personal life, since the world of work was concomitantly experienced as wholly depersonalised), became a separate sphere of existence from wider society. Hamilton continues:

67

meaningful as asking for a wage for slavery. Only when labour power is something that is not bought and sold on the market can domestic labour be accorded its true (cultural and social) value, since the market as such cannot value privatised domestic labour. Thus, whilst domestic labour is an absolute prerequisite for capital accumulation, and is also socially valuable and useful in itself, it must nonetheless under capitalism remain unpaid (see also Gimenez (1990)). Delphy and Leonard pose a similar critique of the flawed understanding of feminists who call for domestic wage-labour (see, for example, Dalla Costa and James (1972). Hamilton (1978, 18-19).

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(In Feudal society) There was a division of labour based on sex which varied from class to class. But men and women cooperated in producing a livelihood fur their families. Alice Clark wrote that •in the seventeenth centuty the idea is seldom encountered that a man supports bis wife; husband and wife were then mutually 61 dependent and together supported their children ' [ .•• ] The identification of men with production and children with consumption awaited the emergence of capitalism. Even then, at first it only properly fitted the bourgeoisie. For worting 69 class women were swept into the proletariat along with their children.

Thus, as production relations gradually became severed from the village home, the latter came to be more and more detached from the social arena Through the further development of industrial technology in nineteenth century Europe and America, with the accumulation of wealth becoming more centralized, production itself was shifted away from the family as the major productive unit in society, and labour was moved away from the centre of family life. The early capitalist home was thus the space of privacy and solace from the noise and degradation of the workplace. Zaretsky writes: With the rise of corporate capitalism, the family became the major institution in society given over to the personal needs of its members. Society divided between an inner and an outer world. At one pole the individual was central and a sometimes desperate search for warmth, intimacy, and mutual support prevailed. At the other pole social relations were anonymous and coerced; the 70 individual was reduced to an interchangeable economic unit

The 'romantic' family, then, was born out of the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. Hamilton summarises this privatisation of human consciousness saying: One of the surest indicators of a person's wealth in our society is the amount of 'privacy' he is able to purchase. Two centuries of socialisation have insured that most people see privacy as a basic need coming not far after food and shelter. Privacy is identified with home, with family life [ ... ] People now feel that they can only 'be themselves' at home. Privacy has become the compensation for alienation from one's labour. The study of feudal society provides

68 69 70

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Clark (1919, 12). Ibid. (1919, 25). Eli Zaretsky (1976 , 80).

evidence that the need for privacy develops through socialisation . Aries stated that, 'at that time[ ... ] there were no frontiers between professional and private life; sharing professional life - an anachronistic expression in any case - meant sharing the private life with which it was confused'. 71

Thus, the institution of the family is, in modem times, thoroughly imbued with interpersonal feelings, sentiments and emotions. These vital constituents of the human personality become isolated in, converge upon, and are forced into the private family unit by virtue of their total exclusion from the utilitarian and pragmatic ethos of wider society. Since, however, a person has not more than one self, the feelings of pain (alienation, frustration, humiliation) which accompany the labourer in his/her social capacity, cannot easily coexist with 'private' familial norms (love, care, trust). At the same time, the economic insecurity and emotional wasteland of capitalist existence causes people to seek further refuge in the family, and competition amongst the sexes, with women relegated to family life and men to work life, is thereby intensified under capitalism. Families are regularly rent apart by the contradictions inherent in capitalist family sociology . When families are not tom apart by the conflicts imposed on them by the social position of the family unit, destructive relationships are often enduringly forged. Leonard suggests that the social position of female domestic workers in a world constructed by and through the extraction of surplus value from wage labour ensures that their self-understanding is fundamentally constricted by their consciousness of the necessity of fulfilling a socially determined family role. In other words, given their lack of independence and the lack of productive (psychological and economic) opportunities available to them under capitalism, women tend to view themselves insofar as they are useful to others. The kow-towing and subservience this sort of self-understanding must necessarily produce is terribly destructive of the individual ego and its capacity to love reciprocally. As such, according to Eichenbaum and Orbach, the female's intentionally pragmatic self-understanding tends to produce a consciousness that is authoritarian, narcissistic and paranoid,72 precisely 71 72

Aries (1962, 366) quoted in Hamilton (1978 , 27). See Eichenbaum and Orbach (1982).

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the psychological states we have described as most conducive to the positive reception of prejudice. Thus both the class position generally, and the occupational status of the working class domestic spouse determines the degree to which isolation leading to asocial autism can develop in the family. A fundamental determinant of the prejudicial mindset within the family is the degree to which the class position of the domestic spouse ensures his/her subordination to the needs and demands (emotional, sexual, nutritional, hygienical) of his/her partner. The dependent and submissive character of the domestic aspect of the strict capitalist division of familial labour can ensure that authoritarianism can become a habitual element of family relations (husband/wife, father/ child, mother/child, sibling rivalry, and so on). There is a dialectical relationship between the degree of self-mastery available to the worker in the social sphere and the degree of his/her self-mastery in the private sphere. Thus, the public/private split generated by capitalist relations of production ensures that whilst the male worker is a slave in the workplace, or a failure in business, he can at least be a master of his own home.73 The entrapment of the domestic labourer within the confines of · the home ensures that s/he is affected by what is a form of asocial autism. That is to say, s/he has virtually no idea as to how 'external' society functions or how to carry on constructive social relations. Rather, the role of the domestic spouse as keeper and conveyor of emotional states and sentiments, given the familial division oflabour which ensures one partner is bound to housework each day, ensures that rational reflection upon public phenomena is relatively precluded from his/her cognitive disposition. The prejudicial proclivity of the sentimental housewife/househusband is more pronounced in the bourgeois household than the fully working class one, as the harsh realities and conflicts of his/her working life, or that of the spouse, can counter both the fantastic aspects of sentimental emotionality and the anti-realism of his/her view of society. Conversely, the sense of pain and frustration felt by the 'breadwinner' in the working class family often translates into a more authoritarian relationship with his/her partner and children, and

73

168

Barrett (1980, 192).

thus inculcates prejudice in its authoritarian personal form. Maccoby74 has foWldthat parents with lower socio-economic status tend to be more restrictive and authoritarian with regard to their child-rearing practices than those with higher socio-economic status. Studies by Bentley and Fox,75 Volling and Belsky,76 Pruett, 77 and Baker and Heller78 all found fathers to be more authoritarian, less reasonable, and more aloof than mothers. Lamb79 found that those fathers who displayed the most progressive (that is, the most constructive and care-giving) fathering traits 'were more educated, had more prestigious occupations, were less anxious, hostile and irritable, and experienced fewer daily hassles than the traditional fathers (disciplinarian and disengaged groups)' .8° Similarly, Paquettea et al.81 found that 'higher SES [socio-economic status] of fathers and/or mothers tends to be linked to more empathic [and less authoritarian] paternal attitudes and greater paternal involvemen~ particularly with regard to providing basic care'. Hoffinan82 found that middle class families tended to exhibit a less authoritarian means of disciplining their children. He suggested that whilst middle class fathers have more means to exert and express their power and rational and creative potentialities outside the home, this is generally denied working class fathers, and this tends to ensure that the latter act in an authoritarian manner towards both their wives and their children. Adorno et al. writes, however, that: We are led to suspect. on the basis of results in numerous areas, that upward class mobility and identification with the status quo correlate positively with ethnocentrism, and that downward class mobility and identification go with anti-ethnocentrism.13

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Maccoby (1980). Bentley and Fox (1991, 320-2). Volling and Belsky (1992). Pruett ( 1993). Baker and Heller (1996 ). Lamb (1986 ). Paquetteaet al. (2000, 215). Ibid. (2000, 222). Hoffman (1963). Adorno et al. ( 1950, 204).

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As noted, the middle class familial milieu may tend towards authoritarianism in that the mother's rationality is stunted by the enforcement of domestic drudgery and constant care-giving to others, leading to her uncritical acceptance of her husband's authoritarian dictates, the 'breadwinning' father's decisions and values dominating the household, and the consequent lack of an identifiable counterweight to the latter. The lovelessness of the middle class father more preoccupied with career than with family can translate into identification with his authoritarian rule and contempt for the role of the mother in the child's struggle for ego-independence and autonomy. This can lead to a reification of facts (as a prerequisite for career advancement), a disregard for the role of women (as domestic labourers), and the projection of destructive impulses towards the absent fatherly love-object onto weak and powerless social entities. In any case, however, authoritarianism may be subjectively experienced in different ways within the middle class and the working class family. In discussing alienation, Marx and Engels wrote: The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement But the fonner class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement that indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. 84

In the same way, whilst the patriarchal norms of repression and alienation to be found in the bourgeois family structure are present in all families under capitalism, they are experienced as a means of advancement, power and security within the bourgeois milieu, often to both sexes, whereas they are experienced as stifling, frustrating and unrealisable in the proletarian household wherein the rule of the father brings uncertain benefits. The wider social context of the bourgeois nuclear family determines the extent to which authoritarianism 84

170

Marx and Engels ( 1956, 5 I).

develops as an enduring pattern in a growing person's social relations. Whilst working class families may tend to exhibit more aggressive authoritarian behavioural norms and values within the family, in the workplace and in 'civil' society, membership in the middle class is very closely guarded, and usually leads the latter to adopt a highly authoritarian and conservative attitude to those social groups agitating for and advancing social change. Indeed, the petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy has consistently provided the social backbone of fascist and authoritarian political movements, whilst the proletariat (the class with nothing to sell but its labour power and thus receiving less than the value of its labour) has consistently been in the vanguard of movements for progressive social change. 85 The desire of the early modem middle classes to be politically equal to the elite nobility and the clergy, and to have a state which would have industrialists and merchants at the same political level as them, necessitated their adopting the same brutal hatred of the lower classes who threaten the unalloyed dominion of the bourgeois reconstituted order. Arguably, indeed, since the new bourgeois order was more grounded in property relations based on exploitative trade and industry ( as opposed to oppressive privilege based on peonage and serfdom under feudalism), middle class hatred and fear of the lower classes, the peasantry and the burgeoning proletariat, was even greater than the nobility's (although the latter had much to fear from the disaffected bourgeoisie throwing in their lot with the revolutionary peasantry and proletariat). For this reason alone, it was likely that the middle classes, caught between

85

Not all property-owners, managers, or professional salaried workers form a reactionary political body under capitalism. The small bourgeois citizens of nations which are superexploited, which transfer more value from their nation than is invested domestically, may be petty-bourgeois with regard to their wage-relationship to the means of production, but they are likely to receive less than the global value of labour or their commodity and are thus constituted as exploited workers (proletarians) or potential political allies of such. Conversely, a person who owns no means of production from an imperialist country may be receiving far more than the value of his labour, thus constituting him as petty bourgeois or semi-proletarian (his money even allowing him profitable access to the means of production). See chapter five on the creation of a labour aristocracy from the superprofits of imperialism.

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clerical and noble power on the one hand and disaffected potentially violent peasants on the other, would make compromises with the existing order. Thus, in France, the Bourbon monarchy was restored to keep in check the ambitions of the nascent proletariat, and to appease the anti-bourgeois peasantry. In contrast to the claim that the middle class is the most authoritarian social class, Lipset 86 argues from a psychological perspective that the working class is less likely to advocate progressive social standards since its lack of ego security (borne from the harsh realities of home and workplace discipline) and 'lack of sophistication' tends to make it difficult for it to support 'norms of tolerance and democratic procedures' .87 But Lipset is assuming (a) that low ego security necessarily translates socially into conservative reaction rather than radical progressiveness and, relatedly, (b) that the norms and procedures he associates with a 'tolerant' society are genuinely democratic and made to facilitate the advancement of working class interests. Since this is not at all the case, it should not be automatically assumed that failure to participate or to want to participate in the 'democratic' processes of capitalist society implies a weak and intolerant ego. Indeed, a measure of ego-strength and self-respect can just as easily accompany electoral boycotts. The point to be grasped here is that that it is the concrete struggle between contradictory class interests that must determine the social effects of the authoritarian personality, just as it is the struggle between classes that ultimately makes for the infusion of filial life with patterns of empathy and constructive didacticism or harsh and aloof disciplinarianism. The class structure, in fact, largely overdetermines to what degree women are oppressed as women, and are thus in a position to advance the struggle against male chauvinist ideological thinking. Many women gamer enormous material benefits from the international structures of patriarchy: White women in particular assume that their careers are only a positive thing for the world. But since· white culture doesn't support itself, doesn't produce its

86 87

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Lipset (1960, 101). Ibid. (1965, 104).

own daily necessities, every breath that white women take costs somebody else something . Revolutionary women have pointed out that the food white women cal was taken from a Third World woman's mouth; the clothing their children wear was taken from a Third World child's back. Since it costs over $200,000 a year above and beyond that to educale a U.S. medical student, many women in the Third World must be robbed of necessities of life to pay the bill. White men don't pay it, that's for sure.••

Third World men are superexploited in industrial manufacture where they are routinely paid less than the value of their labour by their multinational employers or by their Third World employers who are in an escalating cycle of debt to the imperialist country banks. At the same time, these men obtain material advantage over Third World women and children, employed under conditions of virtual slavery. This 'veiled slavery of women and children [corralled into genderspecific superexploited and "domestic" labour - Z.C.] in the new industrial zones requires as its gedestal the naked slavery of women as the social property of men'. 9 Whereas the special oppression of women is a universal feature of capitalism, the extent to which different classes (and discrete male and female genders within) relate to patriarchy varies in the course of the historical and geographical development of capitalism. Since Western women materially benefit from the rule of the father in society as a whole, they both adopt and express dominant male chauvinist ideologies and stereotypes and themselves governmentally preside over patriarchal social institutions. In short, because of their class position, some females objectively advance the global structuration of patriarchal social institutions. This can be seen in the widespread female acceptance and open expression of objectively demeaning male chauvinist gender roles in the 'raunch culture ' of the imperialist countries. 90 The massive pursuit of corporate standards of beauty by women, at enormous cost in personal time and money, is indicative of the psychological and social benefits women in the imperialist countries receive from global patriarchy, 88 89 90

Butch Lee and R~ Rover (I 993, I SO). Ibid. (1993, 159). And even, to some extent, their sexism and male chauvinism (see Levy (2005) on today's 'raunch culture').

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especially to the extent that it is precisely the labour of Third World women and children which accounts for the cheapness of their clothing, cosmetics and fashion consumption. Indeed, the feminist who seeks to apportion to herself a wider share of wealth accumulated through the superexploitation of the Third World acts mainly as an agent of a system of international relations which condemns women as a social group to brutal domesticated superexploitation and prostitution in the Third World. Conversely, it is conceivable that a Third World woman who seeks to uphold the financial responsibility of the father and her own security within a patriarchal familial structure may, in fact, be acting to advance the interests of women against a more nefarious form of patriarchal rule. The point is that it would be folly to describe the latter strategy of resistance to patriarchy as mired in prejudice and the former strategy as the more advanced feminist struggle against gender prejudice without having scientifically investigated the predominant class relations (inter-nationally structurated as they are) affecting the position of women in each case. The class structure, indeed, provides the pivotal foundation upon which the bourgeois nuclear family as such rises and falls. Does authoritarianism, then, also decrease with the demise of the bourgeois nuclear family? The latter form is, in fact, undermined by the very same capitalist . system that historically consolidated it as a means of its own expansion. The drawing of women into superexploited domestic production and the underemployment of males is characteristic of the working class in the age of advanced imperialism. The political struggle against the brutal and onerous semi-feudal relations of production attendant to the same must draw into its orbit the masses of women who feel the full brunt of the patriarchy that is one of is its principal comerstones.91 Where this struggle is completely absent, as in the imperialist countries today, it may be expected that patriarchal ideology and prejudice remains prevalent.

91

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On the socialist struggle against imperialist capitalism as a significant force for the erosion of patriarchy and the equalisation of gender relations see, for example, Broyelle (1977), Andors (1983), Sidel (1973), and Goldman (2002).

Barrett asks why the domestic labourer position tends to be occupied predominantly by females under capitalist society. She gives the answer that the domestication of females under capitalism is a product of the ideological foundations of patriarchal society. Veronica Beechey, however, contends that there are far more direct 'material' foundations of female subordination in capitalism. Beechey considers the ways in which the patriarchal family is functional to the continued reproduction of capitalist property relations. She writes: The woman's domestic labour within the family functions to lower the value of male labour power by producing use values which arc necessary for the production and reproduction of labour power as a commodity, both on a day-today and a generational basis, without remuneration. The interest of capital in keeping down the value of labour power by maintaining the woman's domestic labour within the home thus creates a tendency towards the maintenance of the nuclear family, which is reflected in and reproduced through a host of social welfare policies. 92

In this way, capitalism as a social system oppresses women both domestically and in the workplace. As Beechey writes: Since the Second World War these contradictory tendencies have been embodied in a number of ways of organising the labour process - the creation of flexible shifts, part time work, etc. - which have enabled women to perform both forms of labour, domestic labour and wage labour. Whether she labours as domestic labour outside the direct domination of capital, or as wage labourer under the direct domination of capital, the woman is vitally involved in capital's attempts to extract a high rate of surplus value, and to generate 93 counter-tendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Social decline after the Second World War was a given in the ravaged industrial economies of the West. To rebuild these societies in conditions of a relative paucity of resources and the scarcity of commodities, the institution of the family was to play a vital role. In short, the social costs of war and capitalist supremacy were to be passed on to women in their domesticity. Divorce, for example was

92 93

Beechey (1977, 59). Ibid.

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totally opposed by the church and by the major political parties in the 94 UK and especially protectionist capitalist lreland. Child custody law was and is geared towards enshrining the responsibility for children of wives and mothers. Conversely, in decreasing men's responsibility for their children and their dependants, it was thought that divorce would cause massive social dislocation. At the same time, the less the State provided to the family, the more the husband was made to be the primary support for his family. To this end, post-Second World War childcare under state provision has tended to be minimal, and the gains in this field during the Second World War were rapidly dismantled. 95 Thus, the economic hegemony of the ruling class is augmented by ensuring (a) that all domestic labour and the rearing of children is conducted mainly by women; and (b) that women are constituted as a huge mass of cheap and unorganised labour. The performance of free domestic labour secures the labour of men as the sole property of the capitalist class and also creates a large 'industrial reserve army' (Marx's descriptive term for the unemployed working class )96 available to be employed or fired according to the needs of 94 95

96

Fahey (1995). See Adamson, Brown, Harrison, and Price (1976, 23-30). I am indebted to the writers of this important essay, which has been liberally quoted by Veronica . Beechey, amongst others. The reserve anny of labour is defined by Anwar Shaikh (2003, 474) as: 'A pool of unemployed and partially employed labour [that] is an inherent feature of capitalist society, and is created and reproduced directly by the accumulation of capital itself [... ] The accumulation of capital means its growth. But it also means new, larger-scale, more mechanised methods of production which competition obligates capitalists to introduce. The growth of capital increases the demand for labour, but mechanization substitutes machinery for workers and thus reduces the demand for labour. The net demand for labour therefore depends on the relative strengths of these two effects, and it is precisely these relative strengths which vary so as to maintain the reserveanny of labour. When the employment effect is stronger than the displacement effect for long enough to dry up the reserve army, the resulting shortages of labour and acceleration in wages automatically strengthen displacement relative to employment; a rise in wages slows down the growth of capital and hence of employment, and together with the shortages of labour speeds up the pace of mechanization and hence of displacement In this way the accumulation of capital automatically replenishes the reserve army [ ... ] Added to this is the

will

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organised capitalism at any given time. Thus, (a) ensures the extension of the limits to the extraction of absolute surplus value from the working class and (b) increases the competition over jobs essential for capital's ability to drive down wages and increase the extraction of absolute surplus value from the working class. The subjugation of females by distinct and divergent divisions of labour (actuated by changes in the mode of production) is a long historical process. It is a history of the struggles for and against the sexual oppression of females, and its accompanying ideologies thrive in different forms and in changed circumstances today. In modem times, Mies shows how what she calls primitive capital accumulation (the outright dispossession and appropriation of communal peoples' land and resources for purposes of exchange by nascent capitalists) was a process profoundly affected by relations between the sexes in Medieval Europe. More precisely, what Mies calls 'housewifization' (the capitalistic process of confining women's labour to that of domestic, sexual and familial servitude) has its political roots in the widespread and brutal 'witch hunts' of the late European Middle Ages. Mies notes how the Germanic tribes occupying Europe centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire had laws which gave males virtually unlimited power to sell or 97 kidnap women. However, such laws came not to apply as much to skilled women in the crafts who had some property of their own to trade. As trade and commerce grew, especially in occupations such as clothes manufacture which were dominated by women, the demand for the

97

import of labour from areas of high unemployment, and the mobility of capital to areas with low wages, both of which serve to re-establish the "proper" relation between capital and a relatively superfluous population. Whatever its historical boundaries, the capitalist system has always created and maintained a reserve anny. Modem capitalism spans the whole globe, and so does its reserve anny. The starving masses of the third world, the importation and subsequent expulsion of "'guest workers" by the industrialized countries, and the flight of capital to low wage regions, are simply manifestations of this fact.' Where there is competition over jobs, the capital accumulation process thus described tends to lower the wages of workers to levels acceptable to the capitalist. See also Brownmiller (1975, 16-31) on how ancient and Feudal property laws were indelibly shaped by the legalised preponderance of the rape, on the mass and individual levels, of women by men.

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goods of these women grew also. Moreover , given men's preponderance in constantly fighting wars and crusades, and hence dying, in the Feudal age, women's labour was a major productive force in itself. Thus, many women at the tail end of the medieval era had grown relatively wealthy and were relatively unattached to male power. However, as the feudal order collapsed through the expansion of trade, the widespread prevalence of fatal diseases, and the creation of the world economy through colonialism, there was widespread impoverishment for the European masses, the peasants and trades-people that created all of society's domestic product. As these masses became vagabonds, their labour worthless in the face of imports of agricultural produce and their lands and houses ravaged by famine and pestilence, many flocked to the towns in search of food and work. Amongst these vagabond groups were many poor women who made a living from dancing, singing and prostitution . These women, originally economically and sexually independent, became targets of abuse and slander the more they came into contact with 'honourable burghers' and aristocrats in the cities. Rather than passively submit to the town authorities of church and council, the independent women of the late Middle Ages (who were heavily involved in the various millenarian, radical and even communistic religious sects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) fully resisted the power of the same. They developed ideologies of sexual . freedom, social equality and communal property . The sect called 'the Brethren of the Free Spirit', for example 'established communal living, abolished marriage, and rejected the authority of the church '; many of its 98 members were later burned at the stake as heretics . Mies writes: It seems plausible that the whole fury of the witch hunt was not just a result of the decaying old order in its confrontation with new capitalist forces, or even a manifestation of timeless male sadism, but a reaction of the new maledominated classes against the rebellion of women. The poor women 'freed', that is expropriated, from their means of subsistence and skills, fought back against their expropriators. Some argue that the witches had been an organised sect which met regularly at their 'witche s' sabbath' , where all poor people gathered and already practiced the new free society without masters and serfs. When a woman denied being a witch and having anything to do with all the

98

178

Mies (1989, 81).

accusations, she was tortured and finally burnt at the stake. The witch-trial, however, followed a meticulously thought-out legal procedure . In protestant countries one finds special secular witch commissions and witch-commissars [ ... ] One prosecutor, Benedict Carpzov, first a lawyer in Saxonia. later professor in Leipzig, signed 20,000 death sentences against witches . He was a faithful son of the protestant church. 99

As we shall see more in the following chapter, especially in con-

sidering the nature of 'internal colonialism', the working class itself was divided by the political machinations of the ruling class, the owners of the means of production and their privileged hangers-on. Mies writes that: Proletarian men do have an interest in the domestication of their female class companions. The material interest consists, on the one hand, in the man's claim to monopolise available wage-work, on the other, in the claim to have control over all money income in the family. 100

Federici 101 notes how the rebellion of male workers was effectively curtailed by the legalisation and encouragement of mass rape movements. The single, independent women, of the towns and cities discussed above, were corralled in state-run brothels which proved extremely attractive to lower class males. Moreover, rape by individuals and groups was decriminalised and overlooked in fifteenth and early sixteenth century Europe, and was certainly a means of imposing fear and control on the female populace. At the same time, the craft unions and guilds that were being formed by the better off lower classes conspired to keep women out of their jobs and women's products from being sold on the market. Federici writes :

99

100 10 I

Ibid. (1989, 81). The French protestant Theologian Calvin (1509-1564), whom some have compared in his modernist reforming zeal to Robespierre , the leader of the 1789 French Revolution, was a convinced believer in witchcraft and resolute opponent of witches and magicians . He favoured capital punishment for any person found engaging in witchcraft . Mies (1989, 109). Federici (2004 ).

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It was from this alliance between the crafts and the urban authorities, along with the continuing privatisation of land, that a new sexual division of labour( ... ] was forged, defining women in tenns - mothers, wives, daughters, widows that hid their status as workers, while giving men free access to women's 102 bodies, their labour, and the bodies and labour of their children.

In more recent times, the subjugation of women continues to be a phenomenon profoundly shaped by production and class relations . Although, as Catherine Mackinnon 103 rightly suggests, women as women have been subjected to horrifying and ongoing abuses and indignities in every field of society by male supremacist power, it is imperative, in order to combat patriarchal male supremacy concretely, to understand materialistically how different women relate to patriarchal gender oppression . In particular, as a result of the sociopolitical forces of neo-colonialist imperialist capitalism, women are today increasingly exploited in the Third World even as women in the metropolitan countries reap the material (but not necessarily emotional) benefits of their husband's imperialistic eminence . As Butch Lee and Red Rover write : The owner ship of(Third World women by Third World men]( ... ) is[ ... ] only a strand on the surface weave of capitalism . For imperialism is a jealous patriarch . The outward fonn of Third World women's ownership by 'their' men only facilitate s, as it conceals, the overriding and primary ownership of Third · World women by imperialism, which has let their junior capitali st partners in the Third World commodify women as instruments of national development 104 To be used in the most profitably brutal way to earn hard-currency from the

I02 103 104

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Ibid. (2004, 97) . Mackinnon (1989, 160). Indeed, elements of the Third World bourgeoisie can be said to use women as resources for primitive capital accumulation. Metropolitanimperialism , having drained the Third World of all its capital (its land, its labour, its mineral and energy resources, its experts) through centuries of exploitation, the comprador bourgeoisie of the Third World turns to the appropriation and exchange of women themselves as commodities, particularly through a massive and institutionalised multi-million dollar industrialisation of prostitution and sex slavery, which either forces women into the same , or encourages them to seek alternative work, which is profitably paid a mere pittance, in multinational corporations .

metropolis, to be violently used up and discaroed at a pace of exploitation so rapid that it is even cheaper than chattel slavery was.ios

The oppression of women in the peripheral capitalist nations as women (as objects of sexual commodification, as absent from the political process, as 'sweatshop' labourers and as domestic skivvies), rests upon a relation of imperialism which objectively benefits both biologically defined women and their male gender oppressors in the advanced capitalist countries. So much is this the case that, for much of the past century, feminist women in the advanced capitalist countries have appropriated and increasingly accepted the imperialist culture of their patriarchal husbands and fathers. Thus, in the early twentieth century, feminist 'egalitarians' campaigned to bring 'civiliz.ed' sexual morality to the 'promiscuous' and 'bestial' natives outside Europe. 106 As beneficiaries of imperialist country superprofiteering women in the First World participate in the patriarchal gender oppression of Third World women, who are forced to make a living in a nationally oppressed capitalist state by selling their bodies sexually and those of their children to the highest bidder, as well as provide massive and onerous domestic labour free of charge. As a vehicle for the liberation of women from patriarchal relations of production and control, contemporary metropolitan feminism often leaves intact the most pressing and urgent concerns for the majority of women, those living in the Third World, namely, starvation, death, democracy, national oppression and the imperialist capitalist responsibility for the same. In the concrete struggle against these terrible maladies, Third World women are objectively allied with Third World men, to the extent that Third World men must fight patriarchal power structures to free up their own restricted exercise over their lives and destinies. The degree to which the fight against scarcity, the fight for the international equalisation of leisure time (time spent in a capitalist society not engaged in wage-labour or socially necessary housework),

lOS Butch Lee and Red Rover (1993, 106). 106 See Burton (1994), Bush (2000) and Newman (1999) on feminist and suffragist support for imperialism and its ideological justification.

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and the fight for sexual liberation coincide is absolutely decisive for feminism to realise, in the imperialist countries and the Third World. In sum, the fact of female subjugation as both domestic worker and wage-labourer cannot simply be understood as the result of the concretisation of an ephemeral ideology. Rather, female subjugation must be historically analysed according to how its ideology coincides with the predominant practicalities of gendered social existence and the prevalent mode of production upon which these are based. Poststructuralist feminism107 is quite right to consider gender as a historical social construct, but wrong to abjure materialist analysis of the formation of this construct according to the needs and requirements of embedded though dynamic lived institutional structures (especially those based on the reproduction of society's material means of survival). As Robert Connell suggests, rather than simply reducing the gendering of bodies to the machinations of discourses, we need to provide a more concrete and historical analysis of the ways in which discourse and social practice coincide to produce distinct ideologies of gender. As Connell writes: To grapple with the full range of issues about masculinity [and also femininity - Z.C.] we need ways of talking about relationships of other [not simply discursive] kinds too: about gendered places in production and consumption, places in institutions and in natural environments, places in social and military · struggles. 108

Gender (and the relations of domination and subordination that often regularly accompany it) is not a fixed or static entity, but is constructed through the socio-historical reproduction of the human body according to the necessities imposed on it by dynamic situations and practices. Thus Connell, following theoretical motifs of Sartre, 109 understands the construction of masculinity and femininity as 'gender projects', thus stressing the embodied and dynamic character of gender types. The social institutions individuals find themselves living and working within regularly propagate, reproduce, legitimise and I 07 See, for example, Butler ( 1999). 108 Robert Connell ( I 99S, 70-1 ). 109 Sartre, J.-P. (1968).

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even require gendered bodies as a functional imperative. Connell does not situate this 'functional imperative' within the realm of biological determination, in particular that of biological reproduction. Rather, the construction of gender is relatively fixed and constituted within the realm of the concrete social structure. By no means is this to suggest that a particular gender identity, say that of the patriarchal breadwinning male, is internally and externally coherent and non-con10 tradictory. As Juliet Mitchell 1 for one, has explained, gender identity is a complex and often contradictory subject position. But it is by no means one without its habitual regularities. Patriarchal rule, then, is productive of prejudicial thinking insofar as it requires and sustains interpersonal structures of authoritarianism (through female-male dependence and male ownership of female and child domestic labour), narcissism (through the isolation from social practice experienced by women and children) and paranoia (through feelings of female and child ambivalence towards a male love-object who is caring but oppressive). As well as these personal neurotic relations, patriarchy produces the virulent ideology of male chauvinism, which produces and sustains prejudices designed to justify and consolidate its own autocratic practices.

The Industrial Sociology of Prejudice The extent to which subordination and authoritarianism persists within family life is a reflection of the extent to which it is a major structural element of a person's social life. For McKinley, 111 those workers of a higher-class position tend to be more autonomous, more satisfied and more motivated than workers of a lower-class position. McKinley does not, of course, imply that such workers are free not to conform or not to produce in their capacity as worker. But, McKinley suggests, the higher-class worker in capitalist society often finds it easier (because s/he is less supervised) and more rewarding (in terms of status and pay) to internalise the habitual norms of their work situation 110 Mitchell (1975). 111 McKinley (1964, 127- SI).

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than lower-class workers. It is this personal internalisation of his/her workplace norms that distinguishes the personality of the higher working-class person from that of the lower working-class person. McKinley suggests, and provides statistical evidence to attest, that lower working-class persons, by virtue of their relative lack. of autonomy, are more likely to be aggressive and authoritarian both domestically and outside the home. He writes: Within a particular social class or general occupational stratum, those individuals who enjoy great autonomy in their work will tend to show less hostility in their families and toward their children in the socialization process. Those individuals who experience more detailed normative and interpersonal control will express greater hostility in the family situation. 112

This hypothesis is in agreement with our understanding of the principal prejudicial personality types described in Chapter 3. McKinley goes on to suggest that a principal cause of the lower working-class person's outwardly aggressive tendencies is a (sometimes unconscious) perception of his/her being controlled by external, indeed alien, forces and persons. Thus, since a person with relatively little autonomy in his/her life experiences the outside world as a force of repression and frustration, it is quite likely that s/he will tend to direct aggression towards that outside world. Often such aggression is . passive (for example a stubborn and sullen refusal to engage with the outside world's demands) and sometimes it is outrightly offensive (as in violent or abusive attacks on things in the outside world). Very often, however, such violent aggression is directed towards things in that person's private life that s/he does have some control over, such as their kin. By contrast, says McKinley, since the higher 'working class' person (the manager, the successful civil servant, the worker for a small, but successful, business) is more autonomous and tends to think of him/herself as the sole determinant of his life-situation, s/he will tend to blame herself for failures or painful events, and is thus likely to be more inwardly, than outwardly, 'aggressive' in general.

112 Ibid. 129.

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The political basis for the denial of workers' autonomy is discussed in the following section. This section describes the ways in which processes of realistic cognition become stunted in the worker within capitalist labour relations, who is thus predisposed to uncritically accept the ideological image of his/her surroundings. The fundamental condition of the worker under capitalism is alienation. It has been objected by liberal and Marxist social scientists alike that the notion of alienation is far too abstruse a term to be at all useful in understanding human thought and behaviour. Alienation, however, is not such an idealistic notion as its assailants propose. We can quantitatively gauge alienation by assessing the degree to which human nature 113 is regularly and systematically negated by the conditions of people's everyday existence and according to whether an inverse relation exists between the capacity and the actuality of the realisation of human needs. An alienated habitus is one wherein individuals do not work for themselves and at the same time each other, where people do not understand the ends of their labour and thus determine them, and cannot rationally transform the conditions of their existence. Thus, by measuring the rate of exploitation of workers, by examining divorce rates, mental health demographics, suicide rates, and so forth, and by examining the extent to which people are able to politically influence their economic activity, and the systematic relations between these factors, one can formulate an accurate picture of human alienation. For Marx, alienation is a direct product of the division of labour within class society. The alienating results of the class-based division of 114 labour, according to Marxaresummarised by Walton and Gamble as follows: It separates intelligence from labour and makes of each a general and exclusive arena of human action, instead of treating the two as aspects of •true anthropological nature' (Marx (1954, 329)). The dichotomy between mental and

113

114

Following Geras (1983, 83) this includes the socially conditioned capacity to freely form referential and inferential linguistic forms, to creatively labour, and to fonn free and loving relationships in line with what is necessary (food, clothing, shelter, hygiene, sex) for human well being. Walton and Gamble (1972, 13).

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manual labour removes many of the intellectual potentialities of the labour process, and incorporates science as an alien power. 115

It might be remarked that the mental/manual division of labour in class societies also tends to remove the manual potentialities of intellectual labour, insofar as the object of purely intellectual endeavour is ideal. A critic of the application of the epithet 'alienative' to any division between mental and manual labour might protest that even in a non-class based society, there will still tend to be forms of work that are largely concerned with intellectual research and study and forms mostly engaged in manual effort. In a class society, however, there tends to be a rigid specialisation of mental and manual labour wherein rarely do the two forms of work combine in the lives of one or more individuals. Instead, there is a section of the population whose sole function it is to engage in intellectual labour and another that is solely engaged in manual labour. In post-capitalist societies, the social relations ensuring that some workers primarily engage in mental and others in manual labour can ossify and help create a class basis for capitalist restoration. However, so far as intellectual/manual workers are consciously (a) able to influence and determine the ends and extent of intellectual/manual labour; (b) influence the application and incorporation of its intellectual/manual findings and techniques into their everyday lives; and (c) able to engage for a time in largely intellectual/manual occupation, is the extent to which the dichotomy between manual and mental labour is transcended. For Marx, the differentiation and specialisation of labour characteristic of the capitalist mode of production brought with it enormous advances in the capacities of human beings to realise their innermost powers, principally, through the massive development of the forces of production that capitalism was to be the vehicle of. Furthermore, subsequent Marxists, most famously Lenin, spoke in glowing terms of Taylorist management techniques and their application to fully socialised production. 116 Nonetheless, what Marx and 11S Ibid . 116 See Nyland (1987, SS-84) for a Marxist defence of the utility of scientific labour management techniques in a socialist society . Yet Nyland clearly under-

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Engels called 'the suppression of individuality'' 17 in capitalist labour had dire consequences for the mind and body of the individual. The process of human objectification becomes reduced to a set of differentiated work tasks that realise only this or that aspect of the human powers. Man becomes 'mutilated into a fragment of a man, (degraded) to the level of an appendage of a machine' in his direct productive activity."'

Adam Smith had made a similar point on the alienation of human labour relations (whilst failing to situate its necessitation by capitalism). As Chomsky notes: [There is) an immeasurable loss incurred when a personis converted to a tool of production, so that, as Adam Smith phrased it, he 'has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention' and 'he naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become', his mind falling 'into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people.' What is the loss in 'efficiency' and social product resulting from this enforced stupidity? 119

Neither Chomsky nor Smith considers the extent to which the ultraintellectualism of the professional thinker renders him/her equally 'stupid and ignorant' as the manual 'beasts of burden.' Nonetheless, the point is well made by both that the praxical social synthesis of understanding and invention is systemically constrained under the capitalist mode of production, and with it the capacity for extensive non-prejudicial thinking. In the workplace dominated by the capitalist mode of production, workers are subject to the same authoritarian and irrational conditions of existence placed upon them by demanding parents. Just as the childish mind is privatised by processes of frustration and punishment within the

117 118 119

estimates the extent to which the over-bureaucratisation of labour management in a socialist society can provide for the growth of an intellectual bureaucracy with interests more bourgeois than working class. Marx and Engels (2000, 207). Ibid. Chomsky (1995, 186).

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insularity of the modem capitalist family, so the worker's mind is privatised by having to work as though s/he worked alone, subject to the constant threat of singular unemployment, intimidation, and discipline according to the necessities of competitive production, as well as the particularity of her place in the division of labour. This holds as true for 'white-collar' workers as for 'blue-collar' workers. Workers under capitalism are subjectified according to the disciplinary mechanisms of management. Their consent is a necessary aspect of the everyday functioning of the production process. As Marx writes, 'The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the conditions of that mode of production 120 as self-evident laws of nature.' Where workers' resistance to these ostensibly 'natural' laws occurs, serious problems can result for the maintenance of profitable production time. Thus, during the capitalist production process, workers engage in a network of social relations concerning 'the functioning and distribution of ownership, control, skill, 121 power and knowledge', and personal roles that ensure the reproduction of certain ideological notions about this social order which augment the prejudicial cognition of the compliant worker. By this logic, Burawoy argues that it is not necessary for theoretical schemas founded on the notion of the hegemony 122 of the State, the Family, the mass Media or personal psychology to explain how the worker in a capitalist society is unable to perceive society as it actually is, rather than imagine it prejudicially and ideologically. For Burawoy: It is [in] the labour process itself that mechanisms exist of constituting workers as individuals rather than as members of a class, of coordinating the interests of labour and capital as well as that of workers and managers, and of redistributing conflict and competition. 123 120 121 122

123

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Quoted in Thompson (1989, 154). Ibid. The word 'hegemony' in this sense is intended to entail the notion that the domination .of one class over another can be exercised not through purely 'physical' or material means (principally through armed force), but through the prevalence of certain ideological paradigms and perspectives in society's 'cultural' realm. The term is mainly associated with the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. (See Simon 1982). Burawoy ( 1979, 30).

In other words, the way the division of labour operates under capitalism ensures that the worker is practically conditioned to give ideological consent to a set of social relations which s/he cannot understand or even perceive, let alone control. These relations centre on competition and authority, and their psychological corollaries are narcissism and authoritarianism. Workers are compelled to identify with and respect the wishes, demands and even ideology of their managers/bosses. Even whilst some or many workers may not positively respect the authoritarian dictates of their bosses, it may be impossible for them to articulate the concrete work situation in any other way than that advanced by their manager. Thompson writes, following Burawoy, that: Tensions in the ~on of worker discretion over time and money may be a consequence of managerial control and allocation of resources, but it is often experienced as obstructions on the part of other workers. This, in tum, 'accentuates a lateral conflict that is endemic to the organisation of work' (Burawoy 1979, 66) transforming and redistributing management-worker conflicts into intra-employee competition. 124

So, being not just unwilling, but incapable of challenging the ideology and decrees of the manager, the agitated worker is more often likely to tum her attention to those aspects of the work process that she can articulate and even potentially transform. Usually, those aspects of the labour process most conducive to workers' understanding and affection have to do with the performance or behaviour of co-workers. In this way, the workers' lack of understanding is doubly compounded, under capitalistic labour: first, by the absence of control and objective understanding over and of the processes s/he is engaged in and, secondly by the attribution of blame for empirically negative aspects of the labour process to the wrong source, namely, his/her fellow workers. Thompson refers to this process as the redistribution of conflict into lateral struggle. 125 Managers also methodically lateralise conflict by ensuring that workers are made aware of and experience the same threatening conventions within their job as they 124 125

Thompson (1989, 161-2). Ibid. (1989, 162-3).

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do in the labour market generally. That is to say, workers are encouraged to compete with one another, rather than with their managers. This ensures that a narcissistic and authoritarian attitude is instilled in workers at the level of the workplace. Such an attitude is, as we have shown, inherently conducive to scapegoating and prejudice. 126 Thus far, we have only treated the industrial conditions of prejudice in modem society insofar as they can be traced back to the workplace. But what of unemployed workers under capitalism? In capitalist society, either the adult individual is employed or s/he is unemployed. The demand for wage labour is institutionalised at every level of the individual's life (in the family, in leisure relations, and in intellectual relations). Thus, unemployed persons are ineluctably involved in the same work-world as those employed. Andy Furlong 127 illustrates the demotivating effects of realistic perceptions of longterm unemployment prospects upon British youth. We can interpret youths' 'withdrawal' from the labour market that typically results from chronic unemployment as entailing psychological narcissism and the tendency (for women especially) towards the familial privatisation of consciousness. 128

It should be noted here that the lateralisation of oonflict in the workplace is predicated upon a division of labour oonditioned by some degree of freedom and privilege for the employees. Where the oorporate workforce is fully oonttolled, organised and ooerced by management, as is the case with the superexploited proletariat of the Third World, the lateralisation of conflict at the workplace level is minimal in oomparison to the verticalisation of conflict. 127 Furlong (1992). 128 It is certainly worth noting the deleterious oognitive affects of drug abuse, more prevalent (and arguably more destructive) amongst unemployed than employed persons. Helmer and Vietorisz ( 1974) cite studies by Fleisher (1966) that suggest a likelihood of prevalent drug abuse in areas experiencing chronic unemployment. 126

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The Political Sociology of Prejudice

As intimated above, individuals in capitalist societies do not necessarily accept the predominant ideological mores and discourses. Quite often the conflicts between people's needs and desires and their frustration, between the embedded moralities of institutions like the family and the labour market (emotional romance versus utilitarian instrumentalism), and the existential necessity of maintaining a degree of conscious self-centredness and, indeed, physical preservation and social cohesion as such, compels the adoption of distinct and diachronic political and moral ideals. The realism of these ideals obviously depends upon the degree to which they are capable of actualisation. A political ideal that remains detached from its actuality and critique can often induce further alienation and narcissistic withdrawal as its 'mere' ideality dawns upon its utopian adherent. 129 The difference between an ideal and an ideology is that an ideal invokes the possibilities inhering in current reality whilst an ideology is the fetishisation of current reality. The prevalent political customs of capitalist society are constituted precisely as the promulgation of ideologising conditions, or conditions wherein the 'facts of life' are fetishistically understood. To demonstrate this, it is first necessary to summarise the central features of a specifically capitalist polity. According to Ellen Meiksins Wood, a capitalist social formation entails: that production and distribution assume a completely 'economic' fonn (... ] no longer[ ... ] 'embedded' in extra-economic social relations, in a system where production is generally production for exchange; that the allocation of social labour and the distribution of resources are achieved through the 'economic' mechanism of commodity exchange; that the 'economic' forces of the commodity and labour markets acquire a life of their own; [and] that, to quote Marx, property 'receives its purely economic form by discarding all its fonner political and social embellishments and associations' . 130 129 This is not to suggest that ideals which have not been actualised are not powerful sources of and catalysts for human self-realisation. Indeed. it is precisely the struggle to actualise ideals that regularly constitutes their reality in the face of alienation. 130 Wood (1995, 28).

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In other words, in contrast to the economy of feudal society, production and distribution under capitalism are not ostensibly geared toward the fulfilment of political, legal, or religious obligations, but rather take place according to the denouement of private capital accumulation. Thus, unlike the plebeian slave or the Feudal serf, the wage-labourer is not physically coerced into working for his/her master, nor is s/he legally bound to do the same. Rather, s/he is obligated to work by the necessity of earning a living wage. Wood continues: The differentiation of the economic sphere in capitalism, then , can be summed up like this: the social functions of production and distribution, surplus extraction and appropriation, and the allocation of social labour are, so to speak, privatised and they are achieved by non-authoritative, non-political means. In other words, the social allocation of resources and labour does not, on the whole, take place by means of political direction, communal deliberation, hereditary duty, custom, or religious obligation , but rather through the mechanisms of commodity exchange. The powers of surplus appropriation and exploitation do not rest directly on relations of juridical or political dependence but are based on a contractual relation between ' free' producers - juridically free and free from the means of production - and an appropriator who has absolute private property in the means of production. 131

The post-feudal fonnal separation of government into separate economic, legal, and political spheres has, according to Wood, not proven conducive to democracy. That is, in preventing people from deliberating and democratically voting for laws relating to the economic sphere, the unalloyed social dominance of private capitalist individuals is institutionalised both legally and politically .132 The celebrated neutrality of the capitalist State 133 is grounded precisely on the Ibid. ( 1995, 29). Anatole France (1844-1924) famously lampooned the 'neutrality' and separateness of capitalist law from capitalist economics thus, 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread'. 133 As in the Hobbesian 'night watchman' ideal of the state found in Mill (1985), Ayn Rand, and Nozick (1975). President George Bush recently encapsulated much of the meaning of the divorce of politics from economics when he told a press conference that he had explained to President Vladimir Putin that what he 131 132

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denial of political power in the economic sphere except insofar as that is intended to, and does, cement the economic power of private capitalist ownership of the heights of the economy. In other words, the capitalist dichotomy between the political and economic realms not only does, but is also intended to, augment the absolute authority of private capitalists (and their managers) over nominally free private individuals. 134 As Noam Chomsky and others have recognised, the modern capitalist Corporation is internally and externally one of the most politically authoritarian and totalitarian institutions devised and implemented by human beings. 135 Chomsky quotes David Ellerman, 136 who lucidly summarises the realities of formal freedom for individuals under capitalism: It is a veritable mainstay of capitalist thought (not to mention so-called 'rightwing libertarianism') that the moral flaws of chattel slavery have not survived in capitalism since the workers, unlike the slaves, are free people making voluntary wage contracts . But it is only that, in the case of capitalism, the denial of natural rights is less complete so that the worker has a residual legal per-

134 135

136

meant by democracywas that investments could be made without fear of facing legislative interference. Bush said: 'I think the most important statement that you heard, and I heard, was the President's statement, when he declared his absolute support for democracy in Russia, and they're not turning back. To me, that is the most important statement of my private meeting, and it's the most important statement of this public press conference. And I can tell you what it's like dealing with the man over the last four years, when he tells you something, he means it. He asked what some of my concerns were, and he explained answers. I told him that it was very important that capital see rule of law, that there be stability, there not be any doubt about whether or not - if somebody invests, whether or not the laws change. And I think Vladimir heard me loud and clear, and he explained why he made decisions he made.• (available at http://italy.usembassy.gov/file2005 _ 02/alia/a502240 I .htm, 12 October 2007). I am indebted to Dr James Daly for this quote and its source. Wood (1995, 30). Chomsky (1998, 19). Margaret Thatcher, apostle of laisser-faire individualism, pertinently summarised corporate employment thus, 'Don't talk to me about "them" and "us" in a company[ ... ) You're all "we" in a company. You survive as the company survives, prosper as the company prospers - everyone together. The future lies in cooperation and not confrontation' (Thatcher, quoted in Hall and Jacques 1987, 31 ). Ellerman (1973, 10-11 ).

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sonality as a free 'commodity owner'. He is thus allowed to voluntarily put his own working life to traffic. When a robber denies another person's right to make an infinite number of other choices besides losing his money or his life and the denial is backed up by a gun, then this is clearly robbel)' even though it might be said that the victim is making a 'voluntary choice' between his remaining options. When the legal system itself denies the n~ral rights of working people in the name of the prerogatives of capital, and this denial is sanctioned by the legal violence of the state, then the theorists of libertarian capitalism do not proclaim institutional robbel)', but rather they celebrate the 'natural liberty' of working people to choose between the remaining options of selling their labour as a commodity and being unemployed. 137

According to Wood, in capitalism, the political measures directly relating to the extraction and appropriation of surplus labour at the point of production are left to the capitalist and their managers (in their major organisational fonn of the Corporation). Political measures not directly related to the extraction and appropriation of surplus labour are left up to the State, insofar as private capitalists have no particular public duties (unlike the appropriative ruling class of the feudal economy). Thus, post-feudal political power began to be more and more delimited by private economic need in the development of the capitalist mode of production insofar as it was left to tend to its own concerns (principally, determining the direct conditions for the corporate extraction and appropriation of surplus labour socio-organisationally and politically). 138 Wood, however, underestimates the corporate organisation of political and legal means to achieve the general social relations of capitaJist production. Thus, for Jessop: [Classes] should not be seen as already constituted political forces which exist outside and independently of the state and which are capable of manipulating it as an instrument. For, although classes are defined at the level of relations of

137 Quoted in Chomsky (1995, 186). 138 The growth of the police force as the anned bulwark of the modem nation-state was integrally connected to the urbanisation of national economies and the related development of national capitalist-industrial hegemony. See Silver (1976) .

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production, their political weight depends on the fonns of organization and means of intervention through which economic interests are expressed. 139

In short, for Jessop, the role of the state varies according to the level of organisation of the dominant class in society, as grounded on the development of the specific mode of production of that society. In a society wherein capitalist production relations predominate, there will necessarily have been executed a concomitant change in the personnel and interests of the governing political body. This governing body, as historically representative of the successful political struggles waged by a particular class within a particular mode of production, must then act to protect the relatively smooth functioning of that mode of production, lest it lose its unique social influence and status. Jessop therefore suggests jettisoning the notion of 'state power' as distinct from 'class power', and particularly the instrumentalist view of the state which views the latter as a 'ready-made' subject ready to be wielded by whatever class has established itself as controlling the means of production. Both Jessop and Wood, however, are agreed that the political thrust of the capitalist state is directed by the need for capitalists to consolidate their private control of the social economy. Insofar as the state tacitly allows the forces of the market to continue to appropriate public resources for private ends, it thereby increases the political power it places in the hands of the market and its unaccountable owners. 140 By what political means has capitalist hegemony historically been constituted? John Urry suggests that, for Marx, whilst at the level of economic transactions and relations, society is increasingly socialised under capitalism, at the level of politics and especially law, society is increasingly individualised. Indeed, the transition from Feudal to fundamentally capitalist society was marked by legal constraints being 139 Jessop (1983, 273). 140 As MacPherson (1973, 148-9) remarks, '[The] more nearly the society approximates [Milton) Friedman's ideal of a competitive capitalist market society, where the state establishes and enforces the individual right of appropriation and the rules of the market but does not interfere in the operation of the mark.et, the more completely is political power being used to reinforce economic power.'

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placed upon organised mass assemblies (what were called in nineteenth century England 'coalitions') and their attendant rights.141 The capitalist corporation itself, in economic terms precisely such a mass organisation, was thereafter defined in legal terms as an individual person, with all of the property rights thereof. 142 The earliest bourgeois political opponents of landed property and hereditary privilege like Adam Smith were staunchly opposed to anyone other than propertied individuals having a say in government for the precise reason that the masses were perceived likely to vote against the interests of private property. Similarly, John Stuart Mill's classical liberal 'democratic' admonitions on the dangers of majority rule are also couched in essentially class-based terminology.143 At any rate, instead of allowing for freedom of organisation, the early bourgeois ideal of citizenship argued for the conception of the freedom of each single individual under the (supposedly class neutral) state law. As Urry suggests, a direct consequence of the institutionalisation of the aforementioned capitalist social structures, is that 'class relations are experienced not as class relations but as fragmented and atomised struggles between individuals'.144 Systematic rivalry amongst atomised and competitive individuals has serious and detrimental effects on the individual psyche rendering it dispositionally insecure and aggressive, such that we can expect that prejudice and its potential will be ubiquitous even in the most normalised and stable capitalist societies. The individualistic competition and authoritarianism that the capitalist polity fosters does not realise the democratic and libertarian potentiality of the socialised production bequeathed by modem industrial and electronic production. Instead, the economic imperatives and hegemonic social role of capital increasingly and system-

141 See Saville ( 1994). 142 See Bak.an(2004). 143 '[The] dangers incident to a representative democracy are of two kinds, danger of a low grade of intelligence in the representative body, and in the popular opinion which controls it; and danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class' (Mill 1890, 125). 144 Urry (1981, 14).

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ically obstruct democratic control of society. Fairbairn 145 suggests that the autonomy fostered in a democracy and upon which a democracy depends ensures that propaganda directed toward a self-annihilating identification with the State is incapable of taking root in the individual psyche. 146 Fairbairn is mistaken that a full identification with the State and its aims is necessarily in conflict either with individual independence or with democracy. The aggression towards or dislike of members of a group to which one does not politically identify need not imply a prejudiced view, particularly when the group is realistically perceived as one that aims or is likely to destroy the cultural and political edifice upon which democracy and individual freedom is based. One can distinguish between states that do and states that don't represent the historical development of democracy and individual self-determination. In the first category one might include those states that advance (inter)national independence and economic democracy and, in the second, those advancing the unhindered accumulation of privately held power and wealth. Fairbairn is correct, however, to suggest that the recurrent inability of individuals to influence the state can foster a degree of dependency and authoritarian identification with the state's self-image. This can induce a prejudicial view of state-defined out-groups and, indeed, any outgroups, in a large population, since infantile authoritarianism is dispositionally prejudicial. According to Ralph Miliband, the 'bourgeoisification' of the landed aristocracy in the process of the formation of the modern state, ensured that a powerful curb on the extension of market forces and their political supports was thereafter removed from public life. Only in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth century did an organised political and economic force come into being that could radically challenge and transform the hegemony of bourgeois politics, namely, the labour movement. It is beyond the scope of the current chapter to delineate the travails of the latter. Suffice for the moment to say that it was quickly realised by both the representatives of the capitalist class and those of elite sections of the working class, that the burgeoning 145 Fairbairn (1952). 146 A viram (2002, 6 ).

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economic force of the ever more organised and massive industrial working classes of Europe would have to be corralled in some fashion lest the structural edifice of capitalist society be increasingly imperilled. Thus Miliband observes that: The smooth functioning of capitalist democracy requires that the worldng class should accept the general validity and legitimacy of the social order; that it should believe that any grievance or demand that it may have is remediable within the confines and by the traditional procedures of the political system; and that it should also be convinced that any radical change in existing arrangements must be highly detrimental to its best interests ( ... ). 147

Miliband provides many illustrations of how even a quite diverse range of politicians and establishment policy-makers have historically tended to agree on the desirability and naturality of the fundamental basis of modem society, that is, the capitalist mode of production. 148 In the process of consolidating its foundations, the capitalist state has tended to disenfranchise even its initial economic support base, that is, the bourgeois middle class. Liberal conservatives such as Will Hutton, 149 have understood that unbridled monopoly capitalism has meant a serious decline in the political power of the middle class. It is this decline that can ensure their clinging to the most apparently fanatical defenders of privilege, that is, the conservative parties of the right. These are the parties, however, who have politically supported and directed the shift from the supposedly free market capitalism (certainly a misnomer as we shall see in the following chapter) of the early modem period to the global capitalism of the contemporary period. Capitalism has disenfranchised the rest of the population even more so and, as a result, many perceive the capitalist political system as an agent of compulsion and appropriation. Miliband quotes the French liberal sociologist Raymond Aron that it 'goes without saying that in a regime based on the private ownership of the means of production, the measurements taken by the legislators and the ministers will not be in fundamental conflict with the interests of the 147 Miliband(1982, 54). 148 Ibid. (1987, 63 et passim). 149 Hutton (1996).

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property owners' . 150 Aron accepts the truth of this dictum, whilst, according to Miliband, failing to acknowledge its profound implications in regard to the fact that the making of a public policy for the general good must often (if not necessarily) require the infringement of the interests of the proprietaires. Of course, says Miliband, it has often been the case that governments acting on behalf of vested and powerful business interests have acted contrarily to the rights of some property ownership. A case in point might be the English enclosure acts of the eighteenth century, they being a clear and early example of the capitalist class assigning itself the right to expropriate whatever property it saw fit to advance its larger class interests. Other forms of state intervention in the capitalist economy in the interests of the most powerful sectors of that economy are welfare state capitalism 151 and fascism. Miliband contends that welfare states, ostensibly set up so as to implement the general good and welfare of all citizens regardless of class is, and was, in large part intended to improve the market conditions for the profiteering of private economic interests. As Miliband notes, 'there are no more persistent and successful applicants for public assistance than the proud giants of the private enterprise system' .152 As Offe writes, 'The welfare state, rather than being a separate and autonomous source of well-being which provides incomes and services as a citizen right, is itself highly dependent upon the prosperity and continued profitability ofthe economy.' 153 As we have noted, the practice of free assembly and freedom of organisation was criminalised quite early on in the establishment of the capitalist state. Since then, the idea that there is free political competition in a self-styled pluralistic capitalist democracy has become ever more unrealistic . From the legal repression of left-wing organisations in some countries (Northern Ireland, the former Federal ISO Aron (1960, 272- 3). IS I On the capitalistic character of the fascist regime in Germany see Schweitzer (1964) and Neumann (1943). On the capitalistic character of the fascist regime in Italy see Salvemini ( 1971). 152 Miliband (1987, 72). The proof of this statement is snappily but amply evidenced in Zepezauer (2004). On the political economy of the welfare state see Green (1982), Tinbergen ()987) , Klausen (1998), and Swenson (2002). 153 Offe (1984, 150).

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German Republic, 1950s USA, and the present-day Philippines, for example), to quasi-legal repression elsewhere (present-day Columbia, 1960s USA, Weimar Germany), movements aiming towards democratising the capitalist economy to any degree have faced governmental sanction. Indeed, there has hardly been a time when left-wing organisations advocating the socialisation of private property have not felt the full-force of state repression. The same illiberal measures have not generally been applied to anywhere near the same degree in regard to extreme right-wing organisations. 154 The cumulative effect of the structural, legal and quasi-legal repression of democratic movements in capitalist polities has produced some very negative results, particularly in regard to the proliferation of prejudicial thinking. The connections between political cynicism, narcissism and authoritarianism were noted early on in Adorno et al.'s seminal study. 155 The level of cynicism in many capitalist polities has not gone unnoticed by many, as the thought that 'politicians are all the same' alongside the notion that ruling class (political) power is all-pervasive and 'there is nothing one can do to change it' has become virtual common sense. Prof. Ron Hirschbein has written: Summarizing the results of numerous studies of the American electorate, Richard Morin (the director of polling for The Washington Post) concludes that: 'The most consistent finding of the surveys is that Americans rank public opinion as the weakest influence on government officials [... ] Americans believe that they are powerless to influence their government.' 156

The effects of the virtual disenfranchisement of the American electorate have tended to ensure that US elections have low voter turnouts. is 7 Hirschbein argues that people shun the ballot box for the very good reason that it is no longer either "'instrumental {politically efficacious)" or emotionally/spiritually "affective".' Echoing C.

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See for example Churchill and Wall (2002).

I 55 Adorno et al. (1950). I 56 Hirschbe in ( 1999, 2). I 57

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At the 2004 US Presidential elections 60 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote, the highest turnout since 1968 according to an Associated Press report.

Wright Mills' analysis, 158 Hirschbein argues that electoral politics in America is largely 'a popularity contest among candidates chosen by competing elites within the pennanent government' .159 If we follow Jessop's rationale, the reason for this unifonnity of established political influence in the USA is that the American bourgeoisie has been enormously successful in conquering and maintaining control of the commanding heights of the polity without the influence of competing social classes. Even as individuals do vote in elections or lend their support to political parties, by no means does this suggest these persons' active determination of public policy-making. 160 It is not only the fact that the political interpellation of subjects of capitalist states takes place undialectically (insofar as political corporations are limited in the degree to which they can shape their policies according to the general influence of all their members), that ensures democratic habits are not cultivated therein. It is also the fact that members of capitalist political parties are interpellated to accept policies, which, if successfully implemented, can only contribute to their long-term socio-political alienation. Just as the workers' lifeactivity becomes more estranged in relation to his/her production of alienated wealth, so the power invested in capitalist political organisations by the political activists and cadre of the capitalist polity estranges his/her political power and understanding. Thus, even insofar as a party may have its' supporters collective will as the 'backbone' of its public image, if it promotes the hegemony of capIS8 Mills (19S6). I S9 Hirschbein(I 999, 6). 160 Goran Therbom (1980, l~S) has related the growth in the publicisation of political bodies (initially constituted as elite clubs and interest groups) to the SbUcturaJnecessity of interpellating the public in the age of increasing mass democracy brought about by the advance of capitalist industry. The growth of mass.based political parties has both positive and negative oonnotations for the capitalist ruling class. On the one hand, a party intended to actively voice the concerns of its members may run the risk that the majority of its members' concerns do not match those of the party's major class constituent In capitalist societies, parties not based in the labour movement or in radical insurgence tend to receive their major fmancial and logistics support, oontrol of the apparatuses of interpellation, 111dtheir org111isationalforms from big capital's investment in them.

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italist economics it must deny the efficacy of people's self-empowerment in the long term. 161 Hirschbein notes that the anthropologist David Kertzer 162 'observes that regular, carefully orchestrated elections reinforce the myth that all citizens are regarded as equals, and that governance is determined by a free, well-informed polity'. 163 But it should be stressed, against Milton Friedman (General Pinochet's economic advisor) that democratic structures are not, by any means, universally attendant on capitalistic economies. As noted above, for a very long time it was a predominant belief amongst British ideologues of capitalism that universal suffrage was a bad idea and would lead to the lower classes ensuring that the economy would function to their benefit. Indeed, political parties nominally representing the interests of the lower classes have also opposed universal suffrage. 164 In the political habituses of hegemonic capitalism the degree of democratic control over society wielded by the social individual is extraordinarily restricted. Habits of democracy which ought to come naturally to rational individuals are not inculcated, and the stagnation of democracy in an age of mass society serves to increase the cognitive scope of prejudice.

161 Similarly, if the underdevelopment of a socialist society ensures that the wealth of the economy is relatively alienated from public political control, political subjects' faith in their ostensible political organisations will prove emasculating in the long tenn. 162 Kertzer (1989 ). 163 Hirschbein (1999, 26). 164 Support from the leaders of the British Labour movement for universal suffrage was tentative throughout the late nineteenth century, and ensured neither opposition to the property laws entailing that only a very small minority of male workers could vote (until 1906), or support for female suffrage (on the grounds that it might accord the Conservative party a permanent majority in parliament). Thus, as a result of Labour support for the Liberal Party, it was only in 1918 that universal male suffrage was granted and only in 1928 that universal suffrage was granted to both sexes. See Tracy ( 1948).

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Conclusion: Prejudice in Society This chapter has tried to show how social institutions based in capitalist economies have placed enormous barriers to the spread of realistic assessment and analysis of the world in the minds of publicly oriented individuals. Capitalism has created huge distances between the knowledge expressed by individuals about public affairs and the objective understanding of such by scientific methods of comprehension. It has done so both by structurally enforcing a strident specialisation of mental and manual labour, by obstructing the relative social dialectical synthesis of such and, concomitantly, by tending to enforce the development of prejudicial neuroses in individual's minds. The thought-processes aligned to habitual and ideological accommodation to the capitalist status quo tend to generate a high degree of anti-social conventionalism, authoritarianism and individualism. The anti-realism of the ideological conventionalist, the aggression of the ideological authoritarian, and the ideological narcissism of the capitalist individual, when integrated, goes some way to suggest a personality inclined towards prejudicial cognitive reflexion. The following chapter will elucidate the recent historical production of bigotry as determined through the development and consolidation of metropolitan capitalist world supremacy. Therein, we shall pursue a politico-economic understanding of social and racial chauvinism, considering these as primary elements of bigotry in the modem age.

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Chapter 5 Political Bigotry

Discrimination and Chauvinism In the previous chapters, prejudice has been considered as: • • • •

a realistic epistemological category; anti-critical cognition; neurotic cognition; and sociopathic cognition.

Throughout, an understanding of prejudicial thinking which relates to all of the above elements as integral moments in a schematic synthesis delineating the lived inhibition of rationality in the modem world has been outlined. In the previous chapter, the subjective dimensions of prejudice as developing through certain basic existential conditions of modem capitalist society were outlined. In contrast, this chapter shall aim to describe how the masses of advanced capitalist countries have become embroiled in political strategies, policies, and economic relations that tend to involve them in acceptance of and support for institutional forms that are actively complicit in the promulgation and inculcation of particularly virulent prejudices. The previous chapter described how the habitual norms of three of the primary capitalist institutions of modem society (the family, the workplace and the state) predispose individuals to think uncritically and to develop neurotic cognitive comprehension of their wider environment. This chapter will ask, what are the most powerful institutions promoting abiding prejudices in modem society, what are their functional imperatives, and from what raison d'etre do these follow? Thus far, the principal categories we have introduced to the conceptualisation of irrationality are prejudice (an epistemological category), ideology (a cognitive category) and bigotry (a psycholog205

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ical category). This chapter shall introduce two further categories of irrationality: the socio-political categories of (a) discrimination and (b) chauvinism. It might be said that discrimination need not necessarily be prejudiced, and furthennore that discrimination can be justified prejudicially or rationally .1 In the present chapter, however, we shall employ a more critical (and widely held) designation of discrimination as implying the unreasonable mistreatment of subordinated persons and groups. In line with this conception, Joe and Clairece Feagin have defined discrimination as 'practices carried out by members of dominant groups which have a differential and negative impact on members of subordinate groups'. 2 Similarly, the United Nations defines discrimination as:

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Any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.3

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I propose to demonstrate in this chapter the extent to which bigotry, aggressively intolerant prejudice, is an effect of institutionalised discrimination. l shall define chauvinism as the attitudinal ideology attendant to those living on the dominant side of a hierarchical power relation. Chauvinism is the supremacist way of thinking that legitimates unequal power relations which operate to discriminate against those groups of a low social status. The present chapter examines some of the most destructive and virulent prejudices in the world today, those of national, ethnic and racial chauvinisms. This does not, of course, mean that national or ethnic bigotry must be accorded de jure or de facto regard in relation to other fonns of bigotry, in particular sexism or what might be called

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Thus one might discriminate in choosing an apple in favour of the one which is less bruised or dirty or a best friend who is the most intelligent and reliable. Feagin and Feagin (1978, 20--1). United Nations (1969).

'classism' (the ideology of class supremacism). 4 The previous chapter has outlined a consideration of sexism and classism as the primal ingredients of the prejudicial mind per se, both currently and historically. Furthermore, there is enormous evidence to suggest that the inequalities and deprivations imposed on women globally are the very backbone of what this chapter considers the racist class system of capitalism. s In any case, it is a serious error to treat racism and sexism as though they were mutually exclusive and autonomous mechanisms of repression. Many writers influenced by black feminism have elucidated the networks of power and resistance that correlate sexism with racism. 6 Thus, the chronological order in which we have here dealt with issues of racism and sexism ought not to prejudice the reader as prioritising one form of oppression over another. The forms and content of social oppression, and their relative determinacy in particular instances, must be examined historically and within the context of the real material conditions sustaining them. Nonetheless, national and racial prejudices certainly constitute the major ideological props for a myriad of unjust, reactionary and thoroughly destructive conflicts and social upheavals plaguing the world political 4

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Neither is the above list of chauvinisms supposed to be exhaustive. Jn the first and final chapters of this book, evidence of a certain ironic chauvinism, wherein intellectuals disdain from ascertaining the truth or otherwise of the claims of oppressed and oppressor social groups in the name of an apparently primordial 'openness'. inclusivity,or undecidability,is revealed. The United Nations reports that women have not achieved equality with men in any country. 'Of the world's 1.3 billion poor people, it is estimated that nearly 70 per cent are women.' Between 75 and 80 percent of the world's 27 million refugees are women and children. Women hold 11.7 percent of the seats in the world's parliaments. The majority of women earn on average about three-fourths of the pay of males for the same work, outside of the agricultural sector, in both developed and developing countries. Women make up 31 percent of the official labour force in developing countries and 46.7 percent worldwide (this work is usually done on top of unpaid domestic labour). Worldwide, 20 to 50 percent of women experience some degree of domestic violence during marriage. (statistics available at http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/women/ women%.htm, 12 November 2007). Eisenstein (2004), Hooks (1982), Lorde (1984 and 1996), Mirza (1997), Potts (1980), Pannar (1982), Afshar (1989), Carby (1982), Collins (1991), and Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1993).

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scene tod.ay and, for that reason, ought to be categorically exposed and analysed. It is wrong to view racial prejudice as simply an erroneous idea eradicable through didactic pedagogy. American historian and sociologist David Wellman challenges the notion that racism is merely a set of prejudices in the minds of individuals.' Racism is not simply one group of individuals mentally projecting negative characteristics upon another group of individuals. Nor is racism exclusively an 'internal' cognitive process of the socially conformist 'in-group' individual, concerned to enhance the power of his/her own psyche at the expense of those of a supposedly different 'race' 8 than he. In treating racism as simply a form of 'prejudice', misunderstood as the cognitive acts of an asocial individual, we are failing to acknowledge the extrapersonal nature of the political structures that render it a powerful social force, both in terms of rationalisation and in terms of being a hegemonic cultural agenda. In understanding prejudice in terms of culturally-grounded intolerance, or allegedly narrow ~cultural' horizons, without articulating how these cultural horizons of persons or groups of persons have been shaped by fundamental material inequalities in the division of labour, power, and wealth, as determined according to the needs and functionalities of the dominant mode of production and the (inter)national geo-political relations based thereon, is to collude in the perpetuation of difference and the hierarchically ordered hegemonies of cultural exclusivities practised, often, in its riame.9 This chapter will demonstrate that the modem capitalist nation-state produces racism through its own politicoeconomic dynamics, specifically its need to colonise and subjugate 'foreign' peoples, in the interests of profiteering. Indeed, '[the] 7 8

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Wellman (1993). '[Several] researchers argue that no simple race-defining variables allow scientists to pinpoint biological, genetic, physical, cultural, or psycho!logicalcriteria A different perspective that many scholars now advocate, which we will also advance[ ... ), is that race is an invention of human history (Omi & Winant 1986). That is, race is a human-made schema, developed over time and history, for delineating human group boundaries' (Operario and Fiske 1998, 33). See Amin 1997, Bannerji 2000, 8- 9; Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and McLaren 2003, 156; and Marable 1995, 8, 256.

historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism'. t 0 It is crucial to emphasise that the methodology involved in our examination of expressions of racial, ethnic and national chauvinism is historical and materialistic. A holistic and critical approach which transcends the positivism of psychologistic, behavioural, or idealistic analyses of prejudice must be pursued. Racial and ethnic chauvinism emanates, resonates and is propagated within established racist social structures. As such, the present understanding of racism finds its Archimedean heuristic in racist society, the concrete amalgamation of psychological, social and political racialising modes of existence. Furthermore, this chapter will argue that the construction of the racist society must be viewed from the perspective of the construction of society itself~ that is, from the point of view of society's dominant mode of production. Operario and Fiske argue that 'racial categories are human inventions; racial categories have no inherently natural basis'. 11 But I will argue herein that racial categories are inextricably linked to human relationships with nature, namely, economics. Racial categories are not merely created by the manipulation of social imagery by political actors; they are the result of the economic position of peoples designated 'races' relative to those who own and control the economy in their own interests through the maintenance of a certain economic system which transcends their personal political proclivities. Racialism arises out of a system of control over, ownership, and reproduction of nature by men and women, ourselves

thoroughlynatural beings. With this in mind, we can substantiatethe 10 II

Robinson (1983, 9). Operario and Fiske (1998, 39). Perhaps Operario md Fiske confuse 'nawral categories• for Platonic 'fonns', eternal and unchanging. In this sense, there are hardly such things as 'nawral' categories, since 'nawre' is ever-evolving, creating and destroying itself. Also, it is important to emphasise that racism tends k> differentiate and arrange human groups' social positions on the basis of their physical phenotypical traits. Racist ideology invariably invokes reference to either phenotype (in the case of the non-"white' skinned peoples) or physiognomy, in the case of phenotypical ' whites' labelled 'inferior' (Jews and people, for example). In this regard, racism at least refers to certain 'nawral' human differences.

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categories of discrimination and chauvinism defined above with an analysis of the predominant economic system in the world today, capitalism, and with a view to establishing how prejudicial chauvinism is sustained according to its development.

The Capitalist Economy C

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In the previous chapter, we established that the capitalistic framework, within which the social structures of the family, the workplace and political rule operate, restricts the advancement of objective and empathic rationality in the wider society . What was not established was how capitalism itself, as a relatively totalistic mode of production, is produced and sustained. What is capitalism, how does it work, and what are some of its major trends?

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In a capitalist economy, the means of production constitute 'capital' insofar as they are employed by individual or corporate capitalists not to produce for social need or even want, but instead to produce commodities for the purpose of profitable exchange. Unlike precapitalist modes of production founded on slavery or serfage (though slavery under capitalism still exists and has been growing in recent decades), the capitalist economy is compelled to expand since, as American economist Michael Yates notes:

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Only if the capitalists make profits will they produce output; only if they make profits will they invest these profits in new means of production and cause the economy ~ grow. Therefore the question of the growth of output is really the question of profits. How is it possible for capitalists to make profits? How can they begin with one sum of money and end up with a larger one? 12

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Yates (2003, 167).

The answer, for those whom Yates calls 'radical' economists, is that under capitalism the individual worker is paid a wage. The surplus capital obliged to motivate a capitalist or group of capitalists to invest in production is produced by his/her paying employees less than it costs to produce an exchangeable commodity for profit. The value of the commodity produced must exceed the amount of value expended on the cost of the employee's labour power. Marx defines the capitalist rate of exploitation, and the rate of the extraction of surplus value, as the total amount of the value of work divided by what is paid out in wages. In short : The capitalist buys the labour power of the worker, and in exchange for this wage, he appropriates the entire production of that worker, all the newly produced value which has been incorporated into the value of this production

[andaccumulatesthe profits made fromexchangingthe full surplusvalueof the worker's produce - Z.C.). 13

The profits obtained from the monetary exchange of surplus value are the capitalist's to do with as s/he pleases. But if the capitalist consumes too much of his/her earnings (say through purchasing mansions or excessive philanthropy), thens/he will not survive in the competitive capitalist market. As capital is held privately by many individual capitalist units, capitalists must invest profits in expanded production, since if any of their rivals do so and they do not, they will not be able to compete effectively over the long term. 'After a while', says Yates, 'they will be undersold and driven from the market, losing all of the amenities that come one's way when one is a successful capitalist - prestige, high incomes, and political power.' In short, competition 'forces each capitalist, on pain of death in the marketplace, to make profits and grow, to, in a word, accumulate capital' .' 4 Economist Michael Barratt Brown identifies three major tendencies which both necessitate and impede the expansion of the capitalist market:

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Mandel(1979, 24).

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Yates (2003, 170).

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