Performing gender

When we talk about performing gender, it’s not like we’re talking about a theatrical performance, something that has nothing whatever to do with who we really are. But equally, gender is not “natural”. Gender, and sex, for that matter, have no objective existence outside the society in which they are created – they are both ways of understanding the world, not pre-existing objects. When a baby is born, it is inspected by a medic of some kind, and based on how well its genitals fit one of two stereotypes, is either assigned an F or an M on its birth certificate. ( or if its genitals fit neither stereotype, defined as intersex) . The obvious question that no-one usually asks is “why does it matter?”

Think of the problems the Olympic organisers have had defining gender – the easy assumption that all human beings can be divided into one lot with penises and XY DNA while the rest will have vaginas and XX so clearly did not work for them that they gave up.

A good analogy is with money. I think most people realise that money is something that’s created as a convenient means of exchange between people – it’s something that we all agree to, and agree to enforce on those who don’t agree to it as well. It may be socially constructed, but it has real power in our society. If you on your own decide that your local supermarket has a lot of food, and you’re just going to take it without paying, you will soon find that your incorrect performance of money will be quite severely punished. Depending on how severe your breach of the social norms is, you might end up in jail.

Now, when we get to transsexual and transgender performance of gender, we are immediately faced with attacks from at least 2 directions. Firstly, there’s the widespread transphobia of cis-sexual people who see us as either evil decievers if they can’t tell, or pathetic fakes if they can. These two positions, damned if you do or don’t, are based on the idea that sex/gender as assigned at birth is a fact, and cannot be changed. The transphobic radfems take a similar gender-essentialist view, and claim that transsexual women, in particular, are some kind of fifth columnist element of the patriarchy, invading “real” women’s spaces in order to – well I’m not quite sure what they’r e worried about, but I’m sure it would be really bad.

Now, both these transphobic, gender essentialist positions are based on the idea that there is some kind of “real” sex or gender, which you can never change, and therefore transsexual women are not women, but men pretending to be women. This transphobic idea of pretence, is not what I mean by gender performance. Transsexual women are women, and we are just as genuine as women as cis-sexual women. Indeed, many cis women have never really thought about the gender they were assigned at birth, and have just gone along with it.

If you think of the gender performance of someone like Grayson Perry or David Walliams performing femininity, what you see is masculine stereotype of extreme costume drama femininity, which might have once been appropriate for the idle rich. No 21^st century woman behaves or looks like that. It has as much to do with genuine feminine gender performance as a pantomime dame. I would argue that they are lampooning femininity by performing masculinity dressed in women’s clothing.

It’s not just trans people who play with gender boundaries. Look at a butch lesbian and her femme partner; the “top” in a gay partnership, or a dominant woman in a BDSM scene. These are performances, but they reflect and actualise the reality of the people performing them, they are not fake – although there may well be artifice involved.

Everyone performs gender. It becomes unconsidered and automatic – but if the audience, the people with whom you are interacting, considers your performance to be inadequate, there will be punishment; in just the same way as you may be punished for not agreeing about money. In the extreme, trans women have been left to die by paramedics or murdered. Those are fairly severe punishments.

In our society, examples of female gender performance might include wearing make up, having long hair, being able to walk well in high heels, using the toilets with the skirted figure on the door, filling “F” in on an application form, being interested in, and able to perform, dance aerobic exercise,... while male gender performance might include a limited palette of clothing, drinking beer in pints, an interest in football, wearing trousers, etc. Or a man offering to carry a suitcase for a woman, and the woman gracefully accepting. Yes, these are social constructs, and the pre-existing differences are small, and if I happen to be a woman who likes wearing jeans and trainers, and is interested in football and beer it doesn’t stop me being a woman, of course it doesn’t.

My idea about how this works is that as one grows up in our culture we absorb messages about how gender is from all directions. Parents, other schoolchildren, the media, people in the street. And somewhere inside ourselves, however clear or vague this might be, we have an idea about what gender we are – indeed, society spends a lot of time telling us what gender we are, and inculcating gendered behaviour. “Boys don’t cry (and you’re a boy, so stop crying)” or “That’s not ladylike (and you’re a girl, so stop doing it)” Reinforcement for gender appropriate behaviour, and sanctions for inappropriate. Why do so many little girls like pink?

For trans people this is a very odd experience. We know (if we are trans women) that we are girls, so we take, and try to act on, all the “girl” messages in the culture that seem to fit with who we are. But we are continually told that we are boys, and boys act like thus and so. So – for many of us, we learn to pretend to do all that, and make up a persona that can function in this world where who we are is rejected. So we pick up all the boy messages for the construct, too, and try to fit those in. How much of our reality are we going to be allowed? With practice, it becomes an act that requires little effort day to day. Maybe a “the show must go on” feeling as one gets up in the morning.

When we do eventually transition, some of us after decades of practice in the masculine role, working out how our true selves can be in society takes time. As a teenage woman, one gets something of a free pass for inappropriate behaviour. A mature woman, however, is expected to know how to behave. I can put my minimal make up on in the morning in 8 minutes, now. But when I started it took more like 28, partly because I used to use 4 shades of eye-shadow, and partly because I am practised, and don’t need to think about it. And that’s just one example. It is more natural, but it’s the interaction between oneself as an individual and the social context that has to be developed. It wasn’t just there, for me.

It’s not a simple argument. We are necessarily social beings and our behaviour in society is constrained by the society we’re in, and more than that, the kind of person we can be is constrained but equally we develop our way of being, and I am in no sense unreal. It’s a continual interaction.

Whoever you vote for, capitalism gets in

I plan to argue that the 1979 election of the Conservatives, and the 2010 election that resulted in the Conservative/LibDem coalition, illustrate crises of representation as well as crises within the economy.

The first being the argument between the unions and the government about who should rule, and the second showing the tensions between party, electorate, elected representatives, party leadership, and government; and in both cases in response to the underlying economic and structural changes that have developed as capitalism has globalised.

 

Democracy is seen as the most legitimate method of government, in so far as it allows the people to rule, in a direct translation of the word.  However, only the earliest, relatively primitive instances of democracy allowed all the people to rule day by day, and even those only allowed free male citizens to do so.   In practice, every actual democracy has been a representative one, where, by some process, a number of individuals are selected to represent the will of the people for a period of time.  Typically the process will be an election, and the key question to be asked is how the selection of those allowed to vote, the process, and the relationship between the people and the selected representative works : how does this machinery result in legitimacy.   Because if it does not result in legitimacy, those who lose out in the resolution of the irreconcilable will not accept it.   I will argue that the need for representation to be, and be seen to be, legitimate, is essential for the continued functioning of politics.  The willingness of political representatives to engage in political negotiation and for their constituencies to accept the resolution of differences that results from this is dependent on the belief that the representatives do indeed legitimately represent them, rather than acting on their own behalf.    It’s possible that the recent public anger in the UK over the misuse of expenses has less to do with the actual money (which in terms of the total UK Government spend is trivial) and far more to do with the suspicion that a representative who spends their time fiddling expenses is more concerned with their own well being than that of their constituents.   The corruption removes their legitimacyas representatives. The contest over whether any particular representative, government, or form of selection of representatives is legitimate that results from these situations is indicative that “representation”  is indeed a living political idea, and I will expand on  the various ways in which it lives in what follows.

 

In economic terms, the 1979 election was a response to the changing terms of trade, such that simple primary and manufacturing jobs were more economically carried out in developing countries, and the result in the UK was that those jobs were largely eliminated, putting large groups into long-term welfare dependency.  The 1997 election represented the hope that having rebalanced our economy, we could continue to have the levels of social welfare that had been in place from 1945 – 1979, while the 2010 election seems to be an attempt to make the best of the financial market disaster that has engulfed the UK along with the rest of the world.  But each of these underlying economic situations had the political effect of creating an apparent crisis in representation also.

 

One strand in the political crisis of representation is demonstrated by low turnout for elections; another is the widespread idea in the UK that all politicians are the same, David Marquand (2008,  p53) “if you ask people...they say... there is nothing to choose between them”.  A further strand is a loss of trust: (ibid, p55) “there’s been a...precipitate fall in the level of trust by the public...in their politicians” All these symptoms may indicate a perception no matter who governs the UK, similar undesirable  things happen.  For example when Kraft took over Cadbury, almost immediately the Cadbury UK factory was closed, but further investigation revealed that the UK factory would likely have been closed anyway, whether or not the factory was taken over. “The plant, ..., had been slated for closure in 2011 by Cadbury, with most of the work moving to a new production site in Poland” (Wilson, A & Russell, J, 09 Feb 2010, Daily Telegraph) . David Held remarks (2008, p43) that “in the era of intensification of globalisation” labour power and the state have remained immobile, while capital “has escaped....the...triangle of power” enabling the relocation and international division of labour to capital’s advantage.   It is unlikely that the electorate see the situation as analytically as this, but the feeling that promises will always be broken, for whatever reason, is evidenced by the above.

 

In the years leading up to 1979 the settled political consensus was of an alternation between “one nation” Tory governments and pragmatic Labour governments whose main ambition was to make capitalism work slightly better for the working class, rather than undertake socialist revolution.

But underneath this cosy arrangement, the world was changing.  A large fraction of the UK’s working population worked in extraction industries, and unsophisticated primary manufacturing.  The globalisation of the energy market, particularly in coal, and the discovery of North Sea Oil, deprived the miners of their crucial position in the UK’s energy market.  Meanwhile, the union leaders in the car industry waged guerrilla war with incompetent managements, ignoring the growing economic threat of Japanese car makers, and the dock workers ignored the changes sweeping over international trade with the coming of containerisation.

 

The last years of the Callaghan government seemed to illustrate the view that the union “barons” were the true rulers of the country, while the democratically elected government could do nothing.   Surely the union leaders were representing the desires of their members, the working class?  And therefore, surely the government would similarly represent those desires?   The breakdown in the links between the electorate, the unions and the government illustrates several key ideas.  The idea of union leaders representing their membership had become institutionalised in ways that were not convincingly democratic.  Michels argues that the interests of the leadership of a group or political party diverge from those of their members. “As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed.” (Michels R., 1996, p70)  Further, that this is in the nature of groups, rather than because the leadership is corrupt in any way.  In the case of the unions the apparent detachment of the union leaders from their membership and the electorate at large shows how their claim to represent the working class lost legitimacy. The union leaders were more interested in increasing their own power and influence than protecting the interests of the working class as a whole, even if they did aim to protect at least most of their immediate membership.

Union leaders negotiated directly with the government (famously over “beer and sandwiches”) but it was far from clear that either side represented the desires of the people. 

The Heath government attempted to deal with the problem, but ineffectually, and when he went to the country on a question of “who governs” the “commonsense answer was: 'not you, mate’” (Marr, A , 2007)  After several years of the following labour government, with the well known “Solomon Binding” agreements between government and unions, the ability of the political class to control union power fell apart in the 1978/9 “winter of discontent”.   

Underlying this was the change in the way global capitalism was working.  Containerisation was many times less labour intensive than manual dock labour, open cast coal quarrying in Colombia and Australia vastly cheaper than  deep mined coal in the UK, and manufacturing was migrating to Japan and later to the Asia Pacific region, fuelled by capital mobility and the availability there of cheap and compliant labour.  So the attempts of the union leaders to protect their own interests, their members, and the working class in general rested on a presumed political settlement where the state, labour power, and capital all needed each other equally, while in fact capital had the alternative of disconnecting the expensive resources, and reconnecting with less expensive ones elsewhere in the world.

 

Stuart Hall, using a Gramscian/Marxist analysis of the Conservative political response to the situation (Marxism Today, June 1987) “Thatcherism aimed for a reversal in ordinary common sense. The ‘commonsense' of the English people had been constructed around the notion that the last war has erected a barrier between the bad old days of the 30s and now: the welfare state had come to stay; we'd

never go back to using the criterion of the market as a measure of people's needs, the needs of society. There would always have to be some additional, incremental, institutional force -the state, representing the general interest of society - to bring to bear against, to modify, the market.”  However, once global capitalism had escaped serious control by any individual state, the UK government had little or no choice but to accede to the demands of the market.   In many ways the defining act of the Thatcher government was the defeat of the miner’s union, not merely a strike, with considerable violence on both sides of the dispute.   Who, in this conflict, legitimately represented the will of the British people?  For some, perhaps, it was the working class miners and their union leadership, but the Conservative government at this time could claim more legitimacy, as the representatives of the whole of the public. Madison (1987 pp122-321) argues that representative government, allows the representative governing elite to deal with the potential problems of faction (party) in a constructive way  that would likely be impossible in a pure democracy,  because representatives are wiser and more thoughtful than the citizens themselves might be, and that this checks the danger of tyranny of the majority.   He does seem to ignore the risk that once a party has control of the government, it may act in accordance with the interests of its supporters.   If the analysis of the international competitiveness of deep mined British coal and the ability of the global economy to reconfigure its sources of supply is sound, then no government could have protected the British mining industry.   But perhaps the impact on the miners and their communities could have been handled less confrontationally.  At the same time, large parts of the UK industrial infrastructure were being shown to be uneconomic, and a massive restructuring of the UK’s economy was underway.  Hall, S (1987) “Gramsci has give[n] us a profoundly expanded conception of what politics itself is ... We are living through the proliferation of the sites of power and antagonism in modern society” We see that government is only one of the organisations that claim to represent the people, and perhaps not the most powerful, while in the background the decision makers of the global economy represent no-one, or perhaps their shareholders. Castells (2000, p 374) writing in 1998 describes this: “global financial markets, and their networks of management, are the actual collective capitalist, the mother of all accumulations” and the mother of all financial crises, too, as we now know.

The changes I’ve described and the development of a new structural arrangement between the state, labour and capital were by no means immediate – and of course many other developments were in train at the same time.  In particular the simple labour/capital split of 19thC Marxism was far less useful as an analytical framework as it ignored the development of knowledge workers and the simultaneous creation of a large underclass excluded from society for whom work was no longer a realistic option. 

 

The 1997 election was another watershed election – Labour had clearly broken the link with the unions by the removal of Clause 4 from the constitution.  Blair (1996) writing in the Times: “we are a democratic socialist party. It says so in the new Clause Four in words I drafted and the party overwhelmingly supported.”  They had become electable because they no longer were attempting to change the economic basis to how it had been – and the 18 years of conservative rule had resulted in a vastly improved economyfor many, but simultaneously the reduction of the welfare state’s ability to provide the social necessities and safety net that the market would not provide.   In the event, while Labour possibly did their best, in the end they failed to restore the secure infrastructure that was being looked for, and merely provided – as they had in the years leading up to 1979 – a slightly more equalitarian version of the capitalism of the previous 18 years.   By breaking their link with the unions, they could represent the people, but of course were unable to change the underlying economic structure. Not that they tried.

 

During the 2010 UK election there were a number of significant issues that would have been exercising the minds of the electorate.   The dire financial situation had been ongoing for over 2 years, and while few understood exactly what had happened, or why, it was clear that somehow the global financial system had collapsed.   Simultaneously there was a further loss of trust in the political class caused partly by the expenses scandal, and partly by the fin de siècle behaviour of the Labour government, and underpinned by suspicions about corruption in other areas such as “cash for peerages”,  campaign funding, etc.   Dahl, R(2008 pp19-24)) theorises that in the real world democracy as such is approached, not actually achieved, and he calls the real world instances of democracy “polyarchy”  By polyarchy Dahl implies that there are a number of competing power sources, rather than a clear line from the electorate to the representatives . The simple idea that the government is the dominant power in the country, and that it is created by MPs who are elected by the people, is only partly true.  There are many other power sources, some external to the country – treaties, the European Union, for example; some internal to the organisation of government – while the civil service may be theoretically willing to carry out any government instruction, they often have views and interests of their own. And there are newspapers, pressure groups and on and on.   One recent example was the way the Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph, used the expenses scandal as a long running story, which diminished the salience of the financial situation. 

 

A particular concern with representative democracy is turn out.  If only just over half the electorate vote, and their vote (in the UK, for example) goes mostly to the three major parties, it’s possible to have a majority government that claims to represent all the people, but it has been elected by say 40% of the voters , who themselves are only 60% of those eligible to vote.  In such a case the mandate to govern would have come from less than a quarter of the electorate.  Not an overwhelming endorsement and perhaps insufficient if truly unpopular measures were needed.  “if people are repelled from politics, and if you were to go down to turn-outs of under 50 per cent then that would be a crisis. But we’re not there yet.” (Heffernan, R, 2008). The result of the 2010 election gave the conservatives a plurality of the seats, but not an overall majority.   The possibilities that were available to the 3 major parties were limited.  The conservatives could have formed a minority government on their own – possibly relying on the Liberal Democrats ( LibDems)for “Supply and Confidence” support in exchange for some relatively minor concessions.  Labour could have tried to form a majority by forming a coalition with the LibDems and some other minor parties, or the Conservatives could form a majority by coalition with the LibDems.  The idea of coalition government is not new, but it’s unusual in UK politics and people needed to try to understand how it would work, adapting practices from countries where it has been used more routinely.    Part of the challenge of developing a coalition in the UK was the tension between the representation that actually occurred, and what was needed to create a working government.   The party leaderships that agreed the coalition obviously had their own interests which would have differed from the bulk of the elected MPs, their own parties at large, and the voters who voted for them.  Michels (1962,  p365) “Every party organization represents an oligarchical power grounded upon a democratic basis.” And both party leaderships would have had to judge how far they could stretch their mandates, what they could give up, what they could agree, and on what they would have to agree to differ.

 

Manin, B. (1987, p352) states that “legitimate law is the result of general deliberation, not the expression of the general [averaged] will.”  To construct policy, the representatives deliberate, and the result of that deliberation is then voted on.    Similarly, the process of electing the representatives in the first place involves a general deliberation among those to be represented, with the candidates making their case to be the representative. 

By contrast, Schumpeter theorises that the collective will is created by the political elites “Human Nature in Politics being what it is, they [the elites] are able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people. What we are confronted with in the analysis of political processes is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will.” (Schumpeter, J, 1976 p263). It’s evident in the control over the political agenda exerted by the media and the political elites that the issues discussed may allow no meaningful choice to the electorate, one example being the lack of dissent among any of the three major parties to the UK’s involvement in the Afghan war.

 

 The elected MPs are a long way from being representative in the sense of containing similar numbers of various groups, with a surprisingly large number of white, middle/upper class public-school educated men compared with the public at large..  The idea of rule by an elite is a living thread through many discussions of politics and representation. Jeremy Mitchell (2008, p2) mentions that “Mosca, Michels, Pareto thought ...there was always rule by a minority”.  Schumpeter and later Dahl develop this analysis, arguing that the people select a ruling elite in free and fair elections.   It’s important to note that while the electorate are interested in probing the views of the competing elites on various matters, what is happening is a competition for the right to rule, not a competition to identify the group which espouses policies which best represent the pre-existing views of the electorate “A party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power.” Schumpeter (1976, p 283)

 

One of the ideas that came to life more than usual during the 2010 campaign was that of appropriate voting models.  The inspiration for this came from two directions. First, there were repeated analyses that indicated that a hung parliament was likely, and second the discussion of the relative percentage of national vote compared with likely outturn in number of seats.   Also, Leader debates on television increased the visibility of the LibDems in the campaign, and that enabled them to get their long standing objective of a proportional representation (PR) voting system onto the agenda.  These ideas were changed and adapted, and have surfaced as part of the coalition agreement in the form of an agreement to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system.   While this is not PR, and not what the LibDems would ideally want, it’s a significant step for the Conservatives who previous to the election preferred the existing single member plurality system.   The process of representation in a democracy depends on the electorate voting for their representatives, and the development of democracy has gradually extended the franchise.  However, this argument is about the idea that it is not just one’s immediate representative that matters, but the government that results, and that for many, perhaps most, voters it is the government, not the local representative, that matters most.   Burke (1854-6,  pp 446-8) argues that Parliament is a deliberative assembly, where an MP is not a delegate of their constituents, but their representative retaining their own views.  Sometimes this may be true, but often an MP votes in line with their party whip, representing neither their own, nor the constituency view.   The electorate are aware of this, and would therefore wish to control the composition of the government as well as their representative in the legislature.  Dahl would, no doubt, argue that this was one of the areas where there can be no perfectly democratic solution; and we adopt the best possible solution in a political way – the processes of political representation itself being as subject to political debate as any other part of politics.  Berman, D. in the  political blog 538 points out “There have...been cases where... the bias of the electoral system was so systematic that it eventually undermined the (albeit) limited legitimacy of the system in regards to its own voters, and eventually led dissenters to opt out of the political system entirely.” (Berman, D, 22/May/2010).  Low  turnout as discussed earlier is a symptom of opting out.

 

Marquand supports my view that these watershed elections are in some sense a response to the current capitalist crisis “The newly untamed capitalism of the last 30 years has ... been driven by stampeding herds of electronic gamblers. It is not only monstrously unjust, it is also unsustainable” Marquand, D. (Guardian 25/May/2010), although his view is that the response of the political elite in forming the LibDem/Conservative coalition was incorrect, and that the correct response would have been “a realignment of the mind, socialist in economics and republican in politics.” (ibid)  Maybe he would have preferred the near impossibility (post election) of a LibDem/Labour/others coalition, and his position is reminiscent of DickTuck's concession speech following his loss of the 1966 California State Senate election: "The people have spoken, the bastards."  (Gutel, R, 22/10/ 2004, National Public Radio).   Castells, writing in 1998 makes a similar point as part of his Network society thesis “The relationship between globalisation and the state...is the dominant political issue at the turn of the millennium” (Castells, M.  2000, p337).  The common ground between Stuart Hall’s Gramscian/ Marxist analysis in the 1980s, Castells in the 1990s, and Marquand’s contemporary view is that there is a powerful and unresolved tension between representative governments of states and the global economy on which we all now rely, and the recurrence of this theme over a 30 year period indicates that the idea of a lack of democratic representation in the global economy is still inspiring critical analysis.

 

We have a situation where the political structure of the organised parts of the world is based on states, while the underlying economic forces have escaped state control and become globalised. Simultaneously: identities, whether nation, group, sexual religious, or any other form of shared meaning have also detached from the state, linking across or inside state boundaries, but no longer with the presumed integration of a national culture with the state.  “...nations, independently from the state, become the sources of identity based legitimacy...” (Castells, 2000, p359)

 

In conclusion it seems that there is always a tension between what the electorate want, and what their representatives actually deliver.  The discussion above indicates that some of the distance between the two is down to the intrinsic nature of representation and social organisation. On the one hand representatives are bound to represent their constituents in the light of their own views; on the other the leadership of any organisation, in this case a political party, whether one forming a government or not, naturally takes account of its own interests in preference to those of the wider organisation.  However, at these watershed elections, the UK’s scheme for turning the electorate’s desires into votes, MPs and hence a government, delivers an arguably legitimate result.   The 1979. 1997, and 2010 elections each in their different ways  reflected the mood of the country, and the electorate’s judgement of the most likely political structure to deal with the combined crises of the underlying economy and of representational legitimacy. Indeed, one benefit of the 2010 coalition is that the combined percentage vote (of those voting!) for both parties was well over 50%, giving additional legitimacy to the probable unpalatable choices ahead.  One might go further, and wonder whether they have made the right choice, but that way dictatorship lies.  However representative the government of the UK might be of the UK electorate, it seems that many of the economic forces that shape our world have escaped state control – so the people have no real democratic control over the global economy.  That remains a challenge for the future development of politics in the UK and worldwide.

(Actual words 4138)

References/Bibliography

 

Berman, D. (22/May/2010) 538 http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/  accessed 23/5/2010

 

 Blair, T. (1996) October 2, 1996, Wednesday, The Times, Times Newspapers Limited, Accessed via Nexis 28/May/2010

 

Burke, E. (1854-56 [1774]) 'Speech to the electors of Bristol', Works, 3 November, vol. 1, pp. 446-8.

 

Castells, M (2000) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 3: End of Millennium (2^nd ed), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing

Dahl, R (2008) “Interview with Robert Dahl”, in DD306 Living Political ideas Transcripts: Room 1, UK, The Open University

Gutel, R (2004): National Public Radio (NPR) October 22, 2004 Friday show: Morning Edition 11:00 AM EST NPR Accessed via Nexis 28/May/2010

Hall, S (June 1987) in Marxism Today

http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/87_06_16.pdf

Accessed 27/May/2010

Heffernan, R (2008) in The lives of ideas: Representation, in DD 306 Living Political ideas Room 1 Review Week http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=255175&extra=transcript_id3048304721 accessed 30/May/2010

Held, D (2008) “Information Society” in DD306 Living Political ideas Transcripts: Room 1, UK, The Open University

Madison, J. (1987 [1788]) 'The utility of the union as a safeguard against domestic faction and insurrection', The Federalist Papers, No. 10, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, pp. 122-321.

Manin, B. (1987) 'On legitimacy and political deliberation', Political Theory, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 352-9.

Marr, A. 2007 “History of Modern Britain” Episode 3. Paradise Lost, 1964 – 1979, BBC

Marquand, D. (2008) “Information Society” in DD306 Living Political ideas Transcripts: Room 1, UK, The Open University

Marquand, D. (25 May 2010) “The new politics needs a realignment of the mind. It needs Caroline Lucas” Guardian  http://tinyurl.com/2dwlyap accessed 31/May/2010

Michels, R. (1962) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, New York, The Free Press, pp. 70-1 and 365.

Mitchell, J. (2008) in The lives of ideas: Representation, in DD 306 Living Political ideas Room 1 Review Week  http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=255175&extra=transcript_id3048304721 accessed 30/May/2010

Schumpeter, J.A. (1976 [1943]) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 260-3, 269-75 and 282-3.

Wilson, A & Russell, J, 09 Feb 2010, “Kraft to close Cadbury plant it offered to keep open” Daily Telegraph, http://tinyurl.com/yg2ppqq accessed 31/May/2010

 

 

 

 

 

Individual & Social

How does an analysis of the wider social context help us understand individual actions more fully? 

  (words 1800)

 

I plan to use the concept of security and how the wider social context mediates the individual’s behaviour by linking it to their perception of risk and their desire to maintain ontological security.  Further, I will relate ontological security in individuals to their attachments, both to other individuals and to the social context, and how these feelings mediate conduct..

 

Social scientists argue that individuals are created by the social context in which they exist, and by the practices that surround them.  “the passport {illustrates] how a[n]...individual is surrounded by social factors [and] a range of material practices” (DD308/Book1/p9).  DD308/Book1/( p7 et seq) goes on to describe how the combination of the procedures used at airports translates individuals into their documentary representation, the passport, and into safe or unsafe persons.  The social context creates the individual as one who may, or not, cross the state’s security frontier.  Simultaneously it creates ontological insecurity in the individual because of their unfamiliarity with and lack of control over these practices, which may mean that they are unable to proceed with their plans – or even may be perhaps  arrested or subject to further investigation.

Perhaps the most primitive social world is the one created between mother (or primary carer) and baby in the earliest years of life.  Winnicot (cited in DD308/Book 1/ p96) identifies this social world as where primary ontological security is created:  ‘Holding...is a capacity to identify to know wha the baby is feeling like.....The result is a continuity of existence.. a sense of self” (Winnicot, cited in DD308/Book 1/ p97) or ontological security. This doesn’t always happen effectively. Where it happens well, the experience has translated the infant from one “on the brink of unthinkable anxiety” (Winnicot, cited in DD308/Book 1/ p95) to someone whose “trust in their own ontological security enables them to develop a sense of presence in the world”. (Laing, cited in DD308/Book 1/ p 94); however, when the holding and attachment process is sub-optimal, the individual will not feel ontologically secure as a general life position.

This need for “holding” applies not only to mother/baby interactions, but to intimate partners and parent/child interactions.    This need to maintain attachment is a crucial constraint in the available conduct for individuals in the social/domestic context; conduct that would break their attachments could feel dangerously insecure.  This has two effects.  One is that individuals change roles and move between social worlds, if all goes well, managing and maintaining their mutual attachment needs.  The other is the need to develop a routine and meta-routines,  negotiation processes that underpin the routines as the social context changes.  These processes help to maintain the individuals in these domestic settings in a state of ontological security.

 

Ontological security is simply the confidence that an individual has a self that truly exists. Giddens (cited in DD308/Book 1/ p94) defines it as “a sense of continuity and order in events...”  DD308/Book 1/ p95 argues similarly that “a framework of routine cultivates a sense of ‘being’” i.e. ontological security. For an individual it is created and maintained through their conduct in the social context they are in.  Mediation is the translation of the understanding of situations from one state of being (or ontology) to another, and therefore the individual’s perception of a particular situation is not objective, but is created in the space between the individual and the social context.  Winnicot (in DD308/Book1/p95) characterised the development of basic trust as developing in a potential space between infant and mother, and there is a clear analogy here between the infant/ mother relationship, and the individual/social interaction.   Winnicott (2010)  also implies that the transition to a healthy relationship with one’s social context may be mediated in early life by a “transitional object”, such as a soft toy, which acts as a replacement for the absent primary carer.  Thus adult ontological security is related to “developments in early life” (DD308, Book1, p95) in a structural way, as well has having been internalised.

 

Jordan (in DD308/Book1/ p18 et seq) describes how the soil (matter) in his allotment was initially a source of ontological security; was then mediated via testing into a source of insecurity, changing his conduct; and then was mediated back into an allegedly safe state. However, although nothing had physically changed, the translation of the allotment soil from uncontested safety and even a source of goodness, to poisonous, and back to safe, but on a very particular definition of safety, mediated his understanding of the risk that he faced by eating vegetables grown there, such that he could only maintain his ontological security by changing his conduct to no longer grow and eat such vegetables.

 

Callon & Latour (in DD308/Book 1/ p24 et seq) define macro-actors as equivalent in terms of agency to individuals, but considerably more powerful.  Here we observe several macro actors mediating the understanding of  the safety of the matter (soil) in the allotment. It changed status when the London Borough of Hackney (LBH) – a macro actor – decided to test the soil.  This was not entirely an LBH decision – perhaps the timing was, but there was little choice about carrying the tests out at all, as they were constrained by a more powerful macro actor, the UK government, which had passed laws that they had to do the testing. The testing translated the soil in the allotment from unexamined to poisonous through the mediation of the testing, and the results were passed to the allotment association (another macro-actor) via LBH.  The wider social context  included, among others, the UK government, LBH, those designing the test and the allotment society.  By publishing these test results, LBH mediated the allotment holders themselves, translating them into individuals who could no longer securely eat their allotment vegetables: conduct that would have been easy before the test result.

 

 Later, the soil was retested in a different way, which led to a translation of vegetables grown in the soil to arguably safe to eat again. But no test could mediate it back to untested and unconsidered.  

The story ends with the official status of the soil being safe, but the allotment holder deciding that they would no longer grow food there, because their ontological security would be compromised by eating food grown on soil that could be mediated into poisonous.   It seems likely that the allotment holder’s ontological security was more deeply shaken than this; it would perhaps be no longer possible for his conduct to include an unquestioning acceptance of any area of soil.   There may even be analogies here between the blissful, unthinking attachment between mother and baby, and the boundary setting that takes place as the two psychologically separate – the allotment holder is no longer at one with Mother Earth.  The soil – matter – in this social world had moved from an unalloyed good to potentially threatening, and therefore creating a need for assessment, rather than secure attachment.

 

In the complex interplay between individuals and social contexts discussed in the intimate social setting of home life routines discussed in DD308/Book 1(pp85-93) , we see how the individual self perception, the meaning to themselves and to others of who they actually are, changes as the situations change through the day.  Activities are largely modulated by clock time; as time progresses the individuals change roles as different social contexts become more or less important.   There are several instances of people being constrained by the social context set by the child’s school. Rose (DD308/Book1/p87) picks the children up from school or the childminder at various times or from school on her working days.  For this to work smoothly, it’s implicit that she negotiates with the childminder to ensure that all are aware of how the routine is expected to unfold.   Ronald, Rose’s partner, takes the children to school in the morning, and takes over homework duty while Rose cooks dinner. The adults, the childminder, the children, school and work contexts are all interwoven, and the individuals are simultaneously constrained by the particular social contexts, and managing them. In particular the adults are translated between domestic and work roles, partly mediated by their journeys to and from their work locations.  There are similar interactions between domestic roles and school demands on the children and parents described for the Wells family.   (DD308/Book1/p89 et seq)

We see a set of routines, taking the children to and from school, childminder, adults going to work, interacting with outsiders, workmates and customers, sleeping, watching television, which are constrained by the wider social context outside the family; and these routines are in continual flux and negotiation within the family too,  so part of the ontological security being created and maintained here is the confidence in the reliability of others not only to deliver on their commitments, whether explicit or implicit, but to negotiate and advise as appropriate when things need to change. “a framework of routine cultivates a sense of being that is separate from non-being (DD308/Book1/p95).  This secure routine, together with the meta routines of negotiation, and the stability of the surrounding social contexts create a sense of basic trust  ...”a defensive carapace [which}offers a conviction of security regardless of its reality”. (DD308/Book1/p95)

 

The individuals studied in detail in DaSilva’s study cited in DD308/Book1(pp85-93)  had become particular kinds of individuals “parents” because once they were in the context where they had childcare and work responsibilities, their conduct becomes constrained by a whole range of social contexts, some with short term effects : a television programme that they may want to watch perhaps, or very long term : examples might be commitment to a life partner in the context of marriage, or a mortgage contract on a house; and these long term associations work like Callon & Latour’s (in DD308/Book1/p24) black boxes: “...which contain[s] that which no longer needs to be reconsidered.” These associations become part of the social context for the individuals creating them.

 

The examples outlined above of the state boundary processes, the allotment and the safety of the soil, and the domestic family routines illustrate Barnes argument(in DD308/Book1/p44).  “...that the individual and the social should not be separated but need to be analysed together”.

 

Individuals are not free agents who can act as they choose, even within constraints, but the kind of individuals they can possibly be is defined by the social context.  Within any particular social context, individuals have a range of behaviours – for example the allotment holder could in principle always decide whether to harvest and eat vegetables grown on his allotment, although the discomfort associated with that decision would vary with the social context. We also see in the home routines how the same individual moves smoothly between multiple roles as different social contexts change importance.   They spend time not only operating the routine, but negotiating what the routine should be and how and when it should change, thus also setting the social context.  So individuals both create the social world they are in, and are constrained by it: the individual and the social context are interwoven.

 

(Actual words) 1901

 

 

 

 

References/Bibliography

 

The Open University (2008) DD308 Making Social Worlds, Book 1, ‘Security: Sociology and Social Worlds’, Manchester, Manchester University Press

 

Winnicott, D. (2010) ‘The Transition Object’, Changing Minds.org, http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/transition_object.htm (Accessed 5 Dec  2010).