Gandelsman Never Fires on a Single Cylinder

Violinist Johnny Gandelsman (photograph by Shervin Lainez, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

There is much to be said for how, at the launch of the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Sanctuary Series at the beginning of this month, bass-baritone Dashon Burton turned a problematic situation (recent recovery from a non-COVID related illness) into a memorable, albeit foreshortened, one. Such prevailing over adversity was so absent during the second Sanctuary Series program, a solo recital by violinist Johnny Gandelsman, that one could not help but wonder if his “secret mission” had been to create adversity. While his technical skills were, for the most part, straightforward, it was hard to avoid wondering whether his approach to performance had been calculated to provoke, if not offend, his audience. (To be fair, from my vantage point in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, I saw only one member of the audience make a discreet exit, which took place before Gandelsman’s program had hit its halfway mark.)

Gandelsman used most of that program to showcase six new works he commissioned through his This Is America project. One of those pieces, “O,” composed by Clarice Assad, which was jointly commissioned by Gandelsman and SFP, was given its world premiere performance. Sadly, to get to “O” the listener had to negotiate compositions by Conrad Tao (“Stones”), Ebun Oguntola (“Reflections”), and Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), the first two of which were given rambling (and often inchoate) introductory recorded accounts by the composers.

In other words, by the time Gandelsman turned his attention to “O,” mind had pretty much lost the capacity to tease signal out of noise. A similar fate befell the following offering, “A través del manto Luminoso” (through the luminous mantle) by Angélica Negrón. Only the foot-stomping fiddling of “New to the Session” by Rhiannon Giddens provided a comfort zone to wrap up the evening’s ordeal.

At the other extreme, Gandelsman warmed up his provocations with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ironically, he selected his own transcription of the BWV 1009 solo cello suite. (Spoiler alert: Matt Haimovitz will play this music on the cello one week from this evening at the final Sanctuary Series concert.) Gandelsman’s attention seemed to be an intense focus on technical challenges. It does not seem to have occurred to him that, following the Prelude, all the movements are named after dance forms; and, as Elizabeth Blumenstock observed at a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Bach really knew his dances. For Gandelsman the music seemed to be little more than a string of notes, one of which deliberately enabled a segue from one movement to its successor without the slightest pause.

As the old joke goes: Gandelsman played Bach last night, and Bach lost!

Sanctuary Series to Continue with Solo Violin

Violinist Johnny Gandelsman (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

The second of next month’s three Sanctuary Series concerts presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) will be a solo violin recital by Johnny Gandelsman. Gandelsman is a founding member of the Brooklyn Rider string quartet and a former member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Perhaps as a nod to Ma, he will begin his recital with a violin transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1009 suite for solo cello in C major.

The remainder of the program will be devoted to new works commissioned through Gandelsman’s This Is America project, conceived to celebrate our country’s rich cultural tapestry and myriad perspectives.

That project will include the world premiere of “O,” composed by Clarice Assad on a joint commission shared by This Is America with SFP. The other composers on the program that have contributed to This Is America are as follows (in “order of appearance”):

• Conrad Tao: Stones
• Ebun Oguntola: Reflections
• Tyshawn Sorey: For Courtney Bryan
• Angélica Negrón: A través del manto Luminoso
• Rhiannon Giddens: New to the Season

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 18. The venue will again be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. The eastbound Geary Bus (number 38) stops within a block of the church after it leaves Geary Boulevard to proceed along O’Farrell. There are also nearby stops for buses on Van Ness Avenue.

Ticket prices are $60 for the main floor and $45 for the balcony. All seating will be general admission. All tickets may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. As available, single tickets will be sold at the door with a 50% discount for students and a 20% discount for seniors. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

Stanford Live Featuring Kronos Film

Kronos Quartet members (David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, and Sunny Yang) on the stage of the Bing Concert Hall (screen shot of the YouTube Web page discussed in this article)

Earlier this month a film was made of Testimony, a full-length concert by the Kronos Quartet, which took place in the Bing Concert Hall on the Stanford University Campus. The program was planned as a musical reflection on the immediate impact of this moment in our nation’s history. The selections began with a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” inspired by the performance of the national anthem given by Jimi Hendrix as one of the high points of the 1969 Woodstock music festival. Other selections included Rhiannon Giddens’ “At the Purchaser’s Option,”  Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” Joan Baez’ “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” given a vocal rendition by Meklit Hadero, and other compositions. Each musical offering will be paired with spoken word poetry by the young Bay Area poets Anouk Yeh, Cecelia “CeCe” Jordan, Jarvis Subia, Zouhair Mussa, and Darnell “DeeSoul” Carson.

The entire film, which is a little more than 40 minutes in duration, has been uploaded by Stanford Live Presents to a YouTube Web page. It will be available for viewing free of charge until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, November 2. After that, viewing will be available to all Stanford students and to Stanford Live members donating at least $100. However, the performance of “The President Sang Amazing Grace” will still be available for viewing at no charge at an alternative YouTube Web page.

I'll Believe It When I See It

Of course it is encouraging to open up the Insight section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle and find a sentence like the following:

The much-vaunted Republican pledge not to raise any taxes is crumbling.

The only problem is that the author of this sentence is Robert Reich.  It is not that I dislike Reich.  To the contrary, I find him to be one of the most reasoned voices trying to address the nature of an economic crisis that prevails no matter how many institutions try to declare its demise.

However, that is precisely the source of my difficulty.  Reich has never really come to grips with the fact that rationality cannot stand up to assault from those who always place domination ahead of signification.  Invoking Max Weber, I recently wrote than “politics is ultimately all about power and who gets to exercise how much of it;”  and anything that politicians do ultimately comes down to matters of power, regardless of what does or does not make sense through even the most elementary forms of logical reasoning.  Indeed, as I observed the in the context of the above quote, the most accessible model for understanding Weber may be the Peanuts character Lucy van Pelt, who once delivered the now classic line:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

The Republicans may be on the ropes right now;  but, like Rocky Balboa, they may still be able to recover enough strength to come out swinging.  Until the rich actually start paying something like a fair share in the interest of getting this country back on a more secure fiscal standing, it is hard for me to have much confidence in any forecasting based solely on principles of rationality.

Social Theory and Semantics

The first thing that struck me about “A New Approach to the Holocaust,” Timothy Snyder’s latest piece for The New York Review, was his attention to a subtlety of the German language.  He observed that the noun Politik (incorporated in the compound Judenpolitik) means both “politics” and “policy.”  This reflects an etymology that can also be found in English usage.  Both words can be traced back to πόλις, the Ancient Greek word that gets translated as “city” or “state.”

What strikes me is that both “politics” and “policy” are basically concerned with the affairs of a centralized social body of governance captured by words like “city” or “state.”  However, in the terminology of Anthony Giddens, the former refers to manners of domination, particularly through the control of resources, while the latter has to do with the legitimation of normative behavior.  While Giddens saw these as independent dimensions of interaction, our own history has at least one example of their confluence for less than salient means, that being the ways in which slave-based plantation life amounted to the legitimation of a particular structure of domination (by slaveholders).  In many ways the rise of the Nazis involved a similar legitimation of domination, but the target of that domination shifted from the black slaves of the South to the Jews of Europe.  This confluence makes for a disquieting point of view for approaching both the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement.

The Failure of Political Processes as we Know Them

David Cole has a relatively short commentary piece in the latest issue of The New York Review.  The title is “Guantánamo:  The New challenge to Obama.”  It is a disturbing piece, as is clear from its sixth paragraph:

A week before bin Laden’s death, the national news was dominated by WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of US intelligence assessments of the alleged risks posed by each of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Lost in the focus on WikiLeaks, however, was an even more revealing story in The Washington Post, detailing how President Obama has thus far failed to close Guantánamo. That story portrayed a president who at virtually every critical stage chose not to fight for what he said he believed in, and instead bowed to political pressure that left America’s values and safety compromised. If he is to build on his victory in killing bin Laden, President Obama needs to stand firm on Guantánamo and oppose Congress’s short-sighted and dangerous proposals.

Basically, this is an unpleasant corollary to the proposition I tried to pursue on Friday, “that peace in the Middle East is too serious to be entrusted to political leaders.”  That proposition was further reinforced this weekend by a polemical speech given by Michael Scheuer, former head of the unit following Osama bin Laden at the CIA, given at the Hay Festival and reported in the London Telegraph (which sponsors the Festival).

The bottom line is that, whether it has to do with issues of signification, through which we might have understood enough about bin Laden to avert the 9/11 catastrophe, or issues of legitimation, according to which what Barack Obama has called “our most cherished values” are being annihilated under our very eyes in the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, our country has, as a matter of both domestic and foreign policy, relegated all decision making to the priorities of resource allocation maintained by political power.  Today is supposed to be the day we remember those who died in battle, but we must also remember the value system strong enough to motivate a commitment to our armed forces.  We have come to a point at which none of the three branches of our government seems committed to causes worth dying for, those causes that used to be fundamental to our sense of national pride.  Both Cole and Scheuer have been perceptive enough to speak out on this problem, but does anyone have the necessary combination of acuity of perception and strength of will to do anything about it?

IMF Priorities

While the media gear up for reporting on how Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) will be exchanging a luxury suite at the Times Square Sofitel for more confined quarters on Rikers Island, BBC News has begun speculations on who will take over as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  They consider ten likely candidates;  but, while they frame the decision in terms of whether the new Managing Director will be based in Europe or in a developing nation, my guess is that all the names floated by the BBC have one thing in common.  They all would be right at home rubbing all the right shoulders whenever the rich and mighty of the World Economic Forum convene.

This seems to be a good time to revisit a comment made by Manfred Max-Neef, author of Outside Looking In:  Experiences in Barefoot Economics, when he was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in November of 2010:

Economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty.

I am sure that there is no shortage of well-educated and intellectually keen economists out there;  but perhaps this is a good time for the IMF to reflect on what it wants its priorities to be.  My guess is that current thinking is that the highest priority is for every country in the world to achieve a respectable rate of economic growth.  Max-Neef’s point, however, is that such a priority says nothing about the existence and proliferation of poverty.  Only Muhammad Yunus has managed to achieve a high profile in the news through his efforts to address the problem of poverty (regardless of how successful those efforts have been);  and he has been scrupulously ignored by both the World Economic Forum and G20 meetings.

One of the reasons that DSK may be in the soup that currently engulfs him is that, however skilled he may have been in addressing problems of signification posed by economic models, his personal life was ruled by priorities of domination (drawing upon the terminology of Anthony Giddens to emphasize the distinction).  Whether or not the developing world is “recognized” through a representative in charge of the IMF, the Fund will still have an agenda that reflects such priorities of domination, specifically domination over the poor.  Since Yunus has just been pushed out of the very job that he created, a shift in IMF priorities might be a situation advantageous for an innovative thinker out of work, not to mention all those people around the world who remain hopelessly (and helplessly) mired in poverty.

From Benjamin to Marx

One nice thing about returning to the writings of Walter Benjamin for their polemic value is that Benjamin was also good for reviving my interest in the writings of Karl Marx;  and, as I have observed frequently (if not tediously), Marx provides good source material for considering the nature of work in the world the Internet has made.  This is particularly the case in his “Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Workers’ Party,” better known as the “Critique of the Gotha Programme.”  This text is best known for its “From each according to his abilities” slogan;  but there is far more to the entire document.

Most important is that the title itself is a good piece of truth-in-advertising.  Marx works his way through the text of the Programme, taking it apart, often at the phrase-by-phrase level, and pointing out its inconsistencies (if not delusions).  The first “victim” of this process is a premise that we have heard early and often from many Internet evangelists:

Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture …

Marx’ response, written at the end of the nineteenth century, could just as easily have been written today:

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labour;  since precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labour must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour.  He can work only with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Using this as a point of departure, Anthony Giddens would subsequently develop a model of a social system as an organization of rules and resources in which domination is exercised primarily through the control of resources.  From this point of view, Marx’ invocation of the concept of slavery is not a mere rhetorical turn to attract attention but a recognition that enslavement is an optimal agency for ensuring domination.  Thus, while the Bush Administration may have propagated the myth of war in the interest of spreading democracy, the real war is being waged against the poor;  and it is being waged on a global scale.  Ironically, the power of the Internet to enable such domination is also the power to bring education to the poor;  and, as Fareed Zakaria observed about conditions in Egypt, the power of knowledge can be the power to rebel.  Thus, the only thing we can say with certainty about the War Against the Poor is that it is far from over with no sign of either side prevailing.

Rational Government?

Elizabeth Drew had a post ready for NYRBlog almost as soon as an agreement on the budget had been reached to prevent the shutdown of the United States Government.  As usual, she did an excellent job in providing a “post-game” analysis, with both recent and historical context to put the week’s antics in their proper perspective.  I find it ironic that Donald Trump seems to have taken the closure of these follies as a cue to start testing the waters for his own run for the Presidency, and I can only imagine that Drew is warming up her fingers for her next assault on her keyboard.

Nevertheless, that irony is also a reflection of one of the key assertions in Drew’s Friday post.  Reviewing the who production of political theater over the budget, she concludes that it raises the question of “whether in the current political circumstances, this country can be governed in any rational way.”  That appeal to rationality strikes me as a bit naïve, coming from someone with so much experience in watching politicians at work.  One would have thought that Drew would have recognized Max Weber’s precept that politics is ultimately all about power and who gets to exercise how much of it.  Furthermore, issues of power are situated along the “dimension of domination” in Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, which Giddens identified as “orthogonal” (my word, not his) to the dimension of “signification,” along which we engage rational thinking to make sense of the world.  To play with words a bit, there may be a rationale behind actions taken over matters of power;  but the motives behind those actions need not necessarily be rational!

Even our Founding Fathers realized that the new country that had just emerged would not (and probably could not) be “governed in any rational way.”  This is why separation of powers and the need for checks and balances played such a significant role in the Constitution that was drafted.  It was also why “selling” those concepts was a major “selling point” in The Federalist, those papers published and circulated to encourage the ratification of that Constitution by all thirteen newly-formed states.  Even Peanuts recognized the inadequacy of rationality in the face of power.  In the words of Lucy van Pelt:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

Twitter Diplomacy

I am trying to figure out whether or not there was irony behind Kim Ghattas, of the Washington Bureau for BBC News, deciding to file a story about Twitter on the Fourth of July. After all, in our new diet-conscious culture, Twitter may now be more American than hot dogs and apple pie; and it has definitely invaded the playing fields of our national pastime. (In spite of the advertising jingle that once linked these three themes, it is probably now irrelevant whether or not the Chevrolet is now "Twitter-friendly.") Indeed, the extent to which Twitter defines American culture was actually the theme of Ghattas' piece, because she pursued a consequence than many would not have expected:

If you want to know where Hillary Clinton is today, no need to watch the evening news or read the papers.

The US State Department's official Twitter account, @statedept, will keep you informed with timely tweets.

It will tell you what country she's in (Poland), what she's up to (signing a missile defence agreement), and who she's been speaking to (former Australian PM Kevin Rudd, by telephone).

Still want to know more?

You can check out the State Department's blog, sign up to its Facebook page, and watch behind-the-scenes videos.

Maybe you'd like to check out the interactive travel map, or follow the tweets of the various US embassies...

You get the picture. The department has embraced social media as a tool for diplomacy for the 21st century, with the strong backing of the Secretary of State herself.

Yes, Kim, I get the picture. As a matter of fact, I got it last March when your radio program, The Interview, invited Evan Williams, co-founder to Twitter, as a guest; and he used your bully pulpit to declare:

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

When Williams delivered that punch line, he scared the bejesus (yes, Kim, your own country's Shorter Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that word, albeit as an interjection rather than as the noun that many of us on this side of the pond engage) out of me, enough for me to vent my fears in an extended blog post. Today's story, however, had me thinking twice about my fears, because it included its own account of some unanticipated consequences:

Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton's senior advisor for technology, and Jared Cohen, from the office of policy planning, last month led a delegation of Silicon valley companies to Syria - one of only four countries still listed by the US as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The visit was billed as an opportunity to engage with Damascus on a different level and attempt to introduce into an authoritarian country new technologies that could help its people connect further with the outside word.

But when Cohen sent a tweet to share his amazement about having a great "frappuccino" in Syria, it raised a few eyebrows and questions back in Washington.

The frivolity of the tweet made some wonder whether this was the right tone to strike in a diplomatic conversation with a country that has not had an American ambassador since 2005.

There was also a tweet about a challenge to a cake-eating contest with a Syrian minister.

The ensuing controversy over that frivolity subsequently led to a structural change in State Department policy:

The State Department issued rules and guidelines about the use of social media only two weeks ago. For now anyone in the building can tweet about their work; the tweets are not monitored systematically but members of staff are urged to use social media "intelligently", according to PJ Crowley.

"We're still learning how to apply these rules individually and collectively, and our policy will evolve," Mr Crowley said.

As a comparison, the British Foreign Office and embassies have official Twitter accounts as institutions. Individual British diplomats do not tweet about work.

(I hope Anthony Giddens has been following this, since this whole episode is providing data to support his theory of structuration.) Still, there is a problem with that adverb "intelligently," because any motivated action can not be deemed intelligent strictly on the basis of the act itself. The "complex" of the act and the motive behind the act need to be evaluated as a single entity; and this is where the question of frivolity comes into the picture.

Ghattas used the adjective "delicate" to describe the mission to Syria during which the allegedly frivolous tweets were transmitted. This adjective tends to be diplomacy-speak for a tentative visit to a country usually taken to be in opposition to American interests, if not downright hostile. Now in the history of diplomacy it has long been the case that one deals with such opposition through the rhetoric of demonization: It plays well at home; and, if played properly, it can intimidate the other country. (On this particular day it is important to recognize that this rhetoric of demonization plays a major role in the text of the Declaration of Independence. See how appropriate your timing was, Kim?) From this point of view, tweets about frappuccinos and cake-eating contests tend to undermine this rhetorical strategy, humanizing the opposition, rather than demonizing it; and my guess is that Cohen had no motive other than to declare that, while being a stranger in a strange land, he was encountering "folks just like the rest of us." Remember that, as I cited yesterday, without that common foundation of humanity, any documents arising from a diplomatic encounter would be, for all intents and purposes, unintelligible.

This is where we come back to that question of acting "intelligently." Diplomacy has always been a (if not the) "great game." Like it or not, social software is changing the rules of that game, exactly as the theory of structuration predicts that such rules get changed. What, then, are we to do with the "old rules?" One answer may actually come from William S. Gilbert, who wrote that, during the Napoleonic Wars, the "House of Peers … Did nothing in particular,/And did it very well." Structuration theory explains that we do not change the rules; they change as a result of the motivated actions that occurring (and not just our own). Our responsibility is to be aware of change, rather than to impose it. This is not to say that State Department rules and guidelines may be counterproductive. They can actually be very productive, but only if they reflect that awareness of change taking place, rather than a resistance to it. If we wish to advance the practices of diplomacy, we should reserve the rhetoric of demonization for that counterproductive spirit of resistance, rather than for other countries that do not agree with us on all matters!

Confusion about Reproduction

No, this is not going to be a provocative position statement about birth control, although it may well be provocative and it deals with theories about the social world. I found myself revisiting my copy of The Constitution of Society by Anthony Giddens this morning. I discovered that I had underlined the following passage:

Rather than becoming preoccupied with epistemological disputes and with the question of whether or not anything like ‘epistemology’ in its time-honoured sense can be formulated at all, those working in social theory, I suggest, should be concerned first and foremost with reworking conceptions of human being and human doing, social reproduction and social transformation.

While I support Giddens' skepticism about epistemology, I realized that I also worry about some of his particular word choices (which, of course, have to do with the epistemology of his own acts of expression). I first read the book when that phrase "social reproduction" was very much in fashion. Many regarded it as a lens for viewing the "knowledge management" problem: When one of your best experts retires, how do you "reproduce the knowledge" behind his/her expertise? When your sales office in San Diego consistently turns in the best numbers, how to you "reproduce the knowledge" behind their success in your other divisions? The reductio ad absurdum was probably a question no longer asked because of the vagaries of economic conditions: How do you "reproduce Silicon Valley" in other geographical settings?

The fallacy behind the word "reproduction" is the connotation of "copying." If something works, make lots of copies and distribute them throughout the world. Even in biology there remains reckless talk about clones, as if the development of the individual depended entirely on heredity to the exclusion of environment. Never mind that the fallacy of the identical copy has been with us (at least) since Heraclitus, we are as obsessed with the perfect copy as alchemists were with their philosopher's stone. Ultimately, that fallacy has supported our efforts to model living systems (including social systems) on a foundation of what pioneering cyberneticist Ross Ashby called "the determinate machine."

The one escape from such fallacious reasoning is provided by our language. Our noun phrases may be able to support thinking in terms of static couplings of objects and their attributes, but our verb grammar has always been far more elusive. This is why I recently celebrated Lydia Davis' use of the future perfect infinitive, describing such constructs as "products of prior generations trying to come to grips with the complexity of their own thoughts in such a way that others could effectively understand those thoughts." Determinate machine-based descriptions are constrained to descriptive language about state; and the language of any dynamic properties is reduced to accounting for what happens in transitions between states. This presumes a latter-day philosopher's stone that will eventually provide us with all the state variables we need and a fine enough division of temporal intervals that any description of transitions will be secondary, if not even less significant.

However, will that utopian state description capture the semantics of the Lydia Davis sentence that provoked my celebrating the future perfect infinitive?

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

For that matter, will our capacity for state description allow us to represent the second measure of Ludwig van Beethoven's third ("Eroica") symphony as something more than a copy of the first measure "displaced along the time axis?" (I have to credit David Lewin for taking on this latter question with an approach that continues to fascinate me while still leaving me wondering if it would have any impact on the communication that takes place between conductor and orchestra when this symphony is rehearsed or performed.) Why should we continue to go boldly into more and more refined efforts to describe state for the sake of abstracting away all of the complexities of how we act when we have a verb grammar that can take on those complexities?

Perhaps the real problem is that we have embraced a theory of logic that is grounded on a language restricted to noun phrases. From this we then deduce that what cannot be expressed through that language cannot be "logical." However, we may do better to put aside our study of Bertrand Russell (who saw logic as the necessary opposition to mysticism) and turn again to that sentence in Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn: "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood." The order in the "blooming, buzzing confusion" described in Chapter XIII of William James' The Principles of Psychology may reveal itself better through the language used by Miller and Davis than through even the most sophisticated formula in one of Russell's logical calculi. This is the approach that Kenneth Burke advocated in his dramatistic approach to human behavior, and it is likely to be the most effective strategy for exercising the expressiveness of verb grammar to its fullest capacity.

Laura Flanders' Armistice Metaphor

As I continue to read each piece of economic news as if it were a dispatch from the front lines of the War Against the Poor, whose objective seems to be the banishment of those below the poverty line from the virtual world of financial practices in which "real world" concepts of value need not interfere with articles of faith based on mathematical models, I took some comfort in seeing that Laura Flanders used The Notion blog on the Web site for The Nation to pursue this metaphor in her own way. Her post this morning was entitled "No Armistice In War on Poor;" and it was clear that she was using Armistice Day as a point of departure. Here is her opening paragraph:

Armistice Day reminds us that when wars end, the winners and losers are supposed to make peace. For the first time, in 2009, leaders of World War II enemies, Germany and France, commemorated the date together as a sign of new mutual respect. But this week also marked the ten-year anniversary of a different kind of war -- a war on Americans' assets and the poor. Ten years later, while the winners and losers are obvious, there's no armistice in sight.

Unfortunately, this concept of armistice, at least as Flanders has conceived it, is a relatively recent one. Peace was not made with the "losers" of the Trojan War. Those who were not slaughtered were enslaved, and we have Euripides to remind of the full extent of humiliation associated with that slavery. While the motivation for war may have been a matter of controlling resources, the "winners" of that control maintained it through the strongest exercise of domination. Winning was not the only thing; one also had to keep a secure hold on one's victory.

This particular view of the nature of war is far from outmoded, so Flanders will not find an armistice in the War Against the Poor because there is no need for one. As her post observes, after the initial setbacks of the economic crisis, the rich are regaining control of their resources, particularly the virtual ones through which they maintain their power. It is, as Flanders observes, "obvious" that they are the winners; and their domination is so secure that there is no need for armistice. Still, the question remains as to why this victory was so important. Was the War Against the Poor nothing more than, as I put is a little over a year ago, "a fight to 'control all the marbles?'"

One theme I have considered since I first invoked the war metaphor is that, as was the case in the Trojan War, this was a matter of domination insured through enslavement. The technology through which man could control nature was now engaged to enable man to control his fellow man. This then brings us back to yesterday's unpleasant theme and its relation to Euripides' account of the aftermath of the Trojan War. Control is not enough; control must be exercised through humiliation. Not only must the "losers" be dominated; but also they must be (in yesterday's language) ravaged to make sure they are "kept in their place." Victory is not only about control but also about the pornographic thrills that can come with the exercise of that control.

The irony is that, back in the eighteenth century, the emergence of capitalism was tightly coupled with the origins of humanistic thinking. As Arthur Loesser put it in his social history, Men, Women and Pianos, "a wealthy, educated, public-spirited cotton manufacturer could rightfully tell himself that he was a better man than the gracefully mannered ne’er-do-well son of an impoverished baron." Nobility could no longer control by rank when manufacturers and merchants controlled resources that the nobles needed. This spirit of humanism culminated in the words of Friedrich Schiller's "An die Freude" in 1785 (later set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven) which, as its Wikipedia entry put it, celebrated "the ideal of unity and brotherhood of all mankind."

It took less than a century for that ideal to lapse into a hollow platitude, but when did the rich discover that the poor could be viewed as a source of pornographic titillation? This is a question that demands further research. I suspect that Charles Dickens was one of the first to bring attention to this dark side of wealth and power, and it is clear that his influences are still with us. Could it be that he started the trend because he was able to apply his literary skills to his own life experiences? Where does that now leave us as readers and observers? Shall we continue to let Arthur Rimbaud's "savage parade" of pornographic indulgences pass us by; or have we the will to recover that spirit of humanism that once tried to heal the social divisions of the eighteenth century?

Two Leaders and Three Followers?

I have used my Examiner.com site to provide a more "bread-and-butter" review of yesterday's recital by the Prazak String Quartet and Menahem Pressler at Herbst Theatre; but, beyond that bread and butter were some interesting aspects of the nature of the performance. In my studies of chamber music performance practices, I have found considerable discussion of the question of who is in charge. Is chamber music truly "communal;" or is some form of Giddens-like domination necessary for the integrity of the performance? In the Beaux Arts Trio it always seemed to me that Pressler was the dominant player, reinforced by not only the physical strength of his piano sound but also by the responsibility of his part for multiple voices in the composition. (Some of this came out to me in my reading of Nicholas Delbanco's book about the Trio.) On the other hand, while the compositions for string quartet that the Prazak performed did an excellent job of treating all four parts as equals, it seemed to me as if first violinist Vaclav Remes was asserting his "authority" through a variety of physical cues. These tended to detach him from his three colleagues, particularly when he would lose eye contact with them in favor of facing the audience.

What would happen when two individuals who had become accustomed to such domination would encounter each other? In this case the result was fascinating. The attention that Remes had given to the audience earlier in the program was now directed at Pressler. It was as if he was accepting Pressler's authority on the condition that he would then serve as the "medium" through which that authority was exercised over the entire quartet. As should be clear from the way in which I wrote my review, I did not feel as if the performance suffered from this "authoritarian" strategy; but it provided an interesting data point to support the argument that the performance of chamber music does not, of necessity, have to be a "democratic" process!

Regulatory Overhaul

Here is how Alan Rappeport summarized for the Financial Times Web site the speech that Ben Bernanke gave this morning:

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, on Tuesday urged an overhaul of “financial infrastructure” to help blunt future crises and said that new reforms would require global co-ordination.

The Fed chief, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, stressed the importance of finding new ways of handling groups that are deemed too big to fail and acknowledged that some policies were magnifying global volatility.

My guess is that this was designed as language to impress Main Street without rankling Wall Street too much, but it is hard to walk down that middle road without waffling. It is difficult to find anyone who does not want reform these days; but it is unlikely that this same "everyone" will come to an agreement over what that reform should be. (The disagreements currently surfacing in the Congress make for a good case in point.) I was reminded of what I wrote that last time I tried to take on the issue of economic reform about a month ago:

When one listens to "the voice of the people," rather than any government-based "official story," one quickly comes to realize than there is a tight coupling between the security of the economic framework and the effectiveness of governmental authority. This is why any strategy for recovery must not be confined to the "engines of the economy." Rather, it needs to address the broader scope of political economy, whether that scope rests on foundations of Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Like it or not, Bernanke's head is deep in the gear-works of those "engines of the economy;" and it is unclear that he recognizes that the sociopolitical side of the problem is as important as the economic framework. This one-sided perspective may be illustrated by one of the details addressed in Rappeport's report:

Delving into the roots of the current downturn, Mr Bernanke argued for a retooling of the “financial plumbing”, the institutions that support trading, payments, clearing and settlement. He highlighted the repurchase agreement market and the money market mutual fund sector as soft spots in the financial system.

Except for Bernanke's preference to the plumbing metaphor over that of a mechanical engine, this pretty much makes my case.

Ironically, Bernanke came very close to sociopolitical ground in another part of his speech:

He also suggested the creation of an authority charged with monitoring systemic risks to help protect the financial system from crises, which he said should be co-ordinated internationally “to the greatest extent possible”.

“The risk-management systems of the private sector and government oversight of the financial sector in the United States and some other industrial countries failed to ensure that the inrush of capital was prudently invested,” Mr Bernanke said, explaining that the failure had led to “a powerful reversal in investor sentiment and a seizing-up of credit markets”.

Mr Bernanke explained that companies considered too big to fail bring many undesirable effects, such as moral hazard and excessive risk-taking. Such companies, he said, needed special oversight and consolidated supervision. Moreover, a system needs to be developed to allow for “orderly resolution” if such companies become insolvent.

Thus, while risk-management systems may definitely be numbered among those "engines of the economy," the decision to take a risk and the possibility of "moral hazard" cannot be abstracted out of the social world into the mechanical metaphors of the objective world. (In my own current medical condition, both the physicians treating me and I have to make decisions about risk, even if none of us are skating onto thin moral ice, so to speak. So I now have first-hand experience with trying to keep the concerns of the social world from getting lost in the abstractions of the objective world.)

I was once involved with a project on fault-tolerant software that gave me an opportunity to collaborate with Peter Neumann at SRI International. Neumann was fond of saying that you can only program your software to tolerate the faults you know about, leaving you vulnerable to the faults you had not considered. "Systemic risks" in the engines (or plumbing) of our economic framework are no different from spam in our electronic mail. Udi Manber's metaphorical view of the problem of spam filtering as an arms race also applies to those "systemic risks." While Neumann was concerned with faults in an engineering system that had not yet revealed themselves, economic regulation has to deal with risks that may not yet have been invented by virtue of those trying to avoid the regulatory framework!

The flaw in Bernanke's position may be that "systemic risk" presumes a "static system." However, in the social world no system is ever static. The structure of the system is always changing to reflect the practices of those who are part of that system. This is the fundamental principle of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory; and Bernanke's myopic view of structure could well impede any progress towards a reform based on political economy, rather than those "engines of the economy."

The People Voice from the People's Republic

Yesterday I tried to examine some of the "official" language that had begun to emerge in the wake of the devastating fire in Shanghai, primarily for the sake of comparing it with some of our own "official" language currently being invoked in the search for appropriate prosecution of those responsible for our economic crisis. Today, thanks to a report from Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times, I have discovered another "voice of reaction" from China, which is far more interesting than the "official" one:

Rather than being distressed at the part-destruction of one of Beijing’s landmarks, many young Chinese took pleasure in the humiliation of the national broadcaster. “Self-castration perfectly fits the image of CCTV which is the world’s number one eunuch media,” wrote widely read blogger Han Han.

CCTV is a broadcasting colossus, straddling 16 channels and bringing in over $2bn of revenues a year. Its annual New Year gala programme is watched by nearly 500m people.

Yet among the metropolitan Chinese who contribute to the country’s lively and ribald internet conversations, there is a deep well of disdain for the wooden style and propaganda of CCTV’s news programmes.

“CCTV is very broad-minded. They have focused so much on the fire in Australia that they obviously forget about the fire in their own backyard,” wrote blogger Caii after the incident was barely mentioned on the national broadcaster.

Internet chatrooms have been inundated with cartoons showing alien invaders attacking the CCTV buildings, while T-shirts are now on sale celebrating the blaze.

Wary of the potential backlash against CCTV, many publications were instructed by propaganda officials to use the version of events from the official Xinhua news agency.

Yet even the Xinhua story appeared to relish the travails of its cross-town rival. It quoted a fire official, Luo Yuan, who said that CCTV staff had ignored safety warnings from local police who had inspected the site. “We have video of the scene and remnants of the fireworks, which will serve as strong evidence in the investigation,” he was quoted as saying.

”There is barely anyone in the Chinese media who was not pleased to hear about the CCTV fire,” said one media industry insider who asked not to be named. ”The high-handed way the organisation dominates the media scene has made it universally hated, even by many of its own employees.”

Some of the schadenfreude is also down to the architecture. Made up of two sloping towers bolted together, Mr [Rem] Koolhaas’ design for the main building has won him the tag of genius from some architects but it is not loved by everyone in Beijing, where its many nicknames include “big underpants”.

Even though the larger building was untouched by the fire, some in the profession believe the blaze will become a symbol for the bursting bubble in brand-name architects.

This strikes me as an interesting sample of self-expression from "the people" who are beginning to wonder just what their "people's republic" has become. I have examined this situation in the past. Over a year ago, when the only voices concerned with a possible economic peril were consigned to the loony bin, I wrote a post on the rising trend of consumerism in China, suggesting that the very question of Chinese identity was going through a disruptive change. Let me reproduce a joke I invoked to try to make my point:

There is an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union. He invited his mother to visit and show her all the perquisites of his power: the dacha, the fleet of limousines, and all the luxury foods kept in his kitchen. After a few days of this grand tour, he said, "Well, mama, what to you think now of your little boy from Kamenskoe?" She looked back at him and said, "This is all very nice, my son; but what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Those who have "taken over" in China want to maintain all of the Maoist trappings of iron-fisted totalitarian control while enjoying all of the fruits of economic growth promised by the ideology of capitalism. Within this bipolar context, individual Chinese people have tried to celebrate wealth while respecting the "parental authority" of the government hierarchy. Today, however, that capitalist ideology is not cultivating those fruits; and China is feeling the same pinch that is being felt by the leading Western industrialized nations. As a result there is a new effort of people below that government hierarchy trying to make their voices heard; and those voices seem to have bought into my metaphor of the "stately capitalist mansion of Shanghai" in attacking not only CCTV but also the very life style embodied in that "mansion."

When one listens to "the voice of the people," rather than any government-based "official story," one quickly comes to realize than there is a tight coupling between the security of the economic framework and the effectiveness of governmental authority. This is why any strategy for recovery must not be confined to the "engines of the economy." Rather, it needs to address the broader scope of political economy, whether that scope rests on foundations of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. The neglect of that broader scope may have been a key factor in the tension between John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt during the worst days of the Great Depression. When Roosevelt accused Keynes of being more of "a mathematician rather than a political economist," this had less to do with Keynes' understanding of conditions and more to do with his willingness to recognize the context in which those conditions were embedded and the need for the President of the United States to take that context into account in any action he took. As the Greek poet Archilochus (best known today through Isaiah Berlin) would have put it, Keynes was a hedgehog who knew economics very well, while Roosevelt was a fox who knew many things about both government and economics, even if he did not know economics as well as Keynes.

This time around we have Barack Obama as a fox; and, like Roosevelt, his dealings with the hedgehogs have not always been a model of achieving understanding through communication. Nevertheless, he leads an Administration that shows far more appreciation of both communication and understanding than that of his predecessor (even when, where the economy is concerned, achieving understanding is a formidable task). The Chinese government, on the other hand, is based on a tradition that honors authority far more than understanding (or, to invoke the language of Anthony Giddens, prioritizes domination over signification). This is not a particularly healthy environment for either hedgehogs or foxes! Nevertheless, in Dyer's report we encounter both hedgehogs and foxes struggling to be heard; and what will the authoritarians do? In 1989, when China was just beginning to see the benefits from its first steps into a market economy, voices were raised over the more general question of political economy in Tiananmen Square; and the world witnessed the brutal response of authoritarianism. This time the benefits will be harder to find, and authoritarianism still rules. It is hard to imagine that Koolhaas’ "stately mansion" will be the only casualty of a "crisis in communication" that may be more serious for China than the current economic troubles.

Permanence, Change, and the Civil Rights Movement

Much as I tend to enjoy the blogging of Andrew Keen, I was very glad to see that Book TV chose to use this day to provide me with an escape from Keen's recent indulgence in what I can only call "second-rate reading." This has included yesterday's reaction to Fareed Zakaria's recent palaver in Newsweek about Barack Obama as the savior of capitalism and today's attack on Thomas Friedman's laptop metaphor in The New York Times, with a swipe at Malcolm Gladwell's "fascinatingly obvious" Outliers thrown in for good measure. I used to sympathize with Harlan Ellison, who felt that we read was more important than what we read; but he used to make that point before the Internet had opened so many reading possibilities for us. These days I feel that life is too short to waste on rubbish; and, while I do not always agree with their editorial decisions, I find both The New York Review and Book TV to be rather good at helping me steer clear of the sort of rubbish that shows up all to often in Newsweek and The New York Times.

This morning I watched a Book TV video that was recorded last May at the Sunflower County Public Library in Indianola, Mississippi, which had hosted Chris Myers Asch to talk about his book, The Senator & the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer. This was a case in which the audience was as interesting as the author, since both Eastland and Hamer were from Sunflower County and have descendants who are working in the County. However, even more important was the way in which Asch framed the conservative thinking of the segregationists for whom Eastland became a major champion in the Senate, particularly when he became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Asch's critical point was his decision to view Eastland more as a planter than as a politician. From this point of view, plantation life embodied "the natural order of things." As Anthony Giddens would have put it in his more elaborate terminology of social theory, plantation life legitimized a structure of domination, which determined who got to exercise authority over whom and how that authority was exercised. From this point of view, the civil rights movement was less about whether blacks should have the same rights as whites (or, for that matter, whether the abolition of slavery had been a great mistake) and more about how it had challenged that "natural order." The underlying struggle, in the words of Kenneth Burke, was the "challenge of change" imposed by the civil rights movement on the assumed permanence that Eastland and other segregationists were determined to maintain.

Needless to say, the scope of such opposition to permanence by change extends far beyond the history of the civil rights movement. Political conservatism is basically grounded on the virtues of permanence, whether or not that permanence is justified by rhetorical invocations of "natural order." Change is perceived as dangerous; and, to the extent that it entails a volatility that undermines the predictability of "life as we know it," it is dangerous. On the other hand, as Isaiah Berlin would work out for himself about a quarter of a century after the material in Burke's Permanence and Change first appeared, "permanence" is just another word for "stasis;" and stasis is fundamentally opposed to the dynamics of life itself and the social interactions that establish our very humanity (an insight developed by another of Berlin's predecessors, George Herbert Mead, who, in turn, had been preceded by Karl Marx, whose influence is clear in both Burke and Berlin).

I make these points because, as we approach Inauguration Day, it is important to recognize that change is far too complex a matter to be reduced to an election-winning buzz word. My guess is that Obama appreciates this, as he appreciates why the stability of permanence is so important to all of us. What we need is a subtle negotiation of a course between permanence and change; and I fear that the subtlety of that course is too much for consideration by the likes of journalistic hacks like Zakaria and Friedman.

Oliver Sacks and the Illusions of Scientific Method

I think I first became aware of Oliver Sacks when I read his essay "The Twins" (which would later be included in the collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales) in the February 28, 1985 issue of The New York Review. I found it absolutely riveting, in no small part because the style of writing was such a departure from the "scientific" (or, for that matter, "clinical") writing that I usually encountered in either the professional or popular press. However, it took at least a decade for me to cotton on to why his prose was as compelling as it was; and, having formed my hypotheses on this matter, I discovered, upon reviewing the Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that they are confirmed by his own observations, but in a terminology different from my own. Since I have invoked my own terminology in several posts on this blog, I figured I would take the opportunity to discuss the extent to which I read Sacks' text as a confirmation of my own ideas.

The common theme that runs through my observations might be called an awakening (since Sacks used that for one of his titles) from a very long nightmare of positivism. The fact that I should have thought of positivism as a nightmare at all was probably a result of a rebellious spirit that emerged when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music, but I have social theorist Anthony Giddens to thank for helping me to take those unkempt rebellious thoughts and put them into a bit of order. Closely aligned with positivism is the "gospel" of scientific method; so, having been more than adequately prepared by my readings of Giddens, I was delighted to discover that the literary theorist Kenneth Burke had devoted much of his professional work to develop a theory of "dramatistic" thinking, which would serve as an opposition to "scientistic" thinking. Burke was enough of a Hegelian to recognize that this was an opposition that would not benefit from either side dominating over the other; but his own career was more than sufficiently filled with the study of "dramatism." So he left it for others to resolve the opposition through synthesis.

One can either try to theorize about such a synthesis or jump in and try to achieve it. In my few brief exchanges with Sacks, the topic of Burke and his theory never arose. I would not be surprised to learn that Sacks is totally unfamiliar with the man and his writings. Nevertheless, were he still alive, I suspect that Burke would quickly see the dramatistic element in Sacks' writings and probably discuss it as pointedly and eloquently as he would any literary source. Sacks, himself, actually acknowledges this synthetic aspect of his work when he writes about

a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist [eureka!], am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness—animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

What, then, is the nature of Sacks' particular approach to dramatism? To some extent it is a synthetic approach to a matter of form, the idea (which, as Sacks observes, goes all the way back to Hippocrates) that a case history is as much a narrative as a scientific account. From a scientistic point of view, the most important element in the documentation of a case is description; but in a case history (by the very virtue of its name) that description is achieved through historiography. This then brings us to the most important element of Sacks' literary style, which is that his historiography is achieved through a subject-based narrative. A case history is ultimately the history of the individual enduring sickness, as Sacks puts it, "the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease." Thus, the case history, as Sacks has chosen to write it, probably comes as close to a synthesis of "scientism" and "dramatism" as we are likely to get.

Sacks then threw yet another radical declaration at me in his Preface:

The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

This immediately reminded my of my favorite dialogue by Plato, "Theaetetus," which tries to define the concept of knowledge, fails, but still leaves us recognizing that knowledge is hard to define because it is so tightly coupled to the concepts of description, being, and memory. The path to knowledge is a path that leads through description, but only because it leads through fundamental questions of being. Indeed, if one wanted to be really dramatistic, one could accord the status of "personhood" (or, as Burke would probably put it better, agency) to the disease as well as the patient, which would mean that the case history embodies that concept of αγών fundamental to Greek drama. From this point of view, one might then view Gerald Edelman's pioneering research in how antibodies work as being based on further endowing those antibodies with agency, making for αγών between both patient and disease and disease and antibody. In the essays that I have read, Sacks never goes quite that far over the dramatistic line; but I know from his writings that he has a high opinion of Edelman's theories about consciousness. Since those theories are, in many ways, an extrapolation of his antibody theories, my guess is that Sacks would see the dramatistic element of Edelman's model were it called to his attention (unless he has already done so).

I have one final observation about Sacks methodology, and this one reflects on my recent citation of Daniel Mendelson. To a great extent Sacks believes that, if you want to understand how the body works, then you need to observe it in circumstances where it doesn't work. You learn little from the healthy state beyond some good hypotheses about normative conditions and behaviors; and that is not, as they say, "where the action is." Healthy bodies, like Mendelson's "good people" do not "make good subjects for operas" (or any other dramatic form). To go back to the Greeks, it is through the study of αγών that we get to the heart of what Sacks calls the patient's "essential being;" so, while it would be a flattering exaggeration to call Sacks' case histories Homeric, there is at least a modest spirit of the Homeric bards about them.

This all leads back to my personal "agonizing" (so to speak) over the sorry state of liberal education. We still seem obsessed with specializing as quickly as possible, in order to jump in and start doing "useful things." We thus see the study of anything as unscientistic as literature as a waste of time that will not equip us with additional instruments for our toolkit. Sacks provides us with specific examples that illustrate the fallacy of this reasoning. Given how long he has been writing these examples, one would think that our educational institutions would wake up and smell the coffee; but their reasoning along these lines remains deep in slumber. As Goya once told us, that kind of slumber produces monsters!

A Cautionary Tale about "The Dimension of Domination"

One of the reasons why I continue to try to draw upon social theory as more than a collection of academic abstractions is that I continue to find diagnostic value in the three "dimensions" of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory when I try to address real-world workplace situations that run the gamut from problematic to downright pathological. By way of a refresher, these are sort of the underlying "channels," which regulate the processes of social interaction, including the "content of messages exchanged" through communication. They are:

1. Signification, which is concerned with the question of "what things mean" and, at a deeper level, just what those "things" are in the world in which we engage in social interaction.
2. Legitimation, which is concerned with identifying and honoring normative patterns of interaction.
3. Domination, which is basically concerned with who gets to exercise authority over whom.

Those who like to wax poetic over such matters as innovation (particularly in the interests of economic growth) tend to play up what happens along the dimension of signification, often avoiding (through either naive ignorance or deliberate choice) the other two dimensions. This is a "tragic flaw;" and, as David Mamet demonstrated by writing a tragic play (The Water Engine) about an inventor who comes up with a machine that runs on water and is then brutally destroyed (along with all apparent evidence of his invention) by agents of "Big Oil," I use the adjective "tragic" in more than a metaphorical sense.

I write this all to introduce a long article by Wellford Wilms, which just appeared on Truthdig and provides an equally tragic account of the triumph of domination over signification in the public sector, specifically the domain of public education. The setting is the Baldwin Park High School in the Los Angeles County School District. The basic "plot line" is laid out in Wilms' first three paragraphs:

Eighteen teachers, Baldwin Park High School’s “leadership team,” sit in a semicircle with their arms folded across their chests looking at the floor. The year is 2003 and the new principal, Julie Infante, an exuberant 44-year-old woman, explains how they are going to lead this high school out of its academic doldrums together. The teachers are clearly skeptical, either distrusting what Infante is saying or disbelieving that they can do it. The Los Angeles County school has hit bottom. The campus is littered with trash, fights are common, students cut classes without penalty, test scores are so low that the school’s accreditation is in jeopardy, and the faculty is demoralized. The stakes are high because failure is an invitation for the state to take over.

Remarkably, in three years, between 2003 and 2006, with coaching from UCLA’s School Management Program, the teachers and the principal accomplished a stunning success. By every important academic measure, the school made impressive gains. The campus was cleaned up, the number of disciplinary cases fell, student absenteeism declined, and test scores improved dramatically. Not surprisingly, the teachers felt more positive about the administrators and less isolated from one another, and their job satisfaction increased. But, in 2006, in an equally astonishing turn of events, the board of education and the superintendent removed Infante, replacing her with a new principal who began to reverse the bold steps that had produced the turnaround.

What happened? Why would the board and superintendent undo the actions that had produced such remarkable results? It was because they failed to understand what Infante and the UCLA coaches had accomplished. They were blinded by their own ambitions and by their conviction that administrative top-down control is the only way to run the schools. What they could not see was that Infante had turned the leadership of the school upside down, leading from behind the scenes and encouraging teachers to take control. As the teachers expanded their responsibility, a new professional authority began to emerge among them that translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students’ failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students’ success.

Wilms then provides an extensive analysis of the events and the motives behind those events. His bibliography draws upon much of my favorite reading matter, including books I have specifically cited on this blog, such as Raymond Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency and Robert Blauner's Alienation and Freedom). Nevertheless, the language of his third paragraph indicates that, like so many others, Wilms is determined to keep his argument confined to the dimension of signification ("they failed to understand" and "they could not see"). He does not explicitly frame his narrative in terms of the question of what happens when signification goes head-to-head with domination. Like the Galileo that Bertolt Brecht conceived for his "biographical" play, he cannot imagine an authority that would not be swayed by the power of raw evidence and irrefutable logical reasoning based on that evidence. He thus ignores the theme that pervades so many of Brecht's plays (not to mention The Water Engine), which is that, in any confrontation with signification, domination will prevail because of its very nature to dominate.

One lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that any innovative action should be preceded by asking, "Who's in charge?" (or "Who's really in charge?" to stress that this question is rarely answered by an objective chain-of-command analysis of an organization chart). If those who dominate do not "buy into" that action when it is first being considered, then it is unlikely to survive a subsequent confrontation, no matter how successful it has been. Furthermore, even more important than "getting off the ground" is the problem of "staying in flight." The field of domination is a highly volatile one. Having authority on Monday never guarantees having the same authority on Tuesday, and this is equally true in both public and private sectors. Managing an innovative undertaking thus becomes a matter of "eternal vigilance." Much as we would like to believe otherwise, there is always someone with the power to cut off an initiative, no matter how strong the support for that initiative may be. Whoever is responsible for the initiative is therefore obliged to know who that someone is and how to keep the initiative on that person's radar in a positive light. "Positive," of course, may have little to do with who benefits from the initiative and everything to do with how that someone can maintain a position of power or acquire a stronger one.

I write all this with a reputation for trying to call out endorsements of innovation that turn out to be little more than reckless talk. The ultimate lesson from Wilms' account is that, while innovation may be absolutely essential for getting out of a crisis situation, if recklessly managed it runs the risk of doing more harm than good. That recklessness comes from choosing to wear blinders while planning and executing one's actions, blinders to the larger context in which those actions are embedded. Taking the blinders off means that you have to deal with all sorts of issues that have no real bearing on the problem you are trying to solve; but, if those issues are neglected, they could well destroy the ultimate solution, however valuable and appealing it may be.