Unconscious Debate, Part the Third
Initially, you are right to criticize me for taking this into a more esoteric realm. This is a personal weakness of mine that needs to be constantly checked in order for me to be effective (and I admit that on one level I approached this as a purely intellectual task). I will try to clarify my concerns, because they still exist...
I can see what you mean from a pragmatic perspective, we can all agree there is something there, call it "x," that needs to be dealt with. I am never one to intentionally fall into the trap of forgoing action to deal with the niceties of the language (in fact, a few years ago I would be disgusted with my current self!). My concern is that the term "unconscious bias," as a conceptual tool for action, is not as effective as it ought to be. Especially if this fight is to be fought in academic and/or legal circles (or led from these circles as many social revolutions are), the wording at this point is the means to the end.
Insofar as people are "unconscious" of the substance of their thought process, I see the challenge of academics to open the window and shine some light on these shadowy aspects of the conscious mind (maybe we can abuse "The Cave" allegory here). A being without consciousness would be incapable of creating the complex web of debilitating ideologies of alienation that we not only make, but then use to help shape/reinforce our material world. We ought not give people a pass when it comes to the very active role they play in creating discrimination.
I am deeply concerned with moving the discourse out of the range of the average person. You can see how that would prove a complete failure to my task of demonstrating the unstable and unnatural nature of things we assume to be otherwise. The value of a good theory, from my point of view, and borrowing from American pragmatism, is its ability to create real change in accord with its ends. So there has to be a kind of theoretical "sweet-spot" where conceptual precision and real-world applicability can meet to create a kind of "perfect storm" of enlightened activism. Hannah Arendt argued that people would follow bad theory if its inner-consistency creates a "hypnotic effect" and "puts the common sense to sleep" (Arendt "On Violence")...thats what we face, we must awaken the "common sense" of people (I use this term specifically to denote the Kantian idea of the sensus communis, how we, as real people, deal with the particular world...this is where I think the whole reasoning process begins to confuse itself with respect to bias). Any theory here must be embedded with a theory of action, this was part of the brilliance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's, the marriage of a theory of racial justice with a theory of non-violent resistance (see Martin Luther King's writings on the role of non-violent resistance).
I ask, what is the course of action to be set out upon when dealing with the spectre of "unconscious bias?" It is too nebulous and imprecise to open a route to change in my opinion, and I also think it is open to being co-opted by dominant ideology. There is a phenomenon today, which has almost reached the level of cultural fad, for "passing the buck." I fear that unconscious bias will be received as an excuse to blame our discriminating mothers and fathers and do nothing ourselves. I know this is not what you propose, and I align myself wholly with your intentions, but how can you alleviate my fear that "unconscious bias" will wiggle its way into the fairy-tale land of psycho-babble and away from the world of social activism?
Change in this realm will require a massive, directed and concerted effort by "people"...I think the conceptual framework should fairly characterize the immensity of this task, it should be free of inclinations toward passive response, and it should be a call to action of sort. I want people to know that a lot of discrimination, whatever its subject may be, is the direct result of the way they are "being" in the world. Certainly much of it is institutionalized at this point by past beings, this is a sort of "capitalized bias," but bias is the activity of conscious beings (it is absurd to say that a "thing" is biased with respect to its judgments, "things" do not judge, conscious people make judgments and sometimes they use "things" to enforce or institutionalize their judgments, but "things" are not judges or biased judges). Its almost like saying that "unconscious labor" is producing bad commodities, what can be done?
It should be a two-fold task...first, an assault on what I have called "capitalized bias." This "capitalized bias" is the bias of past generations that has been made into the "means of institutional discrimination" by crystallizing itself in the law, government, and various sectors of civil society; and then attained a kind of "fetishized" transcendent existence. The second front in the war against alienation is what I will call "labouring bias" (to keep my Marxist paradigm). "Labouring bias" is living bias as it operates in conscious beings at a given time who are in the process of crystallizing the next generation's "capital bias" through the exertion of their biased "labour." This second front will be most difficult because it will require making people aware of the contents of their assumed conceptual tools, and then making them aware that this content is not an actual reflection of things in their particularity. Finally, the task of combating "laboring bias" is constantly at risk of being undermined by the existing "capital biases" that try to urge people otherwise (that work to provide "hegemonic leadership"), because bias in both forms act to reinforce one another (its a dialectic of bias production).
This discussion is already going in the right direction I think though...because we are asking the right questions. I was wrong to state unequivocally that the existing theoretic framework should be scrapped, and you were right to challenge me on that. I am guilty of inhabiting a rather insulated academic world and I am always at risk of "academizing" issues and taking them away from the world of action. I will stick to my point here though and say that I am concerned with the practical nature of a theory that identifies one dominant kind of bias and I am wary of the effect of naming, especially in the age we live in where the world is experienced rapidly through commercial images and soundbytes (packaging). When people take to the streets they will adopt whatever word they feel best suits them, currently we are in the laboratory creating possible tools for them.
I can see what you mean from a pragmatic perspective, we can all agree there is something there, call it "x," that needs to be dealt with. I am never one to intentionally fall into the trap of forgoing action to deal with the niceties of the language (in fact, a few years ago I would be disgusted with my current self!). My concern is that the term "unconscious bias," as a conceptual tool for action, is not as effective as it ought to be. Especially if this fight is to be fought in academic and/or legal circles (or led from these circles as many social revolutions are), the wording at this point is the means to the end.
Insofar as people are "unconscious" of the substance of their thought process, I see the challenge of academics to open the window and shine some light on these shadowy aspects of the conscious mind (maybe we can abuse "The Cave" allegory here). A being without consciousness would be incapable of creating the complex web of debilitating ideologies of alienation that we not only make, but then use to help shape/reinforce our material world. We ought not give people a pass when it comes to the very active role they play in creating discrimination.
I am deeply concerned with moving the discourse out of the range of the average person. You can see how that would prove a complete failure to my task of demonstrating the unstable and unnatural nature of things we assume to be otherwise. The value of a good theory, from my point of view, and borrowing from American pragmatism, is its ability to create real change in accord with its ends. So there has to be a kind of theoretical "sweet-spot" where conceptual precision and real-world applicability can meet to create a kind of "perfect storm" of enlightened activism. Hannah Arendt argued that people would follow bad theory if its inner-consistency creates a "hypnotic effect" and "puts the common sense to sleep" (Arendt "On Violence")...thats what we face, we must awaken the "common sense" of people (I use this term specifically to denote the Kantian idea of the sensus communis, how we, as real people, deal with the particular world...this is where I think the whole reasoning process begins to confuse itself with respect to bias). Any theory here must be embedded with a theory of action, this was part of the brilliance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's, the marriage of a theory of racial justice with a theory of non-violent resistance (see Martin Luther King's writings on the role of non-violent resistance).
I ask, what is the course of action to be set out upon when dealing with the spectre of "unconscious bias?" It is too nebulous and imprecise to open a route to change in my opinion, and I also think it is open to being co-opted by dominant ideology. There is a phenomenon today, which has almost reached the level of cultural fad, for "passing the buck." I fear that unconscious bias will be received as an excuse to blame our discriminating mothers and fathers and do nothing ourselves. I know this is not what you propose, and I align myself wholly with your intentions, but how can you alleviate my fear that "unconscious bias" will wiggle its way into the fairy-tale land of psycho-babble and away from the world of social activism?
Change in this realm will require a massive, directed and concerted effort by "people"...I think the conceptual framework should fairly characterize the immensity of this task, it should be free of inclinations toward passive response, and it should be a call to action of sort. I want people to know that a lot of discrimination, whatever its subject may be, is the direct result of the way they are "being" in the world. Certainly much of it is institutionalized at this point by past beings, this is a sort of "capitalized bias," but bias is the activity of conscious beings (it is absurd to say that a "thing" is biased with respect to its judgments, "things" do not judge, conscious people make judgments and sometimes they use "things" to enforce or institutionalize their judgments, but "things" are not judges or biased judges). Its almost like saying that "unconscious labor" is producing bad commodities, what can be done?
It should be a two-fold task...first, an assault on what I have called "capitalized bias." This "capitalized bias" is the bias of past generations that has been made into the "means of institutional discrimination" by crystallizing itself in the law, government, and various sectors of civil society; and then attained a kind of "fetishized" transcendent existence. The second front in the war against alienation is what I will call "labouring bias" (to keep my Marxist paradigm). "Labouring bias" is living bias as it operates in conscious beings at a given time who are in the process of crystallizing the next generation's "capital bias" through the exertion of their biased "labour." This second front will be most difficult because it will require making people aware of the contents of their assumed conceptual tools, and then making them aware that this content is not an actual reflection of things in their particularity. Finally, the task of combating "laboring bias" is constantly at risk of being undermined by the existing "capital biases" that try to urge people otherwise (that work to provide "hegemonic leadership"), because bias in both forms act to reinforce one another (its a dialectic of bias production).
This discussion is already going in the right direction I think though...because we are asking the right questions. I was wrong to state unequivocally that the existing theoretic framework should be scrapped, and you were right to challenge me on that. I am guilty of inhabiting a rather insulated academic world and I am always at risk of "academizing" issues and taking them away from the world of action. I will stick to my point here though and say that I am concerned with the practical nature of a theory that identifies one dominant kind of bias and I am wary of the effect of naming, especially in the age we live in where the world is experienced rapidly through commercial images and soundbytes (packaging). When people take to the streets they will adopt whatever word they feel best suits them, currently we are in the laboratory creating possible tools for them.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home