wallpaper animals

The world of underemployment means that the primary regulation of the relationship between workers and work is no longer maintained by employers. It must be actively maintained by individuals. For individuals this means a greater sense of insecurity and anxiety as they continually have to consider the possibility that their current employment might cease.

I think that between a worker and their work there is a kind of property relation. That means that the practices that one becomes accustomed to in employment become part of one's identity. The loss of an employment is therefore a threat to identity. Flexibility brought about through underemployment therefore can entail uncertainty and risk about ones own identity.

In response to this risk, workers can develop new capacities for establishing property relations not with their particular employment, but rather with the generalised differences they consider themselves to be able to make in a work situation. Increasingly, "this is what I do" is not a statement of the specific social role they play in an organisation (teacher, doctor, etc), but rather an appreciation of ones' impact on a generic work situation. By building these capacities, individuals acquire new skills to maintain identity and achieve flexibility in an environment of underemployment. Fundamentally, they maintain their readiness for employment or unemployment.

However, the capacity to maintain readiness is dependent on high levels of personal reflexivity. These can best be developed through useful underemployment (or useful unemployment) since the objective is to balance internal human goods (wellbeing, etc) with external socially efficacious practice. In essence, "because I am well I can act well". Have universities (particularly technical universities) focused on 'effective practice' at the expense of the internal human goods and useful unemployment? Whilst at the same time academic universities have focused on 'effective academic action' (essay writing, discursive techniques, etc.) whilst also not delivering the necessary personal reflexivities for surviving in a world of underemployment...

What is to be done? Is a new curriculum required? But once again, the instinct to innovate is borne out of authenticity. The simple question is "how do we make the most out of the available means?" In particular, I wonder if it is about how to make the most out of underemployment: by thinking, reading, writing, performing and talking.

In my last post, I made a strong statement about innovation: "Innovation is always framed by inauthenticity". I want to  explore this.

What I mean is that the instinct to make new stuff is part of a pathological process. Stafford Beer complained about this in his 'Platform for Change'. Beer identifies the maker of new stuff as 'homo faber', where homo faber has been the dominant figure in industrialised society. He wants to see the emergence of 'homo gubernator' instead: the steersman who finds the best way to be in the world that exists without creating new 'stuff' to solve individual problems, but instead to find the best ways of organising and coordinating what's already there. By implication, homo gubernator is more 'authentic'. (It's worth saying that Beer's greatest fear is not homo faber, but who he calls 'homo pontificus', the "harbinger of extinction"!)

Whilst it seems crazy to say 'innovation bad', there is clearly a fine line to tread. Innovation enframes: the desperate attempts to deal with the nuclear disaster in Japan at the moment show how one engineering intervention in the world necessitates numerous others to deal with the consequences of the first. It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of dealing with unintended consequences. This, I think is particularly true of educational innovation.

At some point, there is a moment where someone says "But what's it all about? How have we got here? Does it have to be like this? Given what's happening, what does this tell us about the world?" These are powerful questions and demand a return to authenticity to face them. They are homo gubernator questions. They also demand a level of honesty as people retreat from their innovative ways (to which they have become deeply attached) and are forced to look at the world afresh. It would seem that for every innovation, there may be a corresponding "therapy" where the homo faber instinct is counterpoised by the homo gubernator question: "do you want an iPad2 - or do you want counselling?"; "do you want a portfolio system, or do you want to think what matters in education?"; "do you want an electric car or do you want to rethink our attitude to geography and space?", and so on.

I'm uncomfortable with Christensen's work on Disruptive Innovation because what he's sees as disruptive is just another innovation; just another way of continuing the pathology of the enframing, albeit by coming at things in a different way - but that's often the nature of innovation anyway (if you don't even come at things in a different way, then I would have thought it hardly counts as innovation at all!). Authenticity means going for the powerful question, the homo gubernetor questions, which seek to grasp at the causes of the present condition. Grasping the causes of the world is like an artist understanding their material: one would hope that the intentions of an artist emerge in harmony with the nature of the material which is shaped.

But within this movement to authenticity, the inauthenticity of innovation and the pathology it entails is probably necessary in establishing the conditions for asking the powerful question. That's an uncomfortable conclusion, because it means that within the reflexivity of each of us there is a need to balance the energy of pursuing an enframed making, whilst be sensible enough to know when to stop and think. The serenity prayer springs to mind....!

To imagine somebody watching the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima and saying "gosh! that's innovative!" seems an unlikely (and somewhat dark-humoured) scenario. But why? Clearly, it was innovative in the sense that we often think about innovation; and it 'caught-on' - it was diffused as 'early adopters' were rapidly joined by 'early majority' users. We may be beginning to see the 'late majority' (although if the late majority gets its way, there's a risk we'll all be 'late'!).

I think this scenario tells us something about how we imagine innovation and frame it within a restricted social setting. Nobody said "gosh, that's innovative' about the atom bomb because I think anybody seeing that terrible event would immediately feel the ethical impact on themselves and the world. They were not apart from the events; they were part of them. It was humankind which had brought this power into being.

When we do say "that's innovative", I think there is an implied separation between ourselves and our human condition and the technology we are commenting on. The separation is created because for most of the time, we have a view of ourselves as humans which is framed by our daily concerns and preoccupations: we face 'problems' in daily life, and often mistake our being for the dealing with those problems. Our 'selves' as 'problem-facing' entities becomes separate from our selves as authentic beings. The problem-facing self sees something in the world created by someone else who is living a similar inauthentic existence, facing similar problems and dealing with them in new ways. We see these ways they deal with their problems, and then we can say "that's innovative!".

Innovation is framed by inauthentic experience.

Innovation in education then becomes problematic, because education, in dealing with human goods, must deal with authentic experience. If it doesn't, it may deepen the sense of alienation. Of course, alienation and inauthenticity may lead to new 'innovation' which in turn can lead to new inauthenticity and alienation, and so on. This is the pathology of 'homo faber'.. a sort of pathological autopoiesis. I suspect it is also a key mechanism in the manufacture of risks in society.

In today's world, everyones' experiences and the actions that arise from them are hard-wired into the things that happen, which in turn feed into our experiences. I'm tempted to say (tentatively):

Experience, maybe more than money, power or class structures, will be a key determining factor in the social transformations of the future (be they good or ill). 

This is why my primary concern is phenomenology (the study of experience). Unlike other techniques of phenomenology (e.g. Husserl's, for example), I use cybernetic tools for understanding how experience works. I think a scientific understanding of how experience works is important as we move away from an industrialized manufacturing economy towards a service-based, reflexive economy, which produces risk and where the experience of risk plays the driving role in keeping our society functioning, and the economy going.

I don't think experience has always had such a dominant role in social emergence: Power and Class could over-ride experience. In less equal societies, were the experiences of the poor worth anything? - at least to the rich? Was it only the rich who determined the patterns of social emergence? Yes.. I suspect it was. I think this is not the case now: the experience of the less wealthy is as important as the rich because everybody consumes as part of the risk economy (and the rich need the poor to consume, which they will only do if they have 'good experiences'). However, what is meant by 'rich' and 'poor' here needs deeper definition: it's not about money, but control. The means of production of risk is Capital.

I think that with Capital which is servitised (riskified?), the rich have become adept at manipulating experiences to keep the process of consumption going. I want to understand what's going on here, because it seems to be at the root of some of our deeper social problems - particularly those concerning the experience of fairness.