CHAPTER 6: EXPLANATION (SOCIAL ANALYSIS) OF THE ENTRY TEXT
6.3 EVENTS, TRENDS AND WORLD AFFAIRS RELEVANT TO THE PRODUCTION OF THE TEXT
influenced by strong social constructivism which tends towards irrealism and its attendant lack of agency. For these people, if one is to avoid nihilism, there is no alternative but to cynically play the power2 game (Cf. Vol. 1, Chap. 2.7.3.2).
Behaviourist education provides a useful source of language for the dominant logonomic system, whereby people play the power2 game and manage the contradictions inherent in the ideological complex. They can maintain that their version of truth is the truth, by insisting it is simply and without bias found, that is, it just is. They can also use the behaviourist education-based logonomic system to insist on particular power2 social relations and prevent or at least neutralise challenges to the status quo, by enforcing a strict code of who can say what, when and where.
Thus I argue that the educational language of the Monterrey recommendations, which functions to maintain the status quo, can be explained in terms of the dominant ideological complex of business and industry and its commitments to social theory and epistemology. To put this into the terms of the original questions for this analysis, the dominant ideological complex and its commitments to social theory and
epistemology, required for the functioning of its logonomic system, perhaps form a precondition for the environmental education language of the Monterrey
recommendations.
6.3 EVENTS, TRENDS AND WORLD AFFAIRS RELEVANT TO THE
It could be argued that every event that has ever happened has made a contribution to the text, for example, perhaps without the French revolution, World War 1, and Taylorite management principles, the Monterrrey recommendations would not exist.
However, in this section I choose merely a sample of significant events and trends which I consider of particular importance to this discussion, namely:
• The growing evidence for climate change, linked to the growing strength of the call for business and industry to address environmental issues;
• The trend towards globalisation and increasing of dominance of ‘the market system’;
• The disaffectation of developing countries from global politics in general, and their specific absence from global environmental initiatives;
• The trend towards not naming marginalized groups; and
• The personality/ies of the author/s of the Monterrey recommendations, influenced by past and current personal life events.
The textual characteristics of the recommendations serve to reproduce these trends and events (here I include the synchronous manifestation of a personality as an event), whilst they are at the same time the raison d’etre for them (Maton, thesis).
6.3.1 The growing evidence for climate change linked to the growing strength of the call for business and industry to address
environmental issues
According to Hodge and Kress (1988:8), the ideological complex attempts to pre- empt opposition by incorporating contradictory images into its coercive forms.
However, these images, whilst perhaps diverting attention, all the same exist as evidence that silently declares the limits of dominant power2 (Hodge and Kress, 1988:8). I would argue that the Monterrey recommendations are an indication that business and industry are being forced to look at environmental issues, in the light of the evidence of climate change and the growing call for improved environmental performance (Cf. Vol.1, Chap. 2). Toepfer (2004:3) opened the 8th High-Level seminar which resulted in the Monterrey recommendations with these words:
The world is facing burgeoning problems – poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation. Mandates for action (the most recent being the plan of implementation from the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the UN Millennium Goals) are there.
Nevertheless, whilst the Monterrey recommendations claim to address environmental issues, and some ground is gained in this respect (Cf. Vol.1, Chap. 5.3.1), it is
questionable that the recommendations go far enough and, almost certainly, they are little threat to the current status quo which arguably is the underlying precondition for the environmental crisis in the first place.
6.3.2 The trend towards globalisation and the ‘free market economy’
The global trend towards a free market economy, and its characteristic assumption that increased production and consumption are the corner stone of business, is perhaps the most significant trend to explain the characteristics of the Monterrey
recommendations. The philosophy behind the lived illusion (ideological complex) of this trend is explored above, but here I note how world events and circumstances, underlain by the dominance of the free market ideological complex, might explain some of the key characteristics of the Monterrey recommendations.
Most significantly, the absence from the Monterrey document of issues related to reducing carbon emissions is perhaps explained by the world controversy over the matter of carbon emissions and global warming. The refusal of the USA, a powerful proponent of the free-market economy, to sign the Kyoto Protocol which would commit the country to reduction of carbon emissions is an important aspect of this controversy. Another aspect of the controversy was the USA’s commitment to the Iraq war, started in 2002, which many commentators claimed was based on the USA’s need for foreign oil (for example, The Guardian, November 7, 2005). Bush has
admitted that the US is addicted to oil (The Guardian, February 1, 2006).
However, just as controversial, and possibly alienating of many developing countries, would be a call to reduce deforestation in places such as the Amazon Basin, which, it is argued, would equal four-fifths of the emissions reductions gained by implementing
the Kyoto Protocol in its first commitment period (Santilli et al, 2005). For these countries, such a call seems equivalent to asking them to reduce economic
development, based on increased consumption and production. Santilli et al, (2005) further warn that to ensure the involvement of these countries in the Kyoto Protocol, they will need to be compensated for their reduction of deforestation. It seems possible that for the Monterrey recommendations to achieve consensus, given the presence of representatives from so many different countries, it had to leave out the topic of carbon emissions and global warming (this topic has been left out of other important international documents too, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development implementation plan, Sisitka, pers. com).
6.3.3 The disaffectation of developing countries from global politics in general, and their specific absence from global environmental initiatives
One way to describe the Monterrey recommendations is that it seems to be written from the perspective of the developed countries. Developing countries are mentioned, but only as needing help, and in this mention they are not allocated of agency (Cf.
Vol.1, Chap. 5.3.2). This approach to the developing countries is surprising given that of the five environmental ministers present at the meeting, all of them were from developing countries, namely, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Tanzania, and that the meeting itself was held in a developing country (Mexico) (UNEP, 2004c).
Perhaps the absence of an active presence of developing countries in the
recommendations (Cf. Vol.1, 5.3.2.2) could be explained in terms of their disaffection in terms of world politics. Perhaps it could also be explained in terms of the general omission of developing countries from much of the movement towards sustainable practices, based on the assumption that they need to exploit the Earth at least enough to catch up to the developed countries, which got to where they were by exploiting the Earth. For example, currently, developing countries have no responsibilities towards reducing emissions in terms of the Kyoto Protocol and Santilli et al, (2005) have described as “contentious” discussions of their reducing emissions at three of the Conferences of the Parties to Climate Convention (COPS 8, 9 and 10).
Given that the developing countries have a relatively insignificant role, the question that comes to mind is why they were present at the seminar at all? One might speculate on some of the, possibly interlinked, reasons why this should be. Perhaps, their involvement is cosmetic. Perhaps they need to be present at the meetings to insist that they are given special allowance to continue to unsustainably exploit the Earth.
Another possibility is that their dependence on aid and poverty discourse is
perpetuated in the Monterrey document (recall that they were to be recipients of help).
6.3.4 The trend towards not naming marginalized groups
The absence of mention of marginal groups such as women and racial minorities may be explained by a recent trend in society to avoid talking about the marginalized. Here we are perhaps witnessing the erosion of a previously hard one development (that is, the inclusion of marginal interests in such documents as the Monterrey
recommendations). Thus, the status quo vis a vis these groups and the dominant groups becomes perhaps further entrenched. In terms of this trend, if reference is required for marginal groups, it is as the ‘previously marginalized’ (Tew, 2004:183).
This trend is based on the epistemological assumption, itself based on the linguistic fallacy, that categories are merely social constructs and not real (Cf. Vol.2, Chap.3).
In terms of this assumption, it is argued that, at the very least, constructing ‘groups’
will merely result in the end in deconstructing them, or putting them back together again, since they are not real anyway (Taylor, pers. com, arguing for the absence of mention of marginalized groups in Rhodes University environmental education materials). In the worst case scenario, it is argued that to separate marginal groups from mainstream society by naming them in fact plays into their oppression by strongly defining them and thus making them an easy target for oppression (Goddard, pers. com.), arguing against the naming of gay people as such). The trend to not name marginalized groups is associated with the questionable assumption that these groups are now fully fledged members of society, without the need for extra attention
towards empowerment; and the acknowledgment of the danger of reverse oppression, in which the oppressed become persecutors of their oppressors (Tew, 1994). An influential text documenting the reversal of oppression and placing the blame for it on the doorstep of the naming of different groups in society, is Mamdani (2001).
Nevertheless, I have argued elsewhere, that whilst reverse oppression based on simplistic dichotomies of ‘them and us’ is a real threat, the solution is not to stop categorising, since the categories exist and these people are suffering real oppression (Price, 2006a in Vol.2, Chap 8). Rather, the solution is to evoke a theory of identity that is not based on the mistake of analytic reasoning, such that things (in this case human categories) are deemed to be fixed and extractable from their environment.
Instead, a more appropriate theory of identity would be a dialectical position in which things are deemed to be constituted by their geohistories and by the totality of their relations with other things (Bhaskar, 2000:62).
6.3.5 Stratified personality as textual precondition: a fictional account In this section, I attempt to show the preconditions for the Monterrey
recommendations at the level of the stratified personality, suggested by Bhaskar (1993). For Bhaskar, the following are some of the rhythmics in which an agent may engage (1993:163, 164):
1. the narrative of her life, her biography;
2. the lagged causal efficacy of her unconscious, her unwritten biography;
3. her life cycle as an organism (a human being) and specifically as a woman;
4. the flow of her daily praxis (engaged in a variety of social practices with rhythmics of their own) as tracked by her space-time routes through the cities, dwellings, worksites, landscapes in which she lives;
5. the longue durée of differentially sedimented structural institutions and the social relations upon which they depend;
6. the development of specifically civilized geo-history in the context of human geo-history, inserted in the rhythmics of species, genera and kinds, located in a geo-physical development of a solar system, embedded in the entropy of an expanding universe.
The above points are largely structural, but switching perspectives and talking instead in terms of agency, Bhaskar (1993:164) demonstrates the existential intransitivity of
or less unconscious/ and to a greater or lesser extent ideologically formed) and mere pre-rehearsed rationalizations. He also argues that actions are accountable, even if they are routinized or habitual, and even if their reason lies in custom or convention. It is real reasons for action which comprise the existential agent's intentional causality, and without this concept structure would float free, in a noumenal or virtual cloud, of agency. For Bhaskar (1993), it is embodied intentionality which earths social life (see also Figure 6.1).
In Vol 1, Chap 6.3.5.1, I attempt to tell a story of informed (or misinformed) desire, propelled by absence, as it might power transformative praxis or negation. In this case this is the transformative praxis of an (imaginary) free market environmentalist as he writes the Monterrey recommendations, propelled by the absence of a healthy world environment and the desire for this absence to be absented. I include the first five rhythmics mentioned by Bhaskar above (missing out the sixth rhythmic ‘geo-history’, assuming that an account of the geo-history of Monterrey, and indeed the Earth, was perhaps not necessary).
In Vol 1, Chap 6.3.5.2, I reword this story and tell it from a critical realist perspective.
As Shipway (2002:304) states:
The CR concept of reasons as causes means that agents’ actions and personalities are causally efficacious, reproducing and transforming educational structures and mechanisms, and producing intended and unintended consequences.
Dissimulation (כ self deception)
Expressive veracity (conscious or
unconscious) rationalisation
accountability
Φaction
agency
Unintended consequences
Intended consequences Causally efficacious
(perhaps routinized or tacit) real reason for action
Unconscious motivation conscious
Conditions for action
unknown unacknowledged
FIGURE 6.1: The stratification of action (reproduced from Bhaskar,
1993: 165)
cosmos[biosphere[nature[society[inter-subjectivity[intrasubjectivity
process
agency subjectivity
meta-reflexive totalizing situation
self-narratival capacity
accountability reflexive monitoring of life situation
reflexive monitoring of routinized activities along space- time paths
conscious engagement in a social practice
human praxis
acts performed in or by it
=
intentional causal agency
consciousness/self consciousness preconscious
unconscious
FIGURE 6.2: Stratification of action in terms of a moment in a person’s life (reproduced from Bhaskar, 1993:167)
FIGURE 6.2: Stratification of action in terms of a moment a person’s life (reproduced from Bhaskar, 1993:167)