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165: Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein's Antisystemic Movements

From my notes from December 13, 2011 (!)

Author: Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins & Immanuel Wallerstein

Title (Year): Antisystemic Movements (1989)

Abstract:

The five essays that make up Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein’s Antisystemic Movements, all of which were presented between 1982 and 1988 at the International Colloquia on the World Economy, progressively theorize and explicate the new world-system and the antisystemic movements that shape and are shaped by it.  Although system and resistance are dialectically related, all resistence is directly shaped by the structures and processes of the world-system; the purpose of this volume is to reexamine patterns and successes of antisystemic movements thus far.  To theorize the world-system, AH&W expand on Weber’s distinction between class-based (economic) and status-based (prestige) political communities, which, in turn, is based on Marx’ base and superstructure.  They articulate status-based communities to autonomous nation-states and class-based communities to the increasingly global world economy, where economic and political competition are increasingly being replaced by giant transnational corporations managing vast circulations of capital.  States become striated into three rings of power: the core states, which conveniently include the US, USSR, Japan, China, and Western Europe; the semi-peripheral states, which are mostly communist, and the peripheral states which are going through various iterations of radical nationalism.  As capitalism goes global, power becomes centralized in the core, but capital becomes decentralized as it goes further and further in search of Third World countries that can’t resist its exploitation.  However, while increased globalization of capitalism leads to increased oppression of the world’s peoples, this process also leads to greater opportunities for transnational resistance, because capitalism’s “integrating tendencies” lend structure and organization to the resistence that is always-already fomenting just beneath the surface.  When oppression becomes too acute, antisystemic activity responds.  The dilemma of antisystemic activism, however, is that historically it has been aimed at overturning the state, but in the era of global capitalism it should really be aiming to overturn the capitalist system, because capitalism, not states, is where the power lies now.

I have to admit, I find a lot to like in world-systems theory, partly because it is clearly and succinctly theorized and partly because its global perspective helps explain processes that might be invisible or less logical at a smaller scale.  Although the authors touch on a mere two dozen sources in their bibliography, they spend pages explaining each element of their theory and how they used Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Emile Durkheim to derive it, a process which, while keeping their work solidly within the Enlightenment canon, clearly anchors their ideas in the history of Western thought.  Thus, they are able to derive a political model from the familiar base-and-superstructure, explain that class is by definition a class in itself but nationalism is a class for itself (because it involves mutual recognition of non-economic similarities), and show that at a global scale, class and status become fused at the level of the state and therefore at the level of the (dialectically necessary) antisystemic movement.  Likewise, they can show that while social movements generally occur in direct action against the state, the new global capitalism – and the resulting fusion between base and superstructure at the state level – make it possible for revolution to occur at the global scale, both because the theory works out neatly and because all of the states are thoroughly and irrevocably interconnected.  The combination of theory and global scale makes world processes and world revolution visible and legible.  It also has an eerie ability to make sense of the relationships between, say, the Arab Spring, the teetering Euro, and the Occupy Wall Street movement: increased interconnectivity both renders economics more important than statehood and helps protesters mobilize class- and status-based identities and rhetorics to protest the New World Order.

Despite my infatuation with neat theoretical explanations, however, AH&W’s world-systems version of social movement theory is not without its problems.  Beyond the obvious lack of empirical evidence, world-systems theory, as Tilly reiterates in Big Structures, operates at such a large scale that only sweeping generalizations are possible; this leads to an erasure of the very differences between peoples and movements that can help explain their development, rise, and fall.  Further, characterizing social movements as merely the dialectical partner of global capitalism assigns all agency to the capitalist system and leaves nothing but structurally pre-ordained crumbs for antisystemic activists – or for any social actors, for that matter.  And far from being dynamic, the picture of the world that world-systems theory creates is resolutely static, with its three concentric rings of power, continually-suffering oppressed peoples, and linear trajectory from 1848 to 1968, which the authors call the “great rehearsal.”  The great rehearsal for the glorious revolution?  In spite of their insistence on a dialectical structure, the authors come off as rather heavy-handed Marxists, moulding world history into some slow but steady progress toward the final liberatory revolution.

Despite this heavy-handedness – and in some cases because of it – AH&W’s world-systems take on social movements is connected to many writers working on similar problems at the same time and has had a profound impact on the study of social movements.  The authors cite Marx, Smith, Weber, and Durkheim as their primary influences, and these are all very visible in the text, but Foucault and Althusser are also quite present, particularly in their conception of politics as a closed system and power as inescapable.  Although he disagrees with their choice of scale, Charles Tilly’s Big Structures shows that he was strongly influenced by their nation-state/world-economy tension as well as by the dialectical relationship between social movements and the structures they are moving against.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement belies a similar understanding of these tensions, though he (and Tilly) insist that the large-scale theory be paired with empirical evidence of historically contingent social movements.  Finally, and more recently, geographer David Harvey has adapted world-systems theory for the present day and has used it to advocate for revolution from within the system.  Thus, despite its faults, world-systems theory has been incredibly useful for scholars of social movements, and I imagine it will continue to do so.

164: Louis Hunter's Steamboats on the Western Rivers

In Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, Louis Hunter situates a detailed history of the development of steamboat technology in the social, technological, and economic context in which it developed; he argues that "the growth of the West and the rise of steamboat transportation were inseparable; they were geared together and each was dependent upon the other."

Using contemporary newspapers, census documents, traveller accounts, and other primary sources form about the 1780s to the end of the 19th century, Hunter shows that steam transportation technology was the result of many people's contributions (both English and American), not just those of a few great men.  He also shows that in America, steam navigation started on the Atlantic seaboard but quickly moved inland to the Western rivers, where steamboats dominated inland transportation and commerce for a generation; and he argues that from 1925 to 1850 the steamboat was the main technological agent in developing the Mississippi basin from a "raw frontier society" to "economic and social maturity."  Finally, he claims that the Western steamboat was known worldwide as the "typical" American steamboat partly because it was so important to the economy of the region and partly because it was unique in its design, construction, and operation.  Published in 1949, this book was the scholarly survey of the development of steam navigation on the Western rivers that pulled together technology, operations, and governmental intervention into a consistent whole.

163: Roger Bilstein's Flight in America

In Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts, Roger Bilstein places the technological developments in aviation, space exploration, and the American aerospace industry in a broad social, economic, and political context.  This survey relies heavily on archival sources from the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the FAA, NASA, and oral history, aviation, and transportation collections in Denver, New York, and Wyoming, as well as his personal experiences learning to fly in 1972.  

While Bilstein's sources and approach are somewhat top-down and conventional, his narrative does provide a clear history of aviation in the US.  He traces aviation's early start in stunt planes (the Wright Brothers couldn't get the military to buy their invention, so they sold planes to the circus), post-WWI innovations in military aviation; 1920s mail routes, crop dusting, photography, professionalization, long stunt trips, crashes; 1930s streamlined passenger planes, trans-oceanic flying boats, and German rocketry; Fordist mass production, WASPs, and American air dominance during and after WWII, along with post-war fear of ICBMs, tech innovations by the military, and American desires for an intercontinental passenger network; the development of helicopters and the expansion of passenger travel and "jet setting" in the late 50s and early 60s, tech evolution of private planes (renamed "general aviation" in the 1960s to look less bougie), and the impacts of Vietnam, space exploration, the Cold War, and pop culture on flight.  Deregulation and international collaboration across globalized aerospace industries in the 1980s led to some pretty incredible tech developments along with growing fears of bombs on planes and Soviet/US competition that led to the Challenger disaster.

Throughout, the book is illustrated with photos (though some, like those of the early stunt pilots, are creepy because you know they died flying), and Bilstein works to contextualize flight in American cultural history.  He does spend a lot more time talking about military and defense projects and developments in industry and technology than he does talking about popular responses to flight.  I wonder if that was a conscious choice, if it was conditioned by the archives he chose, or if it truly is difficult to link such capital-intensive and seemingly distant technologies to everyday life?

162: James Flink's The Automobile Age

In James Flink's The Automobile Age, the automobile, and its attendant complex of technologies, mass-production techniques, industrial development, roads, economic and public policy, and changes in American "lifeways" resulting from "mass personal automobility," are central to the history of capitalist development in general and to American history in particular.  Flink's materialist approach combined with the scope of this book - he attempts to cover the rise and fall of the Automobile Age in its social, technological, business, and global contexts, from the turn of the last century to the early 1970s - make it both a fascinating history of automobility and an argument for human agency even in what looks like global domination by the car.

Flink's narrative covers many of the canonical topics within industrialization and automobility: the Fordist system of mass production/ mass consumption; transformations in social relations and the landscape as a result of automobility; Sloanism, bureaucracy, and flexible, style-based mass production;  global automobility coupled with competition from Europe and Japan; and social and environmental critiques of automobility combined with the "world car."  He discusses these processes by carefully tracing technological diffusion within the technological system of the automobile.

161: John Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology

In Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939, John Jordan argues that early 20th century "rational reform" was the product of the top-down, antidemocratic, technocratic politics of the machine age, and thus American liberal reformers in this era became less interested in helping the poor gain their voices as citizens than in engineering and controlling society.  Jordan's cultural history, which relies primarily on the papers of reformers, statements and theories of prominent engineers, writers, and academics, and popular lit sources, shows how technological language and notions of Progress, control, and hierarchy filtered into social reform and the institution of liberalism as a whole.

Jordan divides his study into three historical periods, each with its own reform projects.  He locates the origins of rational reform (1880-1910) in Progressive reformers and sociologists like Veblen, who want to make the relationship between reformers and society less political and more like the relationship between engineers and nature.  From 1910 to WWI, publications like Lippman's The New Republic and foundations like Russel Sage, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corp start arguing that "disinterested specialists" well-versed in social science and technology should lead the masses; Herbert Hoover called on manly men to be "officers in the great industrial army;" and Taylor and other efficiency experts made the efficiency craze visible.

160: Reyner Banham's Well-Tempered Environment

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham argues that architecture is not just about beautiful building facades - it's also about the mechanical systems that make those buildings function.  Frustrated by the lack of attention paid to mechanical systems by architectural histories (in the late 1960s, when Banham was writing, there were apparently none), Banham pored through trade catalogues, lectures to professional societies, specialist periodicals, building plans and patent-office records, and other primary sources in pursuit not of firsts, but of mosts - of the point at which most buildings had incorporated a new technology and thus the point at which that technology had begun to shape architectural design.  His descriptions of particular buildings are thus discussions of the "typical" rather than the iconic.  With this approach, he takes architecture out of art and subsumes it into a larger category of "environmental management," an interdisciplinary, problem-based profession that treats architecture as context-dependent technological systems or "habitable volumes."

159: Eugene Ferguson's Engineering and the Mind's Eye

In Engineering and the Mind's Eye, Eugene Ferguson argues that the current (since the 1950s) privileging of math and science over the visual and nonverbal in engineering education is both a historical aberration and a dangerous practice.  Using a well-illustrated history of engineering design, Ferguson argues that not all engineering problems can be solved by mathematical analysis; without the ability to visualize machines, structures, and the environment, engineers often make poor judgement calls that lead to disastrous failures in bridges, nuclear power plants, refrigerators, and other technologies.

Ferguson's emphasis on the visual is actually linked to a larger concern with engineering's loss of that holistic, experiential real-world experience on which the field was initially based - its retreat into scientific analysis.  Thus, his history of engineering emphasizes its subjective nature before the scientific turn.  In the Renaissance, engineers used improved drawing techniques to visualize and thus think through Scientific Revolution discoveries like planetary motion and human anatomy, and perspective drawing techniques (devised by Renaissance mathematicians) facilitated design by making representations more realistic.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, formalized drawing techniques (especially orthogonal drawing), the use of models, and the development of visual systems for engineering calculation - slide rules, indicator diagrams, nomography, and graphic statistics - kept visual thinking at the forefront of engineering design and practice.  After WWII, engineering education shifted away from an open-ended art and toward deductive, exact science: shop courses were replaced with theories of thermodynamics, mechanics, heat transfer; students have little interaction with the real world; graduating engineers have a hard time designing solutions for real-world problems.

Throughout, Ferguson's underlying argument is that the subjective, connected to real-world problems through visual thinking and representation, is incredibly important to engineers' ability to design effective solutions, and that engineering's scientific turn to abstract objectivity has had disastrous effects on the safety and utility of engineering projects.  While his emphasis on the visual leads Ferguson to neglect larger systems of power in some of his examples (the Challenger failure), and I suspect that what he's actually getting at is fostering creativity rather than the visual per se, his argument for subjectivity and creative, real-world thinking in engineering certainly makes sense to me.

158: Carolyn de la Pena's The Body Electric

In The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American, Carolyn de la Pena examines the relationship between bodies and machines in American from the 1850s to the 1950s.  Using novels, cartoons, trade mags, health fraud investigation records, newspapers, manuals, and other primary sources, de la Pena recovers a wide range of technologies and devices designed to restore the body to its natural state.  In doing so she shows how industrialization led not just to a reorganization and mechanization of production and society, but to a technologically-mediated experience of the body as well.

The Body Electric is divided into three general sections: Dudley Sarget and Gustav Zander's weight-lifting machines and training programs designed to "balance" the body through uniform muscle development and "unblock" energy trapped within; technologies like electric belts, vibration devices, and magnetic collars (mostly from 1880 to 1930) that supposedly injected energy into the body to increase its reserve force; and radium (radioactive) waters that were taken as tonics and in baths to flood the body with heat and energy, mostly from 1902 to 1940.  Throughout, de la Pena examines the relationship between these technologies and gender (increasing male strength; electrically stimulating male sexuality; curing neurasthenia), class (upper classes went to gyms; middle classes bought a wide range of technologies; working classes bought radium dispensers), and race (a Dr. Pancoast at UPenn treated African Americans by applying x-rays for up to 15 minutes at a time "allegedly" to turn their skin white.)   She also shows how these treatments were often supported with the language of science: the laws of Thermodynamics; offsetting entropy; electric transfer; energy.

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this book is that much of this "better living through technology" discourse held on until the atomic bomb, and some of it, like using physical fitness to cure neurasthenia, lives on in only slightly modified language today.

157: Susan Strasser's Never Done

In Never Done: A History of American Housework, Susan Strasser argues that housework, the job done by more people in America than any other, "cannot be separated from the broader social and economic history of the United States."  The women who did housework supported the men who built factories and cities, and the manufactured products and urban culture produced in those factories and cities in turn shaped women's housework.  Strasser thus brings 19th century housewives into history AND provides an exhaustive history of household technologies.

Strasser is interested in what 19th century housewives actually did and what technologies they really used, not in the history of the technologies per se; the date that most households seemed to have a particular kind of technology and how most housewives seemed to use it are a lot more important to her than the date the technology was patented or the technological innovations that went into it or when the first privileged few got ahold of it.  Therefore, she uses new social history methodologies to access her subject.  Her sources include reformers' reports on intolerable living conditions, government documents on standards of living, sociologists' descriptions of daily life, manufacturers' market research, ads, catalogues, travel accounts, letters, and advice manuals, cookbooks, and women's magazines.  In all of these sources, she's looking not so much at the opinions or prescriptive advice but at the ways in which particular technologies and practices are framed - as new, old-fashioned, commonplace, etc.  This strategy allows her to approximate what American housewives' lives might have been like at different points in time form 1850 to 1930.

156: Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America

In Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960, Gail Cooper examines the development of air-conditioning technology and the tensions between engineering philosophy and consumer preference that shaped its design.  Working from a variety of sources, including trade literature, popular magazines, newspapers, and corporate records, Cooper argues that air-conditioning developed via a process of contestation, and that the three systems that resulted - custom-built systems, centralized air, and window units - are each an imperfect mix of the interests of engineers, corporations, and various consumer groups, legacies of the times when each group was more dominant than the other two.

Per Cooper, air conditioning development went through three major phases.  From 1900 to WWI, engineers Alfred Wolff, Stuart Cramer and Willis Carrier adapted industrial heating, ventilation, and freezing systems to offices and factories.  Their custom designs attempted to control both heat and humidity, though they focused mainly on humidity until the 1930s.  The first custom systems were installed in stock exchanges, banks, and Southern textile mills.  Because Progressive reformers were obsessive about healthy ventilation for schoolchildren, schools also became testing grounds for the new technology.

155: Martin Melosi's Sanitary City

In The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Martin Melosi shows that the technologies chosen for a city's sanitation infrastructure depended heavily on the prevailing environmental concerns, available technologies, money, and politics of the day.  Because most American sanitation systems were built around the turn-of-the-century, when permanence was more valued than flexibility, and because this infrastructure is costly (socially, politically, functionally, economically) to replace outright, American sanitation systems are path dependent in that they are constrained by choices made early in their construction, and they are also determinist in the sense that they shape/ constrain development around them.  Melosi thus argues that "to function effectively the American city has to be a sanitary city."

Working from the water management systems in several major American cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Melosi traces the development of sanitation infrastructure through three phases:

• The "Age of Miasmas" (colonial times to 1880): basically, if you can't see or smell it, it isn't there; dilution of waste water will purify it.  

154: Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire

Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West is a history of the development of the American West through the lens of water management technology.  Building on substantial archival research, Worster argues that

The West, more than any other American region, was built by state power, state expertise, state technology, and state bureaucracy.  That is another way of saying that it has been, and is, the most thoroughly modern of American regions, and therefore that its experience, particularly in the matter of water, has been most instructive for deciphering the confused messages of that modernity.

By positioning water as technology rather than nature and the West as a federally-funded, man-made landscape, Worster both deconstructs the West's self-image as independent and free of government control AND reconstructs the region not as a colony of the East but as the seat of a global American empire.

153: Walter Licht's Industrializing America

In Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, Walter Licht complicates the process of industrialization in the United States during the 19th century by re-examining both the context of American industrial development and the composition of American industry.  In the first move, he situates manufacturing within a rapidly expanding market, which was fueled by a growing population, immigration, westward settlement, expanding cities, and developments in transportation and communication infrastructure; industrialization was a result of these changes as well as an active shaper of market relationships.  In the second move, he expands the focus of industrial manufacturing from large-scale industrialization to the broader business landscape of small factories, specialty shops, and regional diversity, which allows him to separate 19th century industrialization from late 19th century corporate consolidation.  Licht therefore deconstructs the old narrative of 19th century production-driven Progress, arguing instead for a declension from ordered mercantilism to a chaotic market economy that was only beginning to organize toward the end of the century.

Licht synthesizes business history, economics, labor history, and the history of technology to situate American industrialization in its economic, social, political, and regional contexts.  He begins in the early 1800s with regional diversity and the Jefferson/ Hamilton debates; examines the diversity of antebellum development in its mill villages, single-industry cities, diversified urban centers, and Southern "industrial" slavery; discusses artisan protests in Jacksonian American along with with evangelical reform;  charts the relationship between the Civil War and government-sponsored industrialization and transportation; and analyzes regional industrial diversity, the rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller and anti-monopoly politics, and the labor disputes, single-issue reform movements, and utopian critiques of late-19th century urban disorder.

Licht's relentless contextualization, breakdown of industry into regions, and insistence that the voices of workers, women, and immigrants be heard are a welcome relief to the usual histories of 19th century technology.

152: David Hounshell's American System

In From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, David Hounshell takes a materialist, history of technology approach to the history of American industrialization.  Tracing American manufacturing from federal armories to civilian gunmakers, clockmakers, bicycle manufacturers and automakers, Hounshell examines the complex and often non-linear process by which American manufacturing moved from standardized, interchangeable parts to the Fordist system of mass production.  By focusing on technological development instead of social change, he overturns several long-held interpretations of this history, including processes of technological change, the economic forces driving mass production, and the definition of mass production itself.

Americans were using relatively interchangeable parts to manufacture standardized goods like window frames, guns, clocks, locks, and furniture in the early 19th century, but true interchangeability, where parts could be subbed out for another part with no reworking, was first achieved in federal armories, who had far more money to play with than did their civilian counterparts.  This "armory practice"diffused to other companies when mechanics left the armories to work at Singer Sewing Machines, McCormick Reaper Works, or Pope bicycles, but armory practice didn't readily translate, partly because company owners and skilled craftsmen resisted (especially at Singer) and partly because true interchangeability, which at that point involved jigs, gauges, and fixtures as well as special purpose machine tools, could be pricey.  However, all three companies lurched toward armory practice in an effort to meet rising demand by reducing rework/ assembly time.  In the late 19th century, Ford began combining armory practice, the bicycle industry's pressed steel, inflexible, single-purpose machinery, and moving assembly lines into a new mass production system, but even he proceeded by fits and starts, so that the apex of mass production was only realized in the River Rouge plant - and then at a time when mass production was no longer the best business model.

Throughout, Hounshell details the genealogical process by which individual people diffused armory practices through American metalworking industries, and he traces this history not through the feats of heroic inventors and designers but through the mistakes and experiments of ordinary people.  He shows empirically that demand drove production in the 19th century, not the other way around, though demand was at least partly driven by advertising and marketing.  He also discusses regional variation in production techniques, as when New England bike manufacturers prefer welding/ forging, while Midwestern manufacturers prefer stamping, and shows how techniques in one industry filter into another, so that Ford's location in the Midwest, for instance, influenced his choice to use metal stamping rather than welding.  And finally, Hounshell uses a history of technology approach - focusing on technology and asking how - rather than a social history approach - looking at social formations and asking why - which allows him to penetrate American manufacturing in detail without worrying about causality until he has the material evidence in hand.

While Hounshell's account would have benefited from further discussion of labor, this book is otherwise an incredibly thorough and wonderfully materialist history of American manufacturing.