D-W forgot his vesitgial tail

D-W focuses on the realm of business over other important realms of exchange. Robins and Webster expand this vision of where deskilling takes place to include the realm of politics. The critique of Habermas takes a different line then most, instead of mounting challenges to the possibility of the ideal speech situation or to the coherence of the rational subject, argue that rationality has overcoded political deliberation as unnecessary. The discourse of the rational bureaucrat and technical politico has supplanted the need for individuals to have political opinions or skills. Politics proper including the new DFL resurgence in the Minnesota State House are entirely predicated on a Taylorist model of organization. More troubling even is the argument against Jurgen in chapter 5, where R/W argue that the older symbols of social intercourse are no longer distinct from floating cultural commodities. Not only are individuals politically interchangeable but the concepts used to engage in politics are essentially crafted by the capitalist machine.

If somebody wanted to have some hope for the future they could D-W's interest in new social movements as an emergent challenge to the expert discourse that has deskilled the population. In terms of politics, D-W wants to reinvent the wheel. There was mass organizing and grass roots action for quite sometime before there was the internet, these "new" growths would seem not to be a radical new phenomena but instead a last bit of the old politics of deliberation. Instead of reading the emergence of new social movements coordinated through the internet as revolutionary, we should see them as a vestigial tail, if anything they are the stale remains of old social movements.

I am not sure what a political reskilling would look like, but it would not look like the long boring public meetings that would constitute rational civil society. The political micro cultures of the blogosphere or narrow casting are devoted to information collection, crisis politics and acceleration. I am interested in reading to the conclusion in R/W to see what the alternative is, because they could really get me pretty down. If these guys don't have some hope toward toward the end of the book, I will start to get a little freaked out. I would still be more afraid of the heat death of the universe, but not by much.

--dan