Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

INTELLECTUAL CLOSURE AND THE NEW CLASS

the universal spirit of bureaucracy is secrecy, it is mystery which is inwardly preserved by hierarchy, outwardly by the closed character of the corporation…. Authority, therefore, is its principle of knowledge, and deification of authority its mentality…. The bureaucracy is la république prêtre.

Bureaucratic monopolies were established by recruitment through education and exams. On the one hand, the threshold raised by educational closure implied a relative accessibility of bureaucratic offices, since birth and/or wealth were discounted as immediate criteria of social placement, and entrances were opened up to competent members of all social classes. On the other hand, the exam was ‘nothing but a masonic formula, the legal recognition of civic knowledge as a privilege’. It was, in Marx’s famous epigram, the ‘bureaucratic baptism of knowledge’, the official recognition of the transsubstantiation of profane into sacred knowledge. There existed an immediate relationship between the bureaucratic secret and the passive submission to bureaucratic authority, which transformed the ‘spiritual essence of society’ into the private property of the bureaucrats. Hence there existed an immediate linkage between secrecy, obedience, and the inner dynamic of bureaucracy, which wished ‘to do everything’ and only viewed the world as a mere object of its own activity (1981:108–9).

It is curious to see how close Marx came to a recognition of the productive dynamic and the typical closure pattern of ‘knowledgeable organization’, without being able to negotiate the conceptual barrier, or to conceive his own socialist project in terms of it. Bureaucracy remained a ‘formal’ system, the content of which resided not within but outside: it constituted the mind or ‘brain’ of the corporations. The unmasking of Hegel’s bureaucracy as a pseudo-universal class turned upon the dialectical antithesis of civil society and the state, the alleged self-sufficiency of civil society, and the idea of the state as the ‘alienated community’ of the citizens’ warring interests. That is to say, it did not derive from the idea, still present in Hegel, that the ‘universal class’ could perhaps assume ‘the isolated position of an aristocracy’ and use its education and skill ‘as means to an arbitrary tyranny’ (cit. Marx 1981:104).

But if we think of bureaucracy as having its own sociological substance, and of the triad of mind-will-action as a force of production in its own right, the Marxian model may yield prismatic insights. The bureaucracy, indeed, is a hierarchy of power/knowledge, and its knowledge is empowered precisely because it is enclosed and kept secret. Although it opens itself to all classes, since intellectual competence is the only relevant criterion of membership selection, each novice must be trained and initiated in the sacred knowledge of the apparatus, and be personally baptized as a ‘knowledgeable’ apparatus person. The bureaucratic examination marks the threshold of a new class of knowledgeable organizers whose ‘spiritualism’ is ‘active’ because it is selfcertain, and whose spiritual certainty derives from the authoritarian imprint of its knowledge. Knowledge is power, not because it is representationally

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true, but because it is rarefied and made inaccessible; because bureaucratic truth is taken for granted and affirmed in an authoritarian manner. Knowledge is private property, not simply because individuals ‘have’ it, but because they define their ‘classwide’ ownership of particular knowledge as exclusive.4 Marx, to be sure, never permitted himself to see his own socialist project in these or similar terms. Because his own revolutionary programme was so much geared to the creation of a dynamic apparatus of knowledgeable organization, the theoretical gap between (the enemy’s) bureaucracy and those very similar practices of the organized proletariat could never be theoretically closed. As Michael Bakunin well foresaw, the Marxist movement, if successful, would establish its own ‘priestly republic’ and staff it with tenant-farmers of truth; ‘scientific socialism’ fatally worshipped the same idols of certainty and authority (God and the state) as its enemies. Since the Marxist movements tended to externalize the unintended consequences of their internally generated power (imputing them to the Other, the Enemy, the Bourgeoisie), they were blinded to the logic of their own interventions in history: as the mobilizing productive force of ‘knowledgeable organization’, personified by a new class of intellectual organizers, who sought to hide their voluntarism behind constructs such as the historic mission of the proletariat and the objective dialectic of the forces and relations of production. But the historic mission was first of all their own, and the crucial and perhaps decisive force of production was constituted by no one else but themselves. Shorn of materialist misrecognitions, many of Marx’s suggestive premonitions recurred in Weber’s perception of bureaucracy as epitomizing the modern rational-legal organization—an analysis which was of course in large part polemically articulated against Marxism itself. Perhaps one may distinguish two rivalling interpretations of Weber’s classical analysis of rationalization in terms of the inexorable rise of bureaucratic domination. One of these claims that Weber’s main emphasis was placed upon the rational exercise of authority over human beings or the control over others’ behaviour, i.e. on disciplined and calculable organization rather than on knowledgeability or rationality in its own right. Bureaucratic organization, in this interpretation, is singled out by its rule-committed nature, its division of competences and authorities, and its separation between administrators and means of administration (or between ownership and control). Put more critically, this view implies that knowledge and expertise are to a certain extent ‘blackboxed’, although to a lesser extent than is the case in Marx’ self-negating materialist conception of management and bureaucracy. To some commentators at any rate, Weber’s analysis of bureaucratization clearly understates the informational dimension of the rise of organized society (cf. Webster 1995:54). On a more charitable interpretation, however, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy might be seen as precisely addressing the mutual articulation of power and knowledge, and hence as offering ‘one of the most famous and consequential analyses of the authority of knowledge and experts’ made available by social science (Stehr 1994a:172; cf. Bell 1976a:67–8). This alternative view highlights Weber’s

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conviction that the superiority of bureaucratic administration is primarily found in the role of technical knowledge, that bureaucracy essentially means ‘domination through knowledge’ (Herrschaft kraft Wissen), and that it is precisely this feature which turns it into a specifically rational enterprise (Weber 1978:223–5).

It is not an easy matter to decide which is the more plausible view. Does Weber consider bureaucracy primarily as a ‘power house’, a house of Herrschaft, or does he prophetically anticipate the ‘new’ institutional logic of knowledge closure? Somewhat like Marx, although more systematically, Weber digresses on the intrinsically dual nature of bureaucratic knowledge as conjugating technical knowledge, acquired through specialized training, with knowledge growing out of experience acquired in the conduct of office. He also perceptively remarks, as Marx had done before him, on the bureaucracy’s inherent tendency towards informational closure, as exemplified by the phenomenon of the ‘official secret’: information which is exclusively available through administrative channels, and which is transformed into classified material by means of the notorious concept of the Dienstgeheimnis (1978:225, 958, 992, 1417–18). The dimensions of power and knowledge are immediately collated in the following striking passage:

An inanimate machine is mind objectified (geronnener Geist)…. Objectified intelligence is also that animated machine, the bureaucratic organization, with its specialization of trained skills, its division of jurisdiction, its rules and hierarchical relations of authority. Together with the inanimate machine it is busy fabricating the shell of bondage (Gehäuse jener Hörigkeit der Zukunft) which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt.

(Weber 1978:1402)

Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that Weber expended far more energy on the analysis of ideal-typical forms of authority, management, and organization (both economic and political) than on an independent investigation of cultural skills and professionalized science as productive forces in their own right, and did not (nor could he be expected to) anticipate the stratificational significance which the cultural variable gradually assumed in late twentieth-century ‘knowledge societies’. As in Marx, modern rational organization was primarily identified as separating physical ownership from management or bureaucratic control, rather than as instituting new forms of credential ownership of intellectual resources. More ponderously, perhaps, the Weberian thematic of rationalization continued to be predicated upon a universalistic and foundationalist conception of scientific knowledge, which separated means and ends, facts and values, science and politics as a matter of principle; his verstehende sociology was more focally concerned with dissecting various forms of legitimacy of organizational domination than

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with understanding the construction of legitimacy of scientific knowledge itself. In this manner, Weber’s neo-Kantian Wissenschaftsgläubigkeit, and his partial blackboxing of science, technology, and instrumental rationality more generally, went far towards defining the intellectual parameters of subsequent theorizing about the ‘intellectualization’ of Western society, up to and including many of the ‘postindustrial’ studies of the 1960s and 1970s.5

INTO THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

Hence the demand for a more focal consideration of the new accelerative spurt in the ongoing process of rationalization that was first charted by Weber at the beginning of this century, and which, towards its close, lays out the contours of an emerging ‘knowledge society’ or ‘technological civilization’ (Bell 1976a; Böhme and Stehr 1986; Stehr and Ericson 1992; Böhme 1992; Stehr 1994a, b). Amidst an extraordinary divergence of opinion on this issue, all theorists minimally agree that there is ‘something special’ about information in the modern world: there is simply more of it around than ever before, and it plays a central and strategic role in virtually everything we do (Webster 1995: 2, 215). Modern societies are increasingly organized around knowledge-intensive production and knowledgeable consumption, and knowledge-based occupations have emerged at the centre of the modern labour force. As measured by GNP and percentage of the working population, the weight of advanced societies is gradually shifting towards the knowledge field (Bell 1976a). Economic and social developments are increasingly driven by science and technology, inaugurating a new phase in the secular transition from material towards monetary towards symbolic economies, or ‘economies of sign’ which operate new regimes of ‘reflexive’ accumulation (Stehr 1994a; Lash and Urry 1994). This penetration of all social domains by scientific knowledge and technology also tends to promote a de-differentiation of formerly separate and autonomous spheres such as science and politics or culture and economics: a ‘culturalization’ or ‘intellectualization’ of society in which relations of production, organization, and consumption become increasingly discursive, information saturated, and communication based (Castells 1989; Lash 1990; Lash and Urry 1994). From ‘superstructural’ phenomena, knowledge and information have accordingly turned into immediate productive forces and new principles of social hierarchy; command of information has become a new stratifying principle, a focal variable of social inequality around which new types of social and political struggle develop (Beck 1992:214).

Beyond such (not so) minimal agreements about broad empirical tendencies, the vast field of disputation with regard to the rising ‘knowledge society’ might be provisionally differentiated by cross-tabulating two antinomies or sets of controversies which were already transversally deployed

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in the previous chapter: that of functionalist vs. agonistic perspectives, and that of power theory vs. property theory (see Figure 7). As suggested before, current controversies surrounding culture, knowledge, and technology as autonomous productive and stratifying forces typically display an advanced state of generalization and hence of convergence or even osmosis of the traditional property and power vocabularies, even though they remain in various degrees conceptually indebted to their different languages of origin. From Lane’s vision of the ‘knowledgeable’ society towards the ‘postindustrial’ paradigm of Touraine, Bell, Galbraith, and others, sociological theorizing about the knowledge society initially stuck to a rather traditional ‘from property to power’ framework, while extensions of economic categories were for example undertaken in the contemporary ‘economics of information’ pioneered by Machlup, Drucker, and Porat (cf. Webster 1995:10–13), the neo-classical Chicago paradigm of human capital theory (cf. Becker 1964), and the Marxist conception of the ‘scientific-technological revolution’ as elaborated in the influential Richta report (cf. Stehr 1994a:5ff.).

More recent conceptualizations, apart from being almost unanimously critical of the functionalist and scientistic presumptions that linger in these earlier theories, are also manifestly oriented towards further closure of the traditional property-power binary and further mixture of economic and political metaphors, even though ultimate preferences often remain divided, and the hegemonic metaphors residually tend to absorb and subordinate one another. Schiller’s ‘political economy of information’, Castells’ view of the ‘informational mode of development’, ‘cultural capital’ theory as advanced by Gouldner, Bourdieu, and Collins, ‘analytical Marxism’ in the mode of Roemer, Wright, and Van Parijs, or Lash and Urry’s culturalist political economy ‘of sign and space’, all liberally extend economic metaphors to the analysis of cultural variables. From the other end of the intellectual

Figure 7 Theories of the knowledge society

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spectrum, the socio-political frame of analysis has been similarly exploited by, for example, Schelsky, Kristol, De Benoist, and other neo-conservatives, by Foucault in his vision of the ‘disciplinary society’, by postmodernists such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Poster, by Parkin and other theorists of ‘social closure’, by constructivist studies of science and technology (Latour, Knorr, Woolgar), and by theorists of ‘reflexive modernization’ such as Giddens and Beck. However, such classifications on the property-power axis already carry a distinctly arbitrary ring, in view of the substantial vicinity and the widening areas of overlap between many of the listed theoretical contributions. While ‘analytical’ and ‘cultural’ Marxists are completing the subliminal drift towards the power repertoire which is evident in the Marxist tradition as a whole, post-Marxist sociologists such as Gouldner, Bourdieu, Collins, Stehr, Lash, or Urry circulate rather unconcernedly in and out of the capital and power frames. From across the (sinking) fence, closure theorists, Foucaldians, and constructivist students of science likewise fuse the analytical frames and push the old ritual dichotomy towards the realm of indifference.

Further evidence of closure of the idiomatic gap is provided by some recent approaches which conceptualize knowledge as a set or bundle of competences that provide a generalized ‘capacity for social action’ (cf. Stehr 1994b:194ff.). Because in such definitions competences are as much ‘powers’ as they are ‘properties’, the idea of knowledge-as-competence once again reflects the new intimate mixture which is progressively erasing all inherited distinctions between the two hegemonic metaphors. In Barnes’ approach, for example, society is analysable in terms of a persisting distribution of knowledge, and social power is a prime aspect or characteristic of this distribution. Any specific distribution of knowledge confers ‘a generalized capacity for action upon those individuals who carry it and constitute it, and that capacity for action is their social power’ (1988:57). Despite this ‘deep equivalence’ of knowledge and power (Barnes 1993:213), the ‘residential’ and ‘distributive’ connotations of the property metaphor are not far away when Barnes talks about power in terms of an ‘ability’, ‘capacity’, or ‘potentiality’ to do something or to produce effects, and asserts that ‘social power is possessed by those with discretion in the direction of social action’ (1993:197; 1988:58).

But this same relationship can also be characterized in terms of the property idiom, as is demonstrated by Sharrock’s view of ‘owning knowledge’ and Böhme and Stehr’s conception of knowledge as a form of ‘appropriation’ of the cultural resources of society.6 Sharrock presumes an immediate relationship between the activities of society’s members and their social corpus of knowledge, as is evidenced by the universal practice of naming (Azande witchcraft, Aboriginal kinship rules, Marxist political economy, Western physics). This naming of knowledge is never merely descriptive, but specifies something like an ownership relation between a corpus of knowledge and its social constituency (Sharrock 1974:49). Böhme

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and Stehr similarly describe the state of knowing things, facts, rules, or programmes as ‘appropriating’ them in some manner, although they respect Simmel’s long-standing suggestion that the intellect, owing to its apparently unrestricted availability and capacity for effortless travel, remains peculiarly resistant to private appropriation (Simmel 1990:438; Böhme 1992:98; Stehr 1994a:13, 93–5, 111). Defining knowledge (like Barnes) as a ‘capacity for social action’, Stehr indicates that such a conception also usefully resonates with von Mises’ definition of property as ‘capacity to determine the use of economic goods’ (1994a:95n.), which is indeed close to conventional relationist definitions of property as a right of action upon things and towards persons.7

The transversal division or axis of contestation highlighted in the above table shows a similar osmotic drift, although the integration of functionalist and conflictual perspectives is more irregular and not as far advanced as the more systematic erasures of the property-power binary. Foucault’s dual view of the productive/repressive functionality of power, Gouldner’s neo-dialectical conception of the New Class, and Parkin’s notion of ‘credential closure’ would offer cases in point. Even though I have pleaded analytical distanciation between both divisions and have initially placed them at right angles, there are some interesting elective affinities and ‘diagonal’ oppositions in which a switch of ‘horizontal’ preferences also induces a ‘vertical’ vocabulary switch. One example is offered by Daniel Bell, whose vision of the ‘postindustrial society’ is primarily set in a power frame, but who also irregularly treats knowledge as an intellectual property or saleable commodity, and identifies the new postindustrial elite as a new knowledge class (e.g. 1976a:176, 213ff.). Critics such as Stehr remark that Bell and other ‘postindustrial’ writers share in a tacit rationalist or scientistic consensus, and easily treat knowledge as a blackbox in their analysis of the knowledgeable restructuring of society (Stehr 1994a:49, 65–70). Characteristically, the ‘capital’ idiom intrudes as soon as the darker side of the ‘intellectualization’ of society comes into purview: while Bell is criticized for optimistically privileging its enabling consequences, he is also censured for the fact that an elaborated notion of symbolic capital is effectively absent in his work (ibid.: 50, 66, 109–12). Stehr, for one, remains interested in a formula of ‘duality’ which is capable of simultaneously accommodating the enabling and constraining features of the knowledge society and the performance of its new knowledgeable elites (ibid.: 13, 106, 176).

NEW CLASS?

As many theorists have repeated after Bell, the emerging knowledge society also entails the rise to pre-eminence of a technical-professional ‘knowledge class’ which is increasingly powerful owing to its discretionary command of cultural and intellectual resources (Bell 1976a:14–15, 43, 213ff.). How can

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this class of ‘knowledgeable organizers’ be profiled sociologically, given the swiftly diminishing tension between the entrenched power and property approaches to social stratification? Let me first briefly discuss the possible candidacy of appelations such as ‘managerial class’ or ‘bureaucratic class’, which loosely derive from generalized political economy and socio-political theory. Both the vocabulary of management and that of bureaucracy admit of considerable extension beyond their respective home grounds, and have become increasingly interchangeable in various conceptualizations of the growing structural convergence of administrative regimes in advanced Western societies. Weber already traced them as virtual synonyms when pointing towards the rational concentration of the means of management and the attendant separation of ownership from administrative office and discretionary control, which was even more decisively accomplished in political bureaucracies than in managerial enterprises (1978:980, 218–19). In his perception, the logic of bureaucratic rule was largely indifferent to the distinction between private and public legal regimes, profit and non-profit sectors, market and state, or capitalism and socialism. Abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that private and public bureaucracies would merge into a single hierarchy; socialism would inevitably enhance the degree of formal bureaucratization already featured by advanced capitalism (ibid.: 225, 1401–2).

The analysis of management and bureaucracy became similarly entwined in neo-Marxist, especially dissident Trotskyite, criticisms of Soviet-type societies, which concentrated upon the emergence of a ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or a ‘polit-bureaucracy’ (cf. Bell 1976a:86ff; Bellis 1979).8 Among these, Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1945) was most emphatic in stating that, in consolidated managerial states with a state monopoly of productive enterprise, managers and bureaucrats would merge into a single class with a united interest. Even in the absence of state economic ownership, the locus of sovereignty was perceptibly shifting towards the administrative bureaux, the active heads of which were the managers-in-government, who were nearly the same in training, functions, skills, and habits of thought as the managers-in-industry. Like Weber, Burnham professed relative indifference towards the legal or financial form (individual, corporate, governmental) which the process of management itself adopted, given the inexorable interfusion to which the political and economic realms were subject (1945:71, 126–9, 135, 232ff.).

Although, in view of the above, one might conceivably adopt broad definitions of management or bureaucracy in order to characterize the class of ‘knowledgeable organizers’ in its entirety, I will here opt for ‘knowledge class’ or ‘intellectuals’ as the generic term.9 In doing so, I distance myself equally from Burnhamite predictions concerning the universal rise of the managers as from parallel attempts to stretch the theory of bureaucratic domination, in order sympathetically to resume what is known (but not much loved) as ‘New Class’ theory (Bazelon 1967; 1979; Gouldner 1979;

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Konrad and Szelényi 1979; Stabile 1984; Berger 1986; Disco 1987; Szelényi and Martin 1988; Kriesi 1989; Kellner and Heuberger 1992). My choice of ‘intellectuals’ as pars pro toto category is therefore not inspired by a wish to exclude managers and bureaucrats, but instead proposes to include them in a more generic description of the new class of information professionals which more definitely neutralizes the cognitive constraints of the two rivalling repertoires, and focuses more intently upon recent accelerations in the process of reflexive modernization. In this option, it is not so much the dual interfusion of economics and politics which commands analytic attention, but the triangular osmosis between the economic, political, and cultural spheres which is engineered by the progressive intrusion of an ‘intellectual’ or ‘cultural’ production logic in corporate management, government bureaucracies, and other large organizational establishments, all of which increasingly recognize the processing of information as pivotal to their productive activity.

In this class categorization of ‘intellectuals’, I follow an early lead by anarchists such as Bakunin, Machajski, and Nomad and revisionist socialists such as Hendrik de Man, whose comprehensive definitions of the knowledge class have resurfaced in the writings of many late twentieth-century New Class theorists. Although, for example, Gouldner’s ‘cultural bourgeoisie’ of intellectuals and intelligentsia incorporated educated managers and particular species of bureaucrats, and Konrad and Szelényi’s category of the ‘rational redistributors’ similarly fused the three categories, they evidently shifted the weight of their analysis from the managerial towards the mental or cultural dimension. Bazelon’s New Class was pictured as consisting of

working intellectuals…non-property-holding individuals whose life conditions are determined by their position within, or relation to, the corporate order…people gaining status and income through organizational position. They achieve their positions…mostly by virtue of educational status…. Education, like capital in the past, is now a manipulable and alienable property.

(cit. Bruce-Briggs 1979:7; Bazelon 1967:307ff.)

Adoption of such a broad definition also implies an option for a ‘leftist’ view of the new knowledge class—as opposed to a neo-conservative one which includes academia, journalism, and the mass media, and usually adds specific sectors of the government bureaucracy, but pointedly excludes managers and technicians in the profit sector. Although the analyses by American, German, and French neo-conservative publicists such as Kristol, Bruce-Briggs, Schelsky, and De Benoist are important, I take their demarcation of intellectuals as New Class pretenders to be overly restrictive. In Schelsky’s Die Arbeit tun die Anderen (1975), for example, they are primarily identified as Sinnproduzenten, i.e. those who perform the social functions of socialization and information—although the author frequently slips towards a broader view which includes functions of caring (Betreuung) and planning

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(Beplanung) besides those of ‘indoctrination’ (Belehrung). Bruce-Briggs (1979) supposes that New Class values and attitudes are penetrating business schools and the public relations, planning, and education departments of business corporations, but he does not nearly go as far as Bazelon or Gouldner, who are less reticent to affix the New Class label to the bulk of corporate managers themselves.

An array of sceptical reactions to the idea of a putative new knowledge class has cultivated the suspicion that it may be neither new nor very much class-like (Bell 1979; Wrong 1983; Brint 1984; 1994; Freidson 1986; Stehr and Ericson 1992; Stehr 1994a; Rootes 1995). It is important to recall that the New Class idea, as it was reinvented by left-wing and right-wing publicists during the 1970s, functioned to add sociological clout to quite discrepant political hopes and fears; both the intellectuals of the left and the right were busily ‘shopping for a historical agent’ (to employ Gouldner’s felicitous expression against its author) and exploited the gravity of the conventional class vocabulary in order to identify either history’s ‘best card’ for a radical politics (Gouldner’s own vanguard of humanistic intellectuals and technical intelligentsia) or the historic class enemy (Schelsky’s ‘new priests’ or Kristol’s and Podhoretz’s status-envious class of the university educated).10 Over against such attempts to ‘solidify’ the political ally or adversary by sociological means, critics repeatedly insisted that the New Class was too fragmented intellectually and occupationally, and too diverse in its cultural and political allegiances to be able to perform successfully as a ‘classical’ class. Shifting his allegiance from the class to the elite vocabulary, Bell soon dismissed the New Class idea as a linguistic and sociological ‘muddle’, because it conflated the idea of an emerging knowledge stratum with that of an adversary cultural attitude, which were not necessarily related. Moreover, the rising knowledge elite demonstrated insufficient community of interest and commonness of ideology to be able to act as a coherent class; its vertically organized locations or ‘situses’ (such as economic enterprises, government agencies, universities, and hospitals) importantly cut across its rather loose horizontal corporative organization in terms of professional ‘estates’. Not a class, the New Class at most represented a spreading hedonistic and anti-bourgeois mentality, which seriously pressurized economic efficiency and exacerbated what Bell called the ‘cultural contradiction’ of capitalism (Bell 1979; 1976b).

Subsequent theorizing and research have done much to dissipate this widely shared hypothesis about the anti-capitalist animus of the intelligentsia, which defined both the hopes of the left and the fears of the right, who commonly saw the new class of knowledge workers as engaged in a historic struggle for status and power with an old dominant class of business owners and executives. Surprisingly, however, while the old propertied bourgeoisie was tendentially replaced by a cultural capital-based new class, it did not bode an end to capitalism, but initiated a remarkable renovation of its structure, which absorbed many of the previous elements and bearers of the ‘adversary culture’ in what has been justifiably called a ‘historic compromise’

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