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Sunday, April 5, 2009
Week 11: Spontaneous, Brilliant Thoughts
This is a place for rambling thoughts, for spontaneous brilliant thoughts that just have to be written and cannot wait. A place to post something that comes to mind after lecture, or while reading, and that will generate spontaneous responses and a back and forth communication. So, freestyle your brilliance and post!
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3 comments:
1)Graham isn't in any of the videos.
2) Why does religion die out as Weber suggests on page 176?
3) Marx vs. Weber, would Weber agree with Marx's vision of breaking free from the iron cage?
1) Graham is the talented artist behind the camera with the sound of laughter...but yes, we must get him to sing too!
2) I believe that Weber argues that the spirit of capitalism is the unintended consequence of a religious, and most importantly, ascetic life. This eventually leads to people becoming wealthy, but losing sight of the religious "values" and placing emphasis on the acquisition of worldly goods.
There is that beautiful passage on page 181: "'...the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage".
But when that care for external goods is heaviness on the saint, we become trapped.
:)
3) What do you mean by Marx's vision of "breaking free" from the iron cage? Socialism?
For Weber, says Prof Burawoy, “only prophets can arise to quell the power of bureaucracy…” thus a leader – Lenin, Ghandi, MLK, if I understood this correctly. In lecture he noted that passive democracy can contain bureaucracy.
Weber would want to fight one's own battle though be deeply touched by the solidarity...and amazed at the cleverness.
4) Take a look at this passage from Marx (Communist Manifesto, Tucker 476). Would you say he is saying something similar to Weber’s quote above?
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
REFLECTIONS ON WEBER
“Sine ira ac studio” (215), says Weber, is how the efficiency and precision of the modern bureaucracy works. Without anger, without bias. Thus, without anger to bring about passion and effect change. It does not take sides, the bureaucracy remains neutral. Yet, it is this very neutrality that leads to question one’s humanity.
Weber’s passage on 216 brings to mind the film Bladerunner in which the suspected replicants are asked to take a sort of exam to test their emotional responses and prove they are human. Replicants are super-humans, possessed with intelligence, highly trained and skilled…but they are not human.
The replicants are the epitome of calculation, without “…love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements…” (216). Yet, it is the “real” humans in the film who have become desensitized and are more like the robots.
Interestingly, in time the replicants come to display human emotions such as compassion and empathy. The irrational becomes the rational and the rational the irrational.
Weber alludes to the dysfunction of the bureaucracy but does not offer us details. He does make a clear distinction between patrimonialism and the bureaucracy, but does not reflect on the rationality of the patrimonial and the irrationality of the bureaucracy.
“Its specific nature…develops the more perfectly…the more bureaucracy is dehumanized”. The bureaucracy becomes the replicant. And the single case becomes the anonymous, caught in some no man’s land, homogenized and without meaning.
If we were to draw Weber’s theory of bureaucracy as a map, what sort of map would it be, or, in what direction would it take us? I imagine a lot of squiggly lines. The purpose of the map or the direction of the map lies in how one reads it. Depending on the perspective one is coming from, they may misinterpret the reality, and thus make a different inference about the world. The beauty in theory is that it allows us to take a “re-read” of the world.
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