Timothy Mitchell, taught at NYU for twenty five years before Columbia University's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) managed to steal him from NYU. He is a political theorist, working mainly on the political economy of the Middle East.
My personal interactions with him (alas, brief) and later my exposure to some of his work including Rule of Experts and Carbon Democracy have convinced me that MEALAC people definitely knew what they were going after when they chose to snatch this gem! He is extremely friendly, very accessible and unbelievably bright. His mind works like a detangler. You give your thought and he helps you de-construct it and realize its weaknesses in a matter of minutes.
I read parts of Rule of Experts while ago and had some notes on it which I am sharing with you here:
“There are two characteristics of social explanations relevant to this problem. First, social theory typically operates by relating particular cases to a larger pattern or process. Event in a place like Egypt are explained as the local occurrence of something more general, or an exception to what generally occurs, or a particular variation in the general range of possibilities. In some of the social sciences this aim is quite explicit, expressed in rules of method and styles of writing. In others it is implicit but still at work, for example in historical scholarship, in which the narrative may focus on a specific context by draws its structure and relevance from an implied comparison with others, more general cases. Inevitably the generic case in such accounts is the history of Europe or the West, and the particulars f what happened outside Europe are explained as replicas of Europe’s history, or variations from that historical pattern, or alternatives to it.” (P. 28)
“The second feature of social explanation follows from the first: all the actors are human. The protagonists of the history of the nation, of modernity, of capitalism, are people. Human beings are the agents around whose actions and intentions the story is written. This is necessarily the case, for it is the intentionality or rationality of human agents that gives the explanation its logic and enables particular cases to fit as instances of something general. The general or universal aspect of events that social theory attempts to identify occurs precisely as the spread of this human reason, technical knowledge, or collective consciousness.” (p. 29)
On pages 40 and 41, Mithcell explains how the Americans started their postwar involvement in Egypt by providing aid (through subsidizing their own industries) to bring their technology into Egypt under the name of “technical assistance,” such as introducing fertilizer schemes and spraying farms with pesticides and introducing “hygienic houses.”
“There were three significant features of this new politics based on technical expertise. First, as with the dam at Aswan, it represented a concentration and reorganization of knowledge rather than an introduction of expertise where none had been in use before. Technical knowledge was to be focused into pilot projects and demonstration sites, from where it would spread throughout the land. Villages in Egypt already had a straightforward method of plastering over mud brick, using particulars local clays mixed with straw…. But existing practice, like the old knowledge of irrigation, involved an expertise that was too widely dispersed to provide a means for building imperial power—or the profits of a Boston consulting firm.
Second, as with the engineering at Aswan, the projects encountered continuous practical difficulties. In fact, every one of them failed. … As at Aswan, the technical experts tried to learn from these failures. Repairs were improvised opportunistic alternatives were introduced, and goals were reformulated. But what this means is that technical expertise did not work by bringing science and technology to develop natural resources. … So-called nature formed the expertise, which never completely escaped its compromising origins.
Third, however, it was an important aspect of the politics of technical expertise that these failure and adjustments were overlooked, in fact actively covered up. Techno-science had to conceal its extra-scientific origins. Nowhere, first of all, was it mentioned that every one of these technologies—crop spraying … or a mud brick more resistance to disease—were themselves responses (and unsuccessful responses) to problems cause by earlier techno-scientific projects, in particular Aswan dam. Beyond this, the fundamental difficulties were presented as minor issues of the improper implementation of the plans, unexpected complications, bureaucratic delays, or the need to follow up….” (pp. 41 & 42)
For his article, "Carbon Democracy," which is also highly recommended, just google the name and it will be the third or fourth option on the search results.
No comments:
Post a Comment