Anonymous, "Lateral Learning at Hacienda Heights", contributed by , Disaster STS Network, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 14 May 2023, accessed 3 December 2024. http://465538.bc062.asia/content/lateral-learning-hacienda-heights
Critical Commentary
My hypothesis is that the passing of EPCRA had its conditions of possibility set in a more general shift from disciplinary societies to a post-disciplinary (more often referred to as "neoliberal") society, a shift that I root in the epistemic rupture that anthropologists have called the "crisis of representation." According to Marcus and Fischer this crisis involved "the destabilizing of foundational knowledges in many arenas of instrumental practice," due to a situation where "traditional concepts and methods are increasingly outrun by real-world events" (Marcus and Fischer 1999, xix). This is precisely the crisis to which that model of governmentality we call "neoliberalism" responds. It is a rejection of disciplinary power, not because it violates "Man's natural rights," but because it fails according to its own standards, according to its real-world effects. It's centralized methods of knowledge production, precise and refined as they had become, had been deemed too slow and encumbered, too clumsy and imprecise.
Disciplinary societies required the government's monopoly on knowledge and of information, that it could adequately understand, represent, and govern the society to which it was beholden under the supposed "social contract." And this, in turn, required an architectonics of surveillance that Foucault called panopticism: the spatial dispersion of the populous in view of the unseen sovereign, imposing a disjunction, a non-relation, an asymmetry between the flows of information from the public to the state and the flows from the state to the public. Two one-way flows, the correspondence of which could be adjusted (i.e. rendered more or less representative of each other, or more or less detached and distinct) in accordance to the strategy of government in regard to the current historical circumstances (i.e. war, peacetime, recession, growth, disaster, etc.). And this panoticism, this asymmetry in the arrangement and flow of attention and information, still structures the spatial arrangements of our schools, prisons, hospitals, etc. to this day.
However, following WWII, the relations of power shifted in light of the clear threat of a state's unchecked use of these disciplinary tactics, bolstered by new discursive techniques (propaganda) and technologies of mass communication (radio, film, and television), which had a tendency to devolve into totalitarianism, to fascism. This combined with the added pressure of recurrent economic depressions and the ineptitude of communist or even Keynesian-style, centralized economic planning, which provoked the set of political economic theories referred to as "neoliberalism."
In short, neoliberalism is marked by a distrust in "central planning," which falls in line with Marcus and Fischer's diagnoses of the era as a destabilization of foundational knowledges that also precludes traditional modes of instrumental practice. Up until this point, central planning was not only unquestioned, but had its roots in the line of enlightenment political theory that produced the unquestionable right of the sovereign. However, with the horrors of the world wars, plus the persistent failures of both capitalism and the communist alternatives, this "right to rule" was problematized.
And I would locate the "environmental right-to-know" on the same epistemic ground as this neoliberal questioning of the government's right to rule (it was, after all, signed into law by that titan figure of US Neoliberalism, Ronald Reagan). In these neoliberal, or post-disciplinary societies, power is no longer organized to produce precise subject effects, but rather to produce that "fungible" subject of "human capital," who is not a citizen, a soldier, a mother, a queer black woman, or any other such person, but rather anybody, anywhere, at anytime. The units of analysis have changed from the individual subject, with all their particularities, to populations, to averages, to probabilities and rates. As such, with this abandonment of the "individual" as the natural and obvious subject of government, to the government of new kinds of multiplicities, this opens the way for new social standing for the corporation.
Though it's become banal to say, the Corporation is no longer a legal fiction, it has become a person, homo juridicus, a legal subject. But they are a distributed person, which is simply not subject to the same disciplinary tactics as were individuals, with their "docile bodies" (Foucault 2008). Thus, recourse has shifted to "the fine," which, because it abstracts, measures, and quantifes the negative value of the crime with that most fungible of commodities, money (rather than inflicting the punishment on the body), can be levied at any scale. An as such, governance structures (particularly punishment and reward) are continually shifting from the calculation of just deserts (is it really "justice" that ensures Elon Musk pays the same speeding ticket that I do?!?!), to refining the incentives and/or obstacles to set a demand curve that keeps "most" actors in check. Some might continue to exceed the bounds, but "that is inevitable." No longer striving for perfection, justice shifts to maintaining a "B average."
Similarly, outside of punishment, in the realm of knowledge and discourse, there has been an inversion in the economy of information that characterized disciplinary societies. Discourse is no longer shaped by the powerful vying to maintain "control of the narrative," to ensure a controlled asymmetry between the flow of information coming from the state to the public, and that from the public to the state. It's about managing the "economy of takes" on the narrative, ensuring that every take on the narrative receives its due (with some exceptions), such that no single narrative can hold the center, or not for very long anyway.
Take the Hacienda Heights meeting, and the response of the moderators to the outcries of the community (this is an interpretation, not a quote): "Ok, we hear you. You have been wronged. You are suffering from blatant failures of government. And this is important; we acknowledge you. But it's not the whole story. There might also be people here who want to know about the structure of the settlement and how the money from this (rather negligible) fine will be spent. That narrative is important too, and deserves equal time. We also have to consider the time of the employee's who are being paid to be here, and value that on equal footing to the "free time" that you have sacrificed to be here."
Furthermore, unlike in panopticism, where the public are dispersed in view of the unseen sovereign. In post-disciplinary societies, it's the sovereign, itself, that has been divided and dispersed, distributing it's authority to the degree that, even if a strong "counter-narrative" begins to take hold, there is no longer any single "sovereign" to serve as its addressee. Rather, there is a seemingly never ending division of offices that require equal amounts of attention, but different kinds of information, different strategies of communication to accommodate their different data cultures, ideologies, and thoughtstyles.
Once again, the example of Hacienda Heights is instructive: The crowd was not distributed so as to be seen from an unseen center; they were literally surrounded. When someone from the crowd asked a question outside the specified domain, they were redirected to various tables, outside the view of the group. This is the new arrangement of "environmental right-to-know:" the community in the center, surrounded by the dispersed fronts of the diverse branches of divisible governance. You can access the data, but you can't have it all in one place. And your access is only ever granted at the individual level. We will not bring the experts from their separate tables to the front of the room, for everyone to see. They will answer your question, but only as an individual. Your take on that answer can then be shared with everyone else, one step removed, so that it's already on the path of dispersion: you share your take, so that your listeners can provide their take on your take, and so on.
But what about those former subjects, the individual, whose "disciplining" has been diminished, if not fully abandoned? The subject of neoliberalism is marked by ambiguity and precarity, impeding the formation of stable, coherent subjectivities necessary for coordinated political activity. Accordingly, resistance requires a turn to epistemic justice, to the development of new, grassroots techniques of power and reflexivity that can scaffold the kind of shared subjectivity that enables collective action. And it is my hypothesis that, one such tactic of power is the "question," a question which hails a specific subject.
Thus, what is most interesting to me, is to situate "the question," (the questions we explore with our research collaborators, the interview questions we ask our informants, the questions of the stakeholder meetings) as a re-capturing of the tactics of discipline, the production of subjectivity, but this time from the grassroots. In the current historical moment, where disciplinary power is no longer hegemonic, having been abandoned by the technologies of the market, by a regime of power that does not work at the level of the subject, bur rather that of populations; in this "neoliberal" era, the strategy of individuation and regimentation, the focus on the production of precise subject effects becomes a tactic of resistance.
To me, this is the more "performative," the more pedagogical role of ethnography: the ethnographer asking questions that provoke ethnographic kinds of subjectivities, ethnographic lines of questioning. Ethnography also has a spatiality to it, producing new kinds of visibilities: We drew members of the City, of SCAQMD, of the Unites States Attorney into "one room," created a public, and subjecting these "decision makers" to its gaze. And there is an infrastructure component: We are building a network of connections between Hacienda Heights and Santa Ana, between both of these locations and UC Irvine, etc. And we are training community members to conduct interviews, establishing a program of information flow that can be repeated and adjusted.
These are all tactics of power, rotating around the force of the ethnographic question, and largely fulfilling a disciplinary function of producing subjectivity. Which means they are also, inevitably, going to be problematic, going to marginalize, exclude, normalize, etc. The question is a curve tracing a line of points across the scatterplot of reality, always connecting some points rather than others. They are not representative, but productive; they force thought in a way that must, to a degree, be violent. But that doesn't they should be abandoned. It means that the precise question, and the subject it hails, too, should always subject to questioning.