Lefebvre's Lament

"Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter." -Edward Abbey

I’m teaching an undergraduate class this semester on globalization, consumerism, & sustainability. I’ve structured the class as a seminar, heavy on reading, discussion, and writing with no formal lectures and no exams. I’ve utilized this format in two previous classes. The first time it went ok, but not great. The second time, it worked beautifully. Using this strategy in undergraduate classes reveals quite a lot about the ways in which the conventional educational model circumscribes the possibilities of active learning, and about the cultural consequences of passive learning.

In all three classes students have been initially confounded. Most of them have been conditioned to accept a hierarchy of knowledge that is legitimized through institutional endorsement. They display a deep suspicion of their own knowledge, experience, and opinions, believing the only person in the room qualified to talk authoritatively, or indeed talk at all, is the one standing up front. They generally accept this unreflexively, ready to absorb a one-way flow of information without question. It appears a self-evident truth that the person behind the podium is unequivocally qualified to be there and deliver all manner of pronouncements while those sitting are unequivocally not so qualified. Why else would the political anatomy of the classroom take the form it does?

This is the principle challenge of teaching in this format, and one that tells us a lot about social conditioning. It is symptomatic of a social formation in which certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing are valued above others; in which knowledge backed up by the credentialing apparatus of formal institutions is not only authoritative, but authoritarian. In other words, this differential valuation embeds the notion that formalized institutional knowledge is superior, and conversely that experiential knowledge is inferior. The societal result is a populace convinced that their own experiences—and the insights and working knowledge thus acquired—are worthless because they are not confirmed by the recognition of the formal merit system. The end result is a kind of systemic paralysis in which the undertaking of any action must first be legitimized by institutional knowledge—a kind of uncritical deference that operates at the intersection of distrust and authority. It operates at every level of social life. Indeed it has thoroughly colonized the lifeworld itself, to the point that the general populace lives in a state of constant uncertainty and doubt, uncertain as to whether it can trust its own intuition (intuition being equated to a sort of superstition), a society composed more or less of automatons. This finally yields what Henry Lefebvre called the “Bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”



By way of illustration, a student approached me after class recently. I had just handed back the students’ first set of critical notes, an exercise in which I ask students to engage with the readings in a reflective manner. It is a highly flexible exercise, intended to generate creative responses (another mode of engagement that is seemingly foreign to many students, programmed as they are to carefully follow detailed instructions rather than improvise. In this general mode of existence, being correct is valued above being creative. Accordingly then, what students most fear is being incorrect, a state of being which is inherently prohibitive of creativity. It is not only students though, and this is the larger point. Their teachers are generally cut from the same cloth. As Jim Harrison wrote of the academic mode of intellectual production, “it is concerned above all else with being correct"). I emphasize to students that I do not want to see summaries of the readings, but critical engagements that can and do often bleed into that feared and oft disparaged territory known as opinion. This particular student had done a bit too much summarizing, and I made this clear in my grading comments. I wrote that next time I’d like to more of her own original thought, less summarizing. “I’m just don’t feel qualified to give my opinions” she said, at which point I encouraged to trust her experience and observations as a human being who inhabits the same world as those who presumably speak more authoritatively than she by virtue of their formal credentials.

However, there is one arena, and only one, in which the citizen (the student, the parent, the lover, the friend) may feel confident, and that is the arena of consumption. Which is I suppose a fortuitous confluence as far as my objectives for this particular class are concerned. So knowledge about the inner workings of the world we collectively inhabit (the world of nature, the world of physical bodies, the world of governance, and finance, and law) are left to an oligarchy of experts, to whom we must defer, while the outer manifestations of the world of commerce are democratized—the hollow “democracy of goods.” We can all be experts on different brands of footwear, but the important decisions are best left to the experts. We lack even a modicum of confidence when comes to matters of the observable world, but we are all supremely confident in issuing our opinion on which is the best brand of whitening toothpaste. And, perhaps most tragically of all, it is in conflating such acts of choice with freedom that we have perhaps irrevocably cheapened, if not entirely emptied the latter term of any vital meaning. Is a “freedom fighter” someone who is fighting to protect his/her “right” to choose between coke and pepsi? What kind of right is that? What kind of freedom? This is what I see as the ultimate consequence of an educational system that actively encourages students to doubt themselves, to refrain from issuing a statement until they can cite sources (issued of course by experts) by which that statement may be substantiated. Until that time, they are encouraged to provide their informed opinion in consumer surveys, so that corporate manufacturers and service providers might “better serve us.”



And so Lefebvre’s designation—a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. It is bureaucratic because deference to expertise is the modus operandi, so much so that it has penetrated even the most trivial arenas of daily decision making. Thus we have people constantly fretting about what to eat and what not to eat (“They used to say eggs were high in cholesterol, now they say their high in omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t know whether to eat them or not!;” “Butter or margarine?”), or how much exercise they should get, and what kind, or whether paper or plastic is better, or whether this or that thing is carcinogenic, etc. etc. This is a condition that another prominent social theorist, Ulrich Beck, calls the risk society: a society characterized by a kind of totalizing internalization of pervasive risk. The resulting mode of engagement is one that requires constant recursive-ness—“Hold on, let me look that up online. Ok, we can do that. Wait, let me check one more source. No, never mind, we better not do that. Or should we? Oh goddamn, give that glass of wine.”

It is a society of controlled consumption because the same recursive-ness, the perpetual cross referencing, produces patterned modes of consumption informed by the often contradictory and thus disorienting pronouncements of the experts. It is, as I have already said, a sort of societal paralysis in which no one is quite sure what to do or who to trust—but most certainly, not yourself.