Susan's Day 8 Summary : Militant Particularism

- Harvey takes one of his experiences on a research project and rubs it against Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘militant particularism’. When asked by Teresa Hayter to define his loyalties, Harvey was unable to side solely with the autoworkers at Cowley. Harvey’s project encompasses a larger context than a single factory in a single town. Focus on the particular in this way does not support the wider socialist project. This points not only to a politics of scale, but also to the subordination of shorter actions in support of longer term goals.

- Williams prioritizes a dialectical reading for understanding of processes over things. He also uses and systematically questions the notion of embeddedness and culture. Reference to levels of abstraction link to Harvey’s ontology and epistemology. Harvey and Hatyer were operating on two different levels of abstraction, which led Harvey to ask: “what level and what kinds of abstraction should be deployed? And what might it mean to be loyal to abstractions rather than to actual people?” (p. 73-74). Is there a politics to levels of abstractions? Harvey would most likely argue there is.

- Answer this: what does Harvey mean by loyalties? “Loyalties contracted as one scale, in one place and in terms of a particular structure of feeling, cannot easily or simply be carried over without transformation or translation into the kinds of loyalties required to make socialism a viable movement either elsewhere or in general” (p.180). Loyalties are a multi-layered and complex concept.

- Nature contains a large amount of human history. Is this natural? An inquiry into the environment can be made to better understand social and cultural change. This seems significant: “The environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment but then culture reshapes environment responding to those choices” (p. 77). The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people create and re-create their livelihood must be analyzes in terms of changes not only in their social relations but in their ecological ones as well” (Williams 1983, p. 13-14). Can this process be better understood at the level of everyday life?

- Williams’ novels, as a mode of communication, are concerned with the lived lives of people. The mode is a form that allows the representation of daily qualities of lives that could not be grasped thought other means. Narratives and stories exist and take place in everyday life. This appears to offer a justification for using narratives and stories in trying to understand lives experiences/spaces. The collection of lived experiences is not objective science, but rather a subjective approach not unconnected to feeling and emotion.

- Militant Particularism: “holds that all politics (of no matter what sort and no matter whether it is local, urban, regional, national or global in focus) have their origins in the collective development of a particular political vision on the part of particular persons in particular places a particular times” (190). Harvey problematizes militant particularism. When used to maintain the status quo, militant particularism serves the interests of a marginalized and privileged community collective. “High levels of local activism often signal strong barriers to progressive and juster forms of social change” (191).

- It is important to understand how transcendence out of particularities can occur (193). Dialectics plays a role in achieving such an understanding: “universality always exists in relation to particularity” (194). An abstraction must be made from particular instances to a more general political context; universality is acquired through a process of abstraction. Orchestration of processes depends on mediating institutions, making reference to the need for understanding the processes that constitute the ‘thing’, in this case the community. The tangible solidarities that are part of the patterns of social life can be understood as a set of abstract conceptions that theoretically have unive3rsal purchase. This shift in thinking requires a move from one level abstraction (attached to place) to another set of abstraction capable of reaching across space. Harvey contends that it is the shifting from one conceptual world, from one level of abstraction to another that threatens the common purpose grounding militant particularism.

- Williams is helpful for Harvey because his characters and the tensions they experience with their identities illustrate tensions between militant particularism and wider socialist projects. Can identities survive the collapse of order?

- The perpetuation of loyalties requires the perpetuation of oppressive conditions. Militant particularism is traditionally grounded in socialist politics. Harvey sees militant particularism as being on the decline.