Centers of calculation, as Miller says, are "center[s] on which a cycle of accumulation is focused and which possesses the power to maintain that situation by disciplining individuals and institutions across a wide spectrum of the society" (25). Miller continues, "the process of accumulation, calculation and exercise of power must not be regarded as separate" (25). In otherwords, centers of calculation construct and enforce ways of seeing and understanding things.
Maybe then centers of calculation do not "reflect" cultural or national biases, but instead, to some degree, "establishes" those biases. In this sense, centers of calculation become machines of ideological dissemination.
Ideology, in a Marxist context, relates to systems of ideas that help to maintain power structures; and ideology is imposed through a number of cultural and economic contexts. Gramsci, however, critiques Marx's argument that ideology is enforced through coercion and force, saying that the working class is complicit in the power structure as well. Hegemony, Gramsci claims, is ideology internalized by the working class, and is accepted as some kind of cultural consciousness, which in return discourages contestation and maintains social stratification.
Centers of calculation then cannot be the reflection of cultural thought. If they were, it would mean that the working class was creating the political, social, and economic agenda. Hegemony however, does not establish the rules, but instead, is a complicit willingness to follow them. If, as Miller claims, centers of calculation and the exercise of power cannot be separated, and if we know that power is exercised by those of the ruling class, then centers of calculation cannot express the thought of the people, but give the people their thoughts.
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3 comments:
You are clearly NOT talking to me. And I am glad. :)
Casual Marxist—Thought-provoking idea, which makes sense. I not be your specific audience, but I'll take a stab at a response anyway!
I suppose one thing that bothers me about widely accepted theories--neo-Marxism, Miller’s (which really comes from Latour) centers of calculations, or even Gramscian critiques--is their neatness. Although there is much to learn from center/periphery, dominant/oppressed, and ruling class/working class models, there is also a lot to learn from looking at what lies outside of those models. For example, even though there is evidence to suggest that scientists like B sat at the center of calculation constructing racial types and disseminating that information to the peripheral masses, there is also evidence to suggest that individual travelers of European, Asian, Indian, and even African decent (ie, Leo Africanus), not to mention native peoples and mid-level colonial administrators, articulated their own set of racial identities that escaped the constraints of the centers of calculation, and in so doing created racial identity in the more post-modern sense of multiple, slippery, and de-centered. My critical term for it is “messy.”
If you’re interested in these ideas, you might look at the work of historian Nicholas Thomas and his cohorts. A reviewer for one book of essays, “The Archeology of Colonialism,” in which Thomas appears, writes, “The essays serve as an introduction to the evolution of scholarly discourses about civilized and barbarian, self and other, indigenous resistance and acculturation, periphery instead of center, and the more recent turn to accepting the ambiguity of colonial situations and the hybridity of their societies along with cultures, not to mention the agency of colonials themselves, rather than their acculturation, elimination, or resistance.”
I don't really understand the difference between the words reflect and establish in this context. I'm not sure one can happen without the other, nor am I a marxist -- maybe that's the (problem) ?
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