Ruling Relations and Textual Mediation

Ruling relations consist of an intricate network of objectified social relations that regulate and organise social life (1988,1990a, 1990b, 2005). As Smith defines in the following passage:

that total complex of activities, differentiated into many spheres, by which our kind of society is ruled, managed, and administered. It includes what the business world calls

management, it includes the professions, it includes government and the activities of those who are selecting, training, and indoctrinating those who will be its governors. The last includes those who provide and elaborate the procedures by which it is governed and develop methods for accounting for how it is done – namely, the business schools, the sociologists, the economists. These are the institutions through which we are ruled and through which we, and I emphasize this we, participate in ruling. (1990a:14)

However, Smith cautions that although ruling relations are organisations of power they are not reducible to relations of domination or hegemony, rather

they form fields of coordinated activities (Smith 1999:79). Smith takes the position, then, that contemporary society is ruled by organisations and professional settings, governments, corporations, hospitals, universities and so on. These same organisations are made up of individuals, but at the same time:

their capacities to act derive from the organizations and social relations that they both produce and are produced by. The relations and organization in which they are active are also those that organize our lives and in which we in various ways participate. Watching television, reading the newspaper, going to the grocery store, taking a child to school, taking on a mortgage for a home, walking down a city street, switching on a light, plugging in a computer – these daily acts articulate us into social relations of the order I have called ruling as well as those of the economy. (2005:18)

Smith’s project here stems from the perspective that knowledge is socially produced and that ruling relations, through discourse and text produces the knowledge that people take for granted. In taking women’s standpoint, especially that of Western women, she argues that much of their consciousness is formed through their own particularising work in relation to children, households and spouses, or what is commonly called domestic work (Smith 1999). Within contemporary arrangements of ruling relations, women’s consciousness is “obliterated” (ibid:74), as are many other voices from marginalised groups. What Smith endeavours to do is open up for investigation the “DNA of social organization”, (1999:94): that is, to make visible social relations other than those of the ruling forms, or the differences between the actualities of everyday/everynight lives and the forms of knowledge of the social that might be developed for them (ibid).

According to Smith, much sociological research is carried out within objectified systems and procedures, and, although social research with the best of intentions seeks to explicate and make visible the standpoint and interests of people, it can often result in producing objectified accounts from a position established within the ruling relations. Smith (2001) problematises the ways in which sociological concepts are created, and in particular the nominalisation of verbs such as organise, institute and coordinate. These

verbs respectively become organisation, institution and coordination. For Smith, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using these concepts, indeed she sees their use as inescapable and also useful. The problem of nominalisation, however, becomes apparent when women’s standpoint is taken up, since:

the ontological ground of whatever is represented in these nominalizations is left wholly indeterminate. Concepts of organization and institution can be substructed by building up underneath them accounts of the local practices and forms of co-ordinating them that entitle reification. (Smith 2001:167-168)

The difference between Smith’s and Marx’s method lay in the historicity of social conditions. The social conditions in which Marx theorised consciousness as an attribute of individuals have developed into consciousness as the workings of a complex of objectifying organisation and relations, mediated through texts and computer technologies (Smith 1999:78- 79) or ‘organisational sociology’. In Marx’s era standardisation and replicable working practices were not so prevalent, with labourers unlikely to be keeping sophisticated records. This is in contrast to the widespread development of trans-local, corporatised and accountable working practices of contemporary society. For Smith, therefore:

In exploring the everyday/everynight world in which organization and institution come into being, we find at every point the textual mediation of people’s activities through standardized and standardizing genres such as forms, instructions, rules, rule-books, memos, procedural manuals, funding applications, statistical analyses, libraries, journals, and many more. Texts are integral to people’s daily and nightly activities on the job. (Smith 2001:173)

All of these standardising procedures become properties of organisation grounded in the materiality of the text and subject to increasingly complex technological expansion.

Texts, then, must be seen as material: in their replicability, and reproduction of one meaning across multiple sites, local settings and at different times, where they are seen, read and interpreted, and where they continuously organise people’s everyday activities. That is not to say that texts

are mechanically effective or that organisations can be reduced to texts, rather it is to say that the textual mediation of people’s activities can be opened up for empirical investigation into how they enter into actual courses of action3

Notwithstanding, Smith endeavours to build into Foucault’s work the aspect of materiality. Thus for Smith, discourse includes text and language as the medium by which social relations are actively organised and co-ordinated. Texts are constitutive of organisations and institutions and not just forms of communication within them, they carry information which is activated by others (Smith 2001). The active text and participation by people is crucial for institutions and organisations to work. They are unable to work on their own. Thus, Smith develops a theory of language based on selected linguists and psychologists who emphasise the ways in which language is essentially social and who do not separate the phenomenon of language from its social context. Whilst there is not the space to discuss these theorists, suffice it to say she utilises and combines Volosinov’s notion of ‘interindividual territory’ in which

. Intrinsic to Smith’s concept of text mediated ruling relations is discourse in the Foucaultian sense, characterised as shaping people’s subjectivities discursively, and also in terms of power and knowledge. For Smith, Foucault’s work is highly innovative, however, although she admires his commitment to subjugated knowledges she asserts:

Theorizing the subject as a creature of discourse provides no ground on which different perspectives could arise. There is in his theory (though not, of course, in fact) no place other than discursively determined subject positions to speak from and no language other than that which intersects with ‘the law of the father’ (Lacan 1977) in which to mean. (Smith 1999:94)

Neither does Smith agree with the popularised view that knowledge is necessarily a relation of power:

The intersection of knowledge and power is an effect of the integration of the ruling relations, establishing subject positions within discourse from which experience can be known only externally and from within an order of domination. (ibid)

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speech is interactive and conjures up objects and experience; Bakhtin’s theory of direct and indirect experience, or primary and secondary speech genres; and Vygotsky’s use of the social in the psyche and in psychological development.

To sum up, texts for Smith, as for Foucault, are extended to include television, film, art photography and so on, and are active phenomena4

2.5.2 Locating Ideology and Ideological Codes within Ruling