#rule of experts

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Scope of Camp Probe Outlined by Ralston," Montreal Gazette. September 2, 1940. Page 5. ---- Ottawa, September 1.-Defence. Minister Ralston tonight announced the scope of the investigation to be conducted by a board of experts into the war prisoner and internment camp situation in Canada.

The board, the Minister said, will examine conditions at the various internment camps and make recommendations regarding any further measures to prevent the escape of men held in these camps.

No time is to be lost in instituting the investigation, said Mr. Ralston, who announced Friday night that the probe would be held. As previously announced, the board will consist of Col. P. A. Piuze, officer commanding the Canadian Provost Corps, chairman; Col. T. Dann, former Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and George T. Goad, warden of Dorchester Penitentiary, members.

"These officers were selected because of their wide experience as custodians and in dealing with prisoners," the Minister's statement said. "Their experience particularly qualifies them to deal with the question of security measures and the prevention of escape."

Col. Piuze, former commissioner of the Quebec Provincial Police and previously warden of St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary. and Col. Dann were in consultation yesterday by Maj. Gen. B. W. Browne. Adjutant-General. Warden Goad will fly to Ottawa to join his associates. -

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"TECHNOCRATS DECIDE TO USE SOFT PEDAL," Toronto Star. December 23, 1932. Page 1. --- Holds No Golden Promise of Economic Paradise," Says Engineer ---- New York, Dec. 23. - Technocrats to-day began to soft-pedal. Technocracy, they contended, is not claiming to be a system of government, a sort of communism run by engineers, as one description made it. Technocracy does not advocate a Soviet of engineers.

Technocracy, declared Dal Hitchcock, one of the engineers, is not a panacea for social disturbances. It is only an investigation of the way modern, speeded-up machinery is rapidly displacing human labor, and, from this analysis when it is completed scientists may "perhaps" work out a new system of industry and government.

Hitchcock appeared before a large group of newspapermen with a long typewritten statement to this effect from Howard Scott, head of the investigating engineers, who is ill.

"Technocracy holds no golden promise of an economic paradise," Hitchcock told the assembled, press men.

"Technocracy points out," he said, that this continent has no fear of gloom or chaos, but that we must face the inconvenience of change - that this continent stands on the threshold of a new era of well-being. The high road to this new era can be one of orderly progression under technological control."

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“TECHNOCRAT SCARE OVER, SAYS EXPERT,” Montreal Gazette. January 11, 1933. Page 17. --- U.S. Engineer Satisfied "Dressed-up Bogeys" Losing Powers ---- New York, January 10. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce was told tonight that the "technocracy scare is over" by Floyd W. Parsons, engineer. 

“Everyone is breathing easier since the subject was dragged into the open and stripped of its mystery," said Parsons, editor of several engineering magazines, director of several manufacturing companies, and a member of a number of engineering societies. 

"Once again the innate good humor and sound common sense of the American people have been clearly revealed. It is gratifying to note that dressed-up bogeys are losing their powers to terrify us, and this is not only a harbinger of better times, but it also indicates the substitution of nerve for nerves. 

"It is even probable that the technocrats are rendering the nation a real service by directing attention to age-old evils that have been passed over too lightly. Out of the battle of words will come a better understanding of machines, money, methods and men in their relationship to each other. 

"Technocracy runs wild when it presents statements, which, if carried to a logical conclusion, indicate that 100 brickmakers can do the work vt So.000 and that 17 flour- mill employees can perform all the duties now taken care of by 27,000 men and women. 

'Its philosophy falls flat when it assumes that sound conclusions can be based on fragmentary evidence that present abnormal unemployment is the result of technological displacement; that who can predict with accuracy what human beings will think or do tomorrow; that everything ,was grand until the machine came along to upset life and industry; that the demand for goods will soon become stationary. and that the future can be measured by kilowatts with human nature loft out of the picture. 

“Unemployment was as bad in the 1870′s as today, and no one can say that labor-saving devices caused the idleness.”

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

But a greater problem than the emergence of the caveman was the updated, more medicalized version of the bumbling groom: the insecure, impotent husband. Men, argued one doctor, were under much more pressure than women. 'She has not to do but merely to be, to exist.' Little wonder that several experts cited 'marital stage-fright' or 'honeymoon impotence' as a serious wedding night problem for men. They advised brides to 'exercise extreme tact' should this situation arise, for 'there is probably no subject about which the male is more sensitive.' However, unless impotence had a deeper psychological cause (such as repressed homosexuality), it could usually be dealt with by that modern panacea: consultation with experts such as doctors or psychiatrists.

Dubinsky,  Second Greatest Disappointment, 220.

[lasmaracuyas]

Our world is made up of technical bodies, hybrids that are neither wholly objects nor ideas, more than just things but not disembodied spirits (hence appearing as crystallized spirit), not properly divisible into nature and culture, or reality and representation. The clerks in the survey office converted theodolite and chain readings from the field into distances to be drawn on the map. Their computational labor was divided up and correlated to form “an almost mechanical system,” something close to a piece of machinery. A calculating apparatus, made out of men, had the mechanical powers of a computer. Like all computers, it was a mixture of hardware and software. But at the same time, the new world of modern politics is organized to manufacture the effect that this difficult, unstable, temporary distinction between hard and soft, physical and mental, real and representational, is a permanent, fundamental, and ontological divide. The map presents itself as a mere representation, an idea or abstraction, set apart from the real, fixed, physical reality it depicts. It erases and hides the contested, political, representational nature of the world it portrays, in the same action with which it denies its own (shrinking) physicality. The mechanical organization of labor, the movement from the field to the office, the repeated accounts of the precision and accuracy of the work, all operate together to produce the effect of a bifurcated world. It is as such an effect that the economy is brought into being.

Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell

[lasmaracuyas]

The principle of abstraction on which the order of law depends can be generated only as the difference between order and violence, the ideal and the action, the universal and the exceptional. But the violent, the actual, and the exceptional - all of which the law denounces and excludes, ruptures itself from and supersedes - are never gone. They make possible the rupture, the denunciation, and the order. They are the condition of its possibility.

Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell

[lasmaracuyas]

...the argument that large-scale private property emerged as a more efficient form of state control begins to exceed the terms in which it is expressed. The argument that assumes a distinction between rural society or economy and the state. The former is constructed out of private persons and their rights, and the latter consists of public powers. One has to take the distinction between state and society not as the starting point of the analysis, but as an uncertain outcome of the historical process. It is a difference whose genealogy parallels the one we are tracing between the abstraction of law and the materiality of land. The new methods of management cannot be understood in terms of an entity called the state imposing its power upon rural society. What is clear from the details of how the estate emerged is that it was neither exactly an arm of the state nor a private arrangement standing in opposition to the state. This is not because the estate was a dual entity, but because until this period neither state nor society was imagined to exist. As the new methods developed, some took forms that began to be categorized as aspects of the state, and others took forms that would be labeled as society. Some of the new powers for the control of land and labor would later appear as public powers, others as private. 

Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell

[lasmaracuyas]

The order of private property that replaced this was just as particularlistic. It, too, was based on individual acts, orders, seizures, descriptions, and inscriptions. But these processes were reorganized so that some seemed partiuclar and others general: some appeared fixed, singular, anchored to a specific place and moment, like objects, while others appeared mobile, general, present everywhere at once, universal, unquestionably true in ever place, and therefore abstract. One set of actions, people, and sites was fixed in position as "land" and "peasants," made into objects to supervise and control. At the same time a series of removals  rearrangements, delaying maneuvers, simplifications, and silences established other sites and other actions as what seems the opposite of this: nonlocal, outside actuality, and therefore universal. This was to create the effect of a fundamental difference: land versues law, the particular versus the general, the physical versus the abstract, thing versus idea, force versus order. To understand how this difference was made we have to reopen the connections between what was separated  follow the links from one action to another, and see how one set of elements in this relationship was subordinated, removed, reserved, or silenced. This will bring to light what is buried when we write theories of "property," "law," and "the state," when we begin with metaphysical abstractions rather than asking what methods of politics and expertise divide the world into metaphysics on the one hand and mere physics on the other

Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell