Shadow Play
"But certainly ,for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred ,truth profane."
Fuerbach, Preface to The Essence of Christianity
I want to continue this line of inquiry into the rational or, as Lichanos put it in his last comment, the complimentary notion of "authentic". As concerns any kind of political project, including my own egalitarian, pluralist one, it seems necessary to deal with this tension between the authentic and the spectacle, the rational and the schizophrenic. If it is true, as Bishop Butler said, that "Everything is what it is and not another thing", why is it I have to use scare quotes when I use the term capitalist "democracy"? How is language mediating our understanding? and how is control over language then a key to understanding cultural hegemony, identity and agency?
For me to find a discursive agreement with someone who believes capitalist democracy is a perfectly legitimate, rational term (symbol, signifier) I would need to at least be able to articulate my own ironic use of the same term. I would need to be able to explain this separation and how his reality is to me an illusion. Lichanos asks how am I ( or Fuerbach) so privileged that I can discern the illusion from the thing itself? Does this "separation" also explain why the exploited "proletariat" cannot seem to recognize it's own rational interests and how their consent is "manufactured"? (a la Chomsky)
We can describe this inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do (death panels?) because there is something the matter with these people, as "epistemic self-privileging or asymmetry". I get it but you don't.But democracy requires at the least a symetry between contestants.
At the heart of cultural politics is that notion of hegemonic domination of the narrative, the normative "recieved knowledge" and ideological formation which follows. As Ben Harper puts it "Fight for you mind!" and the fight boils down to one over words. Accepting Frueds "talking cure" means accepting the "magical' property of words, their ability to draw on myth and emotion and trigger responses which can either be transformative or in the service of power and control. I have long maintained that the heart of this contest is not over the meaning of words like socialism, communism or anarchism but over the meaning of the word democracy. Arundahiti Roys new book, Field Notes on Democracy ,and Michael Moores new movie also acknowlege this site of struggle. The chant at the G20 protests in Pittsburgh is the all-too-familiar "This is what democracy looks like". Riot cops and Black Blocs in the street. Ministers and financiers in the marble halls.
posted by troutsky @ 7:42 AM
14 comments
14 Comments:
Language is usage as Wittgenstein would say and our media control our language.
This leads to Beak being in a position to define the left by usage. Usage which doesn't have to have any material basis.
Now the question is whether those who are opting for a more democratic society are able to be heard over a complete manhandling of the word by the corporate media.
It may be that we are trying for too fine a definition while we allow the corporate media to control the usage to a much different end. How do we demonstrate that what we have in American culture is really a form of Newspeak with out history being tossed down memory holes.
Ducky, There is so much good critique out there, I just heard Chris Hedges read from his Empire of Illusion ( to take off where Fuerbach leaves off) ,(on public media), tying together the rise of the corporate state with consumerism and celebrity culture, the whole deal. Including the debasement of language.I understand Democracy Inc. is also well done, forget the author.
But it does still remain to sort through democratic theory, direct? radical? council,shop floor,participatory, etc..and then create democratic culture with all it's slowness and hassles and tensions.
As for "demonstrate", I still like the theatrical approach of the Situationists or Diggers.
...the appearance to the essence...
Well, there's your problem right there, you reactionary-Hegelian-Platonic-crypto-authoritarian-elitist-PHILOSOPHER!!
Kidding aside (you knew I was kidding, right?) what makes you think anything has an "essence?" Really, that's the problem. Scientists don't argue about essences - it's a total dead end. You go on about the "authentic" self and the inauthentic one. It relates to this idea that there is an irreducible, identifiable quiddity that is the REAL thing. Give it up, and life makes a lot more sense.
We all struggle to make sense - some do it chaotically, some do it with system. It's not a question of authentic. These people who shout about "Death Panels," they have no evidence, they can't point to any, they run in circles, and they know it. Everyone knows it. Some people just don't want to admit it because it gives them cover for other things. That's all. If you put one of those people in a position where they had to choose:
a) demonstrate there are death panels or drop through a pit in the floor into boiling oil
b) admit you made it up, and MEAN it!
They'd admit. But there are no consequences to spouting off at meetings. There's nothing metaphysical going on here.
Language is usage as Wittgenstein would say, and our media control our language
I'm sick of hearing Ludwig brought it to justify every sort of vague proposition. Who controls the media? Who controls the language of the media-makers?
In 1984, Orwell posited Newspeak, a language designed to eliminate the possibility of independent thought. It's the part of the book (an appendix) where his satirical bent is given free reign. People don't notice it's funny! The idea was, that in a generation or two, people would grow up with Newspeak and would be total willing tools. But as S. Pinker has pointed out, that would never work. Children are always inventing private languages. You can't stop language from evolving. Newspeak would never be anything but a dialect of the power elite. We all own our language, if we want to. It's the only thing as much ours as our bodies...
I just don't get it. How can you live up there surrounded by all that majestic mountainous scenery and persist with this gimcrack esoteric analytical approaches? Doesn't Guy Debord seem a wee bit silly when you're contemplating the Rockies??
You might not be able to stop language from evolving but with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 you can sure as hell limit its venues.
You can replace dialog with soundbites.
You can control the visual media.
You can stuff people with advertising as if they were breakfast sausages.
It's been pretty well demonstrated that corporate culture can absorb ANY popular movement and turn it around into a consumer commodity. Hell, look at what happened to hip-hop.
Culture is a COMMODITY. I'd agree with troutsky that there is good critique out there but it has to struggle to be heard.
Listen to some tea baggers talk about "our freedoms" and tell me NEWSPEAK hasn't managed to short circuit thought.
Ducky -
I'm afraid that your comment exemplifies what Republicans mean when they talk about "elitist" liberals or radicals. "Stuffed like sausage?" Could you get more condescending to the non-critical masses?
I agree culture is a commodity, but I just don't buy the notion that peoples' insides are as "colonized" by the commodifiers as you'd say. At least, not much more than in the past. Oh sure, it's more pervasive now, but there's so much more to be pervasive about. In 1066, the Church just had to make sure you worked like a dog and didn't join the rare uprising of surfs and villeins. Now they have to make sure you buy constantly! But people like buying a lot more than they liked plowing fields by hand!!
On another note, I think Los Olvidados is Bunuel's best: far more powerful than Exterminating Angel or La Charme Discret. But hey, his second best is so good, who cares! I discuss him on my blog here and there.
Trout, This may be the first time I fully connected with where you are coming from with your version of Magritte's "this is not a pipe" scrawled on his painting of a pipe.
I recommend this Bill Hicks rap on marketing as a symbol for western, industrial civilization's commodification of nature, excused by an experiment in greed that has become too big too fail. Democracy spreads the blame and therefore excuses individual abdication of responsibility among the largest mob of followers, but no matter which tooth does the chewing, socialism, democracy, dictatorship, we are gnawing at our limb's connection to the planetary tree of life and the consciousness of its existence just to turn a quick profit. Rather than explore how matter becomes conscious, science is in the service corporate patent searches like slavers beating the bushes for people to sell to rich folks, leaving the phenomena of life essence to the mumbo-jumbo of religious symbologists to convince folks how satisfying smoking the painting of a pipe can be.
Ha! In my last comment, I said "I don't buy the notion...
Guess I've been thoroughly permeated with consumer-market-speak!
Trout
You must have been smoking the wacky weed with Graemeful Dead.
Communism is a crackpot failed idea. Its advocates belong in psychiatric care. Were it not for Bolshevik infiltration of media and academia you would already be getting treatment.
Of course commies who practice state censored media and rationalize theft by a drug addict
in Caracas are not known for coherence.
Lichanos, I just want to get to a point where the practice of politics can replace the current system of decision making. It might start with a little philosophy, but that is just a suggestion. Science might also be helpful in some areas but our collective problem seems to be : how can you argue with someone ( like our friend Beak) who believes both in freedom of expression but that those espousing the idea of communism should be locked up? This is just one for- instance, but sadly typical of a cultural epidemic of cognitive dissonance.As to tea-baggers, I agree with Ducky. Your "boiling oil pit" test would be met with howls of "it's a slippery slope" or "I read it on the internet" or "Glen Beck said so"!as they boiled like good martyrs.
Something besides Coke has to be the "real" thing and I suggest a "system" of thought and well constructed arguments considered rationally for public decisions.
"We all own our own language". What you "own" has no force against objective power, you have to speak THE language to operate within that system where your fate is decided. Those parameters are not set democratically or organically ( a la children's inventions) though it's a lovely thought.
As to the mountains and my penchant for gimcrack analysis, they give me space to construct questions but they are not full of answers, as some more romantically inclined folks insist.
Yodood, thanks for commenting. Is the democracy you speak of "spreading blame and excuses" the hollow, formal bourgeois, democracy of today or the one you can imagine in some future?
Beak, thanks for the lesson on coherence.
As for Beakerkin and his non sequiturs, I can't see expending any effort him. He's like those folks I've encountered on jury duty. When the door is locked, and the choice is stay there shouting or start reasoning coherently with other people so you can get out of there, THEN they start speaking rationally.
...What you "own" has no force against objective power, you have to speak THE language to operate within that system where your fate is decided.
Statements like this reek of religious dogma. Were you raised as a Calvinist sinner, perhaps? (I am without sin, personally.) Really, I have nothing to say about this other than I look forward to your posts on more specific issues so I can actually grab a hold of your point of view and maybe agree or disagree...
Trout,
I am speaking of any group formed to accomplish with the might of the biggest mob that which its members abdicated their personal responsibility as ethical individuals to manage and within whose mass all manner of "everybody's doing it" corruption may be indulged as an alternative to integrity. It is as if, by manifesting definitions of the preexisting connection we all enjoy as parts of the invisible web of life, the consciousness we seek to demonstrate becomes too brittle to represent more than the shell of a locust husk after life moved on.
Democracy is to good government as record sales are to good music.
Consciousness follows events. Somehow people go beyond what they are told. Maybe its because of the material world.
Liberals tend to overrate media strength.
Lets do this slowly for Com Wad Jim Jones aka Renegade Testicle and his band of lemmings are slow of mind.
Commies whine about media and set up failed workers state with State run media. The death cultists can not compete in any free exchange of ideas so they silence all dissent.
The apologists for a crack addict megalomaniac have rationalized the theft and closure of critical media outlets in the socialist crack pipe state.
Earth to lemmings you are all imbeciles and are incapable of coherent thought.
Lets hear from the usual suspects why they advocate a system for others but refuse to live under it themselves.
Renouncing your citizenship is easy.
1) Fly to Caracas
2) Walk into the Embassy
3) See an official
4) Fill out the paperwork and surrender your passport.
How is it the foes of the death cult will vote with their feet and the acolytes make excuses.
I would add my 2 cents but it would only muddy the waters!
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