Kill Your Idols XI: Seeing Only the Conspiracy, Research Time, 23/08/2017

What have I figured out from the last two weeks of speculations, drafts, dry-runs, reflections, and meta-reflections?

I’ve been looking at a fateful decision point in the development of revolutionary philosophical thinking – Europe’s anti-communist crackdowns of the 1920s – to see what lessons this very different moment may have for us. It’s a lesson about the sources of power, violence, and stability in human society.

Thinking of freedom all too often involves philosophies that began
in prison cells.

Gramsci’s moment – holed up in a prison cell, wondering with powerful philosophical rigour where it all went so wrong – illuminates a common mistake in a lot of political activism, no matter its ideology. All too often, you misunderstand the nature of political agency.

Gramsci’s fellow revolutionaries of industrial Europe after the First World War made a curious version of that mistake. They absorbed a strange necessitarianism from their twisty intellectual heritage.

They were dedicated communists whose goal was a political revolution to build a more fair and equal society. That was their heritage from Karl Marx himself, both in his most popular works like Capital and in his work as a political organizer.

But they also believed that transformation of the entire industrialized West was inevitable once one revolution succeeded. That was their heritage from the metaphysics of conservative Hegelianism that no one admitted had influenced them.

When Antonio Gramsci was writing his Prison Notebooks, he was figuring out what about the world was different from their expectations. Not just the contingency of real political developments, but why those contingencies led to such a decisive defeat.

Chomsky's propaganda model of communication has functioned until
recently as the Western left's primary way to interpret the world. I'd
venture it was an important cause of how ineffectual the left was
until the millennial wave of feminism and the post-Ferguson civil
rights movement.

The concept he used to understand those key differences between Russia and Western Europe was hegemony. He adapted it from the vocab of studies of international political jockeying, where it described a regional power’s military and diplomatic influence.

Applied to a domestic sphere, hegemony was a matter of popular morality. A hegemonic ideology is the predominant public morality of social and political relations, where that morality is predominantly that of a dominant class in a country. A hegemonic ideology’s rules, principles, and ideals are those of that most powerful class – whether aristocrats, bourgeois, oligarchs, or maybe even workers.

The key thing about hegemony in this sense is that it’s domination without a will to dominate. There’s no central organizing power directing the expressions of hegemonic morality. Instead, there are networks of relationships throughout a society, and the moralities of particular people or groups have a higher prestige and influence on the thinking and behaviour of others.

I think I’ll pick up Henri Bergson’s Two Sources later this year. It would make a good source of ideas for a framework of how more rigorous concepts of non-intentional causality work in social and political investigations.

The problem with thinking in terms of hegemony is that it can really easily drift into conspiratorial thinking. That’s about what I think Noam Chomsky has inspired in the activist left. He analyzed a complex network of relationships between multiple private institutions, governments, multiple classes of business leaders.

He called it the propaganda model of communication. The one term that evokes a shadowy cabal of masterminds controlling the world – Goebbels for neoliberalism.

Hegemony is about systematic, non-intentional causality. Even the elites are dupes of the system, self-deluded donkeys laughing as they fall into their own graves. We have to understand this if we want to understand reality.

Kill Your Idols X: Manufactured Obsolescence, Jamming, 22/08/2017

When I first thought of this post before the weekend, I figured I’d spend more time talking about Noam Chomsky. But I think now that too many have already spent too much.

Manufacturing Consent did a great job of analyzing the methods that modern power centres – um – manufacture our consent. Chomsky walks you through the material structure of the institutions and social networks that keep this self-destructive morality popular.

A thinker should always be careful that they don't
end up on a t-shirt, because then they start writing
for the t-shirt alone. You should always be able to
write for the t-shirt, but never let it become your
primary focus. The world is at least as complicated
as a good book.

We’re in an age where more than just states control and inform these powerful institutions. Our society is more complex. There are more channels and platforms to spread ideas, more social networks to build alliances than ever before. This is true for revolutionaries as well as those deeply invested in the status quo.

That’s the lesson of the Russian Revolution, as Gramsci saw. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party succeeded because Russia’s social order was held together by so few threads. The capitalist democracies were more complex. Now much more so than then.

Chomsky’s analysis is simple but insightful. The for-profit motives of private media companies encourage them to build mutually beneficial relationships with their wealthy investors and shareholders. Same goes for the regular advertisers that bring a platform most of its daily revenue. All groups with interests in the current way of things to protect.

Large media companies respond by letting the ideas and beliefs of these groups pervade their productions. Chomsky focussed almost entirely on news media at the time, but it’s true for more metaphorical cultural producers too. Threats like catastrophic lawsuits can keep rebel organizations in line.

Fearmongering with boogeymen like terrorists (Asians, Muslims) or communists (Jews) or criminal gangs (blacks, Latin Americans) keeps people from concentrating on more fundamental questions.

Those are the five specific techniques and sets of broad messaging ideas Chomsky identifies in the contemporary media ecology end up – um – fabricating our agreement with the current way of the world.

It was a worthwhile insight that set up the basic guidebook that critical activists have used ever since to analyze ideological pressures in our media and culture. I’m glad Chomsky did this. But he hasn’t followed up this work with any political or media analysis of similar worth, originality, and power.

I do consider Chomsky's analysis of how the American oligarchy has
fairly direct control of news media channels through financial
pressure and direct ownership incomplete. There are plenty of less-
intentional, less-directional vectors for ideological influence. But I
should also be honest that I understand perfectly well why the
Washington Post didn't run a giant exposé on Amazon. Not that
it was anything so crude as direct pressure. It would have been a
presumption shared by pretty much everyone around the staff that
you take a pass on looking too much into the boss' other company.

Most of his career since Manufacturing Consent is a continued media blitz of interviews and books repeating that same message in different contexts. But he’s always drifted toward the direction of criticism for the US government’s role in that media ecology.

Now, that’s important. Chomsky is an American, and so has a responsibility to make his primary target as a critic his own country. It’s a patriotic duty.

The problem I have with Chomsky is that his anti-Americanism has consumed his entire perspective. I discussed in a photo caption yesterday how Chomsky so easily blinded himself to Russia’s petty military imperialism. Putin seeks a strutting prestige for himself and his country, as if Crimea, Trans-Dniester, Donetsk, or Abkhazia were jewels on a charm bracelet.

Yet Chomsky gives Putin a pass. Interfering in other country’s elections, peddling a radical Russian Orthodox nationalist ideology across Europe and Asia? The DNC hack was America getting a taste of its own medicine, he said.

Fair enough, since America has overthrown the governments of countries all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That doesn’t give ecclesiastic-ethnic nationalism a pass. Nobody is supposed to get a pass. The essential concept of being a critical activist is that nobody gets a pass.

So there’s the hypocrisy. But there’s also his obsolescence. Chomsky hasn’t ever really updated this model of corporate media as ideological propaganda for the scale-free media networks of the internet era.

Frankly, I’m not sure that he can, because Chomsky’s model depends on editorial control of media organizations directed from a single, small set of oligarchical social networks. It lends itself a little too much to conspiracy theory, frankly. The internet is about platforms for diverse interactions, not broadcasters of uniform and universal channels.

Ultimately, Chomsky today is little more than a professional talking head taking up space that could otherwise go to more innovative and energetic critical theorists.

This feels like very directionless reflection now. I’m going to wrap this up tomorrow.

Kill Your Idols VIII: The Best Raw Deal, Research Time, 17/08/2017

Here is the sort of political activism you need when you understand how complex the relationship between society, culture, and state is.

Your activism has to aim for hegemony. This is more than just control of the state. In fact, hegemony means a lot of different things. The term ‘hegemony’ whose meaning is continuous with present use, began in international relations theory in the 19th century.

Boys at war.

Essentially, the theory that sees all relations between nations and peoples as states at war. Whether by military or some other means. Conquest, dominance, hostility, suspicion, mistrust, fear, and hatred.

The language of what’s called realist IR theory is dispassionate, almost meditative. They talk in terms of interests, calculations of different risks and their mutual impacts, game theory. But I’ve long heard a whisper, an implication in a little too much of this talk, which sounds like little boys in a park playing at war.

Hegemony here is the dominant power – the state at the centre of military and economic power for an entire region or the world. The state to whom every other government pays loyalty if they know what’s good for them.

Antonio Gramsci’s innovation was to adapt the term to a domestic political context. He was thinking of states, cliques of oligarchs or aristocrats, and classes. Hegemony here means the power of a ruling class through the state to force obedience through violence, or else seduce them into it.

This is where those institutions come into play. Most of them – especially in Gramsci’s own time and place, early 20th century Europe – were organs of the state. The different military and police bureaus could force you to obey. One important reason (among many) why Gramsci’s revolution in Italy failed was because the Italian Communist Party thought those violent institutions were all that mattered.

Nothing phallic about this at all.

Consent of the governed is a much more powerful force. Many people who were desperately and inescapably poor under the current way of doing things in 1920s Italy – factory workers, farmers, labourers – simply weren’t up for revolution. They were okay with the way things were.

There are a lot of people who, in situations of terrible injustice, are still okay with things. They can see the real circumstances of wretchedness that the status quo results in, and they’ll just make excuses, or simply act as though it doesn’t matter.

You want an example? Introduce yourself to a middle-class white Canadian from a reasonably affluent suburban community. Ask him about the number of Indigenous rural communities don’t have access to a clean water source.

He’ll be filled with excuses, half of them blaming Indigenous people themselves for not having a basic government service we take for granted everywhere else in the country.

Now why would he believe that? These are ideas that proliferate culturally – in conversations and mass media, whether some media platform or channel is state-run or private. They’re the conversations that condition public morality.

Yeah, I'm going there. At least for a little while.

Powerful institutions, organizations, and sometimes even individuals can control channels and platforms. Effective political activism has to work on all these forces at once. Agitating against unjust government actions isn't enough.

Maybe it’s through direct ownership – the state runs the CBC, Facebook is a company that shapes our online life, several oligarchs become think tank funders or outright buy media companies. Maybe it’s through influence, building a profile in these media or influencing people in states and private organizations.

Together – say it with me now – all these forces manufacture our consent.

So is Noam Chomsky just warmed-over Antonio Gramsci? Pretty much, and not even as interesting. But I think I’ll go into more detail why tomorrow.

The Falsity of False Consciousness, Research Time, 21/05/2014

A core element of Marxist and Chomskian analysis of contemporary Western capitalism and its imperialist activities is the concept of false consciousness. I’m most familiar with the version that exists in Hegel’s work, which is where the concept first originated, even though Marx’s articulation was more popular and influential. Because Marx was such a Hegelian in his foundational concepts, I think I’m in the clear with regard to the focus of my own understanding and critique. 

Stuart Hall's work on Thatcherism would be an excellent
case study for the Utopias project.

Big pile of philosophical names aside, false consciousness is essentially the notion that one’s own framework of thinking, even though it is always basically your own power, deceives you as to how the world truly is. The British left of the mid-20th century spoke a lot about false consciousness. As they watched Thatcherism’s birth, the growth of its momentum, and its eventual transformation of all the basic goals and assumptions of British politics, Michael Bérubé and his central influence in The Left at War, Stuart Hall, describe the British left as convinced that this populist movement was a matter of false consciousness. Eventually, it would be necessary simply to point out the contradictions of bemoaning the modern dissolution of family values and the historical traditions of Britain while their economic policies themselves destroyed those values and traditions. The deception of the working classes would fall away and the conservative revolution would stop.

This did not happen.

Over the last decade in the Western left, particularly in North America, Noam Chomsky’s concept of manufactured consent has come to serve a similar function as the old Marxist adage of false consciousness did. Hall’s central critique of the old British left revolved around a simple idea: they refused to understand how people could actively choose to embrace Margaret Thatcher. As such, they never attempted to understand Thatcherism, only pointed to its internal contradictions as an ideology and waited for the false consciousness to fall apart.

The modern Chomskian left, as far as Bérubé is concerned, makes the same mistake. They presume that people would only agree with modern neo-liberal ideology because the majority have been essentially brainwashed, utterly passive. The elite-controlled media have manufactured the popular consent to their senseless ideology,* so all one needs to do to liberate people is shake them. 

* This is another aspect of the too-simple view of the world as evil agents of capitalism, the passive consenting sheep, and the few faithful who can see the truth. The Chomskian perspective ignores the fact that the so-called elites are governed by a variety of different ideologies, and are more often than not in conflict. There is no truly unified character to the media except a desperation to stay on the air that keeps most people from asking truly difficult questions.

Even for someone considered as remarkably important to
political philosophy as Frantz Fanon, I find it regrettable
that I was never taught about him in any of the
philosophy departments where I've been a student.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon talks about what it really means for a people to be free. It isn’t enough to rebel against one’s oppressors. Even if you win, your mind is still dominated by ideas of rebellion — you are reactive, seeking out enemies from which to continually liberate yourself. In such a mode, you haven’t been freed. Real freedom, he says, comes when you leave the war for liberation behind, having accepted that you have defeated oppression. You use your new free space to create some social or political project with no reference to the oppressor, the struggle, or even the victory.

To believe in your enemies’ ability to manufacture consent renders you entirely reactive, and you believe that the population who you hope to liberate cannot possibly liberate themselves. You are stuck between passivity and reactivity. Real freedom, activity, is not even conceivable, because your enemies have already won thanks to their manufactured consent, the consenting are conceived as entirely passive, and your only recourse is to shout as loud as you can.

Such thinking is lazy dissidence. It refuses to learn a key premise of Anti-Oedipus, the concept that made this book genuinely great. In this book, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ask, not how the masses are seduced or made sheep, but why they actively choose their own repression. Until we understand the importance of why we choose to live as we do, we can never begin the process of freeing ourselves, or even conceiving of what that freedom would be.

Simplicity Is the Enemy of Peace, Research Time, 18/05/2014

You might wonder why I’m reading this book by Michael Bérubé, The Left at War. It’s actually quite normal compared to a lot of my philosophical research. Since I started this blog, I’ve written about such intense and eccentric authors as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. So why am I reading a book by a relatively unremarkable cultural theorist that is largely a polemic against leftists of the Chomskian conspiracist and liberal interventionism hawks?

The first, simplest, answer is that it was there. But the simplest answer is never adequate to the truth. Not false, per se, but not comprehensive. The heart of the Utopias project is a critique of simplicity in political thinking specifically, but also in all thinking no matter its purpose. We are often told the myth about Occam’s Razor, which is that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The principle of Occam’s Razor actually admonishes overcomplication. If your problem is ridiculously complex already, then you will need a similarly complex framework of concepts to understand what is actually going on. 

This notion, that the world is too complex for the simple conceptual frameworks of too many influential figures in the contemporary left, drives Bérubé’s analysis. Writing in the wake of the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, the fatal simplicity of that regime is obvious to anyone who remembers.* If you did not support us in every way, even just to level a minor critique of our methods, you were declared an enemy and demonized. Bérubé’s chapter on the public discourse surrounding the Iraq War is a wonderful refresher on just how much the American government, the media, and the general public fed this attitude that to critique America’s leaders implied a hatred of democracy for which your career and life should be destroyed.

The other day, I saw a clip of Bush-era
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as a
commentator on FOX news. We were
supposed to indict him for enabling
torture and lying under oath, not put him on
TV after he grows a beard.

* Incidentally, something that very much disturbs me about modern discourse is the degree to which even people who lived through the Bush years have actually forgotten how horrible they were. Granted, the Obama Administration has done entirely different terrible things in the name of national security (drone bombing, maintaining the widespread surveillance networks and databases that began under Bush), but Bush was a regime that occupied a country as part of an ideological plan to use military invasion as a means to install democracy, twisted ideals that justified the use of widespread torture and the levelling of entire cities, like Fallujah. This was done in the name of democracy and freedom, and no one in the upper hierarchy of the Bush years has any significant regrets!

The type of revolutionary political attitude that the Utopias project critiques displays that same simplicity. The political revolutionary who believes in the realization of simple principles through direct actions, including violence, desires that a complex world behave according to those principles, and any critical or divergent voices are obstacles or enemies. This description is neutral as to whether it is left or right. Anyone who studies the history of the Bush Administration knows that this is the framework of a right-wing perspective. 

But Bérubé’s analysis of the stereotypically left-wing perspective of Noam Chomsky and the followers of his political ideas reveals this deadly simplicity here as well. The framework of viewing the world with Chomsky’s political concepts has just the same structure as that of Bush. Simple ideas and ideals clearly indicate who shares them, and those who do not are obstacles and enemies to the widespread acceptance of their truth.

There Is No Hope Against a Manufactured Consent, Research Time, 13/05/2014

Chomsky's political writings offer the comforting
simplicity of a world where there is good and evil.

The second chapter of Michael Bérubé’s book, The Left at War, is basically a long critique of Noam Chomsky’s political writings and activism. The content of Chomsky’s work in this area is literally unassailable. Not because it is absolutely right, because it isn’t, for reasons I’ll get to in a little bit. The reason you can’t criticize Chomsky based on the content of his political writings is that his framework of reasoning incorporates any criticism or doubt as to the truth of what he says as justification of the truth of what he says. 

If you say that there are factors in contemporary global politics more complicated than the mass manufacture of mainstream consent to American neo-imperialism by the corporate oligarchy that controls the military, political, and media apparatus of the United States, then Chomsky’s framework automatically labels you as having been co-opted by that apparatus. Any opposition is already rendered illegitimate, because your opposition to Chomsky is a sign of your evil or false consciousness. Bérubé takes the tactic of arguing against his style, and letting the style indict the problems of the substance. He identifies Chomsky not as attempting any genuine persuasion of people, but simply indicting the mainstream culture of the United States as inherently co-opted into a mechanism of imperial evil. He describes Chomsky as having created a counter-culture around his view of the inevitable imperialism and universal reach of the United States and its military power. 

I think at some point in the past, I could have become a Chomskyite, but the moment passed me by. I’ve always admired him for his devotion to pointing out the unsavoury aspects of American history and international policy, but there is an unwavering simplicity to his political philosophy. I know Chomsky wouldn’t like me saying this, or maybe he would, just writing me off as one more voice that reiterates the imperialist order. When it comes to his political philosophy, you’re either with us or against us.

I don’t really know how effective Bérubé’s argument would be against supporters of Chomsky themselves. Of course, he’s probably not writing to Chomsky’s own partisans, as they would understand his opposition to their obvious truths as one more attempt by the imperial American state to manufacture their consent. But he’s likely speaking to those who could be convinced by Chomsky, but aren’t yet.

At some point, I just realized that the world was too complicated for his relatively simple explanation — that all evils in the world ultimately are direct or indirect reactions to the evils of Western, and particularly American, imperialism. Bérubé discusses the accounts he gave, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, why America remained the truly greatest force of evil in the world. The example I’d like to focus on is his comments about American involvement in Afghanistan, an immensely hypocritical affair. It became common knowledge, as Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda rose to the top of public consciousness, that the United States, particularly the CIA, funded mujahideen groups to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of their Cold War gamesmanship. And Chomsky, according to Bérubé’s account, stressed the importance of America’s centrality to the worsening human rights conditions of the Taliban regime and military activity in Pakistan. 

But if the United States really was as omnipotently powerful as Chomsky’s analyses indicate — that America is the imperialist power that pulls all the strings of all the terrible actions of the world — then they would not have become embroiled in such a hideous mess in that country. In many ways, the United States after their own invasion of Afghanistan, became a patsy for Pakistan’s meddling in the region. Quite often, Pakistani support for the Taliban was actively opposed to American interests. Here was an ally of the imperialist power, supposedly on the American page, actively undermining American interests in the region. Their intelligence service, the ISI, was obviously tolerant of bin Laden’s living in their central military city, Abbottabad. Why?

The reason was India, the geopolitical conflict that merits the occasional mention in most Western reporting on the region, but which rarely received in-depth coverage. Pakistan and India have been bitter political and military enemies ever since the departure of the British Empire and independence/partition. Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal regions were the ISI's training ground for the radical Islamist groups who would be sent to Kashmir to drain India’s time, money, and military resources. An Islamist regime in Afghanistan would always be hostile to India as a matter of foundational ideology, so Pakistan always worked within Afghanistan to keep it violently opposed to India. And the United States had nothing to do with this conflict. While the United States’ leaders saw themselves as major entrants into a global political game in Afghanistan, Pakistan saw them as an annoying complicating factor in their continuing conflict with India.

The India-Pakistan conflict is a complication that brings chaos to Chomsky’s well-ordered world of the corruption of corporate America, its worldwide victims, and the elite core of Chomskyites who alone understand the true nature of the world. This is a conflict where America not only has little power to interfere, but about which their leaders remain largely ignorant. It is a sign that the world is more complex than Chomsky’s simple vision can ever understand.

The old linguist is more like W than he’d ever believe.