This morning I received the following email in response to my post Truth Procedures or Uncanny Doubles and the Postmodern Right.
Two quick thoughts on your post “Truth-Procedures”? Uncanny Doubles or the Postmodern Right
- is the “destruction and suffering” wrought by contemporary capitalism outweighed by its gains (including your ability to sit behind a computer and post philosophical thoughts on technology invented by the military/industrial complex)?
- the conversation quoted (if it took place) also has an uncanny resemblance to Delousses’ interpretation of the Nietzschean Master / Slave dialect.
I find these sorts of reactionary questions fascinating. The questioning of whether the conversation took place is icing on the cake. It underlines the manner in which reporting has come to be thought of as a commodity that one picks and chooses according to their ideological preferences of liking and disliking. Whenever something fails to conform to ones ideological vision it is concluded that it must be a leftwing bias and purposeful distortion. These kinds of questions seem to work according to a sort of “gotcha!” logic. “What a hypocrit! You’ve benefitted from x, while nonetheless having problems with it!” I wonder how the author might respond to an abused child. “Is the destruction and suffering wrought by your abusive father outweighed by its gains (the fact that you exist, went to university, and are now able to do research in the social sciences to prevent child abuse)?” Thanks for the Delousses reference. I assume the author must have been being ironic as his email performs the very nature of postmodernism both with his doubt and by having a signature from a prominent southern author that gives a vigorous defense of being southern (the cover of his book even has a confederate flag) while signing his email with an entirely different name, thereby enacting postmodern theses about the fluid and simulated nature of identity.
April 26, 2007 at 11:00 pm
I can play that game! Is the destruction and suffering wrought by contemporary capitalism (including Kitsch McFascist’s book) worth its gains?
April 27, 2007 at 4:37 am
va (is that a name? is it yours?), thanks for playing. The answer is no.
One of the ironies of these discussions, is the continual feeling that they need to requisition our computers, in order to continue to discuss how to protect a marvelous system from the terrorist threat, the yellow threat, the illegal immigrant threat, the union threat, the liberal threat, and the other imaginaries of a paranoid war — which has also become quite real.
April 27, 2007 at 5:09 pm
“I wonder how the author might respond to an abused child. “Is the destruction and suffering wrought by your abusive father outweighed by its gains (the fact that you exist, went to university, and are now able to do research in the social sciences to prevent child abuse)?”
Maybe I can help you out with this. And please forgive my tendency to go on too long. Hopefully, I won’t be too presumptuous about what you do and don’t understand and I hope I won’t be excessively pedantic here. I just want to make an attempt to respond to your question in a way that might further the discussion.
One way the author might respond to your question is to say that you’ve offered an erroneous analogy. A father can provide materially for his children and, for example, pay for his daughter’s educations so that she can go on to a career fighting child abuse, all without being an abusive father. Child abuse is not intrinsic to providing for one’s children.
In contrast, destruction (often referred to as creative destruction by capitalists) is intrinsic to the creative process and the associated material advancement arising from a capitalist system. You cannot have creation without destruction.
In a competitive marketplace, jobs, business enterprises, products and services are constantly destroyed and replaced by new creations (new jobs, new products, new businesses) more highly supported by the purchasing decisions consumers of those products and occupations make. People who used to repair typewriters lost their jobs with the advent of word processing which was, at some point, preferred by the consumer of home/office composition and printing products. These products made the consumers of these products more productive and led to new forms of creation. The author may not be saying you should be willing to put up with the downside of capitalism because you benefit from it; if the author is thinking like an economist, the author might be saying that you cannot have the good without the bad because creation is inextricably bound to destruction. The ‘gotcha,’ if there is one for the non-ideological economist, would not be an accusation of hypocrisy on your part… the gotcha would be that you don’t understand the creative destruction that is behind the creation of the computer you are using.
The capitalist argues that the collectively less preferred gives way to the collectively more preferred with consumer ‘votes’ weighted by the consumer’s capacity to create and trade what is more highly preferred in the marketplace. People vote with their actions and their voting is more powerful if they create more of what others want. Calculations of value, the relative valuations of all products in the universe of products and services are intrinsically expressed in consumption decisions in a dynamically interactive relationship with prices. Again, the weight of the consumer’s vote (purchasing power and influence of price) is determined by the collective valuation of whatever the consumer adds to the dynamic universe of products and services. In a capitalist system consumers are creators and vica versa.
We could have a very long discussion of the meaning of term collectively preferred or desired, as well as many other aspects of the moral and social implications of capitalism, but that would take us far astray from your question about how the author would respond to your analogy of the abusive father. The author, arguing as an economist would say that destruction is intrinsic to creative output in a capitalist system. You cannot introduce one thing without displacing (destroying) something else because the universe of resources and creation, while dynamic, is finite at any given moment. In contrast, abuse is not intrinsic to providing good things to one’s child.
Sorry for going on so long here, but I am attempting to answer your question. There are many devils in the details that I’m not attempting to address here… there are many problems with capitalism, but I believe that the greatest reason that capitalists are indifferent to those who complain about capitalism is that those who complain don’t strike them as having an understanding either of capitalism as they see it or of the devil(s) they see in the details of socialism – devils that aren’t well understood, the capitalist would say, without a basic understanding of the dynamics of competition and creative destruction in material prosperity.
Many years ago, I was an unapologetic capitalist with a strong background in economics and markets (though I was not an academician or a wealthy person for that matter… it was purely a matter of my interest, my curiosity and love of school beyond pursuit of a particular degree). If you do not understand the academic side as an economist does, you can’t begin to engage a capitalist in a discussion of the problems with capitalism. Notwithstanding some of the simpleton bloggers and capitalist ideologues out there, these aren’t all dumb people. Some of them have a very complex understanding of the dynamics of material creation and creative destruction. If you approach them with what I consider to be erroneous assumptions about how they understand the creative process, including creative destruction, you will most likely be dismissed as a know-nothing. I’ve found that I can take these people on and even be accorded a measure of respect by them because I do have a reasonable understanding of where they are coming from.
April 27, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Thanks for your remarks Dr. X. I do, however, feel they miss the point. First, you reverse the analogy I draw. Under your reading I am saying something like, “If a father provides for his child, then he is abusive.” This would be an unreasonable and ridiculous suggestion by any measure, so I’m not sure why you would interpret me in this way. Rather, the claim is “If someone’s father is abusive and has provided for their child in other ways, is it legitimate to still criticize that father?” By the author’s logic the answer is a resounding “no!”. If you benefit from your abusive father you shouldn’t complain, says the author. In other words, the analogy already assumes the father is abusive, not that he is somehow made abusive by providing for his child in other ways. Presumably, in your own analytic practice, you’ve come across children that were abused but also provided for in a variety of ways?
The issue is exactly the same with capitalism. The logic lurking behind the authors question is the assertion that if you benefit from capitalism you should just shut up and not voice problems with other aspects of capitalism. This has little or nothing to do with the elementary economic observations you make about the functioning of capitalism. A parallel would be as follows: if you benefit from technology are you mistaken to nonetheless criticize and fight against some of the problems of technology (environmental problems, health problems, etc)? By the authors logic the answer would be no. One can both be critical of certain aspects of capitalism– for instance, working conditions in third world countries, the destruction of local jobs, etc., etc., etc –while nonetheless endorsing other aspects. Similarly, one can endorse certain aspects of technology while having serious problems with other aspects. The form of the author’s question is designed to put the respondant in an either/or situation and insinuate hypocrisy, which is the mark of a very primitive, simplistic, and vulgar form of thought; not a product of the economic sophistication you try to point to. Given that the author also chose to name himself according to an extreme rightwing southern apologist in the original email that he sent to me, I have little or no doubt that he would ask a similar question like “do you feel that it’s okay to criticize the American government when you benefit from living in America in a number of ways?” Questions such as this are one of the favorite tools of the reactionary conservative. They all follow a common “logical form” expressed in the old standby: “love it or leave it!”
To put the matter a bit differently, the original post wasn’t seeking to understand the authors question, but was poking fun at this type of question altogether. Yes, yes, I’m familiar with the ideology you outline and explicate. I just think it’s mistaken for a variety of reasons.
I suspect that many who have a thorough grounding in economics would disagree with both your “we must destroy to create” thesis, your thesis that socialism is inevitably accompanied by horrors such as we saw in the Soviet Union, or in the inevitability of capitalist economy. That, however, is another conversation.
April 27, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Sorry, you sound insulted. Perhaps I was pedantic. I really didn’t want to offend you.
Personally, I don’t have a problem criticizing capitalism or the negative impact capitalism has on people. And I don’t believe my elementary observations delegitimize your complaints in any way. I thought you asked about how the author might respond to your analogy and I shared my view with you on that. Was your question merely rhetorical? Or, do you think I’m incorrect about how the author might respond or was that not really what you were asking? It seems that you reacted to me as if I was the author and you were arguing with my response. That’s an argument I haven’t the least bit of interest in engaging in.
Really, I might be misunderstanding you, but I thought the question was essentially, ‘how would the author of the statement respond?” I could have said, Levy, your argument is very powerful. You would leave the author slackjawed and stunned, but I don’t think that is what would happen.
To reiterate, I believe that such a person would say that abuse is not intrinsic to parenthood, but destruction is intrinsic to material production and prosperity. I’d add that by introducing the notion of an abused child, you’re introducing something that the author would likely react to as an inflammatory accusation of a highly personal nature. That’s because I think the analogy is more than just a straightforward analogy. It also conveys a less manifest, inflammatory meaning, even if that isn’t what you intend. I think there is an excellent possibility that the author of the statement would hear you morally equating them with a child abuser. Whether that’s how you see the author or not, I think that might be conveyed. The author of the statement would probably be thinking, ‘hey, Buddy (this isn’t me, this is how cspitalists talk — and that’s a joke, Levy), I just built you a computer, you like it and because you chucked your typewriter now I’m just like a child abuser? Voices will get raised.
I’m quite sure that is the response you would get from most capitalists whether you agree with that response or not. If you don’t either acknowledge the elementary insight and propose some way to work around it, or, alternatively, offer an informed disgreement with the elementary economic insight that demonstrates an understanding of economic creation, I don’t think you will draw a capitalist into serious engagement. You’ll probably be dismissed or end up being the recipient of insults.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re interested in how to engage others in everyday discussions in ways that might influence their thinking on matters such as these. I’m just offering my two-cents based on my experience with this particular subject.
April 27, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Well, I’m wondering about the economic regime in which the letters themselves were invented – back in the days when Baal was properly worshipped and a rulers were not treated as gods, but literally were gods. But read any of the classical economists, and are they grateful? Do they say, at least, that sacrificers to Baal did do a few good things? No, those spoilsports. Capitalism arose on the bones of earlier systems WHILE EMPLOYING THE SIGNS AND SYMBOLS developed by those earlier systems. Myself, I just want to see a sincere apology from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, followed by a fund to build some temples to Baal.
April 28, 2007 at 12:07 am
Dr. X, yes I intended the question rhetorically and it was meant to be inflammatory. I get a couple emails like this a week and never respond to them. I don’t feel that there’s much point in engaging people such as this in discussion and tend to advocate ridiculing them out of existence. That is, I think Voltaire was on to something in Candide. They are of interest to me only in terms of how their rhetoric is structured and for whatever insight they provide into the psychology of minds full of ressentiment.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re interested in how to engage others in everyday discussions in ways that might influence their thinking on matters such as these.
It’s likely that I haven’t been entirely clear here, that I’m not expressing myself well in this regard. I’ve spent about six years off and on observing various conservative blogs and sometimes even participating in the guise of a rightwing conservative. I’ve experimented with rhetorical techniques, to discover what will earn prestige in these communities and what will earn vilification. There are a few I continue to read daily to this day, carefully examining the structures of their rhetoric and how these discussions function in relation to information and stories that are uncomfortable to their cause. These are blogs that regularly ban others that don’t tow the party line, so I think I’ve been pretty effective in these interactions given that I’ve never been banned. I’ve thought about these observations as fieldwork studying particular types of rhetoric. The fundamental lesson I’ve learned in this time is that these forms of discourse are populated by a number of highly effective defense structures that render them almost immune to any change or discussion with folk from the outside.
In a number of cases there really is no question of engaging someone else in dialogue or trying to reach and persuade them. Rather, if a dialogue takes place between two people where there’s no chance of persuasion possible, the purpose of this dialogue does not relate to the two people involved but to those witnessing the discussion, to the audience. The discussion is had for the sake of the audience, not for the sake of persuading the other person. Perhaps you’ve seen O Brother Where Art Thou. Recall one of the final scenes where the ugliness of the leading politician is revealed over the radio in a debate between the Soggy Bottom Boys and him, and he’s carried out on a post. This is the point of such discussions, not the persuasion of the politician himself.
When I speak about influencing public discussions, what I’m referring to is putting certain things publicly on the table that aren’t currently available within the public sphere. For instance, in today’s political climate in the United States, being a communist isn’t really a viable option. Sure, you can be a communist. But you won’t find yourself getting serious attention from the news media or from the public. Perhaps this is now changing as we elected our first socialist recently. However, the question here would be “what would have to change in order for being a communist to be seen as just as viable an option as being a democrat or a republican or a libertarian? How does this become a recognize option for the public?”
This can fruitfully be thought of in terms of populations in an ecosystem. How does one go about shifting a population that is almost completely absent in a particular ecosystem to being one that is dominant or the plurality within an ecosystem? The same holds true in public rhetoric. In order to understand this point, rhetoric shouldn’t be thought of two people talking to one another and seeking to persuade one another (what you seem to imply in your comment above), but rather in terms of themes that circulate throughout a social space like an obvious common sense that all parties involved share, even if only in the form of taking a postion for or against. Very few take a position for or against communism today as it isn’t a real position in the social field. The question is one, then, of how to get certain themes on the table at all, how to make them obvious furniture of the social environment.
Let’s take a concrete example. On a few occasions I’ve praised Dawkin’s God Delusion and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Why? I don’t think these texts are particularly sophisticated. I don’t think they make very new or interesting arguments. I don’t think all of their arguments are even that plausible. Certainly they aren’t the sorts of texts that I would cite or take seriously in an article I would write for an academic journal. Most importantly, I don’t think these arguments are going to persuade any of the devoutly religious.
So why do these books interest me? These books interest me in their status as “public books”. That is, they are addressed to a general, non-academic reader or are designed for mass consumption. Since they have been published they have generated discussion on a number of popular television news and radio programs and have been the subject of numerous newspaper articles. The important point here has to do with how these books relate to a certain context in American politics. These books have occured in a media environment that has been saturated by Christianity, where values discussions are constantly pitched in terms of religion, and where atheism is so absent (in news reporting) that it isn’t even discussed premised on the assumption that atheists just don’t exist in the United States. As a rhetorical event and fact (an enunciation that took place and inscribed itself in the media system), these books are thus interesting in that they challenge this assumption and introduce a new creature into the social space: The Atheist. Atheists now, perhaps, come to be recognized as a population that must be counted and recognized as having a say in public debates about policy. A believer finds that they must respond to this position in these debates, whereas before the existence of atheists in the United States didn’t differ markedly from that of biological organisms such as ourselves and infrared light, i.e., they were invisible. All response also entails concession and compromise at the rhetorical level. As such, the simple appearance of something like this– whether one agrees with it or not –shifts the nature of the entire debate and what is rhetorically obvious in subsequent discussions. Time will tell whether the growing voice of atheists has this effect on public debates or whether the hundreds of thousands of agonistics and atheists in the United States will continue to be voiceless and invisible in how public discussions or molded and framed.
No one is going to persuade the likes of Pat Robertson and his followers. What can be done is a shift in the very assumptions underlying the populace in such a way that it is increasingly difficult for such positions to even be heard or recognized as anything but fringe or lunatic positions. That is, positions can also be taken off the table and delegitimated. No one worships Greek gods anymore, perhaps organized religion as we know it today will someday disappear as well. This is why I’m always emphasizing the ethics of repetition and why it’s so important to repeat. It’s not simply a good argument that matters. Every rhetorician knows this. Rather, it’s important to repeat and repeat and repeat again until things are so ingrained in the unconscious of the population that they seem obvious. At one point, a person was on the fringe if they advocated mechanism (in physics) and heliocentrism in astronomy. Now everyone takes these things as being self-evident and assumes them as a part of the furniture of their universe. Even the religious who fought these things believe them today. This was through constant repetition or a saturation of the social space much like cane toads came to saturate the ecosystem in Australia.
Today conservative assumptions are the common sense of even many “leftist” oriented people in the United States. If you frequent democratic blogs like dailykos you discover that their positions are almost indiscernible from those of Barry Goldwater decades ago. This shows just how successful the right has been in shifting the entire field of discussion to the right. This has occured because conservatives successfully dominated the radio and news spheres, repeating their message over and over again and creating certain assumptions about the nature of reality, through a combination of argumentation, production of affects, mockery, vilification, and humiliation. In the meantime, other leftist thinkers feel as if they’re doing something by writing articles on Judith Butler or Zizek addressed to other academics, as if this is how change is produced. The point is not to persuade but to make a certain theme so ominipresent that it comes to be seen as an obvious reality. This also involves the destruction of certain forms of discourse. No one today can publicly stand up and advocate the positions of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis without being booed out of the room. This didn’t occur by persuading the people that had these beliefs, but by changing public attitudes towards people that have these beliefs (i.e., the audience witnessing the discussion). It involved a combination of mockery, humiliation, vilification, and condemnation, as well as sound arguments. This ad hominem style of argumentation made the price too high for others to advocate these positions or tolerate them in the public space. I would like to see that happen with figure such as Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Maulkin, and their more moderate versions. In short, by posting his questions publicly I was mocking the person who wrote me with the hope that he wouldn’t write me again and perhaps that he might feel a little shame and that others who have occasionally thought such things might feel a twinge of guilt.
I am not, of course, suggesting that my blog is somehow doing these things. Here I’m concerned with theory of various sorts, not the actual activity of producing these changes. Clearly I have a lot of work to do in expressing myself if you’re reading my remarks as a plea for Habermasian communication and persuasion with fascists.
April 29, 2007 at 6:31 pm
L, Thanks for your very thoughtful response. Your comments raise an interesting question for me. Why do people experience religious conversions away from pentacostal, conservative religious sects? We are bombarded with public presentation of mass relgious conversions to evangelical and pentacostal Christianity, but people also leave these movements.
I have some ideas about this, but I really need to give it more thought. I come into contact with these people often enough that it might be helpful to look more closely at the reasons they abandon these movements.
Yesterday, I spoke at length with a former hard core pentacostal. He said that studying theology actually led to his abandonment of pentacostalism. Of course, what he said and understanding what lies behind his change are not necessarily the same thing. I’ve spoken many times with former politically conservative evangelicals and pentacostals who’ve left these political/religious movements citing a variety of reasons besides theology. Almost to a person, they also identify the influence of some admired person who did not try to persuade them with argument. I have many thoughts about this, but, again, I want to mull this over for a while.