demonstratr

So, the first thing I want to say is that we will be having a demonstration THIS WEDNESDAY between classes from 11:45 AM until 12:00 PM (or whenever we’re done).  This will be Constitution Day on campus and there will be a celebration of some sort beginning at noon at the Main Building.  We will obviously cut into their schedule, but that’s good for us.  Also, they’d look pretty ridiculous telling us to stop on “Constitution Day” when they will be extolling the virtues of individual rights.  Just to make that the irony is palpable should they try some such non-sense, I encourage everyone who comes to make a sign (even a small one will be ok) with the First Amendment written on it.  For my part, I plan to speak on issues related to speech and rhetoric most of which I will touch on momentarily.  Secondly, I encourage everyone to either grab or bring another sign with an anti-Iraq War message.  There are signs already made which can be found in the basement of Miller Hall or in the Student Organizations Center with all the old LSU stuff.  This could be a really great start to the semester on campus.

On to my thoughts about Right Wing speech and rhetoric…  In my comment to Oliver’s post, I mentioned that fascist rhetoric is typically centers on national unity and ethnic homogeneity.  In the rhetoric of the contemporary American Right, this has found its clearest expression in the Bush’s claims that “If you’re not with us, you’re against us!”  This rhetoric has today reached one of its more absurd impasses.  President Buch and his henchmen on right-wing radio have been attacking John McCain for “aiding terrorism.”  (See the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/washington/18mccain.html?ex=1158724800&en=2c830b4f8298885e&ei=5087%0A).  McCain and several other Republicans on the Senate Armed Forces Committee have passed a bill to the floor to challenge the bill passed last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The joke of course is that McCain and his Republican compatriots are all ardent nationalists and men with distinguished military records (he is joined by Sen. Lindsay Graham of SC and Sen. John Warner of Virginia.)  These patriots oppose Bush’s arbitrary re-interpretation (better understood as an outright dismissal) of the Geneva Conventions because they think it will put US soldiers at greater risk of being subjected to torture.  Better yet, McCain, the man Bush is accusing of “supporting terrorism,” was shot down and captured in Vietnam and was held for years as a POW.  During his imprisonment, of course, he was tortured.  So Bush’s rhetoric is so divorced from reality as to charge a man who “fought for his country” and was captured and tortured with “aiding our enemies.”  Of course, this insanity has already been used by Swift Boat Veterans and company to attack other prominent veterans of the Vietnam War (John Kerry and Max Cleland are the two obvious examples).  But this is the first time this has happened within party ranks on the Right side of the fence.  While I am inclined to laugh at this kind of thing once in a while, I also am profoundly worried that people have somehow completely lost the ability (as if they ever had it?) to discern horseshit and respond appropriately (in this case with impeachment, etc.).

Now to Mexico…  Over the weekend, the leftist candidate in the July election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declared that he will be leading a “parallel government.”  This is an important move for a number of reasons.  The first of which is what appears to be a general shift of power in Central and South America to candidates who refuse to be bullied by the US.  This last week there was a meeting of the “non-aligned nations” in which many of these new leaders were criticial of the US (see http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=12422).  Anyway, if history is any indicator this push for independence from American influence will probably result in stepped up violence and espionage on the part of the US.  I guess we’ll see if the “parallel government” in Mexico will be able to withstand such bullying.  The other reason this is important is that it clearly speaks to the failure of the leadership on the left in the US.  By the time Bush took office, there was no question about election fraud in the 2000 race and the 2004 race was obviously similar - very few people on the left think that Bush won Ohio.  But, here we are with a president who should be impeached fighting a morally outrageous war, all the while disregarding any and every international law.  WHERE IS OUR PARALLEL GOVERNMENT?  The stakes are very HIGH - more than 41,000 dead in Iraq, increasing anti-American sentiment world-wide, militarization of American life, etc.  WHY IS AL GORE ON THE SIDELINES?  WHY IS JOHN KERRY ON THE SIDELINES?  WHY IS RALPH NADER ON THE SIDELINES?  Are there leaders on the left with any courage or integrity?  Apparently not.

Brandon             

‘I reminded them [House Republicans] that the most important job of government is to protect the homeland.” — George W. Bush, Thursday Sept. 14th New York Times

We need to begin asking questions about the origins of such questions of protecting homelands, since what is ultimately at stake is the militarization of space. It should go without saying what that sort of militarization would mean for the prospects of radical democracy.

The discourse of security that is in circulation today has a long history based in liberal thought. The liberal notion of security can most succinctly be traced back to Jeremy Bentham. Liberalism in Bentham’s time was a reaction to sovereign power: it contested the extent to which a sovereign could understand/manage social processes that were argued to be opaque to the sovereign gaze. These social processes (the economy, the bureaucracy, the family, the reasoning individual, etc.) were understood by liberals to be natural social phenomena outside the realm of sovereign power (who sought to make such processes transparent). Thus, the various disciplines of political-economics, political science, public administration, sociology, etc. were established to investigate and reflect upon these processes that were understood to be operative outside (though internally to) the transcendent state.

But, the question was eventually posed as to how to manage such processes within a territorially bound space, and how to make them productive for economic and state growth (hence the title of Adam Smith’s ” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”).

As Michael Dean discusses in his book “Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society,” Bentham sought to articulate four ’subordinate ends’ for state legislation in order to fulfill the utilitarian end of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” The ends, according to Bentham, were to provide subsistence, to produce abundance, to favor equality, and to maintain security.

According to Dean, “security, including security of person, honour, property and condition, was lifted to the top of the hierarchy of government for it is the ‘foundation of life’ on which everything depends.” Of course, this had to due with the economic relation between security and subsistence. Thus, security was first and foremost a disciplining mechanism: a mechanism to produce liberal subjects that exercised a particular type of freedom. In other words, the service of security had to be structured in such a way as to “lead indigent and other troublesome groups to exercise a responsible and disciplined freedom in the market and in the family (Dean).” Bentham’s liberty, argues Dean, is reduced to a branch of security. The detailed regulation of “men and things” thus involves “governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market (Dean).”

How can we trace this liberal notion of security put forward by Bentham to the current predicaments of security that have risen in the aftermath of 9/11?

I think we have to think of the disciplining effects of the purposeful use of the word “homeland” prior to the word “security” when the Bush Administration speaks on the subject. The word “homeland” is a control mechanism that seeks to create what Hardt and Negri call a “differential unity” that must be managed. What do I mean by “control,” and further, what do I mean by “differential unity?”

My use of the important term “control” is borrowed both from the so-called “governmentality” literature, and from the essay “Postscript on control societies” by Gilles Deleuze, whereby a shift has occured from the society that disciplines subjects through institutions (factories, schools, barracks, etc.) outlined by Foucault, to a society where “one is always in continuous training, lifelong learning, perpetual assessment, continual incitement to buy, to improve oneself, constant monitoring of health and never-ending risk managment. Control is not centralized but dispersed; it flows through a network of open circuits that are rhizomatic and not hierarchical (from Nicholas Rose’s “Powers of Freedom”).”

To quote Rose at length:

“IN such a regime of control, Deleuze suggests, we are not dealing with ‘individuals’ but with dividuals: not with subjects with a unique personality that is the expression of some inner quality, but with elements, capacities, potentialities. These are plugged into multiple orbits, identified by unique codes, identification numbers, profiles of preferences, security ratings and so forth: a ‘record’ containing a whole variety of bits of information on our credentials, activities, qualifications for entry into this or that network. In our societies of control, it is not a question of socializing and disciplining the subject ab initio. It is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all networks of practice. Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows of everyday existence. The calculated modulation of conduct according to principles of optimization of benign impulses and minimization of malign impulses is dispersed across the time and space of ordinary life.”

Of course, this everyday existence with multifarious networks of practice should not be understood as a homogeneous existence. Quite the contrary. Operative power within the everyday should be understood as seeking to manage difference towards unifying ends. This is why we cannot understand power today as a return of fascistic tendencies. Fascism requires a homogeneous society with top-down control–a society with a hammer over its head. Indeed, this kind of power that assumes homogenous populations certainly still exists (e.g., in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, China, etc.). But, there is a marked difference between a fascistic sort of power, and the power operative today in the United States.

Instead of a homogeneous society where power is based on top-down fascist violence, power in the United States (and Europe) seeks security through a general economy of command: a management of the flows and networks of everyday existence that Deleuze identified above. This sort of neo-liberal operative power Hardt and Negri identify as “the management and hierarchization of differences;” in other words, it is a power operative through freedom: a subjective freedom that should be understood as participating in markets, taking care of the self, dividualizing, molecular, atomistic.

So when the Bush Administration speaks of “homeland security,” the word “homeland” needs to be understood as a unifying signifier: a signifier that seeks to unify differential and multiple networks into a productive hegemonic acquiescence. The goal is to have the effect of a subject saying “Yes, let us protect that territorially-bounded abstraction (the homeland), while I participate in my everyday over here.” In other words, let them take care of that over there, while I do this over here. The accumulation of the latter sorts of practices (”taking care of this, my own everyday, here”) is what needs to be understood as security. It is the detailed regulation of “men and things” identified above: the “governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market.” That is the meaning of protecting the homeland. The act of articulation on the part of George Bush is a productive managing discourse.

This is a productive power operative through subjects, not on subjects (as in fascism)–subjects that can operate within and reproduce a market-friendly society of control.

Of course, I am here only dealing with subjects that imagine themselves to be participating in the abstract “homeland” of the United States.

–Oliver.

First of all I want to begin by encouraging everyone to please comment on what you read.  This website is about establishing a thoughtful community of politically engaged people and helping them to dialogue about how best to effect change in the world around (UK, Lexington, Kentucky, etc).  Communication is the key here.

On to today’s post…  The other day I was talking to my brother and he suggested that my criticisms of the sciences (biology in particular) were motivated by a concern for justice rather than truth.  The job of the scientists, he said, is to get the facts and this for them is a passion.  We should try to convince politicians not to misuse the facts and help to make sure that the statement of the facts isn’t sexist, racist, etc.  But, ultimately we shouldn’t criticize them on the grounds that their work is unjust or promotes injustice.  Scientists don’t promote sexism or racism and they don’t start or fight wars even though their ideas may be used for that purpose.

Now the first thing to say is that this is historically untrue.  Oppenheimer was trying to design an atomic bomb and his research in “pure physics” was ultimately intended to be put to this use.  Genetics work may have an even worse background.  Psychology in America was funded and developed by the CIA after WWII.  So, as a matter of fact, scientists have often (if not generally) done their work as a means to some nefarious end.  But, of course, everyone objects: “Those were different times and different people.  They didn’t know they were sexist or even what sexism was.  They didn’t understand why war and racism are bad.  But we do.  So the scientists of today are able to do ‘pure science.’  Sure they used to get the facts only in order to do bad things with them.  But now, we know better.” 

All I can say is look around you.  Listen to the news.  Pay attention to your parents and neighbors.  Pay attention to yourself.  Are you so sure that we “know better?”  I’m pretty positive we don’t.  Researchers at UK still do a great deal of work for the US military and on UK’s campus right now we allow the military to have a building and teach classes (filled with propaganda I’m sure) about war and how to fight it (all the while discriminating openly against gays and lesbians).  These things simply cannot be thought of as aberations.     

My other major problem with the idea presented by my brother is the thought that truth and justice are distinct.  The entire tradition of philosophy (with the notable exception of 20th Century Analytic Philosophy which models itself on some scientific ideal) thinks otherwise.  Truth and knowledege have for the most part been thought of as states of the human being in which she takes on the form of nature.  This doesn’t mean simply that she says how the world really is, rather she embodies personally and in her life the harmony, order, and balance found in nature.  Traditionally, this harmony, order, and balance has been thought of as justice.  A person is unjust when he is ignorant and, therefore, lacks justice - the proper harmony or balance of the soul. 

In “modern” philsophy, this tradition is reworked so that truth and justice come to have more to do with freedom than harmony.  According to Descartes, for instance, a person lacks knowledge precisely to the degree that she is controlled by passion and desire rather than intellect and led therefore to make judgements about matters concerning which she is uncertain.  Truth is certainty - the state of being in which a person only makes judgements about matters concerning which there is absolutely no doubt.  In the German Romantics all the way through contemporary Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, truth is only expressed in art - the highest form of human freedom in which the fetters of society are thrown off.  In this whole tradition, justice is identified with freedom. 

The moral of the story: Don’t be convinced by technocrats who claim to be out for the “truth.”  Many of them have other aims entirely.  Science cannot “purify” itself of the social world in which it exists.  And, I don’t think this is something that we should even hope for.  A more human hope would be that “science” could ally itself with the real truth which is freedom, peace, and justice.

Brandon 

I don’t have much to say today, so I thought that I would try to get some conversation going.  My idea is the following: Why don’t those of us who have wisdom to impart or ideas about what to do in Lexington start posting some of those here.  Oliver already started us off today with the suggestion of a campaign against Starbucks.  I have also thought about trying to push for a peace studies program at the University of Kentucky.  Clearly, we want to continue efforts in some of the directions we’ve been moving for a while - weekly demonstrations, etc.  What else do you want to do?  How do you think we should go about it?  Further, for those of us who are veteran activists, what kind of tips, etc. might you offer? 

I’ll see if I can’t get the ball rolling to some degree…  I think that large rally events aren’t the most important kind of activism.  I like them and they’re fun, but I think changes in your daily life are more important.  Finding ways daily to make others think differently and to extricate yourself from systems of oppression and violence are the real activism.  Second to this, I place direct actions.  Again, these don’t have to be big.  Rallies are easier than direct actions (since they tend to have less consequences), but I think they’re less effective generally.

Brandon