Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons The fallout from Abu Ghraib
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Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons
The fallout from Abu Ghraib
Part VI
by Stan Goff
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted,
distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes
only.
HAMMOND: How can we stand in the light of discovery and... and not act?
MALCOLM: What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative
act that scars whatever it explores.
The paradox of post-Enlightenment modernity. Discovery, conquest,
ceaseless transformation, absolute disequilibrium.
The political Left, of which I count myself a part, has missed the
driving force behind any belief system, and the very reason that the
American working class (that thinks of itself mistakenly as "middle"
class) - left on its own - veers inevitably into atavism and reaction
in times of crisis.
Belief systems are adopted out of a desire for meaning and a need for
reassurance in the face of confusion and incertitude.
"Meaning has to do with a perception of order, intelligibility, and
familiarity based on a relationship of compatibility between past and
present experience," says Alf Hornborg. "Fundamental to meaning are
experiences of recognition and reassurance. Its opposite is an
experience of chaos or arbitrariness variously referred to as anomie,
alienation, or anxiety."
This has deep implications for activism and for how activists relate to
the people. It is the reason we are never "rationally" persuasive on a
large scale until conditions create a disruption, and even then people
will integrate new information and new emotions as far as possible into
a semiotic universe that has been constructed for them since birth.
Various forms of "spirituality" are a revolt against the disequilibrium
/ anxiety of modernity - in the overdeveloped world as both New Age
mysticism and manifold species of religious fundamentalism, and in the
underdeveloped world as resistance in the framework of primitive
religious cosmologies.
But what is the material basis of this modern, and evermore
"post-modern" system that has engendered these pre-modern reactions?
Alf Hornborg describes post-modernism as "a condition where the
exhausting attitude of radical skepticism tends to give way to a
structurally enforced feigned gullibility. All hope of certainty has
vanished, but precisely because no pretense to power or truth can be
admitted, any pretense is as good as any other... This is the
structural space of Baudrillard's "political economy of the sign,"
Goffman's "impression management," and Lasch's "culture of narcissism."
It was Lasch who said, in his examination of the social and political
transformations occurring as the US was re-positioned after World War
II increasingly not as a producer society, but as the consumer of last
instance for the world economy:
"Consumer goods spoke so loudly, in fact, that social critics began to
fear that the voice of moderation and sobriety was in danger of being
completely submerged in the clamorous invitation to buy, to borrow, and
to spend without a second thought, and to indulge every whim as quickly
as it came to mind. When Dwight Eisenhower engaged an advertising firm
to promote his campaign for the presidency in 1952, many commentators
objected to this packaging of a candidate by Madison Avenue-a practice
that threatened to replace political discourse with advertising
slogans. Mass promotion, it was now clear, would not stop with the
marketing of washing machines and refrigerators. In The Image (1962),
Daniel Boorstin pointed out that images of reality threatened to
replace reality itself, so that politics came to revolve not around
events but around "pseudo-events" staged for the benefit of the mass
media."
Boorstin was actually coming from an early neo-conservative perspective
that lamented the degradation of "Western civilization" by this
substitution of simulation for reality.
Erving Goffman, who coined the term "impression management," prefigures
the effect of disruptions in these pseudo-events for the Bush
administration, in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in
Everyday Life:
"I have considered some major forms of performance disruption-unmeant
gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes. These
disruptions, in everyday terms, are often called "incidents." When an
incident occurs, the reality sponsored by the performers is threatened.
The persons present are likely to react by becoming flustered, ill at
ease, embarrassed, nervous, and the like. Quite literally, the
participants may find themselves out of countenance. When these
flusterings or symptoms of embarrassment become perceived, the reality
that is supported by the performance is likely to be further
jeopardized and weakened, for these signs of nervousness in most cases
are an aspect of the individual who presents a character and not an
aspect of the character he projects, thus forcing upon the audience an
image of the man behind the mask. "
The latest example of this is the collection of scenes Michael Moore
used in his wildly successful Fahrenheit 9-11 documentary, where - in
violation of the unwritten law of mainstream media to never show
embarrassing out-takes of prominent leaders - he shows Bush rolling his
eyes cluelessly, John Ashcroft telling the make-up artists to make him
look young, and Paul Wolfowitz spitting into his comb to tame his
cowlick... where we can all behold these "leaders" as what they are,
dangerous geeks who have bullshitted their way into power with the help
of advertising psychologists and zillion-dollar PR firms.
The whole pseudo-event of the "good" war in Iraq began to come apart
with the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison and the subsequent release
of hundreds of heretofore "dangerous" characters who were dramatically
and "coincidentally" rehabilitated.
Goffman continues: ... (cont)
samvaknin
Regarding Lasch, these may be of interest:
http://samvak.tripod.com/lasch.html
http://samvak.tripod.com/14.html
http://samvak.tripod.com/15.html
http://samvak.tripod.com/althusser.html
Take care.
Sam