What should The Left do now?

[Luther Blissett]

Where's that thread where we kicked around ideas for new left parties?

[semper occultus]

....its not as if it wasn't all these Po-Mo beard-stroking Faucault freaks who actually started all this post-Truth relativism bull-shit in the first place and thinking they were being SO clever doing it...great fucking job guys....

[JackRiddler]

....its not as if it wasn't all these Po-Mo beard-stroking Faucault freaks who actually started all this post-Truth relativism bull-shit in the first place and thinking they were being SO clever doing it...great fucking job guys....

I can see you've done a deep reading of all this stuff.

[liminalOyster]

....its not as if it wasn't all these Po-Mo beard-stroking Faucault freaks who actually started all this post-Truth relativism bull-shit in the first place and thinking they were being SO clever doing it...great fucking job guys....

Deconstructing the Election
By Win McCormack
MARCH 8, 2001


The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.
—Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

Michel Foucault would have been fascinated by late-twentieth-century presidential campaigns.
—Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth

Since the late 1980s, when they discovered with horror certain French-derived theories of social science and literary analysis that long before then had taken root among left-leaning academics in the United States–essentially replacing Marxist dialectics as weapons of intellectual struggle, in reaction against the failure of radical politics in the 1960s–American conservative intellectuals have held these particular theories under siege. In such books as Tenured Radicals (1990) by New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball, Illiberal Education (1991) by ex-Reagan White House domestic policy adviser (and former Dartmouth Review editor) Dinesh D’Souza and Telling the Truth (1995) by ex-National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman and future Vice Presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, and in innumerable interviews, stump speeches and talk-radio tirades, representatives of the American conservative movement have denounced the exponents of these theories for attempting to lure students away from traditional cherished academic ideals like objectivity and truth toward a cynical, despairing view of history, politics, literature and law.

So we can assume that participants in this decade-long conservative jeremiad did not foresee that at the end of that decade their colleagues in the Republican Party would wage a campaign to win a close presidential election in ways that would seem to confirm, in virtually every respect, the validity of the theories they had been railing against–and moreover, that as part of that campaign, their allies would espouse and promote to the public the very essence of these same reviled theories. However, if we look closely at the theories in question and at the facts of Republican behavior in Florida, we will see that this is exactly what happened.

The theories in question are those derived from the works of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Their conservative critics tend to conflate the ideas of the two men, and then to muddle things further by presenting both as synonymous with postmodernism; in fact, though they worked in distinct fields and did not even like each other (Foucault once called Derrida “the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name”), their theories do have analogous aspects that make it not difficult to confuse them.

Foucault was a philosopher of history who posited, basically, the impossibility of achieving an objective and neutral interpretation of a historical event or phenomenon. Derrida is a philosopher of literature, founder of the notorious school of deconstruction, who suggested the impossibility of achieving a stable and coherent interpretation of a literary text, or any text. In both cases, the (putative) fact of the indeterminacy of the interpretive act leads to the conclusion (or has the assumption) that whatever interpretation comes to be accepted–the official interpretation–must have been imposed by the exercise of political power (though in deconstructionism this latter point has been elaborated and emphasized much more by Derrida’s American disciple Stanley Fish than by Derrida himself). It is this shared assumption that any official interpretation, whether of human behavior or the written word, has been arrived at through a process of power competition and not through the application of objective, neutral and independent analysis (because there is no such thing) that has so agitated conservative intellectuals.

In her book Telling the Truth, the wife of the man who was to become Vice President of the United States following Republican Party political and legal maneuvers in Florida uses a book that Foucault edited called I, Pierre Rivière as the starting point for a critical examination of the philosopher’s ideas. Pierre Rivière was a Norman peasant boy who in 1835 brutally murdered his mother, a sister and one of his brothers with a pruning hook. Foucault and a group of his students at the Collège de France compiled a collection of documents relating to the case. What the documents revealed to Foucault was not an overarching thesis that illuminated the cause and meaning of Rivière’s shocking act–not, in other words, the unifying concept or constellation of concepts that academic analysts typically grope for in their research and thinking–but, on the contrary, a welter of conflicting and irreconcilable interpretations put forth by competing, equally self-interested parties, including doctors, lawyers, judges, Rivière’s remaining family members and fellow villagers, and Rivière (who wrote a memoir) himself.

In other words, as Cheney puts it, the documents were important to Foucault “not for what they tell of the murders, but for what they show about the struggle to control the interpretation of the event.” Or, as she quotes Foucault as saying, the documents form “a strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses and through discourses.” The reason he decided to publish the documents, Foucault said, was “to rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge.”

“Thus,” Cheney concludes, “I, Pierre Rivière is a case study showing how different groups construct different realities, different ‘regimes of truth,’ in order to legitimize and protect their interests.”

The Foucauldian mode of analysis does not meet with any approbation or sympathy from the Vice President’s wife. In fact, she goes on to say that Foucault’s ideas “were nothing less than an assault on Western Civilization. In rejecting an independent reality, an externally verifiable truth, and even reason itself, he was rejecting the foundational principles of the West.” Therefore it seems a pretty good joke on her that it turns out to be the perfect mode for analyzing how Republican Party strategy in Florida was developed and implemented.

In fact, I might suggest that if Michel Foucault had not confected them already, his concepts of “discourses” and “a battle among discourses” ultimately to be decided by power would have to be invented before this signal event of American political history could be properly understood.

...

https://www.thenation.com/article/decon ... -election/

[semper occultus]

- well remebered !...Cheny's old lady wrote that eh...interesting ..my old history professor wrote this one

https://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/easthope.html

[dada]

"The simulation of social systems can also reveal how leaderless systems can exhibit dynamic, coherent behavior. Hartman and Benes addressed this using boids (a particle simulation of collective bird behavior). In the original boids simulation, coherent flocking behaviors similar to what is observed among birds using just three interaction rules: centering, alignment, and separation. All rules were followed by each boid, and conformity was assumed throughout the flock. Centering and separation were achieved not by relying on conformity, but by continually reassigning leadership status to different members of the flock.

Overall, it is the incorporation of self-reference (e.g. feedback or recursion) into a hierarchical structure that allows for heterarchical dynamics to be observed. This can be understood using formal computational models based on connected dynamical systems, but a more intuitive way is to use a thought experiment. This idea came to me while looking through a new book on leaderless political movements. Imagine what a leaderless game of chess would look like. Chess is a game of strategy with many potential moves, but strategy is constrained by the rank of each piece. The rank of each piece does not change, so the overall strategy of the game is oriented by where the king is and where the king will be as the game progresses. In terms of control mechanisms for engineered systems, a leaderless system can produce either multiple stable states over time, or a set of contingency pathways that enable a robust architecture. In both cases, the effects of leaderlessness can be local (as with signaling pathways in the cell) or much more global (as in the case of leaderless chess)."

http://syntheticdaisies.blogspot.com/2012/04/leaderless-control-understanding.html

What should the left do. Make disturbing art, naturally:)

[Joao]

....its not as if it wasn't all these Po-Mo beard-stroking Faucault freaks who actually started all this post-Truth relativism bull-shit in the first place and thinking they were being SO clever doing it...great fucking job guys....

Deconstructing the Election
By Win McCormack
[...]

Donald Trump: A Critical Theory--and Political Economy-Perspective on Economic Power, State Power and Ideological Power in the Age of Authoritarian Capitalism
Christian Fuchs

Abstract

This paper analyses economic power, state power and ideological power in the age of Donald Trump with the help of critical theory. It applies the critical theory approaches of thinkers such as Franz Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. It analyses changes of US capitalism that have together with political anxiety and demagoguery brought about the rise of Donald Trump. This articles draws attention to the importance of state theory for understanding Trump and the changes of politics that his rule may bring about. It is in this context important to see the complexity of the state, including the dynamic relationship between the state and the economy, the state and citizens, intra-state relations, inter-state relations, semiotic representations of and by the state, and ideology. Trumpism and its potential impacts are theorised along these dimensions. The ideology of Trump (Trumpology) has played an important role not just in his business and brand strategies, but also in his political rise. The (pseudo-)critical mainstream media have helped making Trump and Trumpology by providing platforms for populist spectacles that sell as news and attract audiences. By Trump making news in the media, the media make Trump. An empirical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric and the elimination discourses in his NBC show The Apprentice underpins the analysis of Trumpology. The combination of Trump’s actual power and Trump as spectacle, showman and brand makes his government’s concrete policies fairly unpredictable. An important question that arises is what social scientists’ role should be in the conjuncture that the world is experiencing.

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Vol 15, No 1 (2017)

Only the abstract is currently available, but I believe the full text should be online soon.

Surprised to see this is apparently the first mention of Christian Fuchs at RI. Hat tip to BKS for turning me onto Fuchs and triple-C via PM a few years ago.

[JackRiddler]

....its not as if it wasn't all these rock-hugging beard-stroking fault-seeking krauts who actually started all this post-fixed-earth plate-tectonics shit in the first place and thinking they were being SO clever doing it... great fucking job guys....

[Blue]

Do people here really think comedians and satirists are all spooky? What's that say about Jeff?

[Nordic]

Do people here really think comedians and satirists are all spooky? What's that say about Jeff?

Where are you hallucinating -- oops I mean "grokking" -- that?

[brekin]

Do people here really think comedians and satirists are all spooky? What's that say about Jeff?

Well, Canadian comedians are a much more lovable breed.

[Grizzly]

Blue » Fri Jan 13, 2017 7:24 pm wrote:
Do people here really think comedians and satirists are all spooky? What's that say about Jeff?

Whose this 'Jeff' , person you speak of? Hasn't been anyone by that name here in, years!

[Elvis]

What should the left do. Make disturbing art, naturally:)

You are on to something very important here, I think. Very important.

[MacCruiskeen]

What should the left do. Make disturbing art, naturally:)

Yup. That's how Kafka and Picasso managed to nip Nazism in the bud. And I believe it was Edvard Munch who achieved women's suffrage and the eight-hour working day. (Or am I confusing him with Strindberg?)

[MacCruiskeen]

The bourgeoisie is never going to work against its own class interest or even listen to any ideas that might threaten its own class interest. As long as US capitalism offers a comfortable standard of living to most members of its drone class, the US state has nothing to fear from any Left. That's why Michael Parenti speaks to hundreds while Donald Trump speaks to millions. That's why the term "conspiracy theory" is such a dependable thoughtstopper, because don't be vulgar and don't rock the boat and our rulers may be bad but they're not THAT bad (They only kill foreigners.) And that's why Democrats and other Liberals are now rallying round CNN and the CIA while anxiously checking for Reds under their beds and raging at Vlad the Impaler.

If there is hope, it lies in Latin America, imo.

edit: typo: (just such)