I think Niko's question about the position of the reflexive academic is central to Dean's argument -- not necessarily because of she is one herself, but because I think the point of her argument is that it is directed squarely at a position that is quite familiar to contemporary academics, particularly those who "see through" not just ideology, but the ideology of ideology itself, if I can put it that way. That is to say, it is directed not just toward those who would engage in the process of unmasking (myself, naively thinking that I could cause the scales to drop from the eyes of my undergrads -- students who had long ago been descaled), but those who engage in the unmasking of ideology critique itself. Think, for example, of the familiar position that goes something like this: "Critiquing ideology always implicitly or explicitly invokes a truth claim (presumably guaranteed by some big Other) -- you can't tell someone they are "in" ideology unless you locate yourself in a position that is able to distinguish between ideology and something that is not ideology. But, thanks to our postmodern reflexivity, we understand that it is precisely this position (that of the debunker, not the debunkee) that is ideological: there are no grounds for positing the position from which this distinction can be made (demise of symbolic efficiency, decline of the "big Other"). I think a key point here is that such a formulation reproduces the cynicism described by Dean: it's not just that the student/member of the public has become savvy enough that unmasking doesn't work, it's also that the position of debunker comes to coincide with debunkee. That is the academics bent on "enlightening" the public come to adopt a cynical reflexive attitude toward their own position (we know that there is no position from which to adjudicate between ideology and the extra-ideological). There is no point in telling us that all attempts to seek a ground (or closure, suture, whatever) are merely ruses of power...we already know. This is the final debunking: debunking is just one more form of bunk(ery?). The second point that Dean, drawing on Zizek makes, is that this cynicism (savvy reflexivity) nevertheless remains ideological. The notion that we can stand outside ideology is ideological in both of its manifestations: 1) that we can adopt the position of science or truth from which to tell others they are caught in ideology AND 2) the notion that we escape ideology by moving beyond its problematic (ideology critique is quaint and outdated -- a relic of a naive era of critical theory). For what is this second position but an attempt to stand outside or detach ourself from ideology (we see through all truth claims as one more ruse of power, in order not to be seen to be dupes)? This second position might describe the conspiratorial subject position of the academic (always looking for the power interests to which any truth claim can be reduced).
So here is Dean's second point: this cynical distancing is the ideology of contemporary capital. And here is the point about what might be described as "postmodern criticism, or, the academic logic of late capitalism": it instantiates, at the level of theory, the reflexive cynicism characteristic of what Dean calls "contemporary technoculture" (and communicative capitalism). It incorporates a (wide?) stance of "ironic distance." Thus Dean asks, "how does the valorization of fragmentation and contingency benefit global capital by preventing it from being understood as a totalizing modality of power?" (and here, right away, Dean invites the reproach that she is not cynical enough -- she defaults to the position of the dupe from which the savvy subject seeks to distance her/himself).
OK, how? At the level of the savvy consumer/citizen, the subject knows the entire culture industry is a commercial fabrication but continues to participate (and this is the point I was trying to make, rather clumsily, with the example of the Halloween costumes: they all know the culture industry is a for-profit system of image manipulation, and yet, they go ahead and buy the 2Gether albums and dress up according to the images that have been manufactured for them. (Isn't Paris Hilton THE example of the ironic celebrity -- the celebrity who is famously reviled for being famous solely for being famous, and yet -- and yet, she continues to sell products and accumulate "mindshare" -- we mock her fame, and in so doing magnify and reproduce it: we are not "fooled" by it, but this doesn't make it go away. On the contrary.).
How does this ideology operate at the level of the savvy academic. I'll try this out to see if I can generate some controversy/response. One possible example. The author is one Alan McKee, poobah at the Creative Industries campus under the tutelage of John Hartley (well known in audience studies/cultural studies). Here is a quick breakdown of how I think this type of position operates: McKee's version of "distinction":
step 1) culture is a social construction that reproduces class distinction. step 2) (Bourdieu Anglicized and reduced) Culture is purely reducible to the role it plays in creating distinctions. Step 3) Culture itself does not matter -- what matters is what gets done with it. Step 4) there is no symbolic standard for adjudicating between cultural forms (decline of big Other). Step 5: all cultural distinctions are purely a matter of taste -- those who pretend otherwise are seeking to impose a debunked big Other (are exercising power). Step 6: The market is naturalized: our tastes are our own, do not take them away from us, and do not invalidate them by judging them.
The paradox of this position is that it naturalizes taste even as it acknowledges its contingency (and constructed character).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I think you outline the pickle we find ourselves in accurately. However, I think there’s a problem in your 6-step outline in the move from Step 4 to Step 5: “Step 4) there is no symbolic standard for adjudicating between cultural forms (decline of big Other). Step 5: all cultural distinctions are purely a matter of taste -- those who pretend otherwise are seeking to impose a debunked big Other (are exercising power).”
What you fail to note is the acute anxiety produced right alongside cynicism. The decline of the big Other does not come without a price. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse with the “fetishistic ideology” stuff, but I think this quotation from Zizek might help to fill this out a bit:
Although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain the inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known topic of the "future schock," i.e. of how, today, people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of the technological development and the social changes that accompany it - things simply move too fast, before one can accustom oneself to an invention, this invention is already supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament which definitely work better than the desperate escape into old traditions: instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of the technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination - one should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being... One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliche of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely wrote a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of the Global Capitalism. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-self.htm
Just because Western Buddhism is “the most efficient” version of the fetishist mode of ideology does not mean that there are not countless other versions. Academic discourse is itself one of these modes that also 1) in its application of theoretical models of the social offer some sense of a cognitive map, 2) allows one to maintain a cynical distance from the acceleration of the social while still renouncing the “very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the modern logic of domination.” I do not mean some watered-down identity-politics version of academic discourse (although this is certainly “more efficient,” which probably explains its popularity)—I mean us. The very reason that academic discourse continues (the reason that the facts will never all be in) is that we are stuck in between the two positions in Mark’s step 4 and 5 (between recognizing the decline of symbolic efficiency and experiencing a desire to appeal with certainty to a ground in arguments). We cannot choose either pure cynicism or grand narratives, but rather we must live with the insufficiency of each of these (both/and). Like every symptom, academic discourse is a compromise formation that both represses and alleviates the tension produced by a trauma. The reason why Western Buddhism (not exclusively, but it is a good example) is more efficient at alleviating the anxiety produced by the disappearance of the big Other (it is a better symptom) is because it is better at resolving the inconsistency between these two positions. The energy expended in (unsuccessfully) resolving this inconsistency (circulating or pulsing around an impossible object) is the movement called “drive.”
To clarify: I refer to academic discourse as both symptomatic and fetishistic above. There is a distinction between the two, but the fetish can be said to serve a compensatory function like a symptom. The differentiation, according to Zizek, is this: “fetish is effectively a kind of inverse of the symptom. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.”
In conclusion:
Mark outlines two naïve positions for the academic:
1) Ideological Debunker
2) Debunker of the Debunker: “always looking for the power interests to which any truth claim can be reduced”
Is there a third, systemically unstable position that undulates uncomfortably between these two alternatives, or better yet, resides in a purgatorial realm that resists “territorializing” on either of the first two positions? Perhaps the proof is this: if we could convince ourselves that one of the first two positions was credible, wouldn’t we feel much better about what we do? Perhaps then, our symptom working just even better than the Western Buddhists, we would fall into a Zen-like state.
I have a much less theorized response to Mark's post that does not really deserve independent post status, hense this "comment" placement. I would offer this in addition to Chad's much more thoughtful comments.
I also thank Mark for his (via McKee's) steps. I wonder if some problems lie in the interpretation of meaning given to step five and the subsequent step six. The interpretation of step five seems to imply that all exercises of power are equally bad, evil, or whatever. Surely this cannot be the case--can we not all easily give examples of good and bad exercises of power? It does not seem to me to follow from the recognition that most/all interpretive exercises are exercises of power that, therefore, all interpretive exercises are equally problematic or false. What does seem to follow is that it is allowed, as part of our evaluation of each interpretive exercise, to shine a light onto this exercise of power and to look at what this turns up--for example, to look at the effects of a particular cultural stance or interpretation of a cultural stance. Just as suredly as the "surely" above, we would not want to argue that all cultural organizations are equally problematic. Socialism, to list but one possible example of an alternative to communicative capitalism, would have its own ideology and its own hegemony. But would not, for example, "openess" (as an ideology that allows and encourages explict attention to ideology) have better consequences than its opposite? For that matter, isn't an ideology that judges belief/value systems by their consequences superior to an ideology with another way of judging? And I don't, by the way, think that any system can escape the problem of selective attention to consequences that lead to erroneous judgments--successive approximation is the best that can be hoped for, but a belief in successive approximation is qualitatively different than savvy cynicism.
Perhaps all of this is just my Big Other showing?
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. Perry's reflexive turn at the end of his post is productive -- as he suggests, the ability to judge between different forms of power might be described as the return of a repressed big Other. I think the further point to be made is that to the extent that symbolic efficacy remains (and it's hard to imagine its complete demise -- which would be tantamount to a kind of dissolution of communication), some kind of big Other remains inescapable (as in, for example, the pragamtic turn that seeks some means of gauging or judging effects -- what gets "done", or even the constructivist one, which seems to conserve a totalizing impulse (via the logic of exception: all social truths are social constructs, save this one). I think one of the central questions for someone like Dean is how does one theorize the inescapability of the big Other in a savvy era: which seems to move in the direction Chad was pointing out.
Wrt McKee, by the way - I see this kind of argument as pure postmodern ideology: the unthinking debunking of a big Other that leaves the other of capital to continue its operation unharrassed. Naturalization in its most unthinking guise.
Where does praxis fit in all of this?
In Aristotelian thought the basic understanding of the actions of humankind includes theoria, poiesis and praxis (theory, production, and action). I feel as if the fetish of academic focus in its current strain is the tendency to focus purely on theoria or a bit of a combination of theoria and poiesis. I admit, though, that this begs the question - what praxis (actions) and for whom?
Chad you wrote that Academic discourse as a mode of fetishistic ideology -
"2) allows one to maintain a cynical distance from the acceleration of the social while still renouncing the 'very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the modern logic of domination.'"
What allows for this? What allows "one to maintain a cynical distance" in the first place?
I pose this as general curiosity. Hell, I am not even sure if this adds to the conversation! But this is what is left spinning in my head at the end of this conversation.
Post a Comment