The Mythic Liberal Voter in the Solid Crystal of Society:In Response to Michael Hannon’s “Disagreement or Badmouthing?”

            This document came about because of a public (however small that public might’ve been) Twitter conversation. I lamented that people fail to read a great deal of very useful political epistemology literature. As evidence, I (not realizing that what I took to be an inconsequential complaint would unexpectedly turn) pointed to what I saw as a disappointing volume—that which Michael Hannon recently edited. For me, this document serves to respond to Hannon’s challenge and to demonstrate how a rather large body of literature could solve the problems that present themselves in Hannon’s (but not only Hannon’s) volume. I understand the result of my response to be evidence of the problem in the academy by which ever-increasing specialization leads disciplines and sub-disciplines apart, never again to cross paths. Were Hannon and his colleagues to have taken seriously some literature in certain strands of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, anthropology, social psychology, and related areas, many of the philosophical mistakes that appear in the volume’s chapters would likely have been avoided, but alas, here we are: Hell.

            Hannon argues that, because many people don’t really hold beliefs on political matters, it’s often the case that people neither agree nor disagree on political matters. At certain points in Hannon’s chapter, he (whether intentionally or not) gestures toward possible ways of explaining why people often appear unconcerned with facticity, coherence, or consistency. That is, in political matters, people often appear to make claims that they couldn’t believe, to make claims that appear inconsistent with other claims that they make, and to arbitrarily change their minds and even change their minds back again. While Hannon’s explanations for these phenomena ultimately fail, on the surface, it’s reasonable to assume—from the way that these phenomena appear—that people, at least sometimes, really don’t have political beliefs. How else could one explain the glaring appearance by which people seem either to obviously lie or to have no convictions about matters of fact?

            In fact, Hannon’s explanation for these doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Hannon argues that, while people often don’t really have political beliefs, they do express what appear to be political beliefs. What occurs, in Hannon’s conception, is a substitution: people often express political allegiance when they make claims about their beliefs: (I neither believe nor disbelieve in climate change, but) I support the Republic Party, and so on. For Hannon, there are sneaky political actors among us who pretend to have political beliefs, but really don’t. Why would they do so? This is one problem that Hannon’s argument faces.

Hannon offers no explanation for why people would claim to have political beliefs that they don’t have. Realizing the absurdity of claiming that no people ever have political beliefs, he assures the reader that some people, at least sometimes, do have political beliefs, but this might make matters somewhat worse for him. If it were the case that some people do always have political beliefs and some people never do, then one could understand people’s statements of political commitments by realizing that some political discourse is about people’s political beliefs and some political discourse is about people’s political allegiance. So long as everyone is always only ever someone with political beliefs and the other people are people who never have political beliefs, sorting people, and sorting discourse, into either one bucket or the other might not be very difficult.

Hannon repeatedly divides those who have no political beliefs from those who do have political beliefs. By this formulation, there are those whose political activities express political beliefs and those whose statements of political belief actually express mere allegiance. As far as I’ve been able to tell, he never claims that anyone both has political beliefs and expresses allegiance in their political activities. He appears to begin to hedge: “[S]ome voters may initially get their political allegiances by enculturation, but this does not preclude them from genuinely coming to believe some (or a lot) of the things their political party stands for. This may occur through a process of reflection on the attitudes they inherited from their community.” (p. 305) For Hannon, reflective thinking on people’s attitudes may lead them to actually adopt the beliefs (or at least what appear to be beliefs, Hannon clarifies) that the party prescribes, but here, reflection is not a process for someone to break from their community, so insofar as it’s belief, it’s belief in that to which one’s already committed. The reflective thinking that leads to what appear to be beliefs is, for Hannon, merely a matter of “post hoc reasoning.”[1] In other words, this is reasoning as performance; I’ll return to this point. What matters is that, for Hannon, it appears that some people never really hold political beliefs. Does this mean that no one does? Hannon writes, “[P]olitical realism”—the idea that “one’s kind” of person belongs to the political party to which they, themselves, belong—“is implausible as an account of political elites and people who devote their careers to politics. These people surely have genuine beliefs about the issues. My point, however, is that many people are not like this.” (p. 305) For Hannon, there are two classes of people: those elites among us who hold political beliefs and we (they?) plebes who’ve never held a real political belief in their life. For Hannon, one must suppose, the two sides really speak two different languages that merely appear identical.

A better way to understand what Hannon rightly observes—that people can appear contradictory and inconsistent—is that, whether some people always do have political beliefs and/or some people never do have political beliefs, many people sometimes do and sometimes don’t have political beliefs. This could help to explain why people who make political statements, even when they don’t have political beliefs, express their political allegiance in a form identical to that of political belief even though their expression isn’t really one of political belief. This seems to be right, but then, much more explanation is required; at least two things must be established. First, why does political allegiance get expressed in the idiom of political belief?

Why it should be the case that people act as if they hold political beliefs, even when they don’t, isn’t intuitive. It’s not clear that the political agent would lose anything at all by claiming that their political activity is a function of their allegiance rather than a function of their belief. In fact, many people do and have based their political activity on allegiance alone. Hannon even refers to this (p. 300); we know it as identity politics. It’s the politics of nativism, fascism, and the like, and many people’s political activities adopt these forms. It’s the idea that I belong to some naturalized, or dehistoricized, group, and my political actions only reflect my membership in that group and my wish for my group to benefit as much as possible and be harmed as little as possible. If one’s politics are only motivated by their desire to benefit their group as much as possible, then don’t they risk alienating, or at least confusing, their group and, therefore, losing support? What’s gained by translating allegiance into belief? If some people, sometimes, are willing to acknowledge that their politics only express their allegiance, then Hannon offers no explanation for why those whose political activity only expresses allegiance, when that’s the case, go through the process of converting their expression of allegiance into an idiom of belief. Obviously, we seem to have encountered a mistake, and it’s a mistake that leads Hannon to make other mistakes and to fail to account for phenomena that are highly relevant to what he means to explain. So, why would people without political beliefs act as if they do have political beliefs? This is the second problem with Hannon’s “as-if” argument.

How is it that two apparently unrelated things—allegiance and belief—become associated with each other in the first place? This relates closely with the above problem, as we will see, but the point here is that it’s not obvious why people’s beliefs would ever bring about parties, party allegiance, and so on. Someone might avoid the issue of belief altogether by way of participation in identity politics’s forms, but that’s irrelevant to the case that Hannon describes by his as-if argument; in other words, there could be no reason for the as-if style of politics if politics were all a matter of identity politics (that people only, on some occasions, justify post hoc). Hannon doesn’t explain how people whose political activities are based on allegiance and people whose political activities are based on belief might come to form a party. Aren’t they interested in very different things? Clearly, the latter are interested in reasons related to policy choices, and the former are interested in a reified conception of identity. Why would someone with no political belief ally with people who do have political beliefs? If Hannon wanted to argue that people in a geographical area always ally with others in their geographical area, then that could be plausible if the evidence bore it out. Of course, it doesn’t. If people’s political allegiance were always fully explained by familial identification, then that could make sense, but it isn’t. How is it that people without political beliefs ally with people who have political beliefs? In fact, these two problems—the problem of the political idiom and the problem of allegiance—share an explanation.

            One must explain how political beliefs and political allegiance can be converted into each other. Sometimes, Hannon writes, “people count support for a politician or party as a sacred value.” (p. 302n6) If Hannon is right, then one might even claim that support for a political party is itself a kind of political belief. How so? Political beliefs, of course, aren’t completely different from other kinds of beliefs; they always express transcendence in terms of value but also in terms of descriptive difference.  Furthermore, beliefs necessarily always relate temporal moments, but Hannon consistently runs into problems by failing to incorporate considerations of temporality and history.[2] The simplest kind of belief is perhaps that entailed in what Wilfrid Sellars refers to as the “ostensive tie”[3]—the mapping of a signifier onto a phenomenon. When one points at a chair, and calls it a “chair,” they believe that their understanding of chair-ness, which comes from the past, is reliable enough that they can project it onto the somewhat mysterious[4] phenomenon that lies before them. Similarly, the statement, “I believe in gravity,” can be meant as a proleptic statement by which one assumes that available evidence allows for one to make a prediction. To say, “I believe in my mother,” can be to attribute to her a kind of authority based on past experiences. This authority entails assignation of value: the chair’s chair-ness, my mother’s word, or the concept of gravity, is valuable because of the reliability entailed in each. In fact, if authority can always be defined as partly having to do with reliability[5], then all statements of belief are statements that implicate the phenomenon of authority.

We have many ways of determining authority. Erving Goffman notes that things like people’s dress, their gestures, their uses of language, etc. can all signal forms of authority.[6] I wouldn’t entrust a car mechanic to conduct brain surgery and I wouldn’t entrust a brain surgeon to fix my radiator. The fact that someone’s status as a kind of subject depends on what they do exemplifies why, as Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue shows, Hume’s is-ought distinction breaks down. What a car mechanic is depends on them appearing to do what a car mechanic ought to do, and these can’t be separated without breaking down the concrete meaning of each. If the mechanic can’t locate the transmission or properly turn a wrench or assemble an engine, then they’re really no mechanic at all. Whether or not someone understands themselves to be a mechanic, if they can perform all the functions of the mechanic and if they incidentally present themselves as a reliable mechanic, then they happen to be a mechanic. In fact, the degree to which they count as a mechanic depends on the transcendent value of their mechanic-ness—their authority as a mechanic. A person is recognizable as a person because they perform the functions that they ought to perform in order to be legible as a person.

To tie this back to Hannon, he’s right to bring transcendence—the “sacred”—into the conversation. Our values often are made sacred because of the importance of certain possible outcomes, our love for one another, our dedication to certain issues, our attachment to inspiring leaders, and so on. All collectivities only can be collectivities by way of transcendence and its close relative, authority. Because all distinctions entail both descriptive and normative differences, all uses of language entail a transcendent dimension and all uses of language implicate at least the possibility of a kind of authority however vaguely-conceived.

All this granular discussion of transcendence serves the purpose of pointing out that Hannon’s problem has already been solved in a vast, long-standing body of literature. Hannon appears to be wrong when he writes that there are people whose political behaviors reflect allegiance and there are other people whose political behaviors reflect reasoned beliefs. Instead, all political activities necessarily entail both of these dimensions because all social behaviors entail both. To return to our car mechanic, their activities align them with a group of people—car mechanics. They perform their identity as a car mechanic in their professional actions, but also in the different ways that unrelated actions and choices relate them to their identity. The car mechanic isn’t necessarily compelled by their employer to refrain from washing the black grease that distinguishes their hands from those of others, to wear blue coveralls, to speak in a distinct accent, and so on, and yet, one often knows the car mechanic when they see them, just as they—with nothing to go on other than superficial signals unrelated to the actual work—know the professor, the doctor, the construction worker, or the tech bro. People know the members of their group, too, even if they’ve never met them in person.

People recognize styles of dress and speech, social rhythms, expressions of patterns of choices and other types of thinking, and so on. When people who share aspects of their lived experience—what Ernst Bloch calls their “temporality”[7]—they treat them as people who share certain interests and values. In fact, people’s interests and values are constructed through their historical social experiences.[8] The more people appear to share interests and values, the more they can be trusted to reflect shared interests and values. The more people can convincingly express those interests and values in political statements (but not only), the more they’ll be trusted—the more they gain authority among members of their group.[9]

By now, it might be obvious to my reader that there can, in no instance, be a strict division between the values embodied in statements of political belief and allegiance to one’s chosen (or, at least, non-unchosen) political community. Any statement of political belief will be mediated by one’s sense of where their interests lie and by how their interests relate them to a group of people or to multiple groups of people. On the other hand, anyone’s expression of political allegiance demonstrates their commitment to certain political beliefs. At the bare minimum, political allegiance expresses that one values a certain political community and/or political leader. Someone’s allegiance might sometimes appear more important to them than their concern over any particular issue because of how they value allegiance. People sometimes compromise on particular issues because they believe that their perceived group will benefit when their party wins. Their party might not take their own stance on every issue, but they’re better off winning the election than losing it. Different people differently weigh the value of their party winning against the loss by which their particular views won’t be represented. Hannon quotes Liliana Mason on this point, who argues, “[S]ocial identity [… results] in individual differences in identity strength.” (p. 299) Mason seems to be claiming that everyone identifies with a group or with certain groups, but they identify themselves with others to differing degrees. Mason’s claim appears right because it must be the case that anyone who expresses thoughts through uses of human language identifies themselves (whether consciously or not) with a group of people.

Any use of language necessarily commits the language-user to a set of descriptive and normative associations. The language-user can only use language because they’ve learned to use their particular language from their experience in social situations.[10] Every language-user participates in a linguistic, and even cognitive, tradition.[11] Anyone’s statements can only be understood by anyone else if the language-user’s simultaneous articulation of both descriptive and normative associations in whatever statement can be understood by the receiver.[12] In this way, every statement is constituted by the foreground of the signifiers—what Ferdinand de Saussure calls “syntagm”—and the background of those signifiers’ sets of associations—the “paradigm.”[13] What Saussure fails to recognize is that the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships between signifiers could never be “arbitrary.”[14]

Every statement entails historically- and socially-determined values that help to constitute that statement’s background.[15] This background entailment of values, especially because these values relate closely to people’s social positions and ethical and political commitments, is what we mean by “ideology.” V. N. Vološinov shows that all uses of signifiers are ideological because signifiers’ descriptive and normative associations depend on the social situations within which people learn language and put it to use. If, in my community, we tend to value croissants more than biscuits, then this evaluative association is already entailed in the background of my statement: “I want a croissant.” Someone might say that they would prefer to have a biscuit. It would be sensible to think that the person might not be a part of my community because, if they were a member of my community, then they would most likely prefer a croissant. If croissants are more expensive than are biscuits, then these signifiers—croissant and biscuit—also imply class differences. The lower-class person might express that they value biscuits whereas the upper-class person might express their preference for croissants. However, this expression isn’t only unidirectional. Within what Pierre Bourdieu calls a social “field,” the interactions between actors express, and form, relations between what he calls “economic,” “social,” “cultural,” and “symbolic” forms of capital.[16] People with similar economic capital tend to interact in shared situations, leading them to create social ties that Bourdieu refers to as “social capital”—access to particular people and particular sorts of people. People’s economic capital allows them to consume certain commodities but, perhaps, not others. Members of social groups—especially groups with relatively equal amounts of economic capital—tend to consume certain sets of commodities with certain qualities that grant them “cultural capital.” A rich person has access to expensive food, high art, and certain patterns of language use to which a poor person doesn’t normally have access. Among a social group, then, cultural capital—valuable understanding of certain artifacts and processes—expresses economic capital in a way that relates to social capital—the value of knowing certain people and groups of people. In fact, if one can gain cultural capital, then, even without economic capital, they can, in some cases, convert that cultural capital into social capital that they can then, sometimes, convert into economic capital. Of course, concrete social practices ground all of this. My expressed preference for a croissant expresses something about my history of cultural consumption as it’s mediated by the possibilities afforded by my economic capital. These both tend to relate me to certain groups of people, including, more broadly, to an entire economic class. Because these phenomena form the patterns that constitute daily-life associations, my social practices form my ideology as my ideology helps to constitute my choices and behaviors.

This all restates the claim from MacIntyre that I referred to above: All uses of language situate one in a community of people who share aspects of a tradition of thought and practice—a tradition full of various rituals and unconscious commitments. Language-use is always, in some way or another, practical, historical, and social. There is no signification that doesn’t arise from shared processes and that doesn’t also bear potential implications on shared processes.[17] Getting back to Hannon, then, when people express political beliefs, this is never merely an exercise in truth-telling for the sake of truth-telling. The practical implications obviously run deeper than this. In order to understand, for instance, why it might sometimes appear that people lie about political beliefs, one has to understand what kinds of political practices people engage in, what are the stakes of those practices, and how people understand the relationship between their social situation and the statements that they make.

Hannon gives examples of people who, when looking at photos from Obama’s and Trump’s inaugurations, seem to lie, and people who seem to lie about changes in employment levels (pp. 301-2). When one views the two photos, it seems obvious that more people appear in the photo of Obama’s inauguration than in Trump’s. Survey participants were asked, “Which photo has more people?” (p. 301) The correct answer, Hannon writes, is that Obama’s inauguration photo has more people in it. We could all look at the two photos and see that he’s correct to write this, but, because rightness is constituted by various criteria, the question’s simplicity makes ambiguous what the right answer might be. In order to know what is the right answer for the respondent to give, one must know how the survey participant understands their role in their situation. On the surface, the most obvious interpretation of the question seems to be this: The question asks the respondent to determine, to the best of their ability, according to the most reasonable possible method, which photo contains more visible people. This might seem obvious, but the situation isn’t without ambiguity. For some people, the value of their political party winning an election is vital. For such a person, any way by which they can reasonably help to secure that outcome puts them on the side of the good—of their “sacred value.” It need not be the case that they ought to act in accordance with an unstated standard that they would—if they thought of it—understand the survey administrator to have intended. It’s easy to imagine ways by which a respondent might ask themselves if perhaps the photos are distorted or if perhaps there are slivers of people barely registering in certain pixels in one photo whereas, in the other photo, eccentricities make there appear to be more people than are really there, and so on. One could call this dishonest, but the respondent themselves might think that every step along the way was perfectly honest—perhaps, even more honest than if they’d tried to meet the expectation of the elitist (read: “evil”) bureaucrat administering the survey! This doesn’t mean that they necessarily don’t realize what the expectation is, but it also doesn’t mean that they understand the expectation to map onto the absolutely and necessarily correct answer. Are they really lying? Maybe.

In Hannon’s other example, people’s responses change when they’re offered money to be more honest (including to say when they’re unsure; p. 302). The findings seem to support Hannon: people’s responses are more correct when they’re rewarded for honesty. What does this tell us? What it almost definitely tells us is that, when people are asked to account for whether or not they’re doing what’s expected of them, they change their answer. Does it mean that they go from lying to telling the truth? The evidence isn’t sufficient to say that this is so. According to Hannon, one of the questions asked is “whether the level of employment has gotten better or worse.” (p. 302) Better or worse for whom? Better or worse in what way? Someone might live in an area where the reality that’s constructed for them—and that they reasonably believe—is one by which the wrong people—people whose employment shouldn’t count—are employed at the expense of the right people being employed. They may be mistaken in facts around this understanding, but it may be that the overwhelming majority of reliable evidence, based on the consensus and authority that they find reliable, clearly indicates to them that the reality of employment contradicts the story that they read in the newspaper (or have editorialized to them by Fox News) each day. Hannon denies that this is what’s happening.

Responding to the claim that “Democrats and Republicans are allegedly seeing ‘separate realities,’” Hannon writes, “An alternative explanation is that such patterns merely reflect a desire to praise one party or condemn another.” (p. 303) Hannon would seem to be right that people sometimes really do cheerlead for their party and badmouth the other, but Hannon’s problem takes a familiar form. Once again, Hannon claims two things to be mutually exclusive[18], rather than addressing the complexity of people’s social interactions. Here, his use of the term “merely” betrays what would seem to obviously be the case: people can cheerlead while they attest to what they believe. In fact, it’s necessarily the case that this is what they really do. One cannot have beliefs without having preferences and one cannot prefer a party without valuing what that party appears to represent. Republicans want to win because they want the good team to defeat the evil team, and the Democrats feel the same in the other way around. It’s true that polarization has changed the nature of this tendency, but Hannon also denies the history of polarization.

When Hannon writes that “those who are the most polarized are […] more motivated to watch partisan news; thus, partisan news may not be the cause of affective polarization” (p. 300), this relies on magical thinking where the consensus on polarization’s history would be much more convincing. Study after study shows that polarization has grown in recent decades. One need not look back more than fifty years to see a dramatic shift in the degree to which Republicans and Democrats claim to dislike and distrust each other and to which Republicans and Democrats claim to hold mutually exclusive views (however inaccurately they may believe this to be so). Moreover, where Hannon denies that historical media tendencies have led to polarization, the explanation appears extremely straightforward. The erosion of the equal time rule and the fairness doctrine has coincided with a decades-long project (especially on the right) to create more extreme and partisan media—from partisan radio to various political and religious cable shows to Fox News to MSNBC to the birth of the unregulated internet, and so on. One can neatly map the graphs of increasing polarization onto the history of eroding regulation and increasingly partisan media. Where does Hannon think that polarization started, and how? Apparently, the Devil made it happen.

That said, polarization can also be explained by a much longer historical process. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes, “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”[19] Relative to previous times, people today lack the shared socio-cultural resources to be able to meaningfully discuss important issues. He writes that this is for three basic reasons. First, interlocutors’ socio-cultural frameworks are often conceptually incommensurable.[20] Second, the modernist style of debate—characterized by impersonality—implicates a fictional universal and, therefore, transhistorical truth meant to compel people by its naturalist forcefulness.[21] Much of what runs Hannon into logical traps, for example, flows from this tendency. Finally, people argue from the bases of different thought traditions, producing “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments.”[22] It’s not simply that our concepts are incommensurable but that our thinking tends to be full of bits and pieces of systems of thought that contradict one another. MacIntyre, continues, “[A]ll those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived. Moreover the concepts we employ have in at least some cases changed their character in the past three hundred years.”[23] This reinforces Bloch’s point—that people live not only different lives but different temporalities. They live according to different rhythms and tempos; different lifecycles; different transcendental, or even eschatological, ends; different relations to their ancestors, differently conceived of; and different repetitions and novelties.

Of course, one kind of temporality is that liberal temporality characterized by abstraction—as in what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time.”[24] The liberal tends to erase history’s role in conditioning phenomena, including people’s subjectivities. Often, by the liberal account, subjects appear free and autonomous, floating in empty space, without the friction or force of learned values, desires, and concepts—let alone bodies with limits. Ideational phenomena are often understood to have been constructed without any influence from any history whatsoever. This isn’t the only kind of abstraction, though. What Theodor Adorno calls “the cult of the existent”[25] is another form of abstract givenness.[26] With only a thin concept of history—mostly as the kind of national history that celebrates barbarism for its own sake[27]—liberals often overestimate the degree to which phenomena are transhistorical. To be clear, this kind of violator isn’t necessarily in the worst company. Nietzsche mistakenly transhistoricizes the conflict between the person and society. Sigmund Freud does the same. Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty follows Hobbes’s translation of authority into authoritarianism, erasing the modern history of this shift.[28] Of course, there’s good news. Karl Marx writes, “[T]he present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.”[29] It turns out that, in spite of liberals’ best efforts, there is, after all, history. I’ll end with my immediate reaction, after having been challenged by Hannon on Twitter, to the first page of his chapter—not because it’s a significant part of my argument, but because, in spite of its hurriedness, its mistaken interpretive framing, and, in the light of this whole document, diminished relevance, it still captures the essence of the problem with Hannon’s chapter.

Hannon writes, “In the U.S., nearly half of all Republicans and Democrats say they ‘almost never’ agree with the other party’s positions. When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people disagree.” (p. 297) Initially, one may dismiss the egregious overstatement of the case as merely a matter of style, but the implications run much deeper than some consideration for aesthetic difference. To state the obvious, Republicans and Democrats agree on far more political questions than those on which they disagree. They overwhelmingly agree that murder is a crime, that free speech is valuable, that the government should take responsibility for maintaining roads, educating children, regulating lead content in commodities, and an almost uncountable number of other possible policy questions. On how many questions could we say Republicans and Democrats clearly tend to disagree? Ten? Twenty? Maybe 100? Revised, then, Hannon’s claim really ought to read, “When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people agree.” Of course, the diligent Platonist would automatically know this to be true. Differences are only meaningful when phenomena are brought into mediating relation according to the categories by which those differences are constructed. Put in Hegelian terms, individuals’ universal participation in politics is mediated by particular political differences. Still, why does this matter?

The aesthetic (which is to say, perceptual) effect of claims like Hannon’s is that they lead the reader to accept a world in which the things on which Republicans and Democrats agree don’t appear as matters worthy of discussion. If the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats appear endless, then the agreements worthy of consideration must be relatively few. Of course, this is nonsense. The disagreements between Republicans and fascists, or Democrats and communists, are clearly far greater in number and intensity than those between Republicans and Democrats. Yet, by Hannon’s formulation, the disagreements between non-liberals and liberals (by which I mean Republicans and Democrats) are made insignificant; they become the background to the handful of major disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. So long as those things that Republicans and Democrats agree on aren’t to be considered, then they are taken for granted and they become invisible in political discourse. In other words, they become ideology. This is all to say that, by rendering certain considerations invisible, or ideological, Hannon’s claim does aesthetic work toward creating a liberal epistemology.

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[1] He gets this idea from, of all people, Jonathan Haidt lol (p. 308)

[2] Later in this response, the importance to my argument of temporality’s consideration will become clearer.

[3] Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

[4] Of course, every phenomenon is necessarily somewhat mysterious to us—we are mysterious to ourselves, others are mysterious to us, and those things and happenings that can’t communicate to us through human language are, in important ways, even more mysterious to us than are people.

[5] I here borrow Massimiliano Tomba’s distinction between authority and authoritarianism. Authority is a category by which social relations are related to shared values. Authoritarianism is authority’s modern (and, to some degree, proto-modern) simulacrum—deference to thin signalings of reliability. Tomba, Massimiliano. “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23(1): pp. 1-12.

[6] Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

[7] Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Heritage of Our Times.

[8] This point is made by many people: in addition to above-cited texts by Bloch, Sellars, and MacIntyre, also in G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, V. N. Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice,Lev Vygostsky’s Mind in Society, Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” and, despite that Hannon might have never read any of this literature (or at least learned this lesson from it), this list could really go on forever, to include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as a host of authors between them and Hegel.

[9] In this way, authority is constructed as the values and understandings of the group; they appear as socio-historical propriety in people’s appearance and in their various practices.

[10] Again, this point is made repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy, but it’s a point that Hannon seems to miss, and it’s particularly emphasized in Vygotsky’s Mind in Society.

[11] MacIntyre, After Virtue.

[12] Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” See also Vygotsky’s discussion of the “zone of proximal development,” in Mind in Society.

[13] De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.

[14] Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.

[17] Marx, Karl. The German Ideology.

[18] Here, one explanation is standard, and the other is “alternative.” As becomes clearer as his argument goes along, he regards the alternative explanation to be true and the standard one to be incorrect.

[19] MacInyre, After Virtue, p. 6.

[20] Ibid., p. 8; this relates closely with the “separate realities” argument that Hannon disputed but I reaffirmed.

[21] Ibid., p. 9.

[22] Ibid., p. 10.

[23] Ibid., p. 10.

[24] This can be thought of simply as Newtonian time. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389-400.

[25] Adorno, Theodor. “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda.” The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 227.

[26] On givenness, see Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

[27] See Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History.”

[28] Tomba, “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.”

[29] Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 93.

Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation

Some of my writing: “ Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation”

Escapism and Utopia

(This text represents my argument developed in conversation with my friend, Phikria.)

Authenticity is the concept of nothingness’s fullness. Why “nothingness?” Authenticity entails the supposition that, beneath the dirty surface of things, there lies a quiet, still, harmonious, ineffable being that contradicts all our ways of conceiving the material presence of reality as we experience it. One could never talk of authenticity as something; its nature must always remain fundamentally inutterable. If one is to seek their authenticity, they must find it in a kind of nothingness.

Thus, the Authentics manichaeistically divide the world in two—the sacred and the profane. Deep inside everything, the Authentics claim, there is a second register of reality. This second register is the real, or “authentic,” register where only pure, healthy, content, and “higher” phenomena take place. The first register—the domain of quotidian experience—conceals the second register. When one attends to the loud business of the first register, the dirty half-truths of daily life are revealed. When one attends to the quiet, still, full emptiness (again, empty of the hum of all the associations, symbols, and sense-making that occupies our daily life [In The Destruction of Reason, György Lukács refers to this authenticity as the “irrational”]) of the second register, higher, beautiful truths are revealed. This dualism is the necessary condition for both escapism and capitalism.

The full space of authenticity’s emptiness is also the space of utopia. The fundamental reality of the world—that by which reality’s unrepresentable truth is concealed by everyday life’s ugliness—is also the reality of something radically better than what we tend to experience. The achievement of utopia, then, requires a third term—a strategic medium. This medium has been thought to be any number of things: engagement with nature, transcendental meditation, asceticism/self-denial, psychedelic drugs, self-inquiry (despite that many meditators subscribe to the Buddhist concept of anatman [no-self], they ask: “Who/what am I?”), near-death experience, smashing one’s own face with a giant rubber ball, etc. The payoff is figured to be that, if enough people sufficiently participate in the mediating experience, all life in the universe will be freed from suffering. Sounds beautiful, huh? Also, kind of fun, kind of playful, kind of joyous.

Such a process represents the promise of a simultaneous progress for all the world’s phenomena. Indirect progress is also the wager of liberalism, and thus, of capitalism. One might say that capitalism was the innovation by which universal progress would be mediated by the limitless production of abundance and surplus. While, previously, people had often taken care of the poor before securing abundance, liberal individualism permitted the idea that a system of actors would create utopia through rational actions in markets. The payoff, then, was supposed to be that turning focus away from improving people’s lives, and instead, turning toward creating the conditions for creating the maximum possible abundance, would free everyone from suffering, need, and even desire. Oops.

This indirectness deserves reflection; the indirectness itself performs a few functions. It keeps alive the idea of improving things for everyone. Whew! Guilt-free. It allows one to prioritize one’s own comfort above others’ needs without completely sacrificing love for everyone. In fact, by capitalist logic, one can argue that consuming more, and indulging in one’s own pleasure, is a morally good thing to do. By demanding the production of more abundance/surplus, one helps to ensure that more abundance falls into the mouths of the poor. One need not see any conflict between, on one hand, one’s own comfort and convenience, and on the other hand, the needs of others. Enjoy on Earth, and be rewarded in Heaven. There’s no reason, then, to focus on others’ misery. To focus on others’ suffering is uncomfortable and unhelpful. In fact, others’ misery creates an emotional obstacle to one’s enjoyment, which violates the logic of creating abundance in order to perfect life on Earth (or, “in the Universe”—however one prefers). By this reasoning, one could say that focusing on others’ suffering is, then, actually immoral. To focus on others’ suffering might distract someone from the moral good of demanding more. Worry about yourself. Guiltlessly enjoy. This is one of capitalism’s moral commandments.

Of course, one could also guiltily enjoy. Guiltless enjoyment requires a certain kind of discipline. So long as one has enough resources, then it can be relatively easy to go through life without apparently causing harm. One can retreat into ethical purification in order to avoid the frustration and the corruption of politically dealing with others. The good capitalist subject need not engage in politics in order to be ethical. One can escape the world’s stupid and ugly forms of conformity, oppression, and even violence. One can live the ethical life of their choosing. One could, for instance, become a good meditator in the Andes and learn to administer ayahuasca to tech executives, holding out the promise of improving the world in some way. At least, in so doing, one does their small part. So much of contemporary culture hinges on the promise of the supposedly limitless (but also contingent, perhaps even magical) power of tiny acts of kindness. Always be kind. Don’t be critical. Don’t be political. Be a good capitalist subject.

One good reason to escape the direct activity of improving conditions for the most vulnerable people, then, is that it allows one to avoid reckoning with their own complicity in the situation out of which certain people are made vulnerable. Our responsibility makes us sad. It’s far more comfortable to purify one’s own actions with relation to the values of one’s own heart than it is to deal seriously with the overwhelming number of suffering people in the world. One could try and fail. That would be sad. We want to avoid dealing with the ways that the world’s shittiness harms others more than it harms us, so we try to make our world—and, thus, our responsibility—small. In our small world, we can be good and do good. Some people even claim that it’s more important to purify oneself than to improve things for vulnerable people. Before you help others, you should help yourself. Before you support suffering people in some other place, you should pressure your own leaders to stop doing bad things. Purify yourself before you help others. Don’t be so arrogant as to impose your goodness—by doing things like feeding, sheltering, and mending others—before you’re really good.

To be clear, all of this is already entailed in capitalism’s logic. Massimiliano Tomba writes, “Today we can say that ideology has become such a pervasive dimension that it includes both the defense of what exists and its critique, as well as many alternatives to the present.” (“What is Ideology?” forthcoming) Resistance to prevailing ideology is a matter of consumer choice. One can obey the spicy law of disobedience. Thus, ironically, resistance, too, is its own side of the prevailing ideology. Capitalism (and liberalism) welcomes resistance with open arms and tightly-closed prison cells. Violate the law in order to create more options to be commodified. Capitalism loves this. Tomba continues, “[I]ndividual freedom is nothing, because individuals are functions of an existing structure and they are no freer than a stone rolling down a hill; individual freedom is everything, because individuals are free to choose and build their own life; individual freedom is ideology, because the very notion of individual freedom belongs to a historically specific representation of the present.” (ibid.) In the first place, we can say that people think of themselves as “individuals” because they’ve been conditioned to do so. Capitalism necessarily entails the multiplicity of mechanisms for teaching people that they’re free and autonomous—free to choose to act as expected or to deviate. Free to live as they choose and free to die as they choose. Free to engage in violence and free to be imprisoned. Everyone is responsible for themselves, and they’ll be rewarded according to the market value ascribed to their choices at the moment of those choices’ enactment. People’s choices are part of a system that already accounts for, and profits from, differences. Everyone, then, can choose when to conform and when to deviate in order to determine the conditions of their lives from within that system. Such “individual” choices are good because each of them helps to reproduce and strengthen the capitalist system.

The particularly capitalist notion of individual freedom, then, entails the ideology by which necessity is never fully considered. If philosophers’ dealings with freedom always entailed consideration of freedom’s necessary relationship to necessity, capitalism( and liberalism)’s innovation is to conceive of the “individual’s” freedom as limitless and as absent any forms of conditioning. Generally, the philosophers of the past few thousand years would consider such a conception of freedom to be fantastical. However, again, such a conception of freedom is necessary for capitalism’s reproduction.

The ideology of individual freedom allows one to escape their sense of their social nature and the fundamental debt that they—by their ongoing survival—owe to the collectivity. Such a conception of freedom allows one to avoid the fact that anyone’s pain is tied up with others’ fates through the system that we share. As a “free individual,” one escapes their feeling of social mutuality—their feeling that the conditions of their lives are tied up with the conditions of others’ lives. A conception of freedom that wasn’t based on the fantasy of the so-called “individual” would, thus, have to deal with the necessity entailed in people’s mutual relations.

The dualism that is, on one hand, authenticity’s fullness of nothing, and on the other hand, the quietude of utopia, is the same escapist condition that’s necessary for capitalism’s ongoing immiseration and destruction. This is the dualism that supposedly allows some magical mechanism to make everything better for everyone. That magic is also the magic of the “individual,” the magic of a world of non-mutuality, the magic of the absence of necessity, the magic of a mechanism for which the cause by which it improves everything all at once is never—indeed, necessarily can never be—explained. It’s the same dualism that allows one to avoid the possible frustration and sadness of trying and failing to improve things for people. It’s the dualism that allows one to escape their immediate, concrete sense of responsibility to the collective.

Alien Culture and Contemporary Paranoia

I wonder if you remember the late-’90s pop culture craze around aliens and UFOs. Movies, TV shows, and video games often referred to aliens. T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs—bearing levitating discs and/or little green guys with huge black, often upside-down teardrop-shaped eyes—sold by the millions. They often entailed foil and/or holograms. In magazine stands at grocery stores, front covers advertised stories of alien abductions and UFO sightings—right next to stories of Elvis-in-hiding and three-headed people. This sort of thing.

This week, the US admitted that some sites of UFO landings contained “non-human biologics.” This has been taken as evidence of little green men. Some Republican congressmembers said that they knew all along. “I told you so!” What’s more interesting to me, though, is the social psyche of the ’90s. Were we scared? Were we bored? Were we being playful? Was some superstition at play?

Perhaps the contemporaneous culture provides some clues. What other movies were out there? Cyberpunk, horror, rom-com, dark indie comedy, action, disaster, fantasy, and neo-noir films were popular. In this end-of-history moment, characterized by mass incarceration, globalization, deregulation, austerity, increasing economic inequality, high crime, and decaying cities, escapism was the order of the day. In a time when people felt caught, or stuck, they yearned for something radically different. In The Resonance of Unseen Things, Susan Lepselter writes about how UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists share the sense of a constant oscillation between captivity and freedom: “You can be caught, captured, paralyzed, immobilized, stuck. You can be released, restored, redeemed, mobile, free. […] And the two antithetical poles—captivity and release—construct a third term, which is born in the meta-awareness of the relatedness between them.” (29) This third term, then, might just be the spectrum by which one is attuned to the difference between captivity and freedom. It might be the vigilance by which one is constantly accounting for situations of captivity and freedom. It might, then, be a kind of anxiety, fear, paranoia. After all, paranoia isn’t a function of reality, but just the opposite. Whatever’s going on “out there,” paranoia is the pervasive, inescapable, irrational feeling that something is wrong. As many have said, fear is the foundation of conservatism.

In the ’90s, those bug-eyed aliens signified other worlds. Conspiracy theories, paranoia, the promise of New Age (remember Yanni? the chanting monks?) aesthetics, and even the nascent worldwide web offered some hope in an apparently hopeless world. Perhaps, the aliens are ripe for a cultural comeback. Of course, if they seem real, then maybe they’re less culturally useful (for the paranoiacs). The point back then was that they represented alterity.

Those conspiracy theorists in Lepselter’s book seek closure. They want answers, but they want “truth” without reality. They want the fantasy that makes all of the world fit together just so, like a jigsaw puzzle sutured together by the ghosts that they worship. They want for the abstractions of their imaginations to be the glue that explains why their lives have gone so wrong. They want forgiveness. They want mercy. They want to know. After all, fear is always fear of something. Fear is always an expression of powerlessness, of impotence, in the face of potential unwanted consequences. This is why the overreaction to fear is so often domination—or at least attempted domination. The king is rightly a paranoiac. The colonizer is a paranoiac. The money-hoarding capitalist is a paranoiac. One might do away with the other subject who engenders one’s fear: kill or be killed. To the paranoid subject, the leader who recognizes the apparent realism of this imagined zero-sum game grants to the subject assurance that the leader will do what’s necessary in desperate times.

Today’s aliens aren’t those aliens of alterity. Today, Q-anon, vaccines, “the trans agenda,” adrenochrome (an anti-Semitic blood libel conspiracy by any other name…), and other delusions fill that role. Not real aliens.

Hegel’s Closed Dialectics and Marx’s Open Monism

Hegel writes, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational”¹, to which François Laruelle responds: “The real is communicational, the communicational is real”², but why? Why this distinction? Is it a distinction? What’s at stake? In other words, what’s the difference between saying that something’s “rational” and that it’s “communicational?”

Because Hegel wrote in the Enlightenment, or “The Age of Reason,” it should perhaps come as no surprise that, throughout his work, one sees Hegel valorize rationality. One might contend that Hegel banalizes reason—above, the “rational” simply appears as a dimension of reality—but there can be no doubt that Hegel’s environment is one in which the “highest” use of reason tends to be seen as a great virtue. Hegel’s own conformist tendencies³ at least ought to suggest that Hegel sees himself as no great rebel with regard to the Enlightenment tendency to valorize reason.

By valorizing reason, Hegel both supports the conformism implied in his work and he provides a telos to “human progress.” Because, as Hegel claims, reality tends to unfold in a rational manner, one would be foolish to rebel against social developments. Historical progress will continue to push reality forward toward the endpoint of the overall rational, or good. While Hegel allows what he calls “contingency” into his system of thought, that contingency is always treated as the contingency both by which the future is unknowable and by which the the past can, in the present, be made legible.⁴ Hegel’s contingency, then, can be understood only retrospectively; in the present, contingency appears either as chaos or as an open question. Because one can’t know what the future brings, conforming to the established, and rational, forms of life is reasonable; again, to do otherwise would be foolish. If one accepts Hegel’s argument, then it has the effect of closing down argumentation: Hegel’s system is all worked out; Hegel appears to have proven that human progress is reasonable and good. Hegel’s telos leaves nothing to argue over. For Hegel, contingency is an out-of-reach contingency that determines the interactions that appear in the “real” world.

One could go so far as to say that Hegel’s thought surreptitiously reintroduces a kind of dualism through a back door. If the rational good of historical progress is at the bottom of everything, then it’s what Marx calls a “fetish”—unilaterally producing the effects that we know as the world. By this conception, the world changes because the rational history of human progress determines the effects experienced on the surface of the world. This rational progress, then, is what one might call a “deep structure” (or, again, a “fetish”) and what appear to us as human conflicts are really only that structure’s effects. No one ever really intervenes. Until historical progress pushes things along, then, the things, and even processes, of the world are fixed and static. If, in Hegel’s account, it’s historical progress that brings about change, then Marx and his followers offer a very different conception of change and contingency.

Laruelle, following in Marx’s footsteps, reopens the possibility of meaningful difference at the level of people’s behavior (and, more generally, of real-world phenomena). The “communicational” entails no telos; there’s nothing at the bottom of the communicational aspect of the real (or, for that matter, of the real [or mediational] aspect of communication). By emphasizing the material, the processual, and the practical, Marx binds everything to everything else. Every interaction is one by which phenomena meet one another in a context that is surrounded by a broader context, ad infinitum. By this conception, objects and processes are not epiphenomenal to any deep-lying cause.⁵ Crucially, if Hegel’s conception of reality is determined by the motor of historical progress, Marx’s engine is one of social interaction—class struggle. Without flattening phenomena so that all phenomena are equally effective and/or productive, Marx construes all phenomena as having the potential to affect others. Any process entails interactions and choices.⁶ One could never predict that any development will be better than that which came before it. Nothing is guaranteed. History becomes something over which people must struggle.

If all this is true, then Marx is more monist than is Hegel. Rather than bracketing off the ultimate cause of all reality, Marx makes the world’s dynamism immanent to the world of interactions. This is partly because the communicational aspects of all things aren’t presumed to communicate toward the ultimate utopia of liberal rationality. In fact, things can, and often do, go awry. Refusing to conflate means with ends, then, a Marxist might rightly claim that revolution must be communicated and communication must be made revolutionary.

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1 Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Right, London: Chiswick Press, 1896, xxvii.
2 Laruelle, François. “The Truth According to Hermes.” Parrhesia 9: p. 22.
3 Hegel. G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
4 In Hegel’s own words, “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” The Philosophy of Right, xxx.
5 I ought to point out that some very old Marxists weren’t themselves very Marxian. While Marx’s conception of “mute compulsion” could imply (indeed, did imply to many very old Marxists) that Marx construed capitalism as a kind of fetish, Marx’s own consistently monistic methodology, as well as the historical, and complex, way by which he conceives of capitalism ought to dispel the notion that mute compulsion complicates Marx’s monism. Marx, Karl. “Capital, Vol. 1.” Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.
6 This might best be seen in Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of “practice.” Because Bourdieu’s concepts keep in dialectical tension the relationships—between the subject’s inner experience and encounters with the outside world, the scale of the person and of the social, symbol and referent, and so on—they’re useful for explaining how forms of capital help to mediate the ongoing formation of any habitus—that is, both a subjectivity and a culture, or sociality. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of  a Theory of Practice, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Terror-Toilets: Of Child-Me

As a very small child, I was extremely afraid of toilets. I thought, If a toilet can make giant poops and loads of toilet paper disappear completely, then why couldn’t it do the same thing to my small, squishy body? I would watch the water swirl and spiral down into the big, sucking hole, and it frightened me. I knew nothing of the concept of death, but perhaps the toilet allowed me to intuit it. It was clear that whatever goes down the watery black hole would never return; whatever was flushed would cease to be.

I was sometimes overwhelmed by daymares by which I’d be dragged down the hole and become nothing-at-all. Perhaps, I never completely overcame this fear. I catch myself struck by a visceral desire to avoid being sucked into the porcelain whirlpool. In rare moments of automaticity, my body shudders and my eyes widen when I hear the static-shattering whoosh of that monster.

I wonder why children are so manichaean. It’s strange to think that I was once a child. In some ways, I still feel like a child—wondering, groping.

(Anti-)Fascism and Liberalism: On Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than to imagine the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. — Fredric Jameson

            When is the cure worse than the disease? In A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick asks this question in the context of social control[1], or if one prefers, “law and order.” Kubrick says of his controversial film^[2] that it “warns against the new psychedelic fascism—the eye‐popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug‐oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings—which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.”^[3] If Kubrick means to warn of “the new psychedelic fascism,” he, in so doing, portrays familiar elements of fascism alongside problematically fascistic tendencies in certain aspects of liberal social forms. In other words, if teenage boy Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and his “droogs” (Alex’s friends/gang) obsess over the apparent eyesore, and impurity, of homeless people living in the streets; a clear sense of hierarchy enforced through brute force (like when Alex physically assaults his droogs); engaging in “a bit of the old ultra-violence”; sexual maleficence; and the indiscriminate, resentful punishment of the privileged, then the state’s use of law, police, imprisonment, discipline[4], and mind-altering medical remedies is, according to Kubrick, a kind of fascism[5] within liberalism. With its own violence and its own irrationalities and contradictions, fascist aspects of liberalism respond to the violence one might sometimes see in disaffected young European men (perhaps among others). At one point in the film, the prison chaplain (Godfrey Quigley) states, “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” It’s the tension between state control and personal agency on which the film, and this paper, rest.

            In this essay, I’ll draw on classical social theory, as well as on contemporary cultural studies approaches, in order to think through social problems as they’re articulated through the images and dialogue in A Clockwork Orange. The controversy around Kubrick’s film is evidence of what Stuart Hall, as referenced in Ralina Joseph’s Postracial Resistance, showed—“that some audiences might believe the favored meanings encoded in the text, but others will believe only certain elements while rejecting other features in a negotiated manner, and still other audiences will embrace instead an entirely oppositional view.”^[6] As I argue for a particular interpretation, or “decoding,” of the film, I’ll use Kubrick’s words to corroborate my intuitions on the film’s meanings. Throughout the paper, I’ll weave together, on one hand, the film’s encoded messages, and on the other hand, sociological concepts from thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu. I’ll then show how these thinkers’ concepts form a lexicon for understanding the sociological argument that Kubrick puts forward in the film. By connecting aspects of the film to social theory, I’ll show how Kubrick responds to some of the most basic problems that tend to animate sociological research. Crucial to the film, and to sociological understanding, is the set of roles that institutions play.

Liberal Institutions and Fascism in Images

            Louis Althusser referred to the ideology-producing, and ideology-reproducing, institutions as “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) and he referred to the violent hegemonic state institutions as the “Repressive State Apparatuses” (RSAs).^[7] Clear in Althusser’s analysis is that these two kinds of institutions relate to each other and that ideological institutions aren’t mutually exclusive with repressive ones.

One would be hard-pressed to find an imagaic representation more densely packed with representations of liberal ISAs and RSAs than in the image below—the uniformed prison guard (Michael Bates)^[8], the preacher and crucifixes^[9], and the schoolroom chalkboard. In addition to these familiar institutional representatives are recognizable symbols of fascism. The protagonist of the film, Alex, appears in a dark suit and a red armband (like the garb that was common, and peculiar, to Nazi Germany), the preacher simultaneously raises his arm in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi salute, and the prison guard’s small mustache and dark militarist uniform help to grant him a Hitlerian appearance. If Kubrick’s quotation above—on the relationship he saw between fascism and liberal social life—weren’t enough to convince the reader of the film’s central problematic, one could read this image as a clear indictment of some of the liberal state’s fascist tendencies. For Kubrick to evoke Christianity, liberal institutionalism, and Hitler and the Nazi Youth, all in one image, seems particularly poignant and especially accusatory with regard to the problems of the liberal state.

The theme of surveillance and control—a popular theme in sociological research—appears throughout the film. From a technical perspective, Kubrick’s frequent use of a super-wide angle lens (possibly the Kinoptik 9.8mm) gives a kind of panoramist, or perhaps panopticist, perspective. The lens’s distortions might appear familiar to viewers who recall the effect of the “fisheye” lens. The fisheye lens allows the viewer to see an impossibly omniscient perspective—a perspective that radiates in a wide arc from a single point—and this kind of perspective can be useful for surveillance. For a similar surveillance technology, one might think of the mirrors that appear in ceiling corners in certain buildings; they allow hall monitors, police, prison guards, and other surveyors to track the movements and activities of many people at once, and in many nooks and crannies at once.

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Kubrick sometimes combines the use of this lens with backlighting. When characters are backlit, instead of allowing the viewer to clearly see the characters’ features, things are backward. If the light comes from behind the characters on screen, then the lighting that’s behind the on-screen characters lights the viewer from the front. While this is a subtle feature of the viewer’s experience[10], the viewer can, at times, be subjected to the off-putting sense of having a small crowd of people on screen who are looking toward the viewer. In these cases, on-screen characters appear shadowy; the viewer only partially makes out the characters’ expressions and actions. These silhouetted characters can make the viewer feel a bit as though they’re being interrogated, or surveyed, by the people who appear on the screen—the viewer in the position of someone potentially made to feel small, powerless, and alienated.

            For Kubrick, this combination of lens and lighting achieves the effect of sucking the viewer into the film’s action and into the feeling of being monitored, accused, imprisoned, disciplined, and/or punished. The point for Kubrick is that the legal-rationalist justification for bureaucratic milieux—in which contemporary forms of surveillance and punishment occur—make them no less terrifying and harmful. The painstakingly slow proceduralism of liberal bureaucracies can make them seem trustworthy. The seemingly boring normalcy of these bureaucratic institutions is both the condition by which their forms, and their social forces, tend to be reproduced and that by which people in these institutions are granted legitimacy when they commit violent acts.[11] Alex’s relationships to his parents (Sheila Raynor and Philip Stone), his parole officer, the prison chaplain, the police, and the government minister (Anthony Sharp) all show how different social institutions reductively figure Alex as a mere atomized part of an overwhelming and undeterrable social structure. These institutions mediate relationships between Alex and others as they help to contribute to the constitution of the social conditions in Alex’s world and to the nature of those social conditions.[12]

Liberal Bureaucracies and Social Reproduction

Whether or not the reproduction of social forms is part-and-parcel of the “overwhelming force” by which liberal economic activity traps subjects in “a steel-hard casing”[13], clearer is that liberal modernity tends to entail a somewhat difficult-to-explain tendency toward the reproduction of social forms. One might say that this particular issue is the problematic most central to sociology. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim claims that the purpose of rites is “to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of the groups.”[14] While Durkheim writes about so-called “elementary forms of religious life,” he writes from a modern perspective and his points are intended to be instructive with regard to complex bureaucratic societies. Cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has gone so far as to claim that the success or failure of people’s performances—their social practices of whatever sort—hinge on whether or not they convincingly articulate various aspects of social life into the same performance.[15] Such a conception of social activity entails reproduction of social forms as a core normative value and the failure of reproduction as a normative bad.

In A Clockwork Orange, political and criminal justice institutions in the film change in order to stay the same.[16] First, two of Alex’s violent former droogs (Warren Clark and James Marcus) become police officers. In the film’s world, the police institution reproduces itself by recruiting new members[17], even from the ranks of violent criminal gangs. As ironic as this might initially appear, Kubrick’s message seems clear: Other than the blessing of the state, what really distinguishes police, and their violence, from so-called “criminal” violence? After the old droogs/new police officers encounter Alex, they use the opportunity to torture him in retaliation for his previous maltreatment of them. The other example of changing things in order to reproduce them appears when the government minister twice in the film wants to change policies in order to more efficiently control society and in order to (at least indirectly) win a political victory for his government.

For sociologists, the question of how societies reproduce their forms and institutions is a crucial one. Durkheim argues that societies’ beliefs and rituals resulted in their members basically worshipping their own society and its values.[18] For Weber, the “steel-hard casing” of capitalism was a problem insofar as—rather than leading to potentially healthier, more gratifying alternatives—it could trap people in lives that were more miserable than was necessary. For Bourdieu, habitus, capital, fields, and doxa relate to one another in order to balance reproduction with innovation.[19] Bourdieu calls habitus the “structuring structure” out of which strategies emerge.[20] Because people relate agonistically as they struggle for dignity, their investments in their achievement, or accrual, of dignity cause their behaviors to fall into patterns that appear to follow successful strategies that others have used. However, the investment in dignity also leads people to creatively do what they can in order to gain dignity. When one understands how various forms of capital differentiate the hierarchy that constitutes whatever field in which they find themselves, they can either use their resources in order to follow established patterns for gaining capital or they can experiment in order to gain capital, dignity, and social status within the field. In other words, they have the option to follow doxa—the taken-for-granted, unchallenged assumptions in the field—or they can go against doxa.

Political Struggle

A perennial problem in sociology coincides with the question of social reproduction: the question of what leads to social change. In the film, the political struggle between the left—who are represented by subversive writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), who says of “the common people,” “[T]hey must be led, sir, driven, pushed”—and the right—who clamor for “law and order”—leads to a kind of impasse that’s masked by superficial change. To be clear, Kubrick seems to view social change as inhibited by something like Weber’s “steel-hard casing”: liberalism produces an appearance of change without necessarily changing things very much at all. In the film, subversive leftists can engage in an aesthetic, or rhetorical, project of trying to rally the public behind criticisms of those in power, but government ministers can use human subjects as guinea pigs for new innovative techniques of control. Bureaucrats, then, might argue that they, and their bureaucracies, are working on the important problems.

The apparent conflict between the two sides (in this case, left and right) helps to set the boundaries of whatever debate. In other words, according to the film, there’s a problem with what, following the work of Jürgen Habermas, is often thought of as “the public sphere”—the combination of written discourse, spoken discourse, and the settings and norms in which discourse occurs—by which interlocutors meet as equals in order to discuss important social issues.[21] Different forms of capital help to determine how the public sphere functions. So long as the film’s leftists have their writers and their means of message dissemination, and the conservatives have money and bureaucratic power, these forms of capital help to make the public sphere uneven. The public sphere’s unevenness often facilitates the reproduction of forms of privilege at the expense of the needs and welfare of the disadvantaged.[22] The power of the public sphere in this case is challenged especially because most people don’t have very much power, or capital in its various forms. To relate this to the epigraph from Fredric Jameson, liberal institutions’ tendency to reproduce social forms helps to place limits on people’s ability to think outside of the liberal discursive landscape. The production of social change from within the public sphere is complicated by an ideological mirage: political struggles can sometimes appear as conflicts and function as affinities.

Kubrick clearly sees a conspicuous relationship between authority and so-called “criminals.” This is especially true in two scenes that mirror each other. One of the backlit wide-angle lens shots above is of teenage Alex lying in bed, wearing nothing but brief underwear. That scene begins with Alex walking past an open bedroom where he notices his adult parole officer, P. R. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) sitting on the bed. Alex sits next to Deltoid, and Deltoid puts his arm across Alex’s back, resting one hand on Alex’s shoulder. The other hand lies on Alex’s naked leg, and Deltoid rests his head on Alex’s near shoulder, looking up at him, smiling like a gleeful lover. He pulls Alex down onto the bed with him, his arm still wrapped around Alex. Alex tries to sit up, but Deltoid pulls him back down. Alex’s hand slowly slides over his genitals. Deltoid speaks loudly, and his speech is increasingly animated. As Deltoid’s leg repeatedly brushes and nudges Alex’s, Alex has to keep pushing his hand back into his groin in order to keep his hand from leaving the area due to Deltoid’s erratic movements. After a few moments, Deltoid eventually punches Alex in the groin. Alex laughs and stands up. If Kubrick made the point that the police are just as violent as the criminals, then perhaps the liberal authorities are often just as sexually “perverted,” too. In a later scene, Alex walks alongside the chaplain. The chaplain’s arm is around Alex, and Alex’s hands press against, and shift about, his groin. At one point, Alex’s thumbs nervously fidget and Alex looks into the chaplain’s eyes. Alex’s face moves closer to the chaplain. Alex glances down, for a moment, at the chaplain’s mouth, and then, Alex begins to speak. It’s worth noting that Kubrick was very detail-oriented. If, in these two scenes, Alex appears to masturbate while being held close by his authority figures, the fact that it happened twice in the film ought to assure the viewer that Kubrick did this intentionally. The sexual tension that Kubrick depicts between authority and “subversives” relates to the invisibility of bureaucratic power functions.

Bureaucratic Power and Its Appearances

Earlier, I wrote about how Kubrick’s lens and lighting choices help to produce the effect of making the audience member feel as though they’re a relatively powerless person being surveyed, or monitored. The other important effect (at least for the purposes of this paper) of Kubrick’s camera and lighting choices is that of detachment. The shadowy, backlit figures on the screen appear menacing and almost inhuman. For the viewer, the on-screen characters are practically faceless people in suits—they’re silhouettes, hollowed-out impersonal members of institutions and nothing more. The faces of bureaucracy’s evils are, it seems, no faces at all. And, isn’t this exactly how bureaucracy works?

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In the middle of the film, Alex is in prison for murder. He’s been put in a program to “cure” him using what’s called the “Ludovico technique.” He’s given drugs that make him feel ill and he’s forced to watch images of physical violence, sex, and images associated with the Nazi party. The person in charge of the cadre administering the technique, and observing Alex, Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering), at one point says to his colleagues, “Very soon, now, the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis, together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness.” After the video-watching session, Alex comments to a facilitator, Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan), that he doesn’t understand why he felt sick. She says, “You felt ill this afternoon because you’re getting better.” Alex accepts this confusing statement, and continues with the program. The next day, while watching more videos, he screams in agony, “Stop it! Stop it! Please! I beg you!” Dr. Brodsky says to Dr. Branom, “It can’t be helped. Here’s the punishment element, perhaps. The governor ought to be pleased,” before telling Alex, “I’m sorry Alex. This is for your own good.” Alex pleads for the end of the torture, thanking God that he’s “cured.” Alex, now a good pupil/disciple, says of violence, “It’s wrong because it’s, like, against society,” but Dr. Brodsky replies, “No, no, boy, you really should leave it to us and be cheerful about it.”

To synthesize the earlier point—about the film’s production of the viewer’s feelings of smallness, powerlessness, and alienation—with the point about the arbitrary power and violence of shadowy bureaucracy, I’ll point to how Alex is used by different parties toward the end of the film. On one hand, the doctors who administer the Ludovico technique seek their professional advancement, i.e. social capital. The government minister, who wants to cut down on crime and look good in the eyes of the voting public, also uses Alex’s case for his advancement. He arranges for Alex to be put on a stage in order to demonstrate Alex’s feelings of illness and terror. This would show the public that the Ludovico technique can help to reduce crime. The minister later uses Alex for an opportunity to have the press take photos of the two smiling together, implying Alex’s approval of the minister. Finally, the leftist subversive writer tortures Alex partly in order to try to convince the public of the sins of the bureaucracy—who cruelly conditioned Alex to feel terribly when exposed to certain stimuli. In each case, Alex is treated as an instrument to gain capital and power. In each case, Alex has his own reasons to play along and to perform the role of the reformed criminal.

Das Ende

My sense is that the ending of A Clockwork Orange tends to get misinterpreted. The Ludovico technique leads Alex to react adversely to images of violence and sex, along with (incidentally) the playing of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When Alex sees the images or hears the music, he feels ill and helpless. When Alex goes on stage to perform his feelings of dread and illness, a man physically abuses him. Alex then retches. A young, topless woman comes onto the stage and stands next to Alex. Voice-over informs the viewer that Alex wants to have sex with her. He reaches to grab her, but he seizes up and again feels ill. The faces in the audience seem to signal optimism: He’s cured of his propensity toward violence! Maybe. He’s clearly not cured of his desire to have sex. In the next scene, Alex confronts a man, leading to Alex scowling and pulling his fist back to punch the other man. He seizes up again. Even if he can’t act violently, he’s apparently not cured of his desire to act violently.

After having been tortured by the leftists, Alex jumps from a window, landing him in the hospital. A few weeks later, a psychiatrist, Dr. Taylor (Pauline Taylor), tests him. She shows him cartoons that include someone speaking and another person with an empty speech bubble. His job is to provide the second person’s response. As she goes through the test, his responses increasingly revolve around violence and sex. In one case, the dialogue he suggests is, “I’ll smash your face!” Then, “No time for the old in-and-out, love; I’ve just come to read the meter.” Finally, “You know what you can do with that watch? Stick it up your ass!”

In the final frames of the film, the minister has brought Alex some large speakers, and music plays over them. The Ninth Symphony starts to play, and Alex’s face deteriorates, going from a big smile into an anguished grimace, and Alex’s eyes begin to roll back in his head. Suddenly, the image cuts to a scene in which a young woman enthusiastically has sex with a man lying on the floor. The film viewer hears Alex’s voiceover. The combination of the image and voiceover indicate that we’re in Alex’s mind. He says, “I was cured alright.”

If one is to take internet search results as evidence, a common interpretation of the film’s ending is that Alex means that he’s cured of the cure, but my sense is that Kubrick has in mind something both more sinister and more sociological. Alex pleads to the chaplain and the minister to let him into the treatment so that he can be freed from prison. He performs his illness and his perfect Christian reformation. There’s no friction between his initial reactions to the Ludovico technique and his behaviors at the end of the film. Instead, at each point where Alex gets ill, it’s due to an external stimulus: the images, the music, the violence enacted on him, his attempt at sexually groping the young woman on stage, etc. Until the psychiatry test, the question of Alex’s internal (mental and emotional, perhaps) relationship to violence and sex is never broached. In fact, after Alex is “cured” by the Ludovico technique, the film shows Alex trying to have sex and trying to punch someone. When Alex says that he’s cured, it’s ironic, to be sure, but Kubrick’s point is subtler than a straightforward narrative about Alex overcoming his supposedly curative social conditioning.

In my interpretation, Alex isn’t so different from the teachers, his parents, the parole officer, the chaplain, the prison guard, the doctors, the government minister, or the leftist writer. Alex manipulates people’s perceptions and institutional understandings in order to try to get what he wants: his freedom. He even uses forms of cultural capital and social capital in order to achieve his freedom. He performs certain roles in order to get certain benefits. He operates according to the liberal language that’s imposed on him. “Violence is wrong,” he learns to say, and he says it with his body as well as with his voice.

For Kubrick, the issues of discipline, control, institutions, bureaucracy, liberalism, and legitimate violence appear throughout the film, and Kubrick’s message is fairly clear. You can control people’s behaviors—you can even lock them in whatever “steel-hard casing”—but when you don’t allow people to choose, then you merely lock them in a kinder, gentler prison. Moreover, the alienation that liberalism often seems to engender in people might also relate to some people’s tendency to want to be violent. If that’s the case, then the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence doesn’t make people better; it only complicates people’s lives and makes them less free than they’d otherwise be.

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[1] Without making Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” central to my argument, its influence will likely be noticed throughout my essay. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3-7.

^[2] It was controversial for its depictions of violence, drug-use, and sex, including sexual assault, but also because its subtle social and political criticism was sometimes confused for advocacy for fascism and because it was sometimes rightly viewed as critical of liberalism. See: Kubrick, Stanley. “Now Kubrick Fights Back.” The New York Times, New York: The New York Times, 1972, (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/now-kubrick-fights-back-movies-now-kubrick-fights-back.html), [accessed 17 Dec., 2020].

^[3] Ibid.

[4] Like the idea of “control,” from Deleuze’s “Postscript,” concepts like “discipline” and the “panopticon,” from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, influence this essay. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

[5] I take Kubrick’s invocation of “fascism” to be an indictment of elements of violence and of control of people’s ideologies and practices. Kubrick, I argue, criticizes the conditions that tend to lead to liberal subjects being pressured into the performance of something like “good citizenship.”

^[6] Joseph, Ralina. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York: New York University Press, 2018, p. 114.

^[7] Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 232-72.

^[8] Using Max Weber’s conceptualization, the prison guard also represents what Weber calls “the monopoly of legitimate physical force”—a concept to which I’ll return. See: Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 136.

^[9] It’s worth pointing out that the prison chaplain can represent two forms of authority discussed by Weber: traditional and charismatic. To use his language, the scene takes place in a “legally” and “rationally” authorized prison—itself highly bureaucratized. I’ll return to these points. See Weber’s Economy and Society.

[10] In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin claims that these subtle aspects of film make them especially potent for influencing people who are in a state of “distraction.” See Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HUP, 2002, pp. 119-20.

[11] Weber, Economy and Society.

[12] In a different context, David Ryfe makes basically the same point. See his “Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Institutionalism and the News.” Political Communication 23 (2): p. 136.

[13] Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 123.

[14] Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press, 1995, p. 9.

[15] Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Cultural Sociology 22 (4): pp. 527-73.

[16] In his upcoming “Everpresent Pasts,” Stefan Tanaka argues that ideologies of change (as in the case of “innovation”) often reproduce their own conditions, basic assumptions, and even a multitude of their practices.

[17] I’m here thinking of Annette Weiner’s work in Inalienable Possessions, by which she shows how, even in societies that are often described as “primitive,” the changing roles of various actors within any social group, and the need to replace people at different times, means that “primitive societies” don’t simply reproduce their social forms whole cloth, as though they live simple, cyclical lives. See: Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

[18] Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

[19] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[20] Ibid., p. 72.

[21] Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere.” Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 398-404.

[22] Nancy Fraser makes a similar point in “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” See: Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.

[23] This relates both to Weber’s concept of representation, in pp. 127-8 of Economy and Society and to his concepts of rationalization and the division of labor, seen in pp. 143-334 of the same text.

[24] In the trial of Adolf Eichmann, this line of thinking was crucial to his defense—particularly the use of “amtssprache,” or “bureaucratic language.” See: Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

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Bibliography

Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Cultural Sociology 22 (4): pp. 527-73.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 232-72.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HUP, 2002, pp. 101-33.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3-7.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press, 1995Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.

Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere.” Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 398-404.

Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Joseph, Ralina. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Kubrick, Stanley. “Now Kubrick Fights Back.” The New York Times, New York: The New York Times, 1972, (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/now-kubrick-fights-back-movies-now-kubrick-fights-back.html), [accessed 17 Dec., 2020].

Ryfe, David. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Institutionalism and the News.” Political Communication 23 (2): pp. 135-44.

Tanaka, Stefan. “Everpresent Pasts.” In-process.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

The Television Will Be Revolutionized: Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall on Media, Technology, and Politics

Jürgen Habermas and others have shown that, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, new questions appeared in people’s daily lives. Questions of religious practice, commodity purchases, and political possibilities helped to produce private and public spheres (Habermas; Benjamin, 32). People’s opinions became important to the coordination of social life, motivating research in what’s sometimes called “public opinion.” (Habermas) In the 19th century, growing urbanization increased interest in public opinion. New communication technology permitted greater dissemination of messages and images, furthering interest in public opinion and media effects. Early-20th century fascist leaders’ novel uses of mass media to effect political outcomes elicited dramatic growth of research in public opinion and media effects.

To be clear, communication research was political from the outset. The effects of massification; democratization of politics, economy, and media; and new technologies were unpredictable. No one could guess what political paradigms could emerge from never-before-seen social conditions. The aesthetic processes by which media helped to shape people’s perceptions rendered great concerns over media effects and new technologies.

In this essay, I’ll compare and contrast Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall’s views on aesthetics and politics. While they share a good deal, Benjamin’s concerns, expressed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” more clearly reflect early-20th century thoughts on media effects and new technologies. Stuart Hall’s writings advance some of the kinds of arguments Benjamin made, complexifying the role of the masses in producing and receiving media and politics. I’ll begin by explaining Benjamin’s understanding of media effects and technology, before comparing it with Hall’s. Then, I’ll show how they expound on these in order to show the political role of aesthetic processes. I’ll end by synthesizing these thoughts and gesturing toward a kind of political media program suggested in the works of Benjamin and Hall.

Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” shows how the development, and use, of communication technologies led to social effects. For instance, Benjamin says, film helped to lead to a kind of presentism (27). Film’s “tactile” “shock effects”—constituted by its perpetual movement—distracted film viewers, keeping them from contemplating on-screen events (32-3). Distractedness enabled viewers’ thorough absorption of filmic messages. This didn’t prevent potential for criticality, though. The film viewer’s position is distanced from the acts by which films are made, leading them to a critical posture (25-6). However, Benjamin observed that the film-film viewer relationship failed to fulfill its political promise (27). Rather than being directed at social conditions, criticism was primarily aimed at suddenly supposedly archaic traditions.

Parallel to Marx’s commodity fetishism, Benjamin said that art’s disconnection from traditions and material processes—what he calls art’s “ritual value”—coincided with the abstraction of art’s purpose into its “exhibition value” (21-3, 29-30). The destruction of art’s ritual value brought about the loss of art’s “aura”—its history, uniqueness, and unbreachable distance (21). Rather than represent everyday understandings of the world and social life, art became increasingly abstract, reproducible, and exchangeable, no longer tethered to referents (19-22). In this way, the loss of traditional connections to material practices inverted art’s purpose: instead of reflecting existing politics embodied in shared understanding and shared practices, art shaped understandings and politics (23, 28-9). For Benjamin (and as we’ll see, for Hall, too), this meant that public opinion came from the material conditions of people’s lives, but also from media effects. I will now show how Hall’s work relates to many of these themes.

Hall added the use of semiotic theory and took further some of Benjamin’s observations about the role that media play in shaping social outcomes. Hall said that all of reality entails discursive elements (“Encoding/Decoding,” 163-4). People receive (beginning in childhood and throughout life) symbolic systems—constituted by codes that associate symbols with referents—that they use to “decode” messages (“E/D,” 163-6). As people receive more messages, and are exposed to more kinds of associations between symbols and referents, their understandings of these associations and, more generally, of the nature of their particular symbolic system, shift. In this way, received messages help to perpetually refigure particular associations and remake symbolic systems. People decode messages in different ways, depending on their political dispositions and on their understanding of their symbolic system (“E/D,” 171-3). The power to make and remake symbolic associations is important for determining material outcomes. At least since the onset of modernity, ownership of media is a primary constituent of this power (“E/D,” 163, 169-72). This power might be more salient in recent times because the development of the private sphere (Habermas), the propagation of daily choices (Habermas), the proliferation of mediated images and messages (Benjamin), and the dissociation of symbols from referents (Benjamin, 19-20) have increased signifiers’ flexibility and ambiguity. As Benjamin and Hall show, this increased flexibility and ambiguity make more likely the incoherence typical of fascist and neoliberal media.

Benjamin said that fascists exploited the increased political role dictated by the conversion of art’s ritual value to its exhibition value (23). Images and messages in films have been crafted, cobbled together, and disseminated to masses from central locations (22, 25-6, 38n19). The ways by which film arrests attention, reshaping habitual feelings, thoughts, and actions make it an ideal tool for ideology and subject formation, or for propaganda (32-3). Instead of solutions, fascism offers the representation of grievances; Benjamin calls this the aestheticization of politics (33-4). In a way parallel to the way by which signs are divorced from referents and art’s role becomes more abstract (in the conversion to exhibition value), people increasingly succumb to the Malthusian impulse to convert populations into statistics and faceless caricatures (22). These increasingly abstract ways of perceiving the world helped to breed brutal impulses.

The aestheticization of politics must end in war—only war maintains property relations while mobilizing capital, the full labor capacity, and people’s feverish grievances (34). The war that fascism necessitates also produces its own aesthetics—metallized people, clouds of deadly chemicals, giant tanks, synchronized planes, and so on (34). Finally, the filmstar is a resource for fascist leadership style. Movie studios and ancillary institutions compensate for art’s loss of aura by building cult film personalities, not unlike the fetishist cult of the commodity or fascist cults of personality (27, 38n19). Through fascism’s cultishness, ritual value is refreshed but as pastiche: refracted, distorted, fragmented, disembedded symbols are haphazardly glued together (21, 34). Use of media effects to form incoherent ideologies isn’t unique to fascism.

Agreeing with Benjamin (23, 28-9), Hall said that discourse is the domain of politics (“E/D,” 168-9, 171-3). Politics is “produced” ( “Gramsci,” 169): it’s by controlling the field on which politics is played—by producing hegemony—that broad, long-term political victories manifest (“Gramsci,” 163, 168). Hall said that the British right understood the need to create hegemony better than did the left; rather than waiting for conditions to degrade until public opinion magically responded with a proper analysis (as Hall accused the left of having done), the right embarked to shape public opinion (“Gramsci,” 169). Thatcher and her advocates constructed the interests of the working class through what might’ve appeared to have been incoherent aesthetic processes (“Gramsci,” 167-8). Thatcher evoked what Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics”: waving the flag, she sold austerity under the auspices of long-term improvement—“Make Britain Great Again,” she seemed to say (“Gramsci,” 167). Thatcherism seemed to represent everyone, but crucially, it represented the interests of the elites at the same time that it recruited members of the working class (“Gramsci,” 165-6, 167). Employing a panoply of ahistorical, referentless images and hollow slogans, she evaded the promise of leftists’ mostly Keynesian, welfare state policies that the populace no longer believed in (“Gramsci,” 167, 172).

Hall agreed with Benjamin: it’s crucial to find means to achieve victories and to eventually install, invigorate, and even refigure leftist hegemonies (“Gramsci,” 170-1). As Thatcherites aimed to dismantle the Welfare State, they erected something else; this exchange provided an opportunity for the left (“Gramsci,” 165). Social change entails, on one hand, appealing to people’s already-existing attitudes and concerns and, on the other hand, building new kinds of coalitions (“Gramsci,” 170). These must coincide with pressure on attitudes and on coalitions toward more liberatory leftist agendas and greater participation in various kinds of political activities (“Gramsci,” 171). All of this is required to form a leftist hegemony by which political debates would be over choices between leftist agendas (“Gramsci,” 173).

For Benjamin, revolutionary film would’ve fulfilled Dadaism’s failed project to weaponize art (32); it would’ve entailed the marriage between criticism and entertainment (29) while having depicted new possibilities for social life (31-2). Instead of only having represented people’s grievances (as fascist film did), communist film would’ve helped to shape public opinion, having formed a hegemony by which grievances would’ve been relieved (33-4). If pointless, brutal, warmongering rush to death is the necessary aesthetic end of fascism, communists must respond by producing subversive art (34).

While Benjamin said, “Works of art are received and valued on different planes” (23), Hall emphasized this point more greatly. People sometimes subversively decode messages in order to better understand social phenomena and their effects (“E/D,” 171-3). Public opinion isn’t only shaped in an intentional, power-inflected, unilateral way. People’s subversive decodings of texts (including radio, television, film, architecture, etc.) can help them to change symbolic associations. Hall showed that connotation and denotation lie on a spectrum, so people can alter widely-accepted meanings by first influencing connotations (168-9). By this logic, people can begin to re-encode aspects of the social system both from below, through shared social practices, and from above, by making revolutionary art. Especially today, it’s important for the left to decode workings of power, especially as they relate to social conditions. Doing so can help them to exploit media effects and represent new possibilities. As contemporary social life entails the ever-increasing profusion of images and messages, the power to reshape symbolic associations is more important than ever. Using this power, people can redetermine public opinion and form a new leftist hegemony.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Habermas, Jürgen; Lennox, Sara; and Frank Lennox. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, 3, pp. 49-55.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, New York: Verso, 1988, 161-73.

Acceleration, Deceleration, Temporalization, and Spatialization

Plato warned us. Technologies are media that help us to accomplish tasks. Increased efficiency has a way of accelerating aspects of social life. But, the accelerations that technological advances enable also hinder our ability to think through problems. In particular, what Plato notes is that the ability to write would degrade our ability to remember, but memory is important for all problems. Without historical thoughtfulness, the repetition of action deepens the paths made by more efficient actions. We forego possibilities as we become more entrenched in particular ways of thinking and acting. There is no way out of this problem. Heidegger tells us that every showing is at the same time a hiding. To become more efficient in some particular way is to forget and to ignore. The more we do any particular thing, the less we do any other thing, including contemplating history and contemplating possibilities—or, contemplating time itself.

Acceleration, then, entails the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time. Through modern acceleration, spaces become distances become time-commitments. At the same time, the repetition of whatever motion renders efficiency into particular motions enacted by particular bodies in particular ways across particular spaces. Increased efficiency produces spaces as it produces temporalities. As Hartmut Rosa says, it’s a lot of frenetic running in place. However, this showing is also a hiding: while it’s true that there’s a loss of shared historical (and, therefore, utopian) cognizing, real effects are wrought on the environment and elsewhere. It’s perhaps a bit too simple to reduce the situation to energetic stagnation.

Revisiting the Deathcult: Arbeit Macht Frei

Today is May Day, a day of international celebration of labor, the international labor movement, and all that they have brought us. Today, May Day, 2020, a woman carried a sign in the “Re-open Illinois” event. This event is meant as a social demonstration, asking political leaders to allow people to work and to allow businesses to re-open. Her sign reads, Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work makes one free.” Following the ideological belief in the moral value of work, this phrase appeared at least as far back as the 19th century. The phrase rose to popular consciousness when it was borrowed by the Nazi Party and eventually hung over entrances to concentration camps. The implication of this sign being used during the coronavirus epidemic seems to be that (fascistic?) governments impose unfair restrictions. Local and state governments that restrict work make us un-free, or so it goes. This drips with irony.

It was the Nazis—whose incoherent symbols, signs, narratives, and logics worked in mystifying ways—who chose the phrase as a political and culturo-economic slogan. If governments in the US today are preventing work, in the Nazi case, it was the government that was ostensibly calling on people to work. It’s more complicated than this; these kinds of Nazi slogans rarely served to make clear mandates intended toward any logical end. That said, it’s important that this phrase is recognizable due to its association with concentration camps.

German concentration camps were work camps. Nazis brought Jews to them with the intention of making Jews work until they died or were killed. This sign then served two functions. First, it really did serve some vague Nazi ideological purpose. Nazi propaganda and symbolism always reflected some barely-expressible feeling among the German population that tied them to retrograde ideas of nationalism and strength. Working implied action and it implied strength, and freedom was the kind of empty moral value that German nationalists valued. For Nazis, the phrase—Arbeit macht frei—basically means almost nothing other than Germans are strong. On the other hand, the idea of work making one free served as a kind of sinister promise of redemption for Jews who were brought to work until they no longer could. It wasn’t necessarily that work would set them free in this world, but perhaps, if Jews worked hard enough, then they could at least embody some of the ostensibly superior German spirit (or Geist, if one prefers) in order to gain some redemption in the eyes of God or whomever. At the very least, in the eyes of the Nazi Party, the hardworking Jew might prove themselves more acceptable than the Jew who didn’t work as hard.

The irony ought to be clear. The woman in the protest claims that the government denies her work—imprisoning her in a world of Netflix and Cheetos, while the stock market continues to sag (or is it up today?). On May Day, the international day for workers, the real labor organizers orchestrate strikes in order to get material benefits for those who are at greatest risk of contracting coronavirus before they possibly spread the virus and/or perish. The prison that the protester imagines is more likely a prison of ideology, of uncritical enthusiasm, of self-exploitation, and of a world of fake threats, conspiracy theories, and deep state boogeypeople (oh, she really wants me to say “boogeymen” here, doesn’t she?). In our time of coronavirus, it’s the demand for the kind of work by essential the most exploited workers that appears more like our prison. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, these conspiracy theorists and cruel ideologues parrot billionaires and millionaires who sweat over stock prices. These shallow pseudo-activists conceive of freedom as the right to give the majority of their labor for someone else’s profit and the right to rush to their impending death. Only in a world of such deep contradictory capitalist ideology could anyone imagine value in claiming that deadly work would make them free.