A notebook

[Cain]

It probably comes as no surprise that I read quite a lot.  And while I mostly read e-books, I still take plenty of notes about what I'm reading, if I find them useful or interesting.

Anyway, I'm going to dump my notes online as well.  I'm working through them, and adding to them, but there is a lot, and its entirely possible that someone else with run with, or work from, something I found but did not have the time, imagination or inclination to follow up on.

First book is After Authority:

As states open up to the world economy, they begin to lose one of the raison d'êtres for which they first came into being: defense of the sovereign nation. Political change and economic globalization enhance the position of some groups and classes and erode that of others. Liberalization and structural reform reduce the welfare role of the state and cast citizens out on their own. As the state loses interest in the well-being of its citizens, its citizens lose interest in the well being of the state. They look elsewhere for sources of identity and focuses for their loyalty.

Instead [of military power], police power and discipline, both domestic and foreign, are applied more and more. Even these don't really work, as any cop on the beat can attest. Order is under siege; disorder is on the rise; authority is crumbling.

The heedless pursuit of individual self-interest can have corrosive impacts on long-standing institutions, cultures, and hierarchies, and can lead to a degree of social destabilization that may collapse into uncontrolled violence and destruction.

Whereas it used to be taken for granted that the nation-state was the object to be secured by the power of the state, the disappearance of singular enemies has opened a fundamental ontological hole, an insecurity dilemma, if you will. Inasmuch as different threats or threatening scenarios promise to affect different individuals and groups differently, there is no overarching enemy that can be used for purposes of mass mobilization (a theme of one of Huntington's more recent articles; see Huntington, 1997). Those concerned about computer hackers penetrating their cyberspace are rarely the same as those concerned about whether they will still be welcome in their workplaces tomorrow. Whereas it used to be taken for granted that threats to security originated from without—from surprise attacks, invading armies, and agents who sometimes managed to turn citizens into traitors—globalization's erosion of national authority has managed to create movements of "patriotic" dissidence whose targets are traitorous governments in the seats of national power

In short, loyalty to the state has been replaced by loyalty to the self, and national authority has been shouldered aside by self-interest. The world of the future might not be one of 200 or 500 or even 1,000 (semi-) sovereign states coexisting uneasily; it could well be one in which every individual is a state of her own, a world of 10 billion statelets, living in a true State of Nature.

I do propose here that, in the long view of history, the two hundred-odd years between 1789 and 1989 were exceptional in that the nation-state was unchallenged by any other form of political organization at the global level.  That exceptional period is now just about over.

One of the much-noted paradoxes of the 1990s is the coexistence of processes of integration and fragmentation, of globalism and particularism, of simultaneous centralization and decentralization often in the very same place. James Rosenau (1990) has coined the rather unwieldy term "fragmegration" to describe this phenomenon, which he ascribes largely to the emergence of a "sovereignty-free" world in the midst of a "sovereignty- bound" one. Rosenau frames this "bifurcation" of world politics as a series of conceptual and practical "jailbreaks," as people acquire the knowledge and capabilities to break out of the political and social structures that have kept them imprisoned for some centuries.  Rosenau's theory—if it can be called that—is an essentially liberal one and, while he acknowledges the importance of economic factors in the split between the two worlds, he shies away from recognizing the central role of material and economic change and the ancillary processes of social innovation and reorganization in this phenomenon.

Rather than being understood as some sort of atavistic or premodern phenomenon, cultural conflict should be seen as a modern (or even post-modern) response to fundamental social change. The unachievable dream of political theorists and practitioners is stability, now and forever; the undeniable truth is change, always and everywhere.  During periods of "normality," change is slower and more predictable; it can be managed, up to a point. Over the past few decades, we have been witness to more rapid and less predictable changes, brought about by globalization and social innovation. These changes have destabilized the political hierarchies that rule over social orders—even democratic ones—and provided opportunities for those who might seek greater power and wealth to do so.

Today, culture has become the language under which political action takes place, and elites operate accordingly. In all cases, it is the contractual basis of social order that is under challenge and being destroyed. When people find their prospects uncertain and dismal, they tend to go with those who can promise a better, more promising future. Cultural solidarity draws on such teleological scenarios and pie in the sky, by and by.

Polanyi's argument was, however, somewhat more subtle than this. He claimed that there was, in effect, a structural mismatch between the emerging system of liberal capitalism and then-existing social values and social relations of production.

The Concert of Europe was able to keep interstate peace, more or less, but it was hard pressed to address the domestic turmoil and disruption that followed social restructuring.

Rather, it is that modern capitalism was made feasible only through massive, social innovation and reorganization (which are sometimes described as "strategies of accumulation") affecting Europe, North America, and much of the rest of the world. When the first industrial entrepreneurs discovered that they could not entice labour out of their homes and into the factories in exchange for a full day's pay, they found ways of rendering unviable the family and social structures that, in the towns and villages, had provided some degree of social support even in the midst of privation.

the intention of U.S. policy was to reproduce domestic American society (or, at least, its underlying structural conditions), as much as possible, the world over. The implicit reasoning behind this goal, although specious and faulty, was that stability and prosperity in the United States were made possible by capitalism, democracy, growth, freedom, and social integration. If such conditions could be replicated in other countries, everyone would become like the happy Americans.

Left to its own devices, the information revolution might have gone nowhere. Just as in the absence of the impetus of markets and profits, the steam engine would have remained a curiosity with limited application, so were the dynamic of capitalism combined with political and economic instability required to really get this latest industrial revolution off the ground. That these elements were necessary to the new regime of accumulation (if not essential) is best seen in the trajectory and fate of the Soviet Union. The USSR was able to engineer the first steps of the transformation and acquire advanced military means comparable in most respects to the West's, but eventually it was unable to engage in the social innovation necessary to reorganize the productive process and maintain growth rates

What was ironic, perhaps, was that Buchanan and his colleagues blamed political "liberals," rather than hyperliberal capitalism, for the problems they saw destroying American society.  To have put the blame on the real cause would have been to reveal to the listening public that the new economic system is not—indeed, cannot be—fair to everyone, and that those who begin with advantages will virtually always retain them (Hirsch, 1995).  Admitting such a contradiction would be to repeat the fatal mistake of Mikhail Gorbachev, when he announced that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was no longer the vanguard of socialist truth: Attack the legitimacy of your social system's ideology, and there is no end to the destruction that might follow

Just as some did extremely well by the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, so will many benefit from this one. A global class of the better-off (numbering perhaps 1 billion, if that many) and a global class of the poor (as many as 8 to 10 billion) will emerge. Many members of the better-off class will reside in what today we call "developing countries"; a not considerable number of the poor will live in the "industrialized ones." If things work out, by the middle of the twenty-first century we might even see a global middle class that will provide bourgeois support for this new global order and, perhaps, demand some form of representative global democratization (see chapter . Then, again, we might not.

as countries lose sovereign control over their borders and the possibility of managing the movement of people, goods, and ideas, they seem to be focusing more closely on the new subjects of transnational sovereignty, the individuals, in the hope that keeping a watchful eye on such free subjects will serve also to discipline them (Gill, 1995; see also chapter 7).

[Cain]

More of the same

Consequently, we might behold the futures of global politics in both the European Union as well as in the world's chaotic places. As globalization works its way on self, state, and society, we may see the emergence of the "insecurity dilemma" at the social level, rather than between the black-box states of classical realist politics.

A proliferation of new identities— as states, as cultures, as ethnies, as individuals—indicate that fundamental units of global political interaction have been destabilized, thereby rendering problematic the finding of new anchorages on which to base stable political relations

To make this new object "secure" implies different constructions of both threat and security than those with which we are familiar from the past fifty years. Under fluid conditions such as this, the very act of defining security becomes the subject of struggle, providing not only access to material resources and authority but also the opportunity to establish new boundaries of discourse and research (Thompson, 1979; Lipschutz, 1999a). Those who win the debate win more than just the prize, for they also get to mark those boundaries. Those who find themselves left outside have not only lost the game, they have been banished from politics, made outsiders. They may even become the new enemy.

As the collapse of the Soviet Union indicated, even a materially powerful and evidently secure state can be undermined if the mental constructs supporting it come under sustained pressure, both domestic and international.

What, then, is the national security state (NSS)? The NSS is best understood as a particular type of institution whose origins are found in the logics of the Industrial Revolution and the Social Darwinist geopolitics of the late nineteenth century. Through these two epistemological frameworks, the consolidation of geographically contiguous territories and the integration of societies within those territories became the sine qua non of national power and survival. The founders of national security states were animated by two overriding motivations.  First, they directly correlated national power with the domination of resources, territory, people, and violence; second, they directly correlated national power with a state-directed project of industrialization, nationalism, and social welfare. The NSS was premised further on a world of external threats—almost always state-centred in origin — directed against national autonomy and territory, from which the nation must be defended.

General Motors is not always good for the United States (or vice versa). Today, the policies that generate national military power may very well create individual insecurity, and the actions of individuals in the market may very well weaken the state.  While this trend began as long ago as the 1970s, the extent of the divergence between state and citizen only became really evident during the 1990s, as the supposed global threat posed by Communism receded and was replaced by more localized and inchoate ones.

Consequently, a new unit of analysis and action emerged: the Free World. Inside the borders of the Free World, all states would be united in pursuit of common goals based on individualism and the human propensity to "truck and barter." Outside would be those states whose mode of behaviour was "unnatural," spoken of in terms of "rotten apples" threatening the Free World's future (a point further developed in chapter 7). The survival and success of the Free World thus depended on creating and extending boundaries around a "natural community" (Stone, 1988) that had not, heretofore, existed. The survival and prosperity of the Free World on one side of the boundaries of containment came to rest upon keeping out the influences of the Soviet bloc on the other side of those boundaries. Indeed, the Free World could not have existed without the "Unfree World."

The United States, pursuing liberal economic and political organization, focused on individual well-being at home and state power abroad. This made social discipline more difficult, because it was premised on a particular type of mental and material conformity that penalized aberrant thoughts and practices through social ridicule and rejection, rather than on an outright totalitarianism that rewarded dissidence with prison or exile.

The impacts of this change are visible in efforts to rediscipline society. Thus, policy-makers struggle to find new threats and define new visions, strategies, and policies for making the world "more secure." People, losing faith in their leaders and the state, take things into their own hands. Gated communities proliferate in order to keep out the chaos. The privatization of security continues apace and becomes another realm of commodification. Conservative disciplining of liberals and gays mounts. And the most popular television and film "true-life" stories and newscasts inform us just how insecure each of us should really feel.

What are national security planners to do when, in succeeding beyond their wildest visions in making the country safe, they have also set the stage for domestic anarchy? The simple answer: find new sources of threat and insecurity, both internal and external.

This loss of total coverage is problematic: In place of comprehensive threats, the "new" ones discussed or imagined by policy-makers, academics and strategists affect only selected groups and classes within states, with differential impacts that depend, to a significant degree, on an individual's economic, cultural, and social backgrounds.

Hence, not only are there struggles over security among nations, there are also struggles over security among notions. Winning the right to define security provides not just access to resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, thereby directing the policy that leads to real, material outcomes.

In a cohesive, conceptually robust state, a broadly accepted definition of both national identity and the security speech acts needed to freeze that identity is developed and reinforced by each of these three [defense analysts/military, policy-makers/bureaucrats and politicians/social leaders] groups as a form of Gramscian hegemony.

The failure of any particular discourse to establish its hegemony means that there can result discursive confusion and contestation over the meaning(s) of security among those who, for one reason or another, have a vested interest in a consensual construction.  This interest, or the expected benefits, may well be material and not just a matter of patriotic loyalty to nation; by defining security in a particular way, one serves to legitimate a particular set of policy responses.

Boundaries are always under challenge and they must always be re-established, not only on the ground but also in the mind. Here is where security is, ultimately, to be found; here is where insecurity is, ultimately, generated.  The marking of borders and boundaries is never truly finalized, never finally set in stone. Borders are meant to discipline, but they also offer the opportunity of being crossed or transgressed. Borders are lines on maps and markers on the ground, but border regions are rarely so neat. Borderlands are places where mixing occurs, or has occurred, or might occur. They are, in themselves, a contradiction to, a rejection of, the neatly drawn limits of the nation-state. Borderlands are thus a threat to the security supposedly established by the authorized borders precisely because they offer the possibility of people freely moving back and forth across lines without ever actually crossing borders.

Note to self: compare with role of boundaries in Trickster Makes This World

It was the existence of the Other across the border that gave national security its power and authority; it is the disappearance of the border that has vanquished that power. Where Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured.  France is fully capable of doing great damage to the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security. In other words, if safety cannot be distinguished from danger, there is no border and, hence, no security problem.

Securing the self and the state against change works both ways: it seeks to freeze lines on the ground and in the mind, and it keeps baleful influences out, but also imprisons those protected within the iron cage. I can do no better in ending this chapter than to quote James Der Derian (1995:34), who argues that "A safe life requires safe truths.  The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for security." Surely we can do better than this.

If threats are to retain their power to terrorize, therefore, they must be reimagined and fought, over and over, through words, through symbols and images, through languages and rhetorics.

Most contemporary discussions of strategy and battle are, therefore, not about "real" war. They are better understood as "discourses of war" meant, in the absence of an omnipotent and omnicompetent enemy, to terrorize and discipline both friend and foe, citizen and immigrant, alike.

Deterrence thus became a practice akin to telling ghost stories around the camp-fire: if one could scare oneself silly, perhaps others would be scared, as well (as Tom Leher put it, "If Brezhnev is scared, I'm scared"). But one would never want to become too scared, for to do so might be to lose self-control. . . .

The classical image of war is one of a tightly controlled, well-executed pas de deux between two enemies, using the most advanced of weaponry, fighting along a well-defined front, each exerting maximum will. This is the idealized war, the AirLand Battle of NATO (whose imagined clarity, Clausewitz warned us, would prove wholly illusory if it came to pass), the conflict reimagined by Tom Clancy (1987) in his mind-numbing Red Storm Rising

Furthermore, rationality and irrationality, sanity and insanity might not even be the appropriate concepts to apply to this case. Assuming either rationality or irrationality (and nothing else) disregards questions of deep causality in explaining the onset of wars, ignores what is clearly a result of problematic histories of relations among and within states, and attributes events as they inexplicably occur to factors beyond anyone's control (e.g., faulty genes, chemical imbalances, or Comet Hale-Bopp).  Other causal processes simply drop out.

The required publicity about the technology (although not about tactics or intelligence) illustrates an emerging paradox associated with disciplinary deterrence and warfare: Whereas countries once tried to keep their military capabilities a secret, so as not to alert or alarm real or potential enemies, it has now become common practice to reveal such capabilities, in order to spread fear and foster caution

But post-modern war is not about the borders between states or even imaginary civilizations; as I proposed in chapter 3, it is about those difficult-to-see boundaries between and among individuals and groups. Who draws these lines? Who makes them significant? If they cannot be mapped, how can they be controlled?

The reality is slightly more complicated, inasmuch as even properly functioning markets can foster maldistribution and relative scarcity.  As Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (1989; see also Sen 1994) have pointed out, not everyone starves during a famine—indeed, food is often quite plentiful. What crude market analyses don't take into account is that, even at market equilibrium, there may be those for whom prices are still too high. Those who have money can afford to buy, those who do not, starve. Scarcity is only relative in this instance, but some people (and countries) do go hungry.

This is to say that sovereignty, whether individual or national, is about exclusion, autonomy, and keeping the Other out, both physically and mentally. It is also why uneven distribution is so central to international politics: it helps to perpetuate the hierarchy of power that, notwithstanding the acrobatics of neorealists, are central to international politics. That was the purpose of the princes' agreement at Westphalia; that is the point of the reification of methodological individualism today. Inside my boundary, I/we can act as we wish; outside of it, I/we can't. By redrawing or, in some circumstances, abolishing lines, we could change this premise, but that would mean sharing what we have with others and having less for ourselves.

First, in spite of long-standing evidence that Nature "respects no borders," the agreements signed at Stockholm in 1972, at Rio in 1992, and elsewhere during the intervening twenty years and since continue to reify the state as the sole appropriate agent of control, management, and development where environment is concerned.

the problem of unequal distribution will not go away; it will simply be shifted to those who lack the power to make trouble. Sustainability will thus come to be defined not by the justice of distribution but by the judgement of markets. Ecological interdependence will fall before wealth rather than force of arms, as the rich disempower the poor.

In this and other recent works, both culture and identity have been invoked in essentialist terms, as factors that are as invariant as the earth on which they stand. States once came into conflict over raw materials (or so it is said; see Lipschutz, 1989; Westing, 1986); today they are liable to go to war over unfinished idea(l)s.  Straits, peninsulas, and archipelagos were once the objects of military conquest; today religious sanctuaries, languages, and national mythologies are the subjects of occupation and de(con)struction. The result appears to be a new type of geopolitics, one that invokes not the physical landforms occupied by states but the mental platforms occupied by ethnies, religions, and nations.

[Cain]

Some of this needs to go in the 5GW thread, I have realized.

[Cain]

Final section on After Authority:

More to the point, not only are essentialist cultural explanations unhelpful, they are wrong. So-called ethnic and sectarian conflict are artefacts of changes within states driven, to no small degree, by forces associated with recent social transformations linked to global integration and external pressures for economic liberalization. Moreover, the fragmentation afflicting "weak" states, such as those in the Balkans, Central Asia, and Africa (Kaplan, 1996), is only the very visible tip of an iceberg that includes even those "strong" countries that are so prominent in the new global economy, including the United States.

Most of the violent conflicts underway around the world today are domestic and involve often-similar ethnic, religious, or class-based groups, struggling to impose their specific version of order on their specific societies.  Such social conflicts do appear to be contests for hearts, minds, and bodies, and combatants seem to feel no remorse in eliminating those whom they cannot convert—indeed, conversion is rarely an option.

The crystallization of group identities is not a random occurrence; it is traceable to specific strategies, pursued by ethnic
entrepreneurs centrally concerned with the mobilization of group loyalties on behalf of collective interests defined in terms of kinship, region or ethnicity. . . . Clearly, one cannot overestimate the part played by individual actors in defining the nature of the threats posed to their respective communities, framing strategies designed to counter such threats, rallying support for their cause, bringing pressure to bear on key decision makers, and, in short, politicizing ethnoregional identities.

As testified to by efforts to reassemble shattered states, such as Cambodia and Somalia, there may also be a sub-rosa fear that successful nonstate forms of political community could be disruptive of the current structure of international politics. In other words, for the time being, the only normatively acceptable form of political community at the international level is the state. A proliferation of clans, tribes, city-states, trading leagues, social movement organizations, transnational identity coalitions, diasporas, and so on could raise questions of legitimacy and representation that might very well undermine the status of existing states, not to mention well-established hierarchies of power and wealth.

The end of the Soviet Union destroyed utterly and finally the conceptual border between the good of the Free World and the evil of the "bad bloc," thereby exposing the American people to all sorts of pernicious, malevolent, and immoral forces, beliefs, and tendencies

The contemporary state no longer fulfils this moral role, and has not done so for many decades.  Contemporary threats to state and polity are almost wholly material: terrorists throw bombs, illegal immigrants take resources, diseases trigger illness. I argue to the contrary: the modern nation-state acts not only to protect its inhabitants from threatening material forces, it also acts to limit their exposure to noxious ideas by establishing boundaries that discipline domestic behaviour and beliefs. After all, what is a "terrorist" but someone with bad ideas? What is an "illegal" immigrant except someone who knowingly violates public norms? A state that cannot maintain such (b)orders becomes a prime candidate for disorder.

Rather, the question is more properly understood as: Are the borders of our contemporary moral community to be national or global? If pernicious forces have free reign across formerly impermeable borders, how can the struggle stop at the water's edge?  And, if such miscreants threaten to penetrate the body politic with their black helicopters, Gurkha troops, and Soviet tanks, how can we not carry the culture war into the international realm (as Samuel Huntington and others have done)?

As social institutions, markets are subject to both implicit and explicit regulations. The market is governed, first of all, by the command "Thou shalt not kill." Other rules follow. Walter Russell Mead (1995/96:14) makes a similar point about airports and air travel when he argues that, "Cut-throat competition between airlines coexists with common adherence to traffic and safety regulations without which airport operations would not be possible." So it is between states.

In the United States, attacks on "liberals," right-wing violence against the federal government and the "New World Order," and conservative and religious fervour for "family values" (Bennett, 1998) can be understood as an attempt to reimpose a nationalistic moral frame on what some think is becoming a socially anarchic society (Lipschutz, 1998b; Rupert, 1997). The kulturkampf at home is paralleled by the transformation of state practice from military-based to discipline-based behaviour, especially where U.S. foreign policy is concerned (see chapter 4). A closer look suggests that the two are of a piece, as in the convergence of a draconian welfare policy with an increasingly vocal movement against immigrants—whatever their legal status—and their countries of origin.

To restore its moral authority in times to come, the nation-state must redraw the boundaries of good and evil, replacing disorder with new (b)orders. The United States government is attempting to restore order at home and abroad in two ways. First, the notion of "democratization and enlargement," offered during the first Clinton administration, represents an attempt to expand the boundaries of the "good world" (see Clinton, 1997). Those who follow democracy and free markets subscribe to a moral order that makes the world safe for Goodness (which, in turn, supports the now-conventional wisdom that democracies never go to war with each other; but see Mansfield and Snyder, 1995). Second, as described in chapter 4, disciplinary deterrence is being directed against so-called rogue states, terrorists, and others of the "bad bloc," who are said to threaten the good world even though they possess only a fraction of the authority, influence, and destructive power of the latter.  Ordinary deterrence is aimed against any state with the capabilities to threaten or attack. Disciplinary deterrence is different. It is an act of national morality, not of national interests.

The difficulty with disciplinary deterrence is that there is no there there, and it does not work very well. It is largely conducted against imagined enemies, with imagined capabilities and the worst of imagined intentions. Two men with explosives or cults with gas hardly pose a threat to the whole of the physical body politic; it is their ability to undermine faith in state authority that is so fearsome to those in power. And, as pointed out in earlier chapters, where "rogues" and other such enemies might choose to issue a challenge, or why they would do so, is not at all evident (see also Lipschutz, 1999b). But that these enemies represent the worst of all possible moral actors is hardly questioned by anyone. 

Disciplinary deterrence is not, however, limited to renegades outside of the United States; it has also been extended into the domestic arena. For most of the Cold War, the threat of Communist subversion, and the fear of being identified as a Pinko Comsymp in some police agency's files, were sufficient to keep U.S. citizens from straying too far from the Free World straight and narrow. Red baiting continued long after the Red Scares of the 1950s—one can even find it today, in the excoriation of so-called liberals (San Francisco Chronicle, 1997) and Marxist academics (Lind, 1991)—although the language of discipline and exclusion has become somewhat more sophisticated with the passage of time. Still, since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has been difficult for political and social elites to discipline an unruly polity; that things can get out of hand without strong guidance from above is the message of South Central (Los Angeles), Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge.

What is critical here is not political space, but political authority, in two senses: first, the ability to get things done, and second, recognition as the legitimate source of jurisdiction and action (as opposed to one's ability to apply force or coercion in the more conventionally understood sense). As John Ruggie (1989: 28) has pointed out, in a political system—even a relatively unsocialized one—who has "the right to act as a power [or authority] is at least as important as an actor's capability to force unwilling others to do its bidding" (emphasis added). In this neomedieval world, authority will arise more from the control of knowledge and the power that flows from that control than outright material capabilities. The power to coerce will, of course, remain important, but most people do not need to be coerced; they want to be convinced.

Here I would propose that the "organic intellectuals" that operate within these counter hegemonic social movements constitute a transnational cadre that could help to create the "double movement" discussed by Polanyi and Gill.

I do not refer here to populist opposition to globalization, as put forth by both the left and the right. Such movements seek to restore the primacy of the nation-state in the regulation of spheres of production and social life, although they have rather different ideas about the ends of such a restoration. Rather, I refer to more nuanced critiques of current modes of transnational regulation and their lack of representation, transparency, and accountability. Globalization offers a space for political organizing and activism of which these organic intellectuals and the mobilizers and members of nascent political communities are well-positioned to take advantage.

A deterritorialized political community would have to be based not on space, but on flows; not on where people live, but what links them together. That is, the identity between politics and people would not be rooted in a specific piece of reified "homeland" whose boundaries, fixed in the mind and on the ground, excluded all others.

[Cain]

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice

Deconstruction can be seen in part as a vigilant reaction against this tendency in structuralist thought to tame and domesticate its own best insights. Some of Jacques Derrida's most powerful essays are devoted to the task of dismantling a concept of 'structure' that serves to immobilize the play of meaning in a text and reduce it to a manageable compass.

This is structuralism at its most conservative, an outlook that lends support to traditional ideas of the text as a bearer of stable (if complicated) meanings and the critic as a faithful seeker after truth in the text.

Deconstruction is avowedly 'post-structuralist' in its refusal to accept the idea of structure as in any sense given or objectively 'there' in a text. Above all, it questions the assumption – so crucial to Culler – that structures of meaning correspond to some deep-laid mental 'set' or pattern of response which determines the limits of intelligibility.

'Kantianism without the transcendental subject' is a description often applied to structuralist thought by those who doubt its validity.  Culler's line of argument demonstrates the force of this slogan, showing itself very much akin to Kant's transcendental-idealist theory of mind and knowledge. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) set out to redeem philosophy from the radical scepticism of those, like Hume, who thought it impossible to arrive at any definite, self validating knowledge of the external world. They had tried and conspicuously failed to discover any necessary link between mind and reality, or 'truths of reason' and 'matters of fact'.  Thought seemed condemned to a prison house of solipsistic doubt, endlessly rehearsing its own suppositions but unable to connect them with the world at large. Sensory evidence was no more reliable than ideas like that of cause-and-effect, the 'logic' of which merely reflected our accustomed or common sense habits of thought.

Kant saw an escape-route from this condition of deadlocked sceptical reason. It was, he agreed, impossible for consciousness to grasp or 'know' the world in the direct, unmediated form despaired of by Hume and the sceptics. Knowledge was a product of the human mind, the operations of which could only interpret the world, and not deliver it up in all its pristine reality. But these very operations, according to Kant, were so deeply vested in human understanding that they offered a new foundation for philosophy. Henceforth philosophy must concern itself not with a delusory quest for 'the real' but with precisely those deep regularities – or  a priori truths – that constitute human understanding.

Meanings are bound up, according to Saussure, in a system of relationship and difference that effectively determines our habits of thought and perception. Far from providing a 'window' on reality or (to vary the metaphor) a faithfully reflecting mirror, language brings along with it a whole intricate network of established significations. In his view, our knowledge of things is insensibly structured by the systems of code and convention which alone enable us to classify and organize the chaotic flux of experience. There is simply no access to knowledge except by way of language and other, related orders of representation. Reality is carved up in various ways according to the manifold patterns of sameness and difference which various languages provide. This basic  relativity of thought and meaning (a theme later taken up by the American linguists Sapir and Whorf) is the starting-point of structuralist theory.

Interpretation is a quest for order and intelligibility amongst the manifold possible patterns of sense which the text holds out to a fit reader. The role of a structuralist poetics is partly to explain how these powerful conventions come into play, and partly to draw a line between mere ingenuity and the proper, legitimate or 'competent' varieties of readerly response.

In the early writing of Barthes, among others, the aim was a full-scale science of the text modelled on the linguistics of Saussure and the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These ambitions were signalled by the widespread structuralist talk of criticism as a 'metalanguage' set up to articulate the codes and conventions of all (existing or possible) literary texts. Hence the various efforts to establish a universal 'grammar' of narrative, along with a typology of literary genres based on their predominating figures of language. This view of structuralism as a kind of master-code or analytic discourse upon language is taken by Barthes in his  Elements of Semiology (1967). Natural language, including the dimension of 'connotative' meaning, is subject to a metalinguistic description which operates in scientific terms and provides a higher-level or 'second-order' mode of understanding. It is evident, according to Barthes, that semiology must be such a metalanguage, 'since as a second-order system it takes over a first language (or language-object) which is the system under scrutiny; and this system-object is  signified through the meta-language of semiology' (Barthes 1967, p. 92). This tortuous explanation really comes down to the belief in structuralist method as a discourse able to master and explain all the varieties of language and culture.

[LMNO]

I intend on reading this.  Thanks, Cain.

[Bu🤠ns]

this is a great idea, cain..

(that and i like it to appear in my 'new replies' when you update.)

[Cain]

Coolio.

You guys may find the Deconstruction stuff interesting.  I sure as hell did, since I'm not up on post-1900 philosophy still, and this is kind of important in that general area.  Also, its linguistics and thus mercifully not more politics.  I'm kind of getting into the whole signifier/semiotics thing right now, though I concede Derrida may have also had some good points.

[Cain]

More Deconstruction:

There are, however, signs that Barthes was not himself content with so rigid and reductive a programme. If semiology sets up as a second-order discourse unravelling the connotative systems of natural language, why should it then be immune to further operations at a yet higher level of analysis?

The semiologist may seem to exercise 'the objective function of decipherer' in relation to a world which 'conceals or naturalizes' the meanings of its own dominant culture. But this apparent objectivity is made possible only by a habit of thought which willingly forgets or suppresses its own provisional status. To halt such a process by invoking some ultimate claim to truth is a tactic foreign to the deepest implications of structuralist thought. There is no final analysis, no metalinguistic method, which could possibly draw a rigorous line between its own operations and the language they work upon. Semiology has to recognize that the terms and concepts it employs are always bound up with the signifying process it sets out to analyse. Hence Barthes's insistence that structuralism is always an  activity, an open-ended practice of reading, rather than a 'method' convinced of its own right reason.

The dream of total intelligibility, like 'structure' in its metalinguistic sense, belongs (he implies) to a stage of thinking that is self-blinded by its own conceptual metaphors. The element of rhetorical  play is present everywhere. Its effects in critical discourse may be ignored, but they are not effaced by the structuralist 'science' of semiotics.

The apparent eccentricities of Barthes's later writing are mostly regarded as harmless whimsical diversions on the part of a critic who required some form of 'creative' escape from the exigencies of high-powered theory. This attitude, typical of Anglo-American criticism, draws a  firm line between the discipline of thinking about texts and the activity of writing which that discipline is supposed to renounce or ignore in its own performance. Criticism as 'answerable style' (in Geoffrey Hartman's phrase) is an idea that cuts right across the deep-grained assumptions of academic discourse. It is, as I shall argue, one of the most unsettling and radical departures of deconstructionist thought. A properly attentive reading of Barthes brings out the extent to which critical concepts are ceaselessly transformed or undone by the activity of self-conscious writing.

One way of describing this challenge is to say that Derrida refuses to grant philosophy the kind of privileged status it has always claimed as the sovereign dispenser of reason. Derrida confronts this pre-emptive claim on its own chosen ground. He argues that philosophers have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by ignoring, or suppressing, the disruptive effects of language. His aim is always to draw out these effects by a critical reading which fastens on, and skilfully unpicks, the elements of metaphor and other figural devices at work in the texts of philosophy. Deconstruction in this, its most rigorous form acts as a constant reminder of the ways in which language deflects or complicates the philosopher's project. Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea – according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics – that reason can somehow dispense with language and achieve a knowledge ideally unaffected by such mere linguistic foibles. Though philosophy strives to efface its textual character, the signs of that struggle are there to be read in its blind-spots of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies.

Derrida's attentions are therefore divided between 'literary' and 'philosophical' texts, a distinction which in practice he constantly breaks down and shows to be based on a deep but untenable prejudice. His readings of Mallarmé, Valéry, Genet and Sollers are every bit as rigorous as his essays on philosophers like Hegel and Husserl. Literary texts are not fenced off inside some specialized realm of figurative licence where rational commentary fears to tread. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida has no desire to establish a rigid demarcation of zones between literary language and critical discourse. On the contrary, he sets out to show that certain kinds of paradox are produced across all the varieties of discourse by a motivating impulse which runs so deep in Western thought that it respects none of the conventional boundaries.  Criticism, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, the whole modern gamut of 'human sciences' – all are at some point subjected to Derrida's relentless critique. This is the most important point to grasp about deconstruction. There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its own prehistory and ruling metaphysic.

[Cain]

More Deconstruction

Deconstruction draws no line between the kind of close reading appropriate to a 'literary' text and the strategies required to draw out the subtler implications of critical language. Since all forms of writing run up against perplexities of meaning and intent, there is no longer any question of a privileged status for literature and a secondary, self-effacing role for the language of criticism.

Derrida's line of attack is to pick out such loaded metaphors and show how they work to support a whole powerful structure of presuppositions. If Saussure was impelled, like others before him, to relegate writing to a suspect or secondary status, then the mechanisms of that repression are there in his text and open to a deconstructive reading.

The point will bear repeating: deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected. It seeks to undo both a given order of priorities and the very system of conceptual opposition that makes that order possible

Deconstruction is therefore an activity of reading which remains closely tied to the texts it interrogates, and which can never set up independently as a method or system of operative concepts. Derrida maintains an extreme and exemplary scepticism when it comes to defining his own methodology. The deconstructive leverage supplied by a term like writing depends on its resistance to any kind of settled or definitive meaning. To call it a 'concept' is to fall straight away into the trap of imagining some worked-out scheme of hierarchical ideas in which 'writing' would occupy its own, privileged place.

The  concept of structure is easily kidnapped by a tame methodology which treats it as a handy organizing theme and ignores its unsettling implications. Derrida perceives the same process at work in the structured economy of differential features which Saussure described as the precondition of language. Once the term is  fixed within a given explanatory system, it becomes (like 'structure') usable in ways that deny or suppress its radical insights.

Hence Derrida's tactical recourse to a shifting battery of terms which cannot be reduced to any single, self-identical meaning. Différance is perhaps the most effective of these, since it sets up a disturbance at the level of the signifier (created by the anomalous spelling) which graphically resists such reduction.

Derrida replied characteristically by turning the question round to reveal its oversimplified terms of argument. If there is no possibility of breaking altogether with Western metaphysics, it is equally the case that every text belonging, however rootedly, to that tradition bears within itself the disruptive potential of a deconstructive reading. As Derrida puts it, 'in every proposition or in every system of semiotic research . . . metaphysical presuppositions coexist with critical motifs' (Derrida 1981, p. 36). Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce. The most rigorous reading, it follows, is one that holds itself provisionally open to further deconstruction of its own operative concepts.

Nietzsche often seems to spell out in advance the programme and systematic ruses of deconstruction, adopting the same attitude of sceptical rigour and denying himself any secure resting-place in method or concept. Philosophers, he argued, were the self-condemned dupes of a 'truth' which preserved itself simply by effacing the metaphors, or figurative discourse, which brought it into being. If language is radically metaphorical, its meanings (as Saussure was later to show) caught up in an endless chain of relationship and difference, then thought is deluded in its search for a truth beyond the mazy detours of language. Only by suppressing its origins in metaphor had philosophy, from Plato to the present, maintained the sway of a tyrannizing reason which in effect denied any dealing with figural language.

Deconstruction begins with the same gesture of turning reason against itself to bring out its tacit dependence on another, repressed or unrecognised, level of meaning.

Along with his compatriot and near-contemporary Karl Marx, he stands among the great demythologizing figures of modern thought. Between them Marx and Nietzsche stake out the main possibilities and rival claims of post-structuralist criticism.

For Derrida, the language of dialectical materialism is shot through with metaphors disguised as concepts, themes that carry along with them a whole unrecognised baggage of presuppositions. It must henceforth be a question, Derrida says, of taking that language and investigating 'all the sediments deposited [in it] by the history of metaphysics' (see Derrida 1981, pp. 39–91).

Elsewhere in Writing and Difference Derrida broaches the relation between text and politics, suggesting briefly that deconstruction offers 'the premises for a non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology'.

To deconstruct a text in Nietzschean-Derridean terms is to arrive at a limit-point or deadlocked aporia of meaning which offers no hold for Marxist-historical understanding. The textual 'ideology' uncovered by Derrida's readings is a kind of aboriginal swerve into metaphor and figurative detour which language embraces through an error of thought unaccountable in Marxist terms.

The end-point of deconstructive thought, as Derrida insists, is to recognize that there is no end to the interrogative play between text and text. Deconstruction can never have the final word because its insights are inevitably couched in a rhetoric which itself lies open to further deconstructive reading. Criticism can only be deluded in its claim to operate (as Eagleton puts it) 'outside the space of the text' on a plane of scientific knowledge. There is no metalanguage.

Foucault, like Nietzsche, adopts what he calls a 'dissociating view' of historical meaning, one that sets out to shatter 'the unity of man's being through which it was thought he could extend his sovereignty to the events of his past' (ibid., p. 154).

Foucault's Nietzschean rhetoric amounts to an activist rewriting of Derrida's text on Hegel. It sets out to create a maximum disturbance in the charmed circle of exchange where history, consciousness and meaning coincide in the mastery of knowledge. Foucault's critique would equally apply to a Marxist 'science' convinced of its power to escape the figurality of language and achieve a perspective atop all the conflicts of textual signification. It is no longer, he argues, 'a question of judging the past in the name of a truth which only we can possess in the present'. History writing on Nietzschean terms involves a surrender of the privileged claim to knowledge once entertained by a sovereign consciousness. It becomes a question, in Foucault's words, of 'risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge' (ibid., p. 164). Such is the effect of applying a Nietzschean or deconstructive rhetoric of tropes to the self-possessed categories of Marxist-structuralist thought.

This is not to condemn critical theory, as some would suppose, to an endless play of self-occupied textual abstraction. Rather it is to recognize, with Foucault, that texts and interpretative strategies compete for domination in a field staked out by no single order of validating method. Foucault follows Nietzsche in deconstructing those systems of thought which mask their incessant will to power behind a semblance of objective knowledge. His analysis of these various 'discursive practices' constantly points to their being involved in a politics none the less real for its inextricably textual character. Edward Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), has offered a very practical example of how deconstruction can engage cultural history on its own textual ground and contest its claims to objectivity. The image of 'the Orient' constructed by generations of scholars, poets and historians is shown to be governed by an ethnocentric discourse secure in the power of its superior wisdom. Occidental reason is confirmed point for point in its mythography of oriental laziness, guile and 'exotic' irrationalism. To combat this discourse by exposing its ruses of metaphor is not to set up as a 'science' unmasking the confusions of ideology. It is an act of challenge which situates itself on rhetorical ground the better to meet and turn back the claims of a spurious objectivity.

The zeal for deconstruction has not, on the other hand, always gone along with the kind of argumentative rigour Derrida calls for here. Indeed, its appeal for some critics rests very largely on the promise of an open-ended free play of style and speculative thought, untrammelled by 'rules' of any kind. This response has characterized much of what passes for American deconstructionist criticism, at least in its more publicized varieties. With the notable exception of Paul de Man – whose texts display an early-Derridean incisiveness and rigour – the Yale critics have mostly opted for deconstruction on its dizzy, exuberant side.

On the other hand there have been serious attempts to grapple with deconstruction on alternative philosophic ground. These mostly start out from the view that scepticism is not (as even Bloom seems forced to admit) irrefutable on its own terms of argument. Indeed, it may turn out to be self-refuting if one asks the sceptic by what special privilege his or her own arguments are exempt from doubt or mistrust (see Abrams 1978). The deconstructors clearly expect that their texts will be read with care and attention, their arguments weighed and their conclusions discussed in a decently responsible manner. Yet how can this be squared with their own professed scepticism towards meaning, logic, truth and the very possibility of communication? Their case might seem open to what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in a slightly different context, has called the 'transcendental tu quoque'. That is, they demand that their texts be properly understood – or at least intelligently read – while ostensibly denying the power of language to encompass any such end.

[shadowfurry23]

 Interestingly I'm frequently finding points that I very much agree with and others I very much disagree with coming from the same book.

  Cool stuff to share Cain.  Thanks.

[Cain]

Critical Theory: An Introduction

Critical theory allows us to explore the cultural production and communication of meanings in precise and nuanced ways, and from a range of different perspectives. It questions the ways in which we might be used to making sense of artistic, historical or cultural artefacts and prompts us to reconsider our beliefs and expectations about the ways individuals interact with material things and with each other

Language is not a transparent medium through which ideas can pass between minds without alteration. Rather, as almost all of the essays and entries in this book acknowledge, it is a set of conventions that influence or even determine the sorts of ideas and experiences people are able to have. Language is cultural (some thinkers even claim it is the essence of culture), and therefore open to criticism and change. If linguistic meaning were naturally given, for example, why would there be more than one language? A word does not mean what it does 'naturally'; rather meanings arise on the basis of complex linguistic and cultural structures that differentiate between truth and falsity, reality and fantasy, and good and evil, and are inextricably tied up with value judgements and political questions, as well as with identity, experience, knowledge and desire.

Structuralism's understanding of the world, then, is that everything that constitutes it – us and the meanings, texts and rituals within which we participate – is not the work of God, or of the mysteries of nature, but rather an effect of the principles that structure us, the meanings we inhabit and so on. The idea is that the world without structures is meaningless – a random and chaotic continuum of possibilities. What structures do is to order that continuum, to organize it according to a certain set of principles, which enable us to make sense of it. In this way, structures make the world tangible to us, conceptually real, and hence meaningful.

In order for the idea 'spinster' to become meaningful in language, the concept of 'women', as the other of 'men' in the duality 'women and men', would have to come first. The idea 'spinster' could not, in other words, exist without a corresponding idea of gender as male and female. But any meaning for 'spinster' is of course also dependent on the prior establishment of the concept of marriage, as well as a differential understanding of the status of 'women' and 'men' in relation to marriage. Indeed, in this example, meaning begins to seem to have a great deal more to do with value, and specifically cultural value, than the model of language as a naming system might suggest. The meaning of spinster is, after all, surely not inevitable, natural or true, but rather the product of a system of cultural values which are open to debate. If this is the case, then far from simply naming an objective reality, language would seem to play an important role in realizing reality, as well as its meaning for us within the linguistic communities we inhabit. If we did not have the linguistic term 'spinster', would we think of female existence in the ways that we do? It is certainly relatively easy to imagine a social community in which the concept of a spinster might have no meaning whatsoever – not necessarily because unmarried women do not exist, but rather because women are not simply valued, or thought of as meaningful, in relation to whether or not they are married to men.

As I have already suggested, for Saussure language is not simply a system for naming a reality which pre-exists it. Turning that notion on its head, Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure – one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straightforward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways. While this understanding of language allows us to see cultures other than 'our' own as relatively different, by implication it must also show us that the culture we claim as 'ours' is in turn neither natural nor inevitable. That is, it demands that we recognize as  structurally produced the culture which seems to us most obvious, most natural and most true. What Saussure's work gave to structuralism, then, was an account of language as a primary structure, a system of signs whose meanings are not obvious, but rather produced as an effect of the logic internal to the structural system that language is.

I could go on. It may be sufficient, however, to draw the following three conclusions from this example: (i) signs function to constitute meaning only within the terms of the system of which they are a part; (ii) while all sign systems function according to their own structural principles, they all function nonetheless like language; (iii) all forms of cultural text can therefore be understood as signifying systems, the meanings of which are not fixed for all time but, rather, are open to change.

narrative can be found in numerous aspects of life: not only in other forms of art (drama, poetry, film) but in the ways in which we construct notions of history, politics, race, religion, identity and time.  All of these things, regardless of their respective claims to truth, might be understood as stories that both explain and construct the ways in which the world is experienced. As Barthes famously said, 'narrative is international, trans-historical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself'.

The sentence 'Walking dogs should be encouraged' has a single surface structure (plot) and two deep structures (stories). Accordingly, this single sentence can be read as an invocation to encourage dog owners to exercise their pets (story 1) or as a suggestion that perambulating dogs should be cheered on and applauded (story 2). Conversely, the sentences: 'The dog ate my homework' and 'My homework was eaten by the dog' have different surface structures (plots), i.e. they differ in their word order, but have the same deep structure (story). The meaning of both sentences is the same, despite the variation in its presentation.

Despite these legitimate calls for caution, the distinction between story and plot provides a useful way of approaching narratives. One of the implications of the split is the suggestion that story, which is only ever available as a paraphrase, is translatable from medium to medium, whilst plot appears to be text-specific. This is to say that an individual story can appear in numerous distinct texts and across a wide range of media: for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has appeared as a trilogy of novels (1954, 1954, 1955), an animated film (Ralph Bakshi dir. 1978), numerous computer games (1985–2004), a radio play (Brian Sibley, 1981) and, most recently, as Peter Jackson's highly successful trilogy of films (2001, 2002, 2003). Despite this variety of media and 'authors' there is a general consensus that the story of The Lord of the Rings is recognizable in each instance.

'The term History, unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes . . . not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened' (Hegel 1991: 60). History is not discovered but constructed; in other words, facts do not speak for themselves – the historian selects and interprets facts. Accordingly, histories are always composed, created and situated narratives, and it follows that they should be approached as such.

Attempts to bring narratology into inherently political and ideological theories, such as feminism, gender and race, have met with mixed success.

What Marx demonstrated was that far from comprising an open and neutral environment the capitalist economy is first and foremost a power structure. The basis of this power structure is class oppression.

As emerging enterprises create more advanced, diverse and cheaper products, then not only does this steadily reduce profit margins, it also begins to undermine the entire capitalist structure of property relations. An example of this would be the internet, where all kinds of copyright material and products (texts, music, pharmaceuticals, software and so on) can be obtained freely or at much reduced prices. Faced with this type of threat, the typical response of transnational corporations is to increase monopolization by buying up the smaller enterprises and actively stifle competition, innovation and development in order to protect markets and profits. So there is an inherent tension between the revolutionizing drives within capitalism (technological advances, etc.) and capitalism itself (a productive mode based on profit).

The Czech Marxist Kautsky, for example, was to observe that by the early twentieth-century workers were far more interested in trade unionism and social democratic (party) politics than revolutionary communism. This has led writers such as Lichtheim (1974) to argue that Marx's view of inevitable revolution really only held credibility under the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. As these conditions have been transformed through social reform/welfarism (not least as a result of trade union activity and social democratic politics) this view is neither relevant nor likely.

A central assertion was that capitalist society was moving to a new level of ideological sophistication through what Horkheimer called the 'culture industry'. Culture had replaced religion as the new 'opium of the masses' in framing a subtle order of conformism. According to Benjamin the emerging context was one in which the possibility of independent art forms was becoming more and more compromised by an ever expanding mass culture whose basic tendency is towards the banal and mediocre. And this tendency is insidiously political. Not only are cultural enterprises and artefacts increasingly managed and produced on a mass scale for consumption purposes but, at a deeper level, they feed into a self-perpetuating milieu of docility. Mainstream theatre, radio, television, internet and so on can be seen to be already in the service of a certain pacifying bourgeois culture. Indeed all such media may be said to be at its most ideological precisely when it aspires to this idea of neutral entertainment: that is to say, when it implicitly accepts, and consequently naturalizes, the power configuration of the capitalist status quo – thereby displacing and eviscerating all sense of critique and critical energy.

[Cain]

More Critical Theory:

In a similar way, capitalism is a system that seemingly allows for all kinds of individual expression and innovation but only to the extent that it creates a kind of monotheistic attachment to the system itself. It creates a conformism through diversity (an e pluribus unum) in which more and more forms of individualistic 'improvisation' are accommodated on the basis of an underlying collectivist consumer culture.

The legacy of the Frankfurt School has developed in two main and divergent ways. The first of these reflects an optimistic belief in the power of high culture to oppose and transcend the superficial materialism of the bourgeois ethos. Echoes of this approach can be found in the thought of Jürgen Habermas who exhibits a kind of Enlightenment-based faith in the civilizing influence of what he calls 'communicative rationality' and its perceived capacity for overcoming ideological distortion and social conflict.

In stressing the extent of interconnectedness between culture and the economy in an overall configuration there has been a strong tendency in Marxist thought – and especially Marxist structuralism – to endow that configuration with an absolute centre: the functionalist logic of capital. With thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, for example, capitalism is generally affirmed as a totalizing structure that draws all the elements of socio-cultural life ('high' and 'low') together under its instrumentalist rationality. In consequence the popular classes become thoroughly incorporated into the capitalist system. Yet if social identity is subject to such a degree of structuralist closure then how can any form of political resistance ever arise? In effect we would seem to be presented with a simple inversion of Marx's position: instead of being pre-programmed to overthrow capitalism, the masses are doomed to conformist subordination within it.

While the view of the proletarian masses as avenging agents of social revolution is excessively optimistic, the pessimistic Frankfurt School view of the masses as docile Stepford workers is equally extreme. Gramsci rejects both determinism and fatalism and shows identification to be a historico-political matter without any final resolution.

Objects, practices and events can only be apprehended through the assignment of meaning, and this assignment is neither fixed nor neutral but always takes place within a historical framework. As Derrida puts it, 'there are only contexts without any absolute centre or anchorage' (Derrida 1988: 12).

Does this mean that everything is in a constant state of liquidity where meanings change from one moment to the next? Evidently not. People can and do identify with all kinds of positions – the biblical account of the universe, political conspiracies, for and against genetic manipulation, pro-/anti-globalization, etc. – and produce all kinds of material to support their claims. But whether these achieve wider credibility is entirely another matter. And credibility is not the result of any naturalism or imperial measure but is always a human-contextual matter where interpretive collectives – scientists, academics, judges, journalists, policy-makers – broadly establish the nature of 'evidence', 'coherence', 'best practice' and so on. Such categories depend for their constitution on the specific discursive formation in question and the success of the latter depends, in turn, on its ability to exclude/repress other possible formations.

Second, and perhaps more insidiously, the postmodern emphasis on difference is one that tends to assume a kind of level playing-field – all identities must be respected and considered equally without prioritizing one type of identity or social struggle over another. The effect of this, however, is to render real poverty, global hunger and social exclusion virtually invisible and/or abstract (such things happen 'elsewhere').  Thus what is overlooked is precisely this dimension of the necessary exception vis-à-vis the culture, or economy, of differences. Just as slavery showed the symptomatic truth (the embodied negativity) of Athenian democracy as a tyranny of citizens, so too today's abject multitude discloses the truth of postmodern capitalism as a tyranny of differences: a global differential inclusiveness that in order to function relies upon even deeper trenches of exclusion.

What Žižek affirms, by contrast, is a politics of the act. The act (which is derived from Lacan) refers to a radical break with an existing pattern of social existence in such a way that it opens up new possibilities for reconfiguring that social existence.

The primary property of language is that it differentiates. We can confirm that vocabulary is not acquired simply by pointing to referents (things in the world) when we remember that later the child will go on to learn to use words such as 'justice' and 'honesty' [...] If abstract values are not learnt from referents in the world, what about words that name nothing material, but are crucial, even so, to the process of reasoning, such as 'because', 'although', and 'if'? There is nothing for them to correspond to.  Does language name ideas, then? Poststructuralism would say not. On the contrary, ideas come into sharp relief for us when we learn the meanings of the terms.

Language – or signifying practice – does not belong to individuals.  Instead, it already exists before we are born into a world where people reproduce it all round us. Though it constantly changes, these modifications prevail only to the degree that they are shared. In that sense, meanings belong to other people. Lacan calls language 'the Other'. If I opt to hijack it for purely private purposes, I must expect to be seen as psychotic.

The debates about the meaning of a given text continue, but they are located where they belong: in the process of interpreting the text itself, and not in appeals to external authority. There can be no one single correct reading of a text, but there can still be misreadings, as a result of inattention, unfamiliarity with the signifiers, or failure to recognize resemblances or allusions to other texts.

The little human animal, if we can imagine a child that is not already surrounded by signifying practices at birth, would be continuous with the organic world it inhabits, an undifferentiated part of it. But language, Lacan proposes, drawing on Saussure and, to a degree at least, anticipating Derrida, cuts off that direct relation to the world, in so far as the signifier interposes itself between us and our relation to things. The signifier, which differentiates and divides, offers a way to specify our wishes, but at the same time its advent divorces us from a direct apprehension of what Lacan calls 'the real'. The real is unnamed, unnameable, concealed in the shadows cast by the light language throws on the entities it denominates. The signifier names the referent in its absence; it thus relegates the real, obscures it, renders it missing from consciousness by taking its place.

There is no escape, then, even in a world of undecidability, from choosing, and the possibilities, which have material implications, are understood at the level of the signifier. In the poststructuralist account, fiction foregrounds this, makes it explicit. Poststructuralism repudiates the view that fiction reflects the world: the signifier constructs an illusion of reality not its simulacrum. At the same time, however, fiction repeatedly confronts its readers with choices. Which suitor would you marry? Which suspect would you blame? Which account would you rely on? The fictional characters decide – and readers decide whether they are right or wrong. These decisions are not always straightforward. King Lear makes the wrong choice; so does Othello. But what about Hamlet?  Cultural criticism offers a 'safe' environment to practise making choices.

This postmodern way of thinking – which many see as paradoxical – can be characterized as displaying a 'both/and' kind of logic. Making distinctions but not making choices (which would be an 'either/or' kind of logic) between the popular and the elite, the postmodern offered instead a model that would force us to consider equally both sides of this (or any other) binary opposition, and in effect to undo or to 'deconstruct' the seeming opposition between its two terms. There is an obvious parallel here with the theorizing of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of the theory known as deconstruction. Demonstrating how every binary conceals within it an implied hierarchy of values, Derrida strove not to reverse but, more radically, to undo both the opposition and its implicit evaluation of one term as superior. In the process he made us rethink the relationship between not only the oral and the written (his main interest) but also such familiar binaries as high art/popular, white/black, male/female, and so on.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Good stuff, dude.

[Cain]

From Lt Col David Grossman - On Killing

When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of  an animal). They are literally "scared out of their wits." The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.

Another way to look at this is to make an analogy with AIDS. AIDS does not kill people; it simply destroys the immune system and makes the victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The "violence immune system" exists in the midbrain, and conditioning in the media creates an "acquired deficiency" in this immune system. With this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors, such as poverty, discrimination, drug addiction (which can provide powerful motives for crime in order to fulfil real or perceived needs), or guns and gangs (which can provide the means and "support structure" to commit violent acts).

In Japan we see a powerful family and social structure; a homogeneous society with an intact, stable, and relatively homogeneous criminal structure (which has a surprisingly "positive" group and leadership influence, at least as far as sanctioning freelancers).

With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill. Others might respond, "Any man will kill in combat when he is faced with someone who is trying to kill him." And they would be even more wrong, for in this section we shall observe that throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own  lives or the lives of their friends.

The fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission.

The trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.

Perhaps a deeper understanding of the power of the buffeting of hate can be obtained from a study of survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Even the briefest review of available literature reveals that these individuals did suffer from great, lifelong, psychological damage as a result of their experiences in concentration camps, even though they did not have any obligation or ability to kill their tormentors.  Among bombing victims, POWs under artillery fire, sailors in naval combat, and soldiers on patrols behind enemy lines we do not find any large-scale incidence of psychiatric casualties, but in such places as Dachau and Auschwitz they were the rule rather than the exception.

During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. And among the POWs who were subject to bombing (as we saw earlier) the bombs were not personal, and the guards were no threat to the POWs as long as they played by the rules. But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.

Numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually  motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving (1) regard for their comrades, (2) respect for their leaders, (3) concern for their own reputation with both, and (4) an urge to contribute to the success of the group.

To be truly effective, soldiers must bond to their leader just as they must bond to their group. Shalit notes a 1973 Israeli study that shows that the primary factor in ensuring the will to fight is identification with the direct commanding officer. Compared with an established and respected leader, an unknown or discredited leader has much less chance of gaining compliance from soldiers in combat

In addition to creating a sense of accountability, groups also enable killing through developing in their members a sense of anonymity that contributes further to violence. In some circumstances this process of group anonymity seems to facilitate a kind of atavistic killing hysteria that can also be seen in the animal kingdom. Kruck's 1972 research describes scenes from the animal kingdom that show that senseless and wanton killing does occur. These include the slaughter of gazelles by hyenas, in quantities way beyond their need or capacity to eat, or the destruction of gulls that could not fly on a stormy night and thus were "sitting ducks" for foxes that proceed to kill them beyond any possible need for food. Shalit points out that "such senseless violence in the animal world — as well as most of the violence in the human domain — is shown by groups rather than by individuals."

In the same way that this process has traditionally enabled violence in police forces, it can also enable violence on the battlefield.  Alfred Vagts recognized this as a process in which enemies are to be deemed criminals in advance, guilty of starting the war; the business of locating the aggressor is to begin before or shortly after the outbreak of the war; the methods of conducting the war are to be branded as criminal; and victory is not to be a triumph of honour and bravery over honour and bravery but the climax of a police hunt for bloodthirsty wretches who have violated law, order, and everything else esteemed good and holy.

As we have seen before, death from twenty thousand feet is strangely impersonal and psychologically impotent. But death up close and personal, visiting the manifest intensity of the enemy's Wind of Hate upon its victims, such death can be hideously effective at sapping the will of the enemy and ultimately achieving victory.

By ensuring that their men participate in atrocities, totalitarian  leaders can also ensure that for these minions there is no possibility of reconciliation with the enemy. They are inextricably linked to the fate of their leader. Trapped in their logic and their guilt, those who commit atrocities see no alternatives other than total victory or total defeat in a great Gotterdammerung.

Group absolution can work within a group of strangers (as in a firing-squad situation), but if an individual is bonded to the group, then peer pressure interacts with group absolution in such a way as to almost force atrocity participation. Thus it is extraordinarily difficult for a man who is bonded by links of mutual affection and interdependence to break away and openly refuse to participate in what the group is doing, even if it is killing innocent women and children.

There is such a thing as a "natural soldier": the kind who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical obstacles. He doesn't want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification — like war — and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know, but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in  peacetime is too routine and boring).

In a way, the obedience-demanding authority, the killer, and his peers are all diffusing the responsibility among themselves. The authority is protected from the trauma of, and responsibility for, killing because others do the dirty work. The killer can rationalize that the responsibility really belongs to the authority and that his guilt is diffused among everyone who stands beside him and pulls the trigger with him. This diffusion of responsibility and group absolution of guilt is the basic psychological leverage that makes all firing squads and most atrocity situations function.