Very good post and a good way to insist that there is no real antimony between post modernism and Marxism per se as long as we are dealing with a particular kind of Marxism and a particular kind of post modern thinking. I have tried to argue this for the last couple of years in my department with little reception. I would argue that part of the problem is that in the NA context both Marxism and Post Modernism were infected by Weberianism. To my mind much of what passes for Marxism and Post modernism in NA is but Weber dressed in two suits: One blue collar in sentiment and unreconstructed, one white collar in sentiment and somewhat reconstructed.
Travis
>
> I been thinking about all the above most of yesterday---but I would
> like to take this thread into a much larger context. I hope you guys
> don't mind...
>
> Let's back up here. Bush isn't a postmodernist. Bush is a liar. It's
> that butt simple. Rhetoric Department speech aside, the issue of
> lying as politics is a much more concrete point than anything availed
> by wondering about the postmodern interrogation of abstract truth.
>
> And yet the two points, lying for political reasons, and an academic
> or philosophical investigation into the nature of truth are relevant
> to one another. Remember according to Strauss and the neocons, lying
> is the triumph of value or servicing the greater good over the
> material realities of the facts on the ground.
>
> First of all, I am not sure we have ever understood the nature of our
> own political environment and the centrality of lying. We don't really
> have a political environment. What we have is a world of lies where
> any factual issue is translated into a policy statement that redirects
> common sense into a nuance of lies. If not outright lies, then the
> more fancy ideologically driven obfuscation of the material issues at
> hand through propaganda specialists like academic economists. For
> example, take the so-called Washington Consensus that neoliberal
> economic polices are a greater social good, than the centrally
> organized political economies of the past, both capitalist west and
> communist east. Clearly many parts of the world have discovered the
> lie of the former and have returned to reconstruct some version of the
> latter. In this sense then they have discovered that the material
> truth of their own facts have to supersede in their policies the
> so-called greater good (value scheme) of neoliberalism---or else their
> whole society will be plunged into chaos, especially in Africa, but
> not far behind are numerous examples in Asia, Latin American and of
> course Russia.
>
> Clinton seemed to perfect this environment of economic lies,
> especially in his justification of neoliberal economic policies like
> NFTA.
>
> Let's start with an obvious and ubiquitous lie. What is good for the
> economy is good for the nation. This is just a reworked lie that what
> is good for General Motors is good for the country. All of these
> neoliberal ideas presume that the greatest economic good, is
> equivalent to the greatest social good. Plain fact is, that is not the
> case, if you are not a corporation. How many of us are corporations?
> Well none, since a corporation is a legal fiction that in fact doesn't
> even exist as a physical entity. We, actual people do exist and we
> have concrete physical needs, that if these are not met by the
> political economy, we will die. The greatest social good for us, is
> the meeting of those irreducible physical needs like breathing,
> eating, living in clean shelter, being adequately clothed, healthcare,
> and given essential and critical access to policy systems that effect
> us. All of these needs are threatened in one way or another by our
> political economy. Around the world, other countries have discovered
> that in fact if they do privilege foreign corporate-financial entities
> over the needs of their people on the theory that the first will of
> its own improve the hard lot of the second, then their country will
> crash---unless they adopt very strong internal controls.
>
> But let's move on. The above is argued endlessly within the context of
> globalization. The point here is not the merits one way or another,
> but the material truths of people's lives and how those are obscured,
> hidden, lied about in the neoliberal mantra---and in fact in the
> arguments about the merits one way or another. Basically its a cloud
> of bullshit that hides the idea that it is good to seal the labor of
> the poor, and give to the rich all the wealth and benefit of that
> labor.
>
> What I consider a lie, lying, and deliberate obfuscation of material,
> social and political realities is so vast that I can not trace out all
> the arguments. But let's notice that much of the postmodern
> intellectual movements came from an historical period in which, there
> was a rising public awareness that many if not most so-called social
> norms, political truths, etc were in fact simply lies to cover up some
> more concrete truth about society and the political economy. In other
> words the nature of what constituted a social, political and economic
> truth/good was completely open to question. That was in essence
> (philosophical and historical terms) what Paris, Berlin, Mexico City,
> Prague, Chicago on and on until you get down to little places like
> Berkeley in 1968 was all about. The war in Vietnam was a lie,
> political freedom at home was a lie, equality and justice for all was
> a lie, the scheme of common and publicly held political sense was a
> lie, the whole of the political establishment and its political
> parties were liars... In other words the whole arena of modern
> liberalism derived from the enlightenment philosophies of the past and
> then carried out as the foundation of modern societies---all that had
> evolved into one vast ocean of lies---our entire political arena of
> discourse was nothing but a trading exchange of lies.
>
> Because I had convinced myself that the world I was living during the
> period was so saturated by lies, I rarely read anything about this
> moment at the time. I was living it. However, the one thing I did read
> was Arendt's Crisis of the Republic, which addressed lying in politics
> (published a few years later). It was the first book of Arendt's I
> ever read and was hooked for life. During this period Derria read this
> book too and began a couple essays on the basic idea, which he
> expanded by going back to Plato and Aristotle. (I found this essay
> somewhere on the web at work yesterday and tried to email to myself at
> home as an attachment, but evidently my boss has my direct work email
> line blocked. Somebody else might find it and post on some of it.)
>
> Okay another change of course. Earlier this week somebody posted an
> article by Kissinger under the thread, `the adviser who wouldn't
> die'. What was fascinating to me as I read it was how enduring is the
> establishment mind set and how gracefully they can re-interpret and
> reconstruct their lies of the past and make them believable as if they
> were speaking historical truths---and miraculously turn the concrete
> facts of even the immediate moment into pure mush---dissolved in yet
> another solution of lies. What miracles these guys perform.
>
> Cactus Pat posted an article by Richard Perle with the incredulous
> title, We had the very best of intentions. The old Kissinger-McNamara
> de ja vu all over again. The pure hutzpah of these bastards is
> astonishing. I am standing there looking at a giant blue wall. There
> is a public speaker standing in front of this blue wall with the color
> video cams humming, telling me and the rest of the world the wall
> behind him is yellow, and only the color blind don't see it...
>
> And, if you read very far into the Berkeley Rhetoric dept speech there
> is mention of James Reston's article last year when he interviewed
> some political official who claimed the administration created
> reality, that's what power was, and the rest of us were stuck in a
> mere fact based world of lesser moment or value. Or some such
> nonsense.
>
> >From the Berkeley Rhetoric department commencement speech, to the
> Kissinger advisory note, to this jive from Perle, there is a common
> thread. These are all masters of the political lie, and in historical
> fact most of these people (counting Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the
> neo-cons) were directly involved in fabricating the sea of lies of
> 1968 that turned my political views much more radical than they had
> been.
>
> I was once upon a time just a nice liberal kid who went to his first
> voting booth and proudly checked Johnson, truly believing the
> enlightenment ideals promised on tv and in my intro to philosophy were
> just around the corner---The Great Society. Four short years later I
> was living in a nightmare: drafted, flunking the comprehensives, dead
> broke, and spinning down a personal abyss all between January and
> August of 1968. I'll never forget that year.
>
> Based on the Perle article, I started a post on the idea that we or at
> least I should begin to reconstruct the events of the last few years
> and write them down as an historical record of this immediate moment,
> so that as Iraq, the horrid social and political climate and other
> nasty things of this period move on and evolve into the dark future, I
> will have at least a note on the moment---some reference on the
> desolation of the real. This is actually the motivation behind most of
> my posts. The reason is that we are so saturated with lies that we can
> not or rather I can't think straight anymore. My rational mind is in
> revolt---much like it was in `68. But I know that in a few years
> current lies will be turned into historical lies thanks to Perle and
> others, and then these lies will fill the political vacuum of the
> future with more lies. We will be arguing Iraq forever, just like we
> are still arguing over corporate power, civil rights, Vietnam and the
> meaning of 1968.
>
> Even if it is concretely true that the point is not to understand
> history, but to change it, I have through attempting to change history
> or rather improve the material conditions of others in a very minor
> way, discovered these conditions will not change, until we understand
> how they are endlessly hidden, obfuscated, ignored, and re-interpreted
> so as to promulgate them into perpetuity.
>
> What was happening in 1968, was in my mind a vast public disclosure,
> an unravelling or unveiling of the public spectacle to be a fraud. The
> war was made a stunning fraud by Tet, the apparent success of civil
> rights movements through non-violent change---the success of
> non-violent change was made a fraud by King's assassination---that the
> academy was a store of knowledge and truth was made a fraud by too
> many stories of police shootings and beatings to count, capped off
> with the Chicago convention which made all domestic liberal politics
> something beyond fraud, and on and on. What made the moment so
> astonishing was not these things were going on, but that they were
> suddenly made public and in fact there was no other public reality but
> these stories and pictures--that's all there was.
>
> I hope we are in such a moment again, not in the events of violent
> protests and mass marches and so on although more of those now would
> be nice, but in this other sense---the public disclosure sense that
> the entire establishment and its policy front are simply a lie, a
> sham. Not that me or anyone here doesn't already know that, but that a
> much greater mass of people can now see it, only because it is now the
> only thing to see. Most are probably hoping the Democrats will pull us
> out of this nightmare of the real. They could, anything is possible,
> but I doubt it. There are simply too many frauds running for office
> under the Democratic banner to expect anything but another debacle.
>
> I've got Arendt's Crises of the Republic here on the desk in front
> me. I haven't read it in years, and would probably disagree with some
> or maybe a lot of it now, but the titles of the essays alone seem to
> form a summary thought for this post:
>
> Lying in Politics
> Civil Disobedience
> On Violence
> Thoughts on Politics and Revolution
>
> In my mind the above form an arc in the historical sweep were the
> first leads to the second and then the third and finally to the last
> leads to action in the moment.
>
> Arendt in Lying in Politics writes:
>
> ``Hence, whn we talk about lying, and especially about lying among
> acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by
> some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason
> alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood
> deals with contingent facts: that is with matters that carry no
> inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they
> are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows
> how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our
> daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies
> or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or
> classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams
> of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need
> testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established
> in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human
> affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be
> beyond doubt---as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance,
> the statement that two and two make four.
>
> It is the fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point,
> and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because
> things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies
> are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality,
> since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the
> audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for
> public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas
> reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the
> unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
>
> Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which
> there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood
> that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough,
> even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of
> factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single
> falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on
> principle. This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the
> totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening
> confidence in the power of lying---in their ability, for instance, to
> rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the ``political
> line'' of the present moment or to the eliminate data that did not fit
> their ideology. Thus, in a socialist economy, they would deny that
> unemployment existed, the unemployed person simply becoming a
> non-person*.
>
> The results of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession
> of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is
> not among them. There always comes the point beyond which lying
> becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to
> which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the
> distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to
> survive Truth or falsehood---it does not matter which any more, if
> your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can
> be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the
> chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.'' (6-7p)
>
> *I would note that whatever went on in the socialist economies Arendt
> cites, in our society, the position of the non-person is taken
> here in this economy and in this day and age, by the illegal immigrant
> at the bottom of the wage ladder, kept there in political silence by
> the tissue of lies about the economic necessity of his and her
> political oppression. The so-called compromise legislation in
> Congress this very week, is full of such irrational nonsense. (And I
> owe WD for this insight, thanks again.)
>
> CG
>
>
>
>
>
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