← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · SARTRE
Thread ID: 4225 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2002-12-28
2002-12-28 20:09 | User Profile
[url=http://www.sociology.org/content/vol004.003/buchanan.html]The Veil of Piacular Subjectivity: Buchananism and the New World Order[/url]
Just posted this to my BATR Yahoo Group. OD may find value in just how crazed the world of education has become in their narrow 'PC' understanding of the struggle.
This very long and critical essay gives an insight into the sick academic educational mind that has brought us to the brick of national suicide. Here is the conclusion of author Mark P. Worrell. It is amazing that one can focus in on the issue and totally deny its truth in reality, and trash the only intelligent options to reclaim our country. Maybe one of the group would like to contact this brain surgeon! Be glad to enlighten this Yahoo . . .
SARTRE :ph34r:
Concluding Remarks
In the proceeding I have attempted to demonstrate that Buchananism, while rooted in older forms of capital critique, marks a dramatic break in the fetishization of the capitalist mode of production. The Buchananist fetishization of capital can be summarized as endophobic. It fears the corruption of capital and culture from internal forces adopting the spirit of globalization whereas older forms of capital fetishism have been predominantly exophobic. Where Father Coughlin and the Nazis feared aliens and external threats, post-Fordist compartmentalizations of capital, like Buchanan's, seek to combat the nearly complete colonization of America. In short, we have become identical with the alien. We are alien. To regain our once-sacred status, the forces of decency must wage a righteous battle. By proving ourselves in a great battle we will again stand in the reflected glory of God.
Buchanan's culture critique centers on the preservation of "sacred" boundaries and amounts to a campaign against the profanation of the sacred. Radicals, Marxists, feminists, homosexuals, abortion rights activists, immigrants, etc., all represent polluting entities by virtue of their transgression of, and contaminating effect upon, America's supposed historical, normative monism. While wearing a "populist" label and valorizing the power of the "grassroots," political Buchananism actually promotes the negation democracy and direct political activity. Buchananism does not promise collective and democratic participation but redemption by the hero. This authoritarian impulse is most evident in the Buchananist posture toward the working class and its anti- solidarity attitude vis-ÃÂ -vis labour. I have also tried to plausibly illustrate, drawing primarily on the work of Durkheim, Zerubavel and Zizek, that the Buchananist comprehension of culture and its political authoritarianism are wedded to, and inseparable from, anamorphotic processes inherent in a collective life devoted to the piacular intensification of identity amongst collapsing normative boundaries.
For sure, many people embrace multiculturalism and the affirmation of difference. For modernists, the hero has been and will continue to be Goethe's character Faust who willed the frenzy of modernity. The old humanist ethos of self-abandonment in negative particularities and the fury of modern life that we perceive in Hegel and Whitman, for example, is now being celebrated by an "optimistic" coterie of theorists emphasizing detraditionalization and reflexivity. However, the cultural transformations during the last generation makes possible the mass desire for the firming-up of symbolic systems and a spur to authoritarian protest as a response to these changes as well as expanded roles for the interventionist-surveillance state. Whether we refer to historically recent cultural changes in terms of a new, postmodern "regime of signification" (Lash 1990) or the increasing "autoreferentiality" and depthlessness of socio-cultural phenomena (Jameson 1991) the result is basically the same. Harvey (1990, p. 284) states that "we have been experiencing, these last two decades, an intense phase of time-space compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life." The brutal creativity and novelty of modern life can "lead to madness" according to Schon (1969, p. 98) and result in the "inability to formstructures that could be the basis for...perception of reality...."
Decisive amongst these disorientations has been the consequences of "volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices" (Harvey 1990, p. 285). The "production of volatility" has created a society routinely subjected to "disposability," the ascendancy of image over substance, the schizophrenic "collapse of cultural distinctions," ambiguous work relations, and the "collapse of spatial barriers" that lead to collective ambivalence and insecurity. Perhaps most importantly and least dealt with is the displacement of "late capitalist crises...to cultural and psychic realms" (Langman 1994, p. 116). It is plausible, as Langman argues, that "in the face of greater social fragmentation, pluralization of lifestyles, values, and variations of identity, certain fixed collective identities of the past become salient, primarily nostalgic themes which are seen in the embrace of traditionalism, especially conservative religions and patriotic nationalism that provide stable identities in the face of rapid social change" (1994, p. 120).
Buchananism is a piacular act of social regeneration and stabilization. Some people might call it an attempt at re- traditionalization. But, forced to carry out its project within the environment that its abhors (unlike Coughlin, for example), it embodies all sorts of ironies and contradictions. Not the least of these contradictions is the message of value monism, absolute and transcendental morality, and durability mediated by "fleeting, superficial, and illusory means whereby an individualist society of transients sets forth its nostalgia for common values" (Harvey 1990, p. 288). Buchananism's other great contradiction is the abandonment of material interests for ideal interests; every form of populism has been plagued by this tendency: the assassination of extended democracy in favour of "Americanization" or the dream of a Grossdeutchland. As Hirsch says:
Corresponding to a more and more divided society...an authoritarian need for security, a readiness for violence and a diffuse anxiety, a collective aggressivity and a private resignation, pseudo-liberalism and blunted morality as well as renewed nationalism is again useful as a cementing replacement for the material consensus of society which has disappeared. The new intensifying divisions have to be pasted over with the old-new enemy-images that are there: foreigners, drop-outs, social parasites and deviants, communists, pacifists...(1991,p. 31; cf. Harvey 1990, p. 168). It would seem that "As modernity gains ground," (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996, p. 32) "God, nature and the social system are being progressively replaced, in greater and lesser steps, by the individual - confused, astray, helpless and at a loss." But people are rarely at a complete loss or quite as helpless as social scientists often make them out to be. As misguided, confused and dangerous as they may be, large fractions of society simply will not allow their world to be abolished - at least not without resistance and destructiveness. The "evil of missing boundaries," as Durkheim calls it, does not go unsolved.
What might seem striking about Buchananism is not the extent to which it "misses the mark" on so many things and ventures off into fabulous portrayals of corrupting entities such as radicals and abortionists, but that people "fall" for this way of thinking. One might come to the conclusion that as a social critique, Buchananism is decidedly dissatisfying; it would seem implausible that Buchanan's critique of capitalist social relations could possibly appeal to the working class or that the basis of his appeal is determined primarily by class considerations.
But it could be much more reasonable to assume that Buchanan supporters are not really searching for social critique but transport to an enchanted world or the opportunity to re-enchant their existing world. Rather than critique and objectivity, which would lean on inquiry, analysis and facts, Buchananism represents the Lacanian "scopic drive" or desire to see it all without grasping anything. One could almost say that Buchananism represents a return of the Baroque's "madness of vision" or "the overloading of the visual apparatus with a surplus of images in a plurality of spatial planes." "As a result," says Jay, "it dazzles and distorts rather than presents a clear and tranquil perspective on the truth of the external world" (1993, pp. 47-8). Rather than "social critique" or getting to the bottom of things, Buchananism supplants opacity with mystification. But, as Buchananites alienate themselves by conferring power to representations bearing unearthly qualities they simultaneously energize themselves as a collectivity. It is, quite possibly, fun to be a Buchananite. The far right is able to provide people, especially youth, with excitement, organization, community, and a sense of moral purpose or indignation. These are things the left abandoned long ago.
In a recent issue of The Nation, Robert Reich had the following to say:
How do we define ourselves, as global capital erases national borders? What is it that deserves our passionate, relentless, unswerving commitment? In the absence of a coherent answer, the public arena has become a vacant lot, open to all sorts of wacky squatters: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, right-wing pundits from the Cato Institute and, from under other right-wing rocks, Ken Starr, Dick Morris, Phyllis Schlafly, Linda Tripp, Matt Drudge, editorial writers and columnists for the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Times [Buchanan included], religious nuts, conspiracy crazies, racists, Hillary-haters (1998). While many people feel equally exasperated over the long-term degradation of even mildly progressive politics, the spectacularization of public discourse, and the ascendancy of political theology in the U.S., Reich makes a mistake that countless other liberals have made. That mistake is ridiculing those on the extreme right as atavistic throwbacks or deranged to the point of clinical insanity. To dismiss "those nuts" on the right with a wave of the hand would be to ignore the fact that a massive segment of the American public has increasingly aligned its sympathies with these people and their ideas and they are far from being simple bumpkins. However, the days in which the ultra-right was dominated by hayseeds ended with the onset of the Cold War and the crusade against global communism. As Hofstadter stated (1965, p. 80) "The participants in [the] revolt against modernity are no longer rubes and hicks, and they have gained some both in sophistication and in cohesiveness..." Is allegiance to the far right indicative of nothing more than a propensity for being duped by a "fabric oferrors" or delusions? Is that all our mental representations are to us?
While the ultra-right's representations of global capitalism, politics, and culture may, and I think indeed are, egregiously in error and viscous, their ideologies, their systems of ideas, must be comprehended in a way that looks beyond the banal fact that they are, at best, simple or reductionistic half-truths and, at worst, the leading edge of an unforeseen era of demonological hysteria. The sociological approach to comprehending the right might be accomplished if we begin with the same approach that Durkheim took in analysing other systems of belief. To appropriate a few lines from this thinker, it might be said that the paleoconservative way of thinking represents a system of ideas with which individuals and groups represent to themselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it. This is their primary function; and though metaphorical and symbolic, these representations are not unfaithful to them ([1912] 1915, p. 257). It should come as no surprise to us, then, when we start to see similarities between what Buchanan, Robertson et al say about the nature of the world and what the theorists of post-traditional globalization have been saying.
Hence, while the ideas put forth by the extreme right are wrong, they are, as Durkheim would say, well founded. Their representations are grounded in reality, as they understand it. As Durkheim states, "The men who adhere to a collective representation verify it through their own experience. Thus it cannot be wholly inadequate to its object" ([1912] 1995, p. 439). Rather, the representations of the extreme right are not pure fictions but products of imaginative transfiguration (Durkheim [1912] 1995, p. 385). The extreme right will never be defeated by the collective laughter of liberals warming themselves by the fire of moral indignation. We must grasp the mentality of the right. To dismiss Buchananism would be to underestimate its intelligence and dimensionality and, likewise, to write Buchanan off as factually inaccurate would be to miss the point altogether.
2002-12-30 15:06 | User Profile
The word 'piacular' isn't in any dictionary I own. I guess they speak a different dialect of English up there in the higher echelons of the ivory tower.
2002-12-30 18:13 | User Profile
Here's what I found:
ADJECTIVE: 1. Making expiation or atonement for a sacrilege: piacular sacrifice. 2. Requiring expiation; wicked or blameworthy.
ETYMOLOGY: Latin piculris, from piculum, propitiatory sacrifice, from pire, to appease, from pius, dutiful.
2002-12-30 18:30 | User Profile
Originally posted by SARTRE@Dec 28 2002, 20:09 ** The Buchananist fetishization of capital can be summarized as endophobic. It fears the corruption of capital and culture from internal forces adopting the spirit of globalization whereas older forms of capital fetishism have been predominantly exophobic. Where Father Coughlin and the Nazis feared aliens and external threats, post-Fordist compartmentalizations of capital, like Buchanan's, seek to combat the nearly complete colonization of America. In short, we have become identical with the alien. We are alien... **
It might not be English, but it ain't bad.
People living in any sort of tyranny have to break through code, and in our former Republic the code is a sort of goose-stepping rampage of verbiage that dramatists and comedians are going to love satirizing after the Fall of America. The rest of us can enjoy it now.
Still, the small squib I've isolated up there is what the old-time Bolsheviks would call "objectively pro-nationalist." Cut through the blubber and we can use it. Couglin was a social reformer, not really related to the Nazis, but the threat then was indeed external. Now it isn't. And then the bullseye: We are alien.
It's entirely possible that the universities and foundations are putting out a whole literature of dissent. But we have to quote selectively and interpret freely. Do unto the scholars what they do to reality, sort of.