[Paleopsych] Ted Rogers: The Revolution Will Be Televised
Premise Checker
checker at panix.com
Thu Jul 15 20:35:05 UTC 2004
The Revolution Will Be Televised
http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html
Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality In
Decline, (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994).
[1]W. Ted Rogers
What Guy Debord calls la societe du spectacle[2]1, what Jean
Baudrillard calls la societe de consommation[3]2 , what R.H. Tawney
calls the acquisitive society[4]3 , what Istvan Meszaros calls "a
metabolic system of control"[5]4 , what Arthur Kroker and David Cook
call the postmodern scene and excremental culture[6]5 , what Jacques
Ellul calls the technological society[7]6, Richard Stivers calls the
culture of cynicism. What is it? How did we get here? Stivers offers
an important analysis that proposes an answer to these questions.
"American society is experiencing a moral decline, the critics say.
[M]ost critics [from both the political right and the political left,
respectively] seem to think [social problems] can be solved by a
greater exercise of moral authority or by political reform." (p.vii)
Stivers counters these prevailing views by adding that "the decline
runs much deeper than this. For it is not signaled by a series of
discrete moral problems that the conventional morality can no longer
control, but by the Very Morality Itself, a morality that encourages,
even promotes, cynical and self-serving behavior." (p.vii) The
conventionality of Stivers' perception is highlighted by its echoing
of Solzhenitsyn here.
Although Stivers contrasts the relative positions of Kierkegaard (an
ethical position) and Nietzsche (an aesthetic position), it is evident
in some fashion that Stivers would agree with Nietzsche's assertion
that the Moral God is dead because we have killed him: "the nation
[America] has conquered the god of American Christianity [sic] and
become one itself in the process." (p.33) If the Moral God is dead,
what has the new god given us in his stead? Stivers responds: "Modern
American morality in its totality (content and form) is an expression
of the marriage between technological utopianism (mental structure)
and technological power (material structure)." (p.166) If this new
morality was only America's, Stivers' thesis might be of limited
interest; but he expresses agreement with Baudrillard that America is
the realised utopia towards which the rest of the world is headed:
"[A]s the most technologically advanced society, America is the future
of all modern societies." (p.viii)
As societies based on capital develop, they become more technological
and exalt the "virtues" of productivism - echoes of Baudrillard's
analyses in Le miroir de la production. This exaltation of
productivism leads to an emphasis on technique [technical rules] that
are extrapolated to all social action. Citing Jacques Ellul's The
Technological Society: "'Technique is the totality of methods
rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given
stage of development) in every field of human activity.'" (pp.71-72)
The invasion of technique into all human action has a telling result
for Stivers' story:
Technical rules are rapidly supplanting moral norms by making them
irrelevant. A technological civilization is one in which the means
absorb the ends. Traditional norms place limits on power; technical
norms are a form of power. (p.74) [...And, important for a society
of the spectacle:] Ethical meaning [derives] from a limitation of
power. [...] Power is more spectacular than the limitation of power
[!]" (P. 154)
This "power-play" has detrimental effects in that it breeds either
cynicism or idealism - one more piece of evidence in support of
Nietzsche's assertion that we have killed the Moral God and his
ethical system. "Ethical action has a source other than reality
itself, whereas cynicism and idealism both draw their inspiration from
reality in the very act of deceiving us about it. [In other words,
they cause us to enter into the hyperreal]. They are thus
ideological." (p.ix)
The ideology is power and the good that is sought is success. The goal
is accomplished through a naive belief in technological evolution.
"With evolutionary progress perceived as a deterministic process
[technique], power and goodness become identical. Success [the bitch
goddess, Stivers tells us, that Americans exclusively worship] is not
the result of moral character; rather it is moral character itself."
(p.24)
The emphasis on technique makes technology into a system, a
bureaucracy, which recharacterises the nature of power: "to the extent
that technology becomes a system [...], power becomes objectified and
abstract." (p.91) Therefore, a simulacrum of power leading into the
hyperreality in which we find ourselves. Borrowing from Owen
Barfield's Saving The Appearances, Stivers explains:
The equation of reality and truth is the most pernicious aspect of
the onslaught of technology and bureaucracy. It is not enough to
say that science has become the arbiter of truth in the modern
world, for the value of science today lies in technology.
Technology becomes truth. This represents the materialization of
truth. Perhaps this is what Heidegger meant when he called
technology the metaphysics of the twentieth century. (p.88)
This metaphysics works to replace "reality" with Baudrillard's
hyperreality which is more real than the real. Reality is destroyed!
Atomistic science has produced in effect a universe of random
facts. [...F]acts and reality are one, and our approach to reality
is purely aesthetical [therefore, hyper-aesthetics!]. We are
detached consumers of interesting facts. Reality is the sum of all
facts but is known one fact at a time. Therefore reality is
experienced as both fragmentary and interesting."(p.107)
Power as simulacrum, reality fragmented, destroyed, then metamorphosed
into hyperreality, a weltanschauung of hyper-aesthetics where
technology is truth [anti-truth] - voila! the new morality
[anti-morality]! A nightmare desert where the both the subject and the
social are corpses, victims of this society's brutal sign-violence.
"Technical rules, public opinion, peer group norms, and visual images
[spectacle], therefore, converge to create a morality of power,
morality without meaning. This morality of power, morality without
meaning, is, of course, an anti- morality from the perspective of
traditional morality, for it destroys symbolically- mediated
experiences. Technology and the visual images of the media tend to
destroy meaning, without which all norms become exclusively norms of
power. (p.167) [... And a]s technology attenuates a common morality,
the competition for the fruits of technology - increased consumption -
becomes more brutal."(p.165)
Therefore, a landscape of empty signs marked with a monument to
anti-morality and the graves of meaning, the subject, and the social -
all of the characteristics of the postmodern scene!
A Modest Proposal, Or Is Resistance Futile?
In the final chapter of The Culture of Cynicism Richard Stivers pleads
for a new ethic of opposition to the anti-morality, "a life-affirming
ethic instead of a self-destructive ethic. This ethic, however, must
be as unrelenting as the civilization it opposes. A life-affirming
ethic today must be an ethic of non-power and freedom." (p.180) A
total resistance to manipulation and forced conformity, a total
opposition "to technology as milieu and as a system out of control."
(p.181)
Beyond Stivers' analysis of the morality of postmodern technological
society, Stivers lends his voice to the slowly growing chorus calling
for total resistance, a resistance even to the appropriation of
resistance and its subsequent transformation into spectacle: "Were it
ever to attempt to become a morality rather than an ethic of
individual love and freedom, it would be swallowed up by the very
civilization it had chosen to oppose." (p.181) The revolution will be
televised!
But, if the alternative to resistance is the nightmare Stivers and
others describe, then maybe Stivers' modest proposal, far from being
feeble and naive, deserves consideration. Therein lies its real
importance. Although Stivers is somewhat vague about how to implement
this resistance [is he referring us to Kierkegaard?], other voices in
the chorus are more specific, if not more blunt:
Why not get together with some friends soon and say NO! Say no to
the draft, or work, or religion, or authority figures, or school;
say no to television, patriotism, political ideologies, any of the
thousand and one ways in which this society keeps you from
realizing your own needs and desires. You'll find the more you do
it, the more you'll like it! JUST SAY 'FUCK OFF.' YOU'LL GET A LOT
OF SATISFACTION.[8]7
However, there is a common theoretical position today that all
resistance to this anti-morality of the society of the spectacle is
doomed because it gets caught in the "doubling logic" of said society,
viz. it is coopted by society through the violence done on all signs
by the spectacle. Although Stivers is not explicit on this position,
he obviously rejects it. Echoes of Cornelius Castoriadis come through:
Someone who is afraid of cooptation has already been coopted. His
attitude has been coopted - since it has been blocked up. The
deepest reaches of his mind have been coopted, for there he seeks
guarantees against being coopted, and thus he has already been
caught in the trap of reactionary ideology: the search for an
anticooptation talisman or fetishistic magic charm. There is NO
guarantee against cooptation [...] Everything can be coopted - save
one thing: our own reflective, critical, autonomous activity. To
fight cooptation is to extend this activity beyond the here and
now; it is to give it a form that will convey its content for all
time and make it utterly impossible to coopt - that is, capable of
being conquered again and again, in its ever-new truth, by living
beings.[9]8
Len Bracken would agree that this is also the position taken by Guy
Debord, another theorist who rejects the Lyotardian position taken in
The Postmodern Condition - i.e., the death of the metanarrative of
liberation: "More serious play along the line of a
Bakhtinian-parasitutationist dialogue needs to be done rather than
following the nihilisticly cynical path of Baudrillard [...]"[10]9
Debord recommended doing violence to the signs of the society of the
spectacle through detournement among other strategies of negation - a
negation that saves Stivers' politics of total refusal from
indifference.
For the society of the spectacle to be effectively destroyed, what
is needed are people setting a practical force in motion. A
critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it joins
forces with the practical movement of negation within society; and
this negation which constitutes the resumption of revolutionary
class struggle, cannot for its part achieve self-consciousness
unless it develops the critique of the spectacle, a critique that
embodies the theory of negation's real conditions - the practical
conditions of present-day oppression - and that also, inversely,
reveals the secret of negation's potential.[11]10
The revolution will be televised but that, in itself, can be a weapon
against the tyranny of the culture of cynicism. The alternative is an
implicit endorsement of this culture.
_________________________________________________________________
W.Ted Rogers is the Serials Librarian of Old Dominion University,
Norfolk, Virginia. He discovered the politics of postmodernism when he
read two books: The Ecstasy of Communication by Jean Baudrillard and
The Postmodern Scene, by Arthur Kroker and David Cook, and moved on to
discover one of its sources in the International Situationiste.
[12]1. Guy Debord. La societe du spectacle. (Paris: Buchet-Chastel,
1967; Paris: Champ Libre, 1971).
[13]2. Jean Baudrillard. La societe de consommation: ses mythes, ses
structures. ([s.l.]: Editions Denoel, 1970).
[14]3. R.H. Tawney. The Acquisitive Society. (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1920).
[15]4. "Marxism Today: An interview with Istvan Meszaros", Radical
Philosophy (62: Autumn 1992).
[16]5. Arthur Kroker, David Cook. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental
Culture and Hyper-Aestetics. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).
[17]6. Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society, trans. John
Wilkinson. (New York : Vintage, 1964).
[18]7. Anti-Authoritarian Anonymous. "Midge and Cindy", Semiotext(e)
(13: 1987).
[19]8. Cornelius Castoriadis. "The anticipated revolution", in
Cornielius Castoriadis, Poltical and Social Writings: Volume 3,
1961-1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the
Autonomous Society trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis. (Minneapolis :
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.132.
[20]9. Len Bracken, [21]The Spectacle Of Secrecy, [22]CTHEORY (17:
1994).
[23]10. Guy Debord. "The Society of the Spectacle" trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Thesis (203), p.143.
_________________________________________________________________
[24]Baudrillard on the Web
References
1. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#bio
2. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 1
3. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 2
4. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 3
5. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 4
6. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 5
7. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 6
8. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 7
9. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 8
10. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 9
11. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#note 10
12. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 1
13. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 2
14. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 3
15. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 4
16. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 5
17. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 6
18. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 7
19. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 8
20. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 9
21. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/R-Spectacle_Of_Secrecy.html
22. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/ctheory.html
23. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/revolution.html#text 10
24. http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/baudweb.html
More information about the paleopsych
mailing list