“Critical” analysis of political speech should always operate under the following assumption: the purpose of all political speech (with the exception of political speeches made when a candidate leaves office, assuming that candidate isn’t trying to obtain a higher office) is to either advance a program or to advance a candidate. Everything else is subordinate to these two goals. (We should apply a different principle to demagogues like Glenn Beck. For them, everything that comes into their heads is rendered into speech. While they may have certain goals that they don’t explicitly state, it is safe to say that they have no clear plans for the execution of those goals, which are often apocalyptic in nature. Here, the more important task would be to connect a Glenn Beck to a Rupert Murdoch [Stentorello to Machiavelli, as Gramsci said] and to try to decipher the aims of the latter through the actions of the former.)
This subordination of message to goals renders “deconstruction” of political speech a bit naive. To show that the principals undergirding a public statement are, in themselves, contradictory or have an irrational core completely ignores why public speeches are made and how they work. For example, public anger at the failure of Bush’s excuses for the Iraq war should be countered with the self-critical realization that what matters is not Bush’s excuses, but the two facts that 1) we went to war; and 2) if we look for the actual reasons for war, they are under our noses (oil, Iran, bailing out the defense industry). Smiling smugly and stating, “Bush says that we went to war over WMD’s, but I know he’s lying,” will not do. After all, this should be our principle assumption, and all of our analysis should follow from this assumption. Journalists, committees, etc., can help, of course, by unpacking a lie, but by the time they have done so, things have moved far beyond that state of affairs.
We should treat the withdrawal from Iraq and Obama’s accompanying speech according to a similar principle. Rather than deconstructing the hypocrisy of talk about “freedom,” “American values,” etc., or making that classical deconstructionist move of assuming that the speaker believes in these values and then proceeding to show how they have an irrational core, we should treat such aspects of speech as what they are: formal flourishes that may or may not have any importance for the speaker, but certainly have importance for certain target audiences. Bush knows perfectly well that we went to war because the Middle East is a central strategic area for world politics at this moment, that oil is the most important resource in the world, that Enron and certain other right-wing entities were desperate to ramp up military spending after a lull in the Clinton years, and that opposition to Iranian regional hegemony has been one of Washington’s number one priorities since the Iranian Revolution. Anybody who wants to understand what happened should start there, and not with the sounding board of “freedom,” “American values,” and WMDs. We should deny ourselves the smug satisfaction of pointing to the hypocrisy of using terms like “freedom” to wage a war. After all, “freedom” was simply a bribe aimed at the more idealistic members of Bush’s audience. (We could talk about Bush’s Christian anti-Islamism, but I have my doubts about the degree of influence this had on the war, given Bush’s closeness to the Saudi Royal Family. They probably had more say in this than any Methodist preachers.) Political speeches may tell us certain things: what kinds of values are operative in a given social moment, how publics are addressed, how political figures secure agreement. They do not, however, tell us anything important about the motivations behind political actions or the philosophies undergirding an administration, and to treat them as doing so misses the point.
seems so obvious, and yet so few act as if this is the case.
for the ‘theory’ equivalent of political rhetoric, it’s interesting how zizek takes the same premise you have here (knowing the difference between the content of political speech and empirical reality isn’t enough of a basis for comprehension or critique) and uses it to justify philosophical idealism.
This post makes me think of this from Kos:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/5/897174/-The-Charlatan?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+dailykos/index+(Daily+Kos)
as well as this from Vu:
http://twitter.com/traxus4420/status/22679463262
I kind of think Zizek, in The Broken Kettle, is doing precisely what I’m critiquing: “See how smart I am. I realize that everything they’re saying is bullshit, that none of these excuses are true.” Lying and truth telling, though, are not the issue. I’m sure Bush told the truth plenty of times. What matters is that truth and lies are subordinate to what they’re being used to advance. I don’t want to call it “talking down,” per se, although it is true that politicos generally tend to see everyone else as idiots; rather, it’s what happens when speech is universalized, when a public is addressed that is supposed to represent every faction in a nation (and many factions outside of the nation, such as NATO, the UN, the Saudi royal family, etc.). Two principles have to be consistently maintained: 1) benefit must be immediate; 2) the message must be simple. The first principle means that one cannot construct causal chains or ten year plans (not without reason: look at the Soviet Union’s stupid 5 year plans). This means that the real motivations behind political actions – some of which have been in the works for twenty or thirty years – cannot be publicly stated. A kind of bargain is struck: ‘We, the public, know there is something “false” about your speech. We cannot identify it, per se, and so we have to let it be. We can complain, but we will look like crackpots if we do. Instead, we will accept your speech at face value, embrace the ideals that it substitutes for content, and continue to believe that these, and not anything else, are the real reason for carrying through the action.’
I fail to see why idealism would be an appropriate response here. I think it makes much more sense to talk in terms of technologies (in the broad sense, i.e., what Foucault called ‘apparatus’). The left fails because it doesn’t embrace people’s abstract hopes and fears? Really? Has Zizek ever seen a member of CPUSA or the Spartan League speaking? Has he ever been to a leftist political rally. There’s no shortage of idealism. There are some structural reasons why Fox News does better than MSNBC (and they have to do with sponsorship and conflicts of interest largely stemming out of the MS part of MSNBC, not with idealism). Idealism has its place, but this is another one of those things that everyone knows.
(If I ever come to think that Lúkacs understood politics and society better than Gramsci, that will be the day that I retract everything I’ve written here.)
re: zizek, i haven’t read the broken kettle, but i was referring to his “facts aren’t enough, we need theory” line, which he uses to critique noam chomsky, but also journalists and engaged intellectuals like tariq ali, etc. it goes along with the pseudo-althusserian claim that what the left needs is a new ideology, a popular idea in humanities departments, i’ve found (sometimes to the point of being taken for granted).
p.s. i don’t endorse this view.
My critique was more directed at the viewpoint of, “Oh my God, Bush was lying, it’s a conspiracy,” kind of political commentary, than at the in-depth, long-term analysis of foreign policy that Chomsky does. I remember Chomsky getting very irritated with someone who wanted to insist that Bush bombed the twin towers. His view was, just look at the ordinary functioning of government; you don’t need to go chasing the hidden conspiracies. If anything, Chomsky – who at MIT was very active in political organizing and in anti-war activism that went far beyond holding a loudspeaker in the middle of a college campus – would by my antidote, and not Zizek. “Facts are not enough; we need theory.” Sure, I guess. But it better be good theory; otherwise, we’re better off with facts.
But yeah, I knew you don’t endorse the Zizek viewpoint, so don’t read my last comment as directed at you.
I also want to object to this use of the word “theory,” which has become narrower and narrower over time. When Marx and Gramsci used it, it meant analysis of the historical conditions, the possibilities of revolution, of human consciousness, etc. When Zizek uses it, it refers to Lacanian Marxism. If we’re going to use that term, then I think we should keep it broad.
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It might be useful to subsume your theory of “political speech” under a broader theory of ideology. Michael Freeden makes a similar argument in ‘Ideology: A Very Short Introduction’:
“The first question the student of ideologies needs to pose does not relate to the qualitative substance of the ideology, to its ethical stance or its intellectual weight. It is rather: ‘*What has to hold* in order for this utterance to make sense/be true/be right for its producers and consumers?’ We have to understand the assumptions contained in an ideology prior to appraising them. We need to put ourselves into the shoes of the ideological promoter, and that requires a sympathetic, or at least impartial, reading of their words and phrases. Were we to direct the full power of philosophical and logical analysis and of ethical evaluation at most ideological material, that material would collapse under the pressure. But instead of concluding that the ideological arguments were hopelessly flawed, we might more wisely decide that we were using the wrong investigative equipment and consequently missing the point.”
I think that’s good advice for academics. We still need journalists, however, who can immediately tell the public that Sentator Asshole just lied his head off. During the run up to the Iraq invasion, it would have been better to have a bunch of Glenn Greenwalds in the MSM than a bunch of Michael Freedens.
(BTW, in your passing description of the “real” reasons for the Iraq War, you neglect the main causes of the invasion. Interviews with key players and internal documents suggest there were two big ones: (1) a genuine [if stubborn and unexamined] fear of Saddam’s giving away hypoethical WMDs to terrorist groups; and (2) the desire to exploit an anomalous mood at home and abroad in order to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East.)
Recommendation: *Do not* take Chomsky as your antidote to Zizek. The notion that he was a brave, unvarnished truth-teller, crying alone in the jingoistic wilderness of post 9/11 America is a myth. He insinuated and claimed all sorts of bizarre stuff in his lectures and interviews after the attacks, e.g. Soviet forces would have withdrawn prior to 1989 if not for the U.S. intervention, U.S. support for Islamists in the Balkans was part of some sort of master plan, the U.S was perpetrating a “silent genocide” in Afghanistan, etc.
My point is not that he was wrong on all these individual points (though he was) but rather that Chomsky has no interest in appealing to people whose opinions might help determine the future course of action. He believes his own B.S. about “manufacturing consent,” and has despaired of policy makers or the public ever listening to him. (And either of these groups *did* listen to him, it would necessarily be evidence of “selling out.”)
Linking 9/11 to, say, U.S. treatment of American Indians, Chile, Vietnam, Central America, etc. only make sense if you think that, with the WTC attacks, “a cosmic debt was being repaid” (to use Michael Berube’s phrase.) It makes little sense if you are trying to have a positive influence on American opinion or American foreign policy.
The second chapter in Berube’s book ‘The Left at War’ has a thorough and damning account of Chomsky’s response to 9/11.
Michael Freeden’s argument makes sense. It’s somewhat less polemical than my own (an “ideology” issue, but also an issue of what we want to accomplish: analysis or political action). But yeah, there’s also a big issue of hegemony, the cultural front, “war of maneuver”, etc., as well.
With point 1 on “reasons for going to war”, I don’t think you’re right. The desire to invade Iraq long preceeded the belief in WMD’s, and that belief simply provided an excuse. Here, I really do have to argue for something like a “subconscious”: the subconscious desire was to go to war, and any excuses would be valid. As for point 2, I agree 100%, and I did in fact give this as a reason, although in somewhat coded form: oil and Iran are synedoches for the desire to redraw the political map of the Middle East. I would also say that the declining defense industry is not a negligible element. Read The Project for a New American Century’s 2000 report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” This is the unofficial blueprint for the War in Iraq.
I’d go with Chomsky’s historical work, not his public statements.
“The desire to invade Iraq long preceeded the belief in WMD’s, and that belief simply provided an excuse.”
Actually, before 9/11, most of the neocons thought Saddam had *some* manner of WMD program. If I recall correctly, the evidence wasn’t very compelling one way or the other – but they gave him the benefit of the doubt.