Words are Enough
David Bromwich has some interesting analysis of Obama in the current LRB. A particularly insightful comment is he that has been tutored by the American establishment, but is not part of it: thus he aggravates the ordinary voter – seen as elitist –, while the powerful treat him with contempt.
In his piece Bromwich also highlights the self-referential nature of Obama's speeches and the commentary upon them. Their rhetoric appears to inhabit its own world. I look at this here.
But an odd thing about Obama’s presidency has been the extent to which his speeches are taken to be the site of the real action. ‘ There’s something weird,’ a close observer of politics said the other day, ‘about the way when you talk to people about Obama, they mention the speeches. “Oh it’s like the great moment in the Race Speech”… They talk about what he says and compare it to what he says.’ A species of aesthetic judgement has never been allowed to supplant political judgement in quite this way for any previous president. Obama must be aware of the unearned allowance, widely evident in the respectable media, and it can only encourage a false belief that his words are the moral equivalent of actions, as the words of other politicians somehow are not.
Early in the 20th century there began the obsession with language, with art as its own object, of self-contained cultural systems; of language games, of life as text, the linguistic cage…
A major strand of aesthetic and intellectual thought for over a hundred years has been dominated by ideas around the independence of language (linguistic, artistic, cultural; as well as intellectual and ideological), its remove from the underlying reality of lived experience. Since the Sixties a very influential line of thought is that we live in self enclosed language systems, which we cannot penetrate to the world outside. If Bromwich’s analysis is correct the University’s preoccupations have reached mainstream – or is it the other way round: Obama is proof of these ideas validity?
An enormous question, which must include ideas of relativism, the nature of science, the division of labour in the knowledge factories (universities), the economic system and the human mind. My sympathies are against the absolutism of the relativist trends, and their belief in the impenetrable nature of these self-enclosed systems. This is my working assumption in the analysis that follows.
This conception of the world, of isolated and opaque cultures, like fortified villages in the Middle Ages, has become the dominant liberal interpretation in the West. Yet one particular kind of society is looking to control the world; its views, its ideas, are becoming universal: and what a strange amalgam it is, because at its core is the idea of diversity and difference! Our little relativist kingdom on the fringes of Europe has become an Empire, and it is seeking to convert the world into one closed conceptual system. For it is the terrible irony of relativism that it contains an absolutist core.
What is striking about the above quote is that it captures a striking feature of these ideas: their distance, and immunity, from the experiences of the mundane world of eating, sleeping and surviving. The world of facts and emotions, of needs and desires, are reduced to theories and ideas, of texts and images. The latter treated as if they were the reality.
As a description of our media saturated world this is true. This is the world as we experience it culturally and intellectually. However, it is mistake to assume this is our only world, easy to make when there is no mainstream alternative in the mass media – no worker’s or Communist presses and TV stations to show the world from a different perspective.
Of course, if you have money and privilege you can insulate yourself from the hard reality of facts, you can live like a monk in a monastery – and it is striking how much of the new thought of the last century resembles Scholasticism. The world you inhabit becomes one of signs and symbols: because there’s no pressure to investigate the reality behind them (cognitive or physical pressure – the links between our lives, economic and social, and our ideas is both obvious and complicated. To disentangle them, and establish cause and effect, may not be possible).
So politician’s words are reality; bills of credit money, and a philosopher’s description of the world is simply a description of the words he uses…
Very telling in David Bromwich’s quote is his reference to the respectable media tolerance of Obama. This is the big question for modern politics, and a mainstream understanding of social, economic and political questions: the role and power of the media.
It is clear that the press do not control society, although they influence it massively (mostly in tune with the prevailing intellectual climate). However, the press is part of the State-Corporate nexus that does control the major forces in our society. And it reflects the concerns of those powers. Similarly the Catholic Church had an influence in Medieval Europe on the Kings and Emperors, while setting the ideological agenda, which buttressed their power. In the Enlightenment, part of which was the creation of a new world view, and part of which was its validation (particularly in France), the Catholic Church was a large target, because of its entrenched ideology and its connections to Reaction.
Dan Hind in The Threat to Reason compares today’s media with the Catholic Church of the C18th, and quotes Voltaire: Escrasez l’infâme. He argues that just as in France part of the intellectual fight involved a political struggle against the main ideological bulwark of the old order, so today part of any political struggle with involve similar work against the media. We see this very clearly in the States, with independent news like Democracy Now.
The struggle might be harder today. Already by the time of Voltaire and Diderot Christendom was crumbling – all across the piece, but particularly in its intellectual foundations. Today it is possible that rather than being at the end of a conceptual epoch, we are at its beginnings.
In his piece Bromwich also highlights the self-referential nature of Obama's speeches and the commentary upon them. Their rhetoric appears to inhabit its own world. I look at this here.
But an odd thing about Obama’s presidency has been the extent to which his speeches are taken to be the site of the real action. ‘ There’s something weird,’ a close observer of politics said the other day, ‘about the way when you talk to people about Obama, they mention the speeches. “Oh it’s like the great moment in the Race Speech”… They talk about what he says and compare it to what he says.’ A species of aesthetic judgement has never been allowed to supplant political judgement in quite this way for any previous president. Obama must be aware of the unearned allowance, widely evident in the respectable media, and it can only encourage a false belief that his words are the moral equivalent of actions, as the words of other politicians somehow are not.
Early in the 20th century there began the obsession with language, with art as its own object, of self-contained cultural systems; of language games, of life as text, the linguistic cage…
A major strand of aesthetic and intellectual thought for over a hundred years has been dominated by ideas around the independence of language (linguistic, artistic, cultural; as well as intellectual and ideological), its remove from the underlying reality of lived experience. Since the Sixties a very influential line of thought is that we live in self enclosed language systems, which we cannot penetrate to the world outside. If Bromwich’s analysis is correct the University’s preoccupations have reached mainstream – or is it the other way round: Obama is proof of these ideas validity?
An enormous question, which must include ideas of relativism, the nature of science, the division of labour in the knowledge factories (universities), the economic system and the human mind. My sympathies are against the absolutism of the relativist trends, and their belief in the impenetrable nature of these self-enclosed systems. This is my working assumption in the analysis that follows.
This conception of the world, of isolated and opaque cultures, like fortified villages in the Middle Ages, has become the dominant liberal interpretation in the West. Yet one particular kind of society is looking to control the world; its views, its ideas, are becoming universal: and what a strange amalgam it is, because at its core is the idea of diversity and difference! Our little relativist kingdom on the fringes of Europe has become an Empire, and it is seeking to convert the world into one closed conceptual system. For it is the terrible irony of relativism that it contains an absolutist core.
What is striking about the above quote is that it captures a striking feature of these ideas: their distance, and immunity, from the experiences of the mundane world of eating, sleeping and surviving. The world of facts and emotions, of needs and desires, are reduced to theories and ideas, of texts and images. The latter treated as if they were the reality.
As a description of our media saturated world this is true. This is the world as we experience it culturally and intellectually. However, it is mistake to assume this is our only world, easy to make when there is no mainstream alternative in the mass media – no worker’s or Communist presses and TV stations to show the world from a different perspective.
Of course, if you have money and privilege you can insulate yourself from the hard reality of facts, you can live like a monk in a monastery – and it is striking how much of the new thought of the last century resembles Scholasticism. The world you inhabit becomes one of signs and symbols: because there’s no pressure to investigate the reality behind them (cognitive or physical pressure – the links between our lives, economic and social, and our ideas is both obvious and complicated. To disentangle them, and establish cause and effect, may not be possible).
So politician’s words are reality; bills of credit money, and a philosopher’s description of the world is simply a description of the words he uses…
Very telling in David Bromwich’s quote is his reference to the respectable media tolerance of Obama. This is the big question for modern politics, and a mainstream understanding of social, economic and political questions: the role and power of the media.
It is clear that the press do not control society, although they influence it massively (mostly in tune with the prevailing intellectual climate). However, the press is part of the State-Corporate nexus that does control the major forces in our society. And it reflects the concerns of those powers. Similarly the Catholic Church had an influence in Medieval Europe on the Kings and Emperors, while setting the ideological agenda, which buttressed their power. In the Enlightenment, part of which was the creation of a new world view, and part of which was its validation (particularly in France), the Catholic Church was a large target, because of its entrenched ideology and its connections to Reaction.
Dan Hind in The Threat to Reason compares today’s media with the Catholic Church of the C18th, and quotes Voltaire: Escrasez l’infâme. He argues that just as in France part of the intellectual fight involved a political struggle against the main ideological bulwark of the old order, so today part of any political struggle with involve similar work against the media. We see this very clearly in the States, with independent news like Democracy Now.
The struggle might be harder today. Already by the time of Voltaire and Diderot Christendom was crumbling – all across the piece, but particularly in its intellectual foundations. Today it is possible that rather than being at the end of a conceptual epoch, we are at its beginnings.
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