event mechanics

“It’s Doctor Who day!” so proclaimed Hugo award-nominated Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat on Twitter last night. I had already watched the five-part “Pond Life” webisode series through the BBC’s Youtube channel, like many other Doctor Who fans, in preparation of the new series. In Australia we were able to watch the first episode of the new Doctor Who series as soon as we woke up this morning thanks to the ABC making it available on their “catch-up TV” service iView. This is exactly what I did, with a coffee in one hand and my iPad in the other. That it coincided with Father’s Day meant my Facebook and Twitter streams were full of Whovian joy crossed over with accounts of fathers watching the show with their children.

And yet there were also the haters. They were in the minority of course, but one comment struck me in particular; the poster said that Doctor Who “is made for children and simpletons”. Obvious troll is obvious, but, still, the elitist platitudes rubbed me up the wrong way… Doctor Who wears its infantile pretensions on its cross-platform global-brand sleeve. To say it is made for children (and, hyperbolically, for simpletons) is to state the obvious. Doctor Who captures a certain kind of stupid that I want to suggest is desperately needed. Hence, this is a defence of Doctor Who by way of a defence of stupidity.

We live in a world in which stupidities attempt to impinge on our mental and spiritual well-being at every turn. Indeed, I used to think of plenty of things were stupid (and still do to a certain extent): elite sport, organised religion, liberal democratic politics, pretty much everything that someone else is doing. A normative appreciation of stupidity, firstly, locates the stupid in someone else, and secondly, works to trace this stupid as the outcome of some kind of failure; a failure of thought, a failure of imagination, a failure of agency and so on.

The greatest stupid is produced by those who think they are a success. This is a kind of existential stupidity that provides security and purpose. Success as an Australian means policing borders. Success as a savvy businessperson means embodying the will of the market. Success as a moral subject means becoming an evangelist of law and order. Conservatism here is not a political category; the politics is just an expression of the ‘claptrap’ (political speech triggering audience clapping on demand) experienced as a collective pat on the back.

None of this is new. To realise this stupidity as an inescapable milieu is pretty much the only quality that is shared by all post-Boomer generations. Some resist through attempts at withdrawal, but this is insufficient. Like the coffee in a forgotten stove-top espresso machine, strategic apathy percolates into a ‘bitter’ generational cynicism. This ‘burnt’ cynic attempts to ward off being swept up in stupidities, but as a result produces their own. The cynicism of youth valorises the stupid of noseless faces.

The performative knowingness of the cynic is balanced with the performative naivety of the existentially enfranchised. This is more about the earnestness of those who transcend the collective stupidities of the individual and rather than choosing success, they choose the struggle. They are working to transcend the conditions of existence that forever turns inward back to the individualising ‘us’: the individual, the family, the nation. The stupid of the struggle is a failure to realise that resistance is futile; worse, it becomes a resource for the ‘winners’, like two cogs turning against each other.

Three forms of ideal stupidity; actual stupid is a combination of the three. If everything is stupid, how can anything or anyone escape or resist or succeed? Embrace your stupidities. In ancient Greece, Socrates called stupidity ‘ignorance’ and wisdom was the recognition of the way ignorance was an inherent character of humanity. Socrates did not live in our world, however. The possibility of ‘wisdom’ is to smuggle stupidity in through the backdoor under the aegis of philosophy. Although, Socrates was definitely on to something. Kant argued for a higher ‘pure’ rationality that transcends stupidity, but he did not recognise the conditions of rationality as being his own stupidity: the unthought of thought that haunts the modernist project. The stupid is the inescapable outside of thought that conditions the possibility of thought. Kant is the Batman of thought. “Why so serious?”

The fourth response is to follow Socrates, but turn Kant into the Joker, and go ‘meta’ to recognise the limits of the other three kinds of stupidity. The antidote to aggrandised Socratic beard-stoking, while at the same time pursuing an unforgiving self-awareness, is through play. To play is to suspend seriousness in a way that is often utterly serious. Is it a surprise then, that practices of ‘meta’ in the form of play characterise much of the activity found on social networks? “Best cat video.” Or imagining politicians as anthropomorphised animals? This is stupid, without a doubt, but it is obviously so. Almost anything that exists in the online economy of memes is an exchange of stupid. This is an invitation to a playful stupidity that is utterly serious.

Hence, it is a mistake to imagine the audience for Doctor Who as children when it renders explicit its process of infantilising the audience. Using the tropes of popular family-oriented science fiction television, Doctor Who incorporates this outside of thought into an hour or so of accessible television. Doctor Who is a suspension of seriousness that is utterly serious; a playful ‘meta’ of serious television and culture more generally. It is an invitation to become aware of our own stupidities.

Post originally appeared at Limited News.

When I teach journalism students how to do SEO (and the tensions around it etc) I begin with Google’s Adwords Keywords tool so they get a sense of how the ‘Google algorithm’ indexes (‘experiences’/’perceives’?) the language we use in keyword searches. I want the students to understand that when a journalist uses SEO they are basically making allowances for how a machine will ‘read’ their text. Of course, the ‘reading habits’ of the Google algorithm are assembled from aggregated user data, etc. so ‘read’ is the wrong word here, but it is a necessary word to bridge different comprehensions of how human text is perceived. As a sidenote, much of the research in contemporary newsrooms has found that most practicing journalists experience this as an unwelcome intervention in their journalistic practice. Experiencing the intervention of ‘Google’ as ‘alien’ (or similar to what I believe you call the ‘strange stranger’). [A good example of this is the SEO friendly insistence on the removal of 'stop words', which can radically change the meaning of a title or headline.]

Tim Morton left a few clarifying comments to my post about Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. Part of my response is above and it got me thinking about previous engagements between the ‘alien’ and media studies. It reminded me of the Autonomedia volume Media Archive and the short essay The Alien and Its Media by Adilkno. From Charlie Gere’s brief MetaMute review of Media Archive:

ADILKNO, an English rendering of the Dutch acronym BILWET, denotes the ‘Stichting ter Bevordering van de Illegale Wetenschap’, or ‘Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge’, a group of ‘non-academic theorists’ who came together out of the Dutch squatter and autonomous movements of the early 1980s.

I have the print version of Media Archive and it is a fantastic collection of polemical essays. The Alien and Its Media is a very brief essay and I want to suggest that the ‘alien’ of Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology is very similar to (if not the same as) Adilkno’s ‘alien’ albeit with different nuances. Adilkno’s ‘alien’ is derived from McLuhan’s early work on the ‘extension’ of the human into media as an alienation of the human (see the relevant sections in this essay on The Dialectical Methods of Marshall McLuhan, Marxism, and Critical Theory). The ‘alien’ as it figures in The Alien and Its Media is a rearticulation of this processual relation of alienation, but where the ‘alien’ has its own agency.

Media as Hybrid of Alien and Human Being

The opening section of the essay characterises media as a “battle for significance” between and “unholy hybrid… sum” of “alien and human being”. The essay opens by identifying three strategies for the neutralisation of this battle, which I’ve summarised below with some quick examples:

1. Media is civilised. This is basically a kind of ‘(ex)communicative rationality’ response. It is a form of censorship whereby the alien is exiled, but returns with a catastrophic vengeance as a kind of Virilioian ‘integral accident’ (i.e. glitches, crashes), such as the fantastically imagined as the ‘millenium bug’. See Adilkno’s essay from Media Archive on Communication Catastrophe.

2. Defect to the alien. This is the OOO/’new aesthetic’ response. It is a “demand on modern media to become appallingly strange”. Or, as Bogost puts it in th context of the ‘new aesthetic’, it needs to get ‘weirder’. This is a kind of celebratory mode of engagement. “The sublimation of evil into the sublime intends to confine the alien’s dangerous unpredictability to the aesthetic experience of the uncodable, to be consumed within an institutional framework.”

3. Symbiotic/parasitic banalization of the alien into everyday life. This is the everyperson’s ‘coping mechanism’ response; I suspect this is what Morton was working to disrupt with his Nonhuman Turn plenary performance/paper. What Adilkno’s calls the “alien high” (experiences of ‘speed’ or the ‘void’ produced at the level of the ‘machinic’) is “treated as a spiritual initiation”. Think about the first time someone showed you how torrents worked. I’d suggest that the character of the banalization is situated in a specific cultural context. There is a whole genre of person-out-of-time/space films that works to explore this problematic. For example, the Back to the Future series of films are based on the premise of the main characters negotiating between the constraints of competing banalities. On banality see Greg Seigworth’s excellent essay (written as a response to Meaghan Morris’s warning to cultural studies)

Media as ‘Alienation’

“The new media launched by the alien will absorb so much enthusiasm that the bizarre alienating effects of the previous media’s terminal phase are promptly forgotten.”

Adilkno develops a quasi-Marxist/McLuhanist engagement with media, which is entirely absent from Bogost’s book and therefore it would not be fair to compare the two. Closer to Adilkno’s discussion of alienation is the work of Beller. There are various combinations of relations that produce viewership for coordinating the labor of looking. Beller on alienation (bold added):

Though today it may appear that images are the cause of “man’s intellectual confusion,” the alienation of our senses; they are really its consequence. Such is the reason, for example, that Americans do not know or did not see or did not feel the deaths of all those Iraqis, do not dwell on the poverty and prostitution of Asia, do not rise up to help ameliorate the disease and famine imposed upon Africa, do not reckon the consequences of their intervention in Latin America. Images are the alienated, objectified sensuality of humanity becoming conscious for itself through the organization of consciousness and sense. They are an intensification of separation, capital’s consciousness, that is, human consciousness (accumulated subjective practices) that now belongs to capital. Because our senses don’t belong to us, images are not conscious for us. Or rather, they are conscious “for us” in another sense, that is, they are conscious in place of us. As the prosthetic consciousness of the world system, these new sites of sensuous production serve someone or something else. [...]
Thus, cinema is an alienation effect, a result of the increasing quantity of historically sedimented labor creating a shift in the quality of capital itself. Mediations which formerly appeared as ontological (seeing, desiring) now appear as technological (viewing, producing).

The Adilkno essay argues that the hybrid character of media is elided for as long as the focus is on the “human factor”. Similar to OOOers, the point is that they are emphasising the ontological dimension of what Beller is calling the ‘technological’.

Media Genealogy

“Media genealogy is to be interpreted as the chronicle of the coming-out of the alien.”

The neo-McLuhanist approach of Adilkno is fully apparent in their account of the manifestation of the ‘alien’ as a historical signature of media development. Awareness by producers and users of the hybridity of media prompts the development of new media. Aliens “arrive everyday at the push of button” and they “steer humanity toward new media techniques”. The media archaeology movement has a very thorough appreciation of this manifestation of the alien-as-agency that subsumes and coordinates human sensory apparatus. Traces of the alien are found in nineteenth century literature as the experience of a foreign body within the body: the “poetic mechanism is a vehicle for ‘outside powers’.” The alien taps into the human subconscious in the form of images of the supernatural. At stake is the erasure of the distance between the image and the experience, or the experience of the ‘image’ itself. “The alien follows its own trajectory.” This account of media archaeology is preoccupied with the alienation of human experience that transforms media into a conduit of dissassociated ‘(im)personal’ charisma. Manifestation of celebrity worship is not the dialectical subsumption of desire into the ego via the image, but the condition of possibility for belonging itself.

Any critique of Adorno’s concept of the culture industry or mass culture that begins by introducing the notion of identity and the relation between identity and any segment of culture focuses on what is essentially the weakest, if not inconsequential, part of Adorno’s critique. The ‘identity’ critique is based on an overvaluation of the importance of variation (aesthetic or otherwise) in a cultural commodity or a range of cultural commodities. For example, the distinction made by Bernard Gedron between a cultural text and a functional artefact in his critique of Adorno’s critique of popular music relies on the kind of ‘information’ that Adorno argued was required for patrons of mass culture to be able to identify the objects of their ‘curiosity’. Gedron argues that unlike a particular part of a particular model of a mass produced automobile that can be swapped out for another part, a cultural text does not have this parts interchangeability. A more sophisticated version of this critique in the latter part of Gedron’s article is to suggest that the apparent changes within a given market of popular culture is clearly evident of Adorno’s inability to sufficiently account for variability of identity. A focus on cultural commodities at the expense of other aspects of Adorno’s critique signals an utter misapprehension of Adorno’s critique. More broadly, as noted by Max Pensky, there is a normative mode of engagement with Adorno’s writings that is little more than a “ritualistic gesture, reiterating the familiar charges of elitism, pessimism, and high-modernist myopia.” Pensky continues to say that the “trouble is that such accounts effectively preclude critical engagement with the body of thought in question.”

A far more useful way to read Adorno is as a critical theorist of temporality. By ‘temporality’ I do not mean a temporality in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of a dialectical movement that attempts to capture a teleological historical development from one historical mode to another. Bruno Latour’s argument that we have never been modern strongly suggests an alternative thesis to a developmental conception of history. For Latour, modernity is an event that is differentially repeated and (re)produces particular configurations of relations. This is a Foucauldian type of argument, where epistemic shifts are aggregated dispositifs that must continually (re)produce particular compositions of hierarchical power relations. Power does not come from above however, it runs through populations in the ways they reproduce the conditions of their own subjection.

The theory of temporality that I am extracting from Adorno’s writing has more in common with the later writings of Althusser than with a dialectical negative critique of historical development. A productive ‘philosophy of contingency’ dominates the later work of Althusser, and is very useful for understanding the properly immanent nature of contingency. The ‘encounter’ of an ‘aleatory materialism’ “becomes the basis of all reality”:

Whence the form of order and the form of beings whose birth is induced by this pile-up, determined as they are by the structure of the encounter; whence, once the encounter has been effected (but not before), the primacy of the structure over its elements; whence, finally, what one must call an affinity and a complementarity [completude] of the elements that come into play in the encounter, their `readiness to collide-interlock’ [accrochabilite], in order that this encounter `take hold’, that is to say, `take form’, at last give birth to Forms, and new Forms — just as water ‘takes hold’ when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, mayonnaise when it emulsifies. Hence the primacy of ‘nothing’ over all ‘form’, and of aleatory materialism over all formalism.

“The Schema of Mass Culture” presents an argument for how mass culture produces populations that are trained to process contingencies in ways that reproduce the culture. That is, the schema of mass culture is to modulate the capacity of populations to process a temporal order that belongs to an aleatory materialism. Adorno initially describes this modulation as ‘pre-digestion’: the “permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place”. Difference as that which forces repetition is annihilated; instead there is a circularity that short-circuits self-reflection. This is the ‘totality’ of mass culture, a series of “pre-digested” tendential movements. The elements of this short-circuiting relation are practically irrelevant (which geek with which Apple product? Does it matter beyond an “infantile compulsion”?).

Consumers therefore find themselves in what Adorno calls an “abstract present”. Co-ordinates of recall beyond the short-circuit are extinguished, except in peculiar discursive moments where the past, as ‘nostalgia, is mobilised to valorise the appropriateness or not of the present. The reward for this erasure is that the “tension” of the consumer suspended by the short-circuit is guaranteed a ‘happy ending’ in the “ritual conclusion”. Adorno relates this ‘tension’ to the capacity to witness suffering, that is, negative affect. In its place is a passive affection of the ‘happy ending’. Negative affects are not necessarily passive, as Elspeth Probyn has noted in her work on ‘shame’. The experience of shame signals, in the first instance, that a subject is interested, thus sending the subject off on what Sylvan Tomkins called an ‘activation contour’ that develops in the body as the experience of shame. Perhaps the subject is spurred into action by this negative affect, and thus suffers from ‘active affections’ and the correlative increase in the capacity to act. The resolution of tension in the short-circuit of the ‘happy-ending’ is a depotentialisation of affect, so the short-circuit becomes a mechanism for the production of passive affections or what Weber called ‘charisma’.

What post-structuralist philosophers call a relation of futurity is therefore hobbled. This is not some kind of magical process however. There is a mechanics of the event structurated in perception through a suspended expectation. This is the happiest ending, as it were. An ending where this in fact no resolution, but the constant repetition of tension. Adorno likens this to the variety act, which for spectators is experienced as a kind of ‘waiting’; where the “waiting for the thing in question, which takes place as long as the juggler manages to keep the balls going, is precisely the thing itself”. Adorno describes this as a “suspension of living developmenet”, an apparatus of capture produced through the riveting experience of observing potential failure.

There are therefore two ways that the short-circuits produced by the culture industry ‘end’ (or, better, cycle again for another ‘beginning’) and that is through the projection of a ‘happy ending’ as a resolution of tension to produce the subservience of passive affections or a manipulation of tension as a way to capture attention. What if one becomes aware of this short-circuit? What if it is simply refused? What is the secondary apparatus of capture produced by mass culture that ensures there is no escape?

The secondary apparatus of capture is located in the total commodification of ‘curiosity’ and its relation to what Adorno terms ‘information’. Like the surplus labour that is used to control workers, there is a “reserve army of outsiders” ready to participate. They are organised in relation not to the exchange value of their labour but in the production of visibilities of the latest novelty. Did you hear about…?!

The less the system tolerates anything new, the more those who have been forsaken must be acquainted with all the latest novelties if they are to continue living in society rather than feeling themselves excluded from it.

Mass culture becomes a sport, which is “not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection”. There is a compulsive repetition to inflict upon oneself “the same injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society”. Exemplar: Love it or leave it. Kiss the flag. Are you with us or against us. “The act of repetition schools obedience,” Adorno writes, and in doing so absorbs the radical potential of anxiety. Beyond participation, the spectator contains nothing of the potentially redeemable characteristics of sportsmen (“certain virtues like solidarity, readiness to help others or even enthusiasm which could prove valuable in critical political moments”). Mass culture only wants the “howling devotees of the stadium” as they replace spontaneity is a “crude contemplative curiosity”. There is another circuit here, both an extension and an intensification of the short-circuit of pre-digested interest. Instead of facing towards a circular ending planned into the commodity, the commodification of curiosity is a way of incorporating contingency and dissolving its radical potential.

Adorno describes information as the socialisation of curiosity; that is, information “refers constantly to what has been preformed, to what others already know”.
Information is a socialisation of curiosity in the sense that information as a mechanism of control “enforces solidarity with what has already be judged”. It is a deprivation of knowledge about the object of curiosity for the purposes of bestowing the curiosity with satisfaction. Is this not how the entirety of online ‘discussion’ functions? The distribution of knowledge as a diluted ‘information’ about whatever contingency in the world fires up our ‘curiosity’? Whoever cannot answer the challenge of providing curiosity with its palliative antidote of information, that is, of “effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgements of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual”. This is played out in the production of “hieroglyphic meaning” as consumers cannot escape either short-circuit. They turned inward, that is, turn into the elements of the relation rather than the implication in the relation at all.

The more the film-goer, the hit song enthusiast, the reader of detective and magazine stories anticipates the outcome, the solution, the structure and so on, the more his attention is displaced towards the question of how the nugatory result is achieved, to the rebus-like details involved, and in this searching process of displacement the hieroglyphic meaning suddenly reveals itself. It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’, and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the consumers.

Hence, the tension is reproduced as a general anxiety of whether or not the subject of mass culture, the consumer, is sufficiently implicated in its workings: “Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror”. The micro-fascisms of everyday life betray an anxiety that is harboured “within the very medium of technological communication”. It is not that you are anxious about leaving your mobile phone at home, it is the anxiety produced when you do. What short-circuits have you accidently disconnected yourself from? How will you be an insufficient spectator of pre-digested curiosities? Under a hieroglyphic aegis, how will you be able to smuggle in the judgement of contingency with the satisfaction of knowing what comes next?

Researcher at the Institute of Public Affairs, Chris Berg, drew my attention to a tweet by Simon Banks from Simon’s official Hawker Britton (lobbying/PR firm) twitter account:

More proof that Think Tanks are Lobbyists: http://t.co/ZM2q9Kx and my article on why they should disclose their funding: http://t.co/dvbPEyj

It is about the plan to create an industrial relations think tank in the existing Melbourne-based think tank the Insitute of Public Affairs. Support for the new think tank is being provided by those who would benefit the most from a dismantling of the existing Fair Work industrial relations policy:

The [SMH] has learned the former mining executive, Hugh Morgan, has also been a key driver of the process, as has Michael Chaney, a former president of the Business Council of Australia and currently the chairman of Woodside Petroleum. Both have been recruiting executive support.

Bernard Keane has posted an article on Crikey about trying to measure the effect of the existing Fair Work policy on industrial relations. There are a number of measures or indicators for gauging how successful or not the policy has been. He argues that the aspects of industrial relations that would result in the easiest and most beneficial response to the overall economy (the “low hanging fruit”) has been addressed. Now there is the far more “complex challenges” to address to lead to greater productivity:

Now there are more complex challenges like infrastructure investment (and charging for infrastructure), lifting the return from our health and education investment and the “human capital agenda” which the Howard government, under pressure from the Bracks government, belatedly recognised as important to lifting productivity.

Chris got fired up about Simon’s tweet and framed the tweet in terms of whether or not “people genuinely hold views about public policy”:

Australian researcher of social work and welfare, Philip Mendes, describes two of the most common ‘defences’ that think tanks mobilise when critiqued for their role in the production of policy and the influence they have on governance. The first is regarding funding (and it is a similar point to that of Simon Banks regarding lobbyists):

The think tanks claim to be politically independent, and to be offering impartial and disinterested expertise. They insist that their intellectual integrity and hence credibility is protected by their multiple sources of income (Stone, 1996:117; Lindsay, 2000). However, critics argue that they are generally partisan, motivated by political and ideological bias, practice the art of directed conclusions, and have more in common with corporate-funded vested interest groups or pressure groups concerned with political activism and propaganda than with genuinely academic or scholarly institutions (Beder, 1997:75-77; Bone, 2000).

Berg defends this new think tank by following similar lines of argument. He argues that the work of the IPA is funded from 1000+ sources:

At stake here for Berg here is a kind of “cash for comment” type scenario where he is trying to ward off the impression that the IPA simply becomes an ideological mouthpiece for the highest bidder. The other part of the defence is regarding the “truthfulness” or “genuiness” of the beliefs held by members of the IPA or think tanks more generally. The line of argument is that members genuinely hold their beliefs and that they are not bought by those that fund the think tank. Mendes describes part of this point thus:

Finally, they persistently claim to be independent and objective purveyors of truth, uninfluenced by vested or sectional interests. Consequently, their pronouncements, however extreme or bound by ideology, are often granted greater legitimacy and receive less critical public attention than the views of organisations holding more obvious political links and interests.

Of course, the “truth” that Berg is advocating is the “truth” of his own (and it seems those of his fellow IPA members) beliefs in relation to the research he carries out and the arguments he mobilises in his research and opinion-piece writing work. He is making a distinction between think tanks and lobby groups, where he is implying that lobby groups do not genuinely hold their beliefs and are therefore less “true” (or authentic maybe?) than the think tanks, such as the IPA, who are also attempting to intervene in policy debates.
A third defence that Berg mobilises in a tweet in response to me are based around an understanding of the public sphere and whether or not participants in policy discussions in the public sphere should be considered “lobbying”:

Berg is implicitly defining lobbying as the activity of professional lobbyists. If lobbying is understood to happen as the intent of “non-lobbyists”, he suggests, “that would make everyone who participates in public debate a lobbyist, surely”. Well, no. The definition of lobbying that most people understand to be lobbying is defined by the activities of special interest groups, such as those that fund the IPA, to advocate their “genuinely held beliefs” in such a way to influence public debate and therefore government policy. For example, one of the wikipedia definitions of lobbying is:

‘Lobbying’ (also ‘Lobby’) is a form of advocacy with the intention of influencing decisions made by the government by individuals or more usually by Lobby groups; it includes all attempts to influence legislators and officials, whether by other legislators, constituents, or organized groups.

Surely the point of a think tank such as the IPA or the new industrial relations think tank is to advocate a particular position and in doing so influence decisions made by the government?

Of more interest to me is reframing lobbying activities in a “post-political” era. (And here I am going to go off on a tangent concerned with my own research.) Chantal Mouffe has described the “post-political” as characterised by the negation of antagonisms. Distinct from a rational consensus model, the point of democracy is to promote the confrontation of opposing hegemonic positions. She writes:

This kind of liberalism is unable to adequately grasp the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails; conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist. the typical liberal understanding of pluralism is that we live in a world in which there are indeed many perspectives and values and that, owing to empirical limitations, we will never be able to adopt them all, but that, when put together, they constitute an harmonious and non-conflictual ensemble. this is why this type of liberalism must negate the political in its antagonistic dimension. (10)

The negation of antagonism and the reproduction of a (neo)liberal hegemonic consensus is not simply a philosophical point; it is a political practice. The work of think tanks may, at first glance when taken in isolation, appear to exist purely for the purposes of antagonism. That is, their only point is to advocate their genuinely held political views and work hard to impose their ideologies on the rest of the population by influencing policy decision making. The negation of antagonism and the reproduction of (neo)liberal hegemony does not simply happen through think tanks however. As Mendes notes (writing in the early 2000s):

It should be emphasised that neoliberal think tanks do not promote these ideas in isolation. Other important sources of neoliberal influence in Australia include sections of the media such as the Australian Financial Review and influential journalists such as Alan Wood, Christopher Pearson and Piers Akerman, academics such as Judith Sloan and Peter Dawkins, senior econocrats in Canberra such as Ted Evans and Ian Macfarlane, business economists and financial analysts, overt corporate lobby groups such as the Business Council of Australia, and significant groupings within the mainstream political parties. The think tanks constitute one specific component of this larger ‘economic rationalist’ coalition (Argy, 1998:56-57 & 231-239; Stone, 1998:153 & 157). (32)

This coalition or ‘media ecology’ has changed to some degree over the last decade or so, but there are enough familiar names in Mendes’s list for the point to stand. They all work in concert to reproduce the hegemonic ‘common sense’. Mouffe’s (and Laclau’s) arguments about “hegemonic articulations” focus on their apparently self-positing character. A classic example of this is when someone explained to me that “We shouldn’t have illegal immigrants because they are illegal”.

Another way to frame the post-political era that relates to the work of think tanks is regarding the production of political enthusiasm. “Political enthusiasm”, particularly in any kind of liberalist context, would appear to be an oxymoron. “Enthusiasm” was traditionally understood to refer to the religiosity (and therefore, irrationality) of the public in the pre-Enlightenment era. It was the work of great Enlightenment figures to banish enthusiasm (in its religious guise) from the public sphere. It would seem that the (neo)liberal think tanks would align themselves on the side of Enlightenment figures who advocated on the side of rationality in the face of religious enthusiasms. As Mendes (writing about another think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies) notes, they advocate “an economy based on free and competitive markets, and individual liberty and choice, including freedom of association, religion, speech, and the right to property (Beder, 1997:81)” (39). Hence the apparent contradiction in me suggesting that the work of think tanks and the rest of the hegemonic media ecology is not ideological per se, but primarily regarding the (real or apparent) induction of enthusiasm in a given population for particular policy outcomes. The appearance of population-wide anxiety is a good indicator that the hegemonic media ecology is working to produce enthusiasm for a given set of ideological policy imperatives.

The contemporary media apparatus in general trains audiences to be anxious about “complexities”. A “complexity” is the hegemonic term adopted by nearly everyone in politics for the site of what Mouffe calls an “antagonism”. The next key term in (neo)liberal discourse when negating antagonism and producing enthusiasm is “challenge”. A “challenge” denotes a political contingency that cannot be easy incorporated into existing perceptions of whatever is at stake. It is often used in the phrase “the challenge of [issue]”, particularly in speeches. If you do a cursory search for the keywords [“challenge of” speech] you’ll see what I mean. Isolating the “challenge of” in political discourse signals the emergence of a heterogeneity in the normally hegemonic dialectical (for example, us vs them) order. A “challenge” has relatively unique onto-epistemological characteristics in that various populations with various partisan interests can engage with the same, single contingency presented in the social or political order in different ways. (Here is some earlier writing on the subject.)

For example, if you suggest, as Bernard Keane does in his Crikey article, that “more complex challenges” are coming in industrial relations debates, then most casual or informed observers from any side within politics will probably agree in the first instance. In the second instance, the “challenge” will be rearticulated in such a way so as to strip it of its heterogeneity and antagonistic potential. This is the work of the hegemonic media ecology and in particular this is the work of (neo)liberal think tanks to present “ready-made” policy positions so as to frame such heterogeneity in ways that negate the “complexity” of social and political issues. The heterogeneity of antagonisms is important in the political arena as the absence of consensus indicates a site whereby the collective imagination of a population must strive to find a way to accommodate such heterogeneity.

My interest in all this and an area of possible future research is the function of think tanks to produce enthusiasm for a given set of ideologies within a population and thus mobilize a population according to the ideologies of that of the think tank and its funders.

Mendes, Philip. (2003) “Australian neoliberal think tanks and the backlash against the welfare state.” Journal of Australian Political Economy, 51: 29-56.
Mouffe, Chantal. (2005) On the political.

Although my focus is on the composition of power relations that constitute a given scene of enthusiasm and the ways amateur labour is commodified, the other bigger project that I hope to eventually turn to (after doing my existing project justice) is the question of contemporary political enthusiasm. Hopefully this will explain why I am seem to be fascinated by enthusiasm. One of my theses is that the emergence of enthusiasm within a citizenry of a given democratic nation state is framed by the mainstream media as an exception to its normative functioning. Enthusiastic uprisings are represented as exceptions. The problem is that the world faces problems on a scale that require the drive of enthusiasm. Working back from Ralph Emerson’s observation that “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” is that for something ‘great’ to be achieved requires ‘enthusiasm’.

The operational character of enthusiasm has not changed much since the pre-Kantians discussed it as a synonym for ‘fanaticism’. Subjects of enthusiasm pursue a singular task at the exception of all others and, at the same time, enthusiasm is affectively contagious. The work of many thinkers over the course of the 18th and 19th Centuries was to use ‘enthusiasm’ as a negative example in the functioning of a rational citizenry and representive government. They were on the side of Enlightenment Rationality fighting the forces of Religious Mystification. Except for a few asides, it was not until Kant’s comments on the character of spectators supporting the French Revolution did ‘enthusiasm’ gain a positive political meaning. Kant argued that the general support of spectators for the revolution meant that they recognised the Idea of the Good in the revolution and therefore the collective valorisation by spectators of the revolution demonstrated that the revolution transcended practical judgement and was an example of good moral judgement.

The problem in the contemporary era is not judgement per se, but firstly the problem of collective mobilisation born of collective disenchantment (and therefore a lack of enthusiasm) for the mode governance of modern representative democracies. Public debates represented in the media thwart enthusiasm, or, to put it another way, enthusiasm is modulated and harnessed in hegemonic ways. Most citizens are encouraged to be enthusiastic about their own interests, which they are told are shared with many others, at the expense of larger social problems. In Australia this is best represented by the hegemonic relation between the conservative media and the conservative side of politics (that is currently dominant in both major parties). Columnists like The Australian’s Andrew Bolt present his readers’ own enthusiasms back at them as the fundamental truth of a given situation. Conservative politicians, such as Tony Abbott, militantly corral this enthusiasm, shaping it into a blunt weapon to attack the progressive elements of the nation.

The danger in this for conservative politicians is that they must continually ride the wave of enthusiasm and therefore can never properly formulate rational policies based beyond facile arguments about refugees. When a conservative government does try to introduce policy that can’t help but be understood as against their constituents’ own material interests (such as the Howard government’s Workchoices industrial relations policies), enthusiasm turns in a flash against them. The progressive elements of Australia’s representive democracy (as well as the progressive elements of other representative democracies) are curently experiencing a failure of enthusiasm. It doesn’t matter how ‘correct’ (scientific or otherwise) they are in their policies, without a collective enthusiasm behind them whatever project they hope to introduce or catalyse in the population shall fail.

Greater visibility has to be produced around the progressive enthusiasms already set to the tasks of producing a more equitable and sustainable world. Beyond the collective drive that it produces, the other political efficacy of enthusiasm is that it is contagious. Progressive political enthusiasm has to be represented in the media to effect any change.