From: "Glen Fuller" <glenfuller-AT-iinet.net.au>
Subject: Re: the latest in propaganda...
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 09:59:05 +0800


Steve/All

> "oidentified as the common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the
> Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also
> means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us
> inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is
> the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is
> so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something
> like a positive possibility that can be used against it..." (P80)


I have been flicking through some Bourdieu and with regards to 'habitus' it
seems the structural components of subjecthood (as per laclou and moufe's
conception of a two tiered 'subject') can only function effectively if we do
not think about the specific sociocultural conditions or contexts of their
production and existence: "the forgeting of history that history itself
produces" (the logic of practice 56).

Perhaps the 'governmentality' of the processors/possessors of power stems
from a certain forgetting? A kind of total propaganda, the kind that
produces internal contradictions because the not-not-knowing of forgetting
leaves questionable voids. Propaganda isn't about the spread of information
rather power is generated by mistakingly believing propaganda is either
information or mis-information when it is non-information. Us aussies
recently received the PM's anti-terrorist package in the mail. I can only
cringe when thinking about the 'security' people must be feeling everytime
they fetch a coldie whilst watching the cricket and look at the 'security'
fridge magnet they received in the parcel. This package was sent out to
everyone home. (I do not have one as I joined in the 'return to sender'
protest.)

Bourdieu writes the below:

"The fundamental law of beauraucratic apparatuses is that the apparatus
gives everything (including power over the apparatus) to those who give it
everything and expect everything from it because they themselves have
nothing or are nothing outside it." (language and symbolic power 216)

Which reminds me of my most favourite passage from D&G:

"[I]n the so-called modern or rational state, everything revolves around the
legislator and the subject. The state must realize the distinction between
the legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought,
for its part, to conceptualize their identity. Be obedient always. The
better you obey, the more you will be master, for you only be obeying pure
reason, in other words yourself." (Nomadology 42-3).

How successful can the process of non-information be? I am not sure which
knowledge will be legitimated by the currently unfolding events, with the
rise of the middle-class as the only 'legitimate' class everyone will
probably be thinking the same thoughts regardless. Maybe, if the forgetful
remember and the non-apparent becomes apparent, this will be a good thing?
Wishful thinking...

Glen.