|
|
От
|
Pout
|
|
|
К
|
Pout
|
|
|
Дата
|
20.05.2003 09:39:26
|
|
|
Рубрики
|
Прочее;
|
|
Бурдье.про "новояз Империи". NewLiberalSpeak(*)
Оруэлл отдыхает.
Бурдье анализирует "имперский новояз" со всеми
его"мульти-культурализмами","андер-классами" и прочей гомоэковской
набивкой.
Это уже не первая его популярная анти-имперская статья из МондДипломатик
по теме,была из той же серии "Анропологическое чудовище"
http://212.188.13.195:2009/nvz/forum/0/co/87513.htm
Вбрасываются все новые ,подобные тем что анализирует Бурдье,"понятия"
, в "ведущих западных СМИ". Вроде"стран-изгоев","проблемных государств",
наконец, совсем недавно, на днях, Россию обозначили в УоллСтритДжорнел
как "маргинальное государство". Язык -мощнейшее оружие борьбы,как
А-бомба
https://vif2ne.org/nvk/forum/0/archive/520/520966.htm
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_i
d=9956
NewLiberalSpeak
Notes on the new planetary vulgate
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant
Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies,
employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media
intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a
strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of
nowhere, is now on everyone's lips: `globalization' and `flexibility',
`governance' and `employability', `underclass' and `exclusion', `new
economy' and `zero tolerance', `communitarianism' and
`multiculturalism', not to mention their so-called postmodern cousins,
`minority', `ethnicity', `identity', `fragmentation', and so on. The
diffusion of this new planetary vulgate - from which the terms
`capitalism', `class', `exploitation', `domination' and `inequality' are
conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under
the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent - is the result of
a new type of imperialism. Its effects are all the more powerful and
pernicious in that it is promoted not only by the partisans of the
neoliberal revolution who, under cover of `modernization', intend to
remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a
century of social struggles, henceforth depicted as so many archaisms
and obstacles to the emergent new order, but also by cultural producers
(researchers, writers and artists) and left-wing activists, the vast
majority of whom still think of themselves as progressives.
Like ethnic or gender domination, cultural imperialism is a form of
symbolic violence that relies on a relationship of constrained
communication to extort submission. In the case at hand, its
particularity consists in universalizing the particularisms bound up
with a singular historical experience. Thus, just as, in the nineteenth
century, a number of so-called philosophical questions that were debated
throughout Europe, such as Spengler's theme of `decadence' or Dilthey's
dichotomy between explanation and understanding, originated, as
historian Fritz Ringer has demonstrated, in the historical predicaments
and conflicts specific to the peculiar world of German universities, so
today many topics directly issued from the particularities and
particularisms of US society and universities have been imposed upon the
whole planet under apparently dehistoricized guises. These commonplaces
(in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which one argues
but over which there is no argument), these undiscussed presuppositions
of the discussion owe most of their power to convince to the prestige of
the place whence they emanate, and to the fact that, circulating in
continuous flow from Berlin to Buenos Aires and from London to Lisbon,
they are everywhere powerfully relayed by supposedly neutral agencies
ranging from major international organizations (the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, European Commission and OECD), conservative
think-tanks (the Manhattan Institute in New York City, the Adam Smith
Institute in London, the Fondation Saint-Simon in Paris, and the
Deutsche Bank Fundation in Frankfurt) and philanthropic foundations, to
the schools of power (Science-Po in France, the London School of
Economics in England, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in America,
etc.).
In addition to the automatic effect of the international circulation of
ideas, which tends, by its very logic, to conceal their original
conditions of production and signification, the play of preliminary
definitions and scholastic deductions replaces the contingency of
denegated sociological necessities with the appearance of logical
necessity and tends to mask the historical roots of a whole set of
questions and notions: the `efficiency' of the (free) market, the need
for the recognition of (cultural) `identities' or the celebratory
reassertion of (individual) `responsibility'. These will be said to be
philosophical, sociological, economic or political, depending on the
place and moment of reception. Thus `planetarized', or globalized in the
strictly geographical sense of the term, by this uprooting and, at the
same time, departicularized as a result of the illusory break effected
by conceptualization, these commonplaces, which the perpetual media
repetition has gradually transformed into a universal common sense,
succeed in making us forget that, in many cases, they do nothing but
express, in a truncated and unrecognizable form (including to those who
are promoting it), the complex and contested realities of a particular
historical society, tacitly constituted into the model and measure of
all things: the American society of the post-Fordist and post-Keynesian
era, the world's only superpower and symbolic Mecca. This is a society
characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the
correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions
and the dictatorship of the `shareholder-value' conception of the firm,
and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage
labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of
economic activity.
The fuzzy and muddy debate about `multiculturalism' is a paradigmatic
example. The term was recently imported into Europe to describe cultural
pluralism in the civic sphere, whereas in the United States it refers,
in the very movement which obfuscates it, to the continued ostracization
of Blacks and to the crisis of the national mythology of the `American
dream' of `equal opportunity for all', correlative of the bankruptcy of
public education at the very time when competition for cultural capital
is intensifying and class inequalities are growing at a dizzying pace.
The locution `multicultural' conceals this crisis by artificially
restricting it to the university microcosm and by expressing it on an
ostensibly `ethnic' register, when what is really at stake is not the
incorporation of marginalized cultures in the academic canon but access
to the instruments of (re)production of the middle and upper classes,
chief among them the university, in the context of active and massive
disengagement by the state. North American `multiculturalism' is neither
a concept nor a theory, nor a social or political movement - even though
it claims to be all those things at the same time. It is a screen
discourse, whose intellectual status is the product of a gigantic effect
of national and international allodoxia, which deceives both those who
are party to it and those who are not. It is also a North American
discourse, even though it thinks of itself and presents itself as a
universal discourse, to the extent that it expresses the contradictions
specific to the predicament of US academics. Cut off from the public
sphere and subjected to a high degree of competitive differentiation in
their professional milieu, US professors have nowhere to invest their
political libido but in campus squabbles dressed up as conceptual
battles royal.
The same demonstration could be made about the highly polysemic notion
of `globalization', whose upshot - if not function - is to dress up the
effects of American imperialism in the trappings of cultural
oecumenicism or economic fatalism and to make a transnational relation
of economic power appear like a natural necessity. Through a symbolic
reversal based on the naturalization of the schemata of neoliberal
thought, the reshaping of social relations and cultural practices after
the US template, which has been forced upon advanced societies through
the pauperization of the state, the commodification of public goods and
the generalization of job insecurity, is nowadays accepted with
resignation as the inevitable outcome of national evolution, when it is
not celebrated with sheep-like enthusiasm. An empirical analysis of the
trajectory of the advanced economies over the longue durйe suggests, in
contrast, that `globalization' is not a new phase of capitalism, but a
`rhetoric' invoked by governments in order to justify their voluntary
surrender to the financial markets and their conversion to a fiduciary
conception of the firm. Far from being - as we are constantly told - the
inevitable result of the growth of foreign trade, deindustrialization,
growing inequality and the retrenchment of social policies are the
result of domestic political decisions that reflect the tipping of the
balance of class forces in favour of the owners of capital.
By imposing on the rest of the world categories of perception homologous
to its social structures, the USA is refashioning the entire world in
its image: the mental colonization that operates through the
dissemination of these concepts can only lead to a sort of generalized
and even spontaneous `Washington consensus', as one can readily observe
in the sphere of economics, philanthrophy or management training.
Indeed, this double discourse which, although founded on belief, mimics
science by superimposing the appearance of reason - and especially
economic or politological reason - on the social fantasies of the
dominant, is endowed with the performative power to bring into being the
very realities it claims to describe, according to the principle of the
self-fulfilling prophecy: lodged in the minds of political or economic
decision-makers and their publics, it is used as an instrument of
construction of public and private policies and at the same time to
evaluate those very policies. Like the mythologies of the age of
science, the new planetary vulgate rests on a series of oppositions and
equivalences which support and reinforce one another to depict the
contemporary transformations advanced societies are undergoing -
economic disinvestment by the state and reinforcement of its police and
penal components, deregulation of financial flows and relaxation of
administrative controls on the employment market, reduction of social
protection and moralizing celebration of `individual responsibility' -
as in turn benign, necessary, ineluctable or desirable, according to the
oppositions set out in the following ideological schema:
state [globalization] market
constraint freedom
closed open
rigid flexible
immobile, fossilized dynamic, moving, self-transforming
past, outdated future, novelty
stasis growth
group, lobby, holism, collectivism individual, individualism
uniformity, artificiality diversity, authenticity
autocratic (`totalitarian') democratic
The imperialism of neoliberal reason finds its supreme intellectual
accomplishment in two new figures of the cultural producer that are
increasingly crowding the autonomous and critical intellectual born of
the Enlightenment tradition out of the public scene. One is the expert
who, in the shadowy corridors of ministries or company headquarters, or
in the isolation of think-tanks, prepares highly technical documents,
preferably couched in economic or mathematical language, used to justify
policy choices made on decidedly non-technical grounds. (The perfect
example being plans to `save' retirement schemes from the supposed
threat posed by the increase in life expectancy, where demographic
demonstrations are used to railroad privatization plans that consecrate
the power of shareholders and shift risk to wage-earners through
pensions funds). The other is the communication consultant to the
prince - a defector from the academic world entered into the service of
the dominant, whose mission is to give an academic veneer to the
political projects of the new state and business nobility. Its planetary
prototype is without contest the British sociologist Anthony Giddens,
Director of the London School of Economics, and father of `structuration
theory', a scholastic synthesis of various sociological and
philosophical traditions decisively wrenched out of their context and
thus ideally suited to the task of academicized sociodicy.
One may see the perfect illustration of the cunning of imperialist
reason in the fact that it is England - which, for historical, cultural
and linguistic reasons, stands in an intermediary, neutral position (in
the etymological sense of `neither/nor' or `either/or') between the
United States and continental Europe - that has supplied the world with
a bicephalous Trojan horse, with one political and one intellectual
head, in the dual persona of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens. On the
strength of his ties to politicians, Giddens has emerged as the
globe-trotting apostle of a `Third Way' which, in his own words - which
must here be cited from the catalogue of textbook-style definitions of
his theories and political views in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
section of his London School of Economics website,
(www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/FAQs.htm) - `takes a positive attitude towards
globalization'; `tries [sic] to respond to changing patterns of
inequality', but begins by warning that `the poor today are not the same
as the poor of the past', and that, `likewise, the rich are not the same
as they used to be'; accepts the idea that `existing social welfare
systems, and the broader structure of the State, are the source of
problems, not only the means of resolving them'; `emphasizes that social
and economic policy are intrinsically connected', in order better to
assert that `social spending has to be assessed in terms of its
consequences for the economy as a whole'; and, finally `concerns itself
with mechanisms of exclusion at the bottom and the top [sic]', convinced
as it is that `redefining inequality in relation to exclusion at both
levels is consistent with a dynamic conception of inequality'. The
masters of the economy, and the other `excluded at the top', can sleep
in peace: they have found their Pangloss.
This is a revised version of a translation by David Macey of an article
that originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique 554, May 2000, pp. 6-7