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Signs of the Times, Part II:
Post-Democracy in the Age of Simulation
E.
R. E. Knutsson
September 16, 2009
Democracy —
the exception to
the rule
in world history —
belongs to the unique
cultural signature
of Western civilization. The societies of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts and
Germans all shared a similar proto-democratic, tribal organization going back to
a common Indo-European social order.
In the
course of its civilizational history, Western democracy has been transformed
from direct city-state democracy to modern representative nation-state
democracy. In the final, “globalitarian” state of its evolution, Western
democracy resembles a “red
giant” running out of fuel, gradually collapsing into a “white
dwarf”
called
post-democracy.
Detail from the
Acropolis,
Jacques Rancière
observes that the term ‘democracy’ does not strictly designate either a form of
society or a form of government. Every state is oligarchic; every democracy
contains an “oligarchic nucleus” — consisting of a “creative minority,” whose
“creative power,” in
Arnold J. Toynbee’s
interpretation, has been crucial to the rise and demise of civilizations
throughout history.
Since
government is “always exercised by the minority over the majority,” Rancière
points out, there is strictly speaking “no such thing as democratic
government”:
We do not
live in democracies. … We live in States of oligarchic law … where … [oligarchic
elites] hold free elections. These elections essentially ensure that the same
dominant personnel is reproduced, albeit under interchangeable labels, but the
ballot boxes are generally not rigged and one can verify it without risking
one’s life. ... Peaceful oligarchic government redirects democratic passions
toward private pleasures and renders people insensitive to the public sphere. …
[T]he multitude, freed of the worry of governing, is left to its private and
egotistical passions.
In a
post-democratized world run by inevitable oligarchies,
Colin Crouch
points out, “political elites have learned to manage and manipulate popular
demands,” persuading people to vote by “top-down publicity campaigns.”
Governing today, says Baudrillard, “is like advertising and it is the same
effect that is achieved — commitment to a scenario.”
The
political world intensively imitates the methods of other more self-confident
spheres like show business and the marketing of goods.
From this
emerge the familiar paradoxes of
contemporary politics:
[B]oth the
techniques for manipulating public opinion and the mechanisms for opening
politics to scrutiny become ever more sophisticated, while the content of party
programmes and the character of party rivalry become ever more bland and vapid.
As Western
societies are increasingly “moving towards the
post-democratic pole”,
politics and government are “slipping back into the control of privileged elites
in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.” Elections become tightly
controlled spectacles, managed by rival teams of professional experts in the
techniques of persuasion.
This state
of affairs can be illustrated by the last
Axelrod has
a long history of getting racial and ethnic minority candidates elected into key
positions of power, apparently in an attempt to transform
Tocqueville’s democratic “tyranny
of the majority”
into a post-democratic “tyranny
of the minorities”:
Carol Moseley-Braun
in Illinois;
Dennis Archer
in Detroit;
Harold Washington
in Chicago;
Michael R. White
in Cleveland;
Anthony A. Williams
in Washington, D.C.;
Lee P. Brown
in Houston;
John F. Street
in Philadelphia,
Eliot Spitzer
in New York,
Deval Patrick
in Massachusetts (introducing the later recycled
mantra “Yes, we can”),
reaching a crescendo in the swift rise to power of Barack Obama — sometimes
portrayed as an African-American parallel to the African-Roman emperor
Septimius Severus.
The case of
David Axelrod, thus, seems to fit into a larger picture of minority activism,
guided by a special relationship — a "Grand
Alliance"
— between African Americans and American Jews. In this setting, Jews have often
seen themselves as shareholders in a moral crusade. According to
Hasia Diner,
the Jewish cultural construction of Blacks has operated along the lines of a
morality tale in which Blacks have been seen as noble victims, who, by virtue of
their suffering, fall outside of the usual category of "goyim,"
thus occupying a unique locus in the Jewish understanding of the world.
Despite
Jewish self-conceptions, the realities “on the ground” have less to do with Jews
as moral crusaders than about forming anti-White coalitions of minority groups.
Lawrence R. Marcus
points out that the coalition of African Americans and Jews came about because
“both feared WASPs, non-Jewish white ethnics, and conservative Republicans more
than they feared each other.” As
Scott Atran notes, Jews have survived over time as a group by “sanctifying
and steadfastedly implementing an ‘Us versus Them’ strategy”. Guided by this
ancient
Manichean
instinct, “a highly sophisticated and pernicious two-faced moral system” has
been developed, according to which humanist and universalist language games are
intended “for show mainly to non-Jews,” while parallel “deeply racist and
isolationist” strategies are employed to “maintain moral integrity among Jews
alone”:
Jewish cultural and
genetic separatism, combined with resource competition and other conflicts of
interest, tends to result in division and hatred within the larger society. From
this viewpoint, anti-Semitism is a ‘defensive’ response of the larger society
from which Jews isolate themselves in order to better dominate it. … Jewish
group evolutionary strategies, like those of its competitor groups and even
those of other animal species, depend crucially on
deception
and self-deception […]. In the Jewish case, a key (self?) deception is to deny
that proactive Judaism is a direct cause of anti-Semitism.
As
Kevin MacDonald
points out, “Jewish
motivation need not be seen in defensive terms ... but rather as aimed at
maximizing Jewish power. The reality is that the rise of the Jews in the
Indeed, not only was the organized Jewish community the most effective force
leading up to the 1965 immigration law that resulted in massive non-White
immigration, the organized Jewish community has made alliances with other
minority groups (Latinos, Asians) that have established themselves in the US as
a result of a liberal immigration policy regime. The result has been a
well-established pattern
for non-White minorities to cluster in the Democratic Party, while the
Republican Party gets over 90% of its votes from Whites. As Donald L. Horowitz
confirms:
Where ethnic loyalties
are strong, parties tend to organize along ethnic lines for much the same
reasons that other organizations, such as trade unions, social clubs, chambers
of commerce, and neighborhood associations, tend to be ethnically exclusive. …
The communitarian aspect of ethnicity propels group members toward concentrated
party loyalties. … In any society, members of various ethnic groups rarely
distribute themselves randomly among competing parties. Where conflict levels
are high, however, ethnic parties reflect something more than mere affinity and
a vague sense of common interest. That something is the mutual incompatibility
of ethnic claims to power. Since the party aspires to control the state, and in
conflict-prone polities ethnic groups also attempt to exclude others from state
power, the emergence of ethnic parties is an integral part of this political
struggle.
Ethnic conflict is a
continuing reality
in world affairs and
at the heart of the
construction of culture
in contemporary Western societies. Issues of cosmopolitanism, tribalism, race
and ethnicity have been revived in the aftermath of the descent of the nation
states in the West.
Global, competing tribes — Jews, Occidental Whites, East Asians etc. — are
today’s quintessential cosmopolitans in contrast to the often narrow horizons
and infighting passions of the territorial-centred nations of modernity.
As Joel Kotkin
points out:
Born amidst
optimism for the triumph of a rational and universal world order, the twentieth
century [ended] with an increased interest in the power of race, ethnicity and
religion rather than the long-predicted universal age or the end of history.
The quest for the memory and spirit of the specific ethnic past has once
again been renewed; the results will shape the [21st] century.
The “social volcanoes” of racialized
tribalism are
reportedly erupting. As the fossilized nation-states no longer have a
dominant, credible ideology to supply a social cohesiveness for the modern
world, we are seeing the nations breaking up into competing ethnic and racial
groups. Post-WWII Western states have been transformed into obscure “museums for
freedom and the Rights of Man,” reducing the political left to “a pure moral
injunction,” in the words of
Baudrillard:
A morality
of Truth, Rights and good conscience: the zero degree of politics and probably
the lowest point of a genealogy of morals as well. This moralization of values
was a historic defeat for the left (and for thinking): that the historical truth
of any event, the aesthetic quality of any work, the scientific pertinence of
any hypothesis would necessarily have to be judged in terms of morals.
A
“renaissance of particularisms” is occurring:
“regional and tribal
identities
are being revived.”
Samuel E. Heilman
describes the way, “following
on the heels of a renascent black consciousness, a celebration of ethnicity
emerged at the end of the sixties as a response to the decline of the WASP
establishment, which the revolutionary atmosphere of the decade had ensured.”
The resulting
re-emergence of tribalism can be observed in numerous signs of the times, as in
the paradoxically race-charged, iconic status and tribal aura of Black leaders
such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. As Grant Farred
points out,
what is salient about Obama’s politics is
its specifically South African roots. Obama traces his political awakening to
the divestment movement [….] Obama locates himself within a radical
African-American tradition of internationalist thinking that connects him
intimately to black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the
Black Panthers,
both of whom forged links with African anti-colonial or liberation movements.
Ama
Mazama
argues
that “it is evident that race, even when, or especially when its significance is
minimized on the surface, remains at the forefront of any meaningful
understanding of the Barack Obama phenomenon.” Obama (as well as the hard core
of his entourage) seems to personify a post-modern amalgamation of racialized
tribalism and cosmopolitanism. In a global age, ethnic or tribal interests are
played out on a global scale, transcending the linear borders of the decaying
nation states.
Under these
circumstances, those who play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of individual
isolation can be easily overrun and
outmaneuvered
by
collective ethnic and tribal cooperation.
The dysfunctional
asymmetries of elite-promoted “Enlightenmentism” are too obvious to derail
Whites from eventually taking part in the same ballgame being played by
aggressive minorities with victimological claims to moral, cultural, political
and socio-economic hegemony.
The Obama
Spectacle as Soap Opera and Reality Show
The “hyper-reality”
of “Obamamania”
— a bipolar phenomenon fluctuating
between excessive celebration of racial tribalism (dressed up as “post-racial”
egalitarianism) and a flagellant masquerade of promiscuous out-group altruism —
reveals itself in the fact that the
real-life Obama campaign followed the script of the fictional presidential
contest in
Aaron Sorkin’s
The West
Wing.
Eli Attie,
one of the
West Wing
scriptwriters,
modeled his fictitious presidential candidate on Obama, at the time (2004) not
even a
Barack Obama and
The West Wing's
Matt Santos
Baudrillard
judged
Marshall McLuhan’s
“the medium is the message” to be the key formula of the age of simulation,
staging a social world filled with
copies of copies for which
there is no original
— rootless, circulating images and fictions without origin or referent,
displacing discursive meaning with a stream of “random
intensities” and a fetishism of style and surface.
As
noted by
Baudrillard:
Indifferent
to every truth, reality becomes a sort of sphinx, enigmatic in its
hyperconformity, simulating itself as virtuality or reality show. Reality
becomes hyperreality — paroxysm and parody all at once.
So,
what
happens when life starts to look a lot like art? Is Obama a real
president, or is he just acting out the sound bites fed him by his handlers?
Scriptwriters, spin-doctors and
benefactors
dwelling in the shadows of the
West Wing
would probably have reacted to observations of
empty rhetoric
with a shrug: “The medium is the message
is Obama,” or, in Eli Attie’s twist of words, “art imitates life imitates art advises life“
—
a situation described by
Baudrillard
as trans-aesthetic, effecting “the dissolution of television into life” and “the
dissolution of life into television.” Obama - also known as the “HBO president”
- was reportedly so addicted to
Entourage
and
The Wire
that he rearranged his campaign commitments in order not to miss an episode
—
apparently spellbound by the media world’s
ability to be more real
than “ordinary life.”
As
Baudrillard notes,
[T]he truth of mass
media is that they function to neutralize the unique character of actual world
events by replacing them with a multiple universe of mutually reinforcing and
self-referential media. At the very limit, they become each other’s reciprocal
content
—
and this constitutes the totalitarian ‘message’ of the consumer society.
Turning
life into escapist entertainment is, as
Neal Gabler
points out, “a perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of
modern existence.” Celebrities are “the
icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life.” In the
world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from
entertainment to politics to sports to business. Celebrity has become the
post-modern state of
grace,
“the condition in the life movie to which nearly everyone aspires.”
It is not
any ism but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful and
ineluctable force of our time — a force so overwhelming that it has finally
metastasized into life. As a tool of analysis, entertainment may just be what
undergirds and unites ideas as disparate as Boorstin’s theory of manufactured
reality, Marshall McLuhan’s doctrine of media determinism, the deconstructionist
notion that culture is actually a collectively scripted text, and so much of the
general perspective we call postmodernism.
Welcome to
“the world of post-reality”: Life as the biggest, most entertaining, most
realistic, omni-ever-present movie of all. Politics was, according to Gabler,
among the very first arenas (after journalism) to adopt “the stratagems of show
business”
—
a “Hollywoodization”
marked by
“commercialization
… the disregard of privacy, the trivialization of the serious … the erosion of
the boundaries between the real and the imagined, between fact and fiction, and
between news and entertainment.“
Both
journalism and politics have modeled themselves on advertising
copy: very brief messages — visual images and
sound bites
— requiring extremely low concentration spans; the use of words to form
high-impact images instead of arguments appealing to the intellect. As
Colin Crouch
points out:
Advertising
is not a form of rational dialogue. It does not build up a case based on
evidence, but associates its products with a particular imagery. … Its aim is
not to engage in discussion but to persuade to buy.
Adoption of its methods has helped politicians to cope with the problem
of communicating to a mass public; but it has not served the cause of democracy
itself.
The
post-WWII-era politician has, according to Gabler, “simply become another kind
of star, the political process another form of show, and television its best
stage.” In the early 1960s, Norman Mailer prophesied — with JFK in mind —
that “
By
the new politics of entertainment, “the presidency has become the circus, the
media are the ringmasters and we all sit in the bleachers clapping, stamping and
cheering for
the
show to go on.”
Silence is
banished as media images and texts never fall silent: "Images and messages must
follow one upon the other without interruption,” as Baudrillard
points out.
In order to “hit the jackpot” in this entertainment-driven, celebrity-oriented
climate, Neal Gabler
notes,
it becomes vital to grab and hold the public’s attention:
It is a
society in which those things that do not conform — for example, serious
literature, serious political debate, serious ideas, serious
anything — are more likely to be
compromised or marginalized than ever before.
It is a society in which celebrities become paragons because they are the
ones who have learned how to steal the spotlight, no matter what they have done
to steal it. … [I]t is a society in which individuals have learned to prize
social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever role the
occasion demands and to ‘perform’ their lives rather than just live them. The
result is that Homo sapiens is rapidly
becoming Homo
scaenicus — man the entertainer.
Obama the
entertainer is
expected
to be “a combination of scoutmaster,
Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen and father of the multitudes.”
Gene Healy
has observed the unrealistic expectations Americans have of their presidents,
predicting that Obama will end up as a failed president. The decreasingly
hagiographic
media reports
largely seem to tell the same story, portraying an increasingly fading icon
elevated to the pinnacle of power by elite-orchestrated mass hysteria:
People
scream and faint at [Obama’s] rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The
One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser.” An editor at
Newsweek described him as “above the
country, above the world; he’s sort of God.” … Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes
at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As
a campaigner, he promised to “change the world,” to “transform this country” and
even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here
on earth.”
In an age of
spectacle politics, as Douglas Kellner
points out, US presidencies are staged to the public in cinematic terms,
using media spectacle to sell the image of the president to a vast, diverse but
seducible public. Politics is reduced to image, display and story in the forms
of entertainment and drama. The presidential culture of personality and the
swing toward mediatized politainment reflects a shift from a culture of
individualism, with self-directed people shaping their own lives, to an “other-directed
culture of conformity in which people are guided by the media and external
social authorities.”
Aviopolis: Hyper-Surveillance as a Risk Management Strategy
As demonstrated in
The Culture of
Critique,
aggressive minority activism can have a destabilizing and even transformational
effect on a civilization's oligarchic nucleus (its elites), gradually being
transmitted by
mimesis
into mainstream culture. With growing degrees of coherence, structural
complexity and heterogeneity, minuscule causes and self-catalyzing reactions can
sometimes have fatal, long-term effects.
As
Gregory G. Brunk
points out, the greater the level of complexity, the closer a system (e.g., a
civilization) is to a completely critical state. As
societal structures become so inter-connected and hyper-sensitive that failure
in one important subsystem affects all others, the whole hierarchy sometimes
comes crashing down like a house of cards, as demonstrated by the
financial collapse of 2008.
Under the
instability of the system, orchestrating social control becomes crucial in order
to keep the
centrifugal forces at bay.
Post-democratized states
in the West address the control issue by imploding into “risk-avoidance
organizations,” in which security displaces freedom and equality in the
hierarchies of values and priorities. The quest for security occurs in a heated
atmosphere of
constant stress
characterized by apocalypticism, alarm, excessive media spin, dialectical
extremes of heaven and hell, epidemic hysteria and moral panics.
Under such
extreme conditions, radical surveillance and risk-management strategies are in
great demand and good supply — facilitating, as
Clive Norris
observes, “the power of the watchers over the watched not only by enabling swift
intervention to displays of non-conformity but also through the promotion of
habituated anticipatory conformity.”
As a
consequence of the post-9-11 implementation and generalization of the airport
surveillance model, normalizing a constant state of emergency in the name of
“seamless security”, whole societies become soaked up in the gravitational field
of the airport version of Orwellian dystopia,
the exception thus becoming the rule: “levered into position through the
politics of crisis and fear, biometrics quietly moves out of the spaces of
exception into the open circuits of capital and regulation, becoming part of the
information architecture of everyday life. Anyone who resists patching their
body into a global network of tracking and control will simply not gain access.”
Passenger
screening becomes citizen screening (employee identification, controlled access,
perimeter security, biometrics etc.). Secure
areas, “sterile areas”, exclusive areas, security identification display areas
(SIDA) – with their impressive arsenals of magnetometers, x-ray machines, ETD
and EDS systems, and high-tech surveillance - are swelling and expanding far
beyond the compounds of traditional airports: enter the dystopian world of “Aviopolis”
– the catapults of globalization:
The
airport has evolved into a complex techno-cultural machine. … Planes, people,
cars, aviation fuel, freight, and catering are constantly plugging in, peeling
off or just passing through the airport. Airports are multi-platform,
multi-dimensional, multi-tasking movement machines. Like a complex overlapping
of co-evolving biotechnical systems, airports around the world process millions
of things (people, messages, cargo, missions, procedures) in unlimited
combinations every day. … The variety of internationalist protocols,
immigration, flight path routing, safety standards, corporate ‘customer focus’,
airside management, signage systems, landside access and flow management
converge and create architectures of global logistics.
Airports
are sites of routinized paranoia (every passenger is a suspect, a potential
security threat). Nowhere else is the post-democratic order more unveiled.
Distinctions between private space and public space have collapsed to create
spaces in which the airport is “a logistical node in a global network”:
Visible to all, only our thoughts move in private (though soon neuroscience and
brain imaging may put an end to even that). Our baggage, our bodies, our
movements are all part of an encompassing spectacle. … Flesh to image to code
and back again, security machines scan us both inside and out. … Flesh, body and
name are matched simultaneously to info-body and database
—
a body of electronic
traces, image archives and credit card purchases, social security information,
and travel itineraries, each hooked into another body (of information). … The
increase of biometric technologies (along with DNA mapping and a whole range of
biotech industries) seems to signal a new development in the very ancient
‘sympathetic magic’ of mimesis – a shift away from the visual to a more intimate
form of contact based on manipulating a variable databody (and not on
representing the body as an image). … With the rise of biometric systems of
control access, life becomes quite literally a pattern match, and identity
politics starts looking very weird. No longer just concerned with gross
categories like race, gender, sexuality and the like, the apparatuses of state
capture have gone cellular and the biological caesuras that race once ensured
can be refined into other areas. … Identity in a biometric world of code is …
now a data match fractured across multiple programmes in n-dimensional space:
identity becomes a roaming oscillation, looking for a pattern match in a
machine. In a world of global movement where global migrations and mass media
have troubled the once easy attribution of race with otherness, regulative
technologies move beyond the skin to code life itself: everyone is captured in
this net.
Biometrics
is a method of controlling the chaos of movement, of keeping people in or out:
of buildings, of websites, or countries. Biometrics is part of traffic
management. Traffic management is part of security and security is part of
service. Accelerating surveillance becomes “fluid” and omnipresent — even
merging with show-business in the form of “Big
Brother”-style reality TV, a radical transmutation of
Orwell’s
totalitarian nightmare. As
Daniel Boorstin
observed, entertainment has - like a cultural Ebola virus – “invaded organisms
no one would ever have imagined could provide amusement.” Indeed, the “liquid”
stage of late modernity as a phase of civilizational transition is
characterized by a “spinning
vortex of events,” “gigantic
circumvolution” and circular flow:
politics and government - increasingly becoming bureaucratized and
“re-feudalized” through nepotism, clannishness, and the circulation of elites -
retreat into
paranoid
risk-management and omniscient surveillance. Surveillance
penetrates
everyday existence and
entertainment.
Showbiz
flows and soaks into
politics (“politainment”).
And democracy dissolves into diffuse post-democracy as Western civilization
undergoes a process of obscuration and hybridization.
The wheel has turned full circle.
E.
R. E.
Knutsson
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