Philosophy Now Forum

Pluto wrote:Today, all new forms of opposition become paralyzed before being formed; cynicism infects all politics; even imagining an alternative seems futile. But consider the wider context, our one-dimensional societies. There is no meaningful opposition in the political, social, and media worlds; all new forms of opposition become paralyzed before being formed; cynicism infects all politics; even imagining an alternative seems futile. The American political system is widely regarded as broken, but this is certainly by intent, so that the government is rendered unable to take effective action on anything that matters, including soaring inequality and corporate domination of the political and legislative process.

So how can opposition form? How to respond? As Marcuse asked toward the end of One-Dimensional Man, “How can the administered individuals—who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions . . . liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?” His answer, framed in semi-apocalyptic terms, is a root-and-branch rejection of the existing order and the creation of a “new sensibility.”

This means that typical political strategies go nowhere. “The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective—perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty,” Marcuse writes. Thus, from the point of view of One-Dimensional Man, most arguments over the strategy and structures of Occupy miss the point. Rather than be recognizably political, a new radical movement would have to—will still have to—be as much about creating a different sensibility and different values as about an effective alternative politics.

http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/marcu ... right/1494

I like the idea that you must create a 'new sensibility' but realise that within the current order, is close to impossible, especially when you read a newspaper every day.

In the Boston Review, Ronald Aronson writes about the continued relevance of Herbert Marcuse today, especially his magnum opus, One-Dimensional Man. Aronson asks, "As we read One-Dimensional Man today, do we not again and again seem to be encountering the society in which we live?"...

Pluto wrote:Jesus, so sorry I didn't put quotations now. The link is below it so you know who wrote it. The important thing is the meaning of the words! As you say, it is interesting, we should focus on that more maybe.

Pluto wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rso4QX_VEI

At about 49:45, the guy with a tash.

Pluto wrote:The three P's. Newspapers pervert people.

Your newspaper is there to pervert your thinking.

a ceiling off of a larger sensibility

Pluto wrote:

a ceiling off of a larger sensibility

at 32:35

The series also reflected his interest in Bertolt Brecht’s theory of a Verfremdungseffekt (“distancing effect”), whereby events are stripped of familiar attributes to create fresh curiosity and astonishment.

marjoram_blues wrote:Pluto, your thread inspired me to go search for relevant material in PN's articles. I found this, not exactly about journalism but concerns how someone's ideas ( in this case Derrida's) can be misrepresented; the spread of malicious memes, if you like...
https://philosophynow.org/issues/72/Beware_of_Truth

Quine and his colleagues were certainly outspoken in their views. They declared that Derrida’s work: “seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth and scholarship… His works employ a written style that defies comprehension… When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, when coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.” To this, Derrida replied: “How can they say that what I write ‘defies comprehension’ when they are denouncing its excessive influence and end up by saying that they themselves have very well understood that there is nothing to understand in my work except the false and the trivial?”

The letter in The Times gives no examples of what these false or trivial assertions might be. In fact, the only phrase they quote, supposedly to illustrate Derrida’s use of puns, is a phrase that does not appear in any of his writings! It is no surprise when Derrida asserts that their letter: “violates the very principles in whose name these academics pretend to speak (‘reason, truth and scholarship’)… Nothing means that I am right, or that I should be believed merely because I say so, but let those who want to criticise take the trouble to do so; let them read, quote, demonstrate, and so on.”

None of those who criticized Derrida at the time have ever responded to this challenge. In an interview published the following year (1993) in Cogito, Vol 7, D.H. Mellor remained unrepentant about the attack he had launched and repeated his attribution to Derrida of the belief “that writings have no intrinsic meaning… [and] are open to endless and arbitrary reinterpretation by their readers.” Once again, no reference is given to where Derrida is supposed to have said such a thing

If these characterizations of the philosophy of Derrida (and others) are false, why are they so often repeated? This question is often asked in the spirit of ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know!’ Underlying it is that Theory of Truth which underlies propaganda and advertising, that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true. The theory of ‘memes’, introduced by Richard Dawkins, can help us to understand how this works. Lies propagate (duplicate themselves, spread, proliferate) in a similar way to a virus, often more quickly than facts. They become established in the ‘meme pool’ of society (analogous to the ‘gene pool’ of genetics), which is embodied in newspapers, books, and daily chatter. Attempts to stamp them out can never catch up with all the reappearances they make. There is even a word for these viral entities: factoids.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘factoid’ as “something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true.” The earliest published use of the word is from 1973 (in a book by Norman Mailer). So it is a word of fairly recent invention. This is not surprising. The proliferation of the media, and the exponential expansion of the Internet, has vastly multiplied the channels through which factoids can spread.

Here is an example of a factoid: “Tracey Emin won the Turner Prize with her unmade bed.” In reality, Emin was shortlisted for the prize, but has never won it; and her shortlisting was for a substantial group of works, including drawings and videos, not just for the bed piece. But the factoid is repeated often enough to operate as if it were true. It would be easy enough to check the facts, but journalists prefer to copy factoids from other journalists. It is particularly sad to find the same procedures operating in the field of philosophy, because this contradicts the very foundation of the subject...

© Peter Benson 2009

Peter Benson studied philosophy at Cambridge University, where his tutor was D.H. Mellor, later a principal instigator of the campaign against Derrida.

Media Coverage and Jacques Derrida

In the United States, as Sokal revealed the hoax, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was initially one of the targets of discredit, particularly in newspaper coverage.[1] A U.S. weekly magazine used two images of Derrida, a photo and a caricature, to illustrate a "dossier" on the Sokal article.[1] Derrida responded to the hoax in "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious", first published in Le Monde. He called Sokal's action sad (triste) for having overshadowed Sokal's mathematical work and ruining the chance to carefully sort out controversies about scientific objectivity. Derrida went on to fault him and co-author Jean Bricmont for what he considered an act of intellectual bad faith: They had accused him of scientific incompetence in the English edition of a follow-up book (an accusation several English reviewers noted), but deleted the accusation from the French edition and denied that it had ever existed. He concluded, as the title indicates, that Sokal was not serious in his approach, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved.[11]