Bureaucratic 'thinking' and the American mind
Americans only seem to be anti-intellectual. The truth is just that their idea of rational thinking is modeled on the law court and not, as in France, the philosophy seminar.
This has several far-reaching consequence.
One is for the way Americans argue. They don't do so as a matter of course in the general course of things. When Americans argue, they are angry, and not about "it" (imagine a liberal and a conservative who are friends disputing a point of politics), but about, and at, you. We tend to not talk about things to others, but only to others about them. When it seems to be about something else, it really is about them. This gives all discourse a rhetorical and 'policing' character (in Rancière's senses), and it gives it its 'gnostic' character in Harold Bloom's sense. That is, what people say only seems to be about the things they are speaking about; it really is always an indirect way of trying to correct the other's blindness about something. And this blindness is ubiquitous, as it is latent and so present in whatever anyone goes on about. There is always something happening that you don't know what it is because you are not noticing it (what the other person wants you to see) because you are talking about what you are thinking about.
This gnosticism (the view that the world in its totality is one of pure empty materiality that is 'spiritually' false) helps explain the relative authoritarianism of our culture and the peculiar character it takes.
When Americans are most rhetorical, they are most insistent that they are not being so. If someone says, You have said that 100 times, they don’t literally mean 100 times, they might mean 10; what they mean is that it is too much. This has consequences for the exercise of authority in terms of the use of discourse, which it in fact seems to depend upon. (Ask yourself how you might order someone to do something without speaking; you would have to make some gesture that would imply the order, which has the structure of correlating a statement about an act to be performed with the acts that will perform it, in a time subsequent to, though immediately subsequent to, as the idea of immediacy or lack of mediation is crucial here, the statement of the order.) The way that discursive power normally works is something like this: The boss says “The cat is on the mat,” and he means not, or not only to say that, but to tell you what to do. For example, “Move the mat, now!” If you reply by confirming that you understand the statement, you would be incorrect to merely think that you have been told that the cat is on the mat. In fact, that may be a detail; it may be only the supposed statement of fact that legitimates the order. But if you say, “I get it, you want me to move the mat (apparently because of some matter having to do with the mat and cat),” you might be told, No, that’s not it. People give orders in all kinds of ways, just as people are reprimanded indirectly. For example, if you reply to the boss’s demand in a disobedient way, and, let’s say, you use a swear word, you might be told, “No swearing!” Or you may even be told that you are “raising your voice,” which Americans in business context understand as a virtual crime. They see “violence” everywhere, except where it is done by or for them, and so you may be convicted of the imminent violence that more likely describes what they will do to you, while legitimating it by attributing to you their violence as its cause: you raised your voice and so were “violent,” and now they will beat you, or have you arrested, or otherwise treated very unpleasantly as they try to basically throw you out the door, but of course all of this is but a detail, and it isn’t what is discussed. So the boss interdicts swearing, but actually you’ve been convicted of insurbodination. You weren’t obedient. And if you don’t think that is a crime in America, it probably only means that you have been too long and much in middle-class environments where people are used to being treated like privileged children inhabiting an eternally safe space, made safe by police forces guarding what appears to be only a hypothetical or distant boundary.
You spoke disobediently; that is the true matter. And why is that not said? Maybe because official violence is always disavowed. And maybe because Americans characteristically have anxieties about authority and liberty. So no one wants to admit that you are being treated like a slave. Though, in a society that aims to be liberal but not democratic, that may be about the size of it.
One form of domination is that of bureaucracies whose functionaries are expected to reiterate what are actually states of things held true by definition of the authorities and specification in a dictionary of sayables. Truth becomes simply what is said by a speaker entitled with the authority by virtue of their profession and its privileged knowledge to declare to be enforceably true. Bureaucratic personnel have a tendency to think that the words they use are themselves true; this and not that vocabulary is what one must say. So this isn’t an X, it’s a Y. When people in authority say this, they are commanding you to call the thing a Y; you may be treated with unceremonious contempt if you insist on using any concepts as expressing your thought, as if they were metaphors and you a poet, yourself authorized to say what you think is true, and so what things are and mean. People are punished for using unauthorized names. Americans are not more bureaucratic in their thinking than the French, but they are far less likely to be able to recognize when they are not thinking. You can tell this when someone in a customer service job whom you must deal with on the phone insists that they have answered your question, when clearly they don’t understand even when you meant, and are not about to allow you to clarify it; what they mean is that they have uttered one or more sentences in their turn in reply to what you have said, and that means both that they have answered your question, and that it is the truth. This is Foucault’s understanding of truth in discourse in Archeology of Knowledge: truth is what someone is authorized and able to say.
Truth for Americans is also the “common sense,” which is to say, what is obvious to them. Being obvious, it need not be argued for, but only needs to be exhibited and “seen,” that is, be presented as evidence, which means what is seen. The obviousness of evidence as the visibly presented touches upon another enigmatical confusion that is deeper in our culture than just the Anglo-American traditions of thinking about truth and justice in terms of law and property. The problem is the difference between what is presented or “there” and what is true. Statements are true or false, and the matter of their relationship to things that are presentably there and represented in them remains in philosophy something of the puzzle it has been at least since Plato. An image is true if what it presents represents something that is there. But in fact, our culture of images tends to reduce truth to there-ness, or rather, to substitute truth with there-ness. The proof is that there is no real equivalent in appearances to the falseness of statements that say things are in a way that is other than how they are in fact. Sometimes this truth is thought to be established by the evidence of the given that is seen, but this only displaces the problem; it attempts to ground the yes and no of the evaluation of statements in the mere there-ness of things that in principle has no equivalent to the ‘no’ of the said and sayable, since this could only be a nothingness.
That “common sense” is a name for prejudice is a truth whose obviousness marks a typical standpoint of philosophy and law on the Continent. This divides England and America intellectually, which is to say politically and morally, from France and Germany.
The English legal system is one of liberalism in the classical sense associated with capitalism. That liberal thought, so deeply entrenched in America (consider, for example, the whole “New Age” and its endless rebellion against any and every idea of reason, truly a dirty word to most Americans), would color our philosophy, legal thinking, and economics, as well as our culture, which now embraces, in its more advanced locales, the liberty to choose one’s pronominal gender of reference, precisely because individual self-determination is an absolute.
Not a bad idea, perhaps, but this same culture makes many other problems difficult to solve or even notice. Few Americans will readily grant that being rational means anything other than the person making the claim to be or want others to be, in trying to get whatever he or she wants, since all purposes, desires, and interests are in principle equal.
Our legal system is peculiar for the related way in which it turns on a similar distinction between the point of view of enunciation and so of guilt as well as personality, and that of the content of the law, which often turns out to be just a detail. A person in a position to examine the question of someone else’s guilt or essence will not ask whether or not he or she has violated the law or rule in question. They will instead ask whether a person like this one is the kind of person who would. They judge the person, and his or her virtue or vice, not whatever guilt, if there is any such, that would apply only to the failure to observe this or that law. It is entirely possible to organize a legal system this way; and compromises are possible, too, as with the mediation of something like legal principles. For example, it might be held a legal principle that one should not covet his neighbor’s possessions; borrowing and not returning an object might be a violation of an actual law, but its character as such would derive from the principle.
Our legal system confusedly both separates and unites the guilt of persons and that of particular transgressions, a guilt that in a way is proper to, or belongs to, the particular law itself. The guilt of persons is not the violation of a statute but of the principle of laws or “moral law,” or “the rules,” or something like it. This gives us sins like that of hubris, which is a character trait that disposes people to commit some moral transgressions, but is not itself one; it is closer to the very idea of such.
The other confused identity and separation in our legal system is between truth and opinion. The lawyer making his or her case will argue the guilt or liability, or absence thereof, of their client. The system and its discourses are so organized that the lawyer must be understood as simultaneously arguing both an opinion and a truth. He argues the opinion of his client which expresses the point of view of that person as rooted in their motives and purposes of whatever kind. And these are equal here from a certain point of view, which is also the sophistical one of opinion. But opinions can only be argued for, supported with evidence and reasons, if they are supposed as held true by the person arguing. No one else can be asked to be interested otherwise, unless they are somehow in league with the purposes of the person being represented. People arguing their opinion want to win, and to do so in order to get something other than just winning (which might be what the lawyer wants for himself) that they want.
The English common law tradition pushes the whole society towards a certain conformity, while the Roman legal system dominant on the Continent more favors ideas held to be true in some manner much more dependent on what is said and the evaluation of its content.
The problem with the role of bureaucratic thinking in American culture is not that it is so pervasive, but that it is unrecognized. Effects and affects of rage are produced when people realize that they are having a conversation with someone who acts like a machine. The English differ from the Americans in their recognition of this as a problem. The Marxists among them will, and not wrongly, call this a language of class domination, which works by means of the professional class mastering discourses used to manage ordinary people (who might be a different social class, or the same people in a different role or situation), that leave the latter silent and silenced. If a language can be accommodated to the interests of social class and power in this way and fully enough, then there will be a leftover that is treated like capitalist economics’s “negative externalities.” With the managers and the system seeming to define all possible discursive moves, those left outside are excluded others, perhaps automatically labelled either immature, “mentally ill,” or criminal. “Mental illness” simply names an exteriority to a discourse that pronounces on the normality or lack thereof of those who are authorized to speak only in it or on its terms. “I’m so sick and suffering, daddy and mommy, give me more of your ‘mental health’ care services,” says more than one incarcerated psychiatric patient, when asked, to speak on cue about what it is they ‘want’. Just as when some whistleblower convicted of the mere crime of disobeying the authorities in their country’s government, serves up to the press a servile discourse of how they recognize that they were wrong because, blah blah blah. Maybe they were indeed wrong, and see it now, and are indeed sorry, and should be, etc.; but is that really the question?