The interdiction of criticism and the future of the political
"For the record, I have never found any trait to complain about in any 'type' of people in my acquaintance which was not at its basis and essence a disaffection from broad characteristics of the society I live in. Perhaps I could have nourished critical observations about people of various demographical types had I become a stand-up comic who makes a profession of sorts of insulting every social type he can recollect.
The rule of course in America today is everyone is supposed to talk maximally about their own identity, as given by a predicate that is a category of persons. But you may never speak about any social group you are not a member of. Anything at all that you say about this group or any of its members considered as such will be treated as a prejudiced statement and severely sanctioned.
People are supposed to cultivate their own garden and respect everyone else's doing so. Mind your own business. If you are authentic, and not a hypocritical snob, you will do so with assiduity, and may as well get really into it.
The social types are essentially Census categories. Our government and private businesses have the right to ask about them. In the latter case at least, you can choose not to reply. These social categories therefore are governmental. The purpose is to manage the population, which is admittedly diverse, and also to do this partly by encouraging people to self-manage. Self-management becomes a duty. It is facilitated greatly by things like entertainments.
The identification of these types, it must be admitted, is something American society today cannot stop punishing when it is done 'impolitely' by persons not in the category they are mentioning, precisely because it can neither stop thinking in terms of them. It is both an American problem and a "complex" in the sense that it authorizes inconclusive and often very acrimonious discussions (easily ending up in violence), and its function is to authorize such interminable discussions and make the whole framework that does so all the more inevitable. These are paradigms of discourse that do not permit of themselves to be thought. There is always something imperious about being expected to think within a paradigm and not allowed to bring it to mind and criticize it. Though of course a social theory that is concerned with intellectual history would aim to do precisely that.
It is also true in this culture that it is very dangerous generally, and often punished, to criticize another person. No one can be wrong about what they believe, because everyone must be right in what they believe. Anything else would be illiberal if not un-democratic.
This reduces interactions between clients of institutions and businesses, like consumers, to being more or less completely subject to the authority of the expert, professional, office-holder, or manager in that situation. This is of course also true in relation to bosses.
Seventies feminism was mistaken to claim that the personal is really political. What they meant of course is that they would like to politicize it. In general, the left politicizes what is private and the right privatizes what is political.
If we had a democratic republican culture, citizens could and would normally speak together about not each other or the relationship, though that would generally be possible also, but about common matters pertaining to the common wealth or republic or state. And the "society" which only exists because it does; societies are the referents of states.
Discourse often is cut short by invoking a Name of God. By that I mean a name of Authority that is ultimate enough to seem to the speaker to decisively settle the matter. Of course, the deeper truth is that in our society things are decided by markets and money, or the counting of opinions and voting.
Elections with voting in a representative democracy like ours are more similar to de facto decisions made 'by' markets than they are to any rational procedure imminent to discourse.
What I find so striking about the way most Americans think is their cluelessness about it. Most people involved in doing things the way they are normally done in this country are very allergic indeed to having it called into question.
For instance, something we share with the Chinese, whose government unlike ours does not pretend to either liberty or democracy, is the widespread belief that our society should be run by experts, and political candidates should be backed by us because the person is a good man or woman. And in organizations that are governed partly by bodies that reach decisions by engaging in discussions, the priority is always on allowing everyone to speak, and so participate. Unfortunately, these ideas of democracy are very weak in relationship to a principle they cannot dispense with, which is something like "rational discourse," an idea that was preeminent in much of the classical and medieval worlds but fell quite out of favor in modernity, especially in America.
Most "liberals" understand something not very different, except in choice of motifs as obsessional themes, from what most conservatives do: Social life is a social factory modeled on the modern corporation and its office life. (I wonder if the acceleration caused by the pandemic of the move towards people working at home and often as contracting freelancers will lead to changes in this.) Everyone must behave properly according to "the rules." Everyone who transgresses this propriety, which is essentially communitarian and only weakly driven by conceptually explicit legal norms, already weaker in this society because our legal tradition is that of common law by judicial opinion rather than statutes that are explicit a priori -- everyone such transgressors is immediately called out, and taken aside by a manager of the group who then demands a confessional accounting of the reason for his or her, already decided, transgression.
One of these rules is to never criticize or disagree with another person. Everyone is right, all the children get gold stars on their forehead, just for being here and honestly participating or trying. There is nothing essential to think about, as all such questions are decided, mostly already, by authorities. But we all must participate. American school and college classrooms are like jazz jam sessions except that they are more regulated in terms of time allowed and theme. The point is to participate in the discussion; never mind what it is about. That is also why group therapy is used in psychiatric hospital wards and is eternally popular among psychiatrists. This is a society that places a high value on being-with and the intellectual conformity that goes with it, with the twist that the cognitive or conceptual content of the conforming attitude or feeling is not considered of much importance.
It is because of this rule that you cannot criticize another person you have ongoing work-related relationships with that people have to be totally respectful of others' identities. One of American societies' biggest anxieties is obviously about the question:
"Who am I, in the sense of (only) how can I best perform the identity "assigned" to me essentially at birth?" It is assigned to you by the demographical categories you are born into, absent difficult procedures of re-assignment that require enormous investments of personal time and energy. Woe unto you if you deny the identity predicate: you will be said to be in denial. No one is permitted to deny a truth about themselves. In fact, no one is really permitted to question much of anything.
We have, then, a democracy in which anything can be said unless it really is about anything. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that there largely still is freedom of opinion in writing and publishing, to some extent, and in art to a greater one.
What troubles me most about American society today is that it is not one. It is liberal but tacitly authoritarian; it is a democracy that is not really a republic, which is very strange in classical terms. The concept of the republic turns on that of the citizen, who is a participant in the affairs or concerns of the common wealth and polity, as well as being expected to cultivate certain virtues. Perhaps because we are moderns and moderns are individualistic and are, or were, self-reflecting (this also seems to be disappearing from our culture, unless it is just changing in form along with new media and social conditions), the virtue thing remains, certainly, and is everywhere insisted on and enforced, while participation in the classical sense has gone the same way as the ability to say something critical to another person without appearing to breach the norms of civility. We do not have a "civil society" in that sense, partly because our "public sphere" is particular; it is dominated by discourses that can only be engaged in competently by experts trained to do so (and from the professional university-educated middle class, or that small sector of it that cares about public life and discussion). We think that it is not civil to disagree with someone. This is why most Americans think an argument can only be a fight. As I see it, this means that, in general, you cannot say anything to anyone about anything. (In my profession, people make written arguments, and one of the rules, which many students are unaware of, is that one not only tries to write an "excellent" text, but to do so one must make an argument and for a claim that you stake yourself on that is controversial. If you say something that is not a possible object of controversy, then in my (classical republican) book you are not saying something but only sharing. You might share an an attitude or feeling, but if you share an opinion you must either treat it contestable--and this contestation as enjoyable--or admit that you are Sophist. Sophism, as French philosopher Alain Badiou has noted, is the belief that there are no truths, only opinions. It is not that no one recognizes that an opinion is only worth entertaining or even makes sense to formulate and hold to begin with if it is both believed to be true, and understood to be only contingently so, and possibly false. After all, we still have science, and other practices of thought and inquiry. What has disappeared is a public.
A utopia of the political left was long the idea of a participatory democracy. The Israeli kibbutz, the socialist collective farm, the factory council (or "Soviet"), the cooperative, these were all forms of this. So was the American New England town hall. It may be that this ideal has now disappeared for good, not to reappear except in nostalgic recollections.
That utopia may depend on oral culture, and it was perhaps first placed into a dubious position by the rise of the modern novel and perhaps too the decline of theater. Theater was replaced by cinema, which owes more to the novel both in its aesthetic forms and its manner of reception.
The internet is surely effected shifts in the forms of our public sphere. It has so far developed in essentially conservative ways. I think they form a break on its potentialities. As more and more the things that people want have essentially no direct cost, we can begin perhaps to wonder about the possible de-commodification of the life of the mind.
In the absence of the greater proliferation of different forms or uses of discourse, our society has what appear to be town halls marred by their tendency to dissolve into witch trials. (Our show trials, that is, legal proceedings that are conducted partly as media events, may be less a problem than the question of their contents. They are also a sign that politics is normally displaced onto something that is intrinsically rational, certainly, yet not political at all.) My question is, is there a future for the political, and if so, what forms will it have?