Culture Wars cont., AKA The Real World Application of ideological partisanship

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Repress U-A Gramscian Case Study In A War of Position: The "Homeland Security" Attack On Academia by: Paul Rosenberg

Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.

As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out. Discussion begins on the flip.

The article begins:

Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

No doubt many of you read something about these incidents. Or about campus "free speech zones," which Gould-Wartofsky also mentions in this section. But few probably thought about it in terms of what it might it portend operationally. What was the purpose being served? Obviously, chilling dissent is one purpose. But chilling dissent is not the end of it, this article shows. It's just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames. Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

And so, slowly but surely, people become acclimatized to living in a garrison state. It makes them feel "secure," by simultaneously making them feel insecure. It changes their everyday experience, expectations, and assumptions about what is normal, taken-for-granted.

Want to get even MORE scared?

A Gramscian Take on The Times And McCain
by: Paul Rosenberg Sat Feb 23, 2008

The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher. (A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.

(B) Gramsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.

(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.



...

So, again, Straight Talk? Not so much....
Which leads me into one of my recurrent topics--the politics of cognitive developmental levels--and how it helps illuminate the strange workings of the "Straight Talk" meme, a meme that's been prominently applied to Ross Perot, George W. Bush and Ron Paul, as well as John McCain. The implications of "straight talk" are quite clear--in ordinary parlance, a straight talker is someone who tells the truth, without all manner of qualifications and embellishments.

But the "Straight Talk" meme is something quite different--it takes the superficial lack of qualifications and embellishments as proof that what is said is true, even if what is being talked about happens to be rather complicated, and very much in need of qualifications and embellishments. One could understand the "Straight Talk" meme simply in terms of American anti-intellectualism, ala vintage Richard Hofstadter. But I prefer Robert Kegan. In the table below, "Straight Talk" is an example of the underlying structure of Level 2--a "durable category":

Click through and scroll down for chart


The first thing to understand is that we are talking about mere appearances here. While the real deal is an "Enduring Disposition"--the psychological manifestation of a durable category--the "Straight Talk" meme refers simply to the appearance described above.

The second thing to understand is that normal conservatism operates on Level 3. It corresponds to adult consciousness in a traditional society. The self is defined in terms of the matrix of social roles and relationships of the surrounding society.
At that level, we are those roles and relationships, and any criticism of them is a criticism of ourselves. "America, love it or leave it," indeed.
Except that--Third Thing--America was founded as a Level 4 institution. Our very Constitution is the very embodiment of a "Relationship-Regulating Form." And it is the conservative, Level 3 mind's complete incapacity to deal with Level 4 that leads to falling back on Level 2 pseudo-certainties.

You see, each level is more complicated than the one before. Each level involves taking what was subject, the foundation of thought and being, and making it object, turning taken-for-granted context into clearly manipulable content. For those who remain embedded in the taken-for-granted context, this is not merely a frightening possibility, it is, quite literally, inconceivable, because they lack the context needed to conceive it.

Traditional, Level 3 societies change only very slowly over time. This is where the "narrative of 'personal virtue' as the foundational concern of politics" described at the beginning of this post fits in. So long as society is basically unchanging, the person who exemplifies living by the rules has a very strong claim to encompass the very essence of what politics is all about.


But modernism developed out of the quickening pace of change that first hit Europe a good seven centuries ago, in the fast-paced trade-oriented city-states of Northern Italy. They called it "The Renaissance," but it was actually much, much more than the rebirth of ancient knowledge, because that ancient knowledge feed into a newly dynamic form of life, from which a wholly new future would spring--the future in which we now live. This future requires, among other things, the active engagement in reshaping the rules by which we live. Change is simply too rapid, and too all-pervasive for us to remain unchanged and still fit with the world around us.


But the Level 3 mind sees such change as its very destruction. To note things that need changing in America is to be anti-American in this view. Ironically, this view is quintessentially un-American. People come here to reinvent themselves. That is the whole point of America. If reinvention is not your thing, then you just don't belong here. Of course, no Level 3 mind can grasp such a basic Level 4 fact, which constitutes an existential threat to its very existence. And a common response to such overwhelming threats is one form or another of ego defense mechanism, such as regression, which is defined as :returning to a previous stage of development."


Much more