“Ultimately, all arguments for beauty are arguments for freedom. “ –Camus
During my present immersion in Rorty’s Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity, I have come to realize that, while there are a lot of excellent attempts out there to explain the nature and characteristics of a totalitarian state, I would add to it a tendency to put the petty and mundane over self transcendence: self creation to put it in Rorty’s terms, terms I believe he shares with Deleuze despite their differences. And all I have to do is watch a few TV commercials or note that the workplace (not government (via smoking policies and drug testing (has become the most effective form of social control to see how far Capitalism has pushed us to that end. In this sense, philosophers like Rorty and Deleuze have become as important as they ever were. But this is not to say that this form of social control cannot take more sophisticated forms. I return to an earlier point:
“The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 137-138). Kindle Edition.
“I mainly throw this out to my worthy (as in useful (jam-mate, David, who crystallized this point for me which applies to both of my main influences: Deleuze and Rorty (:I’m drawn to French concepts while being equally drawn to the Anglo-American style of exposition . Unfortunately, I cannot track his actual quote and will have to paraphrase it. He basically pointed out that in the old days, the objects that occupy our space were considered to be the language of God. It therefore followed that anyone capable of interpreting that language more accurately than anyone else had to be higher up the ladder: the hierarchy. And we can see, based on this, how that dynamic has managed to evolve into the hierarchies and secular religions of today –something I hope to go into later.”
And now’s as good a time as any. But to explain how I see that subject/object presupposition evolving into modern forms of oppression, I have to offer a quasi sy fy prediction based on an actual experience I had on the old Yahoo boards. During the Bush/Kerry campaign, being the vocal progressive I was, I came up against a libertarian economist who was clearly college educated and had a lot of time to focus on board spats. For every argument I made, he was able to come up with 10 pieces of data that made him seem impressive to the fellow goons he brought with him. And the fact that I knew perfectly well that had I of had the time he apparently did, I could likely find ten other pieces of data that put his into question mattered little under the “rules of discourse” according to the language game he was (via common doxa (controlling the rules of. Eventually, the 2008 economic meltdown proved my instincts right. But more important is what I found out via Thom Hartman: that corporate and conservative think-tanks were paying ideological hit-men (like the one I encountered (to go about the boards and undermine anti-Capitalist stances.
Now we go syfy:
Say Sanders gets the nomination. Isn’t there the very real possibility that those corporate and conservative think tanks will release the ideological hit-men again? And isn’t there every possibility that the strategy those hit men will use is to barrage you with data, thereby engaging you in a data war that most people (those that actually work (cannot win? What they will basically do is claim victory based on the very subject/object dynamic described by David McDivitt: that which gives hierarchical status to those who can read the voice of God (via the object (based on an arbitrary human construct constructed in a power discourse.