Re: <nettime> Bad news for Brexit Junkies! - worse news for Labour and remainers

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 16 Oct 2018, at 9:54, James Wallbank wrote:

> Well, quite clearly I'm beginning to sound like a member of the 
> tinfoil hat brigade - but seriously, the level of democratic failure 
> and delusional thinking at the highest levels of governance are hard 
> to explain in other ways.

I agree with your analysis in spirit, but all of those things were true 
when the UK joined the EU — so it doesn't do do much to explain why 
this and why now?

The nihilistic turn that many established nations are taking is 
maddening because it's hard to tell whether the driving forces are 
structural or, instead, if we're seeing the resurgence of the 'great 
man' model of history (yes, peanut gallery, I know this lot isn't very 
'great'). In theory, those two ways of thinking about society are 
radically different; in practice, they seem to be converging. A handful 
of people who fancy themselves great have fumbled and maneuvered their 
way into positions, political and discursive, that allow them to seize 
— or maybe 'surf' — structural forces. The fact that they're 
jabbering, sophistical narcissists is all the more frustrating, because 
anyone with a shred of optimism left would think those personal 
qualities would make it impossible to rise to such power. And yet we 
also know that those personal qualities are ideally suited to key 
aspects of how media works now, again ranging from the structural (for 
example, the temporal model of 24/7 constant-coverage media machines) to 
the personal (Rupert Murdoch and his ilk). So what we're seeing isn't 
just a collapse of the national regimes, we're also seeing the collapse 
of an epistemic regime that was tied to the heyday of — and depended 
on — those national regimes to establish facts. People like to cite 
that chestnut about everyone gets their own opinion but not their own 
facts, but *in fact* what we're seeing is a rising world in which people 
*do* get to have their own facts — for a while. The first question is 
for how long, and second is what comes next?

In the US the concern is that the GOP under Trump is assembling a 
one-party state at an alarming rate. Much of the basic work had already 
been done before Trump came along, and his forces are now mainly 
connecting the dots. The result may well be a governmental regime that's 
adept at manufacturing its own facts on a just-in-time basis — 
basically shoving crazy short-term noise into media pipelines and 
networks in order to dominate both *how* things are 'framed' (bleh) and 
*what* is framed — 'content' (even more bleh). In practice, this 
relies heavily on subverting the segments of the government whose 
strength has been that they moved *slowly*: the technocratic and 
procedural layers of the executive branch, fact-finding mechanisms of 
the legislative branch, and the analytical authority of the judicial 
branch. Given the right conjunction — autocratic leaders, solipsistic 
ruling parties, minority parties in thrall to institutionalism and good 
manners, and judiciaries systematically subverted over decades — this 
has been surprisingly to accomplish within individual countries.

But this turn involves several (maybe many) countries, which is where it 
gets really messy. It's hardly worth mentioning the importance of the 
community of nations to restrain individual countries' excesses, but 
what happens when these nihilists start to cooperate? We're seeing that 
all over the place: cabals meeting here, theaters of the absurd there, 
shadowy influence networks playing next-level jurisdictional games with 
data, employees, processing. Again, that's not new: for example, the 
homogenization of politicians and campaigns was clear in the '80s, and 
the rise of multinational news systems like News Corp heavily shaped the 
politics of the '90s. But we're only beginning to see how deeply 
political media consulting has been internationalized, and there's a 
growing sense of defeat that any existing institutions will be able to 
establish the facts, let alone determine whether they were criminal, let 
alone prosecute and the people, organizations, and networks involved.

And that's where your analysis, though largely accurate, becomes 
dangerous. It may help us to understand some of the structural 
conditions driving nihilistic projects like Brexit, but because it 
doesn't address my initial questions — why this? and why now? — it 
doesn't do what's needed: help to lay a basis for new frameworks, 
institutions, and procedures that are capable of restraining this turn. 
The dilemma that minority parties face is that they're largely limited 
to assuring people that the institutions can be renewed through normal 
civil processes and that we can return to some semblance of sanity. What 
they can't do is frankly acknowledge the possibility that these 
institutions are 'broken' or hopelessly inadequate to the challenges. 
Again, this isn't especially new: we've seen it in proxy wars, flags of 
convenience, the rise of multinational capital that juggles entire 
nations, the subversion of the very idea of a nation into offshore 
tax-havens, extraordinary rendition, and so on. And yet I think we're 
facing a fundamental break on a new order — of the kind that in the 
past required international war-crimes tribunals, truth and 
reconciliation, or lustration. But those processes rely above all on 
facts, which in many ways have become just another commodity. And what 
they rely on, second to that, is some sort of fiduciary entity: persons, 
organizations, corporation to attest or to prosecute. A new generation 
of jurisprudence will need to squarely address the problem of the 
network. There are precedents (for example, in how organized crime has 
been prosecuted), but they're too scattered and particular for the 
problem at hand.

Again and again, most of this isn't new. In my recent research I've been 
gobsmacked to find how little scholarly attention has been paid to the 
history of public-opinion polling, which — of course – is the basis 
of the kinds of analytics used so effectively to manipulate public 
opinion. Most of the 'work' has been done by people in business schools, 
who are committed to anything but epistemic stability grounded in 
historical fact — which is why they love 'case studies,' a genre 
that's the bastard child of Vasari's art-hagiography and quantitative 
trivia. There are a handful of books on the subject — notably done by 
women, like Sarah Igo's _Averaged American_ and Liza Featherstone's 
_Divining Desire_ — but before that most of the work was tangential 
and squirreled away in the (wait for it...) 'great man' mold of 
~'60s/'70s business-political biography. What's missing is the basic 
insight that opinion-polling *turned opinions into empirical facts*: the 
fact that someone held an opinion became a fact as effective — maybe 
more so — than natural facts. The impact of that turn can't be 
overstated — and what we're facing now is its consequence: the ability 
to mass manufacture 'facts' on a scale capable of subverting major 
nations. Yes, yes, not new, Chomsky etc, etc — but general systemic 
criticisms like his aren't enough. Ian Hacking is more useful, IMO.

But to return to your point, it may just be that your fourth item...

> (4) Britain is notable in being the only European nation to have 
> failed to rid itself of hereditary rulers. Of the 250 or so Dukes in 
> Britain (that's the highest level of the aristocracy outside royalty) 
> around 180 of them still own the land that their ancestors owned just 
> after the Norman Conquest. That represents nearly 1000 years of 
> occupation. They will stop at NOTHING to retain their hidden power.

...may turn out to be the UK's salvation. If (when IMO) they recognize 
just how badly Brexit has damaged their interests, they may decide to do 
something about it. Despite its catastrophic stratification, the US has 
no such chthonic power. Normally I add 'Yet.' to a ending like that, but 
not this time, because I don't think that's how it'll end.

Cheers,
Ted




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