Huffy Crew Idea Report #1
This Huffy Crew Idea Report will be the first in a series that aims to collect and discuss ideas we're thinking about now that we weren't thinking about before. This is a group project, so contribute where you see fit. For me, this is to be a project in which thought and history come together as the calling-out or naming of priorities and mindsets - a task a little like Nietzsche's genealogy, I think. I mean this only in the sense that, while these ideas are emphatically not novel or newly-produced, their relation to us and our interest in them bears the trace of a turn of the mind and revaluation of values.
The Military-Industrial Complex
This one I leave up for grabs (in other words, for debate). I don't know that the MIC ever completely fell off the politico-theoretical radar, but something tells me that its centrality with regard to the study of American foreign policy is a new thing, related most obviously to the Iraq war. Of course, I haven't been paying serious attention to political affairs for very long, but hear me out. This morning, it occurred to me that the problem of journalism following 9/11 was this: That they were unprepared for reporting an historical conflict. The distinction I am making is between an historical conflict and an immediate one, and in every sense the treatment of 9/11 was as an instance of the latter.
An historical conflict is one which requires a knowledge of the history of power in a region; an immediate conflict calls for the understanding of ideologies, beliefs, and emotions as they play out in the immediate present. Was it the Cold War that inured us to the idea of an ongoing immediate conflict? Likely it was; but think of Clinton, who was, by my account, an utterly immediate President. His crises were of the immediate sort - most obvious were the sex scandals, which called for just the sort of psychological and emotional analysis that characterize affairs of immediacy. But think as well of Clinton's rhetoric, his "I feel your pain" compassioneering, which went a long way towards keeping Americans convinced that affairs of political importance belong to the electorate rather than to silent cabals and hidden powers.
Clinton kept our attention upon affairs in the present; he was probably not the first public figure in recent years to do so, but he did it so well that it's worth calling him archetypal. Of course, there were secret cabals and hidden powers, but to root them out requires political archeology - rooting and digging and, above all, an historical understanding of affairs. Historical affairs are not necessarily more difficult than immediate ones; or at least, they are both impossible when thought of in the extreme, only in different ways. The problem with historical insight is that it is never-ending: there are always more players and situations of power than can be counted. Immediate insight is impossible insofar as the motivations of actors are unknowable in the final instance. As it happens, I think, totalitarianism prospers by making all affairs immediate, and by seeking to rewrite the narrative of history as an ongoing conflict of emotions, worldviews, beliefs - in short, according to unvarying, all-encompassing attitudes. It is worth noting that the popular understanding of our "terrorist enemy" follows this narrative; so does any description of a conflict as a purely ideological one, or a clash of beliefs or passions. To take seriously the notion of the MIC and its centrality with regard to current political affairs is to engage in serious historical investigation. We have, I think, begun to reclaim this sort of historical insight; but only after 4 years of war revealed to us a situation of irreducibly historical import.
The Military-Industrial Complex
This one I leave up for grabs (in other words, for debate). I don't know that the MIC ever completely fell off the politico-theoretical radar, but something tells me that its centrality with regard to the study of American foreign policy is a new thing, related most obviously to the Iraq war. Of course, I haven't been paying serious attention to political affairs for very long, but hear me out. This morning, it occurred to me that the problem of journalism following 9/11 was this: That they were unprepared for reporting an historical conflict. The distinction I am making is between an historical conflict and an immediate one, and in every sense the treatment of 9/11 was as an instance of the latter.
An historical conflict is one which requires a knowledge of the history of power in a region; an immediate conflict calls for the understanding of ideologies, beliefs, and emotions as they play out in the immediate present. Was it the Cold War that inured us to the idea of an ongoing immediate conflict? Likely it was; but think of Clinton, who was, by my account, an utterly immediate President. His crises were of the immediate sort - most obvious were the sex scandals, which called for just the sort of psychological and emotional analysis that characterize affairs of immediacy. But think as well of Clinton's rhetoric, his "I feel your pain" compassioneering, which went a long way towards keeping Americans convinced that affairs of political importance belong to the electorate rather than to silent cabals and hidden powers.
Clinton kept our attention upon affairs in the present; he was probably not the first public figure in recent years to do so, but he did it so well that it's worth calling him archetypal. Of course, there were secret cabals and hidden powers, but to root them out requires political archeology - rooting and digging and, above all, an historical understanding of affairs. Historical affairs are not necessarily more difficult than immediate ones; or at least, they are both impossible when thought of in the extreme, only in different ways. The problem with historical insight is that it is never-ending: there are always more players and situations of power than can be counted. Immediate insight is impossible insofar as the motivations of actors are unknowable in the final instance. As it happens, I think, totalitarianism prospers by making all affairs immediate, and by seeking to rewrite the narrative of history as an ongoing conflict of emotions, worldviews, beliefs - in short, according to unvarying, all-encompassing attitudes. It is worth noting that the popular understanding of our "terrorist enemy" follows this narrative; so does any description of a conflict as a purely ideological one, or a clash of beliefs or passions. To take seriously the notion of the MIC and its centrality with regard to current political affairs is to engage in serious historical investigation. We have, I think, begun to reclaim this sort of historical insight; but only after 4 years of war revealed to us a situation of irreducibly historical import.
Labels: huffy crew, idea report
posted by danny marcus at 12:45 PM
3 comments
