#Ideological State Apparatuses

[opencommunion]

"Britain in the 1970s is a country for whose crisis there are no viable capitalist solutions left, and where, as yet, there is no political base for an alternative socialist strategy. It is a nation locked in a deadly stalemate: a state of unstoppable capitalist decline. This has had the deadliest and most profound ideological consequences. Although, under the guardianship of social democracy, Britain backed off a little from the 'law-and-order' state whose construction was well under way between 1972-4, the exceptional form which the capitalist state assumed in that period has not been dismantled. The mobilisation of the state apparatuses around the corrective and coercive poles has been coupled with a dramatic deterioration in the ideological climate generally, favouring a much tougher regime of social discipline: the latter being the form in which consent is won to this 'exceptional' state of affairs. Such an ideological thrust is difficult to delineate precisely, but it is not difficult to identify its principal thematics and mechanisms. Between 1972 and 1974, the 'crisis' came finally to be appropriated — by governments in office, the repressive apparatuses of the state, the media and some articulate sectors of public opinion — as an interlocking set of planned or organised conspiracies. British society became little short of fixated by the idea of a conspiracy against 'the British way of life'. The collective psychological displacements which this fixation requires are almost too transparent to require analysis. To put it simply, 'the conspiracy' is the necessary and required form in which dissent, opposition, or conflict has to be explained in a society which is, in fact, mesmerised by consensus. If society is defined as an entity in which all fundamental or structural class conflicts have been reconciled, and government is defined as the instrument of class reconciliation, and the state assumes the role of the organiser of conciliation and consent, and the class nature of the capitalist mode of production is presented as one which can, with goodwill, be harmonised into a unity, then, clearly, conflict must arise because an evil minority of subversive and politically motivated men enter into a conspiracy to destroy by force what they cannot dismantle in any other way. How else can the crisis be explained? Of course, this slow maturing of the spectre of conspiracy — like most dominant ideological paradigms — has material consequences. Its propagation makes legitimate the official repression of everything which threatens or is contrary to the logic of the state. Its premise, then, is the identification of the whole society with the state — the state has become the bureaucratic embodiment, the powerful organising centre and expression of the disorganised consensus of the popular will. So, whatever the state does is legitimate (even if it is not 'right'); and whoever threatens the consensus threatens the state. This is a fateful collapse. On the back of this equation the exceptional state prospers.

... In 1971, some Sierra Leone students who occupied their Embassy were charged and convicted of conspiracy, appealed, and were denied by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, in the infamous Karama decision. This decision ... perfectly embodied the Lord Chancellor's view that 'the war in Bangladesh, Cyprus, the Middle East, Black September, Black Power, the Angry Brigade, the Kennedy murders, Northern Ireland, bombs in Whitehall and the Old Bailey, the Welsh Laguage Society, the massacre in the Sudan, the mugging in the tube, gas strikes, hospital strikes, go-slows, sit-ins, the Icelandic cold war' were all 'standing or seeking to stand on different parts of the same slippery slope'. The conspiratorial world view can hardly be more comprehensively stated. ... The conspiracy charge was perfectly adapted to generalising the mode of repressive control: enormously wide, its terms highly ambiguous, designed to net whole groups of people whether directly involved in complicity or not, convenient for the police in imputing guilt where hard evidence is not, both at breaking the chains of solidarity and support, and of deterring others, directable against whole ways of life — or struggle.

... As the crisis deepens, and the forms of conflict and dissent assume a more explicitly political and a more clearly delineated class form, social anxiety also precipitates in its more political form. It is directed against the organised power of the working class; against political extremism; against trade-union blackmail; against the threat of anarchy, riot and terrorism. It becomes the reactionary pole in the ideological class struggle. Here, the anxieties of the lay public and the perceived threats to the state coincide and converge. The state comes to provide just that 'sense of direction' which the lay public feels society has lost. The anxieties of the many are orchestrated with the need for control of the few. The interest of 'all' finds its fitting armature only by submitting itself to the guardianship of those who lead. The state can now, publicly and legitimately, campaign against the 'extremes' on behalf and in defence of the majority — the 'moderates'. The 'law-and-order' society has slipped into place."

Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978)

[dizzymoods]

commies are catching strays over calling Biden fascist. Biden is a liberal, fascism is a political ideology, etc.

the commie line on fascism is that it is capitalism in crisis and the capitalist use the weight of the state and markets to bring working class to heel to quick fix the economy.

We see this with Biden busting the rail strike, the never ending waves of layoffs which coincide with increased interest in unionization, states legalizing & encouraging child labor, the rise in prison labor, the contradiction between the necessity of undocumented labor and build the wall — which as we’ve seen multiple times over recently Biden has the same line on this as far rightists (“he was an illegal”; offering to build the wall and other border measures per republican doctrine). the economy is booming according to gdp (the capitalist measuring stick of economic success) but nobody can afford groceries.

the genocide in gaza is a manifestation of this as well. much has been written on israel and the us not having a game plan. there’s no strategic victory just death and destruction for its own sake. all while weapons manufacturers get paid.

the proxy war with russia and posturing toward china hints to this as well; both challengers in some way to us imperialism. But we see the weakness exposed bc the comedian president who used to get gold saucers is now begging for scraps. can’t fund ukraine an israel infinitely.

yemen and ansarallah also expose how stretched the empire is when it seized 3 ships back in october, along with the hilarious fallout of the initial phase of prosperity guardian and the fact that the us has yet to open the red sea.

and insofar as liberalism is opposed to fascism… well we won’t look too closely at the transfer of power in Germany say around january 1933. nor how obama expanded repressive state apparatuses like surveillance, militarized police, unilateral presidential powers, setting a public precedent of extrajudicially killing us citizens and handing it off peacefully to trump, who is evidently a unique existential threat to democracy. nor how in every fascist regime the liberals, who are capitalists, sell out the commies, who are anti capitalists, to the fascists, who are capitalists.

[tanadrin]

@snazzyjazzsounds

it’s weird how for much of human history “democracy” was just like. technologically unfeasible within a medium sized state.

on the one hand i’m a big fan of, like, material conditions as an explanatory factor for social and political structures. on the other, i’m wary of letting the dicks of history off for their dickishness, as if it was impossible to know or nobody ever suggested that war and slavery and exploitation were bad, because, y’know, they did.

i think the paucity of something we might call democracies in the ancient world is due to several factors:

1) states originating as wealth-extraction machines. the earliest states seem to have approximately in common the monopolization of a valuable resource, as in hydraulic despotism, and a degree of keeping people in place by force, so elites can glean the excess of farmers and live without having to do food production themselves. sometimes this supports things people consider to be socially valuable activities, like the upkeep of temples, and sometimes not. but if you want to live in an egalitarian society, even one with villages and farming and whatnot, your best option is the extremely vast territory outside the control of organized states, which at least back in the beginning of Sumerian civilization is, like, most of the Earth. States compete over resources and optimize for better resource extraction, and more sophisticated hierarchies and ideologies that enable them to control larger territories, but the goal of “roughly egalitarian society without a ton of coercion” is exclusive with the goal of “live within the boundaries of a state.”

and i think a lot of ancient commentators noticed this; this is why the Tao Te Ching seems so down on the whole idea of statecraft to begin with, and why it paints the picture of an ideal society being one where the people of one state can hear the dogs barking in the next state over, but have never met those people face to face in their lives. because it was written in a period of fierce inter-state competition, and it did not escape the authors’ notice that states were mostly a bad deal for the people who lived under them.

(as we might also notice of the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece, even “democratic” forms of government were ways of brokering power-sharing between elites; most people living in ancient democracies had no ability to participate in their political systems.)

2) infrastructure is expensive, communication is hard. as you note, how the fuck do you coordinate a medium-sized democracy when it takes days to get a message from one end of your state to the other? on the one hand, yes, very big states did exist in this period, like persia. as did states with comparatively well developed apparatuses, like rome. but a lot of how big states operated historically was delegating to local elites--you tax the big men in the province you just conquered, and trust them to figure out how to get the most money out of their peasants. our modern idea of democracy is in many ways predicated on our modern idea of a state, which is somewhat different an animal than an axial-age kingdom!

and a big part of why this is so difficult i feel like has to be linked to the small size of towns, which is linked to the fact that most of the population had to be farming, because the amount of extractable surplus from the rural population was small.

for centuries--longer than the industrial revolution itself, maybe since the late middle ages--my sense is that the yield per farmer has been gradually increasing, which in addition to the population growth enabled since the industrial revolution itself has really vastly increased the amount of time we can spend on things other than producing food. and i suspect that that means states have a lot bigger pool of manpower available to them to assist in their administration, and gives them the capacity to do things like be run for the benefit of a larger subset of their population--and in turn for the population to demand that they be run that way.

3) i suspect lots of ancient societies were run in ways we would approve of, i.e., comparatively egalitarian, not terribly exploitative. i also suspect these societies didn’t look much like (their neighboring) states. you’re not building pyramids for the pharoah if you don’t have pharoahs after all. your court officials are not writing histories of your dynasty if you have no court and no dynasts. so these societies, along with very many others, leave less of a historical impression.

but i don’t want to overly romanticize the past; lots of societies that left no lasting historical record also probably sucked ass. slavery is observed even among hunter gatherers. humans can be real dicks, and we have, as terry pratchett noted, a really unfortunate tendency to bend at the knees.

[brechtian]

hi! i just finished st joan by shaw, and as someone who’s a fan of both shaw and brecht (iirc), i was wondering if you had any thoughts on shaw’s st joan and brecht’s st joan of the stockyards as contemporaneous pieces?

Hello friend!!! As you know, I found this ask so exciting I went and read both of these plays (it took me a little while; I’ll blame having to uproot my life suddenly and move to Florida haha).

As to their status as contemporaneous pieces, I do find it interesting that both Shaw and Brecht clearly had strong feelings about the then-recent canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920. To give Shaw an amount of credit, premiering a play in 1923 which criticizes the hypocrisy of the Catholic church’s canonization of Joan while maintaining similar attitudes and hierarchical systems of power which caused her execution to begin with was probably a bit more groundbreaking than it reads now. With that said, I’m not sure I’d consider Shaw’s play… particularly good. Which is a shame; one of my favorite things about Shaw is probably his female characters, but Joan, as the only one in the whole play, is portrayed as kind of… banal. Like, she’s perfect, she’s God’s favored, etc. but she doesn’t seem to have much of an issue with social or clerical systems of power at large except for insofar as they obstruct her goals to defeat England. Glancing through the Wikipedia page for the play, I really enjoyed T.S. Eliot’s criticism “instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends to which he objects, he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer” (“A Commentary,” 1924). This isn’t necessarily Surprising, since Shaw’s political/social commentary is incredibly hit or miss, but I found the repetition and one-dimensionality of Joan and her struggles sort of a drag by the time I reached the second half of the play. ALSO… I found the epilogue extremely gauche and bizarre, it really did not fit with the piece and was kind of lip-curlingly tacky lmao.

BRECHT <3 I know you’re shocked to hear this but tumblr user brechtian really really really enjoyed Brecht’s Saint Joan. I mean, it’s really Brecht doing what he does best, which is taking a seed of a preexisting story and transforming it into brilliant complex class commentary. I was hoping going into it that there’d be criticism of the role the church plays in maintaining capitalism and BOY was I not disappointed. Literally the relationship between ideological and coercive state apparatuses, the critique of neoliberal nonviolence, skepticism of the reformed bourgeois + the difficulty of genuinely relinquishing that status within a system that necessitates power inequality SHE HAS IT ALL! Brecht also having the guts to actually have Joan lose her religious faith by the end (quite literally disco elysium voice communism replaces a faith in the divine with a faith in humanity’s future…) makes the empty propping up of her name and legacy as a symbol for the continuation of the status quo at the end sooo much more effective than Shaw’s cheesy fucking epilogue. In short, everything I’d want from a communist chicago stockyard loose adaptation of Joan d’Arc’s life because it has teeth it has claws it has BITE! I fear comparing the two is really coughing baby wealthy democratic socialist vs communist hydrogen bomb

[theuncannyprofessoro]

Reading Notes 1: Marx and Engels to Althusser to Benjamin

In “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Louis Althusser, and Walter Benjamin, respectively, provide insight on our introduction to ideology and culturalism.

What is the division of mental and material labour and how does it manifest in society?

What is the relationship between the state apparatus and the ideological state apparatuses?

How have the processes of reproducing works of art changed over time, and how have changes in reproduction altered the relationship between a piece of art and its “original” object?

@theuncannyprofessoro

[probablyasocialecologist]

The dispossession of the Amerindians, along with the many later European ‘humanitarian’ interventions abroad, thereby became justified on the basis of a stadial conception of development through which non-European societies were deemed materially (and thus normatively) ‘backward’ in comparison with the ‘West’. Hence, as with the formation of the United States, ‘Native Americans, like other less-powerful groups who possessed territory coveted by White Americans, were declared racially inferior and incapable of productive use of the land’. Those communities or ‘races’ that did not ‘adequately’ develop the productive forces were judged unfit to exist, or in need of instructive rule from the morally and culturally superior ‘Western’ societies. Tellingly, the so-called ‘father’ of modern liberalism, John Locke, evoked similar justifications for the dispossession of the Amerindians in the English-held Atlantic colonies. For Locke, the dispossession of the Amerindians was both necessary and legitimate since the ‘Indians had no right, or very tenuous right, to the land, because they had not “mixed their labour” with it sufficiently’. As E. P. Thompson notes, since Locke saw Amerindians as ‘poor “for want of improving” the land by labour’, and since such ‘labour (and improvement) constituted the right to property, this made it the more easy for the Europeans to dispossess the Indians of their hunting grounds’. In these ways, Europe’s colonisation of the Americas and the ideological apparatuses it spawned marked the embryonic origins of the ‘global colour line’ that would subsequently evolve with capitalism’s development into a world system of imperialist domination.

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

[codswallopia]

345 (more) days in America

CELEBRATING STRUCTURALISM (at work and on the road)

Althusser would love this. Note the yellow "STATE" sign peeking from the bottom. A perfect caution against ideological state apparatuses.

[willtarica]

Discussion Leader Panel Presentations

Pink Floyd: Nothing but the Machine

Young students run around causing a ruckus, complaining about their evil teacher who traps them with the masses. Being a hundred times the size of the students who are ants in comparison, the teacher has an easy time putting the kids into the roof of a standard British home that appears to be a funnel and are turned into spaghetti as he watches through his glasses where one lens enlarges into a magnifying glass. The students' lack of individuality reigns supreme in Pink Floyd’s, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two,” they are just another noodle. In “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make the point that the ruling class, the teachers, control the means of material and mental labor, which is divided for one half to appear as thinkers while the other stays passive and grounded in reality. This allows for one class to rule all just like a teacher runs a classroom in 1970s England (Pg. 59-60). Marx and Engels discuss how ideas are not independent of politics, just as music and art are intertwined with politics. Pink Floyd were one of the most influential bands to criticize the education system and how teachers back then put kids in a box as seen in the imagery of a white brick wall encasing a student sitting on the dirt ground. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser writes:

“School (but also other State institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the Army) teaches ‘knowhow’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’. ‘professionals of ideology’ (Marx), – the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc” (Pg.88).

Pink Floyd paints a picture of the ruling class quite literally trapping a child inside a brick wall by the high priest Althusser speaks of, the teacher. Keeping the youth trapped without hope of living their dreams only will force them into the wall of never contradicting their superiors and never accomplishing anything. Instead, the children will end up in the workforce where they will be miserable.

The sad reality is presented in the shot of silver hammers with red and black handles marching like the military in a dark and cloudy night. Each hammer represents a different child who the high priests trapped into our established system, even if that means the children are unhappy because they grew up to work meaningless jobs. Pink Floyd, Marx, Engels and Althusser all agree that the system's hierarchy is oppressive as the ruling class subjects everyone else into a working majority that builds the infrastructure that keeps the upper class afloat and in power. It's a cycle where the high priests manipulate the children to be the same as everyone else so they stay and grow up to work the same jobs as their parents just like their own kids will.

Thom Yorke and the Aura of Surrealism

Thom Yorke from Radiohead and The Smile made a solo album titled “Anima” and a short film with Paul Thomas Anderson of the same title to go along with it. The film features the songs, “Not the News,” “Traffic” and “Dawn Chorus.” In Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he discussed mechanical reproduction and how it depleted the uniqueness of works of art, writing “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Pg. 667). Thom Yorke is one of the few modern musicians who proves Benjamin's critique of artistic authenticity wrong. “Anima” exists outside of time and space. Benjamin’s comments on retakes in film and music is that it depletes the aura of the piece. Maybe multiple takes does make a work of art less organic, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction appears natural in its own right as the film begins with a location all too familiar for many people, the train.

To perfect something, or rather to record something numerous times can only benefit the artwork at hand, but that's just my opinion. Benjamin does speak on the meaning of aura relating to authenticity and Yorke and Anderson show the inside of a subway where everyone is wearing the same coat and flips it over with a choreographed dance sequence of each person moving their body in a bizarre lifeless way. Yorke and Anderson make their point that authenticity and surrealism can go hand and hand.

After the dance sequence, Thom Yorke picks up a woman's briefcase and proceeds to exit the train to give it back to her. Instead, he loses her and wanders around in a dream-like dystopian world. He is searching for answers but nothing is received. There's a point where he tries to exit the station but the turnstile won't move. The same people in identical trench coats continue to walk through the turnstile right next to him, but his still won't budge. The audience is left to ponder the question of what it meant. This is exactly what I want out of art, displaying an ambiguous critique of society. Art becomes repetitive when the answers are given to the viewer instead of the filmmakers forcing the audience to think critically about the film and its meaning. Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson let the viewer experience a dream-like state so they can apply it to an everyday event such as taking the train to work. Yorke and Anderson are breaking the laws of time and space in the film with surreal imaginary and bizarre and striking choreography. “Anima” created its own aura that is not aligned with the idea that a piece needs to be viewed in a specific way or the authenticity will be lost. The authenticity of “Anima” is its unique and uncanny perspective on reality. Maybe Walter Benjamin wouldn’t mind retakes if films were as inventive as “Anima.”

Critical Thinking Questions

According to Marx and Engels, ideas are not independent from politics. Do you think art and politics should be grouped together or can the two be separate?

Is Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two” overly cynical towards capitalism that's perpetuated by what Althusser describes as “high priests,” or is it justified?

Do you agree with Walter Benjamin's opinion that retakes deplete the aura of films?

Marx, Karl. Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 5: Marx and Engels 1845-47. Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1976. 

Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta. The anthropology of the state: A reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[fadedlovemp3]

should i use the work printer to print out ideology and idealogical state apparatuses even though it’s 52 pages i think Louis Althusser would want me to

[alanshemper]

“Today, more than ever, we have to confront not only the bourgeoisie’s apparatuses of political coercion but also the mechanisms and institutions present in civil society that generate a broad acceptance of the capitalist social order. The capitalist elites tend to achieve a significant hegemony over important popular sectors, a real cultural leadership over society; they have the capacity to ideologically subordinate the popular sectors, even those who are exploited by them. As Chomsky says, propaganda is to bourgeois democracy what the truncheon is to the totalitarian state.

—Marta Harnecker, “Ideas for Struggle,” translated by Federico Fuentes, 1st ed. 2004, revised and updated 2016

[some-velvet-morning]

recommend some social science / political philosophy books

oh wow ok. i do better with number limits. one is sloterdijk's rage and time, fascinating writing on emotions that are pivotal to history. second would be althusser's ideological state apparatuses. his view is pessimistic but also enlightening on a micro level. tiqqun essays are very similar, young girl, bloom, etc. fourth, girard, violence and the sacred. religious studies territory. i recently read mannerphantasien and loved the second volume. also loved all agamben i've read. haraway's writings on oncomouse etc. are truly political..

[hillhouses]

@quarkfcker asked me to compile a list of my favorite works of critical theory - here you go! if anyone is interested in the titles i’ll try to find links later (i’m currently stuck in bed with an endometriosis flare up and posting this from my phone lol)

Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor (deals critically with attaching morality to health; in one of my favorite sections Sontag discusses the vocabulary around getting better - “fighting” cancer, “beating” a disease, etc)

Cassie Pedersen - “Encountering Trauma ‘Too Soon’ and ‘Too Late’: Caruth, Laplanche, and the Freudian Nachträglichkeit” in Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions, and Transfigurations (Deconstruction of Freud’s notion that trauma is time-based and only recurrent after the action)

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble (one of my favs forever)

Eve Sedgewick - “Epistemology of the Closet” and “Between Men” (Between Men especially)

I would try very hard to muscle through a little bit of Jacques Lacan just to understand the concept of the Other. It’s not gonna be easy or fun though.

Sigmund Freud - “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (I know I know boo we hate your pussy Sigmund but I think it’s important to read Freud so you can have a leg to stand on when you’re arguing against him. He also wasn’t wrong all the time, and a lot of his theory gets picked up by feminist scholars, especially these essays. I think often it’s a matter of needing someone who wasn’t a misogynist to contextualize his work.)

Edward Saïd - Orientalism

Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth (both are postcolonialist theory. Fanon is a huge name in poco that you should know.)

Louis Althusser - “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (don’t fuck with the working class etc. This one gives you cool and smart-sounding words like The Superstructure.)

Rosi Braidotti - The Posthuman (Good way to dip your toes into the never ending pool of posthumanism.)

Deleuze and Guattari are interesting but I would watch some Youtube videos explaining their work rather than just reading them because it is not brain friendly to me. Check out “The Body without Organs” and “Rhizomes” specifically. However be mindful that reading firsthand is always a good start to understanding, and videos should be supplemental.

Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold are dear to me because I’m a Romantic/Victorian scholar but if you’re not then you probably won’t get as much out of them. I still think Arnold’s Stones of Venice and Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance are good foundational reads to understand a lot of the basis of art and criticism today.

Sigmund Freud (again) - “The Uncanny”

Zora Neale Hurston is incredible and a good name to keep in your pocket. She was a Black anthropologist and a lot of her work is deeply astoundingly moving.

FUCK SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Roland Barthes - “Death of the Author” (this is required reading for everyone.)

Peruse a good bit of Foucault.

Jacques Derrida - “Spectres of Marx,” “Hauntology,” etc. (I LOVE DERRIDA!!!! I’d definitely read an introduction to deconstruction first.)

Toni Morrison - “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (you should already be reading Toni Morrison.)

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic (Loove this one. Feminist reading of Victorian literature.)

Hélène Cixous is a good name to know and have in your filing cabinet, as is Julia Kristeva.

Any and all bell hooks you can find, especially “Postmodern Blackness” and Feminism is for Everyone. If you’re planning on being anywhere near the sphere of education, check out Teaching to Transgress.

Jack Halberstam - “Female Masculinity” (Butchness and how it differs from male masculinity)

Rob Nixon - “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”

E. Ann Kaplan - Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (connection between the individual and cultural trauma)

[antisemitism-eu]

Answer to this comment by vermilionstarlight:

@antisemitism-eu do you truly think the conflict would end if Hamas released all Israeli hostages? Not that they shouldn't, they VERY MUCH should, but an end to the war wouldn't result from that. The rhetoric being spewed forth from Israel's state and military apparatuses is very clearly antagonistic & fascist, just as much as Hamas rhetoric. In spite of the right to safety and autonomy held by Israelis and Palestinians, the fascists have the guns & money on both ends. This isn't anything specific to Israel or Hamas, every government in the world is run by some mixture of incompetence, hatred, greed, and jealousy. Especially so with fascist governments, which I would qualify the state leaders of Israel as, given their observed word and action. No intent to be antagonistic toward you either, btw :3 I'm posing a question primarily, because I don't think ending conflict is as simple as dismantling Hamas. There is ignorant hatred on both sides of this horror, and there are greedy and spiteful leaders spearheading on either end. People have been lied to and manipulated to see atrocities as miracles, on both ends. Hamas is a piece of the puzzle, but people will be spiteful even without Hamas.

I said that the war would end when Hamas surrenders and releases all the hostages.

Every time you say sometime about Hamas, try to pretend we're talking about American White Supremacists, and see if what you say makes sense.

For example: The White Supremacists murdered, raped and abducted Jews. The minute they return the abducted Jews there will be peace.

That doesn't make any sense, does it?

As for the rest of your answer: You're accusing Israel of being Nazis and comparing them to Hamas.

I could answer point by point, but it's very hard for me to talk to somebody who's so antisemitic and yet so clueless about it.

As I said, try to replace "Hamas" with "white supremacists" and see if you still think the same. Now, let's try this: Imagine that in the US there's a community of White Supremacists. They teach their children to murder Jews, they cheer and celebrate every time a Jew is murdered. There's a big statue in every square and plaza, commemorating the successful murder of American Jews. They honor Jew-murderers and pay them a considerable sum every month they spend in jail for their crimes.

In fact, they pay so much money, that the US government helps them out with basic infrastructure, because we wouldn't want them to suffer. When the card-carrying members of this White Supremacist group go on a rampage in a Jewish neighborhood - murdering, raping, torturing, maiming - they are joined by thousands from their community who throng the streets to celebrate and spit on Jewish bodies. They also chop off heads from bodies, so they can remember that great day. They then announce they would do it again and again, until the US is free of Jews No, the conflict will not end when you dismantle the official group.

The entire community needs to be deradicalized

But that's the first step. It's a necessary step. You don't give the community autonomy, expecting them to learn their lesson and become good, productive citizens.

You don't bring in another White Supremacist group

You don't believe a word they say

You don't expect any self-respecting body to condemn the Feds when they go into this community.

You stand by the victims, not by their murderers and rapists.

You don't say describe the White Supremacist community as being "spiteful".

No, the conflict will not end when Hamas surrenders

But THE WAR will end.

This might be shocking to some people, but the reason Israeli soldiers are shooting in Gaza, is because they are being shot at, and because Gazans are still firing rockets, trying to murder Jews.

Nazi ideology is still alive and well. Does that mean that the US should not have dismantled the Nazi state?

Because that's what Israelis and Jews are being told now.

[selaseldon]

The Price of Freedom: Deconstructing Ideologies in Attack on Titan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EUdSXvMVHqfWuosnvoQdS3ce24Xgza3k/view?usp=sharing

Attack on Titan (2013-2023) is an anime based on the manga of the same name by Hajime Isayama that follows main character Eren Yeager as joins humanity’s fight against what is seemingly their greatest threat: the Titans.

To understand the way power is depicted in Attack on Titan, I employ the theories of French philosopher Louis Althusser[1] and his thoughts on how structures of ideology and state apparatus assign and take power from individuals. I argue that one of the most vicious examples of ideology is depicted in later half of the show through the military’s manipulation of the Warrior Unit, and Althusser’s work “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” can be used to help explain how Marley has managed to subjugate the Eldians in Marley and use them as weapons against their enemies. Althusser believes that for a state to maintain power it must “produce” ideologies to convince its people to stay in the position that they inhabit, to maintain order. Althusser describes ideology as “our imaginary relationship to real conditions,” and states that our perception of the world around us is not exactly our experience, but ideology that tells us we are free to recognize such things. Season 4 sees an introduction to Marley, a militarized state that maintains order through force — Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) — and indoctrination — Ideological State Apparatuses, (ISAs). These combined forces work to subjugate and manipulate the Eldians in Marley and convince them their enemies are the “devils” of Paradis, not the state of Marley repressing them. Isayama’s dedication to detail in his worldbuilding of the “multiple worlds' ' within the show is the foundation for characters that exist in completely different positions of power which in turn, reveal more about the world and humanity itself. The change in perspective in the beginning of Season 4 of the show allows the audience to understand the themes of the show from a completely different perspective and add nuance to characters originally thought to be villains.  

Season 4 of Attack on Titan introduces the audience to Marley, the oppressive and colonial empire across the ocean from Paradis, and while the nation itself is perceived to be the Eren and the Survey Corps’ enemies, the show uses the narrative of the oppressed Eldians to show the complexity behind the supposed enemy and that the question of freedom is not one so easily answered. While the audience is used to the military and political world within the walls, in Season 4 we get to understand the military workings of Marley and their struggle to maintain their power using the Titans. While other nations like the Mid-East Forces have been working on technology and weapons to surpass titan power, Marley has only been focusing on Titans as the main source of their power. Now that the rest of humanity has caught up and is now exceeding such power, Marley faces an inevitable loss. To combat this, in Episode 61 “Midnight Train” Zeke (current Beast Titan) proposes an idea to resume the operation from Season 2 to capture the Founding Titan, as that would cement Marley as the possessor of all Titan power. While Zeke is Eldian, he is considered more important to Marley’s military due to his strength as the Beast Titan and his political knowledge. What I think is interesting about Marley’s use of the Titan power is that it must rely on the exploitation of Eldians, as they are the only ones who can turn into titans. While the average non-shapeshifting Eldian lives in specific zones within Marley, if you volunteer to be a part of Marley’s military, you are treated with slightly more respect because of the value you bring to the state. While this might not directly tie to Althusser’s example of policing in his paper, it does function in the same way that it is a militarized force in that they ensure compliance from the Eldians through violence. Just for background, volunteering to be a Titan shapeshifter is not an easy choice to make. If it were, then majority of the Eldians would be. Titan power limits the users lifespan to 13 years after they have gained it, and essentially devotes the Eldian’s life to fighting for the state that has subjugated and discriminated against their people for years. Marley’s military instates order by policing the Eldians within Marley and capitalizing off Eldian’s ability to turn into weapons for their own colonial practices.

In Episode 60, titled “The Other Side of the Sea,” the audience meets the Warrior Unit, a unit of the Marlyean military group that consists of Eldians trained to inherit titans and fight for Marley’s military as they battle over land with surrounding nations. I will focus on the children who are candidates to be the apart of the next generation of the Warrior Unit, specifically Gabi. Gabi is a passionate and strong girl whose main goal is to inherit the Armored Titan from her cousin who is the current Armored Titan, Reiner Braun. We meet the Warrior candidates who are in the middle of a territorial battle with another nation, and Gabi exclaims that to win this battle would prove to Commander Magath that she is the right choice to inherit the Armored Titan. Amidst the battle, Gabi explains to her fellow, less convinced peers that, “To shoulder the fate of us Eldians…and to slaughter that island of devils who’ve done nothing but make us suffer. (5:41-5:48). Here we see the impact of Marley’s indoctrination, depicted through the word “devil” in referring to people of Eldian descent. Even though Gabi is Eldian herself, she uses the word to refer to the Eldians on Paradis, who are the characters the viewers have been following since the beginning of the show. Her hatred of the Eldians is not due to her own experiences with them, but due to the discriminatory ideology perpetuated by the Marlyean government that they use to justify their treatment of Eldians and to maintain power over them. Gabi’s dialogue throughout the show reveals the intense amounts of indoctrination she has experienced, as she feels she needs to prove to Marley that not only is she a “good Eldian” but there are other “good Eldians” out there (5:48-6:02). Here we see her dedication to excel within a militarized system that only wants her for her titan abilities, displaying how the state perpetuates its ideologies onto its citizens.

By applying Althusser’s theories of RSAs and ISAs to Marley’s military forces and practices, the audience can understand other Eldian experiences, not just the Eldians in Paradis. Marley’s indoctrination has convinced Eldians in Marley to view the Eldians in Paradis as the reason for their treatment, while the characters who were perceived to be the villains of Season 2 (Eldians from Marley masquerading as Scouts): Bertholdt, Annie and Reiner, are nuanced due to the reveal that they were essentially manipulated to begin the attack from the first episode and to betray the Scouts. Isayama’s worldbuilding and depiction of power structures not only adds nuance to characters but displays the true dangers of state power.

[1] Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” 9, no. 1 (2006).

@theuncannyprofessoro

[lwrighttheelectrolyte]

Reading Notes 1: Marx and Engels, Althusser, Benjamin

When we think of division of labor, we are typically thinking of the division of material labor specifically. The notion that there’s a proletariat or working class who work for the bourgeoisie and earn from wages, while the bourgeoisie or ruling class controls, and earns from the control, of the means of production. Marx and Engels argue that this division of material labor also lends itself to the division of mental labor. The ruling class creates the ideologies that govern society as a whole. It’s important to note that these ideologies don’t exist independently and are specifically designed to keep the working class docile and legitimize the current ruling class. This often comes subtly in the form of everyday media. Specifically right now in the United States I think of the general values of self-determination or the “grind”, often suggesting that people who aren’t successful simply aren’t working hard enough. 

Althusser claims that the State Apparatus is more accurately a Repressive State Apparatus that functions by violence and repression. This includes things like the government, army, police, courts, and prisons, all of which are public, and ultimately form a single entity. Alongside the RSA are the Ideological State Apparatuses, including the religious, educational, political, communications, and cultural ISAs. When we say educational ideological state apparatus for example, we refer to both public and private education systems. The cultural ISA would refer to everything literature, art, sports, etc. In contrast with the RSA, ISAs are often private, and most importantly, function by ideology as opposed to violence. Althusser notes that beyond all ruling by ideology, ISA’s are more specifically united in that their ideologies all ultimately fall under the ruling ideology. Thus, despite their differences, both the Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses ultimately work together to achieve the same end of maintaining the status quo and reproducing the same class inequalities. 

For most of our history, art has been replicable, but only in the sense that an artist could try their best to imitate an original work, like an apprentice learning from their teacher. There were bound to be differences. Much of what gives a work of art its value is its singularity. Being from one specific artist from one specific time and place, and with only one existing. However, through various technological innovations, we have gotten to the point where we can reproduce nearly any piece of art. Benjamin names things like lithography to printing to photographs, films, and recordings. For lack of a better phrase, this near identical reproduction simply makes many works of art not very valuable anymore. Furthermore, it makes art less traditionally or culturally significant - when, where, and how a piece of art was used or perceived is no longer an important part of its history, as now there are tons of identical pieces in an exponentially different amount contexts. This “[denies] any social function of art” leaving it to be used instead for politics.

[lexluth0r]

Reading Notes 1: Marx and Engels to Althusser to Benjamin

Marx and Engles argue that the division of mental and material labor are both dispensed by that of the ruling class. Because the ruling class owns the means of production, they can provide the mental ideas for the working class to continue the reproduction of the societal fabric that keeps the ruling class in power. The division of mental labor manifests within the working class in forms of media and narratives pushed by the ruling class. These ideals, sometimes unknowingly manifest into a false consciousness. Meaning that the working class accepts the ruling ideals without realizing they are not in their own self interest. Material labor is carried out by the proletariat through the influence of power by the ruling class. The working class carries out the production but does not own the means of profit.

The state apparatus refers to the structural design of the societal system that keeps the ruling class in power and dispenses its ideals to the working class through coercion and force. Althusser explains that these state apparatuses appear through education in school, religion, and the media. The ideological apparatus appears through these same sources, but they are less of a method of force rather than a reinforcement of the reproduction that needs to be done by the working class for the ruling class to maintain their social order.

Reproduction of art has existed in many different forms according to Benjamin. Ancient Greeks used stamps to reproduce themes on artworks and coin making. However, these more rugged forms of reproduction were blown out of the water with the highly marketable invention of the printing press. The ability to reproduce works of art in mass production caused whole markets for these objects as art pieces to be highly commodified in society. Through innovative advancement, the original “uniqueness” of art pieces have been destroyed through material production. This is because the original object is stripped of its historical and traditional roots and turned into a one-dimensional reproduction of the original piece. 

Bibliography

1) Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 2010. “The Ruling Class And The Ruling Ideas.” In The German Ideology, 59-60. Vol. 5. N.p.: Lawrence & Wishart.

2) Althusser, Louis. 2006. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In The Anthropology of the State, 91-93. N.p.: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

3) Benjamin, Walter. 2009. “THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION.” In FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Introductory Readings, 668-670. N.p.: Oxford University Press.