Okay so obviously it's been a busy semester. First post of the new year.

I don't know why I have become accustomed to jumping into the blogosphere from Andrew Sullivan. At first it was because I was already getting some information I agreed with and I thought he was a good guage of where the Pro-Bush, neo-cons were headed. He would often piss me off, but at least I could better understand the logic of the people who seemed to be such craven cheerleaders for fascism.

Then, as the shit started to hit the fan last spring/summer, between the absence of WDMs in Iraq and the release of the Abu Ghraib I was sort of shocked to see him as one of the few people who was actually re-thinking some of his positions. So I watched him as a hopeful guage of the direction of the other side of the possible voting public in November. That was, of course, a serious disappointment--the election, that is, not the fact that one guy out of the posse was asking a few moral questions that have since become almost unconscionably spun into something to be valued: that is, the use of torture to get information that leads to saving lives. For some reason the cognitive dissonance learning about these things causes makes people use the most juvenile, transparent arguments as justification. Since there was no information to get out of people in Ghraib; since there have been no convictions for terror since the Patriot Act was instituted, I don't think these "ticking bomb" scenarios are all that relevant.

The problem is that once you tell someone to do whatever they can to get "the information" it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy-and rarely in the way that it does in Sartre's "The Wall." The hitch the the "ticking bomb" scenario is that most of the time the interrogators, almost as a structural response to the situation, have to assume that something bad is about to happen and that the reason that they have resorted to these methods is to find out for sure. It is the logic of the pre-emptive Bush/PNAC doctrine taken to its micropolitical conclusion: you torture, you bomb, you kill relentlessly because you don't know--or claim not to know--what is a reasonable threat and what is simply an irrational, primal response to a fucked up situation, then afterwards you say things like Col. Jessup i.e. Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men and anyone who asks questions is some liberal softie for believing in the value of the law. In the end, I think it has to be a complicated negotiation between the two positions, but if you don't have, to extend the metaphor, the Kaffee (Cruise) position, then there really isn't anything worth protecting on this side of the wall, as far as I am concerned. Then again, I am obviously one of the softies so I would think that.

I digress, but not far, because what I was initially going to say was that there are a couple of pieces that Sullivan has recently put up, neither of which are all that original, but which remind me of patterns that are continuing to emerge.

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20050220

In the first, he sets the ground for the second by noting something that Cultural Studies folks noted long ago about the Sony Walkman and which is, anyway, a fairly obvious observation made by someone who doesn't normally try to talk about these things. The piece is about how the Apple iPod has become "ubiquitous" and has changed our culture fundamentally so that there is an end to society. Since we are no longer forced to interact with our fellow humans in the public sphere because we are stuck behind our ear buds, the social fabric is rotting. I have already lived through this and haven't been keen to jump onto that bandwagon: after riding the bus to elementary and middle school in my own little insular bubble, embarassing myself by singing out loud to my favorite (often very bad) songs, I have come to appreciate the value of not having music in my ears every second of the day. That and I am a grad student who simply can't rationalize spending $300 on a machine, however awesome, that I don't really need. Besides, I have too much reading to do. Anyway, the wide-eyed Sullivan is largely trapped behind a whole other set of blinders which is basically the perspective of an upper middle class fellow who notices his fellow iPod users more than the immigrant mothers and homeless vets and assesses that they are society and since they are listening to the iPod, something new and exciting (or disturbing) must be happening. But this techno-centered view of the world is to be expected from a blogger, especially one as triumphalist and elitist as Sullivan. As with the financial outlays for an iPod, many people (technically, including myself: this machine was bought totally on credit and has yet to be paid off) can't afford a computer with regular internet access. So to think of either of these things as widespread causal factors of anything in the broader society is fairly elitist. Yes they may have an interesting conversation with a good 1-5% of the population, and they certainly have an effect, but they certainly aren't something anywhere close to a mass medium. It doesn't seem to occur to him that, as Putnam and others have pointed out, and Hardt and Negri and others hope to change, civic society has been disintegrating and dessicating for years.

Nevertheless, he is trying to think this stuff through and, in the second column, he manages to come up with, roughly, the same sort of conclusion that Habermas comes to in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Namely, that the distinction between public and private has been erased, which, destroys much of the private sphere as a necessary counter balance to the public sphere. His final words in this section are, I think, useful: "the technology that has liberated us in so many ways is also capable of suffocating that inviolable personal space that once had another name. That name was freedom." I try not to think in these terms, but it is still an important argument, I think, for what it points to.

But Habermas doesn't give a technological explanation to how this came to be. Though technology obviously played a role, the distinction between public and private had to do with two movements which, in sequence, began the dissolution of the liberal order. With the commodification of culture people were no longer asked to participate in the cultural sphere as more than consumers and cultural objects were simply there to be consumed. (with the strengthening of copyright, this is becoming even more pronounced.) And this movement was met with another, which made the distinction between public and private even more tenuous and degraded the function (or even existence) of civil society. The latter was defined as a space for the discussion of the society that was not subject to the interventions of either the state or the market. As large corporations and non governmental organizations (lobby groups, activist groups, etc.) began to refuedalize the notion of representative democracy, i.e. instead of representing the people, they represented their power over the political process to the people through publicity, much like the monarch of the fuedal order. This left less space for civil society to have power to change the political order. An interventionist state is the last component of the structural stransformation. In an almost libertarian argument, Habermas points to the loss of privacy, or at least the disctinction between public and private, with the expansion of the welfare state. (232-236 basically sums up this part of the argument.)


I will have to pick up on this argument later and bring it back to one of the books I am reading at the moment by Tyler Cowen.