A New Look at the Left Wing — Hi Andrew. This blog is excellent. I’ve noticed a habit of mine to, upon identifying an aspect of culture that benefits/protects the presiding paradigm, assume that that particular foible of culture is preserved/held in place/perpetuated by that paradigm (e.g., how political discussion is pretty much taboo in friendly/light/’polite’ conversation in the United States), which I’m realizing is wholly unscientific and possibly approaches tinfoil hat territory. More likely, perhaps, is that a paradigm flourishes in a certain time and place because that culture’s foible-set creates a particularly fertile environment for that paradigm. Right? I don’t know. Anyways, I was hoping you might be able to point me toward some books/articles that treat/critique the tendency of culture critics to think of a dominant paradigm as an intelligent, self-concerned, self-preserving organism. Thanks, Michael

Answer

Hi Andrew. This blog is excellent.

I've noticed a habit of mine to, upon identifying an aspect of culture that benefits/protects the presiding paradigm, assume that that particular foible of culture is preserved/held in place/perpetuated by that paradigm (e.g., how political discussion is pretty much taboo in friendly/light/'polite' conversation in the United States), which I'm realizing is wholly unscientific and possibly approaches tinfoil hat territory. More likely, perhaps, is that a paradigm flourishes in a certain time and place because that culture's foible-set creates a particularly fertile environment for that paradigm. Right? I don't know. Anyways, I was hoping you might be able to point me toward some books/articles that treat/critique the tendency of culture critics to think of a dominant paradigm as an intelligent, self-concerned, self-preserving organism.

Thanks,
Michael

glvno asked

Thanks for the compliment, and your question. I think the point you raise is a very good one. Unfortunately, I don’t do a whole lot of discourse analysis so I’m not really able to answer your question. I think it is addressed to some degree in the essay ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Some Issues of Method and Substance’ by John Roemer- wherein he critiques what he calls the ‘lazy teleological reasoning’ of Marxists who argue that racism and sexism reproduce themselves purely because this benefits capitalism (even though capitalism could function perfectly without them). As a friend of mine once pointed out, it’s like saying ‘well, the sun benefits the trees, so the trees cause the sun.’ You’re very right to call it unscientific.

Having read a bit of Foucault I think I have a bit of the grasp of the framing that many people use to explain how these paradigms operate and reproduce themselves without resort to the ‘tinfoil hat territory’ that we’d understandably like to avoid. Those who draw on Foucault’s work say that power relations become embedded in discourse, so that dominant modes of thinking and talking about particular issue produce and reproduce themselves regardless of the intentions of those talking. Clearly this has a lot of explanatory power (when talking about things like unintentional racism and sexism and the like), but I think a lot of danger lies in taking it too far, as I have partially discussed before. I think those who seek to discuss dominant modes of discourse purely in the terms of some ‘group’ or ‘system’ which is benefiting from and directing them are misreading Foucault, who stressed that networks of power operate on their own logic and only contingently (even if consistently) benefit one group.

I think there are problems with this view as well, because as James Gordon Finlayson points out in his introduction to Habermas’ work, the stronger you make the presence of power in discourse, the less plausible your explanations become. This is because as you’re positing an ever more powerful ideology that has more and more hegemony over discourse, you’re making it harder to escape from- even for yourself. In so doing, you put yourself in the awkward position of having to explain how simultaneously the dominant ideology is so powerful and your explanations of it are so accurate.

I do like the idea of another way of looking at it, which is why I’m drawn to the field of social philosophy (in analytic philosophy). I think it provides a sharper picture of social phenomena, even if it is sometimes lacking in relevance to contemporary issues, and analytic philosophers are generally very sensitive to the potential negative implications of their positions. I think a more radical application of it that preserves its precision and clarity of argument would be able to avoid these pitfalls (which is a bit of what I’m trying to do with my geography term paper).