Surprisingly often ideas advance, theses refined, by serendipitous means. So it is in this case. I have just finished Michiko Kakutani’s excellent The Death of Truth, a discourse on our present era, one which has been understandably characterized as ‘post-truth’.
In most of my publications, and blogs too, I have short-changed culture, so keen have I been to rescue and restore structure and structured agency to the substantive fields of stigma and health inequalities. I have however consistently maintained that the postmodern or relativised culture associated with post-1970s financial capitalism has played into the hands of the (class-driven) governing oligarchy by undermining the potential to construct and endorse a ‘grand’ narrative for social transformation. As Habermas argued in The New Conservatism, a relativised culture favours the status quo and therefore comprises a form of neo-conservatism.
I have long insisted on retaining the classical sociological concept of ideology. Ideology, for me, still denotes a skewed view of the world (a skewed ‘grand’ narrative if you will) that reflects the vested interests of a dominant group. Ideology invites, nurtures and fuels ‘false consciousness’ among the many on behalf of the few. In this sense neoliberalism is currently the near-ubiquitous ideology of Britain’s transnationally-oriented governing oligarchy or, if you prefer, plutocracy.
I have also argued that whilst objective class relations have been reinivorated in financial capitalism, subjective class relations have diminished in salience for identity formation. This is in part a function of the postmodernisation or relativisation of culture in which the preponderance of pick-and-mix ‘petit’ narratives and the new individualism are embedded. There is empirical evidence that whilst people have typically retained much of their propensity for class-alignment in terms of their politics, this alignment has been weakened – for example, in voting patterns – by cross-class views inclinations and commitments on cultural issues.
So where does Kakutani come in? Reading her this evening circuitously called to mind the work of the philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos. If I remember correctly, Lakatos offered a refinement of Popperian philosophy (via Kuhn). He suggested that the core of any credible ‘research programme’ was surrounded by a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses, and that these hypotheses bore the brunt of, and blunted, attacks emanating from rival research programmes. Thus the core of a Marxian research programme, discerning the logic and internal contradictions of capitalism, has survived apparent refutations of Marxian hypotheses about the inevitability of class polarization in industrial societies leading to the proletarian overthrown of the bourgeoisie.
The notion I want to consider here is that the neoliberal ideology that provides a warranty for the heavily globalised ‘British’ governing oligarchy in financial capitalism has, like one of Lakatos’ research programmes, a protective auxiliary belt, in this case comprising a specific subset of cultural properties. This subset of cultural properties is captured by the idea of post-truth. And this is where Kakutani comes in.
Trump, Brexit and much else, Kakutani contends, are products, and in turn reproduce, novel cultural tendencies made possible, facilitated and lent urgency by new technologies and networks of information and communication, most notably social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on. She very eloquently and in detail identifies and illustrates these ‘novel cultural tendencies’ and I cannot hope to do justice to her exegesis here. Instead I will focus on examples of what I meant when I referred in the last paragraph to a ‘specific subset of cultural properties’.
Kakutani presciently refers to the ‘new nihilism’. A quote or two will give a flavour; they draw on Tufekci’s insightful Twitter and Tear Gas:
‘in the digital era, sowing confusion online through a barrage of misinformation and disinformation is actually becoming the go-to tactic of propagandists around the world …’
‘In the networked public sphere the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasing difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people’ (direct quote from Tufekci).
‘the nihilism in Washington is both an echo and a cause of more widespread feelings: a reflection of a growing loss of faith in institutions and a loss of respect for both the rule of law and everyday norms and traditions; a symptom of our loss of civility, our growing inability to have respectful debates with people who have opinions different from our own; and our growing unwillingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, room for an honest mistake, the courtesy of a hearing.’
In many ways this is an update of Habermas on postmodernism as the new conservatism. What I’ve termed financial capitalism’s cultural ‘companion’ has opened the way for a (now you see it, now you don’t) cynical opportunism (and therefore for the dark arts of the governing oligarchies of Britain and elsewhere). It should be noted too that cultural relativism permits dangerous forms of (often proto-fascist) fundamentalism (via populist movements), as well as more conventional forms of opportunistic governance.
It is not necessary to labour the message here. The essence of my claim is that aspects of the postmodern or relativised culture emergent with (but not of course simply a function of) financial capitalism provide an expedient set of auxiliary hypotheses, comprising a protective belt, around the neoliberal ideology that underpins our class-driven governing oligarchy. In other words, critiques of neoliberal ideology can often be rendered ambiguous, obfuscated, side-stepped, diverted, undone: they are neutered, lost in the mists of the cultural ether that surrounds it. I’m not sure that anybody has articulated how this happens – and what more devastating vehicle than Trump – better that Michiko Kakutani. What a pleasure it is to read such a talented writer.