October 23, 2008

This essay is the re-write for a prompt in Democractization and the Public Sphere, a class at the University of Illinois at Springfield with Professor Richard Gilman-Opalsky. Essay written by Greg Bishop

Cooperation is something we learn early in life, the time when we are closest to the truth. In the essay, “Communicative Power”, Hannah Arendt defines “power” as a collective public coming together to form a common understanding that can only be produced with communicative action. “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” (Arendt, 64)

The relationship between power and the public sphere is when the public joins together with a common cause; there is power within the public. Communicative Power is actual political power of the public realm. This does not exist in the private realm. There is no way to produce it. It is formed in a shared sense of what just for the public’s sake.

Historically, the public sphere was something to be desired. It was the sphere of the nobles where the decisions were made for the citizenry. Privacy was undesirable and sometimes, even today, it can be used as punishment as in solitary confinement. Many of our privately held notions of life cannot stand up to the brightness of the public sphere. “[O]nly what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrelevant becomes automatically a private matter.” (Arendt, 51)

Public parks are established by the state for private citizens to use. Does this mean that public space has been legally created? Not so. Though the park is open to the public, the possibility of a public joining together to show its power would be misdirected at rock faces, geysers, and ancient trees. The true public sphere, sometimes, can be spontaneous. Just like power cannot be created, the public sphere cannot be created. Laws cannot establish a public, or dictate what the sphere does with its power.

When a group does form in the public sphere with a consensus, power grows and is contagious. When the public disappears, which can happen just as fast as the public formed, power destabilizes, it disappears and vanishes. You must have communicative power or else you are not in power.

If power, in the sense of Arendt’s definition, is absent in a political party, the institution can collapse, “they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.” (Arendt, 62) This is where public hardship arises. Government groups who want to remain in power must resort to tyranny (or coercion or manipulation … take your pick). Tyranny is coercion or violent methods used to sustain control, but it is not powerful. Tyranny emerges in absence of power.

If a government does not have power over the people, and sees the power in the people, tyranny may be useful in maintaining control. It is important at this time to reiterate the difference power holds from force, strength, authority or violence. These words are not synonymous with power as Arendt points out in her essay.

Communicative power is the opposite of violence. Violence comes from lack of power, as tyranny comes out of a lack of power. “[P]ower always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point can manage without them because it relies on implements.” (Arendt, 62) Wherever real power exists, violence is not necessary. If you have the people behind you, you are in power. The only need for violence is when the people no longer show support, sometimes in the form of mass protests and calls for removal. This is apparent when an institution collapses.

Arendt even goes as far to mention how lucky Gandhi and his non-violent movement were for facing the English rather than the Germans or the Japanese. She speaks of this in context to Russia’s conflict in Czechoslovakia. But the reason she gives for England not using excessive violence on the level of massacre is “rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that become manifest in its ‘solution’ of the Czechoslovak” (Arendt, 69)

But absolute unity should not be the end-all be-all. This is the agonistic nature of Arendt. Agreement, without discussion or initial disagreement, can be dangerous. Conflicts are healthy. They are active, not passive. When there is always consensus, you must be very cautious. Debating issues, talking about problems, and having differing opinions keeps the public involved. When everyone agrees, debates are sure to go out the window, leading towards a very passive role for the public to play. Serious dangers follow when people agree without argumentation. Argumentation can only happen in public for communicative power to be realized. If it is private, the public cannot be witness to differing opinions.

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been quite impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.”
David Rockefeller to the Bilderberg Group – 1991

“The cultural apparatus” according to C. Wright Mills is the system of producing, distributing, and consuming products created by the power elite. These cultures, produced for the general public, create reliance for interpretation and understanding of events by a commercial mass society. “[E]very man is increasingly dependent upon the observation posts, the interpretation centers, the presentation depots, which in contemporary society are established by means of what I am going to call the cultural apparatus.” (Mills, 406) As Mills states, “Every man interprets what he observes – as well as much that he has not observed: but his terms of interpretation are not his own; he has not personally formulated or even tested them.” (Mills, 406) This is a scary thought to have, and I’m not certain it is my own.

This determines the kind of public that exists in a society because when culture is dictated rather than spontaneously created, consumers of the cultural product are not getting a true reality. “The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.” (Mills, 405) The public made of private citizens are developing understanding second hand. This is a basic concept in the study of communication.

“…[T]heir experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by ready-made interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet. Yet for every man these images – provided by strangers and dead men – are the very basis of his life as a human being.” (Mills, The Cultural Apparatus, 405)

The various components of the cultural apparatus are the cultural publics, cultural workmen and the cultural establishment. The publics consist of consumers of cultural products; be it in the form of “art, science, and learning, entertainment, malarkey, and information,” (Mills, 406) sports memorabilia, replicas of the US constitution, or even general interpretation of events. Workmen are the ones creating the products to be consumed. They do not, however, control the means of distribution.

When speaking of the cultural establishment, connections are made to big business, military and political elites, also known as power elites. These are the networks made up of the most influential international management borkers. “But the essential feature of any establishment is a traffic between culture and authority, a tacit co-operation of cultural workmen and authorities of ruling institutions. This means of exchange between them includes money, career, privilege; but above all, it includes prestige.” (Mills, 409)

By being the traffic between culture and authority, the cultural apparatus can transform the public into a mass by the cultural establishment hijacking the definitions of reality. What is deemed valuable is also controlled by the power elite. Even what is tasteful and beautiful in artwork can be decided by the establishment. “Accordingly, its members have easily monopolized both social prestige and political power as they have created and occupied the top positions of the class structure.” (Mills, 420)

The most prestigious workmen are those who work with the power elite, the financiers and deciders of cultural products. When workmen become “stars”, they also become an opinion leader. Take Chuck Norris for example. He begins talking about “issues” important to America in a book with an absurd title and gets on the media rounds, ultimately helping propagate his book and the ideas found inside. Who dubbed Chuck Norris an expert on anything but self-defense and acting, and the second is questionable in my eyes. Celebrity gets into mainstream by catering to power elite. But this can backfire, “[g]enerally the star system tends to kill off the chance of the cultural workman to be a worthy and independent craftsman,” (Mills, 419) which independence is something to be desired.

In other of Mills’ writings, he talks about the synthesis phase. This phase is a hybrid of a truly democratic society and an authoritarian society. In the synthesis phase, some celebrity will be popular because of mass appeal, but others may be manipulated into distribution. Activists can work for years and until someone in the mainstream gets onboard, nothing will happen for their cause.

From what we are told in class discussion, this is not true of every culture. “The cultural apparatus is usually confined to very small circles and to rudimentary middle classes” (Mills, 413) in underdeveloped societies. Class discussion also, however, states the U.S. has folded commercial culture into political culture, making it difficult to reject salacious and entertaining dialog. “Mass culture in the United States is essentially commercial culture.” (Mills, 418)

Bourgeois businessmen do not select content. That is determined and distributed by the cultural establishment. Cultural workmen are dependent on bourgeois businessmen because of ownership. All avenues are privatized and commercialized, including intellectual property. Our culture is determined commercially. Culture is not an accident and not determined wholly in or by the public sphere. The public sphere becomes increasingly cooperative and a willing patron to the power elite only to absorb what is dictated to them. “Taken as a whole, the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they interpret and report what they see.” (Mills, 406)

Some problems of contemporary “mass society” Mills and Arendt are concerned with are the misunderstanding of what power is, an establishment view of the world, and culture is created by authority for a consumer public. This means that we do not live in a reality constructed by us and we do not understand the true power that we posses.

“[O]ur terminology does not distinguish among such key words as ‘power’, ‘strength’, ‘force’, ‘authority’, and, finally, ‘violence’ – all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they did.” (Arendt, 63) By the mass not understanding the difference between power and authority, the line blurs to the point where power is automatically deferred to the state, I believe. Restating tyranny rises in the absence of power, it is very easy to confuse force with power. This can have dangerous ramifications leading to forced conformity.

When power is deferred to the state, the authority therein shapes the world view of the mass. “With such means, each nation tends to offer a selected, closed-up, and official version of world reality.” (Mills, 407) This becomes ingrained in the given culture where the phenomenon takes place. “That is why the cultural apparatus, no matter how internally free, tends in every nation to become a close adjunct of national authority and a leading agency of nationalist propaganda.” (Mills, 410)

We are a consumer based society who will buy whatever is in front of us. This is especially true when the media is involved. Having that central opinion post gives an authority to the message, making it truer in the consumer’s eyes than if they were to hear the same message from a complete stranger, which an anchor is to most. Though, we know that the truth does not always lie in those messages.

Fluff and smut is abundant, and on-demand. Reason facilitators are almost shunned. When I go back home to visit friends, I may talk about politics. Some in the group don’t appreciate that too much. I believe if we use communicative power to turn off the TV and turn on our neighborhoods, communities, cities, and states, we can realize true power and dictate to the establishment what the true culture is. We do not necessarily need to turn off the main stream media, we just need to rethink what we are absorbing … or interpret it differently.

Another option to counteract the apathetic consumption of messages from the cultural workmen in the public realm is to get into the public realm. Understandably this is not likely to happen across the spectrum of citizens. We all have jobs, families, friends, and hobbies; but communities must take time out to learn what exactly is going and prop up their culture, their voice, their power. As the David Rockefeller quote at the Bilderberg conference suggests, the mainstream media have very complicit in their presentation of world events to fall into a particular agenda. To counter act this, we must have enlightenment ourselves and get the public, made of private citizens, to dictate their culture, not regurgitation of the product sold to them by culture headquarters.

Written by Greg Bishop

June 08, 2008

Springfield IL - A movement for direct elections of Central Committee members was shot down during the Illinois Republican Convention over the weekend. The resolution brought a vote to the floor Saturday, either in favor of or against a direct election of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee.

Prior to the resolution, Platform Committee chair Gene Dawson called for the vote to change the platform's language pertaining to euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Republican Chair Andrew McKenna conducted the verbal vote where the “aye” seemingly won the majority, but not without a disruption from the floor delegates.

Within moments of the platform language vote, the resolution to oppose direct elections was introduced to the floor for a vote.

Chairman McKenna conducted a verbal vote. Delegates from the floor attempted to be recognized, but were met by the sergeant in arms. After an equal showing of ayes and nays, Chairman McKenna said “The ayes have it”. The delegation floor burst into chants for a roll call vote when Chairman McKenna tried to move to the next item on the agenda. McKenna brought to the floor a standing vote after continued delegate outbursts.

There was confusion by some on the floor as to what was being voted on, partly because of the lack of time between the two votes. There were two votes back-to-back. One vote was to strike language from the platform and the other was the issue of direct elections of Central Committee members. Several delegates worked to make sure surrounding delegates were aware of what they were voting for or against.

After several minutes of counting standing delegates in favor of or against direct elections, it was 556 ayes and 160 nays to oppose the direct elections of Illinois Republican Central Committee members.

Senate Bill 600 was discussed Friday at the Platform Committee in Decatur.

The outcome of the vote on the general assembly floor of delegates during Saturday’s convention was not representative of the vote during the Platform Committee hearing on Friday, nor the voice vote on the floor of the general assembly.

Friday’s vote outcome in the Platform Committee was 11 opposed and 8 in favor. The resolution to the Platform Committee did approve a minority report for the direct elections of Central Committee members while approving a resolution to recommend opposition of direct elections to the floor. The alternate resolution to recommend opposition to direct elections passed.

The direct elections of Illinois Republican Committee members changed to a system of appointments by county leaders in the late 1980’s.

Many rank and file members of Illinois’s Republican Party believe a return to direct elections of Central Committee members will lead to a popularity contest where the candidate with the most money wins, this according to open discussion outside the convention.

Doug Ibendahl of ChampionNews.net believes the current system is open to manipulation “with some really bad incentives”.

Central Committee members are chosen by the heads of Illinois' 102 counties and not picked by voters during a primary election. The resolution that passed was a resolution to oppose direct elections restoring the status quo.

The Illinois Republican Convention was held June 6 and 7 in Decatur Illinois, the city where Abraham Lincoln made his first political speech. 178 years after Lincoln’s speech, the Republican Party witnessed the largest attendance in Illinois history with 857 delegates and 668 alternates and guests. This was also the first time in Illinois Republican history that all 102 counties had delegations.

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Greg Bishop can be reached by email: bishoponair@gmail.com