The Other Side of Pedagogy by Johnson T. R

Author:Johnson, T. R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

SPEAKING AND WRITING AS S1

As Hannah Arendt puts it, in her classic study of fascism in the 1930s, atomized, isolated individuals can derive their entire sense of place in the world exclusively through loyalty to a master (316). The fewer and smaller the person’s links to immediate, specific, material social realities, the more alienated and ignorant a person is, then the more likely they are to devote themselves to social movements that hinge on the most vast and vapid generalizations. That is, when class-based material concerns are no longer the lifeblood of political debate, vast numbers of people can no longer affiliate themselves socially according to these concerns, and, as they lose any chance of organizing into groups according to common interests, they channel the resulting fury and fear into the most foggy, far-flung ideals: the dream of a thousand-year reich, for example, or of the global hegemony of free-market capitalism, projects that have nothing to do with local particulars, but, in demanding absolute loyalty, afford the true believer an identity, a sense of purpose, and the illusion of community as a mask for the most complete alienation, the illusion of mastery in the depths of slavery.

Arendt quotes Himmler’s remark that “My loyalty is my honor,” as if his identity and his very existence were a function of his capacity to mirror his boss, and she adds, “What convinces the masses [to organize this way] are not facts and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part” (341–42), a consistency achieved simply through repetition, the chanting of slogans that, as repetition, increasingly bleed into the insistent thrumming of the death drive, the darkest form of jouissance. Through this repetition, uprooted masses are made to feel at home, are “spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations” (343). Moreover, the total absence of specific content at the level of discussions about policy, programs, and platforms is, according to Arendt, covered over by the essential purpose of the movement, which is to take absolute control over all aspects of the governing apparatus and then extend that apparatus as far as possible throughout the world. Again, a distillation of the discourse of mastery: disavow dialogue and know nothing, but act urgently, even violently, to impose this nonknowledge as widely as possible, over and over again, in an apotheosis of the death drive, the production of the darkest jouissance.

Arendt describes the way totalitarian movements resemble suicide-cults (320–21). Rather than develop, say, actual ideas about governance through the free play of opinion and painstaking debate, they desire apocalyptic chaos and carnage without limits as the key to constructing a new order. Arendt quotes another leader of the Nazi movement in Germany, Goebbels, who said that what everyone wanted was access to history, even if the price of admission was total destruction. This is how the infinitely lonely and lost can undergo a happy reversal of fortune purely through their loyalty to and willingness to make supreme sacrifices for the leader.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.