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Ideology at work (literally)

January 6, 2014

As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social.

Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after she wandered away from her rural western New York home. And in suburban Philadelphia, as the storm approached, a worker at a salt storage facility was killed when a 100-foot-tall pile of road salt fell and crushed him. Falls Township police said the man was trapped while operating a backhoe.

I'd rewrite that this way:

A cruelly insufficient social safety net (the Alzheimer's patient) and dangerous work conditions caused by cuts to public workforce (the backhoe operator — I wouldn't be surprised if he was working for a private contractor; at the very best he was probably pulling a double shift, hence exhausted) plus the grossly insufficient public transport system and poorly maintained roads, coupled with economic desperation (the car drivers — dollars to donuts they were trying to get to a crappy service job, but don't worry, the Walmart where they worked will put out a collection basket) continued its reign of terror today, with the winter storm being the proximate cause that only a fool, knave, gull, or ideologue would blame for the social conditions that exposed these people to its effects.

*A Thousand Plateaus, 68E: "Ideology is a most execrable concept concealing all the effectively operating social machines." I think they are saying that the real German Ideology** is that individualized, subjective, cognitive, ideas are where it's at, rather than the social machines producing subjects prone to patterns of affective cognition. I say a little about that here, and here.

** Immortal words, these: "Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany."

Posted in “Austerity”? You mean class war, don’t you?, Disasters, natural and otherwise, John Protevi, Political Economy

19 responses to “Ideology at work (literally)”

Jon Cogburn

January 6, 2014

Amen to this.
It’s sickening just how universal are the phenomena you describe.

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bzfgt

January 6, 2014

“I think they are saying that the real German Ideology** is that individualized, subjective, cognitive, ideas are where it’s at, rather than the social machines producing subjects prone to patterns of affective cognition.”
Which is what Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology (particularly in the critique of Stirner), as you recognize with your second footnote. So, I’m not sure why a Deleuzian would be scornful of the concept of “ideology,” since the main source for the modern use of the concept is The German Ideology, isn’t it?

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John Protevi

January 6, 2014

I’m reading DG as implying that many uses of “ideology” at the time they were writing had drifted back from the Marx-Engels critical sense to that of those whom ME were criticizing, namely that “X is ideological” means “X has the wrong set of ideas” (for instance, that X naturalizes the social, as in this example of “killer storms” or in the idea that “racists have incorrect biological ideas,” and so on). For an example of the latter, see http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/about-thinking/201312/four-simple-reasons-smart-people-shouldnt-believe-in-races
“The critical problem with biological races is the claim that we are all inherently limited or empowered based on our birth into a unique genetic group that contains millions of other similar people. Many good people who champion racial equality and would not be considered racists carry this destructive belief in their heads. But it can’t be true because the groups themselves are unnatural, inconsistent and illogical.”
Of course, the author is correct that many racists have bad biological beliefs. But that’s not all that’s wrong with them; they also have screwy emotional structures. And social racist structures are not aggregates of individual beliefs; you don’t need people believing bad biology to have redlining of mortgages continue residential segregation patterns, you just need economics: people with less than X credit ratings don’t qualify for mortgages in Y district, and it just so happens that Af Am (for instance) folks are disproportionately represented in the less than X credit rating group, whereas they also happen to be over-represented in Y residential area.

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bzfgt

January 6, 2014

Cool, I suspected that was the point. But it seems to imply that a good Deleuzian is free to talk about “ideology” in the Marxian sense without fear of proscription from her brothers and sisters…

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grad

January 6, 2014

Is there an inside joke with the footnotes?

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Jon Cogburn

January 6, 2014

We would like to blame David Foster Wallace, but it’s really our own damned fault.
I once interviewed a really interesting person whose dissertation on the phenomenology of walking consisted entirely in footnotes.
I also read once that the book that had the first really extensive use of footnotes was Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” They are where his anti-Christian snark is often most hilarious.*
[Notes:
*Full Disclosure: I’m a Presbyterian myself, but nothing in our Book of Confessions prohibits enjoying the literary fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment.]

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grad

January 6, 2014

I’ve never been able to get Word to let me footnote a footnote, so I commend your efforts.
There’s a Russian science fiction novel (the title escapes me) in which the footnotes slowly become full-blown characters.

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David Wallace

January 7, 2014

Only a fool, gull, knave or ideologue, no doubt, would risk demurring from such a post, but I actually find the rewrite more misleading than the original. It’s just plain true that there were a bunch of fatal traffic accidents over the weekend and that the proximate cause in each case was something that doesn’t happen absent terrible weather. You can legitimately make the further point that the US has a poor traffic safety record compared to most of the developed world and that it also has more miles driven, partly because of poor public transport, so in aggregate you’d expect it to have more casualties in these cases, but do you really want to go from that to the claim that when (e.g.) Brandon Hewitt’s Honda minivan lost control after hitting a snowdrift on Saturday afternoon, or an unnamed 75-year-old pedestrian was hit by a car in Brooklyn on Thursday, their deaths can specifically be attributed to the political neglect of the underemployed or the US’s infrastructure deficit rather than individual error, ill chance, acts of God or some other factor again? Bad weather is still going to claim lives in anticapitalist utopias, and the 1% drive cars too, and lots of things beyond road repair and economic desperation cause car crashes.

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David Wallace

January 7, 2014

Actually, on reflection (curse the lack of editing) here’s a better way to put what bothers me here. We can make a case that in aggregate, given the statistics and the known causal factors, various bits of US policy contribute to needless deaths. We can also make the case that for a specific person about whom something is known, that particular person can be demonstrated to have died because (or partly because) of these factors. But here we have a small group of specific people, about whom we don’t know anything much except that they died in road accidents in a period of extreme weather. To conclude that they, specifically, died for these socio-economic reasons doesn’t seem warranted. If NBC had reported a la John’s rewrite, it would have been journalistically unjustified.

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John Protevi

January 7, 2014

Hello David, I would have thought the hyperbole of “fool, knave, gull, or ideologue” would have alerted readers that the rewrite was not — in the immortal words of Senator Jon Kyl — “intended as a factual statement,” but was a way of making the point that this particular news story did not even nod in the direction of the sophisticated points you make (and that I hope you’ll grant that I would make were I to attempt a serious investigation of the social, material, and transport infrastructures, which of course needs statistical analysis).

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David Wallace

January 7, 2014

Point taken. (& yes, I probably slightly misread your tone.)

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John Protevi

January 7, 2014

No worries. I would however be happy to support as a working hypothesis that a good number of folks driving in those conditions are close to the poverty line. The general point is that MSM reporting on disasters tends to elide the social in favor of the natural, but this is misleading, as low SES leads to increased vulnerability to “the natural.”

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Mike Jacovides

January 7, 2014

So you’re illustrating Deleuze’s claim that talk of ideology stands as substitute for the serious investigation of social structures. Tricky!

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Mike Jacovides

January 7, 2014

(13 was to 10 and not 12.)

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John Protevi

January 7, 2014

I think I was too clever by half in this post. What I had hoped would happen is that folks would see the twinkle in my eye when I wrote “card-carrying,” and that they would also recognize Deleuze and Guattari’s penchant for exaggeration (I don’t actually think they thought that all uses of “ideology” were “execrable,” only those that backslid from the Marx-Engels position to the one they targeted.)
I suppose I should say what I think here. I take the Marxist critical position to say that on a population basis, ideas tend to correlate with social position [of course this is not deterministic in individual cases, or else they would have no way of explaining how the factory owner’s son Engels thought the way he did], but that the real work is to look to those ideas as clues to social structures, which are themselves the proper targets for action (Thesis 11).
So that’s what I would have done here had I worked everything out instead of relying on people catching the clues and following the links to my more fully worked out writings: I would have gone from the false ideas of the newstory — that one can discuss the effects of natural disasters w/o taking social position into account — to the social conditions conducive to people talking that way (big MSM corporations have no interest in inciting thought / action about the class effects of “natural disasters” as they aren’t in the habit of talking about “class” at all), and proposing those social conditions as in need of political action.
The problem then with the “idealist” notion of “ideology” is the idea that attacking false beliefs with arguments leading to true beliefs is enough, and that changing those beliefs in the absence of social-political-economic change is a) possible in any statistically significant sense (“you can’t convince someone of something when their paycheck depends on them not believing it”), and b) sufficient for such change to then occur, after the belief change.
So I think DG would be happy to consider their work in the specific sense of Marxist “ideology critique” sketched above in paragraph 2, that is, as leading from ideas back to “effective social machines” which are the proper targets of analysis and action.

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Mike Jacovides

January 7, 2014

I guess I assumed that Deleuze and Guattari were criticizing talk of ideology as airy Marxist jargon that displaces serious thought about social structures and that when you quoted John Kyl you were confessing to bullshitting us, albeit in a good-hearted way and with a twinkle in your eye. If that isn’t what they meant, I guess you can’t be praised or criticized for embodying their criticism. (If that is what they meant, I recommend that you embrace the irony.)
I suspect that the average victim of the cold is richer than the average American, because the north is a lot richer than the south. Even though the average victim probably is wealthier than the average American, I suspect that they have less income, because extreme weather is hardest on the old.
Here’s a paper on the relation between migration and deaths from extreme weather in the US. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13227 It turns out that moving to Florida when you get old may save your life.

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John Protevi

January 7, 2014

Hello Mike, I will read the paper with interest. I would think the proper comparison though would be to other folks in the North, not to the US as a whole. That is, my hypothesis is that the poorer you are relative to others in this winter storm area, the more you will be dangerously exposed to the storm’s effects.
As for bullshitting, if that means indifference to the truth, then no, I’m actually gruesomely sincere in my commitment to truth in this case: a) that the MSM elides the social in their coverage of “natural disasters” [whereas, in truth, you must discuss the social and natural aspects of disasters], and b) that the above hypothesis about SES and exposure to winter storm harm is i) plausible, and ii) testable.
So I’d say one shouldn’t mistake self-deprecating jocularity (“card-carrying”), colloquialism (“dollars to donuts”), or exaggeration (“fools, knaves, gulls, and ideologues”) for indifference to the truth.

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Mike Jacovides

January 7, 2014

I would think the proper comparison though would be to other folks in the North, not to the US as a whole. That is, my hypothesis is that the poorer you are relative to others in this winter storm area, the more you will be dangerously exposed to the storm’s effects.
I’m sure that’s true. That the rich have it easier than the poor is both the first step to revolution and a conceptual truth about money. I didn’t mean to mock remedial efforts to help the poor get through this and other storms, and I was embarrassed when 13 came after 12 rather than 10.
I just meant to (gently) mock 10 in light of the original post. If it came across as insulting rather than funny, well, I’m sorry and I apologize. I didn’t mean it that way.
(I posted the weather and migration paper because it seemed interesting and a propose.)

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John Protevi

January 7, 2014

No worries, Mike, and I’m sorry if I was touchy. In this case I really was demonstrating, by complaining about people missing my tone, that it’s easy to miss people’s tone on the net!

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