Moving the markers
From Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,’ which is about videotaped rapes as propaganda in Croatia and Bosnia. From Are Women Human? pp 162-3:
Some of the rapes that are made into pornography are clearly intended for mass consumption as war propaganda. One elderly Croation woman who was filmed being raped was also tortured by electric shocks and gang-raped in the Bucje concentration camp by Serbian men dressed in generic camouflage uniforms. She was forced to “confess” on film that Croatians raped her. This disinformation – switching the ethnic labels – is especially easy when there are no racial markers for ethnic distinctions. It is a standard Serbian technique…Serbian propaganda moves cultural markers with postmodern alacrity, making ethnicity unreal and all too real at the same time.
That seemed to me to link up rather nicely with a recent post of Nigel Warburton’s on Slavoj Žižek – who is from Slovenia.
Zizek like many postmodernists, poses as one who knows, who can see through ideology and diagnose the short-sightedness of those in the grip of naive enlightenment ideas or systemic violence that is more or less invisible to most of us. We dim-sighted ones naively rail against what he calls subjective violence (or what we traditionally call ‘violence’), apparently blind to systemic and symbolic violence. Unfortunately when he comes to discussing ‘historian’ David Irving he seems to commit symbolic violence himself…On p.92 of Violence, in the context of a discussion of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Zizek suggests that the freedom of the press in the West is not as extensive as we like to believe because we can’t tolerate questioning of the Holocaust.
Nigel points out that Žižek describes Irving as ‘expressing his doubts about the Holocaust’ – but Irving did a lot more than that: he not only denied the evidence, he also extensively falsified it in at least one of his books, as Richard Evans discovered for the defense at the trial in which Deborah Lipstadt defended herself against Irving’s libel suit. Falsifying evidence is not mere ‘questioning,’ and calling it that is just another kind of falsification. Another example of moving markers with postmodern alacrity.
Not only does he falsify evidence he also compares the holocaust to the bombing of Dresden in the vain atempt to paint the alies as no better than the nazis,he realy is the scum of the earth!although I still would let him speak.
He is also on record saying that more people died in the back of Ted Kenedys car than died in the holocaust.
In the interests of accuracy, I think it was ‘in the gas-chambers at Auschwitz’, not ‘the holocaust’. Still a bag o’ sh*te…
Dave yes you are right it was the gas chambers that he made the Ted Kenedy comment about, he dosnt fully deny the holocaust he just tries to downgrade its magnitude,God he makes me puke!the worst thing of all is that he has an enormous knolledge of history and if put to good use he could produce serious work and yet he just uses his knolledge to distort the historical record.
Irving has certainly made himself famous though. Betcha his falsifications have made him a tidy profit. I wonder if he believes his own hype or whether he is fully cognizant and deliberate in his wrangling of the truth?
Excuse my ignorance, but what is symbolic violence? I’ve never been able to read Zizek, but he’s a Lacanian, and I’ve never made it through a page of Lacan either, and I’ve tried. Perhaps suffering symbolic violence is the experience of trying to make sense out of Lacan.
Well the falsifications that Evans documented are so extensive that it’s hard to see how Irving could entirely believe his own hype. He knows he’s falsifying, so how could he (really) believe it?
It’s worth pointing out the falisifications at every opportunity (however pedantic that may be) because most people (including journalists) think he just ‘questions’ the Holocaust.
“Excuse my ignorance, but what is symbolic violence?”
I’m guessing it’s either a pretentious synonym for something trivial or a pretentious term with no fixed meaning.
It was still crappy of the Austrians to lock up Irving though.
Well, mistaken, anyway.
(I have a hard time thinking it’s really crappy because of the falsification. He’s not just an opinionator, he’s not just wrong; he cheats, he falsifies history. It’s a mistake to make that a criminal matter, but crappy? Mmm. I balk at that.)
I didn’t know “crappy” had such a precise meaning! I thought it was about the most general term of disapproval.
I think you’re right. I suppose I just mean I can’t manage to disapprove of locking Irving up. I think it’s mistaken without managing to disapprove of it. But I’m not a bit sure I shouldn’t disapprove of it.
Just ignore me.
Can’t ignore you I’m afraid. I deeply disapproved of it especially as it gave the likes of Ahmadinejad a stick to beat the supposedly free-speaking west with.
Well but that’s saying they were mistaken – it’s not disapproving of the act in itself. Tactics are about mistaken or shrewd rather than about morality. I agree that it was mistaken; I agree (without enthusiasm) that falsification of history shouldn’t be a criminal offense; but I don’t really disapprove of the Austrians’ actions, or if I do it’s again without enthusiasm.
From the book “Culture and Power” by David Swartz: Bourdieu understands ideology, or “symbolic violence,” as the capacity to impose the means for comprehending and adapting to the social world by representing economic and political power in disguised, taken-for-granted forms. Symbolic systems exercise symbolic power “only through the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it” (Bourdieu 1991C:164). In using the term “symbolic violence” Bourdieu stresses how the dominated accept as legitimate their own condition of domination (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:167). But symbolic power is a legitimating power that elicits the consent of both the dominant and the dominated.”
Bourdieu (1987f:13) thinks of symbolic power as “worldmaking power,” for it involves the capacity to impose the “legitimate vision of the social world and of its divisions.” Because symbolic power legitimizes existing economic and political relations, it contributes to the intergenerational reproduction of inegalitarian social arrangements. In a key passage Bourdieu offers the following definition:
Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:4)
I should rephrase.
I disapproved of it as I don’t think people should be locked up for acts of speech or writing.
In Britain and Europe it is often said that it is part of the superiority of our way of life to the likes of Iran that we don’t lock up people for acts of speech or writing.
In one country in Europe they lock up Irving for that very thing. So I strenuously disapprove of that. Also I am galled by the fact that then Ahmadinejad can say, Nyaah, nyaah, talk about hypocrisy, with some justification.
So any pleasure that I have in the thought of that piece of pustulance Irving being rendered uncomfortable is outweighed by this disapproval and gall.
Also, is this Zizek the new thing like Marcuse in the sixties?
Marie-Therese: Thank you for your definition of symbolic violence according to Bourdieu. I still don’t understand why the fact that the dominated ideologically accept their domination (which does occur) constitutes an act of violence. The fact that the dominated do accept their domination needs to be explained and calling it violence isn’t an explanation. It’s a far more complex phenomenom than violence.
K.B.Player:
>I deeply disapproved of it especially as it gave the likes of Ahmadinejad a stick to beat the supposedly free-speaking west with.< >I disapproved of it as I don’t think people should be locked up for acts of speech or writing.< I agree with K.B.Player. No “even so” or “gave confort to the Islamists”, or any qualification whatsoever. I don’t believe Irving should have been locked up for expressing an opinion, period. The dubiousness of his historical contentions is another question altogether, and should be treated separately, not connected to his imprisonment. (Though one can understand why that particular law was enacted post-WW2 in West Germany and Austria; I believe it applies in a few other European countries – anybody know which?) First, in principle. Second because that way lies the danger of suppressing historical research in directions that are not generally approved, or on details that are perfectly legitimate to examine against received opinion.
An addendum to clarify: I do appreciate that people on this thread will overwhelmingly (I think!) be against Irving’s imprisonment. I just don’t think anyone should be adding, oh, but he did do this or that egregious thing (with the implication, well, in some way he deserved it, so it’s not such a bad thing). If it’s wrong, it’s wrong regardless who the individual is.
But can’t I just think he deserved it in some personal sense – a sort of (non-theological) karma without endorsing it as a matter of public policy? Of course, if you’re committed to some notion of a single overarching and universal moral position then the answer may well be no but I’m not so committed and I don’t think it should be taken as granted that anyone else should be.
But I don’t think people should be locked up for expressing an opinion either. And I don’t think they should be locked up for falsifying history (I mean really falsifying: changing quotations, that kind of thing) either, but I’m not a bit sure there shouldn’t be a penalty of some kind. I refuse to defend anyone’s ‘right’ to falsify history – to publish falsified documentation or evidence or both. It shouldn’t be a felony, but it shouldn’t be a right, either.
OB: I certainly agree that no one should be locked up for falsifying history. But should they be penalized in some way, as you say, except in the opinion of their readers? Irving falsified the history of the Holocaust, which, for reasons that I will not go into, is more offensive to most people than falsifying, say, the genocide committed against Native American peoples by European colonizers. Should people who glorify the conquest of the western frontier in the United States or the bloody Chilean conquest of the Mapuche lands be penalized or just shunned? I think that there is a right to be stupid, a right to be unconcerned about others, and a right to lie in print, which is only limited by laws about libel and slander, two Anglo-Saxon concepts that I always confuse. If we are going to making lying in print a crime, the editors of most major newspapers and all known world leaders are going to end up behind bars.
amos, well, but I said ‘falsify’ rather than ‘lie.’ That was deliberate, because it’s generally nearly impossible to be certain when people are lying. But falsification is another matter – Richard Evans was able to show that Irving did that.
But in any case…there are a lot of circumstances in which people don’t have a right to lie, in print or out of it. I’m not a bit sure there is a general right to lie in print. (Just for one thing, people can and do get fired for lying in print. That would be tricky if there were a general, broad right to lie in print.)
If we don’t do imprisonment for falsifying history, perhaps we should reconsider the stocks? Rotten fruit arriving by air would be a powerfully symbolic expression of the masses’ righteous anger.
Rose Irving is a bankrupt his books make him almost nothing he even has to deliver them because no one will handle them anymore.
>Rotten fruit arriving by air would be a powerfully symbolic expression of the masses’ righteous anger.< God save us all from “the masses’ righteous anger”. >If we don’t do imprisonment for falsifying history, perhaps we should reconsider the stocks?< I know Chrisper doesn’t mean this literally, but taking the underlying point seriously, who is to decide who is falsifying history? Courts of Law? Courts make mistakes.
“But can’t I just think he deserved it in some personal sense – a sort of (non-theological) karma without endorsing it as a matter of public policy?”
Actually a nice bit of karma would be a if he was tested by the DNA geographic and ancestral method and they found a good chunk of his genetic material was African, Jewish and Gypsy. I saw a programme recently where a National Front type was confounded when something like 14% of his genetic make up was traced to Africa.
“I know Chrisper doesn’t mean this literally, but taking the underlying point seriously, who is to decide who is falsifying history? Courts of Law? Courts make mistakes.”
Some kinds of written fraud are crimes – benefit claims, tax returns, car ownership papers and the like. But these are very narrow and specific.
Outright fakes for profit like the Hitler Diaries have led to imprisonment. However that was actual false documents rather than misquotation from true documents, as in DI’s case.
In works of scholarship outright falsification is a hard and lengthy thing to prove. I read somewhere that other historians were not comfortable about condemning David Irving as they wondered uneasily if their own work went under a similar scrutiny whether their own slackness and carelessness wouldn’t show up.
I think intellectual disgrace is the best you can hope for.
I think intellectual disgrace is enough. David Irving, who was a truly gifted historian and not a bad writer (although he tends towards the novelettish in a slightly disturbing way sometimes)is now thought of as an irrelvant crank within academe and a sinsiter nutcase by those few outside of it who take an interest. I really think thisat is punishment enough. I recommend ‘The war between the generals’ to anyone who is interested in the WW2 period, though. It is really fascinating(unless it is full of distortions I don’t know wbout, of course).
OB: People generally get fired for lying in print, if they tell lies that the editors don’t want to publish or at times journalists end up taking the blame for lies that they were told, tacitly or explicitly, to tell. People also get fired for telling truths in print that editors don’t want to be published. Actually, my remarks were somewhat ironic. There are certainly circumstances (during trials, in medical emergencies, during a fire, talking to friends, writing in your blog, etc.), where lying is wrong. I don’t know if this is question of rights. I don’t have much faith in journalism, and so I don’t expect the media to tell the truth. I’ve worked as a journalist. Is it worse to falsify evidence or just to lie? I don’t know. Is it worse to lie consciously or to lie because one has not taken the trouble to investigate the facts? In any case, lying is wrong, which of course implies that truth exists. Actually, honesty is a very important value for me, especially not lying to myself, but one reason, besides my innate laziness, why I never was successful as a journalist was my dislike of lying or of half-truths.
Yeah, I think intellectual disgrace is (usually – I don’t want to be too categorical in case there are exceptions) enough too. On the other hand I’m not sure it’s enough that people think Irving is a crank, because (sorry if I’m repeating myself) many people forget or don’t know that he’s also a falsifier. Žižek for instance drastically underspecified Irving’s disgrace.
“Žižek for instance drastically underspecified Irving’s disgrace.”
Well, we can hope for a little intellectual disgrace for Zizek in the future.
Zizek will never be intellectually disgraced, because he has already proved you can say the most *outrageous* bollocks, and if you are a freaky, kooky East European with a scarily intense knowledge of postmodern gibberish, Americans will fawn over you ’til Kingdom come… Which is all that matters, today, in the real world of academic power-plays, where being famous is the only thing that counts, and US literary studies depts, for reasons known only to themselves, get to decide who are the famous alleged ‘philosophers’ of our time…
Americans?! It’s not just Americans, I’ll have you know! Steven Poole is no American.
No, it’s not just Northamericans at all. Try some Chilean philosophy departments and you’ll find post-modernists in their glory. The more meaningless their writing, the higher the status received. The more leftist philosophy departments seem to think (“think” is the wrong word here) that saying something meaningless is more radical than saying something with meaning. Lenin would have shot them all. Excessive. Lukacs would have obliged them to read Kant’s collected works with due attention. A suitable punishment.