Analysis of Murray Edelman's "Constructing the Political Spectacle"

I actually wrote this as a college paper about a year ago and felt it blog worthy.

The Constant Crisis, the Continuality of Evil

The crisis, a politically constructed phenomenon, with direct promises and ambiguous threats of real consequences that would, potentially, effect everyday-life for everyone in a given society and typically reified and perpetuated by a political elite or group of elites. “A ‘crisis,’ by contrast, heralds instability; it usually means people must endure new forms of deprivation for a time. In the conventional view, then, problems are chronic (though curable in principle) and crises are acute; but the distinction turns out to be arbitrary when the catalysts of crises are examined” (Edelman, Pg. 31). A political crisis is typically broadly defined and redefined, and directed at an externality. “Beliefs in political enemies seem to influence public opinion most powerfully when the enemy is not named explicitly, but evoked through an indirect reference. Perhaps the most common form of subtle evocation is the advocacy of a course of action that implies that a particular group is dangerous” (Edelman, Pg. 73). The creation of a foreign enemy is key to a successful and lengthy political crisis. The other is demonized with politically linguistic acuteness. Simplistic yet powerful dramaturgy is easily digestible for a core majority of a given population and implies or alludes to patriotic or nationalistic sentiments.

A phrase such as “Evil Empire” used during the Reagan administration to describe Soviet Russia generates an explicit negative and an implicit dichotomous positive. “…references to foreign peoples as barbarians and to foreign states in such terms as Reagan’s phrase, ‘the evil empire,’ seem to be an effort to go beyond the limits of the conventional vocabulary in order to voice the speaker’s hate” (Edelman, Pg. 73). Concurrently, as the audience of such a sound-bite, is suggested to believe that Soviet Russia, and communist ideology in general, is damnable; the audience is also seduced to believe that the United States or democratic ideology in general, is righteous and praiseworthy. A more recent phrase, “Axis of Evil” coined by the George W. Bush administration, referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea incite similar concurrencies while invoking historical nostalgia of World War II alluding to an Axis vs. Allied duality.

Evil, as a force, group, or ideology is slave and subject to the prevailing ideology of any given moment in time. It is defined and proliferated by the hegemonic force. Evil is Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law reaction to every action. Evil is not evil because of an inherent trait or internal monstrosity. It is the constant political crisis that requires the ever-presence, ever-vigil external evil to exacerbate and exhaust all elements of fear within a society to benefit the agenda of elite politics. It is the fear of evil, not evil itself that allows the acquiescence of a population to their leaders. Evil, in this etymological context, exists and is perpetuated based on the contention that a crisis and the imagined event of a crisis are continuous and eminent. Although the players and situations may alter, the tactics and foundational elements remain in tact and just as effective.

The Crisis Spectacle

The Crisis is but a spectacle, a diversion from the realities of domestic stigmas such as poverty, unemployment, racial inequalities, healthcare, or welfare. “Perhaps the most frequent application of this principle lies in the capacity of foreign threats to diminish attention to domestic conditions. Leaders have often maintained a supportive following by focusing attention on foreign threats that divert concern from unsolved domestic troubles. While each domestic problem typically hurts only a small proportion of the population, there are always foreign problems that can credibly be presented as pressing threats to everyone” (Edelman, Pg. 28). Political crises may also be a masked attempt toward another foreign policy that does not fit coherently with the values and norms of a given population. The “domino effect” theory during the Cold War years was used as an excuse to invade and setup regimes friendly to the United States for economic gains rather than defeating communism. It is also true of the more recent and even more ambiguous “war on terror” as a device for geopolitical dominance. The invasion, destruction, and occupation of Iraq for oil revenues and strategic geopolitical positioning in an irreducible era of oil deficiency in an oil efficient region which, by the way, there has been no evidence of terrorist ties.

In both examples above themes like “Evil Empire” and “Axis of Evil” are paramount in defining who is good and who is evil. The crisis is inherently designed to do both. “To support a war against a foreign aggressor who threatens national sovereignty and moral decencies is to construct oneself as a member of a nation of innocent heroes. To define the people one hurts as evil is to define oneself as virtuous. The narrative establishes the identities of enemy and victim-savior by defining the latter as emerging from an innocent past and as destined to help bring about a brighter future world cleansed of the contamination of the enemy embodies” (Edelman, Pg. 76). Although Murray Edelman wrote this during the Cold War and was in reference to Soviet Russia, one can edit such an observation by replacing Soviet Russia and communism with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or Iraq and still discover the same truths. September 11 invoked such questions of innocence as “why did they do this to us, we’ve done nothing to them?” How easily aspirations of hegemonic world dominance and CIA involved terrorist activities are forgotten when searching for an external culprit for internal deficiencies – a convenient amnesia.

Concepts of Evil

Evil, in accordance with Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualization of it, accounts for those groups, individuals, or ideologies that run against the grain of mainstream society and ideology. On a world-wide scale, evil is the counter-balance to globalization and the proliferation of western ideology and culture.

Baudrillard has perceived the globalizing effect as having a massive deregulatory component that is unrelenting and unapologetic. “Better: the whole of our system turns this liberation into a duty, a moral obligation – to the point where it is difficult to distinguish this liberation compulsion from a ‘natural’ aspiration towards, a ‘natural’ demand for, freedom” (Baudrillard, Pg. 50).

However, as Baudrillard explains, there is an inherent or natural resistance to global emancipation – a nostalgic longing for the rigidity and top-down iron fisted rule of the past, whether real or imagined. “For this symbolic disobligation is accompanied by a general deregulation. And it is in this universe of free electrons – free to become anything whatever in a system of globalized exchange – that we see growing, simultaneously, a contrary impulse, a resistance to this availability of everyone and everything that is every bit as deep as the desire for freedom” (Baudrillard, Pg. 50). Therefore, it is the same deregulatory freedom of the globalized system that allows the United States and its willing coalitions to deploy “freedom” and “democracy” where they see an opportunity that also allows for the creation and exponential growth of groups like Al Qaeda or insurgency groups. “You cannot liberate good without liberating evil. Sometimes evil even quicker than good, as part of the same movement. At any rate, what we have here is a deregulation of both” (Baudrillard, Pg. 51). Through this lens, contradicting ideologies, good and evil, are part of the same double-edged sword. What, therefore, defines good and evil is the distribution of hegemonic power. This implies the old adage, “might makes right”, which becomes a circular signifier – those who have power are right, and those who are right are so because they maintain enough power to declare themselves right. This is the roguish element of good. The paradox, which is always the same, is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality even though it is called for by every concept of international, and thus universal or universalizable, and thus democratic, law. There is no sovereignty without force, without force of the strongest, whose reason – the reason of the strongest – is to win out over [avoir raison de] everything” (Derrida, Pg. 101).

Voyous and Rogues

A voyou and a rogue concepts developed by Jacques Derrida, however they nevertheless fall under Baudrillard’s concept of evil. Voyous are typically evils that exist within a society that is conceptualized as good. Rogues are an external characterization of an internal embodiment.

Voyou is a term with negative connotation that labels individuals and groups of people who live their lives by a different code than that of mainstream society. Although they often work out their manifestations as individuals, they act as a single unit of force or disruption. “When speaking of a voyou, one is calling to order; one has begun to denounce a suspect, to announce an interpellation, indeed an arrest, a convocation, a summons, a bringing in for questioning: the voyou must appear before the law” (Derrida, Pg. 64).

However, they can also be a group of people that act as a unified force such as a “voyoucracy”, or an underground affiliation that is in counteraction with democracy. “…an organized force, not yet the quasi state of a mafia but a sort of occult or marginal power, the delinquent counterpower of a secret society or conspiracy, the counterinstitution of a clandestine brotherhood that brings together outlaws and the wayward [dévoyés]” (Derrida, Pg. 64-65). Voyous are in response, an active response to the prevailing knowledge, however Derrida seems to indicate, with no apparent goals but to cause internal turmoil within a sovereignty – a countersovereignty.

Rogues are usually defined by western leaders as those states that do not follow international laws or trends and are either an ominous nondemocracy or a failed state run by war lords or terrorist networks. “In a movement that accelerated during the Clinton administration by reference to what was already being called international terrorism, the term [rogue state][1] was extended to international behavior and to supposed failings with regard to either the spirit or letter of international law, a law that claims to be fundamentally democratic” (Derrida, Pg. 95).

Although hegemonic states like the United States are quick to identify underdeveloped and undeveloped states as rogue states when they violate international law or do not comply with United Nations mandates, under closer inspection, and it doesn’t take much detective work, one can see that those who accuse others of being rogue states are actually the rogue state. “It is not a criticism of these courageous works to wish for a more fully developed political thought within them, especially with regard to the history, structure, and ‘logic’ of the concept of sovereignty. This ‘logic’ would make it clear that, a priori, the states that are able or are in a state to make war on rogue states are themselves, in their most legitimate sovereignty, rogue states abusing their power. As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state” (Derrida, Pg. 102). This potency of sovereignty alludes towards an anarchic and at the very least demos of democracy social and political structure recalibration.

I believe Baudrillard would agree, if he were still alive, with Derrida’s concept of rogue states and the hypocrisy of the hegemonic rogue. Evil is, as Baudrillard points out, an internal destructive force also. “-terrorism can be interpreted as the expression of the internal dislocation of a power that has become all-powerful – a global violence immanent in the world-system itself. Hence the attempt to extirpate it as an objective evil is delusional given that, in its very absurdity, it is the expression of the condemnation that power pronounces on itself” (Baudrillard, Pg. 163). Terrorism, although it is highlighted in mainstream political discussion and news, as a purely external threat, is, as Baudrillard describes, a mirror image of the hegemonic sovereign force. “The violence you mete out is always the mirror of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence you mete out” (Baudrillard, Pg. 163).

The paradox of evil and good trudges on; as the linguistic use of rogue state to pinpoint evil continues to expand, so too does the inability to pinpoint rogue states. As liberation, emancipation, and freedom from domination globalizes, non-state actors gain sovereignty and power. It has and will continue to get harder and harder to identify states as rogues as the frequency of international actors are stateless or multinational. “All these efforts to identify ‘terrorists’ states or rogue states are ‘rationalizations’ aimed at denying not so much some absolute anxiety but the panic or terror before the fact that the absolute threat no longer comes from or is under the control of some state or some identifiable state form. It was thus necessary to dissimulate through this identificatory projection, to dissimulate first of all from oneself, the fact that nuclear arms or weapons of mass destruction are potentially produced and accessible in places that no longer have anything to do with a state. Not even a rogue state” (Derrida, Pg. 106).

This is all, however, part of the constant crisis that the western world finds itself in. Rogue states, the absence and illusoriness of non-state actors as vital threats, and voyous as subversive individuals acting to undermine state sovereignty remind society of the constant crisis they are in and keep them in fear of the unknown and the unknowable. “National security is a key symbol because fear of a foreign attack is a contagion that spreads widely and rapidly” (Edelman, Pg. 29). Fear is the constant spectacle of crisis. A fear of evil, which is defined and labeled by hegemonic rogue states. If it is true that the hegemonic power is the most roguish of the rogue states, as Derrida explains, then we are truly our own worst enemy. The concept of evil will last as long as the perpetual crisis, because the crisis is aimed at diverting attention away from real acute domestic issues and focusing on obtuse foreign emanate threats. They will last because it is in the states best interest to propagate crises. Evil will continue in two forms: 1) the state will always identify an evil for the perpetual crisis. 2) there will always be backlash and resistance to a hegemonic and over-arching force such as western globalization. “If terrorism is evil – and it certainly is in its form, and not at all in the sense in which George W. Bush understands it – then it is this intelligence of Evil we need; the intelligence of, the insight into, this internal convulsion of the world order, of which terrorism is both the event-moment and the image-feedback” (Baudrillard, Pg. 164).