Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Pique practicePique practice

Clare Short's whistle-blowing was more anger than candour

Mark Lawson
Saturday February 28, 2004
The Guardian

Details of MPs' external earnings released this week suggest that Robin Cook received £450,000 from publication and serialisation of memoirs which proved to contain no major revelation. So one oddity of the spy scandal now bugging Tony Blair is that Clare Short blurted out for free on radio a revelation which might genuinely have been worth seven figures if strategically saved for a hardback and Sunday front-page splash.

The former minister's failure to follow that fashionable strategy for a fallen politician can be interpreted in two ways: 1) she is an instinctively honest person who finds it impossible to hold back information relevant to public debate; or 2) a quick temper and a loose tongue mean that she often doesn't realise what she is saying. Is she, in short, a heroine or a heroism-addict?

Possibility one - that Short is a political whistle-blower, a cabinet equivalent to Katharine Gun, who leaked from GCHQ and avoided prosecution - raises problems. In a generally confessional culture, it's tough to make the case for secrecy; but anyone who chooses to become a minister or a privy counsellor (neither of which action was forced on Short) is signing up to the idea of state secrets. These are basic professional rules: don't become a rugby player if you want front teeth; don't become a senior politician if you wish to be completely honest or true to your conscience.

A defence might be that, while she broadly accepted the necessities of espionage and an official secrets act, she had never in her blackest fantasies imagined that our spooks would be tapping into the UN. But the hole in this apologia is that the casual reference in her radio interview to transcripts of Kofi Annan's phonecalls landing on her desk suggests that she tolerated this moral horror while in the job. There seems to be no suggestion that her discovery was even the cause of her resignation, which was driven by personal opposition to the attack on Iraq.

Another piece of moral fibre flakes away on the question of timing. While it's to Short's credit that she didn't save the Annan revelation for her memoirs, it's surely to her debit that her own courage so closely followed the safe completion of Ms Gun's own whistle-blowing mission. There's much less merit in taking the high moral ground when there's already a big flag flapping on it.

It's also worth noting that Short was among those criticising Tony Blair for his presidential approach. But one sure way of encouraging leaders to become more reluctant to discuss decisions with colleagues is to create the fear of the spill-all interview by former ministers. Cook has also been guilty of this contradiction. (A distinction should be made between books published in mid-administration and those which wait until the events for which you shared collective responsibility are history. Alastair Campbell, for all his faults, appears to understand this.)

It seems more likely (possibility two) that what happened this week was a product of Clare Short's temperament. Surname is sometimes destiny. Muriel Spark writes sparky fiction; the architect Rem Koolhaas designs cool houses; Clare Short has a short temper and never stays in a job very long.

One newspaper commented yesterday on the coincidence that she twice made an impact on the media this week: the night before her Radio 4 interview, she had appeared on BBC2's My Week in the Real World, a job-swap series in which she moonlighted as a geography teacher in a comprehensive school.

The show was a humiliation, in which she lost control of the class after choosing to use ingratiation ("You have to help me") rather than discipline. Short has complained about selective editing, but it seemed to me that what emerged was the personality flaw which denied a great political career to a woman who had all the other gifts for it. In the classroom, as in the minister's office, Short ignored the proven rules of the game in pursuit of feeling comfortable with what she was doing.

For me, the proximity of My Week in the Real World and the Today programme interview was not a coincidence. Humiliated by that documentary and angered by the mocking press coverage of it, Short, deliberately or subconsciously, wanted to re-establish her validity as a political figure.

So she told us a secret.

She must know that her career is now over, as the civil servants and the spooks will never let her near a secret memorandum again. But her final self-destruction was characteristic. In those newspaper questionnaires in which celebrities are asked what their first act would be if they ran the world, the fashionable smart answer has become "resign at once". That was the spirit of Clare Short, and is admirable in everyone except a politician. What made her a hopeless teacher made her a bad minister as well.

comment@guardian.co.uk

كتاب سؤال الهوية - شريف يونس

From Monologue to Dialogue

Bakhtin distinguishes monologue from dialogue as an attempt to provide another way of talking about and critiquing the long-celebrated objectivist (i.e., modernist) tradition. Bakhtin introduces the term "dialogic" as a way of identifying social processes as central to any understanding of our worlds. As Sampson (1993) summarizes Bakhtin's position, "Neither meaning nor self is a precondition for social interaction; rather, these emerge from and are sustained by conversations occurring between people" (p. 98-9).

Bakhtin's insistence that meaning emerges in dialogue is contrasted to a monologic view of meaning construction. In short,

. . . monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I (thou). For a monologic outlook (in its extreme or pure form) the other remains entirely and only an object of consciousness, and cannot constitute another consciousness. No response capable of altering everything in the world of my consciousness, is expected of this other. The monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response; it does not await it and does not grant it any decisive force. Monologue makes do without the other; that is why to some extent it objectivizes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the last word. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 318)

The inevitable conclusion of monologue is for the speaker to assume the position of objective observer, evaluator, and an intentional agent/actor whose actions have certain effects on their objects. Even a "silent" therapist (i.e., one who spends most of his or her time listening) could be cast as an intentional agent and thus as illustrative of Bakhtin's monologism. To many therapists, there is purpose, evaluation, and objectivity in their silence. These features characterize Bakhtin's monologism. Action emerging from an implied notion of agency, individuality, objectivity, and consequently evaluation assume that monologic voice rather than the dialogic voice of relationship. Thus it is important to point out that it is not necessarily the case that a therapist who adheres to a monologic epistemology or ontology will actually do things differently from a therapist who adheres to the dialogic principle. Yet the interplay of the therapist's and client's actions will be qualitatively different in both cases with the dialogic therapeutic context serving as an illustration of attentiveness to relational processes (i.e., processes of social construction).

Another way of discerning monologism from dialogism is to recognize that a monologue locates our investigation within the person. To that end, any attempt to discover, assess or adjust identity is directed toward an investigation of a self-contained individual (Sampson, 1977; 1993). Dialogism, on the other hand, locates our investigations in relational patterns. We enter into our conversations, our investigations, our therapeutic contexts privileging processes rather than individuals. Such an emphasis means that "people's lives are characterized by the ongoing conversations and dialogues they carry out in the course of their everyday activities, and therefore that the most important thing about people is not what is contained within them, but what transpires between them" (Sampson, 1993, p. 20, original emphasis). Consequently, the conversational practices that engage therapists and clients become the focus of dialogic therapy whereas studying what are assumed to be features of the client become the focus of monologic therapy. In the later, there is little or no consideration given to the relational creation of identity that emerges in (1) the therapeutic relationship and in (2) the client's telling of his or her story. The telling of a story is always constrained and potentiated, as are its meanings, by the relationship (real and imagined) in which the telling occurs. Consequently, a story told to one's therapist might construct a different identity than the same situation storied in another relational context.

Psychotherapy, because it is considered the "talking cure," could all too quickly be identified as dialogic. Conversation is already a central component of psychotherapy. It is easy to deduce from this realization that, by its very nature, therapy is dialogic. However, a return to the distinction between dialogue and monologue illustrates that despite it's largely conversational nature, most forms of psychotherapy are, as illustrated above, monologic.

Monologue implies or suggests that a therapist can evaluate another through his or her ability to objectively determine and intervene in the other's life and this can be and often is a therapist's stance even when/if she or he proclaims a "process" orientation. For example, a therapist who attends to interpersonal processes in families but claims that the family has diffuse boundaries and is therefore enmeshed does not speak as one engaged in relational construction but as one who is the objective observer of complex family patterns. On the other hand, a therapist who "plays" with the idea of boundaries, who invites clients to "try on" this discourse as a way of talking about the current problem situation, is engaging in dialogic interplay. In other words, the dialogic therapist does not levy a diagnosis or evaluation on his or her clients. Rather, the therapist suggests a way of talking about the client's situation which draws on that therapist's array of conversational resources (i.e., ways of talking). The limits and constraints of these resources, to the postmodern therapist, are always featured.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Voices in the Wilderness
Voices in the Wilderness:
Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric
By Patricia Roberts-Miller
The University of Alabama Press, 1999

Reviewer: John W. Fendrich
Bradley University

This book presents a scholarly point of view of the way the people in America deal with public discourse. This is done by mostly a consideration of puritans in their realization in seventeenth century America, and somewhat the vestiges of puritan ways in contemporary discussion and debate. Puritans are analyzed both historically and in relationship to a point of view that emphasizes dialog, that is confrontational, but with a goal of discovery, especially the discovery of truth. The book presents these points of view clearly, but the presentation is predominantly scholarly.

To set the stage: two general points of view are presented. One is that of monologic discourse in public and societal affairs. This involves intellectual certainty and security. It does not work with people who are committed to opposing the policy or proposition under consideration using monologic discourse. Synonyms for monologic discourse are eristic discourse, hegemonic discourse, persuasive discourse, and strategic action. The book predominantly presents the puritan view case study as an instance of monologism. The reviewer thinks that American education at all levels, but particularly collegiate and university education, is rooted in monologism.

The other point of view is dialogic rhetoric in public and societal affairs. This point of view involves a patchwork of ideas characterized by little intellectual certainty and security. Theoretically, it should work with people who are committed to opposing the policy or proposition under consideration. However, the book does lament the lack of experience in such a way historically in American public discourse and in contemporary education, especially the teaching and learning of rhetoric. Dialogic rhetoric's synonyms include consensual communication, controversial thinking, dialogic discourse, and also persuasion.

The book essentially tries to answer the question, why do Americans have so much trouble disagreeing productively. Ways that Americans disagree unproductively are presented as models of interaction. One model is the, "voice crying in the wilderness," model. To invoke the, "voice in the wilderness," ethos is to summon up an entire relationship of public argumentation as a battleground of good and evil. Puritan ways are given close scrutiny as an individual trait or community way that most promoted this paradox of public discourse as hyperbolic rationality. Puritans went/go to great trouble to demonstrate the rationality of their premises. Only when an interlocutor demonstrates willful irrationality did, for instance, seventeenth century puritan ways resort to torture or banishment. It is suggested that such a term, "voices crying in the wilderness," still can be a term used as a title or approvedness. Examples given are nineteenth century writers, Edward Ashley, Albert Schweitzer, William Jennings Bryan, George Bush, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Long, John Muir. Examples are given of chains of events that lead individuals to engage in unproductive methods of argument.

The predominant productive method of discourse presented in the book is that of rhetoric. Models in which people who disagree about fundamental things can argue without engaging in verbal or physical violence present it. Dialogic rhetoric has such a goal. A paradox is that puritan ways had/has the intention to: 1) establish a realm of discourse that would disregard the status of the person speaking in favor of the force of the argument, 2) establish a realm of discourse in which all topics would be open for discussion, and 3) establish a realm of discourse that would be open to anyone who met minimal standards of rational behavior. Such lofty intentions were not realized because of decisions on who met minimal standards of rational behavior. Dialogic rhetoric uses skepticism about one's own rightness, a sense of contingency of any particular resolution, respect for the opposition, and desire for discursive reciprocity. An important moment in an argument is when another person rejects what seems to one person to be an obvious premise.

The reviewer thinks that, although this book is mainly a treatise on the rhetoric discipline and methods of teaching and learning, the book's discussion applies to methods of teaching and learning anything. It is asserted that this book is of tremendous help in understanding the products and ideas of accelerating change in contemporary society.

Monologue or Dialogue in the Web Environment? - The Role of Networked Library and Information Services in the Future - 66th IFLA Council and General Conference - Conference Programme and Proceedings

Monologism and dialogism
In monologism, the individual is hold to be a Cartesian cognising subject, a self-disciplined monad or atom (Sampson 1993). Therefore, the monologic self is viewed as an independent and unique source of the meanings it has created. In pure monologism, concepts like collaborative learning or collective cognition do not make sense. The individual is the knower, the learner. Knowing is something internal, it is a subjective process. Knowledge, on the contrary, consists of objective universal facts. However, monologism is historically and culturally specific theory of a human subject, not a self-evident universal fact. The birth of monologism took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is linked to the rapid advancement of industry and capitalistic modes of production (Alasuutari 1992).

As opposed to monologism, dialogism stresses the intersubjective nature of language as a social system. According to dialogism, we produce and organise social reality by talking and writing. Dialogism assumes that knowledge is something people do together rather than an individual possession: "knowing is made and remade, reified and maintained, challenged and destroyed in communication: in dialogue, contest and negotiation" (Dervin 1994, p. 377). From this viewpoint it does not sound at all strange to talk about learning organisations or interactive learning environments, collective remembering or thinking institutions. A quote from a psychologist Jerome Bruner crystallises the central thrust of dialogism quite elegantly:

"Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation." (Bruner 1990, pp. 12-13.)

From Pedagogical Dialogue to Dialogical Pedagogy (PDF)

David Skidmore
LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 14, No. 4, 2000: 283-296

In my discussion of the transcripts I make use of theoretical concepts drawn
from the work of the Bakhtin Circle, which I believe may help to illuminate
certain qualities of classroom talk from a fresh angle. Dialogism, the umbrella
term often used to describe Bakhtinian theory (Brandist, 1997; Holquist, 1990),
departs in a number of crucial respects from the assumptions of the dominant
approach to language in the West during the 20th century, the discipline of structural
linguistics established by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1974). De
Saussure drew a dichotomy between langue, the unified, normative system of
language, and parole, the unceasing flux of speech events. For de Saussure, the
extreme heterogeneity of speech (parole) rendered it unamenable to scientific
study; thus the discipline of linguistics should focus on the underlying systemof
language (langue). Against this, Bakhtin argued that the idea of language as a
closed, self-consistent system is an ideological construct, something always
posited, never given; the reality is that, at any historical moment, the totality
which we call a language is made up of many different, mutually contradictory
languages, refracting the different socio-ideological positions of various social
groups (occupations, generations, classes etc.). Bakhtin introduced the term
heteroglossia to describe this condition of internal stratification and differentiation,
which he sees as a fundamental, intrinsic property, part of the ontology of
language (Bakhtin, 1981: 262–3). A related but contrasting term in Bakhtinian
thought is monologism. Strictly speaking, truemonologue is a non-possibility for
Bakhtin, but he uses the concept of the monological utterance to identify the
tendency in discourse to portray the speaker’s position as the ‘last word’ to be
said on the matter, the attempt in practice to effect a closure upon dialogue.
Significantly for our present purpose, Bakhtin uses the example of teacher-pupil
discourse to illustrate the concept, though I think we should take him to mean
that teacher-pupil talk all too often assumes a monological form, rather than to
suggest that it must be or ought to be so (Bakhtin, 1984: 81; emphasis added):

In an environment of . . . monologism the genuine interaction of
consciousnesses is impossible, and thus a genuine dialogue is impossible as
well. In essence idealismknows only a single mode of cognitive interaction
among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs
someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a
teacher and a pupil,which, it follows, can only be a pedagogical dialogue.

A further distinction which Bakhtin makes is that between internally persuasive
discourse and authoritative discourse (Bakhtin, 1981: 342 ff.). Authoritative
discourse refers to those forms of language use which present themselves as
unchallengeable orthodoxy, formulating a position which is not open to debate
(for example, religious dogma); it ‘demands our unconditional allegiance’
(Bakhtin, 1981: 343). The semantic structure of internally persuasive discourse,
by contrast, is open; it acknowledges the primacy of dialogue, the impossibility
of any word ever being final, and for this reason it is ‘able to reveal ever newer
ways to mean’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 346; original emphasis).

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | French intellectuals attack 'war on intelligence'

French intellectuals attack 'war on intelligence'

Jon Henley in Paris
Wednesday February 18, 2004
The Guardian

More than 20,000 French artists, thinkers, film-makers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics have signed a petition accusing the centre-right government of "waging war on intelligence" and instituting "a new state anti-intellectualism".

In a campaign bound to inflame passions in France, where penseurs are accorded the kind of respect most countries reserve for their rock stars, the signatories denounced a "coherent policy" to "pauperise and fragilise every field considered ... unproductive, useless or dissident".

Among the better-known names to have signed the document, published in today's issue of Les Inrockuptibles magazine, are the philosopher Jacques Derrida, film-makers Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Lanzmann, theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine, novelist Marie Darrieusecq, the former Socialist culture minister Jack Lang and Danny Cohn-Bendit, hero of the May 1968 student uprising.

The collected professions "of knowledge, thought and research" are under systematic attack from a state-sponsored philistinism intent on reducing the complexities of Gallic public debate to a series of "simplistic and terrifying" alternatives, the protesters say: "For or against Islamic veils? Left-leaning magistrates or too-tough cops? Artists - are they idlers or profiteers?"

The charge of anti-intellectualism is a highly damaging one in France, whose present-day Left Bank thinkers can draw on a rich tradition that includes the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre.

Paris remains one of very few places in the world where postmodern structuralists or relativist post-structural modernists can harbour realistic hopes of making it in television.

Sylvain Bourmeau, a journalist at Les Inrockuptibles and one of the petition's organisers, said that at one stage last week, email signatures were coming in at the rate of 700 an hour. The magazine will publish the first 8,000 names over 17 pages this morning, he said.

"We are aiming to mobilise all those whose work involves some kind of mediation, which in turn demands a detour via comprehension - in other words, all that this government is currently short-circuiting in the name of political and PR efficiency," he added.

Perhaps unwisely, the blokeish prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who prides himself on his man-of-the-people touch, has never been shy about confessing his suspicion of thinkers, savaging "those who suppose themselves to be great intellectuals" as recently as last October. His centre-right government has enraged many of France's "intellectual professions" recently.

Moves to regulate the status of psychotherapists provoked the fury of a whole generation of analysts, while fully 40,000 scientists denounced swingeing cuts in state funding and the loss of some 550 postgraduate research jobs this year.

Lawyers, meanwhile, are up in arms at a bill passed last week which they say radically extends police and prosecutors' powers at the expense of justice and human rights, while magistrates are seething at the ruling UMP party's public criticism of the sentence handed down recently to its chairman, Alain Juppé.

Schoolteachers walked out several times last year over plans to reorganise the state education system and cut back on classroom assistants; university chancellors threatened not to sign budgets because of "catastrophic" shortfalls in funding; and actors, musicians and dancers are still furious at reforms to their unemployment insurance which they say put the performing arts sector at risk.

"Of course there are huge differences between all these groups," Mr Bourmeau said. "But the political job we are doing here is to bring them all together and underline the basic similarities of their situations."

Current Issues in Comparative Education, 1(2)--response article (April 30, 1999)
Several paragraphs from this essay have been taken from Critical pedagogy, postmodernism, and the retreat from
class: Towards a contraband pedagogy by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, in press, Theoria.
Contesting Capital: Critical Pedagogy and Globalism
A Response to Michael Apple
Peter McLaren
University of California, Los Angeles

'Queer Eye' for Big Brother (washingtonpost.com)'Queer Eye' for Big Brother

By Susan Murray
Wednesday, January 28, 2004; Page A21


When Congress passed the Patriot Act in October 2001, civil libertarians soundly criticized several provisions of the legislation, including its expansion of the government's surveillance authority. But while opponents of the law directed their outrage toward Washington, across the nation resistance to governmental intrusion was slowly being sapped by an unlikely source: reality television.


By reality TV, I don't mean C-SPAN's coverage of Congress. Rather, it's programs such as "Survivor" and "Joe Millionaire" (which scores of Americans watch for dating tips and a soap opera-like fantasy) that soften us up to accept increasing levels of governmental surveillance and that chip away at our belief in the sanctity of privacy. Strange as it sounds, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" may be doing some of John D. Ashcroft's dirty work.

As most of us are well aware by now, surveillance cameras are everywhere. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union found that as early as 1998, about 2,400 cameras were recording New Yorkers in a multitude of parks, stores and other public places. Recent estimates say the number of cameras has reached 7,200. In addition, the Total Information Awareness program, the brainchild of John Poindexter, once national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, promised to protect Americans by electronically tracking their every movement. Although Congress eventually scaled back the project's reach, its initial goals and its logo (an eye fixed on the globe) are chilling. Even more frightening, the U.S. government has begun scanning fingerprints and taking photographs of arriving foreigners.

We don't immediately think of reality television -- with its ever-present cameras and microphones -- in relation to the larger context of government surveillance. Perhaps this is because, in a post-Sept. 11 era, the recording and watching of others -- and ourselves -- has become a component of our everyday lives.

But reality TV does play a crucial role in mitigating our resistance to such surveillance tactics. More and more of these programs rely on the willingness of "ordinary" folk to live their lives in front of cameras. These people choose to have sex, get married, give birth, compete for prizes, work, fight, weep and brush their teeth in front of millions. We, as audience members, witness this openness to surveillance, normalize it and, in turn, open ourselves up to such a possibility.

Some of us have a desire to become reality TV celebrities; others set up a blog or a webcam. Many of the rest of us just allow video cameras and computers to follow our every movement through city streets, stores, subway stations, schools and apartment buildings. Most of us don't protest or even think about such everyday tracking. We may even take it a step further by engaging in a policing or monitoring of our own behavior -- whether or not we know cameras are present -- as we grow conscious of the fact that even the tiniest detail of an individual's life can be considered so socially significant as to warrant recording or broadcasting.

Certainly most of us want to believe that we would never actually choose to go on a reality program ourselves. Yet our collective fascination with the genre validates the decision of those who choose to do so. We long to watch people in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances so we can compare their lives and decisions to our own while simultaneously feeling the power that comes with being an observer. But we must realize that by participating in the process, we are entering into a tacit agreement to redefine our relationship to privacy. We can't all be watchers without eventually subjecting ourselves to being watched -- just as we can't expect that the surveillance techniques protected by the Patriot Act will negatively affect only those who pose a genuine threat to us.

At a time when the government is asking us to open our lives to scrutiny in the name of national security, we should be aware of all the ways in which we've already exposed ourselves to observation. This is not to say that we can't watch and enjoy reality programming. We just need to be more thoughtful about the implications of doing so.

The writer is an assistant professor of culture and communications at New York University and co-editor, with Laurie Ouellette, of the forthcoming anthology "Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture." She will discuss this article online today at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.

Frank Rich: My Hero, Janet Jackson
New York Times - February 15, 2004
FRANK RICH
My Hero, Janet Jackson

t may be a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Two weeks after the bustier bust, almost no one has come to the defense of Janet Jackson. I do so with a full heart. By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds' duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.

You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda — the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album's release — and so she did. She's not faking much remorse, either. Last Sunday she refused to appear on the Grammys rather than accede to CBS's demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual "apology" to the nation for her crime of a week earlier. By contrast, Justin Timberlake, the wimp who gave the English language the lasting gift of "wardrobe malfunction," did as he was told, a would-be pop rebel in a jacket and a tie, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal's office. Ms. Jackson, one suspects, is laughing all the way to the bank.

There are plenty of Americans to laugh at, starting with the public itself. If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.

Once the deed was done, the audience couldn't stop watching it. TV viewers with TiVo set an instant-replay record as they slowed down the offending imagery with a clinical alacrity heretofore reserved for the Zapruder film. Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported that the number of searches for Janet Jackson tied the record set by 9/11-related searches on and just after 9/11.

"That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief," wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site. (Though not, perhaps, to the fundamentalist zealots who attacked us.)

For those who still couldn't get enough, the cable news channels giddily played the video over and over to remind us of just how deplorable it was. Even though by this point the networks were blurring the breast with electronic pasties, there was still an erotic kick to be milked: the act of a man tearing off a woman's clothes was as thrilling to the audience as whatever flesh was revealed therein, perhaps more so. But to say that aloud is to travel down a road that our moral watchdogs do not want to take. It's the unwritten rule of our culture that the public is always right. The "folks," as Bill O'Reilly is fond of condescending to them, are always the innocent victims of the big, bad cultural villains. They're never complicit in the crime. The idea that the folks might have the free will to tune out tasteless TV programming or do without TV altogether — or that they might eat up the sleaze, with or without young 'uns in the room — is almost never stated on television, for obvious reasons of fiscal self-interest. You don't insult your customers.

Since the public is blameless for its role in creating a market for displays like the Super Bowl's, who should be the scapegoat instead? If you peruse Mr. O'Reilly's admonitions in his first three programs dealing with the topic, or the tirades of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing direct-mail mills like the Parents Television Council and Concerned Women for America, you'll find a revealing pattern: MTV, CBS and their parent corporation, Viacom, are the exclusive targets of the invective. The National Football League is barely mentioned, if at all. To blame the country's highest-rated sports operation, after all, might risk insulting the football-watching folks to whom these moral watchdogs pander for fun and profit.

But the N.F.L. is in the sex business as assiduously as CBS and MTV, and for the same reason: it wants those prurient eyeballs. It's now been more than a quarter-century since Super Bowl X, when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders first caught the attention of the nation. "The audience deserves a little sex with its violence," Chuck Milton, a CBS sports producer, said back then.

The N.F.L. has since worked tirelessly to fill that need. This year was not the first MTV halftime show that the league has ordered to try to expand its aging audience beyond the Levitra demographic. The first such collaboration, Super Bowl XXXV three years ago, featured Britney Spears all but falling out of a halter top and numbers in which both Mr. Timberlake (then appearing with 'NSync) and Nelly grabbed their crotches. There was, to my eye, twice as much crotch-grabbing then as there was this year, but that show generated no outrage whatsoever.

It did, however, attract two million more viewers than the game itself. The N.F.L. wanted more of the same for 2004, which is why the league's commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, released a statement saying, "We're pleased to work again with MTV" when announcing the encore. Or pleased up to a point. When MTV proposed that part of the show be devoted to a performance of the song "An American Prayer" by Bono to increase awareness of the horrific AIDS epidemic in Africa, the N.F.L. said no — even though Bono had done the league the favor of giving the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show a dignified musical tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The mention of a sexually transmitted disease might dampen the libido of the salacious MTV show that the N.F.L. wanted this year and wanted so badly that the league remained silent even when MTV's pregame publicity promised that the performance would contain "some shocking moments." As one participant in the production told me, the N.F.L. saw "every camera angle" at the show's rehearsals and thus was no less aware of its general tone than CBS and MTV were. You don't hire Ms. Jackson, who's been steadily exposing more of her breasts for over a decade on magazine covers, to sing "Rock Your Body" if you have a G-rated game plan. Nonetheless, Joe Browne, the league's flak, pleaded total innocence after the event, releasing a hilarious statement that the N.F.L., like the public, was the unwitting victim of a show that it had both commissioned and helped supervise: "We applaud the F.C.C.'s investigation into the MTV-produced halftime. We and our fans were embarrassed by the entire show."

That investigation, piggybacked by last week's Congressional hearings, is an election-year stunt as full of hot air as the Bud Light horse flatulence ad. "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration," declared Michael Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, upon announcing that the entire halftime would be examined. A celebration of what, exactly? Didn't Mr. Powell, the nation's chief television regulator, watch the previous MTV halftime show?

He promises to conduct the investigation himself — a meaningless gesture, though it may gain him an audience and perhaps a photo op with Ms. Jackson. Mr. Powell's real agenda here is to conduct a show trial that might counter his well-earned reputation as a wholly owned subsidiary of our media giants. Viacom has been a particularly happy beneficiary of the deregulatory push of his reign, buying up every slice of the media pie that's not nailed down. Should CBS be found guilty of "indecency" by the feds, the total penalty would amount to some $5 million, roughly the price of two 30-second Super Bowl commercials. Congress's new push to increase those fines tenfold is just as laughable. Viacom took in $26.6 billion last year.

Not for nothing did the company's stock actually go up the day after the Super Bowl. The halftime show was great merchandising for both MTV and CBS, the go-to network for "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show." Not to be left without a piece of the action, even NBC got into the act. Citing the Jackson flap, it decreed that two split-second shots of an 80-year-old woman's breast in an emergency room sequence in "E.R." be excised. But the "E.R." star Noah Wyle then went on NBC's "Today" show the morning of the broadcast to joke about the decision, and the network-owned NBC affiliate in New York used the banned breast as a promo for its post-"E.R." news broadcast: "What you won't see on tonight's episode of `E.R.' — at 11!" Thus did NBC successfully transform its decision not to bare geriatric flesh into a sexual tease to hype ratings. This is true marketing genius, American-style.

What's next? Some are predicting that all the tape delays being injected into TV events to pre-empt future wardrobe malfunctions will be the death of spontaneous, live TV. But the moment an awards show takes a ratings hit, this new electronic prophylactic will be quietly abandoned by the networks even faster than the N.F.L.'s vague threat not to collaborate with MTV next year.

Ms. Jackson, the biggest winner in this whole escapade, is already back on the air. Her official rehabilitation began right after the Super Bowl, when BET started broadcasting a 10-part series of "special Black History Month" spots in which she profiles historical luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

"Her tone is serious and focused, with the air and diction of a seasoned lecturer," says the network's news release, which also notes that "the spots feature Ms. Jackson clad in classic black." Wasn't her Super Bowl dominatrix costume classic black as well? Well, never underestimate the power of synergy. BET is another wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom.

xreferplus - Liberalism

Liberalism

Liberalism (from Latin liberalis, ‘of a free man or woman’) is the name given to a diverse set of political doctrines committed to ensuring liberty and equality for individuals, within conditions of limited and representative government. Liberalisms, in principle, are politically secular, and embrace philosophical rationalism and individualism. Historically, liberalism originated in western Europe and North America and expressed the political aspirations of those who argued for freedom from state and church control of thought and expression. Liberalism has always stood for tolerance-although liberals are not thereby obliged to display tolerance towards the illiberal, especially those who would seek to abolish liberal arrangements. Liberalism is grounded in the belief that there is no natural moral order which can be confidently known by states or churches; therefore individuals must be free to pursue their own conceptions of the good-consistent, of course, with enabling others to enjoy the same freedom. It follows that liberals support freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom from governmental ‘intervention’ in the conduct of private life, and that the institutions of church and state should be separated.

These beliefs explain why liberalism and democracy are compatible although historically liberalism has not always been associated with a democratic philosophy. Indeed it was not until the mid-19th century, in the writings of the French analyst Alexis de Tocqueville and the Englishman John Stuart Mill, that liberals came to believe that democracy, individualism, liberty, equality and the rule of law could be reconciled. However, this reconciliation of liberalism and democracy had been anticipated in the constitutional republican writings of French- and English-speaking authors of the Enlightenment-notably in Rousseau's The Social Contract and in The Federalist Papers, written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, which helped shape the American Constitution. American liberals, drawing upon the thought of the French philosopher Montesquieu and the English philosopher Harrington, prescribed checks and balances, and a separation of powers, as ways of preventing the potential for governments to become despotic.

It is possible to distinguish several types of liberalism. In the first place there has been a division between utilitarians and rights-based liberals. utilitarians believe that moral and political philosophy must be based on welfare-maximizing principles: government and public policy must be conducted according to ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’, on the supposition that each person is to be treated as equally important. On this conception the aim of liberalism is to ensure the maximum degree of want-satisfaction, or alternatively to minimize the degree of suffering experienced by people. The utilitarian foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. By contrast rights-based liberalism, associated historically with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, emphasizes that individuals have (or should have) inalienable rights or personal autonomy which should not be transgressed by any other individuals, groups, or, most importantly, the state even in pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. In this perspective, government should be based upon the consent of individuals who contract with one another to protect their rights; and government should be limited to the protections of these fundamental rights and to the provision of basic services which individuals agree cannot be provided by their own actions.

In the second place we can distinguish between classical or economic liberals, enthusiasts for the laissez faire doctrines of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and new or social liberals, like T.H. Green and J.M. Keynes, who were influenced by socialism. Economic liberals emphasize the centrality of private property rights and the free commerce of individuals as the foundations of a free and prosperous society; and reject governmental intervention, except where it is absolutely necessary, on the grounds that governmental monopolies lead to inefficiency and stagnation. Classical liberals believe in maximizing liberty and minimizing government, and in Adam Smith's doctrine of the ‘invisible hand’: if agents are left to pursue their economic self-interest they will, unintentionally, produce the best economic consequences. They also embrace methodological individualism. Economic liberals are also likely to see democracy as a threat to the operations of a free market society because democracy permits people to organize against the consequences of market competition and therefore seek to ensure that constitutional provisions can prevent governments from violating property rights.

New liberals or social liberals, by contrast, reject the minimalist role of the state envisaged in classical liberalism. They have a more wide-ranging conception of freedom, positive liberty, which rejects the classical liberal assumption that greater government means correspondingly less freedom. They have historically been influenced by the political theories of the Englishman T.H. Green, which were in turn influenced by the writings of the German philosopher Hegel, by the American educationalist John Dewey, and by the theories of political economy developed by J.M. Keynes. Common to social liberalism is the belief that advanced industrial society requires substantial state intervention in order to offset distortions produced by the free market; and a rejection of the extreme individualism which sees no place for society, community or the state in forging the conditions necessary for individuals to be free and equal. Social or modern liberalism is a friend of benign big government; believing that the welfare state can and should raise the moral and intellectual capacities of citizens, and enable genuine equality of opportunity.

This division within what was liberalism has led classical or economic liberals to be called ‘conservatives’ in English-speaking countries, while the label of liberalism has been claimed by the new or social liberals, who have often allied themselves with social democrats and socialists. On the European continent, by contrast, liberalism generally retains its classical meaning.

In contemporary political theory, liberalism is criticized by ‘communitarians’ for having an impoverished, atomistic conception of human beings, which neglects the profound importance of community in shaping individuals' capacities and morality-a criticism common to conservatives, socialists and religious critics of liberalism. Robust defenders of liberalism maintain in reply that it is precisely the virtue of liberalism that it does not take for granted whatever prejudices or values may be bestowed by tradition or communities, but rather requires that they be capable of rational justification. This rationalist impulse explains why liberals are so often in the vanguard of movements to reform societies and states. BO'L


See also conservatism; libertarianism.
Further reading G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism; , L. Hart, The Liberal Tradition in America; , D.J. Mannin, Liberalism; , J.S. Mill, On Liberty; , M.J. Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and its Critics.

Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought, © Bloomsbury 1993

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plural élitism

The doctrine that power in modern liberal democratic states is shared between a multiplicity of competing élites (e.g. Dahl, 1967). Plural élite theorists acknowledge that in complex modern industrial societies élites will inevitably dominate. In this they are at one with classical élite theory. Modern plural élite theory differs from classical élite theory, however, in two key respects:

(a) in accepting that élite in modern liberal democratic societies are representative élites - thus while the people may not rule, the people's élite do;

(b) in asserting that in modern liberal democracies, power is either shared between multiple élites or these élites compete openly and continuously for political power without any one group achieving a lasting dominance over the others. It is in these terms that modern élite theory distinguishes between democracies and non-democracies. See also political cleavage, stable democracy.

Critics of plural élitist theory (e.g. The Theory of Democratic élitism, Bachrach, 1967) object, first, to what they see as its tendency to understate systematic biases in the actual distribution of power in modern societies (see also nondecisions, mobilization of bias) and, secondly, to the restricted conception of political participation and individual development with which a 'democratic élitism' is associated. In responding to these criticisms, plural élite theorists point to the greater realism of their own view of democracy compared with traditional models, further insisting that the distinctions between democracies and non-democracies captured by their models reflect key differences between actual political systems.

See Bibliography.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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LRB | Conor Gearty : A Misreading of the Law
LRB | Vol. 26 No. 4 dated 19 February 2004 | Conor Gearty

A Misreading of the Law

Conor Gearty

Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG by Lord Hutton | Stationery, 740 pp, £70.00

At first sight, the Hutton Report seemed to provide further evidence of Tony Blair's intuitive political genius. It was extraordinary to have reaped from the appointment of Lord Hutton a set of findings which transformed a crisis that threatened to be overwhelming into a vindication of every aspect of the government's conduct, and of the prime minister's moral probity in particular. But when the full implications of the report sank in, as the opinion-makers and others who had already commented on it got round to reading it, the true extent of its partisanship sank in too. As Lord Hutton ploughed on, turning a messy political story into an occasion to destroy the BBC, so the political skills that had created the stage for this report began themselves to look increasingly debased. In the immediate aftermath of the report's publication, the Napoleonic posture of Alastair Campbell, proclaiming his integrity from some sort of throne against a grand imperial backdrop, contrasted with the BBC employees' mobbing of their departing director general to give us the two images with which Hutton will now always be associated. It is possible in politics to be too clever by half; this attribute can be found very close to genius on the political spectrum and, in the excitement of the success of their ploy, Blair and his (former?) spokesperson (ventriloquist?) may have strayed towards it. Given that it remains the case that a neocolonial war has been fought to please neo-conservative friends in an administration despised abroad and at home, this crowing may prove not to have been the wisest of moves.

David Kelly's decision to take his own life on 17 July 2003 produced a wave of public revulsion against the government, and against the prime minister in particular. It could have seemed a relatively minor event - the sad death of an eminent public servant who had worked as a weapons inspector in Iraq and elsewhere - but its effect was to transform a range of disparate disgruntlements into a profound sense that the government had shown itself to be morally and politically bankrupt. There were many elements to this bad feeling: the prime minister had seemed to take the country into war on a false basis and against the wishes of the people; now, with the invasion complete, it appeared that there were no weapons of mass destruction at all; instead of admitting this, the government had suddenly launched a series of attacks on the BBC, delivered in near-hysterical fashion by Alastair Campbell, a figure already far too controversial for his position; the brutal exposure of Dr Kelly that followed added to the general feeling of distaste, especially when he was seemingly forced to abase himself in front of not one but two parliamentary committees.

The Hutton Inquiry 'into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly' was announced on the day Dr Kelly's death was confirmed. There was some initial anxiety about the narrow scope of these terms of reference, but any misgivings were soon forgotten in the thrill of Lord Hutton's preliminary sitting on 1 August, the grand, patrician manner in which he outlined the procedure he intended to adopt, and the prospect of an exciting autumn ahead. Many persuaded themselves that the government's whole war strategy was on trial, and here was the right man to do the judging.

The media may forget terms of reference but judges have built their professional lives on resisting such amnesia, and Lord Hutton is more judge-like than most. 'The circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly' included 'Mr Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003' since these had 'closely involved Dr Kelly' because they had alleged '(1) that the government probably knew, before it decided to put it in its dossier of 24 September 2002, that the statement was wrong that the Iraqi military were able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of a decision to do so and (2) that 10 Downing Street ordered the dossier to be sexed up.'1 These were the 'allegations attacking the integrity of the government which drew Dr Kelly into the controversy about the broadcasts' and which Lord Hutton therefore considered it right that he 'should examine under [his] terms of reference'.2 Also relevant was the matter of how Dr Kelly's name had got into the public arena and how he was treated by his departmental managers. Not relevant were the questions whether there were weapons of mass destruction, whether the intelligence alleging that such weapons existed was faulty, whether there should have been a dossier at all, even whether the 45-minute claim wrongly failed to distinguish between battlefield and strategic weapons. All these matters were outside His Lordship's terms of reference. They were of 'wide import' certainly, but nothing to do with him.3 During the autumn, Lord Hutton listened with great politeness to a very great deal of evidence, and read even more, on issues that he had already - or soon would - entirely put out of his mind.

With its terms of reference construed in this way, the report was bound to be somewhat favourable to government and somewhat critical of the BBC. The authorities could not help but win. Both the BBC and Andrew Gilligan had already 'accepted that there could be criticism of the 6.07 a.m. broadcast' on the Today programme, and the BBC had also acknowledged in its evidence to Hutton 'that there could be criticism of the way in which the BBC treated the broadcast thereafter'.4 Such criticism duly appears in the final report. The Ministry of Defence is also predictably criticised for having communicated to Dr Kelly less well than it might have done the fact that his name was about to be confirmed as the source for Gilligan's reports.5

What was not anticipated (even, I imagine, by the government) was the extent of the victory that Lord Hutton would go on to deliver to ministers, public servants and their advisers. The point is not so much that Blair is himself acquitted of any wrongdoing in relation to David Kelly's outing: it had always been extravagant to claim, as the press did, that the prime minister, to quote Hutton, 'had made a policy decision at a meeting in 10 Downing Street on 8 July to make known Dr Kelly's name to the public',6 and Hutton sets out extensive factual data rebutting this assertion (which would probably have obliged the prime minister to resign had it been found to be correct).7 Rather, it is the total exoneration of the entire cast list of B and C division government players - the Hoons, the Scarletts, the Tebbits, down to the lowest ranks of personnel in the Ministry of Defence - that makes the report so extraordinarily one-sided. The analogy with the Widgery Report into the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972 is wrong on many scores but in one respect it is spot on: the government may over time come to regret the inexorable recitation of official good behaviour in the Hutton Report, just as much as Widgery is now regretted. The general public are not close readers of terms of reference, but things were simply too perfect, too beautifully and compassionately managed at too many levels of government for the report to be believable on the terms that the public are interested in: there was a war fought on an apparently false basis, a scientist who seemed to have tried to point this out was dead, and nobody responsible for the war or that death - not a single minister - has paid a political price.

The contrast with the way Lord Hutton treats the BBC is brutal. The corporation's central claim was that despite its mistakes there had been

great public interest in the September 2002 dossier and serious issues of great public importance arose in relation to the reliability of the intelligence contained in it, and therefore it was right for the BBC and Mr Gilligan to report the concern of Mr Gilligan's source that the dossier had been sexed up and that there was concern in intelligence circles about the way in which the 45-minute claim was worded in the dossier.8

The point was also made that 'there had been a number of similar claims in the media and that the evidence of Dr Brian Jones' - a senior government scientist - 'showed that the report that there was concern in intelligence circles was correct.'9 As far as Lord Hutton was concerned, all this was neither here nor there. The 'communication by the media of information on matters of public interest and importance is a vital part of life in a democratic society' but it is 'subject to the qualification (which itself exists for the benefit of a democratic society) that false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media'.10 So where 'a reporter is intending to broadcast or publish information impugning the integrity of others the management of his broadcasting company or newspaper should ensure that a system is in place whereby his editor or editors give careful consideration to the wording of the report and to whether it is right in all the circumstances to broadcast or publish it'.11 Because such a system was not in place to the satisfaction of Lord Hutton, or at least was not sufficiently robust to prevent Gilligan's 6.07 a.m. broadcast, the BBC was to be condemned, as it was also to be criticised for not subjecting that early morning broadcast to close forensic analysis when the controversial nature of the claims it contained had become apparent.

I remember once appearing as a member of a legal team before a committee of law lords that included Lord Hutton. Most of his interventions were concerned with the operation of a subsection that we had considered a very small part of a bigger picture. But a key part of the success of a judge lies in his or her skill at isolating the issue for decision: the larger it is, the broader the sweep of the case; the narrower, the fewer implications a ruling will have. Lord Hutton is by nature a judge in the second category, a man more inclined to focus on the narrow point than to indulge in grand claims or unnecessary generalisation. Here, though, the narrow route led to an astoundingly broad ruling. The 6.07 broadcast is the core of Hutton's case against the BBC; from that live, unscripted, subsequently modified set of remarks all else flows, including the loss of the corporation's chief executive and chairman. But the strength of the criticism of this broadcast, the engine that makes these few seconds of airtime into the greatest catastrophe in the BBC's history, is a ruling so fundamental in its effect that, if applied rigorously, it could destroy BBC journalism for ever. Imagine a BBC that checks all its output all the time for potentially 'false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians', and refuses to broadcast anything that might conceivably pose such a risk. And there is no reason to stop at the BBC: Lord Hutton's supposed rule must apply generally. So we must also imagine the kind of 'democratic society' we would have if all television, radio and print news organisations followed with Huttonesque rigour what Lord Hutton says is the law. There would be calm, certainly, and quiet reportage of ministerial achievement, but there would not be democracy as we know it. Lord Hutton, famously, is from Northern Ireland; in his interpretation of the law the newspapers would need to have known that British soldiers shot dead innocent civilians in Derry on 30 January 1972, and the Sunday Times Insight team would need to have known that the authorities were subjecting internees to techniques of sensory deprivation to make them talk, before either story could have been run.

Lord Hutton does not appear to have thought any of this through. He is a decent man, out of his depth, the simple rule he grabbed hold of for support being transparently repressive and for that reason certainly not representing the law, either as it is or as it ought to be. Defending his general rule against broadcasting doubtful facts impugning the integrity of others, Lord Hutton refers to a recent House of Lords case, Reynolds v. Times Newspapers Ltd,12 and sets out in an appendix what he describes as 'relevant passages' from the speeches of three of his judicial colleagues in that case.13 The message here seems to be, 'Remember, I am not alone on this one,' but as any first-year law student will tell you, the common law doesn't work by culling a few quotes from the latest leading case: it emerges out of concrete facts and builds not on one authority but on many. There were two other speeches in that decision, and the three law lords from whom Hutton quotes were not as unequivocal as his report implies.

More to the point, the Reynolds case raises a central question that Hutton misses completely. If Gilligan's broadcast was so terrible, if the Blairs were having sleepless nights as a result of being accused of deceit, if the prime minister was shunned at home and abroad as a liar, the law has a simple remedy, the one adopted by Albert Reynolds in the case that Hutton makes so much of: sue for libel. Reynolds was himself a prime minister (of Ireland) but if it is thought beneath the dignity of a serving UK PM to resort to the courts, why did poor, maligned, isolated Alastair Campbell not sue himself, especially when (he would have us believe) his own honour was so grossly impugned? And what about the Mail on Sunday, where Gilligan's greatest excesses of character destruction were to be found? Campbell makes much of his hatred of the paper: here was a chance to take it to the cleaners. Had this course of action been adopted, the judge and jury who heard the case would not have been constricted by the terms of reference with which Hutton misled himself. There would have been questions about the context and a proper cross-examination of the principal actors. The jury might not have been able to avoid asking itself about those supposed weapons of mass destruction that this supposedly unsexed up dossier was so certain about.

In truth no such suit would have succeeded, which is why none was launched. Perhaps the most disappointing feature of Lord Hutton's report is his failure to appreciate the distinction between stopping the media in advance from publishing something and punishing a media outlet for wrongful publication after the event. It is the second of these that our defamation laws are concerned with. Newspapers and other media seek legal advice, balance the risk, take a chance here, are caught out there, settle, apologise, pay damages if all else fails. Even if a case reaches court and the defendant draws a Hutton, an appeal can ensure that the matter is heard before a more balanced bench. But the law is set against the first approach, seeing a challenge to our democratic culture in the prior restraint of the media. Thus, the laws of libel have long rejected efforts by litigants to prevent publication, on the grounds that, if there is any chance of publication being justified, the place to argue the point is in court after publication, not before. The same applies to trade libels, injurious falsehood and similar claims. Contempt of court laws were changed some years ago specifically to prevent the stifling effect of spurious libel writs being issued in order to be able to invoke the contempt laws to shut the press up. It was the prior restraint dimension to the Spycatcher affair, all those endless injunctions, that ultimately led to a series of Strasbourg rulings against the government in 1991. The Human Rights Act, enacted by Labour in 1998, takes great care to protect the press and other media from injunctions obtained without their participation, and designed to foil reports which have not yet been run. Lord Hutton ignores all this. Instead he would create a mini court of law inside the BBC, staffed no doubt by cautious lawyers, whose job it would be to examine all news broadcasts for evidence of 'false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians'. An ideal Hutton world would have such commissars everywhere.

One of the more mystifying aspects of the Hutton process was the media's treatment of Hutton himself, before the publication of his report, as an Olympian demigod, hovering above the fray, fastidious in his search for truth and justice. His appearance and extraordinary accent have helped; the media love caricature, and here was a judge who seemed to have walked into the limelight directly from the 1950s. But underpinning the blind trust that was placed in him, and which has now rebounded so badly, was a more general enthusiasm for the judiciary which is all the more remarkable for having been so recently acquired and for being (as far as the commitment to media freedom is concerned) largely without foundation.

It is not so long ago that judges were the most maligned group in the entire body politic. Their naked partisanship during the miners' strike, the Spycatcher debacle, and then the succession of miscarriage of justice cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s had established the senior judiciary in the eyes of most people (and particularly in the eyes of the media) as inclined to authoritarianism, unaccountable in their exercise of power and entirely out of touch. The refusal of judges to give any interviews, under cover of antiquated 'rules' which a long forgotten lord chancellor had invented, compounded the sense that they were all, or almost all, malevolent recluses. Things began to change with the arrival of a new lord chief justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, and the appointment to the bench of intelligent and progressive voices like those of Harry Woolf, Thomas Bingham and Stephen Sedley. By the mid-1990s, the senior judiciary were conducting a spirited campaign of defiance against successive Tory home secretaries over such issues as the need to obey court orders and to sentence convicted prisoners in a moderately humane manner. Hardly left-wing campaigning, but enough to persuade the media that judges had somehow or other changed. The inquiry into the Matrix Churchill affair by the lively and loquacious Richard Scott, a famously bicycling judge, played its part. The new willingness of the judges to be interviewed also helped, even though the interviews were invariably conducted with a deference that had long been withdrawn from ordinary politicians. The rebranding was highly effective and by the time Hutton was appointed it was assumed that all judges were paragons of open-minded independence. The complaints now being made about Hutton in the media - about his background, his conservatism, his acting for the government at the Widgery tribunal - can easily be made to look like special pleading on the part of losers surprised at the extent of their defeat rather than objective concerns.

Two points were missed by the bright-eyed defenders of the judiciary. First, it is certainly true that some judges are liberal, much more so than in the past. Just like previous administrations, this government has lost its fair share of cases in court, perhaps more than most as judges have sought to exercise their power under the Human Rights Act to achieve a just (or at least a less unjust) society. Where issues relating to the administration of justice are concerned, however, judges tend to favour their own authority over press freedom. Judges, even liberal judges, hate to see the law broken. Lord Hutton would not have been the only judge to take seriously the fact that Dr Kelly had spoken to journalists 'in breach of the civil service code of procedure which applied to him'14 or to have found that the whistleblower's legislation passed in the early days of the Labour administration didn't shield him because he didn't talk to his superiors before talking to the press.15 As for the naive faith that judges are more in favour of freedom of expression now than in the past, that will have been dealt a blow by the law lords' recent resounding affirmation of the right to regulate political speech, in an appeal against a ruling allowing a ProLife Alliance election broadcast brought - bizarrely in the present context - by the BBC.

The second point is more fundamental. At least in litigation, governments neither control the parameters of the case nor the composition of the bench that decides the matter. In public inquiries they do both. This is the reason it was Lord Widgery and not, say, Lord Scarman who was appointed to the Bloody Sunday tribunal, and Lord Diplock (rather than, for example, the equally distinguished Lord Gardiner) who was asked in 1972 to restructure Northern Ireland's legal system so as to camouflage the state's war against the IRA with a veneer of legality. These examples can be multiplied right up to the present day: a range of judges - personally appointed to the task by the prime minister or another wing of the executive branch - preside over the security state, publishing annual reports confirming that all is well in MI5 and MI6, that telephone tapping is being scrupulously done, and so on. Even if the government gets the wrong judge by accident, the terms of reference imposed will usually hinder even the entirely independent investigator's power.

It is not difficult to establish a coherent account of the events that led David Kelly to take his life. The idea of a dossier had been around since February 2002, when the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office had commissioned a paper on the weapons of mass destruction capabilities of four countries of concern, including Iraq.16 Even then the possibility of public use of such a document was being considered.17 The following month, at the prime minister's request, a further paper, dealing only with Iraq, was completed.18 On 3 September 2002, Tony Blair announced that the government would be publishing a paper on Iraq's capacity in relation to weapons of mass destruction.19 The old material was then gone through with an eye to public dissemination. Given the high level of political engagement, the commitment to publish the dossier made almost unavoidable a careful reworking of earlier material so as to put it (from the government's perspective) in the best public light. Alastair Campbell acknowledged that the intelligence community needed to be '100 per cent happy' with the content, but in the same message to John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he made clear that 'the judgment as to whether a single person should be appointed to write the final version' had yet to be made.20 On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control by Number 10 unnecessary, constructing a document that pleased his political masters, and which required some further tinkering rather than a radical overhaul. The replacement of 'could' with 'capable of being used' and other concessions of this sort made at Campbell's request have credibly underpinned the allegation of 'sexing up'. But the whole document was in its conception, structure and language a 'sexing up' of intelligence: all Campbell was alleged to have been doing was 'sexing up' the already 'sexed up', like offering Viagra to a sex maniac. Right from the start, the intelligence community (a spooky term in every sense) should have had nothing to do with the idea of a dossier intended for public consumption. Instead they were drawn into the Campbell world of spinnery and sleight-of-hand, where even they - arch-spinners and sleighters-of-hand - couldn't cope.

When the Foreign Affairs Committee decided on 3 June that it would hold an inquiry into 'the decision to go to war in Iraq',21 this was very unwelcome news to the government. We can now see why: as early as late May it was an open secret among those in the know in Washington and London that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; as the former UN nuclear inspector David Albright has been reported as saying, 'the only people who did not know the facts [were] the public.'22 Clearly the government was going to face tricky questions about the dossier which it published in September 2002 and which had seemed to be convincing in its assertions about the danger Saddam Hussein posed both in the Middle East and further afield. When he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June, Alastair Campbell's chosen means of evasion of the key issue - the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction - was to launch an attack on the BBC for having alleged that the prime minister had lied: 'the story that I "sexed up" the dossier is untrue; the story that I "put pressure on the intelligence agencies" is untrue; the story that we somehow made more of the 45-minute command and control point than the intelligence agencies thought was suitable is untrue.'23

Putting the entire focus on one report by Andrew Gilligan broadcast very early in the morning was a neat evasive ploy, and it might have worked for a while had not two events intervened. First, David Kelly came forward and admitted that it was possible that he had been Gilligan's source. Second, after his appearance before the two parliamentary committees, and with the full spotlight on him, he killed himself. This turned a diversionary skirmish into the main theatre of war. The government managed the disclosure of Kelly's name in a way that - given the circumstances - was neither brutal nor overly insensitive. How Number 10 must have wished that he had kept silent, and allowed Campbell's hysterical attack on the BBC to work its way to a conclusion, fill a few front pages and distract public attention a little longer from the main issue. However, with the scientist's death, the government took the chance further to postpone confrontation of that issue. Blair must have hoped that by the time of the publication of the report the problem of the non-existing weapons of mass destruction would have gone away, been forgotten or mistakenly elided in the public mind with the Hutton Inquiry. But the judge's total exoneration of the government made the last of these impossible. And with perfect timing, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, promptly made the first two of these scenarios quite impossible.

So, magnificently and rightly, we are back where we started, with the absorbing question of those weapons of mass destruction without which we would appear to have gone to war on an entirely false basis. In a replay of the Hutton trick, a new committee is to rule on the nature of the intelligence that went before the prime minister and on how that material was used. With the assistance of whatever this group reports, but relying also on the revelations that are bound to flow from Capitol Hill, the British public will in due course have to decide whether their prime minister had a totally unreasonable belief in the existence of such weapons, or whether he consciously lied about them to fool the country into war and please George Bush, or whether he was tricked by the intelligence 'community' into an unnecessary conflict. It is not an attractive choice for any country: is their war leader mad or bad or has he just been had? Perhaps the answer will eventually prove to be a bit of all three.

Footnotes

1 Para 9.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Para 276.

5 Para 436.

6 Para 402.

7 See Paras 402-418, especially Para 411.

8 Para 276.

9 Ibid.

10 Para 280.

11 Ibid.

12 [2001] 2 AC 127.

13 Para 280. See Appendix 17.

14 Para 259 (2).

15 Para 255.

16 Para 163.

17 Ibid.

18 Para 165.

19 Para 171.

20 Para 173.

21 Para 41.

22 Observer, 1 February 2004, p. 19.

23 Para 45.

Conor Gearty is Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and Professor of Human Rights Law at the LSE, and a barrister at Matrix. Principles of Human Rights Adjudication is forthcoming from Oxford.

I am a Fighting Atheist
"I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj Zizek"

Interview by Doug Henwood, Intro by Charlie Bertsch
Bad Subjects, Issue # 59 , February 2002

Doug Henwood, interview; Charlie Bertsch, introduction

It's hard to become a superstar in the world of scholarly publishing. Most of the people who read its products can also write them. To stand out in a crowd this smart requires both luck and perseverance. Slavoj Zizek has demonstrated plenty of both. When Yugoslavia started to break up in the aftermath of the Cold War in 1990, pristine Slovenia was the first of its republics to declare independence. We were thrilled to be witnessing the rebirth of "nations" that had disappeared into Germany, the Soviet Union, or, in the case of Slovenia, first the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then Yugoslavia. .As this little-known land's leading thinker, Zizek basked in an aura of novelty. His work, simultaneously light-hearted and deep, invoked the dream of a post-Cold War world in which free thinking would transcend all borders.

A decade later, we know how quickly that hope turned to despair. But Zizek's star hasn't dimmed. If anything, it has grown brighter. People who started reading Zizek because they couldn't believe that Communist Europe could produce such a supple thinker read him now for the simple reason that he is Zizek. For anyone who has tired of the dumbing down of mainstream political discourse in the West, who finds it hard to believe that the bone-dry American leftism of a Noam Chomsky represents the only possibility for resistance, who wants to critique global capitalism without falling back on faded Marxist slogans, Zizek's work flashes the promise of something better. From his ground-breaking 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology to his trenchant 1999 critique of Western governments' intervention in the former Yugoslavia, titled NATO as the Left Hand of God?, Zizek has never failed to stimulate thinking. And what more can we ask of an intellectual? As Zizek himself suggests in the interview here, philosophy helps us, not by "purifying" our thought, but by making it more complex.

What really sets Zizek apart from other major scholars is his willingness to take risks. If you were to read all of his books in rapid succession, you would see that they sometimes contradict one another. But you would also see how the tension between them reflects Zizek's real purpose: to make us see the world with fresh eyes. Unlike the vast majority of academic thinkers, Zizek is not worried about being "careless." He roots around in the realm of ideas looking for whatever will prove useful. It doesn't matter if his findings come from different intellectual traditions, if they are, in some sense, philosophically incompatible. Zizek's writing forces them to collaborate. Marx, Freud, Hegel, Kant, Lacan. . .and Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and the Slovenian electronic agit-prop band Laibach all come together in a delightful mix. This delight, finally, is what seals the deal for Zizek's readers. It's one thing to illuminate contemporary political concerns with the help of dense philosophical points; it's another entirely to make that insight fun. Zizek does.

Left Business Observer editor and Wall Street author Doug Henwood talked with Zizek prior to the September 11th terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, then asked a few follow-up questions in its aftermath. In the days following the attack, Zizek's take on its significance – an incredibly moving essay titled "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" - circulated on e-mail lists worldwide. Unlike the vast majority of commentators, Zizek was not content to express disbelief and outrage. His words offered an antidote to the mindless drivel on the major networks, CNN, and Fox News. Reflecting on the many "previews" of the tragedy in American movies, Zizek refused to blunt his critical edge: "In a way, America got what it fantasized about."

This interview is excerpted from BS editor Joel Schalit's anthology The Anti-Capitalism Reader, forthcoming from Akashic Books in the summer of 2002.

BS: In general, anarchism plays a big role in American radical politics and countercultures. Do you have any thoughts on this influence?

Zizek: I certainly can understand where the appeal of anarchism lies. Even though I am quite aware of the contradictory and ambiguous nature of Marx's relationship with anarchism, Marx was right when he drew attention to how anarchists who preach "no state no power" in order to realize their goals usually form their own society which obeys the most authoritarian rules. My first problem with anarchism is always, "Yeah, I agree with your goals, but tell me how you are organized." For me, the tragedy of anarchism is that you end up having an authoritarian secret society trying to achieve anarchist goals. The second point is that I have problems with how anarchism is appropriate to today's problems. I think if anything, we need more global organization. I think that the left should disrupt this equation that more global organization means more totalitarian control.

BS: When you speak of a global organization, are you thinking of some kind of global state, or do you have non-state organizations in mind?

Zizek: I don't have any prejudices here whatever. For example, a lot of left-wingers dismissed talk of universal human rights as just another tool of American imperialism, to exert pressure on Third World countries or other countries America doesn't like, so it can bomb them. But it's not that simple. As we all know, following the same logic, Pinochet was arrested. Even if he was set free, this provoked a tremendous psychological change in Chile. When he left Chile, he was a universally feared, grey eminence. He returned as an old man whom nobody was afraid of. So, instead of dismissing the rules, it's well worth it to play the game. One should at least strategically support the idea of some kind of international court and then try to put it to a more progressive use.

America is already concerned about this. A few months ago, when the Senate was still under Republican control, it adopted a measure prohibiting any international court to have any jurisdiction over American citizens. You know they weren't talking about some Third World anti-imperialist court. They were talking about the Hague court, which is dominated by Western Europeans. The same goes for many of these international agencies. I think we should take it all. If it's outside the domain of state power, OK. But sometimes, even if it's part of state power. I think the left should overcome this primordial fear of state power, that because it's some form of control, it's bad.

BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there's something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling structures?

Zizek: Absolutely. And I'm not bluffing here; I'm talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it's not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn't be articulated. Which is why I'm deeply distrustful of this "let's just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion." I'm more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

BS: We've seen over the last few years the growth of a broad anti-capitalist — or as we say in the U.S., anti-corporate or anti-globalization — movement, a lot of it organized according to anarchist principles. Do you think these demonstrations are a sign of any left revival, a new movement?

Zizek: Mixed. Not in the sense of being partly good and partly bad but because the situation is undecided – maybe even undecidable. What will come out of the Seattle movement is the terrain of the struggle. I think it is PRECISELY NOW - after the attack on the World Trade Center - that the "Seattle" task will regain its full urgency! After a period of enthusiasm for retaliation, there will be a new (ideological) depression, and THAT point will be our chance!!!

BS: Much of this will depend on progressives' ability to get the word out.

Zizek: I'm well aware of the big media's censorship here. For example, even in the European big media, which are supposed to be more open, you will never see a detailed examination of the movement's agenda. You get some ominous things. There is something dark about it. According to the normal rules of the liberal game, you would expect some of these people to be invited on some TV talk shows, confronted with their adversaries, placed in a vigorous polemic, but no. Their agenda is ignored. Usually they're mocked as advocating some old-fashioned left-wing politics or some particularism, like saving local conditions against globalism. My conclusion is that the big powers must be at least in some kind of a panic. This is a good sign.

BS: But lots of the movement has no explicit agenda to offer. Why is the elite in such a panic?

Zizek: It's not like these are some kind of old-fashioned left-wing idiots, or some kind of local traditionalists. I am well aware that Seattle etc. is still a movement finding its shape, but I think it has potential. (Even though) there is no explicit agenda, there is nonetheless an outlook reproaching this globalization for being too exclusionary, not a true globalization but only a capitalist globalization.

BS: At the same time this movement was growing, there was a string of electoral victories for the right — Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia in Italy, Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria, our own Bush. What do you make of these?

Zizek: They're not to be underestimated. I'll put it in my old-fashioned Stalinist terms: there are two deviations to be avoided here, left and right. The right-wing deviation is to fully endorse their liberal opponents, to say, "OK, we have our problems with Gore or Blair but they're basically our guys, and we should support them against the true right." We should also avoid the opposite mistake, which is that they're all the same. It doesn't really matter if it's Gore or Bush. From this position it's only one step to the position that says, "so it's even better we have Bush, because then we see the true enemy."

We should steer the right middle course: while maintaining our critical distance towards the moderate left, one shouldn't be afraid when certain issues are at stake, to support them. What is at stake is the following: it looked in the 1990s that after the disintegration of socialism, the Third Way left represents the universal interests of capital as such, to put it in the old Marxist way, and the right-wing parties represent only particular interests. In the U.S., the Republicans target certain types of rich people, and even certain parts of the lower classes—flirting with the Moral Majority, for example. The problem is that right-wing politicians such as Haider are playing the global game. Not only do we have a Third Way left; we now have a Third Way right too, which tries to combine unrestrained global capitalism with a more conservative cultural politics.

Here is where I see the long-term danger of these right wingers. I think that sooner or later the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules. For example, in Europe, the tendency behind all these movements like Holocaust revisionism and so on, is an attempt to dismantle the post-World War II ideological consensus around anti-fascism, with a social solidarity built around the welfare state. It's an open question as to what will replace it.

[*Ed Note: Such as the new emergency powers granted the U.S. government for domestic surveillance purposes following the WTC/Pentagon attacks, which suspend habeas corpus rights for immigrants, allow security services to monitor your telecommunications activities, and review your student and bank records without permission from a judge]

BS: What about the transition from Clinton to Bush? What's significant about this from your point of view?

Zizek: The sad thing is that Clinton left behind him a devastated, disoriented Democratic Party. There are people who say that his departure leaves some room for a resurgence of the party's left wing, but that will be difficult. The true problem of Clinton is his legacy; there is none. He didn't survive as a movement, in the sense that he left a long-term imprint. He was just an opportunist and now he's simply out. He didn't emerge as a figure like Thatcher or Reagan who left a certain legacy. OK, you can say that he left a legacy of compromise or triangulation, but the big failure is at this ideological level. He didn't leave behind a platform with which the moderate liberals could identify.

BS: A lot of readers of American underground publications read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and the stuff coming out of small anarchist presses. What would they get from reading your work that they might be missing?

Zizek: Martin Heidegger said that philosophy doesn't make things easier, it makes them harder and more complicated. What they can learn is the ambiguity of so many situations, in the sense that whenever we are presented by the big media with a simple opposition, like multicultural tolerance vs. ethnic fundamentalism, the opposition is never so clear-cut. The idea is that things are always more complex. For example, multiculturalist tolerance, or at least a certain type of it, generates or involves a much deeper racism. As a rule, this type of tolerance relies on the distinction between us multiculturalists, and intolerant ethnic others, with the paradoxical result that anti-racism itself is used to dismiss IN A RACIST WAY the other as a racist. Not to mention the fact that this kind of "tolerance" is as a rule patronizing. Its respect for the other cannot but remind us of the respect for naive children's beliefs: we leave them in their blessed ignorance so as not to hurt them...

Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work — though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic theory are of no use — that things are simply evident, like American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this. And the second point is that with all his criticism of the U.S., Chomsky retains a certain commitment to what is the most elemental ingredient of American ideology, individualism, a fundamental belief that America is the land of free individuals, and so on. So in that way he is deeply and problematically American.

You can see some of these problems in the famous Faurisson scandal in France. As many readers may know, Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which was threatened with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust. Chomsky claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should still be published for free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I can't support him here. The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom for all, even for those whom we find disgusting and totally unacceptable; otherwise, today it is them, tomorrow it is us. It sounds logical, but I think that it avoids the true paradox of freedom: that some limitations have to guarantee it.

So to understand what goes on today — to understand how we experience ourselves, to understand the structures of social authority, to understand whether we really live in a "permissive" society, and how prohibitions function today — for these we need social theory. That's the difference between me and the names you mentioned.

BS: Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren't "the facts" enough?

Zizek: Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. OK, (he provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don't think that merely "knowing the facts" can really change people's perceptions.

To put it another way: Chomsky's own position on Kosovo, on the Yugoslav war, shows some of his limitations, because of a lack of a proper historical context. With all his facts, he got the picture wrong. As far as I can judge, Chomsky bought a certain narrative — that we shouldn't put all the blame on Milosevic, that all parties were more or less to blame, and the West supported or incited this explosion because of its own geopolitical goals. All are not the same. I'm not saying that the Serbs are guilty. I just repeat my old point that Yugoslavia was not over with the secession of Slovenia. It was over the moment Milosevic took over Serbia. This triggered a totally different dynamic. It is also not true that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was supported by the West. On the contrary, the West exerted enormous pressure, at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to remain in Yugoslavia. I saw [former Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav TV supporting the Yugoslav army's attempts to prevent Slovenia's secession.

The ultimate paradox for me is that because he lacks a theoretical framework, Chomsky even gets the facts wrong sometimes.

BS: Years ago, you were involved with the band Laibach and its proto-state, NSK (Neue Slovenische Kunst). Why did you get involved with them?

Zizek: The reason I liked them at a certain moment (which was during the last years of "really existing socialism") was that they were a third voice, a disturbing voice, not fitting into the opposition between the old Communists and the new liberal democrats. For me, their message was that there were fundamental mechanisms of power which we couldn't get rid of with the simple passage to democracy. This was a disturbing message, which was why they got on everyone's nerves. This was no abstract theoretical construct. In the late 1980s, people got this message instinctively — which is why Laibach were more strongly repressed by the new democratic, nationalist powers in Slovenia than previously by the Communists. In the early 1980s, they had some trouble with the Communists, but from the mid-1980s onward, they didn't have any trouble. But they did again with the transition of power. With their mocking rituals of totalitarian power, they transmitted a certain message about the functioning of power that didn't fit the naive belief in liberal democracy. The miracle was that they did it through certain stage rituals. Later, they tried to change their image (to put it in marketing terms) and they failed.

BS: You talk and write a lot about popular culture, particularly movies. How does your thinking about pop culture relate to your thinking about politics?

Zizek: We can no longer, as we did in the good old times, (if they were really good) oppose the economy and culture. They are so intertwined not only through the commercialization of culture but also the culturalization of the economy. Political analysis today cannot bypass mass culture. For me, the basic ideological attitudes are not found in big picture philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld practices — how do you behave, how do you react — which aren't only reflected in mass culture, but which are, up to a point, even generated in mass culture. Mass culture is the central ideological battlefield today.

BS: You have recently been speaking about reviving Lenin. To a lot of politically active young people, Lenin is a devil figure. What do you find valuable in Lenin, or the Leninist tradition?

Zizek: I am careful to speak about not repeating Lenin. I am not an idiot. It wouldn't mean anything to return to the Leninist working class party today. What interests me about Lenin is precisely that after World War I broke out in 1914, he found himself in a total deadlock. Everything went wrong. All of the social democratic parties outside Russia supported the war, and there was a mass outbreak of patriotism. After this, Lenin had to think about how to reinvent a radical, revolutionary politics in this situation of total breakdown. This is the Lenin I like. Lenin is usually presented as a great follower of Marx, but it is impressive how often you read in Lenin the ironic line that "about this there isn't anything in Marx." It's this purely negative parallel. Just as Lenin was forced to reformulate the entire socialist project, we are in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we should do today, at an even more radical level.

For example, at the most elementary level, Marx's concept of exploitation presupposes a certain labor theory of value. If you take this away from Marx, the whole edifice of his model disintegrates. What do we do with this today, given the importance of intellectual labor? Both standard solutions are too easy — to claim that there is still real physical production going on in the Third World, or that today's programmers are a new proletariat? Like Lenin, we're deadlocked. What I like in Lenin is precisely what scares people about him — the ruthless will to discard all prejudices. Why not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I think it's a useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct pacifism.

Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco companies. But this obsession with the danger of smoking isn't as simple as it might appear.

BS: You've also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you've been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?

Zizek: I'm tempted to say, "The Leninist part." I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture. What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is give us the idea of rebirth. Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of ethics: not that each of us should do our duty according to our place in society — a good King should be a good King, a good servant a good servant — but instead that irrespective of who I am, I have direct access to universality. This is explosive. What interests me is only this dimension. Of course it was later taken over by secular philosophers and progressive thinkers. I am not in any way defending the Church as an institution, not even in a minimal way.

For an example, let's take Judith Butler, and her thesis that our sexual identity isn't part of our nature but is socially constructed. Such a statement, such a feminist position, could only occur against a background of a Christian space.

BS: Several times you've used the word "universalism." For trafficking in such concepts, people you'd identify as forces of political correctness have indicted you for Eurocentrism. You've even written a radical leftist plea for Eurocentrism. How do you respond to the PC camp's charges against you?

Zizek: I think that we should accept that universalism is a Eurocentrist notion. This may sound racist, but I don't think it is. Even when Third World countries appeal to freedom and democracy, when they formulate their struggle against European imperialism, they are at a more radical level endorsing the European premise of universalism. You may remember that in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always appealed to universal Enlightenment values, and it was Buthelezi, the regime's black supporter in the pay of the CIA, who appealed to special African values.

My opponent here is the widely accepted position that we should leave behind the quest for universal truth — that what we have instead are just different narratives about who we are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that view, the highest ethical injunction is to respect the other story. All the stories should be told, each ethnic, political, or sexual group should be given the right to tell its story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the plurality of stories with no universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon.

I oppose this radically. This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a right to narrate, as if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own story, as if only a black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black lesbian mother, and so on. Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment we accept this logic, we enter a kind of apartheid. In a situation of social domination, all narratives are not the same. For example, in Germany in the 1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many. This was the narrative that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take the gay struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be heard." No, the gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the sense that their implicit claim must be that what happens to us is not something that concerns only us. What is happening to us is a symptom or signal that tells us something about what's wrong with the entirety of society today. We have to insist on this universal dimension.

Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, is currently Senior Researcher at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, in Essen, Germany. His latest publications are On Belief, (Routledge, 2001) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Verso, 2001).

Doug Henwood is the editor of the Left Business Observer and author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), and the forthcoming A New Economy? He was once a teenage reactionary, but outgrew it.

Charlie Bertsch is a member of the Bad Subjects Production Team and an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona.