I’ve been reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (kpunk: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ ) and one of his arguments is that late capitalist institutions work not by functioning properly but by creating the representation of their current success and future performance. This is how how the stock market operates: traders aren’t interested so much in the actual value a company creates as what other traders’ aggregate perception of a company might be. The best pop culture example is found in The Wire, where police, school administrators, and politicians spend more effort on “juking the stats” than actually reducing crime, improving education, or relieving poverty. Fisher’s point is not that slick PR types are actually duping everyone, manufacturing consent and so on. On some level we all recognize the falsity of public relations, but still act as if there is a Big Other out there that we have to please. This Big Other — defined by its “constitutive ignorance” of the distinction between “what is officially accepted and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals” – is less an all-knowing deity or stern Father and more like a child who still believes in Santa Claus. It is okay for a politician or a CEO to act in an utterly mendacious way so long as this social fiction isn’t pierced, as long as it is possible to pretend that someone else still believes in their virtue, even if that is obviously not the case. The child might very well be pretending to believe in Santa Claus for the benefit of her parents, who seem to enjoy pretending to believe, etc.
Shirley Sherrod’s resignation and, even more so, the Cordoba House controversy show how racism and bigotry in public discourse have come to work in this way. Often, rather than directly espouse intolerant views, pundits and politicians triangulate with a fictive racist Big Other who might be offended. This was a constant refrain of the pundits during the Obama campaign. More recently, Sarah Palin called the Cordoba House an “unnecessary provocation” that “stabs the heart” of her emotionally traumatized Big Other; the Anti-Defamation League made a similar case for imaginary victims whose “anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.” Even Newt Gingrich – who is more than willing to be openly Islamophobic elsewhere – invoked an “average American” who might perceive the Cordoba house as an affront. Fox News and other cable TV news outlets do this all the time. Whether a given position is actually correct or even effective is unimportant; what matters is polling data, the “narrative,” imaginary public opinion — the views of an invented collective subject who is always a little bit slower and a little more impulsive than the commentators. On its own merits, it’s difficult to justify opposing a Muslim community center based on its proximity from Ground Zero so, instead, this intolerant stance is displaced, half-disavowed even as it is enthusiastically taken up as a rallying point for conservatives. We know very well that there’s nothing wrong with Muslims worshiping in Manhattan, but think of the bigots!
