Non-Political Words that Occlude Politics

Control,   False Consciousness,   Conspiracy,   Outside Agitator,  and  We/They.

Terms to avoid if one wishes to understand politics:

• • Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”

  • The Master replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”

  • “So! indeed!” said Tsze-lu. “You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?”

  • The Master said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.  If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3 (James R. Ware translation 1980)

"Be careful how you interpret the world: it really is like that" -- Erich Heller

The bold-faced five words (and others) are used to name or even explain political realities but they don’t; instead they occlude and suppress real politics behind murky and misleading superstitions.  Realpolitikers will snort at my list, as will those who hold that forces and factors govern politics from above, below, behind, from somewhere else other than politics.  I don’t deny the claim of other influences but the 1989 velvet revolutions in Central Europe, not to mention any daily engagement with politics or attention to news from the Middle East quickly show that violence, power, wealth, the conceptualities of “theory,” etc. ride on something else, opinion.  And opinion is not addressed by the five terms; it is suppressed.

In politics, a plurality of human beings arrange matters among themselves taking each other into account (or not).  They express themselves and seek arrangements for various reasons but those reasons, while mostly shared, are individually understood.  That individual understanding lies at the basis of politics; if all humans thought the same way or utterly different, there would be no politics.  Individual variation in understanding is the basis for the modern affirmation of democracy and open societies.  Those arrangements best match the inevitable political conversation among individuals and are most responsive to their shifting opinions.  Of course, most humans have lived or now live in circumstances that hem in political conversation, but constraints on political conversation render a regime brittle and blind it to the opinions that constitute it and to those that undo it.

Control: One controls materials where one has a sure grasp of their self-same nature and where the materials have, aside from decay, negligible agency.  So engineering can control materials and machines.  Humans are not material; they not only vary from one to the next but each person varies over time and in different circumstance (Plato’s Indefinite Dyad).   Moreover, they are agents, and their actions likewise shift over circumstances, times, and persons. Humans can be cowed to a semblance of control but that semblance is composed of individual, ongoing and negotiated accommodations.  If a conversation is controlled, then it cannot express what is “going on.”  A regime can collapse, the semblance of control having been hollowed out; the accommodation no longer worth the effort.

False consciousness:  The claim of false consciousness, manipulation, brainwashing and such like is gnostic; that is, it claims on the basis of special insight or teaching -- the soft sciences, the hard sciences, pseudo-sciences or just “my experience” -- to know the real interests of other individual minds, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.  This sort of esotericism hides from itself the fact that the individual who supposedly votes against her interest or partakes in rituals that are politically “irrational,” or is fooled into false beliefs -- that this "unwitting" individual actually does mean to vote that way, does mean to partake in such rituals, and as a matter of fact does hold foolish beliefs.  Or not (see comment about negotiated accommodation in previous paragraph).  In effect, political esotericism allows the critic to dismiss "mindless" individuals and avoid coming to terms with another individual’s understanding.  Express opinion is supplanted with occult externalities.

Conspiracy: A conspiracy is a group of people, organized around a shared interest, who collaborate on furthering that interest.  It is called a conspiracy because that interest is perceived by others to be adverse to the common good or to the interest of some privileged group or to the majority.  Note that any association in civil society fits the foregoing description.  To construe associations as conspiracies rather than robust politics signals that a political regime (or explanation) is repressive, unable to meet its real basis, unable to find its footing in politics. It is unwilling to converse with the conspiracy; instead it abridges politics with police powers. “Conspiracies” that break the law or resort to violence are criminal; but associations, even politically motivated associations seeking to infiltrate and influence the government are not criminal but political factions.  The only political response available to counter a faction is more politics. (See “control.”)

Outside Agitator:  If the “outside” agitator agitates anyone “inside,” then the "outside" view is inside the political conversation; it is already engaged in politics.  Like most of these terms, the presumption here is of some unchanging identity that needs to be kept unchanged, but that very claim is political and will be sorted out by politics.  Also like other terms here, “outside” is a refusal to respect, to consider, and to address the views of an individual; it is meant to exclude the “agitated.”

“We/They”: In politics, groups of people organize themselves as associations or institutions and then “speak as one” so it is convenient to refer to them as "them" or "us."  That abridgment is as misleading as “control.”  A group is made up of individuals who share an interest but from varied understandings.  The many members of a group likely diverge in their understanding of their shared interest as well as in their other interests.  Political groupings ("identities") are in constant flux; they expand, transform, fracture, reconfigure, and fragment.  In politics as in diplomacy, there are no fixed friends or enemies -- those terms and their groupings may be useful but passing approximations; taken as real demarcations they are superstitious and self-defeating impositions.  Instead, there are negotiated and varied groupings of individuals.  That makes for a conversation, for politics.  “They” and "we" aggregate persons into concepts, abridging politics and substituting demons for people.

"But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

This was first formulated and composed during my political philosophy seminar, "Unorthodox Politics" at Bogazici University in 2008.  The wording (not the five words) has been revised many times, and it was posted as a public site nearly a decade ago.  This is its third webpage ("technology moves on").