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Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution

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Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION by Philip Edmond Olsen A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Concentration in Philosophy Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2014 READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION by Philip Edmond Olsen This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ____________________________ Dr. Daniel White ____________________________ Dr. Michael Harrawood ______________________________ Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College ___________ Date ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, for his insight, conversation, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Harrawood for giving me a lot of books and talking about philosophy with me. Finally, I would like to thank Calvin Bankert, John Carney, Alexa Robinson, Janeen Smith, and Daniel Zengotita for talking to me about things. It all helped. iii ABSTRACT Author: Philip Edmond Olsen Title: Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Daniel White Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Concentration: Philosophy Year: 2014 In the 1960s, the French Communist thinker Louis Althusser undertook to reorient capitalistic societies toward realizing socialist ideals. However, Althusser envisioned a self-sustaining capitalist state placing, through ideological state apparatuses, seemingly insurmountable limitations on constituents’ ideas and actions. In brief, his characterization of social phenomena as revealing a constructed ideology favoring the state, itself supporting the economy, seems to have contradicted his revolutionary goal. This thesis argues that communication theory, as explicated by the Canadian theorist Anthony Wilden, provides a framework capable of rectifying Althusser’s theory of the state to meet his goal of creating a society whose citizens are free from state control. Althusser thought undoing ideological apparatuses began with their identification, proceeded through their disruption, and concluded with their transformation. Wilden’s theory of morphogenic systems, conceptualizing “resistance” to ideological structures as “noise” in the “signal” of the state apparatus, shows that generating noise permits political actors to foster morphogenesis in a “repressive” state. iv CONTENTS Introduction: The Revolutionary Mind . 1 Chapter One: The Problem Posed by Capitalistic Ideology . 5 Chapter Two: Ideology and Marxism . 18 Chapter Three: Prion Logic: Reconciling Althusser and Wilden . 36 Chapter Four: Governance, Aberration, Revolution . 49 Conclusion: Reading the World, Writing the Mind . .. 61 Works Cited . 67 v Introduction: The Revolutionary Mind All discussions about philosophy are inevitably discussions about history, but in the interest of concision I am not going to be able fully to contextualize my research in this short document. I hope that readers will take my philosophical analysis as indicating one aspect of a broader critical perspective that I have tried to adopt in all my research. My thesis is on ideology, revolution, and the way that change takes place in different kinds of systems. My thesis is in part on the philosopher Louis Althusser. During the 1960s he put a lot of time into thinking the most radical thoughts he could. Althusser was a member of the French Communist Party, and was dedicated to revolutionizing both society and the field of philosophical discourse. (He would have argued, by the way, that society and philosophy are two fields that inform, reflect, and change each other, and that they are pretty much inseparable.) Althusser had a schematization of the way that philosophy and society are constantly working to preserve the same state, and it is not a state toward which Althusser was particularly sympathetic. Do you remember hearing about the cultural revolution in China? This is the kind of problem that Althusser thought and wrote about. The Russian Revolution showed political philosophers that a complete sociopolitical reorganization was impossible if the party in power did not manage to create some change in the minds of the people. It would have to be a radical change! Suppose you are a communist. I know, it’s hard to actually get into the shoes of the communist for us. I walk around in my Pumas® while drinking Starbucks® coffee, myself. But if you are a communist you want a complete reorganization of the socioeconomic structure. This involves a radical redistribution of wealth, and a shift in legal terminology respecting the proprietorship of the means of production. What else would it involve? The Maoists in China realized that a real “revolution” would have to entail a complete reorganization in the way that people confronted the world: a complete change in the way that they punctuated, or introduced boundaries into, experience! Think about it. If you can force or convince (let’s suppose for a minute that it doesn’t matter which) people not just to behave in a certain way that prioritizes the good of the community over that of the self, but to internalize that belief system, that would constitute a real revolution. How hard would it be for us in our society not to think of ourselves as ourselves, but as being primarily constituents of a larger social or environmental system, and only secondarily as isolated bodies and minds? 1 Okay, this is getting out of control. Let’s talk about some understandable, concrete things. Let’s talk about contemporary capitalistic societies. Althusser had this idea that capitalist societies have a certain structure that prevents change from taking place. Specifically, Althusser says that these structures work to reproduce the relations of production in the state . You have to look at things from a specific perspective in order to understand what Althusser was getting at. For Althusser everything he observed spoke to the supplementation of a certain way of life, which was tied up with, although not definitively, capitalism. This way of life privileges the notion of control over everything else. Althusser perceived the structure of capitalist control as having two main forms. The first one is something that he calls the Repressive State Apparatus. It is embodied by things like the military, the police force, and the prison system. These are institutions in the capitalist state that literally and physically exert control over the actions of transgressive people. The second kind of structure is the Ideological State Apparatus. Althusser claimed that ideological state apparatuses share the goal of reproducing the relations of capitalism by exerting control on the way that people think, which is evident in the way that they act. Institutions like the church, the schools, the news media, and the law all contribute to a delimitative process on the thinking of the constituents of capitalistic societies––in Althusser’s terms, they prevent the formation of a truly communistic thought. By exposing ourselves to and embodying the doctrines of selfishness and accumulativeness expounded by the ideological state apparatuses, Althusser thought, we subject ourselves to the control of the capitalistic ideology. Since I like to think like a communist sometimes, if only as an intellectual exercise, I am a little perplexed by the problem Althusser’s model poses. Althusser phrases it in no uncertain terms: all of the institutions that you and I can identify are parts of the ideological state apparatus. All our news sources are the ideological state apparatus. Florida Atlantic University is the ideological state apparatus. The churches we attend all share in the ideological state apparatus. The ideological state apparatus is bad! If it seems like we can learn at educational institutions, how is it that the state exerts its control so invisibly? Can we escape the confines imposed on our imaginations by an institution that conceives of knowledge as being comprised of cutting things up into little bits, whether conceptually or physically? If we are good communists, I think the answer is yes. I wonder what we are. My thesis examines one particular thinker, Anthony Wilden, whose work in the 1970s joined together the field of communication, which had been abstracted from the mid-20th century 2 experimentations with robotics and cybernetics, and the perspectives provided by the newly minted field of deep ecology. Wilden and Althusser shared the same idea that the capitalistic state contains in its structure certain apparatuses that limit the extent to which people can freely think, and that orient them in the direction of preserving capitalism. However, Wilden had the idea that maybe the boundaries presented by ideological institutions were not so rigid after all. Here we have to try to get into Wilden’s perspective a little bit. The truth is that Wilden probably walked around all the time feeling like he was in The Matrix (1999), seeing ones and zeroes everywhere. His work System
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