Irrational Political Discourses

1. Irrational Political Discourses Rainer E. Zimmermann Fakultät 13, Hochschule München (UAS) & Clare Hall, UK – Cambridge rainer.zimmermann@hm.edu

2. Motto „When I use a word“, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, „it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.“ „The question is“, said Alice, „whether you can make words mean so many different things.“ „The question is“, said Humpty Dumpty, „which is to be master – that‘s all.“ Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass, Penguin edition, 1980, 274

3. Irrational Political Discourses • Motto • Preliminary Remarks & Motivation • Savage Thinking (Lévi-Strauss) • Reading Capital (Althusser) • Totalitarianism (Arendt) • Outlook: Critical Geopolitics & Ethics

4. Irrational Political Discourses 2. Preliminary Remarks & Motivation

5. Irrational Political Discourses Research Tradition: Frank Fuchs-Kittowski, Werner Kriesel (eds.): Informatik & Gesellschaft. Festschrift für Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski. (Lang, Frankfurt a.M., 2016) Project at the HTW Berlin (since 1994).

6. Acknowledgements José María Díaz Nafría (León), Kyriaki Goudeli (Athen), Annette Grathoff (Wien), Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Wien), Michael Keller (München), Kanelia Koutsandrea (Athen), Cecile Malaspina (London), Silvia Mazzini (Berlin), Muraad Nofal (München), Renate Quehenberg (Wien), Klaus Ruthenberg (Coburg), Tomáš Sigmund (Prag), Verena Streitenberg (Berlin), Evi Maria Weigl (München), Doris Zeilinger (Nürnberg), Zhang Xiaomeng (Beijing)

7. Irrational Political Discourses Introductory Example Syria: A Study in Political Complexity About 14 immediate actors (or agents) within a confrontation network of interactions. Interactions change according to rational and (apparently) irrational actions to be taken.

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11. Irrational Political Discourses (following the New York Times report) Sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun on early morning of 4th April Trump between meeting King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Xi Jinping of China Notification of Russian command on location. 6th April, 7.40 p.m. Tomahawk missile attack on Al Sharyat airfield

12. Irrational Political Discourses Possibility A: Syrians have hold back Sarin gas and used it in an air strike. (Did the Russians know?) Possibility B: Syrians have hold back Sarin gas that had been recovered by one of the rebels group which used it for producing confusion. (Then not by air strike.) Possibility C: One of the other groups produced Sarin gas and used it. (Ditto. And could they?) Possibility D: Turkey provided Al Nusra with Sarin gas who used it then. (Remember the case of Can Dündar.) […]

13. Irrational Political Discourses Welcome to Complexity, Mr. Trump!

14. Irrational Political Discourses 3. Savage Thinking (Lévi-Strauss)

15. Irrational Political Discourses Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Scorcerer and his Magic (1949). In: id.: Structural Anthropology, vol. 1 (1958). After a young man of the Zuni in New Mexico had grasped for the hands of a young woman, she collapsed. The man was accused of applying magic what he first denied.

16. Irrational Political Discourses But because people did not believe him, and the death penalty was immanent, he then admitted the deed and performed a complicated ritual entering a state of trance. Then he said he (and she) would be cured now. But during the night he tried to espace and was re-captured and oncemore accused. This time he admitted again telling a lengthy story and said his magical power would rest on a set of magical feathers in his possession. The judges asked him to show them.

17. Irrational Political Discourses He led them to his house, but could not find any feathers for a long while, apologizing for not having used them recently. Finally he found a very small, old feather behind a wall covering, and he presented it proudly, saying at the same time that now he would have lost his magical power completely. In the following assembly he repeated his story with many more details. And the judges were composed now and discharged him.

18. Irrational Political Discourses Lévi-Strauss comments: „We realize that the accused does not achieve his discharge by exculpating himself, but by admitting his supposed deed – even more: he improves his situation by presenting different versions of the deed, one always more detailed and embellished than the other. The judges do not expect that he contests a thesis nor that he disproves any facts, they instead demand him to confirm a system.“

19. Irrational Political Discourses (Mario Erdheim supplements:) „An essential function of magical rituals [of healing] is therefore to assert the community ist omnipotence in ist centre. […] This omnipotence results in a loss auf autonomy for the individual who exchanges for this shelter and a feeling of security. Without such a group contact the individual is hardly viable.“

20. Irrational Political Discourses Modern Examples of Savage (Magical, Mythological) Thinking: The Knights Templars, Witches, The Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, 1982; Dan Brown, 2003, 2006) Protocols of the Sages of Zion (1903 Russian, 1921 The Times)

21. Irrational Political Discourses Ufology (Orson Welles, 1938), The Moon Landing (Kaysing, 1976), Handys and Cosmic Radiation (Ghana, 2008), Conspiricy Theories (9/11), Corn Circles etc. etc. Umberto Eco: Foucault‘s Pendulum (1989) (Secret Lodge P2 = Propaganda Due, 1887-1944, 1981)

22. Irrational Political Discourses Hence, the common aspect is always that there is a world view derived from a closed system of thinking with ist own logic that abandons empirically verifiable facts. This closed view within a context of closed collective subjectivity is indeed magical.

23. Irrational Political Discourses 4. Reading Capital (Althusser)

24. Irrational Political Discourses „What the classical political economy does not see is not really what it does not see, but it is indeed what it sees; it is not what is missing, but on the contrary it is what is not missing, it is not what it falls short of, but on the contrary what it does not fall short of. The error is in not seeing what one actually sees: This error does not refer to the topic, it refers to seeing itself. The error is one that concerns seeing itself: the non-seeing of something which is in the interior of seeing, this is a form of seeing itself and is hence in a necessary relationship to seeing.“ (pp. 13 sq., New German edition, 2013)

25. Irrational Political Discourses 5. Totalitarianism (Arendt)

26. Irrational Political Discourses Hanna Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951. Antisemitism (Jews as supporters of the state that cannot be controlled) Imperialism (downfall of colonialism) – Pan Movements Total Governance (downfall of the national state, end of human rights, downfall of class society) Mob & Elite co-operate temporarily in order to establish an institutionalized apparatus forming terror as a new form of state. (propaganda ist instrument)

27. Irrational Political Discourses „The main difficulty of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfil the yearning [nostalgia] of the masses for a consequent, comprehensible, and predictable development without coming into conflict with common sense. […] It is as if the masses would demand for a permanent repetition of the Septuaginta‘s miracle that reports that seventy disjoint translators achieved an identical Greek translation of the Old Testament.“

28. Irrational Political Discourses „This possessed blindness which is characteristic for the escape of the masses from actuality into a self-consistent fictitious world corresponds to their homelessness within a world where they cannot exist anymore, because the anarchic coincidence in the shape of annihilating catastrophes has become their master.“ […] [progress & complexity]

29. Irrational Political Discourses „The masses‘ revolt against common sense‘s intuition of actuality and what appears to be plausible within the course of the world is the result of an atomization by which it has not only lost its position within society, but also the whole sphere of communal relationships within whose frame only common sense can function in a reasonable way.“

30. Irrational Political Discourses „In a situation of complete spiritual and social homelessness, the well-balanced insight into the mutual conditioning of the arbitrary and the planned, of the coincidental and the necessary, by which the course of the world constitutes itself, does not make sense anymore. Only where common sense does not make sense, can totalitarian propaganda slap into its face.“

31. Irrational Political Discourses „But whereever human beings are posed in front of the alternative (outrageous in the first place) either to simply vegetate within an anarchically proliferating decay surrendered to each possible despotism or to subdue oneself to the rigid and mad coherence of an ideology, they will choose the death of consequence, and they will also be ready to suffer the physical death – […]

32. Irrational Political Discourses […] and this not, because they are stupid or bad, but because within the general collapse of chaos this escape into fiction is at least what seems to guarantee them a minimum of self-respect and human dignity.“ (pp. 746 sq.)

33. Irrational Political Discourses 6. Outlook: Critical Geopolitics & Ethics

34. Irrational Political Discourses Gearóid O Thuatail [Gerard O’Toal] und Simon Dalby (eds.): Rethinking Geopolitics. Routledge, London, New York, 1998.

35. Irrational Political Discourses Refusal of complexity is thus a moral attitude, and not an ethical one. What adds to complexity within ongoing evolution? (Globalisation, Industrialization, Digitalisation in technical terms, change in work and life balances (emancipation of women, of the youth etc., change in sexual behaviour, change of life styles), etc.)

36. Irrational Political Discourses Refusal of complexity leads backward to mythological thinking (S = s). alienation/ideology (Marx), non-simultaneousness (Bloch), bad faith (Sartre)