Blogging is a Moral Obligation

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” It was in DeKalb, Illinois sometime in 1986 that I first discovered The War that Hitler Won by Robert E. Herzstein. I was in graduate school at Northern Illinois University at the time and taking The Rhetoric of Social Movements in the Communication Studies Department with Dr. Lois Self. My final paper for the course embraced the two ideas that were central to the book. The first was that Hitler, with indispensible help from his Minister of Popular enlightenment, Joseph Paul Goebbels, conquered Germany and had a huge advantage over his adversaries in the Second World War Because Goebbels was the first person to master in practice a style of governance based on using mass media to shape and manage public opinion with enough subtlety and skill to justify speaking of the result as Manufactured Consent in exactly Noam Chomsky’s sense of that phrase. The second and more controversial idea set forth by Herzstein was that Nazi Germany was the first modern state. This assertion was based on the claim that every modern state was based on the process of manufacturing consent central to Nazi practice. It was in this sense that Hitler won the war; the governments of the world are not all fascist now, but they are all based on the manufacture of consent.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote of centripetal and centrifugal forces that shaped society. The new forces that emerged from about 1900 to 1950 (radio, TV, Film) were all centripetal; they strengthened the center at the expense of the edge and tended to homogenize individuals and sub-cultures into a mass audience. Communication was one way between a source of information and a passive receiver of information. The Internet and its related technologies are centrifugal. Each node is, at the same time, a transmitter, a receiver, a re-packager and a connection between nodes. This centrifugal process creates communities based on narrow-casting that could not exist otherwise; each of these is in turn a venue for the performance and rehearsal of new identities that may transfer to the flesh-world if they prove satisfying. The most fascinating of those communities are created through a process of gerrymandering which puts people together based on a single shared interest that would previously have never interacted or influenced each other at all. I first started writing about these issues back 20 years ago and the fascination still persists:

If Architecture Is Politics What are the Politics of the Internet: A Bakhtinian View

St. Louis, Missouri, 10/21–10/24 1993, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America.

Blogging is a moral obligation. The mere act of uttering\outering\othering the truth of one’s own subjectivity is perhaps the most subversive of all methods of speaking truth to power. The “real world” of manufactured consent is always a reduction and an abstraction that so fails to do justice to any one individual life as to finally be an instrument of repressive violence against individual existence per se. The most subversive of all methods of speaking truth to power is the simple refusal to be disappeared from a “real world” which is not the place anyone actually lives; every subjectivity that is powerfully uttered/outered/othered provides a contrast that make the “real world” false by comparison.