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March 11, 2004
The last posts, which have quoted Don Watson's Death Sentence, at length, have given a number of examples of the poverty of public language. This poverty or decay has arisen from the impact of the corporate world on parliamentary politics. Politicians now talk in business speak.
That is how Don Watson understands the decay of public language in Australia.
I would now like to contextualise Watson's argument in a broader philosophical context.
One way to do this is to link back to an earlier post on Carl Schmitt's understanding of liberal modernity and the way that economic-technical discourse eradicts particularity. This formal mode of thinking reduces all qualitiative difference to quantitative difference in that it makes no difference between a silk blouse and poison gas. Both are simply commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace.
Schmitt understands this economic/technological rationality as sapping all social relationships of any humanity through its abstract impersonality. This instrumental rationality is concerned with the quanities its calculates, not the qualities it affects.
What is gained by this return to Schmitt? A critical way of thinking otherwise that does not have much public presence in Australia. This way of thinking that sees technology as a way of thinking (economic/technological rationality) that is concerned primarily with the manipulation of matter;. saps the world of meaning; and establishes the possibility for novel and harsher modes of domination. So Schmitt has a lot in common---affinities---with Weber and the Critical Theoriests of the Frankfurt School.
What is common ground here is that the view that bureaucratic liberalism, legal positivism, the political primacy of the economic, and machine technology itself are all epiphenomena of instrumental reason, or modern metaphysical technology.
Schmitt counterposes a political Roman Catholicism to the abstractly formal economic rationality in technological modernity; a quite different response to say Bataille, who turns to the body, romanticism (surrealism) and inner experience.
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