The following is taken from a transcript of a Laurie Oaks interview with Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the Coalition Opposition in Australia, on the Nine network Sunday 29th November.
Turnbull was as frank as any leading Australian politician in living memory and it is an important interview in terms of speaking truth to power. He is describing the effects of power as it circulated among political statements and events. Turnbull understands scientific battles and competition amongst intellectuals for defining knowledge and truth as conflicts of power, not simply as intellectual debate.
Oaks begins by asking Turnbull how 'How are the knife wounds?' Turnbull quickly moves into criticizing Senator Minchin's position on climate change as a left-wing conspiracy about climate change, which Turnbull doesn't agree with.
MT: Look the Minchin-ites do not want to delay consideration of the legislation, they do not believe that climate change is real, they do not believe that humans are causing it and they do not want to do anything about it. Nick Minchin made that very clear in the Four Corners programme as did a number of his acolytes. What he is trying, what he is is a climate change denier. He stands for doing nothing on climate change. He said a majority of our party room do not believe that humans have any impact on climate change. Now that is a view contrary to the opinion of the vast majority of Australians, contrary to the opinion of every government in the world, and every major political party in the world. Now, if Nick Minchin wins, if he wins this battle, he condemns our party to irrelevance, because what he is saying on one of the greatest issues and challenges of our time, one that will affect the future of the planet and the future of our children and their children, Nick Minchin is staying "do nothing". He wants us to be the "do nothing on climate change" party and he has been, he's on the record about that, and when he talks about a delay or a deferral, what that means is denial.
LO: But if you …
MT: That is political death for us.
LO: If you agree to delay, you could probably save your leadership and live to fight another day. You must know in your heart that you are going to get done on Tuesday?
MT: Laurie, I will win on Tuesday and I am not interested in becoming a mouth piece or a Patsy or a tool for people whose views are completely wrong and are contrary to the best interests of our nation, our planet and indeed the Liberal Party. Just remember this, John Howard was a noted sceptic about climate change, he had doubts about the science. But John was enough of a leader to recognise that we had to act. And the emissions trading scheme that is currently in the Parliament this coming week and which must be passed this week is one which is very similar to the scheme that John Howard took to the last election, John Howard himself has said that. Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews for that matter, were in that Cabinet. They didn't object, they went along with it and now they say "We didn't ever believe in it". What does that say about their integrity.
LO: But this is destroying the Liberal Party.
MT: Well they are destroying the Liberal Party, there is a recklessness and a wilfulness in these men which is going to destroy the Liberal Party. Remember this: we took an ETS to the last election. John Howard did. We then had a party room meeting back in October in which we overwhelmingly agreed to take a set of amendments, Rudd's ETS to the government. And the basis of that negotiation was if you agree with what we're asking, or enough of it, to satisfy us, then we will vote it through. Then we will give you what we want, we will pass the bill with our amendments. We achieved massive concessions, everyone was amazed how much the government gave us. We went back to the party room, and as you have note in your column the party room, by a majority, not a huge majority to be fair, but by a majority, agreed with the recommendation of the Shadow Cabinet. So we shook hands with the government, an agreement was done and we agreed to support those amendments.
Oaks says that then the Liberal Party fell apart. Turnbull responds by saying that the only way the Liberal Party can get over this is to get this issue passed. If this issue is not resolved, the climate change war that Nick Minchin and his wreckers have started will continue to destroy the Liberal Party until such time as we are destroyed by Kevin Rudd in an election.
What Turnbull is describing is a "regime of truth" which refers to the mechanisms for deciding what is true, the status of those who utter true statements, and so on.He is saying that this is dependent on power and he understands power as being dispersed through the network of relationships which make up society and based in discourse. This is not to deny that power struggle might be unequal but to suggest that it is not exercised in a single, downward vector. Foucault says:
Truth isn't outside power … Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint…And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true
Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time starts with Marshall Berman's account of modernity in All That is Solid Melts into Air as the experience of a dynamic and inherently contradictory process of constant change, a 'maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal. This text aims to renew our sense of modernity by giving us back 'a sense of our own modern roots'.
I've previously dug into the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty over at conversations, where I'd briefly explored the Introduction and here at philsophy.com. in relation to traditional epistemology. Here I am interested in the body for it is Merleau-Ponty who shows the body’s primacy in human experience and meaning.
Richard Shusterman in the chapter entitled The Silent Limping body of Philosophy says that philosophy has traditionally devalued the body compared to the mind:
For philosophy, bodily weakness also means cognitive deficiency. As the body’s senses distort the truth, so its desires distract the mind from the pursuit of knowledge. The body, moreover, is not a clear object of knowledge. One cannot directly see one’s outer bodily surface in its totality, and the body is especially mysterious because its inner workings are always in some way hidden from the subject’s view. One cannot directly scan it in the way we often assume we can examine and know our minds through introspection. Regarding the body as at best a mere servant or instrument of the mind, it as a torturous prison of deception, temptation, and pain.
Radically inverting the conventional valuations of mind and body, he argued that we can know our bodies better than our minds, that the body can be more powerful than the mind, and that toughening the body can make the mind stronger. Concluding this logic of reversal, Nietzsche insisted that the mind is essentially the instrument of the body, even though it is too often misused (especially by philosophers) as the body’s deceptive,torturing prison.
Merleau-Ponty’s argument for the body’s philosophical centrality and valueis more shrewdly cautious. He embraces the body’s essential weaknesses but then shows how these dimensions of ontological and epistemological limitation are a necessary part and parcel of our positivehuman capacities for having perspectives on objects and for having a world. These limits thus provide the essential focusing frame for all
our perception, action, language, and understanding.
The limitation the body has in inhabiting a particular place is precisely what gives us an angle of perception or perspective from which objects can be grasped, and the fact that we can change our bodily place allows us to perceive objects from different perspectives and thus constitute them as objective things. Similarly, although the body is deficient in not being able to observe itself wholly and directly (because the eyes’ view is fixed forward in one’s head, which it therefore can never directly see), this limitation is part and parcel of the body’s permanent, privileged position as the defining pivot and ground orientation of observation.
Moreover, the apparent limitation that bodily perceptions are vague, corrigible, or ambiguous is reinterpreted as usefully true to a world of experience that is itself ambiguous, vague, and in flux.
This article in Prospect by Phillip Blond ---Rise of the red Tories takes us much deeper into the territory briefly explored in a note on Australian conservatism in public opinion. Blonde says:
Since 1945 Britain has experienced two governing paradigms. The first—state sponsored Keynesianism—extended from 1945 through the oil shocks of 1973 to its death in 1979. The second—neoliberalism—ran from then until the global debt crisis of 2007-08. It is often assumed that these models represent genuinely different and mutually exclusive worldviews—yet, in spite of very real distinctions, they share important philosophical and economic assumptions, and both attracted cross-party support. Look at the society we have become: we are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. The intermediary structures of a civilised life have been eliminated, and with them the Burkean ideal of a civic, religious, political or social middle, as the state and the market accrue power at the expense of ordinary people.
Blond says that:
To understand why the legacy of liberalism produces both state authoritarianism and atomised individualism, we must first note that philosophical liberalism was born out of an 18th-century critique of absolute monarchies. It sought to protect the rights of the individual from arbitrary abuse by the king. But so extreme did the defence of individual liberty become that each man was obliged to refuse the dictates of any other—for that would be simply to replace rule by one man’s will (the king) with rule by another. As such, the most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others.
The legacy of liberal individualism is the restoration of the very absolutism that it originally sought to overthrow—a philosophical tragedy that can be summed up as: “the king is dead, long live the king.”
I've dug into the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty earlier over at conversations, where I'd briefly explored the Introduction. In the first chapter Charles Taylor argues that Merleau Ponty helped us to break out of classical or representational epistemology's picture of our grasp of the world\that heldus captive. He says:
There are many versions of this theory, but the central idea in this picture, as we have seen, is that all our understanding of the world is ultimately mediated knowledge. That is, it is knowledge that comes through something “inner,” within ourselves or produced by the mind. This means we can understand our grasp of theworld as something that is, in principle, separable from what it is a grasp of.
This separation was obviously central to the original Cartesian thrust that we are all trying to turn back and deconstruct. On one side, there were the bits of putative information in the mind – ideas, impressions, sense data. On the other, there was the “outside world” of which these claimed to inform us. The dualism can later take other, more sophisticated forms. As I said earlier, representations will later be reconceived no longer as “ideas,” but as sentences, in keeping with the linguistic turn, as we see with Quine. Or the dualism itself can be fundamentally reconceptualized, as with Kant. nstead of being defined in terms of original and copy, it is seen on the model of form and content, mold and filling. In whatever form, mediational theories posit something that can be defined as inner, as our contribution to knowing and which can be distinguished fromwhat is out there.
We start off as coping infants and only later are inducted into speech. Even as adults, much of our lives consists in this coping.Even as adults,much of our lives consists in this coping. This couldn’t be otherwise. To focus on something,we have to keep going – as I was on the path, while thinking of the difficult conversation; or as the person is in the laboratory,walking around, picking up the report, while thinking hard about the theoretical issues (or maybe about what’s for lunch).
All exercises of reflective, conceptual thought only have the content they have situated in a context of background understanding that underlies and is generated in everyday coping. we are only able to form conceptual beliefs guided by oursurroundings because we live in a preconceptual engagement with these surroundings, which involves understanding.
So our grasp of things is not something that is in us, over against the world; it lies in the way we are in contact with the world. Hence the view of the agent as being-in-the-world.