{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":7,"pdf_page":17,"physical_index":17,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2d9ed5458f1d3b3ae68a3bed32ee99ca31edccc707ee074786215ef5d3ecb86d"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"The Am.erican left has done little to challenge the hegemony of the victim. Instead, we have embraced and encouraged the current condition wherein those who don't speak as victims lack standing. The trap is deadly: those who don't speak as victims aren't supposed to complain (they are privilegedi what do they have to gripe about? what do they know of sufering?) and the political trajectory that follows from the complaints of victims enhances surveillance and control, policing and security. Precisely because the victim-security matrix is so tightly structured, the left is either left out of the current matrix or doomed to reinforce it.\n\nThe 2000 presidential election is not the only instance when the American left failed to acknowledge victory. The left also won the culture wars fought throughout the universities, arts, and media during the eighties and nineties. Slavoj Zizek helps explain how such a victory functions. He writes: \"The true victory (the true 'negation of the negation') occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat. It occurs when one's specifc message is accepted as a universal ground, even by th� enemy<sup>:'12</sup> Zizek uses the example of British prime minister Tony Blair to -make his point. Blair secured the victory of the batle fought by his seeming opponent Margaret Thatcher in her attack on the British welfare state. Bill Clinton is the U.S. equivalent of Blair. Clinton achieved a dismantling of social services surpassing the right's wildest dreams. Speaking a neoliberal language that made the state just another market actor, Clinton realized the victory of Reaganism.\n\nThe victory of the academic left in the culture wars should be understood along similar lines: the prominence of politically active Christian fundamentalists, Fox News, and the orchestrations of Bush advisor Karl Rove all demonstrate the triumph of postmodernism. These guys take social construction-packaging, marketing, and representation-absolutely seriously. They put it to work. The tight's will to construct (and deconstruct) reality to fit their interests reached new extremes during the Bush administration: it paid the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to endorse the president's No Child Left Behind program, that is, to impersonate a journalist while promoting a specific political agenda. Similar fake news was distributed by the Transportation Security .Administration (a report praising airport security), the Department of Health and Human Services (television spots advertising the Medicare prescription drug benefit), and the State Department (segments of good news from U.S. miltary eforts in Afghanistan and Iraq) .13 As the New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes, \"The same conservatives who once deplored postmodernism and moral relativism were now eagerly promoting a brave new world in which it was a given that there could be no empirical reality in news, only a reality you wanted to hear (or they wanted you to hear) :'14 Is it so surprising, then, that when empirical reality is up for grabs many may start to doubt any claim made by the administration, even one as seemingly basic as its account of the events of 9 I 11?\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n7","previous_page":6,"next_page":8}