Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness

Chapter 7 Conclusion

It would be an exaggeration to say that this study has produced a robust vindication of false consciousness, at least as elaborated in the schema laid out in Chapter 2. But it has shown that a number of often-cited objections can be rebutted and that others can be accommodated by recognizing the complexity of the interpretations and judgements that need to be made. The first element of the schema seems to me fairly sturdy. I have no doubt that one can draw a distinction between the true and the false without adopting any dubious metaphysical baggage of the kind alleged by Foucault to be required. Nor do I buy the Foucauldian skepticism about the possibility of escaping from the coils of power/knowledge.

The second element in the schema, the claim that we could see false consciousness as a product of oppressive social orders, was more troublesome. The problem, as I see it, is that Marx's theory of 'ideological hegemony' consists of some plausible suppositions that have not been worked out in detail (and the details are not easy to supply). It is not easy to say just how the ruling class is supposed to be promulgating the desired beliefs (or if they are not doing it, just how it is getting done). I see plenty of examples of efforts to shape consciousness (and I cited some in Chapter 4), but they do not add up to the kind of pervasive influence that would seem to be needed to accomplish the result Marx posits. The theory of fetishism is endlessly intriguing but tends to dissolve under close inspection. What did emerge in Chapter 4 that seem to me to be of undeniable importance are the sorts of accounts provided by the non-marxian perspectives briefly sampled there. It seems to me that the shaping of consciousness in everyday interactions is of far more practical significance than what gets covered or not covered in the New York Times or which media conglomerate takes over the local TV station. Perhaps something can be retrieved from the doctrine of fetishism, that is, from the idea of illusions which are a spontaneous product of social interaction, by working out more systematically the ways that social interaction can convey or encode tacit messages. Still, I do want to insist that concerted efforts by business and government to propagandize the public are real and sometimes significant.

My discussion of the third element of the schema, the claim that false consciousness lends support to oppressive social systems, was necessarily fairly inconclusive, since the issues raised were empirical ones for the most part, and those cannot be settled by analysis, speculation, or anecdote (the tools of the philosopher). Nothing in the works discussed there has shaken my own very strong sense that I live in a world where many people are pretty well mystified about a number of important aspects of social reality. Every year, for example, I teach a class which includes some study of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II period, and every year I find that the overwhelming majority of my (adult) students are shocked and dismayed at what they learn. It doesn't fit their picture of the leader of the free world. False consciousness?

The fourth element, real interests, can be explained by a view which seems to me to be very attractive, because it captures so many of the features of evaluative reasoning and experience, features that are distorted or left out by the more familiar theories. And I think it is an account of valuing which grants to the concerns of postmodernists and contextualists everything that can be sensibly granted without descending into a relativist abyss. The account makes clear, though, just how complicated it would be to fully vindicate a judgement about someone's real interests in a case where their understanding was very different. No simple appeal to basic needs or evaluatively neutral information would be likely to be available in such a case. Instead, one would have to engage the other in what Anderson calls "the thick conceptual structure of the space of reasons," working one's way from whatever common ground could be found towards a shared understanding of the different ideals and evaluative practices in play. On the other hand, very different ideals will not always be in play. Sometimes the interests in question will be unproblematic and what will divide people will be causal beliefs. This doesn't make discussion or organizing any more tractable but that can't be blamed on the concept of real interests.

In The Politics of Truth Michele Barrett says (at the very end of her rethinking of the problematic of ideology) that, even though it is possible to distill a useful conception of ideology by removing the link to class interests, still "It is much easier to coin new terminology than to redefine old. The old meanings adhere. . .." "The connotations of simplistic illusion . . ., the implication of an 'infrastructure', . . . the explanation in terms of class . . . " all come trailing along with the word "ideology," whether we like them or not. So she suggests that we might be better off if we "point with more accuracy to an instance that might previously merely be labelled ideological: a partial truth, a naturalized understanding or a universalistic discourse, for example. Better, perhaps, that we oblige ourselves to think with new and more precise concepts, rather than mobilizing the dubious resonances of the old." [1] The same could surely be said about the term "false consciousness."

But, in my view, these associations are not all bad: it is useful to identify a mystification or mistake as false consciousness when it is, in one or more of a variety of ways, the product of an 'infrastructure', when it does work to the benefit of some (a group, not necessarily a class) and to the detriment of others. Of course, the relationships indicated here (the schema of false consciousness) are not necessarily present, not always present, perhaps not present nearly so often as 'critical theorists' (who are often not very critical of their own assumptions) would like to think. But I think they are present often enough. And if the term continues to be used, as it has been for some time now, in a broader way, to include the falsifications mixed up in male domination, race privilege and so on, then the association with class, already weakened, will fade away.

Now for the doubts promised at the end of Chapter 6:

"Discussion is repression" ran a slogan of the German student movement in 1968. The students had a point. A problem with the appeal to the idea of free and open discussion in the theory of value (or anywhere) is that, in the real world, there is no guarantee that any formal rules or procedures will prevent the subtler forms of interpersonal power from corrupting the process. Anne Phillips' account of the drawbacks of participatory democracy in the women's movement illustrates the problem.[2] In face to face meetings, the emotional relationships of the participants become crucial. Phillips reports many women feeling afraid to voice disagreement, informal and unaccountable patterns of leadership, and the emergence of false consensus. (There are also the practical problems of time and inclusion.) Lyotard also worries about the ideal of consensus, fearing that it will turn out to be a more subtle form of coercion and erasure of difference.[3]

I think these are real problems, and I think there is nothing to do but be alert to them. Participatory political practice, the growing interest in deliberative democracy, and social models of deliberative justification like Anderson's, all confront the same set of issues. I see no possibility of an easy or permanent solution. It is possible to stipulate 'rules of engagement', like taking turns and making sure everyone has a chance to contribute to agenda-setting. But nothing of this sort can guarantee that people will not be shamed or seduced in one way or another.

And a final salvo in the direction of postmodernism:

On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Armed Forces entered the town of El Mozote in the Morazan province of El Salvador.[4] Trained by U.S. Special Forces instructors, armed and equipped at the U.S. taxpayers' expense, the soldiers proceeded to round up, interrogate, and finally to kill every man, woman, and child in the village, some 500 people. Women and young girls were raped then shot, men were tortured and then decapitated with machetes. Finally no one was left but the children. After some hesitation, the soldiers carried out their orders to kill them too; the older ones, gathered into one of the larger houses, bludgeoned with rifle butts, slashed with machetes or stabbed with bayonets; the younger ones, herded into the church and sprayed with bullets from the soldiers' M-16's. One woman, Rufina Amaya, survived the massacre by squirming into some bushes while the soldiers weren't looking. She stayed hidden while listening to her children, locked in her neighbor's house, cry "Mommy, they're killing us."

At some level, I want to say: This is true. It really happened. Play with signifiers as you will, deconstruct all you want, consider a multiplicity of subject-positions, ponder the various discourses within which one could rewrite that story and, still, Rufina Amaya lay with her face pushed into the dirt, weeping as quietly as she could while the soldiers killed her children. And then, for years, it was denied and covered up.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith wants to emphasize the 'symmetry' of "beliefs currently seen as absurd or wrong as well as those now generally accepted as true."[5] Though, she says, it would be misleading to say that both kinds of belief are equally valid (because, if validity is understood objectively, then, on her view, there is no such thing; but if validity is understood subjectively, then, of course, everyone believes what they believe), we can say that the credibility of all beliefs is equally contingent, that is, equally the product of contingent social processes, equally constructed. This seems right, as far as it goes. For any belief (more broadly, for any form of consciousness), it is possible to investigate how the believer(s) came to believe it. And there will be a story to tell that involves at least the learning of a language (in which the belief can be formulated and expressed), the development of a person with certain values, interests, and other beliefs (which form the context of even the most basic perceptual belief), a person whose very identity is constituted in a set of social practices, themselves contingent, possessed of a history, and so on.

But surely there are important asymmetries: Between the Salvadoran soldiers' belief that they were bound to follow orders and the belief of the villagers that they did not deserve to be killed, between the doctrines of counter-insurgency developed by the defense department and Rand Corp. intellectuals[6] and the doctrines of universal human rights promoted by the NGO's calling for a halt to torture and murder, between the meticulously assembled forensic evidence produced for the U.N. Truth Commission report on the massacre and the evasions, half-truths, and refusals to investigate by which the U.S. State Department covered it up, so that they could 'certify' to Congress that the behavior of the Salvadoran government was improving, between the exterminationist rhetoric of "draining the sea" and "eliminating the cancer" that filtered down from the Salvadoran high command to the soldiers with the machetes and the M-16's and the rhetoric of solidarity and love with which Bishop Romero appealed to those same soldiers to stop. We can grant Foucault and his followers, perhaps, that there is a sense in which both members of these pairs contain a truth which is an effect of power. But in another sense, a sense with far more practical importance, what we have in these pairs is power on one side and truth on the other.

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