We have a “right” to exercise free speech in the US, but that does not mean we fully exercise that right. In fact, we tend to do everything to ensure that free speech—with all its implications—does not really exist. But if we continue to tell ourselves that we do have free speech, then we’ll only be operating in the spirit of that old joke, about a husband who gets caught cheating: Lying in bed beside his naked mistress, the husband tells his wife, “I’m not cheating! Don’t believe your lying eyes!” In other words, we’ll only be telling ourselves to label something other than what it actually is (or, in this case, what it is not).
Indeed, public discourse in America is not typified by free speech, despite our insistence that it is. And also, our discourses have increasingly become hallmarked by “invisible repression”, which makes the US, in one sense, as oppressive as authoritarian societies. Coincidentally, the very nature of this repression—its “invisibleness”, itself—does not stop us from being affected by it. Even though we do not perceive it, “invisible repression” still threatens us, controls us, and perpetuates our lack of free speech and action. And all of this occurs, largely, on a level of which we are unaware.
Invisible repression, to be understood, needs to be contrasted with its “visible” counterpart. And Cuba provides a recent example.
“Visible repression” is the blatant, state-sanctioned repression of dissent. We see it in authoritarian societies, when the government shuts down universities, or when it bans newspapers. When these measures fail to abolish opposition, we see it in police brutality against dissenters. This is kind of repression is a systemic element in authoritarian countries. And it is what occurred to Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose blog is famously known for its pacifist dissent against the Cuban government.
Sanchez was assaulted by Cuba’s state-security forces earlier this year. She had been walking to join the “march against violence”, organized by local artists. The “march”, itself, was planned as “a peaceful performance march—neither a protest nor a political demand”, the Miami Herald reported. Nevertheless, Sanchez and her friends were confronted and assaulted on the street by Cuban officials. As she later explained, a civilian-marked car suddenly pulled up, and state officials exited the car. The agents then seized her, and Sanchez was “dragged toward the car”. She was “thrown head-first inside,” where “they applied judo or karate holds to us and the punches … kept raining down.” The Cuban government later released Sanchez and her friends without charges.
The function of visible repression, such as this, should be obvious. It serves as a form of terrorism. Recall that “terrorism”, at its minimal definition, is the use of fear and intimidation to psychologically paralyze a people into submission, in order to achieve strategic and political ends. Cuba’s government freely implements this visible repression against its citizens, which creates “fear and intimidation”, in order to achieve obedience to state ideology. Such repression creates, what is called, “hegemony”.
Political philosopher Terry Eagleton defines hegemony as “the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates—though [hegemony covers] both consent and coercion together.” Therefore, the Cuban government “wins consent to its rule” through the “coercion” of visible repression, via media censorship and police brutality, against “those it subjugates”—the Cuban people, themselves.
Let’s clarify the essence of visible repression further. The very manifestations of this phenomena, themselves—the open censorship, the physical brutality—are not the goal. They are the “means” to the “end” of creating mass obedience, of creating “hegemony”. Once hegemony sets into the cultural DNA of a given population, the citizens largely police themselves. The “fear and intimidation” becomes indoctrinated into the collective psychology of the society and, accordingly, the population is left traumatized into obedience. Only a strong-minded few, like Yoani Sanchez, escape the effects of hegemony.
Hegemony and Prescription
Understanding the psychology of hegemony is crucial, if we are to also grasp the dynamics of “invisible repression” in the US.
Hegemony occurs through the phenomena of “prescription”. Prescription, itself, is born out of the relationship between the oppressive state apparatus and the oppressed population. Living under repressive conditions fosters psychological exhaustion. A people, who exist for a prolonged period of time in such an environment, begin, through fatigue, to lose their sense of “self”. Their defense mechanisms break-down. And an acceptance to the status quo gives way to prescription.
Prescription, then, occurs when the values and perceptions of reality, which a government espouses to its citizenry, becomes accepted and “internalized” by the population. Once these values and perceptions are “prescribed”, the citizens tend to view both themselves and reality through the filter of these perceptions. An individual who has undergone prescription has become “indoctrinated”, has incorporated into his or her consciousness the ideology of the government he or she lives under. The individual sees reality the way the government wants them to see it.
Such ideological indoctrination, as philosopher Louis Althusser put it, “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” This imaginary perception is exemplified in Frank L. Baum’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. Before Dorothy and her companions enter the “Emerald City”, they are required to wear green-tinted glasses. The glasses are to remain in place during their visit. As they enter the city, they perceive the buildings to indeed be made of the precious, green stone. But this is an illusion created by the colored lenses. The “real conditions of existence” are that the city is actually made of common materials, not the “imaginary” emerald. Therefore, the glasses represent ideology. Only if we remove the glasses, can we begin to see the truth.
Social theorist Paulo Freire explains “prescription” further: “Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.” In other words, the individuals who undergo prescription, who submit to political hegemony, become puppets controlled by these internalized perceptions. This phenomenon is summarized by George Orwell. Orwell describes the indoctrinated person as having to wear a mask (ideology, itself), and over time “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it” (prescription). At the moment the person is molded to “fit” the ideology, he becomes the ideology and—in a way horrifyingly reminiscent of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”—does not exist outside the ideology’s controls.
Any indoctrinated citizen, therefore, experiences a “duality”. Freire states that such people “suffer from the duality, which has established itself at their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.”
In authoritarian societies, the “fear” Freire references originates in the fear of state-police brutality, the fear of visible repression. Yet after hegemony sets in, a second “fear” is born: invisible repression.
Invisible repression is internal in origin, not external—hence its “invisibility”. It is the psychological fear of “freedom”. After prescription, the fear of defying the hegemony becomes ingrained. The very thought of imagining a freer way of existing becomes tantamount to self-betrayal. Following through with achieving such a freer existence is equated with immorality.
And here lies the catch for Americans. In the US, invisible repression is achieved without the use of its “visible”, brutal counterpart. And that is how hegemony is achieved in America.
Invisible Repression in the US
The US is different in nature from Cuba. The US is an “open society”. And as such, visible repression is not permitted, is unconstitutional. Because of this absence of visible coercion, Americans claim to have free speech. They claim to be free, carte blanche. But these claims, almost paradoxically, are proof in the pudding that most Americans have already undergone prescription. That most Americans accept the status quo, that they refuse—aghast when challenged—to question their political beliefs, even when there is objective reason to do so, underscores the really-existing state of hegemony in the US.
Let’s now revisit Eagleton’s definition of hegemony. Hegemony is “the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates—though [hegemony covers] both consent and coercion together.” Since the US government cannot use physical coercion, like Cuba does, to “win consent”, it uses various forms of cultural coercion to foster “consent to its rule from those it subjugates”—the American population. This cultural coercion is predominantly achieved through the public educational system and the corporate media. And these two institutions, benign as they present themselves to be, are the creators of hegemony-via-invisible repression.
We do not want to cover old ground. So let’s simply note, here, that the public educational system is structured not to produce generations of critically-minded, enlightened adults, but rather to “crank out” skilled and obedient workers—cogs for the machine of society. This fact has led education theorist Jonathan Kozol to lament that “Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people, who live in segregated neighborhoods, have available.” Professor Noam Chomsky has equally decried US public education as “a system of imposed ignorance”. In terms of the corporate media’s own complicity in maintaining invisible repression, Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have thoroughly documented the elusive, though really-existing, propagandistic structure of the American media in their book, “Manufacturing Consent” and in a documentary of the same title. Readers interested in the repressive natures of these two institutions are free to explore the works of Kozol and Chomsky. We will not review them further here.
What we do want to explore is the “invisible repression” in American discourse, which results from the media and educational systems. These two systems serve the same role as the police brutality and the blatant press censorship in Cuba. That is to say, together they function to “prescribe” state ideology into the minds of US citizens that creates hegemony. Thus an unquantifiable majority of Americans perceive reality through the “duality” Freire discusses above. These citizens “are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.”
For an example of this invisible repression, let’s examine a recent political discourse. On November 13, 2009, French filmmaker Gilbert Mercier published an article, “It’s Time to Abolish the Death Penalty”, on newsjunkiepost.com. The resulting exchange occurred between two readers (whose names are changed here) on the article’s comment thread:
“Eric: [This is] Another reason why we need the Death Penalty and why it should be used more often.
“Alan: your reaction is exactly the problem—when things like this happen we want someone to die—that’s the same type of anger that leads to convictions on shaky evidence because we feel this emotional need to punish someone… people get exonerated too often for crimes like this—if you kill them, you can’t let them out of death. And the beating they’ll get in prison will probably be worse than dying.
“Eric: Nope sorry, [Alan], it’s overly compassionate Liberals that create a culture of child abusers, murderers and gang bangers to believe that they can continue their behaviors and will NOT be held accountable and in some cases, REWARD them with programs that they receive in prison such as education, health care, etc. The Death Penalty isn’t emotional as it is common sense! In many countries, the death penalty is executed much more severely.”
Eric’s dialogue here is a textbook example of a “prescribed” person, speaking through his own invisible repression. Eric had previously asserted, in a more emphatic way, that the death penalty should be used more liberally, and in more cases. The core of his sentiment is to ruthlessly punish disobedience of the state’s laws. The very notion of questioning the sanity or ethics of the law is moot. Eric, as a prescribed person, operates on the level of the state, itself. Thus to question the state, would mean to question himself. When Eric speaks here, he speaks from his “duality”, as a person having internalized the state ideology into his consciousness. In fact, he speaks as the state, itself, while still experiencing himself as an autonomous individual. Again, we should evoke the allusion to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, in this case.
Note that Eric, without evidence, blames Alan, and anyone who thinks like Alan—“overly compassionate liberals”, who would question the ideological status quo—for creating “a culture of child abusers, murderers and gang bangers to believe that they can continue their behaviors and will NOT be held accountable”. It does not occur to Eric that the very laws and social organization of capitalism, itself, might be the cause of dehumanizing environments, which foster criminal behavior. For Eric to confront such an idea would be to question a facet of his own psychology: that is, the prescribed “alien” ideology of American capitalism regulating his mind.
The duality of Eric’s “puppet” consciousness does not allow for such a probing thought. Thus, the origin of “a culture of child abusers, murderers and gang bangers” must be located not in anything state ideology condones, but rather in anyone who disagrees with the state ideology. Indeed, the death penalty is “common sense” because it is common sense to accept the state’s logic. That logic, being a part of Eric’s own “dual” mind, after all—why should he not accept something which is so much a part of his self?
We can see now why free speech, carte blanche, is “traumatic”, why it is an “illusion”—hence the title of this article. The nature of hegemony occurs through a “traumatic” prescription of thoughts, into the mind, creating an “illusion” of free speech flowing from the “self” of the indoctrinated person. For the prescribed person, morality is “based on the further assumption that the exercise of authority is itself moral; that is it is moral to reward obedience and punish disobedience”, cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains. Therefore, free speech is impossible for the prescribed majority. They cannot “speak freely”, due to their controlled, “puppet” morality.
This inability to acknowledge one’s morals as something “alien”, as something foreign to one’s “true self”, is summed up by psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek in his book, “Violence”: “Certain features, attitudes, and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non-ideological, natural, commonsensical … it is precisely the neutralization of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and most effective.”
To an almost totalizing degree, American politics today has become void of any human-oriented ethics. “Invisible” prescribed ideology, instead, dominates the discourse. Politics, at this zero-level, is a facet of what philosopher Alain Badiou calls our “atonal world”—a world devoid of any regulating ethical values, other than the inhuman ethics of global capitalism, the inhuman ethics of the “free market”.
With this death of humanist ethics to regulate society, we are left only with “bio-politics”. Zizek explains: ““bio-politics” designates the regulation of the security and welfare of the population as its primary goal … as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear; it focuses on defence from potential victimization or harassment.” In other words, the American obsession with “national security”, with pushing more punitive laws, with “safety”, with—what Gilbert Mercier calls—America’s “overblown obsession with crime and punishment”, is a collective delusion. It is a symptom of the death of all other regulating ethics and values.
Hence, Americans are left indoctrinated, with an overblown sense of infantile fear. As Zizek notes, “fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the exessive state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of ecological disaster, fear of harassment.” This irrational fear leads them to demand more and more “state security”. And with the “free market” as their only point of existence, Americans demand, simultaneously, more and more access to the consumer market—at the expense of all who suffer as a result. Meanwhile, human-oriented values remain dead. And to suggest this reality, leads one to confront the rabid ideology of the indoctrinated population, who will fight tooth-and-nail to maintain their “Coca-porno-Disney” consumer ignorance.
Given this, the entire notion of free speech is tossed out the proverbial window. If so many of us are incapable of acknowledging the cultural crisis, in which America is drowning; incapable of having a reciprocal conversation; incapable of being open to new ideas; incapable of innovating solutions to social problems—if so many are only capable of parroting their own prescriptions, like borderline psychotic dolls pulling strings on their backs—then any semblance of freedom in America is already dead. And we should begin writing freedom’s obituary.
At the extremes of hegemony, we already see this death of free speech on the nightly TV news. The phenomena of telling interview guests, who offer dissent, to “Shut up!” signals this. The idea of allowing the “split-screen” talking heads to devolve into infantile shouting matches signals this. The ordering of the off-stage sound manager to silence a dissenter’s microphone, a tactic which is paraded like a neurotic tick by Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and others—to “Cut his mike! Just cut his mike!”—signals this.
We already see it in politicians like Sarah Palin, like Mike Huckabee, like George W. Bush who are incapable of operating outside of their anti-intellectual, prescribed psychologies. Indeed, we are witnessing the total domination of the irrational, the total domination of the hegemony, and the abolition of the “free individual” in politics. This moment of history, indeed, is hallmarked by the rise of the “body-snatched” ideologues.
Indeed, we have continually failed to heed Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
And to those of us who remain human, who remain “free”: we need to stop talking to these prescribed ideologues as if they are reciprocally sane, as if they are actually capable of considering rational arguments. They are not.
In fact, if the sane among us wish to get the wheels of democracy moving again, we should start calling the hegemony out. We should call “prescribed” people out for what they are—brain-washed, indoctrinated, helpless. We need to seize the reigns of the discourse, to steer it in a sane direction—even at the expense of leaving the insane, who have already caused so much harm, behind us.
We mentioned, above, that the function of visible repression “serves as a form of terrorism. Recall that “terrorism”, at its minimal definition, is the use of fear and intimidation to psychologically paralyze a people into submission, in order to achieve strategic and political ends.” Invisible repression is no different. It serves as a form of terrorism. Invisible repression—the hegemony in the US—uses “fear and intimidation”, “bio-politics”, the hysterics of the Right-Wing, to “paralyze a people into submission”, to halt the wheels of democracy and free speech. In sum, invisible repression is the domestic terror of American political discourse. And it should be confronted, like all other forms of terror, until its extinction.
Stephen Dufrechou is a college professor in Memphis, TN. He is a regular contributor to News Junkie Post.
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“we need to stop talking to these prescribed ideologues as if they are reciprocally sane”
“We should call “prescribed” people out for what they are—brain-washed, indoctrinated, helpless.”
I thought they were supposed to be oppressors motivated by greed? Now they are helpless victims?
Steve, you obviously failed to understand the how prescription and hegemony work, as per the article. The prescribed individual is helpless due to his “duality”. (See Freire’s remarks, above.) Perhaps a closer rereading will help you grasp this nuanced dynamic – you obviously need to read it again, given that the word “greed”, that you tossed out here, was never once used or implied in the article.
A more active read of this piece would not allow you to superimpose your preconceived onto the text, itself, which nave resulted in your misreading.
The thing that bothers me the most about the article is this: It is all written from the politically correct precribed view of “academica,” that is specifically in this case the departments of linguistics. I have studied Lakoff and Chomsky, as well as other linguists. It’s a fascinating field, but a study of the history of the field of linguistics reveals that it has not fround a permanent “truth” either.
We also need to see that people who have spent their lives in academica may also be working under the hegemony of a different sort.
I feel there must be a truth in between. What, for instance, can be said about the MSM–especially MSNBC–which also suppress certain points of view and do their own type of filtering of points of view?
It appears to me the radical swing from neo-con right to the far-left “progressive” point of view that Lakoff and Chomsky (though those two individuals have little love for each other) represent is also something that we need to worry about.
We can have our truth prescribed from the left as well as from the right.
All valid points here.
I’d be curious to read what the nature of the “truth in between”, that you suggest here, might be.