I have admired and agreed with just about every analysis and commentary piece Josh Marshall has written, but I have to take issue with his latest thesis, that the neocon ideological rigidity in foreign policy is equivalent to the intellectual rigidity of French post-structuralism and post-Marxism and that both are equally dangerous. My issue certainly isn’t with the first half: I don’t know that I would exalt pragmatism in every foreign policy situation, but the neocon march to empire has substituted wishful thinking for empirical study at every turn. The newest confirmation of this comes in a recent article in Slate debunking the administration’s comparison of Iraqi guerilla reistance with the Nazi “Werwolf” insurgence of post-occupation Germany. As the article points out, the comparison is near useless, as the Werwolf was a meager phenomenon, which did not kill not even one single U.S. soldier:
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford’s Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)?
For Marshall, this willingness to tinker with the empirical is writ large in an approach culture suspicious of nonpartisan expertise:
By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done.
So far, so good. But how are these two related tendencies (intellectual dishonesty and anti-technocracy) like French postmodernism. In MarshallÂ’s words,
Like orthodox Marxists who pick apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of ‘bourgeois ideology’ or Frenchified academic post-modernists who ‘deconstruct’ knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues seek to expose “the facts” as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases. The Bush administration’s betes noir aren’t patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, but establishmentarianism, big-government liberalism, and what they see as pervasive foreign policy namby-pambyism. For them, ignoring the experts and their ‘facts’ is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause.
Yes, poststructuralism, especially the version that’s seemed to take hold of the academy, deserves to come in for a few licks. I’ll gladly put a few in myself. But isn’t Marshall attacking a bit of a straw man here? After all, the postructurualists differ from the orthodox or Leninist Marxists precisely because they Â- intellectually at least; whether deep-down is another matter Â- do not think ideology is simply a matter of the masses being fooled and the revolutionary vanguard being right. Poststructuralists are notorious in their relativism not because they say that politics and culture are ideological Â- any sociologist worth his salt would come to similar conclusions, even if she/he avoided the term, but rather because they argue that the sociologists’ work, too, is tainted by ideology.
What’s more, in some respects the debate over Iraq and the Middle East demonstrates that ideology (and we should specify that ideology here is in the Marxist sense of an underlying, collective political unconscious, not an explicitly held set of beliefs) colors the interpretive frame that one uses to make sense of what’s going on. The neocons may be cynically lying at points. But I honestly think they believe what they say. Same with centrist or liberals or anti-war Brits or pro-Palestinian Arabs. I agree with Marshall that there are good reasons to insist on the kind of technocratic knowledge currently being disavowed by the Bush administration (after all, I agree with Bourdieu that certain kinds of intellectual pursuit are useful in tempering the relativism of poststructuralism), but it also strikes me that the French-style of ideology is something worth retaining at this moment.
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