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Moving Past Post Factualityandthe Suppressionof Communicative Action
In the post-factuality of contemporary political discourse, the difficulties of achieving a workable consensus about the " truth " of a current event often stifle effective action. To interrogate this phenomenon, I specifically examine the media storm and protest actions surrounding the completion of Energy Transfer Partner's controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The particular crisis of understanding at the core of this issue has deep roots in longstanding traditions of systematically distorted communication: state intervention in protest movements, bureaucratic failure to adequately obtain public consensus, corporate domination and of course, the unique struggles of indigenous peoples on Turtle Island/North America. The inability of media and individuals alike to reach a general consensus on the " facts " about the DAPL situation may be emblematic of deeper legitimation crises and the concern of new social movements with " the grammar of the forms of life (Habermas 1982, 33). I apply Jurgen Habermas' analysis of the four principles of communicative action-truth, truthfulness, normative rightness, and comprehensibility – to this particular event, and argue that without faith in the other's truthfulness (sincerity) or agreement on normative values (framing), rational discourse remains impossible. Rational discourse requires individual and social examination of ideological framing, but the participatory public discourse about political values that would facilitate such questioning has been undermined by the rise of mass media and the " shift from communication to mass communication " (Hardt, 3). For effective consensus-oriented dialogue to be achieved in regards to Standing Rock, participants must be aware of historical systematic distortion and willing/able to examine, critique, and come to a consensus on shared normative values. Without these two factors, consensual discourse cannot occur (Habermas UP, 93).
Fear the Monster!: racialized violence, sovereign power and the thin blue line
Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime: Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen eds.
In the United States, a spate of high profile killings beginning with Michael Brown in 2014, have mobilized a broad coalition against police violence. This action has brought about much needed attention to the increasingly prominent role of police in American social life, demonstrated for the first time the need for an accurate accounting of lives lost to the police and brought coercive practices such as " stop and frisk " under increased public scrutiny. While these and other victories have been won, they stand in sharp relief against a history of cyclical and facile police reform stretching back more than a century. In order to elaborate upon the failures of reform, we focus upon the mass-mediated fear of crime, theorizing it not simply as propaganda or ideology, but rather as a technique and instrument of pacification. In doing so, we outline a dialectics of fear which arrests social change and obscures the horrific nature of everyday police violence and of the social order which it upholds.
[2018] Leftist Political Violence: From Terrorism to Social Protest
Terrorism in America, 2018
Loadenthal, Michael. “Leftist Political Violence: From Terrorism to Social Protest.” In Terrorism in America, edited by Kevin Borgeson and Robin Valeri, 36–74. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. --------------------- • Terrorism is a difficult to define label, and its application controlled by state authorities (e.g. Executive, courts, legislature, police, military). It is typically used to denote forms of political contestation that challenge the government in symbolic, rhetoric, and practical terms. Because of this patterned application, terrorism fails to adequately describe acts, and instead is a means of defaming a particular tactic, strategy, organization, ideology or individual. • The labeling of leftist violence and rightist violence is done irregularly with leftists frequently labeled and prosecuted as terrorists and rightists typically described and framed through other discourses such as extremism. • The first wave of global terrorism is often associated with the rise of individual anarchists targeting heads of state in the 19th century, and while this era saw kings and presidents slain by leftists, it promotion of propaganda of the deed declined by World War II. • The 1960s saw a landmark rise in networks and organizations of Marxist-Leninist and other leftists adopting violent means (e.g. bombing, armed robbery)—frequently labeled as terrorism—in their opposition to the War in Vietnam, national liberation (e.g. Puerto Rico), and the larger socio-political environment framed as US-led imperialism. • In the 1980s, when the Marxist-Leninist vanguards declined, they was replaced by a rising tide of clandestine animal liberation networks, and by the 1990s, the addition of environmental campaigns of sabotage, vandalism and arson—labeled by the government as “eco-terrorism.” Though these networks did not employ lethal means, due to the frequency of their attacks and their large financial cost, they were quickly cast as domestic terrorists and a premier target for further criminalization through the rhetoric of terrorism. • Around the millennium, the left engaged in a series of large-scale counter-summit street protests. Following the attacks of 9/11, these leftist tactics were further criminalized through a rhetorical association with terrorism, and thus a movement on the rise was quickly curtailed. • Following the discursive shift equating civil disobedience and disruptive protestors as “terrorists” occurring after 9/11, in the early months of 2017, legislative and policing practices have demonstrated a renewed desire to recast demonstrators as an existential danger to the state and national security—this time by framing “demonstrators” as “rioters” if property destruction occurs within the demonstration.
In many contexts, social media has been considered as a group of tools that facilitates people's access to freedom and democracy. But this view is challengeable. In this study, two different aspects of social media are examined. The first aspect examines social media’s use by protesters in two completely different contexts—Iran and the UK. The second aspect, on the other hand, investigates how the two governments, who have very different approaches to governance, exploited social media in an attempt to control the two protests. The main question addressed in this study is: “What are the differences and similarities between government surveillance of social media and mobile communications during Iran’s Green Movement (2009) and the UK riots (2011)?” The findings of this study suggest that social media and mobile phone communications were both important to protesters. Furthermore, this research illustrates that governments monitor the protesters on social and mobile media in different ways, and justify their actions by mainly saying that they do so in order to protect public order and national interests.
The Insidious Bond Between Political Correctness and Intolerance
New English Review, 2019
https://www.newenglishreview.org/Lawrence\_A\_Howard/The\_Insidious\_Bond\_Between\_Political\_Correctness\_and\_Intolerance/ This paper is a follow-on to my article, “Culture, Morality, and Ethics: The Interplay between Belief, Behavior and the Objective World,” that the New English Review published in December 2017, in which I I pointed out that morality is a subjective concept. On the other hand, ethics stem from objective truth, i.e. verifiable evidence. When humans are moral, they follow the learned precepts arising from their culture, their socialization. When humans are ethical, they try to step outside the box of their culture and discover that which is actually extant. People who force other people to attend diversity training sessions (and do things like call Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, and Clarence Thomas “race traitors”) are in locked boxes of subjective morality, never stepping outside them.
Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 43, 2014
To examine how social media restrict and re-creates messages within current interactionist scripts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this study applies a framework of digital reflexivity highlighting stages of information flow. It applies the symbolic interaction concept of critical emotional events to analyze the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the role of social media in disseminating Bouazizi’s act as one catalyst of the MENA citizen uprisings. The role of social media in the “Arab Spring” merits investigation because social media provide opportunities to examine shifting identities, interactions, and actions of citizen activists in the MENA uprisings. This study is important and timely because little symbolic interactionist scholarship exists on MENA identities and social movements, or on crowd interaction and activism outside the West. The nuanced nature of MENA political activism and complex processes of the development of activists’ “mutable” selves (Zurcher, 1977) are fluid and resistant to symbolically defined social roles, interactionist scripts and reflexivity, and public communication practices in a MENA under political and social transition.