Invisible University

ISS 1510: Thinking about Politics: A Methods and Data-based,
                   Event- and Process-oriented Approach

 This course began with an unforseen event: the Imus brouhaha.  We began with the injunction to pay attention only to actual data--in this case, as indicated in Figure 1, actual statements, related statements, institutions, institutional roles, markets, etc.  Your own feelings about the issue are irrelevant, and an obstacle to serious intellectual activity.  Nevertheless, it is now part of our popular culture to emphasize feeling over thinking.  It is the responsiblity of the faculty in an institution such as this to make this problem clear, rather than take the easy way out by encouraging the mindless blurtings that dominate the media and fill so many classrooms.


 


The figure above embodies the mental discipline so central to advanced thought.  We do not express our feelings about Imus's remark: we examine evidence, assemble facts, analayze contexts, and deploy the theoretical models found in the literature or developed by ourselves.

In the above figure, text production and distribution falls under the authority of the corporation of which Imus is only an employee, not a citizen on a soapbox, and therefore issues of free speech are irrelevant.  What is if critical importance, however, is the place of the listener in this system of relations, and therefore theories that deal with the listener are relevant (see reception theory).

In addition, with the intervention of the corporate advertisers into the Imus affair, questions of corporate structure, of inter-organizational relations, and of the relationship of corporate structure and networks to politics, are at issue.  One might Google these firms, look them up in Opensecrets.org and thewhitehouseforsale.org, and more generally take advantage of the Internet.
 
The figure below suggests that we view the Imus affair as a wormhole that leads into the depths of being.  The figure below shows the course conceived of, in part, as just such an event-based entry into the problematic of politics.


 
Don Imus's words, and the reactions to them, become an originary explosion sending shock waves through the domain of being.  A concept of Demonization is required to cover the common characteristics of these shock jocks.  Such a concept must deal with the rage, the sexual perversions, and the sadism expressed by these shock jocks.  These are the primal forces,  the dark energy, of politics.  As such it draws us into literature and philosophy on the one side, psychology and biology on the other.  But it also, as in the Imus case, draws us especially into a concept of the theater of sadism, on the one hand, and a concept of cogntive regime, on the other.

Letters to the editor and electronic comments are special resources providing insight into the cognitive structures of public engagement with the media.


MediaMatters.org provides a valuable service in monitoring media and rhetoric.  One article recounts Imu's long history of sado-sexual rheotical gestures.  Another surveys the varieties of "offensive" language of a large number of talk show hosts.

Expressions to avoid: Is Obama black enough?  What does he really think?  Does Barak Obama have enough experience to be President?  Can he win?

Family background, education, and career vector--these are the three areas of Obama's life that are in question.  Although his maternal grandparents raised him, we know little about them. Fortunately, for purposes of historical understanding in today's world this is no problem.  As will be seen, the subjective, personal experiences, the feelings and hopes of Barrak Obama are utterly irrelevant for an understanding of the nature of "his" politics.  

In the decomposition of fictitious entities (fictitious from the standpoint of being), and the constitution of the being of the phenomona in question, "Obama" is seen to be a derivative of and a functional entity within a force-and-configuration complex.  Even his text production will appear, once we get out from under the spell cast by his obvious verve and intelligence, as a routine and predictable deployment of a standard repertoire of cliches, vague tone poems to particular subsets of widely shared sentiments sociologically contextualized.

As a first approximation, the "Barak Obama" of interest to the study of politics can be comprehended as a career vector.  (second approximation as an element in institutional matrix of Chicago Internationalists-Adlai Stevenson was a partner in the Sidley Austin law firm--defined by both their input-output inter-organizational flows and their political networks.  Such networks of power encompassing input-output flows, intistnonal bonds andd poltiical conenctison , taken thgether, can be called strategic elites.)

Career vector (in progress)

Sectoral Patterns in the U. S. Economy, 1866 - 1939

(This table is derived from a study of the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State.)