Written by Allen Jones   

Why was Lisa Simeone fired from NPR for her support of the Stop the Machine protest, a close cousin of the Occupy Wall Street movement? How did NPR justify this dismissal? The following comment from a memo written by NPR CEO Vivian Schiller that stakes out the organization’s position regarding off-duty activism was sent to all of its employees before John Stuart and Steven Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity”:

"No matter where you work at NPR you should be very mindful that you represent the organization and its news coverage in the eyes of your friends, neighbors and others. So please think twice about the message that you may be sending about our objectivity before you attend a rally or post a bumper sticker or yard sign. We are all NPR." (1)

The message is clear. Whether at work or in private life, if you work for NPR you must consider how you represent the organization as a whole. You must appear to be politically disengaged, unbiased, objective and neutral under all circumstances, whether you are a political reporter who covers Congress, an intern who makes copies, or the host of a radio show about opera. Ultimately, because you are a part of NPR, you should carefully avoid making your own perspective public.

What makes this case so interesting is that it provides us the occasion for an analysis of a hidden structure that can be unearthed in many, if not all of the formal institutional frameworks of our society. It even points to a social form that increasingly shapes this society in its entirety. With the Occupy movement, we are witnessing the first genuine confrontation to this social form that has appeared in the years subsequent to the passage from an industrial economy to an information economy.

What exactly is this social form? It’s not easy to identify. So long as it remains unopposed, it does its work almost invisibly. Only when it is disrupted do its outlines begin to make themselves apparent to those who find themselves within it. Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault was among the first to detect this social form in his analysis of the changes from the medieval to the modern paradigm of social rule. In the medieval paradigm (which remained effective well into the period of industrialization) social command is carried out by disciplinary institutions. These institutions straightforwardly prescribe the limits of thought and practice. It is never unclear who or what the source of social discipline is; the king, the landed aristocracy, the papacy, the robber-baron industrialist, etc.—all of them exist at the top of clearly defined social hierarchies and wield absolute social control.

As time went by, the mechanisms of social control developed subtler features. Finally, culminating in the flowing “information-based” society, they became entirely invisible. Gone were the days when the king, the robber-baron, the conqueror—all obvious, specific agents of power—violently compelled the people to conform to the order of a particular, recognizable sovereign. But we should be wary of mistaking this invisibility of the forms of social control for their absence. Far from being absent, these disciplinary structures have been intensified, generalized and horizontalized in modern society—and this even more acutely in those institutions that proclaim most loudly to be liberated of repressive forms of control (universities, schools, government, news media, etc.). Indeed, the rise of the modern “democratic” or “objective” institution, such as NPR, seems to announce the end of disciplinary structures precisely because of this almost total horizontalization of power structures.

While there is a hierarchical or vertical structure within an institution such as this, there are also horizontal levels of administrators, managers and functionaries, each seeming to have his or her own voice. The hierarchy seems to function more as a simple administrative mechanism than any sort of disciplinary structure. All of the parts of the institution are supposed to work in happy concert, and there is a cheerful congeniality between the vertical levels that mostly effaces any authoritative character. Working in happy concert, the institutional mechanisms suggest a sort of organicism. The brain (CEO) does not compel the arm (radio show host) to move. They both exist as parts of an organic whole and work in symbiosis with one another, each serving the other in mutual interconnectedness. “We are all NPR.”

Nonetheless, these power structures remain as present and as dominant as ever, only in this more “developed,” “democratic” society these modes of control are interiorized as structures of our very subjectivity. What does this mean? How do we understand this interiorization of the mechanisms of social control? Rather than overtly deploying repressive forms of control, administrators attempt to cultivate l’esprit de corps and to seduce the individual into a deeper identification with the prevailing ideology of the organization, such that ultimately one no longer separates one’s fundamental identity from the organization itself.

Of course, no matter how involved one becomes with such an institution, one always senses a kind of irreducibility between one’s work and a life that transcends this work. And of course it is okay from the standpoint of the institution to have a life of one’s own, but one should restrict this life to the private sphere; for example, to washing one’s car, to decorating one’s house or to playing softball with friends and co-workers, but never to acting out in a way that radically calls into question one’s fundamental integration into the institution: “Think twice about the message that you may be sending about our objectivity before you attend a rally or post a bumper sticker or yard sign.”

In attempting to recover themselves from these profoundly invasive structures of control that shape their very subjectivity, members of our society go to the absurdest of lengths. The pathological drive to outfit oneself in stylish new clothing, a sleek car, a perfect haircut—all of these express the contradictory desires, on the one hand, of ‘fitting in’ and, on the other, of creating a sense of inassimilable individuality. Moreover, it provides a powerful explanation for our credit crisis; namely, that spending on consumerism, the very movement that leaves intact and even intensifies these same invisible structures that bind us, is the only socially acceptable form of escape. And as the invasiveness of social control increases, so too does the drive to consume. How else explain the exponential increase in consumption of the last 10 years? 9/11 created the conditions for further invasions of social control, which in turn exacerbated the consumer impulse.

We can also find evidence of the existence of these interiorized structures of control in what may seem like an unrelated practice: the weekend binge drinking that is so regular and pervasive among the twenty and thirty-somethings who work in these institutional environments. The urgency with which these young, healthy, integrated members of society take to excessive carousing on the weekends is striking. What function does alcohol intoxication have if not to release them from the invisible parameters that delimit their very subjectivity, to loosen the invisible grips of social control? It’s an act of self-violence that makes one unavailable in body and mind to execute the directives of one’s social identity—directives that continue to bind us even when we are not at work. It’s a desperate, fitful gesture of rebellion, a useless passion that never really threatens to finally dislodge these interiorized structures of control.

Now we have the key to a deeper understanding of NPR’s reaction to Simeone’s activism. Having really nothing to do with any genuine violation of the imperatives of journalistic integrity, her dismissal happened at the very moment that she bucked this insidious, totalizing institutional subjectivity. It’s not without irony that— alongside the problems of perpetual war, impending climate disaster and abysmal debt—it is exactly this invasive mechanism of corporate subjectivization that has engendered the intense frustrations that culminated in the “Stop the Machine” protest for which Simeone was dismissed. These protests, along with the Occupy movement, aim at just that dislodgement of interiorized structures of control that consumerism, hobbies, and binge drinking cannot accomplish, because they merely masquerade as forms of emancipation. While these social practices produce nothing more than a superficial suspension of these modes of control, the Occupy movement, without quite understanding this, aims at a complete overturning of them.

What can such an overturning achieve? Certainly not the transcendence or final overcoming of power relations as such. It’s clear that though the specific forms that power takes will inevitably change, repressive forms of subjection will persist and forever reassert themselves whenever our vigilance against them diminishes. And for this reason it’s insane to hope for the emergence of any sort of utopian, empathic society in which power relations are totally neutralized. What we can work towards is the unearthing and demystification of these social forms and their attendant power relations. Seen in this light, the role of the journalist (and the philosopher) is exactly to punch through these mystifications and to press for this overturning—not to remain “objective,” “impartial,” or “unbiased.” As the Simeone case reveals, these outmoded standards have even become impediments to speaking about what is really going on here.

We can no longer accept a form of journalism that simply represents what is happening according to the invisible codes of corporate subjectivity (ideology). That the journalist must also be an agitator is something that many within the Occupy movement intuitively comprehend. Because any genuine investigation of social realities must involve a disturbance and a challenge to them on behalf of truths that they displace, these two roles will always go hand in hand. In recent protests, we’ve seen that at the moment the police threaten to forcibly re-impose these codes, the Occupy encampments deploy journalists (what they call, ‘observation teams’). When the police threat subsides, these journalists are simply reabsorbed within the activist encampment. What are these journalist-protestors doing if not finding and exposing the threshold at which this social system shifts from merely conditioning social conformity (the horizontal model) to the old, overtly repressive disciplinary forms of control (the vertical model). As the Simeone case reveals, these disciplinary forms of control do not simply express themselves in police action, but also in the reassertion of the authoritarian model within the corporate institution, however much executives try to mask it in the false ideology of symbiotic corporate organicism. (“We are all NPR.”)

This process at once reveals the hitherto hidden threshold of our social reality and casts a light upon those who profit from it, including those within the media industry. There is something almost scientific in the way that the Occupy movement has done its work. For far too long we have operated under the blind assumption that we live in a free society. The protestors, suspecting with good reason that this was a false assumption, have transformed it into a hypothesis and are selflessly using their own fragile bodies as subjects for the experiment. While the activist is engaged with testing the mechanisms of the prevailing social form and finding its limits, the journalist documents and publicizes it so that others can make informed decisions about the true structures of this social reality. We can hope that witnessing this will disillusion the public, and awaken them to a form of social conditioning that functions to conceal the true power dynamics within our society. These dynamics disproportionately favor the most avaricious, power-hungry and venal among us—just those individuals in whom an anti-democratic, totalizing tendency is strongest.

We should not be misled into believing that the existing social institutions are anything like organisms, capable of health and sickness according to the degree to which the workers assimilate themselves to their role, but as violent machines that need to be dismantled because they not only represent a threat to human flourishing, but to life itself. We are the fuel and the grease of these machines. Without our compliance and submission, they will fall apart. This is what we should conclude from the radical interrogation of the social system that the Occupy movement has undertaken. They have disrupted this invisible movement of subjectivization and brought the true mechanisms of the corporate system to light.

For this reason, we can see that Lisa Simeone was motivated by a genuine journalistic impulse to reveal the truth in precisely the activism for which she was fired. If NPR and the corporate news media were doing authentic journalism, they would actively make a place for the challenges to the system such as that of Simeone. Any urgency for discovering the truth is in fact impotent without this underlying impulse for activism. In scientists, philosophers, and journalists alike, there must be a willingness to cut through the tissue of illusion. Sadly, this activist impulse has been totally neutralized within all but a few of the existing media institutions, and this explains the almost total lack of faith that our communities have in them. Instead, NPR and institutions like it, function to carefully maintain the illusion, and this is why they must be challenged and, if necessary, dismantled.

(1) http://tinyurl.com/3yj6pvk