War by other means: A trip through the marketplace of ideas on UNC campus
Hello World! I am Charlie; in the next few posts I plan to discuss the connections between education, centralized media, free speech issues, direct action, and right-wing anti-sciences such as global warming denial. For this post, I’m reprinting “War by other means: A trip through the marketplace of ideas on UNC campus”, a “critique of the marketplace of ideas, for general reading and discussion” written by Sarah Simmons, circulated through the UNC sociology listserve, and distributed on campus as a printed zine. I think that it offers a revealing perspective on the effects of information-age capitalism: information and ideas are converted into dollar signs, and in the process, stripped of their connections to physical reality and of any sort of cultural and ethical meaning. Thus the marketting of an idea becomes more important than its meaning or truth value, and stately white men can be taken seriously while they deny the health risks of tobacco, or even advocate for the treatment of large sections of the population as second class citizens.
War by other means:
A trip through the marketplace of ideas on UNC campus – Sarah Simmons
Today Western Imperialism is the imperialism of the relative, of the “It all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who is stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to believe in something, to affirm anything at all.
- The Coming Insurrection
In a rare moment of accidental wisdom, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1967, “The college classroom, with it surrounding environs, is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas.” Perhaps no better phrase can be found to characterize the social malaise, passive nihilism, and active relativism with which ideas are “debated” on campus at UNC. Here, ideas are not just exchanged as generic commodities, but specifically bought and sold with all the import, value, and meaning of gas station candy bars. “You like Baby Ruths more than Snickers? OK, OK, that’s fine, but why get so worked up about it? It’s only a candy bar!”
Every aspect of this marketplace allusion, or should I say, illusion, is implied in the economic analogy: an isolation from the real physical world of violently conflicting social forces, a consequent lack of moral or ethical urgency, a pretense of equality in the mass media distribution of and financial investment in the ideas themselves, and an ahistorical understanding of the social and political contexts that give rise to them.
Somewhere in this silly “environ,” the concept of free speech emerges, pathetically attempting to assert itself in a world where no student really cares and no student group is particularly willing to risk anything: to extend itself beyond the safety and comfort of the teach-in or the permitted Pit demo in order to turn their ideas into reality. And here again the marketplace of ideas is just like any other marketplace: a house of cards built on faith and rhetoric, waiting to be either dismantled or transformed into its more overtly fascist counterpart, as soon as a truly active opposition emerges.
An exchange of ideas which occurs with no underlying threat that those ideas might become reality, with no possibility of action, is a meaningless exchange. This is why every year student groups face almost complete turnover, why service clubs are more popular than “activism,” why the apolitical always seems to triumph over the potential for transforming the University into a place that could actually challenge our social conditions.
No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains a total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble…Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light–such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end.
– The Coming Insurrection
In the past eight or nine months, UNC’s administration, in partnership with the Daily Tar Heel and the leadership of several student groups, has gone on the offensive to promote this concept of the marketplace of ideas. In response to repeated challenges from forces, both in and outside of the University, that stand in active opposition to the ultra-right-wing Youth for Western Civilization, this coalition of mediators, moderates, and bureaucrats has taken a normally unspoken framework implied by the inertia and timidity of campus “politics” and turned it into an institution in and of itself.
Soon after the wildly successful disruption of a speaking event hosted by YWC on April 14th, in which an anti-immigrant ex-congressman was forced into an undignified trot upon being chased off by anti-racists, Chancellor Thorp sent an email to all students, condemning the largely participatory action and calling for a return to civil discourse. To a certain extent, his public shaming worked: just days later, leaders of both CHISPA, a Latino student group, as well as members of the Black Student Movement and student body president Jasmin Jones gathered in a circle with several members of the white supremacist YWC to hold hands and sing the school anthem. Cameras flashed, journalists rejoiced, and everything seemed to return to normal.
On another level, however, his shaming was a failure. A second YWC event was also disrupted, as well as protested from outside. Propaganda continued to appear around campus urging fellow students to not be fooled by YWC’s attempts at political legitimacy or by calls for polite dialogue with a hate group. This work had its effect. Despite the DTH and Thorp’s pleas for civility and appeals to the marketplace of ideas, YWC’s advisor Chris Clemens quit his post, citing the group as too “inflammatory” and a magnet for “extreme left-wing” protests. In other words, the protests worked.
Actions have continued against YWC: on the first day of fall classes, 3,000 copies of the DTH were wrapped with a “special anti-racist edition,” which detailed YWC’s racist origins as well as the false opposition presented by liberal discourse around white supremacy and protest. A pamphlet exposing YWC’s new advisor as a racist collaborator prompted him into overreaction, thus causing the second resignation of a faculty sponsor. In order to combat this continued campaign, Thorp gave $3,000 from a private fund to YWC and personally sought three new advisors for the group, one of whom (Jon Curtis) is himself the head director of student organizations and activities. A conflict of interest, perhaps?!
Nearly every faculty member, bureaucrat, or student associated with YWC has publicly gone on record as opposing YWC’s national mission statement. And yet, amazingly, these professed “liberals” are the only thing keeping the group alive, pathetic martyrs to the existence of an idea that has no visible proponents on our campus. It’s one big joke: the suggestion that an idea’s opponents are obliged to support it merely so those opponents have something with which to peacefully debate. It is nonsense that can only be explained by the weakness of the administration’s position: With only one or two actual members, no public meetings, and a president that publicly criticizes his own group, YWC is effectively dead in the water. The anti-racists have basically won. So YWC becomes a corpse on life support, maintained by a concept of ideological exchange that is as meaningless as it is irrelevant to the way ideas actually travel in the real world.
The reason the administration and some faculty are so desperate to assure YWC’s “rightful place” is that the group’s abolition would be a tremendous defeat for the Liberal conception of the University, a rupture with how and why students are taught to enter into debate. The administration understands what most students do not, that in breaking with the marketplace of ideas, anti-racists presented an active critique of the primary tenets of Liberal discourse. More and more students around the country are challenging this discourse: from occupations and tree-sitting at UC-Santa Cruz to the shutting down of a speech by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in New York, the rickety framework of Liberalism is teetering towards collapse. Students wonder, could there be another way of doing politics? In doing so, can we dispense with “politics” entirely?
Specifically, YWC opponents understand that debates around what is and is not white supremacist do not occur in a bubble, but in a society whose entire economic and political machinery was built upon and is maintained by racial hierarchies. Any debate around race takes place somewhere in that hierarchy, which is a structure permanently maintained by violence.
This violence isn’t just rhetoric. If students were to talk to Northside neighbors about police harassment, or have some honest conversations with the day laborers on Jones Ferry Road about the conditions that brought them to the US, this would all be readily apparent. The realities that force people to move here from the Global South, that cause people to take shitty service work jobs on campus, are all produced by coercion and violence. It is laughable to speak of the “free and equal exchange” of perspectives about immigration in a country where migrant workers die of pesticide exposure and families face deportation, where border walls partition the once-whole territories of indigenous people and private corporations run immigrant detention centers. A debate in which one side has the power to arrest, imprison, deport, or murder the other side is no debate at all. The “marketplace of ideas” model pretends to freeze these conflicts in order to conduct debate outside of real space and time, somehow removed from the physical world where the fate of migrants is not guided by ideas per se but actually by police, judges, racist vigilantes, bankers, authorities, capital—by power.
Critics of the marketplace of ideas understand that in a country where nearly every textbook, every classroom, and every TV-screened political debate affirms the basic logic of capitalism and the State, the “free and equal exchange of ideas” is a hollow gesture. Given this larger context, most dialogue around “issues” is just a superficial repetition of foregone conclusions, based on the unexamined larger frameworks for understanding that we’ve already been given. This is what passes for “debate” in this society. It should be no surprise that its function is to keep things as they are.
What is the point of debate if there is no sanctioned action to achieve the results of that debate? If every xenophobe was suddenly convinced of the barbarity of the Border, would the wall suddenly crumble? We would still find ourselves in a place where our only choices lie between the endless deliberations of useless politicians and the direct action of our own social forces.
“War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” Karl Von Clausewitz
All this raises the question: What happens when the debate is over? Do we act then? But what if our acting stifles further debate? Is that bad? When do we act?
The point of the “marketplace of ideas” is to ensure that the debate never ends, so that we never act. Debate only has meaning when we are prepared to act on our beliefs, to take risks beyond those of the classroom. This is why, despite the whining of Thorp and the Daily Tar Heel about the silencing of free speech, debate around issues of speech, immigration, and white supremacy was actually stronger after the events of past April. Debate has substance when it occurs in an honest context that reflects the daily physical conflicts occurring inside and outside of the University. Discussion and critique must be imbued with the urgency of real life.
It would be interesting to ask what would have happened had anti-racists instead obeyed the expected rules for civil discourse. Tancredo’s speech could have proceeded uninterrupted, while he insulted immigrants and Hispanic culture generally, until eventually students would have gotten their chance to ask him some “hard questions.” He would have answered them politely, the students would feel a small nagging frustration, and everyone would go home peacefully in a world where immigrants are being incarcerated and deported, families separated, workers fired, and migrants killed. Surely little attention would have been paid to the event at all. NPR wouldn’t have done a story about the immigration debate; Mexican journalists wouldn’t have written sympathetic articles about pro-immigrant UNC students. YWC would probably have continued to grow, and had no trouble finding a more loyal president this fall.
Capitalizing on its new political legitimacy, the group might eventually have grown large enough to push policy changes at UNC, keeping undocumented students out of the classroom and making sure cops weren’t accountable for any racial profiling, among other things. All the while, the vast majority of UNC students could rest assured that there was nothing important enough to get worked up about. The cowardice and apprehension of campus “activism” would have gone untested.
Thankfully, this isn’t what happened. A tiny spark of excitement and tension was instead injected into campus life, along with the possibility of challenging not just a racist student group but the larger framework of how we do politics. In reaction to this possibility, the administration is now actively aiding a group whose goal is the growth of a “right-wing youth movement on campus.” Thorp is doing this under the rubric of the marketplace of ideas, assuring the existence of a defunct group so that he can save face and make a bizarre gesture towards a skewed version of “free speech.”
Nevertheless, the unstable marketplace has been challenged, and for some, the house of cards has fallen. The administration has now shown its true colors: it will actively aid a racist tendency if this protects the notion of Liberalism, thus preventing any break with the current University framework. Students have a choice to make. Do they have the courage to act, to become a social force capable of creating change and asserting power, or do they remain a timid, passive subject in the marketplace of ideas?
