Liberation from the Symbolic Order

To analyze ideologies that generate collective forms of violence, at least a part of one’s self must exist in a condition of separation from these ideologies. Is it possible to create (within oneself and the world) a liberated place where the hegemonic discourses of society (and those of academia) do not hold sway? I would love to hear your reflections on this issue. Please share your thoughts by writing to me at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net.

I wish to thank those of you who responded to our “Call for a Book Reviewer” for Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. I’m very grateful. One individual has been assigned by the editor of the journal to review Nations Have the Right to Kill. Many of you are writing book reviews for other venues. I also wish to thank those of you who wrote to me about “History, Mass-Murder and Truth” and about “After Post-Modernism.” I’ve read and have been transformed by the responses.

I’m also grateful to those who provided information on your book publications and sent essays and papers. Eventually, I’ll find a way to use this material. Soon, we’ll promote other books through this Newsletter; and publish papers and book-reviews on our Ideologies of War, Genocide and Terror Website.

The experience of the invasion and domination of consciousness by society is not far from any of us. When I was young, I glanced for five seconds at the front page of the Newark Star Ledger and quickly turned to the sports pages. Now, the mass-media constitutes a pervasive matrix that shapes our mind and thoughts.

Is it possible to develop a distance from this noise in order to experience society as outside the self? French (and American) theorists have put forth the conception of a self created and defined by virtue of its encounter with language—inextricably bound to symbolic structures in society.

Lacanians say that we are “subjects of the symbolic order,” much as Hitler said to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Without denying the extraordinary power of societal narratives, I still pose the question: How may we develop a space of freedom, allowing us to apperceive societal ideologies as separate from the self and to analyze them?

I’m not speaking of opposition (a stance with which many academics are comfortable). Opposition arises when one has deeply internalized an ideology and seeks to do battle against it. But what if a cultural discourse is nonsensical or irrational? Does one wish to engage in a struggle against a mirage or phantasmagoria?

Erich Fromm many years ago wrote about “social filters” that are the result of “logical categories embedded in and diffusely distributed through the culture, which shape and constrain our experiences of ourselves.” This idea is consistent with the post-modern view. R. D. Laing in Self and Others (1961) wrote that the “normal” state of affairs is to be “so immersed in social phantasy systems that one takes them to be real.”

The post-modern view is that linguistic and cultural categories construct reality and define the self. Discourse rarely is viewed as a “phantasy system.” But we can empathize with the view that immersion in one’s culture’s phantasy may give rise to a struggle to “shake one’s self out of a false sense of reality.” By virtue of a process of “derealization,” one becomes capable of “apperceiving the phantasy system” in which one is immersed and of extricating oneself from “unreality.”

But what does it mean to say that social reality is also a source of “unreality?” If the self is socially constructed, how is it possible for one to perceive that which constructs the self as unreality. Laing, according to Daniel Burston, contends that social phantasy systems envelop us in a “dense, obstructive sense of pseudo-reality that pre-empts contact with the truth” and that often “estrange us from reality and the ground of our being.” If truth is a social construction, how is it possible to reject societal discourses as untrue?

My perspective on these issues has been shaped by research on Hitler and the Holocaust. If there is one thing one learns from studying Nazi culture and history, it is that an entire society can be wrong: can be defined by a shared fantasy or delusion.

I often ask scholars and students to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1933 out of a population of sixty-six million (reminding them that the majority of Jews murdered were not German). I receive guesses ranging from five-million to ten-million (even twenty-million from a prominent anthropologist). The actual number was 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, far less than 1% of the population. The Jews were a weak group, lacking political power, absolutely no threat to Germany.

Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, however, did not experience the Jews in this way. According to the Nazis, Jews posed a mortal threat to the survival of Germany, the Aryan race and Western civilization. Hitler and other Nazi leaders claimed that Jews represented a “force of disintegration” working toward the destruction of Germany. Genocide represented the struggle to eliminate the Jewish force of destruction, and thus to rescue the nation.

Hitler feelings about the Jews are captured in the following passage, when he declares that “only rarely do the life of peoples suffer such convulsions that the deepest foundations and the edifice of the social order are shaken.” Who would refuse to see, Hitler says, that today we are in the midst of a struggle concerning the question of the “maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited human order of civilization.” Hitler and other Nazis were driven by their paranoid fantasy that the survival of Germany and Western civilization was threatened by the Jew, and that in order to rescue Germany and Western civilization—Jews had to be eliminated or destroyed.

Hitler’s desire to initiate the Final Solution made no sense at all. Yet the entire bizarre, absurd episode—the Holocaust—grew out of an ideology that was deeply believed and passionately embraced by Hitler, other German leaders, and some proportion of the German population. Daniel Goldhagen (1996) observes that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology” and that their writings about Jews were so divorced from reality that anyone reading them might conclude that they were the product of the “collective scribes of an insane asylum.”

In spite of everything that historians have written, many people find it difficult to grasp or accept the fact that actions with such profound societal consequences could have arisen based on a hallucination or delusion. Governed by their own ideology—the delusion that human behavior grows out of rationality—many Americans and Europeans find it difficult to imagine that the Holocaust had no foundation in “reality.” People assume that there must have been real reasons why Hitler and the Nazis did what they did (or that they did not actually believe their delusions but only pretended they did).

There were no “real” reasons for the Holocaust. Jeffrey Herf in The Jewish Enemy concludes that Nazi leadership pushed to the extreme the “widespread human capacity for delusion and belief in illusions,” noting that the assumption that these men did not believe their fantasies relies on an “optimistic view of the power of human rationality, justified neither by the events of modern history nor by our now widespread awareness of the role of nonrational forces in human experience.”

What happens when the belief-system of an entire society is defined by a delusion? If reality is a social construction, is it possible that many societies are constructed based on delusions? If this is the case, how can we apperceive these delusions if (according to post-modern theories) our self is not separate from the discourses that define us?

In order to understand the ideologies that shape collective violence, one must achieve a space of separation or distance such that one neither embraces these ideologies nor is engaged in a desperate struggle to oppose them. Is it possible to achieve a space of freedom outside society (or from deep within the self)?

What stance shall we take toward a social world that is defined by ideologies that are extraordinarily powerful and seem oh so real, but often feel psychotic at the same time? What are your views? How can we achieve a space of freedom? Please write to me at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net.

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg