This month, Vice Magazine’s online interface uploaded ashort video documentary entitled “White Student Union.” This video documents
the hegemonic tensions that permeate Townson University’s student body after
senior student Matthew Heimbach initiated the organization of a white supremacy
group (The White Student Union) in 2012. This group dedicates itself to an
ideology known as “Identitarianism”(0.2:15) for the purpose of “demanding
equality for white people on campus” (00:55). The different perspective and
beliefs expressed by each featured speaker suggests that truth,
power, and justice are never simply given, and that the lived experience of
individual speakers constitutes the grounds for expressing claims to the right, true,
or just aimed at appealing to a "common sense," over the anticipation of ascending towards a valid consensus.
As students of Cultural Studies and
Communication, we see Vice’s documentary as framing a site of hegemonic flux: the notion that truth, power, and
conflict are continuous processes implicating what it means to make sense of
the world. When truth, political rightness, or the sovereignty of one group is seen
as self-evident and naturalized, then alternative ways of understanding the
world are “rendered non-sensical or unthinkable” (Barker, 406). Our analysis
focused on Heimbach’s speech acts through the lens of Habermas’ outlining of a
“consensus theory of truth,” whereby “I can attribute a predicate to an object
if and only if everyone else who could enter into discourse with me would also
attribute the same predicate to the same object” (Habermas, 89). The WSU
documentary serves to set up a political context for this theory of truth: for
if truth is a virtue, and if it depends on the possibility of discursive
consensus, then one method for achieving consensus would be to segregate, or
render unintelligible, any group or person that would not contribute to the aim
of consensus.
For Habermas, “truth” is one of
four claims to validity that are fundamental to “smooth” communication. These
validity claims include: “the intelligibility
of the utterance, the truth of
its propositional component, the normative
rightness of its performative component, and the sincerity of the intention expressed by the speakers” (Habermas,
90). If we stay with the validity claim dealing explicitly with “truth,” we can
note two conditions that establish the “truth” that we claim a proposition to
have: “First, it must be grounded in experience […] Second, the statement must
be discursively redeemable […] it must command the assent of all potential
participants in a discourse” (Habermas, 89). Here, according to Habermas, are the
conditions of truth as such. Our class noted that according to these principles
of validity, the WSU is inherently contradictory: for the “truth” of its
missions is rooted in an ancestral ideology, not existential grounds, and the
existence of this ideology forecloses the possibility for discursive
redemption in an intellectual environment that supports cultural difference and diversity through dominant hegemonic structures of normative rightness.
If the WSU is inherently
contradictory, that is, if its ideology contradicts its validity claims, how does
it continue to operate at a level of intelligibility that would attract members
and support? Stanley Deetz might suggest that the existence of the WSU rests on
the prevalence of “systematic distortion” in human communication. While
distortion in human communication may in fact be more of a rule than an exception, we can
identify its more pathological tendencies operating in the rhetoric of the WSU.
These pathologies are grounded in the development of “internal logics and
rules,” that form systems of communication that are predicated by "closure and
fixed interpretive processes," and which "properly have no outside, no natural checks and
balances, and few moments of escape to see the system as it works” (Deetz,
460). The absence of an “outside” is evidenced in the rhetoric of the WSU in a
number of ways, notably through it's “naturalization” of its organizing principles – the
commonality of the "race card" (13:55) and the assumed unified identity of “white European peoples” (18:09) – and in its
“bounded rationality” – its appropriation of a “higher discourse,” such as Christian
scripture, to create an insular, self-referential, hegemonic intelligibility.
To conclude, our analysis of the
WSU documentary has led to an understanding of the WSU as a group that operates
according to a pathologically distorted system of communication. In this system
of self-referentiality, the validity of truth claims are not open to adjustment
or negotiation, but are contingent on the exclusion and neutralization of
opposing viewpoints. By rendering truth a “common sense” that is “given,”
rather than as a consensus that may be ascended towards, the WSU can be seen as
demonstrating what Ranciere calls a dissenssus – “a division put in the
‘common sense’: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we
see something given” (Ranciere, 304). In staging a dissensus, the WSU
demonstrates that cultural conflicts and hegemonic tensions need not
be issues of “truth,” but are practices in the crafting of “common sense.”
