A taste of my next book + Twitter update
'Manufacturing authority': a 2,000 word research piece for CIEO
A few weeks ago Joanna Williams’ think-tank CIEO published a 2,000-word research piece of mine entitled ‘Manufacturing authority: the power of dogma’. To date, I have been unable to share this with the world via Twitter because I am still blocked from accessing my account.
The piece anticipates one of the major themes I’m exploring in my next book, The Progress Factory, specifically ‘the politics of causation’: how a sort of cod-sociology provides a constant apparent evidence base for the assertion of authority in our public sphere.
I start off by examining a Guardian editorial about Liz Truss before she became leader, denouncing her not for being the free market ideologue that she is, and that now seems to be doing significant economic damage, but for being confrontational with her rhetoric against the Scottish National Party and others.
The message is that Truss’s approach is destined to fail, leading to the dissolution of the UK, as a subset of the ‘rightwing politics of Brexit’ which [the Guardian] considers to be the ultimate root cause of all this division.
The sense of destiny is crucial here, giving the Graun’s leader writers the sense that they are dispensing not ammunition to their readers, but knowledge. Indeed you might say that they are distributing a more sophisticated kind of ammunition than the normal: ammunition with a higher authority behind it. This authority knows how social causation works and can anticipate outcomes of different courses before they arise.
As I write:
Projecting into the future to say what will work and what will not becomes an effective means of manufacturing authority, one that conveniently removes any need to check facts and evidence as they do not yet exist.
After considering the Guardian with Truss, I turn my attention to the anti-Brexit shock jock James O’Brien, whose book How Not To Be Wrong I also reviewed here.
His claim to the authority of ‘reason’, I say, “gives [O’Brien] and his fellow travellers that ‘licence’ to sit in judgement – and to impose their own strict conditions of right and wrong, with opponents who do not meet their standards removed from the scene.”
The politics of causation always seems to lead to certain forms of action as necessary: almost invariably involving the removal of political opponents from society in one way or another, just as a surgeon seeks to remove a cancer from the body.
My Twitter update is that there is no update. I have had no communication from Twitter since being blocked from my account. Twitter’s guidelines said that it took between 12 hours and two weeks to process appeals. However it has now been around a month since I made mine.
And, just to clarify, my account hasn’t been suspended. Rather I have been suspended from accessing it. I am still able to access Twitter via my Vaughan Williams account, @RVWinfo. However, in order to preserve the integrity of the account, I don’t do any personal tweeting on there, except for a little bit of necessary stuff over the past few weeks. It is however another way to contact me, via DM.