Martin and list

Yes, the question you are asking is what I am also asking myself. To be
honest I don't fully understand the mechanics of how this is happening. It is
more that gut feeling which hits you and raises your suspicions and to do a
rigorous analysis I would have to access a media monitor service and get all
the footage and clippings. Since this was a discussion list I didn't want to
pull punches with qualifiers like I suspect, also.

The scapegoating stuff is fairly clear. On the front cover of yesterday's
_Telegraph_, a Murdoch tabloid, was a graphic of 21 blanked out faces with
the headline something like: 21 arsonists who set Sydney ablaze. It is fairly
clear that these 21 mainly teenagers are being blamed for all the fires yet I
know already that some of these so-called arsonists were caught attempting to
light a fire and did not light the major fires. The fire in the northern
suburbs of Sydney may have been deliberately lit but the fire to the south of
the Blue Mountains appears to be caused by lightening strikes, also. It will
take forensic testing to be more certain and even then this is not always
conclusive. Forensic science can be wrong, often inconclusive or open to
legal challenge and is easy to tamper with.

The type of media analysis, critique and theory I am using is not interested
in arguing a point of truth and trying to disprove the coverage, although
this may arise as a serious concern. Nor is it interested in in the
individual person or people being portrayed. I think this may be what Candice
is referring to with the sort of simplistic critique of media events which
relies on a sort of judgment of truth and which Chomsky falls into the trap
of doing. What I am doing is in general looking at the relation of forces and
the real effects and outcomes.

Ummm... sorry, I know what I just said is very abstract. Perhaps one way in
is a particular type of practical use of Foucault's discourse analysis. To
understand how this works, I should say that Foucault entered academic
thinking in Australia through the radical gay liberation movement which was
led by various members of revolutionary marxist organisations and university
academics and students so Foucault more or less got re-read in a historical
materialist way. In this street based thinking and discussion which also
infected academic thinking theory became not a way of understanding or
interpreting the world but as a useful tool in changing the world. This has
had an impact on the type of media criticism which is taught in the
Communication degree at the University of Technology, Sydney and the
University of Western Sydney, two of Australia's leading communication
schools. so when I say a relation of forces I am not talking about
relativism, either. Into this gets thrown anything else that is useful such
as Deleuzian philosophy, science system theories like cybernetic systems
and so forth. It is a type of critical method and analysis that works not
only in literary theory, but also scientific discourse. it may sound eclectic
but it is a rigorous synthesis which in the simplest terms makes theory a
tool of analysis and critique. (To be fair to Chomsky, he was one of the
people who inspired this approach I take through one of his graduate students
at Harvard, Noel Sanders, who then came to Australia and began developing
these ideas through his readings Foucault, Deleuze and many, many other
theorists and then taught this to students at UTS. Noel was working on a book
on horrendous gay murders in Wollongong, so I must chase it up and see if it
has been published.)

So to go back to the scapegoat, I am not using it in terms of an actual
person but more in the sense of a trope. But not trope as in a metaphor or
figure of speech but the older usage, from the ancient Greek, as a turning
away or diversion which then occupies a position on the margins. Through the
social operation of ageism teenagers are marginalised in this sense and then
become set up as rhetorical scapegoats in a signifying system. The other
thing I should say is because this is occurring in some sort of cybernetic
communication system you never really know what will happen but can only
modulate the various outcomes in what would be complex feedback loops.
Anyone who has ever had to make an editorial decision in publishing should be
able to relate this in the sense that you never really know what is going to
be the outcome of your decision. But you can modulate what does happen and if
lucky, through publicity and so forth perhaps end up with a best seller.

As for tracing the actual mechanisms that then make the government complicit
in this incitement of teenagers to light these fires that would be quite a
research project involving a team effort including psychologists, statistical
analysis, and so forth. But having worked in the field and having several
contacts with the government (as any journalist would have, of course) I just
get a very strong feeling this is happening although I need to stress they
may not be conscious that they are actually doing this and may be quite
shocked to hear this.

If you want to know more about cybernetic criminology I think the following
web-site is useful:
http://www.tryoung.com


I don't feel I have done a good job of answering your question, but hope this
at least helps.

best, Chris Jones.


[PS It is not a good idea to assume the editors and proprietors of the
_Telegraph_ and other Murdoch tabloids as just stupid idiots. Lachlan Murdoch
is very smart and knows his media theory and how to use it. He obviously got
a lot out of Yale and got me thinking. I have to admire him.]



On Thursday 03 January 2002 22:40, you wrote:
> That was a very powerful & illuminating mail, Chris, its local precision
> made me understand better than before the way modern governments
> orchestrate *events & manipulate, engineer as you put it,  people's
> (re-)actions. But I don't quite understand yet the factual logic of
> <The kids are doing what the
> social engineering of the government is inciting, in effect. In the final
> analysis the Carr Labor Government as good as lit those fires but then that
> is the beauty of cybernetic social engineering. You can always deny
> responsibility and blame a scapegoat.>
> A scapegoat is usually innocent of the crime for which s/he is ostensibly
> punished, in this case not. I don't quite grasp how those kids are innocent
> of lighting the fires, even if social engineering predisposed them to do it
> ~ but how did it do that? I am genuinely unclear about this. I do
> understand that their guilt is less than that of a venal &
> self-aggrandising power structure using it (their guilt) to divert
> attention from the real exploitative crime(s) & the cui bono aspect of the
> situation, pacifying critical social unease & creating a fake consensus.
> Perhaps you could clarify that point.
> Martin