Charles C. Lemert - Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things

THE STRUCTURAL LIE

THE
STRUCTURAL

LIE

Small Clues to Global Things

CHARLES LEMERT

First published 2011 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2011 Paradigm Publishers

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The structural lie : small clues to global things / Charles Lemert.

p. cm. (Great Barrington books)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59451-532-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-59451-533-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Inference. 2. Social sciencesResearch. 3. Social scientists. I. Lemert, Charles C., 1937

BC21.I6S77 2011

301dc22

2010027999

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-533-0 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-532-3 (hbk)

THE STRUCTURAL LIE BEGAN UNDER ANOTHER NAME, Queer Things Aboundinga phrase drawn from Marx, Capital I: A commodity is a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Marx was well known to have been a poet of sorts. Quite apart from the stunning beauty of many of his locutions, the key to his poetry was the artful recognition that the whole world of human values can (and must) be contained in any one of its singular partsnone more true to the point than the commodity. commodities queer the worlds because, apart from their deceptions as to theological niceties, any single thing of value sufficient unto exchange embodies all of the possible qualities and equivalences by which economic systems are constituted. This is the point of this book, which, like all books, proves its own point. Any single book offers itself for sale to a vast market wherein one hopes to find a few readers, if not buyersa hope that is mysteriously met, though one hardly knows how or why.

The Structural Lie collects essays written for various occasions in the past few years. a few are older. Yet, audaciously, I believe that the point they together make is particularly apt to the present moment.

Something odd is happening in the world. The world as suchthe one many of us grew up onis coming apart, dissolving into worlds in which deep and intractable differences are sharper before they were assumed to be. At the same timeand this is the mystery of it allthese worlds, in their divergences, are implausibly better connected by speedy appliances that are well known to everyone who is, at the least, literate and quite a few who are not. What this means, whatever we might call it, is that for the first time in the long history of humankinds attempts to understand its own nature, the differences between parts and wholes is simultaneously less salient and more acute. In short, this is a time in which the particulars of global flows truly express the magnitudes of the whole while at the instant of their decoding in some handheld device they, having passed through a universe of digital 0s and 1s, necessarily contain everything that can and needs to be known. When push comes to shove, a digital universe is not much save for its capacious appetite for encoding everything of value. This is the essential principle of the theory of codesa single bite of expression draws its significance from an invisible harvest of possibilities that subsist in an unfathomable sea of permutations necessarily absent from a present occasion when the encoded meanings offer themselves as text messages or such like. Thus, and thereby, the worlds as they are in this global hour of the early decades of a new millennium conform to the general theory of values that Marx was the first to describe.

The Structural Lie, thus, is about Marx. Yet Marx, as time has shown, was inadequate even to the full meaning of his poetic vision. He knew this but could not say it in so many words. In our allegedly global circumstance, what is very well understood by all but the most nave or ill-motivated is that these are times in which truth stands for very littleor, better put, very little that stands up for very long before some movement calls it into doubt. Much can be said for truth as a moral practice. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine how we might live with others if it were not that we each and all in the presence of others did not take for granted that truth is about to be told. Yes, we who are honest enough to remember the make-believe of our childhoods, and all the subsequent necessary infidelities of our lives, realize full well that neither we ourselves nor these others with whom we live know the truths they tell. Yet, they and we tell them just the same. Were it not so, then nothing we do or say would matter in the least. Hence, the terrible irony of human existence: we all, without exception, must lie in order to tell what truths there may be without which there would be no We, hence nothing shared, thus also no worlds of any meaningful kind.