Chomsky:

Comments?

F. Leon

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A glance at the spring issue of "Public Culture":
The deceptions of spirit mediums and capitalists

While in Thailand to analyze the "Asian economic plague" of 1997, Rosalind
C. Morris was distracted by a curious national spectacle: revelations by
Chuchad, a self-described spirit medium that yes, he was a fake! For Ms.
Morris, an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University, the
revelations, and the way Chuchad staged them as a pageant of honesty and
openness, provided telling parallels with the way modern capitalism in
Thailand "disguises itself as mere monetization." Both Chuchad's
revelations and capitalism, she decided, depend on a sham "transparency"
-- on creating the illusion that crucial reforms are taking place, when in
fact larger deceptions are being perpetrated. In Thailand, mediumship has
proliferated in recent decades, even though, as Ms. Morris writes, it has
at times been officially denounced as primitivism at odds with the
country's goal of modernization. To overcome this rap, mediums have at
times trumpeted the very ideologies used to disparage them. Chuchad, in a
masterly display of media manipulation, staged a television conference to
announce his plans to reveal the secrets of his dissimulations, then held
a spectacular event in an enormous vacant lot by a strip mall, where he
performed such feats as pretending to slice his tongue off and then
explained how he faked those acts. Yet, Ms. Morris concluded, Chuchad's
renunciation of deception amounted to a pageant in magic, itself a
deception. All of this leads Ms.  Morris to conclude that, in Chuchad,
"the occult had returned in the guise of transparency." This reminded her
of governmental declarations about "transparency" -- its claims that the
country was embracing fiscal planning and market stabilization based on
true disclosure by banks and other lending institutions of their financial
pictures. Yet, she argues, while the country's economy increasingly needs
the "salaried masses," it is in fact a "system premised on secrecy" that
denies those workers knowledge of where profits are going. So, in Ms.
Morris's view, "transparency" is nothing less than "that ideological
pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the
function of regulating the state where once it was the function of the
state to regulate the market."

An excerpt from the article is available on the journal's Web site, under
"forthcoming issues," at:

<http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-pub-cult/>


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