Extracted from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pagre/message/511 via https://archive.org/details/yahoo-groups-2016-12-04T02-30-46Z-f494f3 pagre. Referenced by https://www.quora.com/What-is-issue-entrepreneurship
The other day I read John Keane's biography of Vaclav Havel (Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, London: Bloomsbury, 1999), and I'd like to reflect on the relevance of Havel's life and ideas to the current situation in the United States.
Vaclav Havel is a playwright and political essayist who led the dissident movement in communist Czechoslovakia and, after the 1989 revolution, spent 13 years (until this past February) as the Czech president. He is a hero, and he managed to live a worthwhile life in terrible conditions.
John Keane, for his part, is an English political theorist who is best known for bringing the work of Havel and other dissident intellectuals to a world audience in the 1980's. This work became immensely influential. Not only did it help somewhat to protect the dissident movement from repression, but it gave rise to the current discourse of "civil society" as a sphere of social life independent of the state.
Havel is by any measure a remarkable person, and in reading Keane's biography I was struck by a pattern in his life. The pattern begins in his teenage years, when he led a remarkable literary circle of his peers. The circle was called the Thirty-Sixers because its members had to be born in 1936, and it published several issues of its own literary journal. Having gathered this circle, Havel and his colleagues then sought out various Czech literary figures to get advice on their literary works. This is the same person who, much later, was one of the main organizers of the Charter 77 dissident movement, calling on the Czech government to uphold its commitments to human rights under the Helsinki Accords, and who was then, in 1989, a principal organizer of the Civic Forum, which represented the opposition in the transfer of power from the collapsing communist government.
The pattern in Havel's life is what I call issue entrepreneurship: pick an issue, gather a network of people with an interest in it, and organize activities among them. In the case of the Thirty-Sixers, the issue concerned the distinctive experience of a generation and its literary expression; in the case of Charter 77 it was human rights; and in the case of the Civic Forum it was the creation of new political structures to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Successful people, in my experience, engage in a great deal of issue entrepreneurship, repeatedly evolving their issues and expanding their networks as they go along. A well-chosen issue will identify what sociologists call a structural hole: a bunch of people, preferably already well-connected in other ways, who ought to know one another but don't. By identifying such an issue, the issue entrepreneur spots an opportunity to become centrally located in newly emerging social networks -- a position that can generally be converted to some kind of advantage, even if the details of that advantage are not necessarily clear at the outset. There is nothing wrong with this. It is a powerful way of understanding the world, and I wish that everyone knew how to do it. Yet this central skill of social life is a mystery to almost everyone, with the result that society is filled with misguided theories, e.g., that power is completely seamless and static, or that success is simply a matter of hard work or else entirely arbitrary. Issue entrepreneurship is rarely taught, and until recently it has scarcely been codified. So the real puzzle is how anyone ever learns it at all.
Havel's life is a case study in this puzzle. He was born to a wealthy family, and so perhaps he was socialized into the skills through his upbringing. Yet his family was not especially entrepreneurial. They did own a theater, and his charismatic uncle ran a film company, so that his interest in literature was understandable. But from Keane's description, he reminds me of numerous people I've met who seem to have been issue entrepreneurs from the time they were born.
In any case, the skill of issue enterpreneurship does not suffice to explain the phenomenon of Prague teenagers, surrounded by wars and political disasters, starting a literary circle and publishing their poetry. It speaks well for the health of Czech culture at that time, at least on an elite level, that the cultural forms of the literary circle were so readily available -- their practices not just familiar to a group of teenagers but appealing to them. This is a culture that understood that the world is made of ideas, and knew that it actually matters how well a group of young people is managing to express its distinctive generational experience in the form of poetry. This kind of intellectual seriousness ran throughout Havel's life, and it eventually provided the backbone of a dissident movement that had little else to sustain it.
All of this matters to Havel's subsequent life. I want to discuss two aspects of his work: his ideas about (what later came to be called) civil society and his concern with language. The problem for dissident intellectuals was how to oppose a regime that was willing to place overt opponents in prison -- how, in other words, to practice politics in a society where politics had been outlawed. Havel argued that the regime's opponents should build parallel structures: associations that were private and nonpolitical in character, but that provided the society with at least a minimum of connective tissue and intellectual life in order to avoid being wholly atomized. The point is not that he opposed politics in general, but that he believed that the political health of a society -- and, in the case of occupied Czechoslovakia, the potential for a political revival when the time was right -- required it to be healthy on a more basic, prepolitical level.
Havel was not simply generalizing from his own experience. His ideas grew from the intellectual community of which he was part, which in turn was part of a larger European tradition. But his lifelong disposition to issue entrepreneurship was an excellent example, perhaps the best in his whole society, of what he was talking about. By articulating issues and building networks, he helped to build the connective tissue of a substantial community, and this in turn provided him with a support system for his activities and an audience both within the country and internationally for his work.
I am particularly interested in his work on the subject of language. One of his early absurdist plays, for example, concerned the disaster inflicted on a bureaucracy by a newly rationalized language in which commonly used words were given the shortest spellings (the word for "wombat" had 216 letters) and words with similar meanings were made as dissimilar as possible. The bureaucrats were instantly rendered incapable of communicating, and so a new rationalized language was introduced in which words with similar meanings were made very similar, with similar results. It is important that he could count on his audience, living as they did in day-to-day absurdity of communist rule, to understand the absurdity of a rationally organized way of life, and especially the absurdity of attempts to exert rational control over language.
Aside from the intrinsic fascination of his well-lived life, I am interested in Havel for the consequences that his ideas hold for the contemporary United States. The connection may not be obvious. After all, the United States is a free society and the enemy of communism, is it not? But Havel, first of all, is not a simple anti-communist. It is more accurate to say that he is an anti-modernist in the fashion of Heidegger. Although he was especially emphatic about the need to overthrow communism, he diagnoses the ills of rational organization in all modern societies, due to the influence of technology. Unlike other opponents of communism such as Friedrich Hayek, he is no friend of the free market. For Havel, what is central is civil society: the way that people are knitted together in their beliefs and associations on the ground. Only on the foundation of civil society is democracy possible, and when the market conflicts with the connecting function of civil society then it has to take second place. Unlike many conservatives Havel does not advocate undoing the modern world. But he wants to construct a social foundation on which a democratic and sustainable society is feasible.
Havel's main concern, though, is not modernism but authoritarianism. And the United States is going through a period that the ancient Greeks would have understood very well as the early days of an authoritarian regime: dubious election results, a cult of personality honoring a mendacious leader who routinely issued false accusations of lying against his opponent, civil liberties "emergencies" that soon become permanent, increasing secrecy, centralization of political power, contempt for science and the legislature, demonization of the very idea of a democratic opposition, an institutionalized total war, and so on. As with many authoritarian regimes, these measures are rationalized as responses to a genuine enemy, yet all of them had already been in evidence before the attacks of September 11th and none of them has any necessary connection with such attacks.
Of particular concern in terms of Havel's philosophy is the special language that has been evolved over the last decade by the ruling party and its adjuncts. Words and phrases have been systematically turned into political weapons, often by reversing their customary meanings. Organizations like Fox News continually broadcast government propaganda while falsely accusing legitimate journalists of "bias". (Projection is a very common property of authoritarian language.)
My point is not that George Bush's America is perfectly equivalent to Gustav Husak's Czechoslovakia. Havel's ideas are useful not mechanically but in comparison and contrast. One important difference is that authoritarianism in Czechoslovakia was not home-grown, as in the United States, but was imposed from the outside. Without tanks rolling in the streets, the Czechs had proven quite capable, in 1968, of liberalizing the regime on their own. Czechs were able to recognize the absurdities that Havel lampooned in his plays in part because they already understood the regime and its lingo to be artificial and foreign. Not only that, but the authoritarianism that was imposed on Czechoslovakia, first in 1945 and then in 1968, was already senescent, its early dynamism having been lobotomized through successive waves of purges. Whereas the propaganda system in the United States originated in a business context in which investments, whether in propaganda or anything else, are contingent on measurable results, the Soviet system of propaganda was "scientific" only in a dogmatic fashion that had no room for such empirical reality-testing methods as focus groups and polling. American propaganda inhabits and simulates American vernacular language in a way that, aside from the older tradition of trade union discourse, had little analog in Czechoslovakia.
Thus, despite its thoroughgoing irrationality -- its consistent practice of standing just beyond the reach of rational debate -- the jargon of American propaganda is in an important sense rational. It ought by rights to be susceptible to the same kind of lampooning that Havel applied to the rationalized languages of his own milieu. Yet, whereas Havel's plays could readily occupy the gap between absurdity and reality in occupied Czechoslovakia, Americans have found that gap much harder to identify. Even the American regime's most vocal opponents have been essentially befuddled by the artificial languages that pelt them.
Havel's ideas about civil society and language were interrelated. In order for people to knit themselves a system of parallel structures beyond the reach of an oppressive politics, they needed to recognize the emptiness of the ruling party's language. In the United States, by contrast, not only is the ruling party's language altogether more sophisticated, but it actually includes a distorted version of the language of civil society. Heard for example during the 1990's debate on welfare reform, it aims at the creation of "intermediary institutions" that remove the populace from direct participation in politics and place it under the tutelage of the ruling party and its ideology.
The goal of this strategy, plainly, is occupy the entirety of the language, thus leaving the democratic opposition with no language with which to speak, whether by writing absurdist plays or otherwise. Czech authoritarianism, in Havel's analysis, was primarily concerned with the public sphere, thus leaving the private realm of apolitical association at least somewhat open for parallel initiatives. Contemporary American authoritarianism is different. Although ruling party opponents are routinely slandered in the media as traitors and spoken of as providing aid to terrorists, an offense for which people can be sent to prison with no legal process whatsoever, the party controls the public sphere primarily through bombast and projection, rather than through overt oppression. And, just as importantly, its strategies for occupying the language are equally effective in the sphere of private association.
Now despite all of these developments, the United States is nowhere near as authoritarian a society as Havel's Czechoslovakia. Although the rationalized irrationality of American propaganda is much greater than that of the communist Czechs, American society is in Havel's sense much healthier than the society that the Soviets invaded and occupied. One straightforward reason for this is that issue entrepreneurship is much more prevalent in the United States than it was in Czechoslovakia. The American tradition of autonomous association has of course always been celebrated -- not always justly, but we are speaking of comparisons. American society, being much less stratified by class, offers greater opportunity and thus incentive to those who embark on issue-entrepreneurial careers. The dynamism of the economy likewise depends upon and rewards that kind of initiative, both as business entrepreneurship in the narrow sense and career networking in a broader if incomplete sense that began to be codified widely in the 1980's.
Issue entrepreneurship, however, is not an automatic antidote for tendencies toward authoritarianism. The American ruling party apparatus consists almost exclusively of highly aggressive practitioners of issue entrepreneurship. What is needed and missing in the United States is the other major component of Vaclav Havel's life story -- the intellectual seriousness that believed down deep that the world is made of ideas and that the health of a society depends on the health of its language. To be sure, the United States does a remarkable job of motivating its young to be poets. Its universities are institutionally the strongest in the world, functioning as platforms for issue entrepreneurship to an almost unbelievably greater degree than those of, say, Germany and France. What is urgently needed is that sense, innate to the intellectuals of Central Europe, that something crucial is at stake in the health of the language. Civilization cannot survive when language becomes the terrain of a thoroughly instrumentalized political war. Vaclav Havel and his colleagues won a contest of decency against the dead hand of an authoritarian system that had nothing living inside it. Today's authoritarians are altogether more resourceful. Today's civil society will have to discover a correspondingly deeper meaning in its own ideals.
end
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