[Insert editors list here]

We recently received a letter from an undergraduate contributor, telling us that he had heard “someone voice their suspicion that P-ROK had something to do with a conservative purge impulse disguised in the rhetoric of having an ‘open and unbiased’ learning environment.” First, we were horrified to be associated, however secondarily, with an impulse to “purge,” forbid, or close down. Then we were amused by the fortuitous timing of this rumor-our current issue is on Spin-as we were trying to figure out how to knit together the disparate definitions, distinctions, and demarcations which our contributors had offered without masking (or effacing) our own editorial voice.

Here we were, presented with the perfect diagnostic for our spin-ridden times: our claim to professional authority, our assertion of respect for objectivity in knowledge production (ever striven for but never fully achieved), is understood as an interested, political, even partisan statement. Of course, we should not be surprised: we launched ourselves into a media sphere dominated by the “fair and balanced” news of Fox, with Bill O’Reilly’s self-proclaimed “No Spin Zone” on the same network (O’Reilly, it happens, declined to be interviewed by P-ROK for this issue), and into a political environment where “spin,” the cardinal sin of the Clinton administration in the eyes of its Republican antagonists, has been taken to new heights in pursuit of an arrogation of executive power (including war-making power) perhaps unprecedented in American history.

We were motivated, in choosing this subject, to think more deeply about the impasses of knowledge under the domination of spin. Spin, we suspected, has quite dramatic effects on knowledge, on the role belief plays in assessing facts, on what counts as truth-effects that are far-reaching and often insidious. Is there an antidote to spin other than a claim to truth, to real, objective, hard facts? Can such a claim to objectivity and truth ever be successful when the greatest of the contemporary spin artists insist, for the most part successfully, that they exist outside of spin? When their spin works to insulate themselves from charges of spin? The thought that we, at P-ROK, may be “part of a conservative purge impulse,” merely wrapping ourselves in the language of diversity and plurality in order to achieve other effects, reminds us that we are certainly not insulated from the charge of spinning, but indeed are being spun even before publishing an issue which dissects the phenomenon. This prevalence of spin is a symptom, or perhaps a cause, of an impoverishment of political possibilities; it reveals a dominant tendency in our political culture to assign all statements, all speech, all knowledge to one of two boxes: liberal or conservative, red or blue, right or left, good or evil.

The facts, and interpretations of the facts, are more diverse, more uncontained than that. Spin, itself, as our most recent American administrations have shown, is quite neutral, an operation available for any political ideology or persuasion. It relies neither on the sensory overload resulting from too much information, nor on the weight of any one particular bit of info, but on the ability to put information in motion, on the speed at which it can be turned over, and on the multiplier effects of the twists and turns as it moves. Spin is all about time, and an aura of authority (“fair and balanced;” “I am the decider”). Motion over weight, speed over veracity, multiple perspectives over depth of verification, immediacy over duration. Spin is, importantly, active, and performative. It makes things happen and aids in assembling or dissembling a world-view, an order of things, around its constantly whirling and shifting center.

All of this may sound very familiar to those who know, for instance, Frederick Jameson’s celebrated 1984 definition of “post-modernism”-(to paraphrase): flatness, speed, compression, decentering, plurality, flux and indeterminacy. Superficially, spin can look very much like what post-modern philosophy is often charged with: relativism. This equation, between spin and philosophical relativism, has been made concerning the current administration’s disregard for “reality-based” modes of knowledge-generation. As Franklin Foer wrote in the New Republic in 2004, this administration “takes the radically postmodern view that ‘science,’ ‘objectivity,’ and ‘truth’ are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda.” But spin must be rigorously differentiated from the post-modernist fascination with “truth effects” and the sociology of scientific truth. The point about spin, however, is that it is a way of manipulating information with an eye to immediate effects (truthful or not), rather than a mechanism for making “truths” or determining the “truth-value” of a fact or proposition.

Nor can we sustain an equivalence based on the charge often leveled against post-modernists, of “unoriginality,” of just borrowing and pastiching, unconcerned with source or derivation. There is some greater aporia, some larger refusal of evaluation, at play in the work of spin-doctors. One possible source of the term comes from the early 1980’s efflorescence of turntabling and DJ artistry. The DJs, who now sustain a large industry of hip hop, dance music, and remixes of popular songs, play recorded music, sampling, juxtaposing, and assembling without apparent regard for sources, depth, or tradition. However, some mild ethnographic familiarity with this milieu convinces us that there are still standards and procedures of discrimination. There are more and less-skilled DJ’s, good and bad dance nights, better and worse remixes. In the universe of spin, on the other hand, a claim of evaluation is instantly transmuted into another instance of spin, unverifiable and immune to empirical, or any, argument.

There is an element of chicanery and confidence-artistry in spin doctoring that the high seriousness of postmodern philosophical preoccupations does not account for. There is a glee in the manipulations and prestidigitations of a Rush Limbaugh or an Ari Fleischer (admitting some distinction between what they each intend) that has little to do with the self-serious search for archaeological traces of different regimes of truth.

The political economy of spin is easier to discern than its abstract and “scientific” definition. Much as propaganda, initially a form of contest within a politicized sphere, yields to the professional propagandists of an official party-line, so too spin yields to professional spin doctors who exist in a bubble of spin. In spin the party-political effect of a certain construction of events is more important than its truth or falsity, and the intention is often to depoliticize a topic by turning it into “pure” entertainment. The professionalization of spin is inherent in our very language: as Harry Frankfurt points out, in our Forum, we speak, on the one hand, of “bullshit artists” and on the other of “spin doctors.” The potential authority of spin-doctors may be equivalent to that (once) held by Ph.D.’s and medical doctors. Then again, the spin-“doctor” may not, in fact, intend to make better (as in medicine), or to correct (as in academics), but merely to fix, to tamper with, to adulterate (that is, to doctor).

Sports and especially gambling metaphors are the most often cited sources for the term “spin.” To put spin on a ball is a way of outfoxing your opponent at bat, to change the ball’s apparent trajectory so it moves in unexpected and curious ways. To put a spin on a pair of dice is a way of cheating at craps. But perhaps we should be more charitable to the pitchers, grifters, hucksters, and con artists who provide a metaphoric source for spin. There is honor among thieves, and certainly between teams; while spin doctors, as we currently know them, appear to have none.

What is clear is that we must generate new forms of verification, new discriminations for a new era, some that may even apply specifically to the practice of spin. And for certain types of claims in the intellectual field we must demand some procedures, some formal standards of public reason, which can discriminate true from false-or, minimally, better-quality from worse-quality information. The new, elaborately democratic and highly popular open-source encyclopedia, Wikipedia, for instance, claims that it is a community striving for neutrality not objectivity. Conceivably a step forward. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia’s editors concede that their “neutral point of view” policy has “proven difficult to enforce consistently.”

Indeed, enforcement of standards is perhaps the greatest challenge in a spun universe. Spin’s primary effects are achieved through circulation, rapid rotation, renaming, strategic dissimulation, a temporal dizzying that contests and unsettles truth claims, formal procedures, and verifiability in order to disengage truth from any accredited authority. Spin makes academics particularly uncomfortable, for academic procedures of verification - irrespective of the field - are not fool-proof. They are complex, historically contingent, and only rarely can academics state things without equivocation (this editorial may serve as a case in point). Hence, the posture of self-doubt is frequently used against academics (as Lee Silver in the Forum points out with regard to scientists as expert witnesses). Modesty becomes a vulnerability rather than a virtue. The contingency of academic knowledge production and the initial position of agnosticism as to truth that must begin most academic inquiries are turned into accusations of professorial weakness and at the same time deployed for the strategic ends of fortifying non-academic positions of authority. See, for an example of this double effect, our own Donald Rumsfeld’s (Princeton ‘54) February 12, 2002, Department of Defense briefing, where, with great certainty, he listed the “known knowns … unknown knowns … [and] unknown unknowns” of the administration’s War on Terror, in order both to denigrate intellectual opposition, based on uncertainty, and to enlist support for his own un-self-critical and aprioristic positions.

We concede that at the end of our editorial process the conceptual questions posed in an era of spin remain open. Many experts, like Mary Douglas (Comptes Rendus), for example, simply think that since truth tends always to adhere to the positions of power and authority, then spin is a permanent condition. In our Interview Ralph Nader (Princeton ‘55), on the other hand, claims still to fight spin (which he calls “evasion”) with factual correction and empirical argument. The line demarcating spin from interpretation or argument is as yet blurry (both of the latter being essential elements of what Kant celebrated as “public reason”). We know it is there, but, for the moment, its precise location must be experimented with on a case-by-case basis. Writers routinely tailor their information to their intended audience, as in Patricia Crone’s (Innovations) new edited series of short popular biographies on major Muslims in history. To reach and inform an audience comprised of non-Arabic speaking Muslims, university students, and the general American public, what must the authors omit? Is this spin? The same questions arise (Forum) in any attempt to teach undergraduates.

Thus, where, and when, does spin find its ultimate limits? It is not merely an American phenomenon, as Stephen Kotkin (Comptes Rendus) shows us in writing about the new language of political attack and corruption in Russia. And, as Sadik al-Azm (Comptes Rendus) makes clear, what is almost invisibly spun in our political context, may be seen as baldfaced lies by a viewer located outside the political and cultural boundaries of America. Humor, too, he reminds us, is a great device for testing the limits of spin, and the patience of authority. Tony Grafton (Forum) quips that “spin works until nature bites you in the ass.” Or if nature keeps us waiting too long, we might instead look to the law, as in the recent conviction of Enron’s Kenneth (Kenny Boy) Lay and Jeffery Skilling for fraud and conspiracy. These convictions stand as a epitaph for an entire decade of financial excesses and management failures that were only revealed when the stock-market spin of a dawning epoch of limitless growth finally met “market realities;” a decade, the sequelae of which we are living out now, where self-certitude and spin substituted in equity markets for caution, reflection, and assessment of “fundamentals.”

Provisionally, we conclude that spin is a variety of interpretation: an interpretive act meant to subject words and concepts, data and information, to a whirling motion. Which, of course, with its implied invidious judgment as compared to academic rigor and rectitude, means that at one level we too are spinning spin.

In that spirit, we invited our contributors to 4Q & 4A to spin, which they surely did, with relish: speaking of “English professors who secretly loathe ‘gender-neutral’ language” (Robert George); describing “sexual politics” as “Politics without (having) sex”” (Stanley Corngold); describing “street politics” as “handing out copies of Karl Marx on Wall Street,” in a dream, no less (Ruben Gallo) or as “celebrating [the] Independence of Israel” by parading up and down Fifth Avenue in a gold cart (Ruth Westheimer).

In this pursuit we may, from time to time, be similarly gleeful, dismissive, sharp, even arrogant. What we refuse, however, is to “disguise our intentions in rhetoric.” That, then, is where we draw our final line.