Thursday, January 05, 2006
Friday, October 14, 2005
The Reign Of Terror....
continues in Haiti:
Haiti To Delay Elections
In Haiti, interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said that "technical problems" have forced the government to delay elections set for Nov. 20 by three weeks. If confirmed, the delay would be the second time the elections have been postponed. The elections will be the first since the elected government of President Jean Bertrand-Aristide was overthrown in February 2004.
U.S. Millionaire to Run in Haiti, But Not Jean-Juste
Meanwhile, Haiti’s Supreme Court has ruled a Haitian-born U.S. millionaire may run in the presidential elections. Dumarsais Simeus, owner of a Texas food services company, had been barred from the race because he is a U.S. citizen. Simeus called the decision “a victory for the Haitian people.” Another prominent candidate, jailed priest Gerard Jean-Juste remains out of the race. Representatives of the Fanmi Lavalas, the party of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, tried to register him last month but were rejected on grounds he wasn’t present himself. Amnesty International calls him a “prisoner of conscience.” - DemocracyNow
Haiti To Delay Elections
In Haiti, interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said that "technical problems" have forced the government to delay elections set for Nov. 20 by three weeks. If confirmed, the delay would be the second time the elections have been postponed. The elections will be the first since the elected government of President Jean Bertrand-Aristide was overthrown in February 2004.
U.S. Millionaire to Run in Haiti, But Not Jean-Juste
Meanwhile, Haiti’s Supreme Court has ruled a Haitian-born U.S. millionaire may run in the presidential elections. Dumarsais Simeus, owner of a Texas food services company, had been barred from the race because he is a U.S. citizen. Simeus called the decision “a victory for the Haitian people.” Another prominent candidate, jailed priest Gerard Jean-Juste remains out of the race. Representatives of the Fanmi Lavalas, the party of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, tried to register him last month but were rejected on grounds he wasn’t present himself. Amnesty International calls him a “prisoner of conscience.” - DemocracyNow
Pinter
via warszawa at Persistence of Vision:
Harold Pinter:
In Mansfield Park
Harold Pinter:
The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.
But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.
What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
In Mansfield Park
Thursday, October 13, 2005
War On Terra
MARGARET MONTOYA: Sister, today we have seen the photographs from Abu Ghraib. I'm wondering, when you saw those photographs, what was your reaction?- DemocracyNow
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: I could not even stand to look at those photographs; neither could many of the other torture survivors, especially those of us from Latin America.
MARGARET MONTOYA: Can you tell us why it was difficult to look at those photographs?
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: Because so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me.
AMY GOODMAN: At that point, Sister Dianna Ortiz broke down, but she continued to testify in this mock trial in Washington. Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who went to Guatemala to work with women and children. The human rights attorney, Margaret Montoya, then asked Dianna Ortiz what things she saw in the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib that were done to her. Dianna Ortiz composed herself after breaking down and answered the question.
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming – filming parts of the torture that occurred, parts of the torture that I was forced to participate in.
MARGARET MONTOYA: So why did they film you, Sister?
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: They were laughing while they were filming these horrible things and threatening that later they would show them to my friends and family or even publish them.
MARGARET MONTOYA: And what were your feelings about that?
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: It was unbearable. No matter what you tell yourself rationally, those threats haunt you for a lifetime. It's part of the psychological torture of making you feel that it's all somehow your fault, that you are to blame for it all, also that they can still find you and hurt you later on.
MARGARET MONTOYA: Is there more that you can tell us about?
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ: There were other people in the clandestine cell, the clandestine prison, as well, and I could hear terrible screams. Many were killed. I saw some bodies. There were children, as well.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
"Eldorado"
Mamadou Diakite explains in the Socialist Worker his attempt to cross from Morocco onto Spanish territory:
My second child died when she was four. She was very small when she was born, but seemed to get better and then was carried away by flu or something. She was too weak, too underfed I think.- via bat at Lenin's Tomb
When I saw her poor shrivelled body I decided that I would no longer be a shameful person who cannot provide food for his family. Instead I would go to Eldorado — to Europe — and get work and make my parents and my family happy and proud of me.
[...]
Around Melilla there are makeshift camps. Ours was known as “the ghetto”. There were people there from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana and Nigeria.
We all just wanted to get to Europe to work. I would do anything to get money for my children.
Most of us were young men, but some people had their families there as well. I stayed three months in the ghetto, learning about the razor-wire fences that keep you out and waiting for a chance to get across.
It was not a nice place, there was very little water and food was hard to come by.
One night we agreed that we would rush the fence. We made our ladders from branches and then at night we went to the fence. I could not believe what happened.
There were police with tear gas and rubber bullets and batons. Many of us were beaten, others very badly cut by the wire. Nobody got across. The Spanish and the Moroccan police both hate you, both are out to club you.
The second time there were more of us and we coordinated better between the camps. I think ten people made it this time, although many were very badly beaten.
Then recently 500 of us made another attempt. Some people were killed because there was live firing. But dozens got through. I was badly beaten by a policeman and did not make it across.
It was appalling to see those broken bodies, human beings treated worse than dogs. But it is a measure of our condition that overall the result seemed good to us because some people might have made it to Spain.
If you said to me roll a dice and if you get a six you will get to Spain, and if you get a one you will die, then I would happily roll the dice rather than go on as I am.
Columbus Day
Happy White Supremacy Day.
In honour of this day, celebrating the rise of Eurosupremacy over the globe, I'll make my little contribution to the debate about trolling.
The two bloggers whose at times histrionic efforts to stifle stark racist expression in comments boxes and haloscans have most drawn my attention have proven, both, to be themselves energetic purveyors of all sorts of racist thought and discourse. One of them, whose favourite expression elsewhere is "Ban that racist, please" - this means: "I can authoritatively identify racism, am now displaying for all to see how it pains my delicately liberal sensibilities to make contact with it, and am thus certified free of that contagion myself" - has left a handful of racist comments here, anonymously, including the bizarre claim that non-white people do not employ the term 'ruling class'. (No foolin'.)
This is hardly surprising. The perpetuation of the arrangements of power and privilege which racism allows requires discursive discretion. It is in the interests of the beneficiaries of racism, and in only their interests, to preserve the liberal veneer of 'tolerance' on the racist structure of "common sense" and mainstream thought. To accomplish this, direct expressions of that underlying structure must be suppressed. Through exhibitions of taking exception to direct expressions, the covert racist earns a reputation as an anti-racist, under which veil he or she may continue to propagate the ideology which maintains his or her position of power by virtue of race and class.
It is much like the horror with which the Fox News spokesgolems' frank admission of profit-seeking on the tail of the London bombings was greeted by the entire class whose money managers of course were doing exactly that on their behalf, as always, looking for profit from human misery. There can be of course no profit to investors any other way. But maintaining the illusion of a reasonable degree, of tasteful moderation, the illusion that human misery is the accidental, not deliberatly contrived, effect of profit seeking, the illusion of a threshhold beyond which killing for money becomes vulgar, is in the interest of the class as a whole and results in this scapegoating and communal disavowal of the too-blatant, the wolf who forgot his sheepskin, just as the polite liberal racists of the blogsphere go on theatrical crusades against the ranting racist trolls.
Not in front of the servants!
Also for Colombus Day, from Giaccomo Leopardi's Dialogo di Cristoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez:
In honour of this day, celebrating the rise of Eurosupremacy over the globe, I'll make my little contribution to the debate about trolling.
The two bloggers whose at times histrionic efforts to stifle stark racist expression in comments boxes and haloscans have most drawn my attention have proven, both, to be themselves energetic purveyors of all sorts of racist thought and discourse. One of them, whose favourite expression elsewhere is "Ban that racist, please" - this means: "I can authoritatively identify racism, am now displaying for all to see how it pains my delicately liberal sensibilities to make contact with it, and am thus certified free of that contagion myself" - has left a handful of racist comments here, anonymously, including the bizarre claim that non-white people do not employ the term 'ruling class'. (No foolin'.)
This is hardly surprising. The perpetuation of the arrangements of power and privilege which racism allows requires discursive discretion. It is in the interests of the beneficiaries of racism, and in only their interests, to preserve the liberal veneer of 'tolerance' on the racist structure of "common sense" and mainstream thought. To accomplish this, direct expressions of that underlying structure must be suppressed. Through exhibitions of taking exception to direct expressions, the covert racist earns a reputation as an anti-racist, under which veil he or she may continue to propagate the ideology which maintains his or her position of power by virtue of race and class.
It is much like the horror with which the Fox News spokesgolems' frank admission of profit-seeking on the tail of the London bombings was greeted by the entire class whose money managers of course were doing exactly that on their behalf, as always, looking for profit from human misery. There can be of course no profit to investors any other way. But maintaining the illusion of a reasonable degree, of tasteful moderation, the illusion that human misery is the accidental, not deliberatly contrived, effect of profit seeking, the illusion of a threshhold beyond which killing for money becomes vulgar, is in the interest of the class as a whole and results in this scapegoating and communal disavowal of the too-blatant, the wolf who forgot his sheepskin, just as the polite liberal racists of the blogsphere go on theatrical crusades against the ranting racist trolls.
Not in front of the servants!
Also for Colombus Day, from Giaccomo Leopardi's Dialogo di Cristoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez:
Colombo: Ma da altro canto, considero che la pratica si discorda spesso, anzi il più delle volte, dalla speculazione: e anche dico fra me: che puoi tu sapere che ciascuna parte del mondo si rassomigli alla altre in modo, che essendo l'emisfero d'oriente occupato parte dalla terra e parte dall'acqua, seguiti che anche l'occidente debba essere diviso tra questa e quella? che puoi sapere che non sia tutto occupato da un mare unico e immenso? o che invece di terra, o anco di terra e di acqua, non contengo qualche altro elemento? Dato che abbia terre e mari come l'altro, non potrebbe essere che fosse inabitato? anzi inabitabile? Facciamo che non sia meno abitato del nostro: che certezza hai tu che vi abbia creature razionali, come in questo? e quando pure ve ne abbia, come ti assicuri che sieno uomini, e non qualche altro genere di animali intelletivi? ed essendo uomini: che non sieno differentissimi da quelli che tu conosci? ponghiamo caso, molto maggiore di corpo, più gagliardi, più destri: dotati naturalmente di molto maggiore ingegno e spirito; anche assai meglio inciviliti, e ricchi di molta più scienza ed arte? Queste cose vengo pensando fra me stesso. E per verità, la natura si vede essere fornita di tanta potenza, e gli effetti di quella essere così vari e molteplici, che non solamente non si può fare giudizio certo di quel che ella abbia operato ed operi in parti lontanisssime e del tutto incognite, al mondo nostro, ma possiamo anche dubitate che uno s'inganni di gran lunga argomentando da questo a quelle, e non sarebbe contrario alla verisimilitudine l'immaginare che le cose del mondo ignoto, o tutte or in parte, fossero maravgliose e strane a rispetto nostro.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Laboratory
THERE are good poor people and bad poor people and invisible (white) poor people. The grateful poor and the ungrateful poor. The inspiring and the ones who need to be rebuked. The "good" poor woman in Nickels and Dimes with "a perpetual smile that masks her melancholy eyes," who has a back story (that is, we know some of the prior circumstances of her life) and who works and volunteers and takes care, as best she can, of her five children with very little money or support. Then there are the "bad" poor people of Scattered in a Storm's Wake and Caught in a Clash of Cultures. Those who aren't grateful enough for the help that is being given to them -- those who are asked "why they didn't get out" of New Orleans when they could. "Their time at the mission [where they would be sheltered] would become both an object lesson in the psychic strains of disaster recovery and a laboratory for the challenges of sheltering victims so different from their caregivers." Hmmm. Object lesson and laboratory.- HystericalBlackness
Shepherd And Flock
The highly regarded biologist Garrett Hardin wrote in his 1949 book Biology: Its Human Implications that "Either there must be a relatively painless weeding out before birth or a more painful and wasteful elimination of individuals after birth. If we neglect a program of eugenics, will the production of children be non-selective? By 1968 Paul Ehrlich, in his Population Bomb, was urging a cutback in government programs of "death control", i.e., public health. Nixon cut health benefits and pumped money into population control.- Alexander Cockburn
Allan Chase, in The Legacy of Malthus, says 63,678 people were compulsorily sterilized in America between 1907 and 1964 in the thirty states and one colony with such laws. But there were hundreds of thousands more sterilizations which were nominally voluntary but actually coerced. Chase quotes federal judge Gerhard Gesell as saying in 1974, in a suit brought on behalf of poor victims of involuntary sterilization, "Over the past few years an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually by state and federal agencies." This rate equals that achieved in Nazi Germany.
Gesell said that "an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization. Patients receiving Medicaid assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure."
Writing towards the end of the 1970s, Chase reckoned that probably at least 200,000 Americans per year were the victims of involuntary and irreversible sterilization.
In the mid-1990s liberals flourished the same basic hypothesis as Bennett. They said there was a cycle of poverty and welfare dependency that bred crime. In 1994 Arizona and Nebraska prohibited welfare increases for recipients who had additional babies while on the dole. Connecticut in the same year gave serious consideration to a bill providing additional subsidies for welfare mothers who accepted a conctraceptive implant (called Norplant).
Though race specific terms were usually avoided by eugenicists, who preferred words like "weak minded" or "imbeciles" (a favorite of that enthusiast for sterilizing, Oliver Wendell Homes, a jurist much admired by liberals) the target was, by and large, blacks. What direct sterilization could not prevent, incarceration or medically justified confinement has also sought to achieve.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Gore Packs A Lot Of Meaning
The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.- Al Gore
(Train was crowded with turrists. I'm too tired to unpack.)
USelf-Government
US Threatens Nicaragua-DemocracyNow
The United States is threatening political groups and politicians that Nicaragua will lose millions of dollars in aid from Washington if any moves are made to bring down the US-backed president, Enrique Bolaños. In a move reminiscent of US intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the US deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, is in the capital Managua this week to head off the possibility of the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, returning to power. The Nicaraguan national assembly has been debating a proposal to impeach Bolaños over campaign finance violations. He was elected in 2001. Zoellick said that $4billion in debt forgiveness and a $175million grant to Nicaragua would be withheld if Bolanos is impeached. After the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the US organized, armed and funded death squads in Nicaragua known as the Contras.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Sensitive Liberal Overman
Schwartzenegger; a real life fascist, also a fascist icon, the central figure in a series of fascist fables.
He made one flop in his career, a hugely expensive one: The Last Action Hero. It flopped perhaps because it was not fascist. It had light fascist touches, but it was dyed in the wool liberal, a veritable manifesto of the liberalism which the third wayers harnessed to take the reigns from Thatcher and Reagan. It was also fairly clever in parts, even almost witty. The target of its overt satire was Schwartzennegger himself and the genre he had been so successful at selling.
The Last Action Hero was an example of an already existing and still existing cinema genre of Alices and reverse Alices, Oz and reverse Ozs. A fictional character in the real world or a 'real' person (from the baseline realist diegetic plane) in the world of some genre. Truman Show was a more recent one. Purple Rose of Cairo took the Fictional Ideal Hero of depression era glammy movies into the harsher world of Allen's naturalism, and also allowed the heroine from the harsher world a visit onto the paradise of the screen, though briefly.
This genre's gimmick of course is the creation of dual realities: both are fictions, but there is a hierarchy; one is fictional with reference to the other, the other only fictional with reference to something outside the frame (the thing that television has recently disappeared).
But what the double presence does, ideologically, generally, is deny or in some way pervert the understanding of production, the relation of production between the real and the fictional, obscuring that that the fictional universe is produced by an industry in the real one. The premise is normally that the fictional universe has gotten out of the control of the real one, and has a reality, on its own terms, experienced by the beings in it, equal to the 'real' world; the fantasy situation is set up so that the interaction of the two worlds involves vying, a competition, with a two-way, mutual action, accomplished by those who cross over from one to the other. So 'real people' are normally portrayed as only slightly less, if at all less, formed by and determined by their realist genre than characters are by their low genres. Lightwieght magic - a 'charm', a device from the oldest fantastic - is involved.
(In Truman Show, which is a quirky exemplar of the genre abutting another genre - horror - this fact of production is not disguised; Truman is a fully human prisoner of the producers of a television show, not a shell, not a rôle, although he is characterized and deployed in ways which make the rôle of Truman in Truman Show resemble more closely the rôle-rôles of double fictions than it resembles the rôles, tout court of single fictions. A deliberate maximization of confusions in the highly disturbed frame of the belated fictionality of the spectacle. A fictional character, the rôle Truman in the movie Truman Show, played by a celebrity Jim Carrey, underlying the illusory real man within the film's diegetic plane, the individual Truman who is the prisoner of the producers of the Television Truman Show, doubling as a semi-fictional character in that Television Show, that is a fictional character by virtue of being forced to lead a fictional life which is broadcast on television, but whom the fake audience know is a 'real person' - and whom the real audience know is Jim Carrey - a)leading a fictional life b)pretending to be a real man leading a fictional life.)
That exception aside:
Normally in these Alice/Anti-Alices, we have a pair of fictions serving as foils for eachother but the pair together serving also as both foils and substitutes for the older pair whose interaction generates modern fiction in the first place: Illusion and Reality. The Don Quixote meaning machine. Partrigde at the theatre.
When Partridge is at the theatre, though, the actors are knowing and savvy (as is their educated audience) and he is innocent. In The Last Action Hero, the little real boy, the Partridge, is knowing and savvy and the fictional killing machine overman is innocent. He is one degree more fictional than 'an actor' in a fiction playing a character inside a fiction in a fiction. He is the rôle, detatched from the actor-in-the-fiction (the celebrity Schwartzenneger himsef), 'come to life.' As rôle he is liberalism's tabula rasa. It turns out his environment is responsible for his violence; he is intensely responsive to alterations of conditions, the left-liberal dream of the re-makable individual. And just how innocent he is, this 'merely' fictional killing machine, and how sensitive - his discovery of Mozart! his crush on a 'real,' not glamorous single mother - is progressively exposed.
These films generally are overtly concerned with 'popping the bubbles of genre,' of the lower order of fiction - of satirizing them with reference to the higher order of fiction which serves as 'reality' in comparison. (Again when needed constructing a nonexistent innocent audience to carry on the myth of a bumpkin credulity in pulp fiction unlike, and despicable in comparison to, the geek-hipster 'fandom' of Tarantino consumers or the like.)
Slyly then, these double helix fictions are 'apologizing' for the the 'anchor' fictions, these 'faux-realities' within the overall fiction, disguising their own ideological operations, which appear to be necessitated by the more fictional fictions, to be ruled by them in the sense that the 'real' is obliged to correct the exaggeration. This appears to be the causality at work - genre first, chosen object of lamppon, then its systematic debunking through 'realism.' The generic workings of the 'outer' fictions seem less contrived when made to clash with the generic workings of their own exaggerated self-portraits.
The Last Action Hero is a lampoon of action films but of course is a classic action film itself; it is perfectly generic while at the same time a satire of its own genre. This is really a bit of a puzzle, an impressive shell-game, an illusion requring more than ordinary narrative deck-stacking.
These double decker fictions create fictions within the fictions which are identifiably 1)didactic and/or 2)escapist and/or 3) sensational. The relations between the two fictions, as a possible arena for the examination of the propaganda fuctions of fiction and genre - a common feature of noht 18th and 20th century novels - are emphatically not explored.
It is actually this mood of the fiction within the fiction, this type of twice-fictional environment, which the whole of Buffy adopts, its traditional foil of faux-real simply jettisoned - but really right there, up close, in the commercial spots and on the rest of the dial, around which the viewer is flipping costantly. (The rest of the channel choices are the faux real for the inner Buffy fiction, faintly distinguished by its archess).
As with the speech of the Action Hero inside the action film inside Last Action Hero, nearly everyting the characters in Buffy say is a line from another television show or film or close. Game Show. Thriller. Teen romance. They are inside another show. But they are also conscious of it - like the action hero once returned to his fictional fishtank after his Alice adventure in the less fictional 'real world.' Now all these lines we've heard five hundred times before are spoken again, but with an ever so slightly different voice, a knowing voice, speaking through the smirk of adoring disdain, but the disdain is a)gratuitous and b) is covering up the absence of the foil, of the 'real', of some more authentic and meaningful or at least less clichéd vocabulary. The elided adventure into the real world - where the audience is on the sofa - these characters are faintly suggested to have had, like the Action Hero, has not of course made them real children. They just know they aren't real. This genre of double-fiction is in a sense the repressed history of Buffy's formal posture.
The Buffians achieve their kewl status, in comparison to implied but actually absent foils, by sneering at themselves, at their bad-tv echolalia, but in fact, they have nothing else. No other language, no other 'thoughts', propositions, rhetoric, than these clichés they recycle. The recycling is given an appearance of being voluntary. An object of choice. They appear to be instrumentalizing a box of brightly coloured babyblocks with logos on them, playing with all the toys one carries home in the Saban tote from MIP. On the level of pure style, the clichés endlessly spouted by Buffians are a degraded replacemlent for erudition and experience, for knowledge. Television characters who have a simulacrum of 'historical consciousness' could reasonably display it by the constant reference to television, their own history. The way Buffy delivers announcer lines from Game Shows instead of human-like thought is much like the way aged scholars would spout Latin clichés; but it indicates that these are the capsules of possible thoughts, possible positions, authoritative and debased simlulataneously. A friendly form of erudition, one that everyone has already mastered by watching television.
What hasn't been heard before on television, what seems not obvious and identifiable as this or that moment of television, for Buffy consumers thus appears evil, or nonsense, or must immediately be gutted and refitted into one of those capsules. Complex, adult thoughts, complex real history, cannot fit; they are inadmissible; they need not be precisly expelled because they never appear, they are pre-emptively eliminated by the style. The whole range of thoughts which cannot be expressed in these formulae are simply rendered useless socially, and worse.
What is most disturbing in Buffy is the air of extreme self-satisfaction with this banality reheated in the microwave over and over and over, still amusing the 'presence.' This supreme contentment with the situation.
The liberal The Last Action Hero is, in contrast, both giddy in the slightly Buffyesque vein of being its own biggest 'fan,' and deeply anxious. The narrative enacts the realization of a suspected threat with which liberalism is concerned in its yes-buttish way - Yes it's dishonest, But a vibrant debate is necessary for a healthy society or Yes, freedom of expression is paramount, But the prestige and economic power of these fictions may render them a fit object of regulation - that the action genre is actually incubating forces which will bring psychological and physical harm to real people in the real world, while the positive effects they have - and they are also in evidence - may be minor and unimportant in comparison the the level and urgency of the threat.
The first half of the film argues fairly unambiguously and persuasively and even with a kind of passion that the action genre is the product of the sadistic imagination of sadistic, avaricious appropriators. That in this sense it is deeply anti-humanity. Then the action unwinds inevitably toward the 'But' to this Yes, its excuse, its forgiveness; the genre is in the end the giver of life, that which alone can nullify death, can infallibly punish the wicked and monstrously evil and reward the brave and good, the place of redemption and moral certainty for the rôle, the tabula rasa, that is humanity.
The Last Action Hero can't decide about action films, but it's indecision is its own theme and mode of production. It leans toward action films on several axes - of narrative, style, generic value-ordering - and strongly against them on the built-in 'values' liberal-interpretive plane. The film demonstrates, as if at a trade show for genres, the ideological flexibility of the action genre by having the narrative enact its othering and condemnation (in the inner, and fascist, fiction) and recuperation and redemption (in the outer, and liberal one) simultaneously.
A more thoroughly liberal gesture is unimaginable.
He made one flop in his career, a hugely expensive one: The Last Action Hero. It flopped perhaps because it was not fascist. It had light fascist touches, but it was dyed in the wool liberal, a veritable manifesto of the liberalism which the third wayers harnessed to take the reigns from Thatcher and Reagan. It was also fairly clever in parts, even almost witty. The target of its overt satire was Schwartzennegger himself and the genre he had been so successful at selling.
The Last Action Hero was an example of an already existing and still existing cinema genre of Alices and reverse Alices, Oz and reverse Ozs. A fictional character in the real world or a 'real' person (from the baseline realist diegetic plane) in the world of some genre. Truman Show was a more recent one. Purple Rose of Cairo took the Fictional Ideal Hero of depression era glammy movies into the harsher world of Allen's naturalism, and also allowed the heroine from the harsher world a visit onto the paradise of the screen, though briefly.
This genre's gimmick of course is the creation of dual realities: both are fictions, but there is a hierarchy; one is fictional with reference to the other, the other only fictional with reference to something outside the frame (the thing that television has recently disappeared).
But what the double presence does, ideologically, generally, is deny or in some way pervert the understanding of production, the relation of production between the real and the fictional, obscuring that that the fictional universe is produced by an industry in the real one. The premise is normally that the fictional universe has gotten out of the control of the real one, and has a reality, on its own terms, experienced by the beings in it, equal to the 'real' world; the fantasy situation is set up so that the interaction of the two worlds involves vying, a competition, with a two-way, mutual action, accomplished by those who cross over from one to the other. So 'real people' are normally portrayed as only slightly less, if at all less, formed by and determined by their realist genre than characters are by their low genres. Lightwieght magic - a 'charm', a device from the oldest fantastic - is involved.
(In Truman Show, which is a quirky exemplar of the genre abutting another genre - horror - this fact of production is not disguised; Truman is a fully human prisoner of the producers of a television show, not a shell, not a rôle, although he is characterized and deployed in ways which make the rôle of Truman in Truman Show resemble more closely the rôle-rôles of double fictions than it resembles the rôles, tout court of single fictions. A deliberate maximization of confusions in the highly disturbed frame of the belated fictionality of the spectacle. A fictional character, the rôle Truman in the movie Truman Show, played by a celebrity Jim Carrey, underlying the illusory real man within the film's diegetic plane, the individual Truman who is the prisoner of the producers of the Television Truman Show, doubling as a semi-fictional character in that Television Show, that is a fictional character by virtue of being forced to lead a fictional life which is broadcast on television, but whom the fake audience know is a 'real person' - and whom the real audience know is Jim Carrey - a)leading a fictional life b)pretending to be a real man leading a fictional life.)
That exception aside:
Normally in these Alice/Anti-Alices, we have a pair of fictions serving as foils for eachother but the pair together serving also as both foils and substitutes for the older pair whose interaction generates modern fiction in the first place: Illusion and Reality. The Don Quixote meaning machine. Partrigde at the theatre.
When Partridge is at the theatre, though, the actors are knowing and savvy (as is their educated audience) and he is innocent. In The Last Action Hero, the little real boy, the Partridge, is knowing and savvy and the fictional killing machine overman is innocent. He is one degree more fictional than 'an actor' in a fiction playing a character inside a fiction in a fiction. He is the rôle, detatched from the actor-in-the-fiction (the celebrity Schwartzenneger himsef), 'come to life.' As rôle he is liberalism's tabula rasa. It turns out his environment is responsible for his violence; he is intensely responsive to alterations of conditions, the left-liberal dream of the re-makable individual. And just how innocent he is, this 'merely' fictional killing machine, and how sensitive - his discovery of Mozart! his crush on a 'real,' not glamorous single mother - is progressively exposed.
These films generally are overtly concerned with 'popping the bubbles of genre,' of the lower order of fiction - of satirizing them with reference to the higher order of fiction which serves as 'reality' in comparison. (Again when needed constructing a nonexistent innocent audience to carry on the myth of a bumpkin credulity in pulp fiction unlike, and despicable in comparison to, the geek-hipster 'fandom' of Tarantino consumers or the like.)
Slyly then, these double helix fictions are 'apologizing' for the the 'anchor' fictions, these 'faux-realities' within the overall fiction, disguising their own ideological operations, which appear to be necessitated by the more fictional fictions, to be ruled by them in the sense that the 'real' is obliged to correct the exaggeration. This appears to be the causality at work - genre first, chosen object of lamppon, then its systematic debunking through 'realism.' The generic workings of the 'outer' fictions seem less contrived when made to clash with the generic workings of their own exaggerated self-portraits.
The Last Action Hero is a lampoon of action films but of course is a classic action film itself; it is perfectly generic while at the same time a satire of its own genre. This is really a bit of a puzzle, an impressive shell-game, an illusion requring more than ordinary narrative deck-stacking.
These double decker fictions create fictions within the fictions which are identifiably 1)didactic and/or 2)escapist and/or 3) sensational. The relations between the two fictions, as a possible arena for the examination of the propaganda fuctions of fiction and genre - a common feature of noht 18th and 20th century novels - are emphatically not explored.
It is actually this mood of the fiction within the fiction, this type of twice-fictional environment, which the whole of Buffy adopts, its traditional foil of faux-real simply jettisoned - but really right there, up close, in the commercial spots and on the rest of the dial, around which the viewer is flipping costantly. (The rest of the channel choices are the faux real for the inner Buffy fiction, faintly distinguished by its archess).
As with the speech of the Action Hero inside the action film inside Last Action Hero, nearly everyting the characters in Buffy say is a line from another television show or film or close. Game Show. Thriller. Teen romance. They are inside another show. But they are also conscious of it - like the action hero once returned to his fictional fishtank after his Alice adventure in the less fictional 'real world.' Now all these lines we've heard five hundred times before are spoken again, but with an ever so slightly different voice, a knowing voice, speaking through the smirk of adoring disdain, but the disdain is a)gratuitous and b) is covering up the absence of the foil, of the 'real', of some more authentic and meaningful or at least less clichéd vocabulary. The elided adventure into the real world - where the audience is on the sofa - these characters are faintly suggested to have had, like the Action Hero, has not of course made them real children. They just know they aren't real. This genre of double-fiction is in a sense the repressed history of Buffy's formal posture.
The Buffians achieve their kewl status, in comparison to implied but actually absent foils, by sneering at themselves, at their bad-tv echolalia, but in fact, they have nothing else. No other language, no other 'thoughts', propositions, rhetoric, than these clichés they recycle. The recycling is given an appearance of being voluntary. An object of choice. They appear to be instrumentalizing a box of brightly coloured babyblocks with logos on them, playing with all the toys one carries home in the Saban tote from MIP. On the level of pure style, the clichés endlessly spouted by Buffians are a degraded replacemlent for erudition and experience, for knowledge. Television characters who have a simulacrum of 'historical consciousness' could reasonably display it by the constant reference to television, their own history. The way Buffy delivers announcer lines from Game Shows instead of human-like thought is much like the way aged scholars would spout Latin clichés; but it indicates that these are the capsules of possible thoughts, possible positions, authoritative and debased simlulataneously. A friendly form of erudition, one that everyone has already mastered by watching television.
What hasn't been heard before on television, what seems not obvious and identifiable as this or that moment of television, for Buffy consumers thus appears evil, or nonsense, or must immediately be gutted and refitted into one of those capsules. Complex, adult thoughts, complex real history, cannot fit; they are inadmissible; they need not be precisly expelled because they never appear, they are pre-emptively eliminated by the style. The whole range of thoughts which cannot be expressed in these formulae are simply rendered useless socially, and worse.
What is most disturbing in Buffy is the air of extreme self-satisfaction with this banality reheated in the microwave over and over and over, still amusing the 'presence.' This supreme contentment with the situation.
The liberal The Last Action Hero is, in contrast, both giddy in the slightly Buffyesque vein of being its own biggest 'fan,' and deeply anxious. The narrative enacts the realization of a suspected threat with which liberalism is concerned in its yes-buttish way - Yes it's dishonest, But a vibrant debate is necessary for a healthy society or Yes, freedom of expression is paramount, But the prestige and economic power of these fictions may render them a fit object of regulation - that the action genre is actually incubating forces which will bring psychological and physical harm to real people in the real world, while the positive effects they have - and they are also in evidence - may be minor and unimportant in comparison the the level and urgency of the threat.
The first half of the film argues fairly unambiguously and persuasively and even with a kind of passion that the action genre is the product of the sadistic imagination of sadistic, avaricious appropriators. That in this sense it is deeply anti-humanity. Then the action unwinds inevitably toward the 'But' to this Yes, its excuse, its forgiveness; the genre is in the end the giver of life, that which alone can nullify death, can infallibly punish the wicked and monstrously evil and reward the brave and good, the place of redemption and moral certainty for the rôle, the tabula rasa, that is humanity.
The Last Action Hero can't decide about action films, but it's indecision is its own theme and mode of production. It leans toward action films on several axes - of narrative, style, generic value-ordering - and strongly against them on the built-in 'values' liberal-interpretive plane. The film demonstrates, as if at a trade show for genres, the ideological flexibility of the action genre by having the narrative enact its othering and condemnation (in the inner, and fascist, fiction) and recuperation and redemption (in the outer, and liberal one) simultaneously.
A more thoroughly liberal gesture is unimaginable.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Faith And Fascism: Another Slayer Ordained By Heaven
Buffy: What do you want?
Angel: The same thing you do.
Buffy: Okay. What do I want?
Angel: To kill them. To kill them all.
Buffy: Sorry, that's incorrect, but you do get this lovely watch and a year's supply of Turtle Wax. What I want is to be left alone!
She doesn't want to, she has to.
RONALD CASS:The Constitution is designed to give the President the power to make these nominations and appointments on a heavy presumption in favor of the President's selections. I think both in terms of the history and structure of the Constitution and the sense of what this President stands for, people should look at this and say we trust the President, he's made a selection of somebody he knows well, he has told us what he stands for, and he has consistently promoted judges who fit that model. I expect Harriet Miers will, as well.- DemocracyNow
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader?
RALPH NADER: It's not a matter of trust, as the former dean of Boston University Law School should know. It’s a matter of public examination and evaluation, not just by the public at large, but by the Constitutionally-invested U.S. Senate providing advice and consent. And what President Bush has done is appoint as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court of the United States a confidante whose record is going to be confidential, because all the memos she wrote to him, her advice to him as governor of Texas, her advice to Bush as President, all of the paperwork is all going to be confidential.
So here you have this spectacle, where a nation full of jurists and law professors and lawyers who could provide the talent and experience and a record for open examination being shoved aside, and the President is appointing a confidante whose record is confidential. Now, if the Senate does not rise to that challenge, that itself sets a very, very dubious precedent. It is not a matter of trusting the President. It’s a matter of revealing to millions of Americans in open hearings what her positions are, what she advised, what she stood for, what she stood against on the momentous issues before the President of the United States, and you can be sure that the White House is going to say that's confidential. In fact, she was part of the President's coterie which insisted that the memos written by Judge Roberts when he was in the Solicitor General's office in the Justice Department were confidential and could not be given to the Senate.
Buffy: I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me. There is something supernatural at work here. Get your books! Look stuff up!
We are all doomed. Unless:
Darla: Don't let her hunt you down. Don't whimper and mewl like a mangy human. Kill [read: create]. Feed. Live!
One of the contemporary innovations in which Buffy's fascism participates is of course tone and mood: while fascism in the past was traditionally dour, and seemed almost to require a posture of humourless intensity, Buffy's posture is one of unrelieved 'teevee irony' - a particularly narrow self-reflexivity, a sterile meta-sarcasm, a degraded form of faux-sarcasm which treats with the appearance or (empty) tone of sarcasm things never meant to be taken seriously in the first place. It disingenuously mistakes its objects in order to slyly grant them a seriousness they never possessed, a seriousness retroactively implied by the pantomime of utterly needless and indeed impossible mockery.
Buffy treats other television programs, no more and no less hokey than itself, as if they were earnest. It mocks gratuitously; it mocks that which cannot be mocked because it is already self-mocking. How can we describe the posture of making fun of X-Files? Can even Baudrilliardian propositions get that far away from the material, disappear the world, dissolve so utterly the last hint of the 'frame' which the operation of rationality requires? How can you treat a product like X-Files sarcastically? You can't. This posture looks like sarcasm; it sounds like sarcasm; it is delivered in a sarcastic voice. But it is not sarcasm anymore; it is missing the foundation of rationality, of sanity, sarcasm, an any intelligible discourse, requires. It has lost the ability to make distinctions between the absurd and the reasonable, the plausible and the risible. One must posit an unimaginably naïve and credulous bumkpin population, taken in by X-Files, to perform this operation. An imaginary population so imbecile as to be even more imbecile than the audience to whom Buffy is selling zit cream and sneering, must be invented to propose to mock X-Files, to propose to mock that genre of campy self-conscious kitsch.
What is this imaginary bumpkin population which Buffy's posture of faux-sarcasm invents/implies? It is a phantom of 'the public' and 'the television audience' to which the real television audience is encouraged to defer while it keeps its sneering, self-congratulatory distance. It is a figment offered for the actual television audience to believe in and to imagine as the public to whom politicians in democracy answer, the public to whom the 'sarcastic' audience feels superior but at the same time controlled by - the Red staters, the electorate, the dupes of X-Files. Constructing this imaginary intermediary audience,between the real audience and the politicians who play their roles on television as representatives of that audience, bound to that audience, courting that audience, is an essential tactic of the new fascism achieved by the society of the spectacle.
This Buffyesque attitude of sterile sarcasm is that which the Bush regime hopes to inculcate, and depends on in its nomination of Miers. The nomination, like X-Files, is already kitsch. It is camp. It is openly unserious. One can imagine only a Buffy snickering at it thusly: "It's like he nominated his own lawyer!" Literally true. The lampoon and the facts are one and the same. But the faux-sarcasm offered as an 'out' for 'intellectuals' must assumle the existence of a public taken in by this campy kitsch politics. Some brainwashed bumpkins must be assumed to be seriously believing in the legitimacy of the Miers nomination for the thing to be possible at all, as for Buffy to make the machine laugh, some bumpkins must be imagined to exist who take X-Files seriously.
Wholesale mockery, a posture of mockery, a posture of unrelieved lampoon, is in our new fascism increasingly the literal situation, the actual politics, the actual performance. Like Buffy 'mocking' X-Files - an impossibility masked by a simulacrum of sarcasm - the nomination of Miers is literally already the manifestation of a mockery, of a satire of a corrupt and fascist supreme court nomination. Here is a politics of "teevee irony." Requiring a posture of "teevee" irony to proceed. This emasculated irony has recently become a hegemonic political stance, the tone of politics in the US, addressed to the television audience via its intermediary, which does not exist but is offered to it as an object of sneering disdain and shrugs of self-satisfied disaffection. The gravity, earnestness and requirement of probity once characterized the adult public world - it was until recently at least necessary to simulate it - fade ever more from memory. This is all indeed increasingly unrecognizeable to a broader population, especially elite clerks.
Within the diegetic plane of Buffy rules the posture of the teevee audience in this state, imagining an audience more gullible than itself, mocking the satires it doesn't recognize as such, referring everything to teevee, associating real adult forms of knowledge and savvy with the mere metasarcastic replication of what is familiar from teevee. Wit in Buffy consists of echoing, with this ersatz irony toward objects never intended to be treated earnestly, lines and situations from other television shows; wisdom is displayed by maximum reference to the workings of previous formula fictions, of genres. Intellignce is the lockstep submission to those formulas' directives, albeit with an awareness of their corniness. The Slayer laughs at herself saying "I do it because I'm the Slayer!" (because its written that way, because the genre demands it), but this self-conscioussness, however, unlike the self-consciuusness of rational adults, does not entail any power, any awareness of the ability, any will, to change this; it is not a critical selfconsicousness, but the denial and refusal and rejection of all critical rationality, the condemnation of critical rationality as both evil and unkewl. This faux-self-consciousness, an infantile mockery of self-conscioussness, boasts of being a willing servitude; it is a self-consciousness that is merely the smugly appeasing recognition of the inescapability of the divine predestination of the corporation's logic, an acceptance of its control, a volunatry slavery portrayed as laudable, fashionable, smart, kewl, and whose only alternative is the unself-conscious (embarassing, unkewl) version of the same willing, indeed zealous, slavery to the corporate Heaven.
The submission to generic imperatives appears as a kind of service to the divine order, as indeed the duty of The Good. The rules of teevee are smirkingly accepted, obeyed self-consciously. Thus the mockery is not mockery, in content, but its opposite: affirmation, merely masquerading as mockery, enforcement, as immune to debate and change, as immune to argument and refusal, as any fascist proposal in the humourless vein.
The confirmation hearings of Justice Roberts were identical in tone and posture (in the appearance or empty pageantry of debate and contest confused with and collapsed into a faux-ironic, half-acknowledged collusion to submit to the inescapable divine order of genre) to this sterile replica of satire from Buffy:
Holden Webster: Oh, I have so much to learn. Come on, isn't this insane? I mean, I was afraid to talk to you in high school, and now we're, like, mortal enemies. Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we became nemeses?
Buffy: Is that how you say the word?
Holden Webster: We're gonna have to fight to the death, aren't we?
Buffy: It's the time-honored custom.
Holden Webster: Wow, reality just shows up sometimes, doesn't it? But, you know, I've got the bloodlust pumping, and I kinda get it. I'm looking for a fight. And, oh, it's nothing personal.
Buffy: Oh, no, I mean, you've been great.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Holden Webster: Hey, I don't mean to be Count Buttinsky here, but you just don't seem as thrilled. Is it because we're gonna fight?
Buffy: It's because I'm gonna win.
Holden Webster: Hello! Two years of Tae Kwon Do and vampire strength. I think somebody's counting their chickens.
Buffy: You're not leaving this graveyard. Can't let you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Buffy: If you knew what I've done, what I've let myself become. My best friends don't even?You'd laugh, you heard some of the things I've done to them.
Holden Webster: Buffy, I'm here to kill you, not to judge you.
Alas.
The Prime Indirection
Star Trek, the manifesto of dead-centrist liberalism. Which could also be called compassionate fascism. The credo of which is: "Yes, But."
It is a dour joke in the campy original Trek: The prime directive is a rule which exists only to be violated. The answer to its assertion is Yes, But. The answer to every assertion of its kind is the same. Star Trek’s demurely braggadocios liberalism acknowledges the irony at its heart through the invention of the prime directive. Liberalism’s doctrine is that doctrine exists only to be wrong; plans exists only to be impractical; method exists only to be violated in response to any task to which it might be conceivably applied.
Thus liberalism is the socio-political ideology which allows the state -an imperial military aggressor state with a reasonably democratic homeland, a capitalist state revering and running itself by a Rights of Man constitution increasingly interpreted against its grain - to never play by its own rules and at the same time, indeed as a consequence, to seem the unwavering manifestation of its principles.
This running earnest joke around the prime directive: it is a way of accommodating, of venting, controlling by mantra, the repression or denial or forgetting upon which Liberalism depends and which is its clockwork design, its mode of reproducing itself, which in Star Trek is explicitly foregrounded. Wagon Train To The Stars was Gene Rodenberry’s famous pitch. That is: a fantasy of space exploration modelled on a narrative of frontier settlement that was in the deepest possible denial about the criminality, acquisitiveness and murderousness of the history it was producing into fiction. Manifest Destiny proposed property without proprietors for the proprietors without property, but the romantic fictions of the conquest of that land not only acknowledged the people in it already, but built their whole panache around them, as part of the scenery.
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before. Yes. But to seek out strange new worlds, and civilizations. What does it mean? The comfort with the rapid and utter contradiction of the opening narration is striking. Star Trek too acknowledges that there are people in space. Interesting people; the whole point of the adventure is to meet them and interact with them. They will be offered as other and us simultaneously; allegories of us through others; allegories of what is to be othered in us - communists, hippies - through others. Meeting them will chisel us into some clearer shape. An operation coiling in on itself endlessly.
So, people in space - in fact us, already in space, waiting to be met by us - is a given. A voyage of (self) discovery. Because while we are already in space waiting for us, what there are not in space are subjects. Subjects of knowledge. We’re in space already but as objects only. The Yes - yes I see it - of liberalism is out there waiting for the arrival of the But - but its not what it appears - which never fails to catch up.
The earnestly-ironically named Enterprise is not purportedly in space for commerce or economic advancement of any kind. It is a peaceful, scientific mission, gathering knowledge ‘for its own sake.’ The spirit of exploration, but going under the name of enterprise - recalling the heroic bourgeois figure of the merchant adventurer, the daring protagonist of the pre-industrial commercial age. (We are in a period of its post-industrial replay.)
A scientific mission. The domination of the Federation subjects aboard the Enterprise over the object-persons met is accomplished along the axis of science and knowledge; the crew are the knowers; the others are the known. But this fraud recalls, in the name of the ship, the ‘cold war’ truth it conceals. Disinterested conquistadors; a neutral military.
Space gazes back.
How does the program ‘feel’ about this scientific enterprise? Anxious beyond belief. The most horrible situations and pickles the crew of the enterprise stumble into - from the pre-Kirk pilot onward - are those when they find themselves the trickster tricked, the objects of just such a study, as when they fall into the hands of Trilaine. Dressed in Enlightenment garments, in a gothic atmosphere, he seems to be the personification of the enlightenment project‘s underside, because he is irrational, capricious, lewd, voyeuristic, temperamental, severely judgemental and overly confident, and his experiment on the crew, which is also a botched history lesson, leads to sentencing Kirk to hang. Humiliatingly, the crew are in the gerbil run of small child. A small child who is Reason and Audience - the confidence of the scientist and his blindered indifference to his objects - as well as experimental science, law, and historiography, the personification of the enterprise‘s own tools of power over their objects.
Trilaine is torturing Kirk and posse in his childish curiosity and heartlessness, failing to respect their ‘humanity’ - which is morally equivalent to his own inborn dignity. The episode is Star Trek’s premise confronting its repressed violence, and the repressed violence of the history it produces, and the inadequacy and deception of its justification.
But then comes the defining liberal moment, the thing that returns this self-critical reflection on manifest destiny then and now and the cold war (Yes) into its modest self-congratulation (But).
In the end, the luminous Ossie and Harriet in the heavens, a pair of calm voiced blinking holies, successfully sue for Kirk’s forgiveness of their little boy’s cruelty to his pets.
That forgiveness, the Kirk smirk of it. It’s everything. The indulgence with which the crew greets the apologies of the hovering glowing monogamous pair in the sky, the indulgently severe couple, shamefaced and proud of their son; in that plea and concession is the tone of the whole original Trek, its attitude toward itself. The absolution is the classic liberal compromise, a smirk of gentle resentment, affronted forgiveness, self-satisfied doubt, smug humility, knowing innocence, bashful bravado, the coerced generosity of the embodiments of spontaneous, volatile, bungling infallibility.
It is a dour joke in the campy original Trek: The prime directive is a rule which exists only to be violated. The answer to its assertion is Yes, But. The answer to every assertion of its kind is the same. Star Trek’s demurely braggadocios liberalism acknowledges the irony at its heart through the invention of the prime directive. Liberalism’s doctrine is that doctrine exists only to be wrong; plans exists only to be impractical; method exists only to be violated in response to any task to which it might be conceivably applied.
Thus liberalism is the socio-political ideology which allows the state -an imperial military aggressor state with a reasonably democratic homeland, a capitalist state revering and running itself by a Rights of Man constitution increasingly interpreted against its grain - to never play by its own rules and at the same time, indeed as a consequence, to seem the unwavering manifestation of its principles.
This running earnest joke around the prime directive: it is a way of accommodating, of venting, controlling by mantra, the repression or denial or forgetting upon which Liberalism depends and which is its clockwork design, its mode of reproducing itself, which in Star Trek is explicitly foregrounded. Wagon Train To The Stars was Gene Rodenberry’s famous pitch. That is: a fantasy of space exploration modelled on a narrative of frontier settlement that was in the deepest possible denial about the criminality, acquisitiveness and murderousness of the history it was producing into fiction. Manifest Destiny proposed property without proprietors for the proprietors without property, but the romantic fictions of the conquest of that land not only acknowledged the people in it already, but built their whole panache around them, as part of the scenery.
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before. Yes. But to seek out strange new worlds, and civilizations. What does it mean? The comfort with the rapid and utter contradiction of the opening narration is striking. Star Trek too acknowledges that there are people in space. Interesting people; the whole point of the adventure is to meet them and interact with them. They will be offered as other and us simultaneously; allegories of us through others; allegories of what is to be othered in us - communists, hippies - through others. Meeting them will chisel us into some clearer shape. An operation coiling in on itself endlessly.
So, people in space - in fact us, already in space, waiting to be met by us - is a given. A voyage of (self) discovery. Because while we are already in space waiting for us, what there are not in space are subjects. Subjects of knowledge. We’re in space already but as objects only. The Yes - yes I see it - of liberalism is out there waiting for the arrival of the But - but its not what it appears - which never fails to catch up.
The earnestly-ironically named Enterprise is not purportedly in space for commerce or economic advancement of any kind. It is a peaceful, scientific mission, gathering knowledge ‘for its own sake.’ The spirit of exploration, but going under the name of enterprise - recalling the heroic bourgeois figure of the merchant adventurer, the daring protagonist of the pre-industrial commercial age. (We are in a period of its post-industrial replay.)
A scientific mission. The domination of the Federation subjects aboard the Enterprise over the object-persons met is accomplished along the axis of science and knowledge; the crew are the knowers; the others are the known. But this fraud recalls, in the name of the ship, the ‘cold war’ truth it conceals. Disinterested conquistadors; a neutral military.
Space gazes back.
How does the program ‘feel’ about this scientific enterprise? Anxious beyond belief. The most horrible situations and pickles the crew of the enterprise stumble into - from the pre-Kirk pilot onward - are those when they find themselves the trickster tricked, the objects of just such a study, as when they fall into the hands of Trilaine. Dressed in Enlightenment garments, in a gothic atmosphere, he seems to be the personification of the enlightenment project‘s underside, because he is irrational, capricious, lewd, voyeuristic, temperamental, severely judgemental and overly confident, and his experiment on the crew, which is also a botched history lesson, leads to sentencing Kirk to hang. Humiliatingly, the crew are in the gerbil run of small child. A small child who is Reason and Audience - the confidence of the scientist and his blindered indifference to his objects - as well as experimental science, law, and historiography, the personification of the enterprise‘s own tools of power over their objects.
Trilaine is torturing Kirk and posse in his childish curiosity and heartlessness, failing to respect their ‘humanity’ - which is morally equivalent to his own inborn dignity. The episode is Star Trek’s premise confronting its repressed violence, and the repressed violence of the history it produces, and the inadequacy and deception of its justification.
But then comes the defining liberal moment, the thing that returns this self-critical reflection on manifest destiny then and now and the cold war (Yes) into its modest self-congratulation (But).
In the end, the luminous Ossie and Harriet in the heavens, a pair of calm voiced blinking holies, successfully sue for Kirk’s forgiveness of their little boy’s cruelty to his pets.
That forgiveness, the Kirk smirk of it. It’s everything. The indulgence with which the crew greets the apologies of the hovering glowing monogamous pair in the sky, the indulgently severe couple, shamefaced and proud of their son; in that plea and concession is the tone of the whole original Trek, its attitude toward itself. The absolution is the classic liberal compromise, a smirk of gentle resentment, affronted forgiveness, self-satisfied doubt, smug humility, knowing innocence, bashful bravado, the coerced generosity of the embodiments of spontaneous, volatile, bungling infallibility.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Dehumanization Of Human Affairs
Let's review the mode of production of our writers' [The Freikorps novelists] language once again. It too cannot be grasped simply by revealing its "unconscious" contents. It is not primarily characterized by its specific use of a typical symbolism, nor indeed by any kind of expression; we are not even dealing here with projection.- Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies
Making clear what the language cannot do is revealing in itself. It cannot describe, or narrate, or represent, or argue. It is alien to any linguistic posture that respects the integrity of its object or takes it seriously. The language seems just as incapable of forming "object relations" as the men who employ it. (The language neither lies nor tells the truth; those are irrelevant categories.)
What does it do then? It consistently employs the postures mentioned above (e.g. "narration," "argumentation"), but only as empty shells. It seems to me that the process that is really specific to it is a different one, a process of transmutation. The linguistic process is inherently a process of production, one that appropriates and transforms reality. What is striking about our male writers is that the particles of reality taken up in their language lose any life of their own. They are deanimated and turned into dying matter. They are forced to relinquish their life to a parasitic, linguistic onslaught, which seems to find "pleasure" in the annihilation of reality. Reality is invaded and "occupied" in that onslaught. The language of occupation: it acts imperialistically against any form of independently moving life.
It is above all the living movement of women that forces it immediately into a defensive-aggressive stance. It either screens itself against their existence (e.g. wives, "white" mothers, and sisters), or destroys them (e.g. proletarian women, "rifle-women", and erotic sisters and mothers). The emotional force and sexual intensity emanating from women seems unbearable, incapable of being worked over by this language.
Mechanisms of defense and attack are not the only things at work in that language. (Projection is a simple defense mechanism.) In relation to the self, those mechanisms act as survival mechanisms. In relation to objects, they act as annihilation mechanisms. Both these latter are coupled together, operating in one and the same action. They are two effects of a single process.
Human productions as a rule invest their objects with life. It is the living labour of the artisan that allows a table to be created from a tree, the living worker's living labour that forges a tool out of raw metal; the "mother's" living labour that enables a newborn infant to become a person. The production of our men acts conversely. It divests social products, both people and things, of the life that has entered into them, especially in war. Their mode of production is the transformation of life into death, and dismantling of life. I think we are justified in calling it an antiproduction. This antiproduction has a destructive and a creative aspect. It builds new orders from a reality that is devivified.
The process of destruction is marked by two successive states. "Perception" is followed by an assault. Even perception itself is an act of destruction, since it doesn't really "perceive" at all. The men's gaze is constantly on the hunt. We can visualise this process more clearly by comparing it to the operation of a camera. A camera admits light and produces living images. The eyes of these men, conversely, admit nothing. When they catch sight of real movement, they block out the light - the eyes narrowing to mere slits - then emit beams of their own that cause the viewed object to appear distorted. Their eyes operate rather like spotlights. The image that is formed from the sharply illuminated real objects resembles a police photo. In police photos, people appear doomed not to remain much longer among the living, as if they were already under a death sentence. The police photographer acts as if he were going to produce a photograph. In reality, he destroys his subjects physiognomy in the glare of his spotlight. Soldier males train that same gaze on reality. They record the living as that which is condemned to death.
In its second stage, the destruction is completed. The men turn their weapons on the illuminated object, because it brazenly continues moving around in the spotlight's glare, instead of quietly crawling off into some corner or taking its own life. Instead of a camera and cutting table (living image and montage), they work with a spotlight and a machete (dead image and dismemberment.)
Yet like the police photographer, they insist that what they have produced is a photo.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Buffy, You Have A Little Human Flesh On Your Fang
Chavez Blasts US Over Posada [The Vampire Slayer]- DemocracyNow
In international news, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is striking back at the US following a judge's refusal to hand-over Cuban-born militant and former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela. The judge said he would not send Posada to either Venezuela or Cuba, saying he could face torture in either country. Caracas has officially requested that Posada be extradited to face charges over the bombing of a Cuban civilian airplane in a 1976 bombing that killed 73 people. As President Chavez arrived at the airport in Brazil for a regional summit, he blasted the U.S.: "They protect him (Luis Posada Carriles) and besides allege, in a cynical way, that they're protecting him against Venezuela because Venezuela is going to torture him. That's to say, the government of the United States is protecting the number one torturer in the history of Latin America, the Bin Laden of Latin America. It's a cynical and sham government, whose mask falls more everyday and it's left in front of the world with its Dracula molars full of blood."
Judge Orders release of More Abu Ghraib [Vampire Slaying] Pics
A federal judge ruled Thursday that graphic pictures of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released, despite government claims that they could damage the US image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of "rape and murder" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were "blatantly sadistic." The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights sought the release of 87 photographs and four videotapes taken at the prison as part of the ongoing lawsuits over Abu Ghraib. The government is being given 20 days to appeal the decision. Last year, after viewing a large cache of unreleased images, Rumsfeld said "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse."
Thursday, September 29, 2005
It's Only A TV Show
"Genocide Rocks."
How much is Buffy to blame for the revival of the fascist mood in the US? How much credit can Buffy take for the ease with which the regime carried out the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans and continues to carry out the conquest and destruction of Iraq and Haiti, with the consent of the Buffy-consuming young media clerks?
Buffy and Orientalism: what we the audience, and ’we’ the audience’s representatives within the fiction(the slayer’s human constituency or race/species flock), know about vampires comes from the slayers and the vampirists. There is no hint of hesitation about this ‘science’, and science in Buffy is openly coterminous with occult knowledge, that is, with the priestly religion of the elect race/species. The ideology of the slayer's clerks is inherently virtuous and divine. There is no scepticism, no suspicion that the scholarship could be fraudulent or flawed, and might indeed be ideology presenting the reality of vampires distortedly or on its head. There is no suspicion that we are being lied to about the slayers and their 'people,' that they are telling us their self-justifying myths, when what really happened is they came, conquered and exterminated the vampires who were just living there, minding their own business, in Massachusettes or Palestine or South Africa; there is no hint that this may be the heroic fable of the cleansing of the vampires being told a hundred years from now by the descendants of the victorious slayers. Although the narrative fits that model and genre more perfectly than any other.
The vampire-scholar, whose job is to assist the vampire killer - just as the Orientalists job at the end of the 18th century was to assist Napoleon’s campaign of conquest, and as Bernard Lewis' job today is to assist in the conquest and domination of the whole 'Arab world' - enjoys an unreflecting cognitive control of the enemy species, which is total and self evidently righteous, just and ‘scientifically neutral.’ The vampire scholars data and his interpretation is always accurate and a tool of power over the object of the science. ‘Knowledge’ of vampires is a precondition of the slaughter of vampires, and indeed scholarship has no other purpose than to facilitate that slaughter; the domination the science of vampires allows is the indispensable weapon deployed against the vampires; the stacked deck of fiction delivers a perfect, flawless and morally unquestionable knowledge - a self justifying symbolic domination, unchallenged because always accurate and always promoting the survival of the threatened human species - self evidently virtuous and justified by the concocted total submission and coherence of the ‘evidence’ and data of vampire existence to the symbolic control of the vampire killers. The latter, the killers, of course conceive themselves, like all genocidaires, as the vampires’ victims, exterminating only in self defence and for their own survival. The authority behind the curtain assures us this perception of the war with the vampires is true.
We may sympathize with and enjoy vampires, in that Orientalist way monsters are made to be enjoyed; we may even occasionally identify with certain conditions they experience, but they remain Other, studied, objectified, defined by their killers as inassimilable to humanity and incompatible with the survival of humanity; the threat they pose to us and to the slayer - our leader and representative and protector - is always intolerable. At the end of the day, genocide is the only practical solution, though it is carried out, as are all genocides, with a heavy heart beneath the gushing, joyful ecstasies of bloodshed, domination and conquest.
Afterthought:
The vampires are the perfect placeholder for current genocidal ideology's needs, which require the entirety of humanity be potentially the objects of genocide. The group requiring extermnation has no constraints with regard to its identification: members don't have to be born into it, or live in a specific place or think a certain way or practise a certain profession. All the enemies of the state can fit into the model - bolsheviks, anarchists, racial inferiors, national enemies. The enemy is freely defined, given new traits and identifying characteristics, at the will of the slayer-scholars. Today, chimères, zarkawians, Sunnis, and 'Chavez loyalists,' yesterday 'Serbs,' tommorrow gays, altermondialistes; the construct is endlessly serviceable specifically for being the maximally flexible 'enemy race' conception possible. Nazis stretched the boundaries of existing 'race' conceptions they inherited; their 'Jews' and 'Bolsheviks' were conceived as a category of a different order from the 'race' concepts inherited from a) 19th century nationalism and b) 19th century colonialism. Buffy's vampires represent a further development in that direction, from which 'liberal discourse' of the political sort takes a step back while the ideology of its phantasy-fiction proceeds forward in the dehumanization of all humanity and the concurrent anthropomorphization of the master race of capital and corporations.
Vampires are in fact 'humanity.' And it is Buffy and posse, who continue to appear human, whose forms conceal their secret identity as references to inhuman, non-human, anti-human powers of the corporate-state.
We can't forget who is bringing the audience the 'message' that is Buffy. Bringing that message to an entranced audience whose critical faculties have been disabled and which is thus ready to imbibe as truth the corporation's image of 'the monstrous,' (your neighbors) and more importantly of the 'human,' that species of thing the survival of which is self-justifying ('Buffy,' a cuddly despot, a brand, a trademark, an industry, an oracular television programme, vehicle for advertising messages as mystical apodictic truths, a seductive lure offering initiation into wisdom/fashion/the illusion of participation in power, high priestess of a genocidal cult, a divinely ordained executioner, and those who serve her).
It is hardly uncommon for Masters to portray themselves as the surpreme ideal versions of those whom they dominate - as demigods say, beautiful human beings but even better - and to portray their slaves as fiends and savages requiring control or extermination.
The bedazzlement effected by the spectacle creates the disoriented condition in which the audience is vulnerable to even the most preposterous propositions regarding itself, regarding humanity; the vampire supernaturalism is so distracting it confuses the audience into supposing the vampire fictions possess a greater fictionality - a greater 'undecidability'- than the 'human' fictions. But a creature with divinely ordained powers and a divinely ordained mission to slaughter vampires with a magic weapon, a thing with the ability to be resurrected from death, is obviously as much a fantastic figment, a mythic beast, a supernatural fiction, as a 'vampire.' Television's endless confusion of plausible and implausible, the pliability of the 'experience of the world' to which the television audience is subjected, the fictionalizing of history and the faux-historicizing of fiction that advertising and newsproduct involves, allows for the successful propagation of the illusion of a hierarchy of mimesis in the Buffyworld which serves an essential propaganda function.
(This is also relying on the Orientalist assumption of the world of clarity and science in which Buffy-like beings dwell, and the mysterious murkiness of the sphere from which threats to that world emerge.)
Thus the flaunted and openly proclaimed fictionality and metaphoric nature of vampires (Other) successfully distracts from and disguises the insidious and deceitful fictionality and metaphoric nature of slayers, ('Us'), of Buffy herself.
But what is 'Buffy'? She is a corporate state masquerading as a petit bourgeois teenager, an 'ordinary teenage girl' (among the weakest figures in the privileged class, but as consumer an essential figure in the maintenance of the status quo); she is a form of domination, authority and power over humanity, anthropomorphized.
Buffy is the monster in Buffy. This is the con which takes in the dupes of the corporate message - again and again, in every advertisement. Falling in love with Buffy is falling in love with, idenitfying with, the self-righteous control and sadism of capital, admiring and desiring to share its prerogative of definition of the other, its power of life and death over the other, the exclusivity of its own right to thrive and survive, the limitless lawlessness and liberty with which it obliterates all that is not useful to it and which does not serve its quest for increased power and the satisfaction of its hunger for 'creative destruction.'
The vampires are, as is traditional in the ideology of the Masters, the corporation's perverted portrait of us. Vampires are beings whose very existence is criminal, that is, larger and larger portions of humanity - 'humanity' as such, with fewer and fewer, more arduously earned exceptions - as portrayed increasingly by Masters and their obedient clerks (Thomas Friedman or Christopher Hitchens for example.) Vampires are humanity from the point of view of capitalists who wish to persuade their collaborators - the minority granted indulgence in exchange for assistance - that humanity has no inalienable right to survive, but indeed must earn its survival through various forms of obedience and usefulness to capital. Opportunities to do so are conceived of as the exercise of magnanimity on the part of capital, which like Buffianity alone enjoys a self-evident, inalienable right to existence and satisfaction.
Perhaps you, today, are not a vampire from the point of view of Master Corporation 'Buffy,' but one issue of the NYTimes will reveal your concealed hideousness and demonic nature and turn you into a member of the menacing horde. The vampires are all of us who refuse to collaborate. Who refuse to worship Buffy, go to the mall, stare at the ads, and assist her genocidal adventures. Vampires are the audience, whose desires and needs and habits the corporation "studies" (market research) and creates (advertising and Buffy) simultaneously. Vampires are not insignificantly at their worst when they are human beings in a position to assert themselves against the annihilating force of 'Buffy' through institutions (legal, religious, political and economic). Vampires who are not yet entirely dispossessed are simply members of the demonic underclass horde who have infiltrated the upper spheres of the world over which Buffy must reign as divine, unchallenged dictator, arbiter of the survival rights of all beings. Without the permission of 'Buffy,' nothing and no one has a right to exist. Vampires are the audience and also the audience's future, as the excess population to which they will be reduced by 'Buffy,' a population criminalized, utterly powerless and propertyless, as in New Orleans - we've seen how well Buffy trained the television audience to believe there were actually rampaging vampires in New Orleans - as in Falluja, or anywhere. Vampires are humanity trying merely to survive and protect itself from 'Buffy', the corporate state, its clerks and its collaborator-consumers, the New World Order (sexy hip consumer/entrepreneur Clintonian version, mutating gradually into holy hell-harrower Bush version). Vampires are the literally demonized protagonists of humanity's desperate, doomed struggle to fend off 'Buffy's' righteous crusade of domination portrayed as liberation, invasion portrayed as the (pre-emptive) repulsion of invasion. 'Buffy' is the loveable action figure of capital, the divine death dealing tyrant imagined as life-giving champion of freedom, so adoreably human while possessing superhuman strength and supernatural gifts, so cutely flawed but virtuous at heart, a little selfish at times but always well meaning, burdened by her power, reluctantly living up to her celestially designated duty to massacre, vulnerable and sensitive and self-sacrificing even as she exercises her supremacy, inflicts unerringly the salubrious pain and death social renewal and survival requires, and unleashes her divine vengeance on those who oppose her.
Buffy is the destroyer of humanity (demanding the loyality of its select accomplices whom it poses as 'representing' rather than dominating) as it portrays itself, as always since the night of time, as Saviour.
So the corporation seduces humanity to love it and hate eachother, by playing on humanity's persistent need for human relations thwarted and poisoned by the imperatives of competition. The television consumer is trained to hate his/her fleshly, warm, living competitors and enjoy their pains and failures even more than he enjoys his own pleasures and success. Thus deprived (s)he is ripe for attachment, even passionate attachment, to 'Buffy,' the corporation in human clothing, the inanimate, heartless and destructive disguised as the living, affectionate and creative. Unable to love and admire one another, human beings crave the ersatz beloved, the cold, fake, empty thing that looks almost human; the craving for real fellows learns to satisfy itself with the fraudulent simulacra of emotions that cold thing inspires, and to accept and cherish, along with its imitation humanity, any sinister, perverse, inhuman and anti-human qualities with which the corporation, supplier of this dead substitute for living love object, endows it. 'Buffy's' disposition to domination, surveillance, pompous assumption of divine ordination, exclusion and expropriation without due process, and extrajudicial execution, must all be adored along with 'Buffy's commodity bazaar of faux emotional delights, of faux pleasures and faux sympathies, if the ersatz loyalty and ersatz love which 'Buffy' inspires is not to be lost, leaving the audience desolate. And the more attached humanity grows to 'Buffy,' the more contented and resigned to that relationship, the better prepared it is to dispense with any and all of its living fellows.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The Smuggest Nazis Ever
Prisoners condemned to torture, slow and terrifying deaths. Torture, torture, judicial and extrajudicial execution of innocents, and more torture.
Meanwhile the terrorist Posada Carilles will not be extradicted to Venezuela "because of the possibility that he would be tortured there. The Convention Against Torture act prohibits the United States from deporting someone to a country where they could be tortured."
Meanwhile the terrorist Posada Carilles will not be extradicted to Venezuela "because of the possibility that he would be tortured there. The Convention Against Torture act prohibits the United States from deporting someone to a country where they could be tortured."
The Revolutionary Television Audience
Funny thing occurs to me. My CIA troll, amusing itself impersonating the cia on my sitemeter, hoping to be taken for the real thing, intended evidently to expose me as ridiculous for believing I could draw the attention of intelligence services.
But the hilarious thing is that the troll poses elsewhere as a revolutionary leftist, a committed militant actively seeking radical social change and aiming for the overthrow of the government and ruling class of the US.
So here we have someone who poses as genuinely actively dangerous to the ruling class, but at the same time cannot imagine doing anything, or knowing anyone who is doing anything, which would bring them to the notice of the government and ruling class they purport to be in the process of actually threatening.
Revolutionaries at once proud of their principled and courageous actions for which they predict heartening successes in the thwarting of capital's expropriations and overturning of property arrangements and the humbling of state power, but at the same time so entirely assured they will never achieve anything, or even come close to looking like they will ever achieve anything, that the very notion of doing something which might draw the attention of the forces they are dedicated to overthrowing is perfectly risible.
The revolutionary politics of my troll is taking place in the same television show whose last episode saw Colin Powell's Austin Powers act. Like the Dubyaemdee, its threat to power is at once unimaginably devastating and totally harmless.
A paradoxical state of mind Zizek would have a good time with, I think.
Television, Race And Mythic Terrors
"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," [Maj. Ed] Bush said Monday of the Superdome.- LA Times (via HystericalBlackness.)
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."
Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.
The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.
"It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."
Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.
This tradition of terror rumours is ancient in the United States. In the past, the absence of mass media facilitated the propagation of preposterous exaggerations and tales relying on implausible conceptions of human behaviour, demonic and savage fictions of humanity taking the place of ourselves and our fellows whom we know from experience. But mass televisual and telephonic media, potentially an obstacle to the functioning of the 'rumour mill' which traditionally relies on distance and the exclusivity of description in language uncontradicted by pictorial reports or the availability of disseminated evidence, has in the hands of corporations become instead the most powerful handmaiden of rumour and a mechanism by which it can be far more precisely controlled and deployed by deliberate rumour mongers and propaganda masters than ever before. The success of the New Orleans terror rumours, a domestic success to rival and even surpass that of the Iraq WMD terror rumours which had distance and 'foreignness' to aid them, exhibits the refinement and sophistication with which mass media performs its role in preparing and forming the consciousness of the public as a television audience, maleable, manipulable, but also actively participatory - knowing and playing its function in the loop, supplying the learned ideological rationales and themes in response to scarcely a gesture of prompting. For the 'media savvy' clerks who are aware of weekend Box Office revenues, the measuring rod for satisfying sociological and historical understanding is the explanation of the behaviour and motivation of fictional characters a writer could successfully sell to HBO as a watchable and 'impactful' two hour drama. What is compelling in fiction on television has become identical to, the exclusive measure of, what is believable reportage of human affairs. Thus all the ideology offered by deliberately and generically produced television entertainment slips invisibly into the audience's dominant paradigm of interpretation and perception of history, the world, themselves and their fellows.
Television's seamless tapestry of fraud and factoid, advertisement and weather report, morality tale and headline exploitation, horror and sickly sentimentalism, disables the ability of viewers, and indeed eradicates their desire, to distinguish the plausible from the implausible, the myth or the anecdote from history, the typical from the bizarre, the coherent from the contradictory. It trains viewers to accept the rules by which the delivery of detail, information and explanation is considered necessary - and entertaining, and sufficient - in Hollywood drama as the standard by which journalistic reportage is also to be judged. Television consumption has effectively turned the audience's rationality against itself, and trained viewers to take those narratives of unfolding historical events which conform best to the most common fictional narrative structures as the most, rather than the least, believable stories. That which resembles a three act action or disaster film or a one hour franchise drama episode is greeted by the tv news consumer with the credulous, untroubled acceptance familiarity and predictability inspire rather than with an appropriate suspicion supported by an historical consciousness, just as those sentiments which when expressed by sitcom characters make the machine giggle are taken for wit rather than the merely empty, mechanical, endlessly repeated simulacrum of it, which is really its opposite.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Supremacy Dreams: A Rant
This post is for the seemingly tireless Troll, who has of late posed an endless stream of rhetorical questions to "the intellectual vixxxen alphonse," and being evidently a devotee of the cult of "Occam"s Razor," stamps her foot and demands answers as "simple" as possible, as "simple" as a soft drink slogan, as "simple" as what she's used to "learning" from teevee.
This is as simple as I can make it:
Following up on:
This.
Months ago Leninino sent me a 'meme' about superheroes I really didn't know how to deal with but which inspired some thoughts about individuals in capitalism. This meme could have been called 'What Is Your Favourite Flavour Of Fascism?' In what way, it asked, do you fantasize your domination over others? How would you most enjoy others to be inferior to and weaker than yourself?
The theme of this meme never really rests in its circulation of the blogsphere but it reappeared lately - and has given rise some posts here - disturbingly in Lenin's response in his haloscan to s0metim3s initial, cogent objection to an appalling post which sought to repeat and at the same time rationalize the infamous American blood libel of 'young black men' that was being, predictably, propagated by the media as a justification for the military and paramilitary cleansing and occupation of New Orleans.
"Chill out, you sanctimonious pillock."
A further, rather desperate and disingenuous defence by the post‘s author, trying to seize the self-congratulatory high ground of high minded courage to speak impiously about race, appeared below in the haloscan: "But that tired old stick that race experience is a black box and any attempt to discuss it, however constructively, is always-already racist? That's not only invalid, it's actively counterproductive. What's the alternative? Sitting monadically in our individual race realities and letting the real racists get on with their depradations? That may be enough for you, but not me."
These responses of course exhibit all the cockiness of one who is ensconced in the 'black box of race' he has pretended to abolish but has really enclosed as his private property, the property of the non-raced white, the fortress from which to 'make', define, usurp and pronounce upon the 'simple' and universal raced experience of raced others while remaining immune himself from such scrutiny.
From within that black box - really the white fortress - the free-of-race can construct and endow the raced others with traits, histories, psychic conditions, and criminal guilt at whim, like a child playing a video game, and simultaneously congratulate himself on having made his pawns in less fiendish and monstrous guise than other, crueller, less forgiving masters are wont to do.
Such a disdainful and bitter rejection of inquiry into this rhetorical manoeuvre relies on the assumption of the unique ability of whites to overcome their 'making' by the racially oppressive society in which they enjoy advantages. It repeats the belief of Jefferson that it is black slaves, not white slave owners, whom the institution of slavery turns into sadists and rapists, and the oppressed, not the oppressors, upon whom the structures of oppression exert any deforming or formative effect at all. 'We' made 'them.' (They are effectively our fictions; our imagination literally creates them, freely, without any materialist constraints or obligations of respect.)
You are, says the author to 'young black men,' whatever I say you are. You are as I imagine you. Be grateful I am not more severe, and choose to spread the blame for your monstrousness around; you share it with my competitors.
The premise is that the system which endows us with power over our fellows and schools us in the pleasures of its exertion did not deform 'us,' but deformed 'them.' So 'we' can clear headedly analyse 'their' experience and their moral failings, from a position of 'science,' mastery and neutrality - our private black box - and enjoy the prerogative, unearned, of forgiveness and understanding and the ability even to cure and ‘remake’ our depraved inferiors subsequent to our diagnosis.
The assumed proposal is that these creatures of ours, deformed by the brutality of our incompetence and indifference, our failures to provide adequate care and role models, are now in need of our (reformed) guidance and rehabilitation.
This theme is of course not confined to the justification for disseminating the ever popular American blood libel with its ever popular liberal spin of ‘black pathology.’. The assumption of (socially) white (middle class+) individuality and rationality - the (socially) white (middle class plus) immunity to collective ’making’ and deformation by experience of raced and classed society - in contrast to brown and black horde raced existence is absolutely indispensable to the various apologies for US-UK government and corporate policies and the 'war on terror/terra' right now, across the right-left spectrum.
The idea that 'the left' is responsible somehow for explaining and accounting for the (fictionally savage) conduct of ‘young black men’ in New Orleans, like a kindergarten teacher whose students have been the subjects of complaints of bullying, who while mightily annoyed at them for letting the side down when the cameras were rolling will nonetheless make some kind of irresponsible explanation before the court of public opinion on their behalf, in utter disregard of evidence or plausibility, infantilising and possessing them with brazen self-congratulatory entitlement, is very much a part of this, and in keeping with the assumption that 'the left' - or any anti-capitalist or dissident with access to media - is responsible for Sadam Hussein or heroin middlemen or child-sacrificing Palestinian mothers or whatever human or natural phenomenon is spotlighted or invented and disavowed by capital on television and used as the pretext for capital‘s aggression, domination and expropriation (in the guise of restoring order, liberation, stability or whatever.).
Also crucially dependent on this assumed race hierarchy and othering is the repeated insistence that a higher standard of proof is required to suspect (socially) white capitalists and (socially) white middle managers of a crime for which they had definite motive and from which they have derived calculable resulting benefits than is needed to suspect dark capitalists and dark middle managers from dark corners of the world with neither conceivable motive nor any resulting benefits - who are however of course racially or culturally prone to acts of spectacular and counterproductive violence, having been ’made this way’ by us - of that very same crime.
The bile, deafness and venom with which doubts regarding the 'official guilt assignment' for 9/11 (’subaltern weather ’) and the destruction New Orleans (meteorological disaster plus crazed young black men) - unreasonably termed the 'official narrative' - are greeted derives from the emotional attachment to the principles of race and class (and 'culture') hierarchy, the assumed and cherished superiority of the educated clerk class itself both intellectually and culturally to the designated irrational, reactive, instinctive others 'society (elites) made,' gluing belief to this wholly implausible comic book of history which a) tends toward absolving the enemies of humanity of their crimes against humanity and b) obfuscates humanity's available paths to collaborative solutions by portraying the non-white and property-less majority as irrational, reactive and animally instinctive and thus incapable of constructive collective action in self- and communal interests.
The suggestion is that these people whom ‘we made’ require our leadership, when in fact 'the left' to which bloggers, journalists and academics belong in the US and the UK is not going to get anywhere in terms of promoting the commonweal until it learns to give up its race-class entitlement to control and management and learns to assist, listen to, learn from, cooperate with and follow the militants and resistance movements of the south and the south-within-the-north. We need finally to recognize the vast majority of humanity who are oppressed and dispossessed - the property-less billions, our slaves - not as objects of our generous forgiveness and patronage and pupils to be enrolled in our ethical re-education programmes but as, painful as this may be to us, our moral superiors, our generous comrades, less vengeful and spiteful and judgemental and competitive than we are in general, less addicted to control and the exercise of tyrannies and manipulations, whose help and guidance and solidarity we require for our own cure.
From the devotion to race hierarchy and its hideous credulity in reality-inverted-in-a-silver-spoon comes all this condemning or not condemning this or that insurgent or militant group, this or that tactic, which goes along with the instinctual violent defence of elite white and only elite white innocence of atrocities and enormities until guilt is proven. Who asked the blogging brigade for imprimatur? Never in my life did anyone ask me if it would be okay with me if they organized suicide bombings. I’m not involved in this; I don’t facilitate it: that should be enough to exhibit my non-election of this tactic of resistance, but there are these inevitable demands for striking podium postures of condemnation as if I were somehow in charge, by virtue of my race and class, of the actions of anyone whose right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness I champion (which would include everyone, regardless of the delivery systems of the bombs they may or may not be exploding).
The generosity of the burdened white man does not withhold these constant unsolicited offers of ethical and strategic management consulting to those struggling more effectively and less electively, and so we have a constant outpouring of this advice and constructive criticism of movements the volunteer management disdains even to join - this intellectual and moral assistance given often in frustration of course, for the grunts do not always obey.
The assumption is that a combination of CEO and PR is the only role suitable for us in any subaltern movement we express the least interest in or sympathy for. Thus the endless thumbs up, thumbs down, condescending applause when humanity doesn’t disappoint us or fail to live up to our shining example of courage and rectitude, voluntary rebukes, announcements of forgiveness and understanding though NOT, repeat NOT excuses - we’re NOT making excuses for you this time kids! (who asked you to?) - the ceaseless moral, historical and tactical lectures.
Noam Chomsky is not only admired but truly beloved all over the world, I believe, precisely for never doing this. For never flagging in his respect for other human beings, for never dominating others with his discourse. (My father was like that, too.) Chomsky is forever stressing that it is precisely what we do have a say in, and are responsible for, that is ethically and practically our proper concern, and not the rhetorical management of the pecadillos and crimes ofby individuals associated (by us or by others, genuinely or according to race or other fictions) with those struggling desperately to get out from under our own boot or that which rests on our necks far far more lightly.
So: perhaps the disturbed, egomaniacal superhero fantasies to which we attach our dreams of world-betterment and personal fulfilment need to be jettisoned, and humanity recognized by us as powerful enough to liberate itself collectively if only we would stop doing everything we can to thwart, control and dictate the acceptable parameters and worthiness tests of its endless struggle. If only we would stop demanding humanity be as angelic as we are in our fantasies before we let it out of the Inquisitorial interrogation chamber.
It seems to me that what we can do best of all, at least, and for a start, is try to be useful by refusing our social role as reproducers of this pernicious paradigm and disseminators of all the perverse anti-humanity fictions and avenues of oppression it generates. So perhaps it would be seemly for us to stop fantasizing about our ecstatic domination, about the possession of even more power over others than we have now, about being harder, faster, stronger than everyone around us, about the adulatory gratitude which we expect to be showered upon us by those inferiors whose lives we spare despite their sins and whom we may even protect from nastier masters. Perhaps it would behove us to try to fantasize about being in need of cooperation rather than in charge - its not that outrageous a notion - about being as vulnerable as everyone else, and being useful rather than in control and instrumentalizing, instructing, manipulating, coercing, lecturing, threatening, intimidating, managing and aggressively imagining others, usurping their liberties of action and expression. Because until we are cured of this fantasy of our real superiority and these dreams of even greater domination and impunity, whether we indulge them as outright sadistic vengeance dreams or dreams of the patronizing, sadistically sentimental kind, we will not be able to contribute constructively to the creation of a social order requiring us to relinquish the power we have now and strive for arrangements where we have less power, not more, over the rest of humanity, which we desperately need to begin making now, even though that dream does not practically allow us to imagine ourselves heirs to the throne of an impeccable paradise of our own superhumanly magnanimous making.
This is as simple as I can make it:
Following up on:
This.
Months ago Leninino sent me a 'meme' about superheroes I really didn't know how to deal with but which inspired some thoughts about individuals in capitalism. This meme could have been called 'What Is Your Favourite Flavour Of Fascism?' In what way, it asked, do you fantasize your domination over others? How would you most enjoy others to be inferior to and weaker than yourself?
The theme of this meme never really rests in its circulation of the blogsphere but it reappeared lately - and has given rise some posts here - disturbingly in Lenin's response in his haloscan to s0metim3s initial, cogent objection to an appalling post which sought to repeat and at the same time rationalize the infamous American blood libel of 'young black men' that was being, predictably, propagated by the media as a justification for the military and paramilitary cleansing and occupation of New Orleans.
"Chill out, you sanctimonious pillock."
A further, rather desperate and disingenuous defence by the post‘s author, trying to seize the self-congratulatory high ground of high minded courage to speak impiously about race, appeared below in the haloscan: "But that tired old stick that race experience is a black box and any attempt to discuss it, however constructively, is always-already racist? That's not only invalid, it's actively counterproductive. What's the alternative? Sitting monadically in our individual race realities and letting the real racists get on with their depradations? That may be enough for you, but not me."
These responses of course exhibit all the cockiness of one who is ensconced in the 'black box of race' he has pretended to abolish but has really enclosed as his private property, the property of the non-raced white, the fortress from which to 'make', define, usurp and pronounce upon the 'simple' and universal raced experience of raced others while remaining immune himself from such scrutiny.
From within that black box - really the white fortress - the free-of-race can construct and endow the raced others with traits, histories, psychic conditions, and criminal guilt at whim, like a child playing a video game, and simultaneously congratulate himself on having made his pawns in less fiendish and monstrous guise than other, crueller, less forgiving masters are wont to do.
Such a disdainful and bitter rejection of inquiry into this rhetorical manoeuvre relies on the assumption of the unique ability of whites to overcome their 'making' by the racially oppressive society in which they enjoy advantages. It repeats the belief of Jefferson that it is black slaves, not white slave owners, whom the institution of slavery turns into sadists and rapists, and the oppressed, not the oppressors, upon whom the structures of oppression exert any deforming or formative effect at all. 'We' made 'them.' (They are effectively our fictions; our imagination literally creates them, freely, without any materialist constraints or obligations of respect.)
You are, says the author to 'young black men,' whatever I say you are. You are as I imagine you. Be grateful I am not more severe, and choose to spread the blame for your monstrousness around; you share it with my competitors.
The premise is that the system which endows us with power over our fellows and schools us in the pleasures of its exertion did not deform 'us,' but deformed 'them.' So 'we' can clear headedly analyse 'their' experience and their moral failings, from a position of 'science,' mastery and neutrality - our private black box - and enjoy the prerogative, unearned, of forgiveness and understanding and the ability even to cure and ‘remake’ our depraved inferiors subsequent to our diagnosis.
The assumed proposal is that these creatures of ours, deformed by the brutality of our incompetence and indifference, our failures to provide adequate care and role models, are now in need of our (reformed) guidance and rehabilitation.
This theme is of course not confined to the justification for disseminating the ever popular American blood libel with its ever popular liberal spin of ‘black pathology.’. The assumption of (socially) white (middle class+) individuality and rationality - the (socially) white (middle class plus) immunity to collective ’making’ and deformation by experience of raced and classed society - in contrast to brown and black horde raced existence is absolutely indispensable to the various apologies for US-UK government and corporate policies and the 'war on terror/terra' right now, across the right-left spectrum.
The idea that 'the left' is responsible somehow for explaining and accounting for the (fictionally savage) conduct of ‘young black men’ in New Orleans, like a kindergarten teacher whose students have been the subjects of complaints of bullying, who while mightily annoyed at them for letting the side down when the cameras were rolling will nonetheless make some kind of irresponsible explanation before the court of public opinion on their behalf, in utter disregard of evidence or plausibility, infantilising and possessing them with brazen self-congratulatory entitlement, is very much a part of this, and in keeping with the assumption that 'the left' - or any anti-capitalist or dissident with access to media - is responsible for Sadam Hussein or heroin middlemen or child-sacrificing Palestinian mothers or whatever human or natural phenomenon is spotlighted or invented and disavowed by capital on television and used as the pretext for capital‘s aggression, domination and expropriation (in the guise of restoring order, liberation, stability or whatever.).
Also crucially dependent on this assumed race hierarchy and othering is the repeated insistence that a higher standard of proof is required to suspect (socially) white capitalists and (socially) white middle managers of a crime for which they had definite motive and from which they have derived calculable resulting benefits than is needed to suspect dark capitalists and dark middle managers from dark corners of the world with neither conceivable motive nor any resulting benefits - who are however of course racially or culturally prone to acts of spectacular and counterproductive violence, having been ’made this way’ by us - of that very same crime.
The bile, deafness and venom with which doubts regarding the 'official guilt assignment' for 9/11 (’subaltern weather ’) and the destruction New Orleans (meteorological disaster plus crazed young black men) - unreasonably termed the 'official narrative' - are greeted derives from the emotional attachment to the principles of race and class (and 'culture') hierarchy, the assumed and cherished superiority of the educated clerk class itself both intellectually and culturally to the designated irrational, reactive, instinctive others 'society (elites) made,' gluing belief to this wholly implausible comic book of history which a) tends toward absolving the enemies of humanity of their crimes against humanity and b) obfuscates humanity's available paths to collaborative solutions by portraying the non-white and property-less majority as irrational, reactive and animally instinctive and thus incapable of constructive collective action in self- and communal interests.
The suggestion is that these people whom ‘we made’ require our leadership, when in fact 'the left' to which bloggers, journalists and academics belong in the US and the UK is not going to get anywhere in terms of promoting the commonweal until it learns to give up its race-class entitlement to control and management and learns to assist, listen to, learn from, cooperate with and follow the militants and resistance movements of the south and the south-within-the-north. We need finally to recognize the vast majority of humanity who are oppressed and dispossessed - the property-less billions, our slaves - not as objects of our generous forgiveness and patronage and pupils to be enrolled in our ethical re-education programmes but as, painful as this may be to us, our moral superiors, our generous comrades, less vengeful and spiteful and judgemental and competitive than we are in general, less addicted to control and the exercise of tyrannies and manipulations, whose help and guidance and solidarity we require for our own cure.
From the devotion to race hierarchy and its hideous credulity in reality-inverted-in-a-silver-spoon comes all this condemning or not condemning this or that insurgent or militant group, this or that tactic, which goes along with the instinctual violent defence of elite white and only elite white innocence of atrocities and enormities until guilt is proven. Who asked the blogging brigade for imprimatur? Never in my life did anyone ask me if it would be okay with me if they organized suicide bombings. I’m not involved in this; I don’t facilitate it: that should be enough to exhibit my non-election of this tactic of resistance, but there are these inevitable demands for striking podium postures of condemnation as if I were somehow in charge, by virtue of my race and class, of the actions of anyone whose right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness I champion (which would include everyone, regardless of the delivery systems of the bombs they may or may not be exploding).
The generosity of the burdened white man does not withhold these constant unsolicited offers of ethical and strategic management consulting to those struggling more effectively and less electively, and so we have a constant outpouring of this advice and constructive criticism of movements the volunteer management disdains even to join - this intellectual and moral assistance given often in frustration of course, for the grunts do not always obey.
The assumption is that a combination of CEO and PR is the only role suitable for us in any subaltern movement we express the least interest in or sympathy for. Thus the endless thumbs up, thumbs down, condescending applause when humanity doesn’t disappoint us or fail to live up to our shining example of courage and rectitude, voluntary rebukes, announcements of forgiveness and understanding though NOT, repeat NOT excuses - we’re NOT making excuses for you this time kids! (who asked you to?) - the ceaseless moral, historical and tactical lectures.
Noam Chomsky is not only admired but truly beloved all over the world, I believe, precisely for never doing this. For never flagging in his respect for other human beings, for never dominating others with his discourse. (My father was like that, too.) Chomsky is forever stressing that it is precisely what we do have a say in, and are responsible for, that is ethically and practically our proper concern, and not the rhetorical management of the pecadillos and crimes ofby individuals associated (by us or by others, genuinely or according to race or other fictions) with those struggling desperately to get out from under our own boot or that which rests on our necks far far more lightly.
So: perhaps the disturbed, egomaniacal superhero fantasies to which we attach our dreams of world-betterment and personal fulfilment need to be jettisoned, and humanity recognized by us as powerful enough to liberate itself collectively if only we would stop doing everything we can to thwart, control and dictate the acceptable parameters and worthiness tests of its endless struggle. If only we would stop demanding humanity be as angelic as we are in our fantasies before we let it out of the Inquisitorial interrogation chamber.
It seems to me that what we can do best of all, at least, and for a start, is try to be useful by refusing our social role as reproducers of this pernicious paradigm and disseminators of all the perverse anti-humanity fictions and avenues of oppression it generates. So perhaps it would be seemly for us to stop fantasizing about our ecstatic domination, about the possession of even more power over others than we have now, about being harder, faster, stronger than everyone around us, about the adulatory gratitude which we expect to be showered upon us by those inferiors whose lives we spare despite their sins and whom we may even protect from nastier masters. Perhaps it would behove us to try to fantasize about being in need of cooperation rather than in charge - its not that outrageous a notion - about being as vulnerable as everyone else, and being useful rather than in control and instrumentalizing, instructing, manipulating, coercing, lecturing, threatening, intimidating, managing and aggressively imagining others, usurping their liberties of action and expression. Because until we are cured of this fantasy of our real superiority and these dreams of even greater domination and impunity, whether we indulge them as outright sadistic vengeance dreams or dreams of the patronizing, sadistically sentimental kind, we will not be able to contribute constructively to the creation of a social order requiring us to relinquish the power we have now and strive for arrangements where we have less power, not more, over the rest of humanity, which we desperately need to begin making now, even though that dream does not practically allow us to imagine ourselves heirs to the throne of an impeccable paradise of our own superhumanly magnanimous making.
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