I cite

Sale! Great books at good prices, good books at great prices

Columbia University Press is having a 'white sale' (I thought that term just applied to lines and bedding and was typically used in January). There are titles from Deleuze, Kristeva, Cixous, Butler, Levinas, Adorno, Searle, Barthes,Irigaray, Rawls, Gramsci, Gitlin, Vattimo, Arditi, Debray and others. Also, Edinburgh and Wallflower Press books are available at discounted prices. Quite a few 2007 titles have been discounted--including Lefort's Complications and Kelly Oliver's on women and war so this isn't just a ton of obscure backlist.

I was surprised Columbia University Press has so many books on animality and on food. The press is careful not to mix these up.

Can global capitalist democracy have a human face?

At first glance, the question 'is global capitalist democracy with a human face enough?' doesn't help much to open up thinking about the dilemmas of the present. One way to approach its limits and maybe put it to work is by breaking the implicit claims apart, word by word.

Global: since the global is not the world or even a world insofar as antagonism is Real, the question begins with the fantasy of a totality, a fantasy that the next term, capitalist, either reinforces as ideology or ruptures as Real. Thus, the next term

Capitalist: already contradicts and calls into question the first as well as the second, unless

Democracy: remains but an empty signifier.  After all, there isn't an institution for a global democracy; democracy and capitalism are incompatible; democracy isn't global in its theory or practice.

Human: is rather shocking in contexts of homo sacer, the critique of human rights, and the ongoing critical engagements with the anthropomorphic machine. In fact, it's so counter to Zizek's anti-humanism (what kind of neighbor is the human neighbor, anyway?) that it seems part of a phrase constructed for radio (tertiary orality?), especially when we recall his critical responses to Levinas's

Face.

And

Enough: for what? For a slogan? A platform? An aspiration? Ideological formations combine dissonant and even contradictory ideas. We could then imagine left responses to the question (or, differently put, the implied left enunciating position): "yes, that's enough for us!"  We could be so fortunate to live in such a wonderful world!

Is it enough because its impossibility sustains desire? enough because the ideal lets us keep enjoying: global! capitalist! democracy! these are all the best goodies! the political equivalent of a chocolate chocolate chip cookie (why the combination of chocolates?). Those who are left out, excluded from or deprived of any of the three, have something to fight for. The obvious incompatibility and emptiness is surefire protection against Laclau-inspired critique. Or maybe the slogan, global capitalist democracy with a human face!, is a slogan for the multitude (and a lot easier to swallow than the joy of being communist!).

Zizek on Democracy Now (part 2): is global capitalist democracy with a human face enough?

Link: Democracy Now! | World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror & More.

      For me, that protest was part of what I see as the main failure. But it’s not a subjective failure. It’s in the situation of modern left, which all too often for me adopts this rather comfortable moralizing position of we condemn, we criticize, but like we can’t do anything more, so this safe moralizing position, which is why, as I like to emphasize, I was in Great Britain, in United Kingdom in that point. And what did strike me is how, after the big protests, both sides appeared satisfied in a strange way. The organizers of demonstrators made their point: you see the majority is behind us, people oppose war, we made our point. But silently, they knew they didn’t stop the war, nothing. Blair government, the other side, was also satisfied. You see what an open society is: even when a country goes to war, we can—and again, the best answer, I think, was provided unintentionally by George Bush when he visited at that time UK. I remember, when asked by journalists, “How do you comment on big protests against you?” he said, “I totally support them, because, you see, that’s why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this, massive protest against the government, so that things like this could happen only—will happen also in Iraq.” So, of course, this was either a bad joke or hypocrisy or whatever you want. But there is a truth in it. Everyone, in a way, all the sides, felt satisfied. And this is what often worries me, this—how should I put it?—secret, symbiotic relationship. Those in power like a certain type of moralistic protest, which does nothing.

      And again, I think that even—of course, everybody likes them Zapatistas in Mexico—that even Zapatistas fell a little bit into that trap. At the beginning, they were a little bit of a serious threat. Then when their—this famous anonymous leader, Subcomandante Marcos, then he made the choice of playing this, how should I call it, moral authority, you know, and at that point making comments on what is wrong in Mexican society. From that point on, everybody loves him now, you know? Everybody—oh, yes, he’s our moral consciousness, and so on and so on.

      But again, I’m not simply reproaching the left for it, because, how to put it, of course now then there is the cruel question: but what can the left do? What can you effectively do? So I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing this. I’m just saying—what I’m saying is basically one simple thing. I repeat it in all my talks, and so on. It’s fashionable to make fun of Fukuyama, End of History, but even the majority of today’s left is effectively, if I may make an adverb, Fukuyamaists. Basically, isn’t it that most of us leftists silently believe capitalism is here to stay, parliamentary democracy is what we [inaudible], so the problem is simply how to make it work better? Our ultimate horizon is, again, in the same way as we were talking about socialism with a human face, global capitalist democracy with a human face. And for me, the key question is, is this enough?

Some readers of Zizek (Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, to mention a couple) read Zizek as accepting global capitalism. I disagree. I think that 'ultimate horizon' refers to our setting, what limits left politics and left thought today (in good old Hegelian terms, philosophy is its time comprehended in thought). For years Zizek has pointed out how many left academics live and how our actions reflect our belief: those of us who are tenured have retirement accounts; we may own some kind of property like a house or condominium; we have health insurance; we worry about our kids' education etc. Of course, there are activists who are not sheltered in the academy. At this point in the US, though, it's safe to say that they have not yet produced a major crack in the ideological edifice in which the left remains encased. We know, but nevertheless...

 

Hooked on a feeling

Although I remain confused and mystified by The Community Community and Means without Ends, one of my favorite ideas from these books is the spectacle's return to us of our linguistic nature in an inverted fashion.

The spectacle contains and captures the possibility of a common good. We could even say its production of a common is its good or that the power of spectacle is its production of the common as a feeling, necessarily shared. Its form is inseparable from its affect. A spectacle is affective form and this is its common good.

Yet this common good is so fungible, so commodifiable, that we feel its force most often as lost. Zizek would emphasize stolen. We might also call this feeling of lost common good a sense of corruption or distorted. The common, the we, appears or is manifest only through distortions, inversions, and corruptions, via theft, commodification, and capture. We feel the common, our commonality or a commonness, by feeling also and at the same time its corruption or capture. Conceptually it's possible to separate the common good from the spectacle that inverts and returns it to us, but only conceptually, not actually.

Actually we encounter our hope for change channeled and manipulated into mainstream political parties and candidates, into commodities and ads and packaged experiences that promise to be different, this time, to be spectacular. We encounter or experience our own feeling pushed and distorted into too simple packages of for and against, optimist and pessimist. Where one argues that the pessimists are cynics demeaning one's authentic political longing, another views the optimists as kool-aid drinking compromisers. In either case, the common good as intensity of being and belonging together impresses itself upon us with and as the intensity of our sense that another is trying to take or distort, capture or coopt it.

If optimism is felt as a threat, then, this is not primarily a fear of feeling or an inability to risk hoping again after being disappointed. Yes, it is felt as a threat when one feels pressured to like-feeling, to identifying with the group spirit or identifying group spirit as the common good: having grown up Southern Baptist, I know this feeling well, this pressure to feel the Holy Spirit, to feel Jesus in the room. Did others feel It, Him? Or is what they felt the pressure to feel? And did they name this pressure God, the big Other? (My son says his friends are incredulous that he is an atheist, "Dude, but God is like awesome!"). In this example, it isn't the specificity of optimism that's the problem. It's the compulsion to feel like everyone else, on their time. If there is a sense of threat, and there may not be, this sense comes first and it itself part of the inverted return of common good. This sense is the carrier, the impulse we invest with our hopes and fears, our optimism and pessimism, our faith in the future or defense of lost causes.

Rather than optimism as what is at risk, hope as a desire too fragile to sustain, optimism and pessimism are two aspects of the same distorted common feeling, what the inverted spectacle returns to us. The spectacle may be political (it always has political effects), commercial, religious, sexual, even natural (understood as unavoidably mediated). Spectacle is a form for imagining, projecting, experiencing, believing in the movement of others, we are moved because they are. 

So you had a bad day...

I suspected middle school would be tough.

Political theory friends told me about their kids...hell on earth, amazing they made it through it, the worst part of their lives.  And now these kids have finished college and become political theorists themselves. Paul says that this is not necessarily the best case scenario, not a cause for optimism. I have another drink and decide to blog about it.

I was horrible in seventh and eighth grades (Paul was good but had no friends). Not quite Gus Van Sant level, but not nothing. I ran away (got caught before the night was done), did drugs (just pot but it was Alabama, and maybe I shouldn't erase the prescription drugs I scrounged out of our bathrooms), cut classes, got caught smoking in the locker room (I thought the teacher was an old hag, but she didn't turn me in), rounded more bases than Disney would acknowledge.

But not my kid, not my perfect brilliant angel, my musician, my math kid, the ethical kid who weeps for the outcasts, the kid who tells me about his life, who still hugs me, who endures the stuffed animals I place on his head and around his neck before he goes to sleep.

Change. Hormones. Who am I? Where do I belong? Do I have a place? Don't lock me in. I'm not you. You don't know me. You can't make me. But I did. I do. Don't I?

My students help. They tell me I over-analyze. Seventh graders don't think like political theorists (or do they? we've been reading Nietzsche. It fits: we saw kids playing king of the mountain outside our windows-- the perfect Nietzschean game).

He got beat up. The message from the nurse was that they weren't sending him to the hospital. The ice packs were enough. He started it. Provoked it. I'll see the footage tomorrow. Provoking a fight and then getting the shit beat out of him. And crying. Wanting respect, wanting to set the stage, the pace, wanting to call the shots, to be the man. And getting pummeled into black and blue and red.

He started it. He put a dirty broom on another kid, said "Mexican," and mocked him. That was last week. Or so it appears in the recap I head I heard this morning, the three minute version of days of his life, days I know too little about, but can't really ever know.

And also last week: "moose." Why does it hurt him to be called "moose"?  I don't get it. It's a gesture to a logo on the clothes we get for free, from another family whose son outgrows them. "Moose." Does this mean preppy? white? privileged? Weak?

I thought about making him delete or erase all his WOW levels. Start at the beginning. My students said this was way too harsh.

But still I navigate a terrain where the familiarities are deceptive and any move will have repercussions I cannot foresee but only regret.

How much is too much?

This is an old topic, much trodden in these parts. But, I'm finally getting around to writing a review that was due 18 months ago (it has now become a review essay) and so I'm returning to old themes. Why, why, why do 'critics' attack Zizek for writing too much? An essay in one book I'm reviewing treats the amount of his writing as a symptom. What amount is symptomatic? When does quantity equal pathology? Is a journalist who publishes weekly or twice weekly or thrice weekly somehow diseased? Are all bloggers suffering from pathology? (The answer to this might be yes without that indicating that might larger point is wrong). Who decides on the number that becomes 'too much'?  In law, Cass Sunstein publishes a couple of books a year. Is he ill? What about Stephen King? Did Derrida suffer from the same malady? I suspect that the accusation of 'too much' is raised by people who don't publish enough, who are worried that they might look bad, like they are lazy, like they should be doing more.

Adoph Reed, Jr.: Obama No

Adolph Reed, Jr. in: Obama No | The Progressive (read the whole thing).

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much, partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia compromise speech—a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring “acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies—has gained him breathing room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.” But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black “anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s.)

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

Stealth video

A friend of my son's got suspended from seventh grade for secretly videoing one of his teachers. Naturally, he posted the video on YouTube. It had a caption like "Mrs. Jones Dancing," although she wasn't dancing. She was just talking. Some kids made funny or almost funny comments. And then they forgot about it until someone told the teacher and they figured out who had posted it. It seems like the charges that led to the suspension are "having a camera in the classroom" and "videoing a person without her permission."

My son asked me what I would have done if he had done this. I'm not sure about the law here. I didn't think it was illegal to video another person in a public place without their permission as long as the video was not for commercial use. I'm squeamish about videoing kids. It seems kinda stalker-ish.

At this point our chat led me into a long excursus on Althusser's ideological state apparatuses and Foucault's account of discipline. My son didn't even seem to mind. He actually agreed ("school sucks"). And so we concluded that if he and his friends formed a "coalition of those who think it was unfair to suspend that kid" and made videos of teachers and vice-principals and posted them as an act of rebellion that I wouldn't be mad.

As long as he keeps his grades up.

Adoph Reed, Jr. on Democracy Now

Adolph Reed, Jr. is great. I've only met him a couple of times, but I admire him completely and always learn from him (about politics, for sure, and also some refreshingly choice profanity). What is particularly striking: while all sorts of other academics pose as leftists and activists, as radicals (even as they act and write as if a presidential election were radical politics), he is completely genuine.

Link: Democracy Now! | The Politics of the Rev. Wright Controversy: A Debate with Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Adolph Reed, Jr. (read the whole thing).

JUAN GONZALEZ: Adolph Reed, you’ve been critical of the progressive credentials of Senator Obama and of everything from his community organizing experience to some of his political views. Could you explain your views on that?

ADOLPH REED, JR.: Well, yeah. I mean, I want to say a couple things. I mean, one is, yeah, I don’t think that what Obama—well, I tend much more to Doug Henwood’s view, that what Obama has put together is not so much a coalition as a fan club, right? I mean, you don’t build a movement around a political campaign. I know I’ve heard people say that, well—you know, Kool-Aid drinkers have said that, well, you know, this could be—he could set in motion forces like those that moved FDR in a progressive direction, those that moved JFK in a progressive direction. But as Will Jones, the historian at the University of Wisconsin, has pointed out, you know, that comparison fails, because in each of those cases there were dynamic, rooted social movements that had been pushing for progressive agendas with popular bases on the ground prior to the election of the president. You know, you can’t compare—frankly, I think the comparison of the Obama coalition to either, you know, the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Greensboro sit-ins or the Gastonia textile strike, you know, just fall completely flat, because this is a candidate- centered politics.

I think it’s also the case that—well, I mean, the connection of race and religion, I think, also very much disturbs me. I mean, there’s no intrinsic black American religious experience. I think there are a lot of us who don’t have any religion whatsoever and don’t really care about it and don’t especially want to see it in public life. And I think that’s a—you know, that’s a stance and a mood and a disposition that’s as culturally authentic among black people as anything else, if there were such a thing as cultural authenticity, which I don’t believe.

Finally, you know, the premise that our politics is—at the national level somehow has been characterized by partisan division just flies in the face of everything that we’ve seen over the last twenty-five years. I mean, what have progressives been complaining about, right? That we have basically two wings of a single party, right? It was the Clinton administration and the Democrats who have led—who have polished off the destruction of the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to direct provision of income support for the poor, to direct provision of low-income housing, that led to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, that opened up the dotcom boom, and so—and so on, that’s been as committed to a regime of public advocation and service provision as Republicans have.

And if anything, the contention that the candidate can bring us all together despite our partisan differences is the same thing that the Democrats have been claiming consistently since at least, you know, Dukakis, to be post-partisan, to be post-political. And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics, ultimately.

The academic climate

If academics were serious about climate change, we'd stop flying so much.

A mid-level academic likely attends at least one major conference a year, maybe two. She might get invitations to speak a few times a year. Folks who are in greater demand as well as those hoping to get their work before more audiences will fly more than this. In 2007 I went to South America twice, the UK once, and Europe three times. I also flew domestically, but didn't count those.

A department running a search might bring in anywhere between two and ten job candidates. Conversely, a hot candidate might have fifteen or so interviews.

And let's not forget the academic couples that can't get positions close to each other. In some instances, one or the other flies every weekend.

This adds up to lots of miles in the air, lots of emissions.

What would an academic no-fly zone or list look like?

For starters, academics would have to get rid of the notion that the expert is the one from far away. They'd have to cultivate awareness of the work of people who are close by, work more collaboratively with colleges and universities in their neighborhoods.

What about ending small meetings, the small expert, invitation only conferences that solidify networks and often lead to edited volumes or special issues of journals?  What about ending mega-conferences, the huge national and international conferences of over 5000 people? Are these really necessary? No one goes to every panel when 70 are scheduled at the same time. No one even attends all the panels in their speciality. No one even has face time with all the people they want to meet. Sure, it's fun to meet with friends, to see what scholar x looks like close up. But many complain about the big meetings anyway--they are impersonal, meat-markets, degrading, and, well, big.

A number of groups and associations already post papers online in advance of a meeting. There have also been multiple efforts, of varying degrees of success, at holding online or virtual conferences (whether through text based interactions or in Second Life, whether in real time or over the space of several months).

Admittedly, it's not the same. The demands of everyday life intrude and make it hard to spend hours in front of the computer. But, hey, many of us already do this (we are bloggers, after all). Colleges and universities could acknowledge and facilitate e-conference days. Here they might encourage small groups' participation and interaction online. (I'm not explaining this well. But in March, seven members of my department flew from upstate NY to San Francisco for academic meetings. With e-meetings, we could have been in a smart classroom, on screens, but also communicating with each other f2f and in real time. Likewise, folks from other schools that are close by (in Rochester, Ithaca, Syracuse) could have met up, again, having a mini f2f conference alongside the bigger one on the west coast.

We could eliminate the campus visit for job candidates. Job candidates could post their jobtalks on YouTube. Search committees would be forced actually to read the writing samples.There could be online interviews. Again, many places already do phone interviews as part of the search.

What will be interesting: the ways that academics fail to act responsibly, the ways we won't give up our travel and our meetings. Business people are much worse than we are. Scholarship requires meeting with other people. Good ideas need to be presented and defended. How can we stay up with our fields? The real answer, though, is we enjoy it. Flying around makes us feel important.

Pie

The best pie I ever tasted was made with strawberries and pecans.

Food, particularly gifts of food and hospitality, particularly desserts and sweet food, can set off strong chains of association. Pecans remind me of the tastes of my childhood, pecan pie, pecans in the stuffing, pecans in cookies and fudge, pecans in the crusts and batter of fried chicken and shrimp. Pecans comfort and reassure. In the deep South, we had lots of pecans. We'd pick them off the ground, sometimes, hoping we could eat them. I wasn't much for shelling pecans, myself, although I enjoyed seeing my grandfather's ever-changing arsenal of devices for excising pecans from their shells. Perhaps because of the work it takes to get the meat out of the shell, pecans were special and common, familiar treats.

My mother and grandmothers didn't make many strawberry pies. There was one that was oddly gelatinous. Strawberries were sliced, sprinkled with sugar, and served on top of homemade vanilla ice cream or waffles. So strawberries weren't common or familiar; they were part of another cookbook, a different lexicon of flavors.

And so the combinations of old and new in the strawberry pecan pie I ate this weekend sent me in different directions, into Southern memories and unknown, rather cosmopolitan associations. There was something reassuring yet a little surprising, like a new friend one has known for quite a while.

Message force multipliers

The true highlight of the statement of the obvious news of Pentagon-organized and defense industry profitting former generals shilling for the Bush administration by pushing for war with Iraq and lying about military 'progress' there is the notion of 'message force multipliers.' It's a wonderful insight into the politics of drive in the circuits of communicative capitalism.

The term can be accented in at least two ways: the force multiplication of messages or the multiplication of message forces.

The force multiplication of messages seem tres militaristic, like adding lots and lots of forces, sending in more and more troops. It's like spam for television (and this is not the same as propaganda; the term isn't useful in an add of constant media, ever present advertising, unavoidable spin). And, what makes it particularly great is that it is spam that is requested, "please, sir (Mr. Bush), I want some more!" It's the ultimate perverse relation to media, wherein the msm are positioned so as to ask to be bearers of the regime's message, they want to be its tools, its instruments. They are the means/medium for it, after all. That's their role, instruments/media for disseminating messages. Force multiplication makes them all the more effective. It enables them to better do what they do, better to serve man (citational gesture to old "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" episode).

But the multiplication of message forces may be even better. This suggests a concrete awareness of the affective dimension of media in communicative capitalism. Of course, the Bush administration has excelled in excepting itself from the signifying aspect of language and relying instead on affective. It knows full well that repetition exerts a force, a compulsion, that it has effects independent of any meaning of what is repeated. The impact comes from the repeating.

Likewise, the Bush administration knows how to tie together seemingly stable meanings in ways that rely on these meanings, disrupt them, and generate affects from the tension surrounding the combustion of meaning and non-meaning. One of the most noticed early examples of this was the term "axis of evil." John Stewart mentioned another term last night "non-Iraqi terrorists responsible for 9/11." At any rate, the idea of multiplying message forces is useful because it fully acknowledges that the message is the carrier of a force, an affective force. The goal isn't just 'getting our message out there.' That's so old school, as if people read, think, consider, and understand. The goal is spreading and intensifying the message force. The generals were excellent vehicles for this spreading and distributing. Message force genbots.

Steve Fraser, The Two Gilded Ages

Read the whole post (the beginning has details on the billions pulled in by hedge fund managers betting against subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations). Tomgram: Steve Fraser, The Two Gilded Ages.

Beginning in the 1970s, our age's business elite became acutely politically-minded and impressively well-organized, penetrating deeply all the pores of party and electoral democracy. They've gone so far as to craft strategic alliances with elements of what their nineteenth century predecessors -- who might have blanched at the prospect -- would have termed the hoi polloi. Calls to dismantle the federal bureaucracy now carry a certain populist panache, while huffing and puffing about family values has -- so far -- proven a cheap date for a gilded elite that otherwise generally couldn't care less.

Moreover, the ascendancy of our faux revolutionaries has been accompanied by media hosannas to the stock market as an everyman's Oz. America's long infatuation with its own democratic-egalitarian ethos lent traction to this illusion.

Horace Greely's inspirational admonition to "go West young man" echoed through all the channels of popular culture in the 1990s -- from cable TV shows and mass circulation magazines to baseball stadium scoreboards and Internet chat rooms. Only now Greeley's frontier of limitless opportunity had migrated back East to the stock exchange and into the ether of virtual or dot.com reality. The culture of money released from all ancient inhibitions enveloped the commons.

"Shareholder democracy" and the "ownership society" are admittedly more public relations slogans than anything tangible. Nonetheless, you can't ignore the fact that, during the second Gilded Age, half of all American families became investors in the stock market. Dentists and engineers, mid-level bureaucrats and college professors, storekeepers and medical technicians -- people, that is, from the broad spectrum of middle class life who once would have viewed the New York Stock Exchange with a mixture of awe, trepidation, and genuine distaste, and warily kept their distance -- now jumped head first into the marketplace carrying with them all their febrile hopes for social elevation.

What, me fatalist?

I'm accused in the comments of being fatalist. But, gee, with a little help from my friends, I can change the world! Love is all you need. And awareness. And maybe an awareness of love and how deep down we are all good people and truly wish for peace. I know I can truly make a real difference that matters. All it takes is everyone just looking at themselves and really being themselves and doing what they feel is truly right.

Here's a list of all the things I've done TODAY to make the world a better place. And you should all look deep into your hearts and if you really feel like making a difference then YOU CAN! Because that's all it takes. I'm looking at the woman in the mirror, so just look at yourself and make a CHANGE!. Just by making YOUR OWN list you can FEEL SO MUCH BETTER about yourself and the world, which really, if you think about it are the SAME!

1.  I replaced an old lightbulb with the new swirly kind that has sucky harsh light.
2.  I planted seeds for an herb garden!
3.  I kissed a child.
4.  I recycled something I got in the mail.
5.  I signed like five different petitions that were circulated via email.
6.  I forwarded at least two petitions to my friends.
7.  I walked to work (instead of driving; but I drove to where I run, which is sorta stupid, but because I'm aware of it, then it's okay, and also because I do A LOT to help the world).
8.  I didn't fly in an airplane or book a flight.
9.  I took my canvas grocery bag to the store (well, actually I didn't, because I didn't go yet, but I am going to so my intentions are really good).
10.  I made a list about how I am really making the world a better place.

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Ktismatics on Ciné-Musique

An insightful engagement with Patrick Mullins' 2005 book. Read the whole thing, including the "interview" in the comments: Ciné-Musique « Ktismatics?.

[Patrick Mullins (aka Jonquille de Camembert) has been a sporadic and memorable commenter here at Ktismatics. I just read his book...]

In ciné-musique we live a movie fiction that was first suggested to us by real movies. To keep living this ciné-musique, we turn the materials of movies into objects that go beyond them. - Patrick Mullins, Day of Ciné-Musique, 2005

A cumulative artifact assembled from cinematic objects gathered from very specific but diverse sources, Day of Ciné-Musique (2005) transports the reader to an abstract aesthetic milieu that author Patrick Mullins calls “reality fiction,” a sort of tangible imaginary space he discovers beneath the hypnosis of a lifetime of infection by Hollywood.

The book begins and ends with a series of visual images: photographs of works created by Swiss painter Christian Pellet. Each image appears abstract and iconic in isolation, but collectively they function like screen shots excerpted not from a particular movie but from the protean arche-movie that spawns all films. Oddly, the poses and gestures have been transposed from “real” movies and re-staged by live models. These transmutations, conveying a sense of artifice in the extraordinary attention paid to seemingly irrelevant details — clasped hands, buttons of a vest, part of an armchair — lend a formal gnostic aura to the book. This process of abstract idealization, where cinematic events intertwine with the material world, mirrors Mullin’s writing, in which he juxtaposes real visits to L.A. with idiosyncratic glimpses of mostly obscure Hollywood movies. The cumulative effect of these transformations is the assembly of a ciné-musique landscape that verges on the surreal, perhaps bordering on Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic territory of disembodied organs and childhood fantasy. The approach also calls to mind the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who, through attention to details that repeat themselves in different times and places, paradoxically creates a sense of eternal transcendence. It’s appropriate then that both Mullins and Pellet cite the film version of Robbe-Grillet’s enigmatic novel Last Year in Marienbad. But Mullins’ writing is more subjective than Robbe-Grillet’s, more personal and romantic.

More Copjec and Laclau (fifth in a series on drive)

Laclau is quite explicit about the relation between his discussion of hegemony and Copjec's discussion of drive. The problem, though, is that there seems to be a difference between these discussions that Laclau doesn't acknowledge. He writes:

The logic of objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are identical.

For him, the 'logic of objet petit a' seems to mean "making an object the embodiment of a mythical fullness." This seems to overlap with the idea of the elevation of the object to the dignity of the Thing. But that Lacanian notion remains vague and indistinct, hovering between the logic of desire and the logic of drive.

Laclau writes:

The aspiration to that fullness or wholeness does not, however, simply disappear; it is transferred to partial objects which are the objects of the drives. In political terms, that is exactly what I have called a hegemonic relation: a certain particularity which assumes the role of an impossible universality. . . . With this we reach a full explanation of what radical investment means: making an object the embodiment of a mythical fullness.  Affect (that is, enjoyment) is the very essence of investment, while its contingent character accounts for the 'radical' component of the formula.

I will leave to the side a discussion of how affect and enjoyment are not, strictly speaking, synonymous. What interests me here is that Copjec does not say that in drive an aspiration is transferred. She writes:

The partial object or object of lack is the one that emerges out of the lack, the void, opened by the loss of the original Plenum or das Ding. . . . The object a . . . is that something more in the external object ... which adds nothing to this object, predicates nothing more about it--except that it satisfies the drive. . . . The elevation of the external object of the drive . . . does not depend on its cultural or social value in relation to other objects.

Laclau renders creation out of nothing as transference in order to preserve his claim for an aspiration to fullness. But there is nothing in Copjec's account of drive that suggests that the drive's capacity to provide enjoyment has anything to do with the loss aspiration

There is also a difference between Laclau's use of one of Copjec's gestures to Deleuze's discussion of the close up and Copjec's critical point. Laclau brings out the line that says the close up discloses "the whole of the scene itself." Yet Copjec emphasizes that objet petit a is neither a whole, nor a part of a whole, but a part that replaces a whole. She writes:

"Drive to come" translates the idea that the object of the drive is partial; it does not promise a future free of this partialness.

The partial object neither embodies mythical fullness nor assumes the role of a mythical universality. It is partial and this partiality is satisfying. This is what sublimation looks like: satisfaction in something partial. If this were an article in Cosmo it would call it 'settling.'

Laclau can't have it both ways. He can't have his logic of hegemony and objet petit a. Objet petit a is not itself a 'logic.' It is a part of no-part, an excess at the site of lack and a lack at the heart of desire. As the latter, it can operate within a logic of desire as a marker of impossible fullness. But as the former it is part of a different logic of drive. As I see it, Zizek's point against so-called radical democracy is that is takes satisfaction in the little things, the day to day business of politics. I would add that under communicative capitalism, so-called radical democracy is captured in the circuits of drive, circling around whatever neoliberalism gives it, enjoying it. And I use 'whatever' here deliberately, hoping to point to whatever being as what replaces identities in the politics of drive.

Copjec, Laclau, and Zizek (fourth in a series on drive)

Laclau claims that his notion of partiality converges with with the psychoanalytic notion of a partial object, that is a partiality functioning as a totality. Indeed, his critique of Zizek hinges on this point:

what Zizek is ignoring is the whole logic of the objet petit a, which as I argued above, is identical to the hegemonic logic. That the object is 'elevated to the dignity of the Thing' is what Zizek seems to exclude as a political possibility. The alternative he presents is: either we have access to the Thing as such, or we have pure partialities not linked by any totalizing effect. I think that  a Lacanian such as Zizek should know better.

It seems to me that Laclau is relying on a one-sided reading of Copjec here. Her account of drive depicts the object not as elevated to the dignity of the Thing at all. We could say that it is noThing, nothing at all, and drive is the circuit around this nothing that becomes something because of the circuit.

I tried to express something like this idea in my discussion of drive in Publicity's Secret. There I consider the way the secret becomes the scoop in communicative capitalism. Some stupid, trivial bit of information becomes something by being construed as revealed--diet secrets of the stars! What's there to care about in Britney Spear's latest traffic accident? Nothing. No Thing. There is no there there. But there is the circulation of drive around this nothing that makes it something, that makes it deliver something extra, something that is in it more than itself.

Laclau's mistake, I think, is to construe the partial object in terms of totalizing effects that make it represent an absent fullness. Britney's driving problems don't stand in for anything. They deliver jouissance on their own. Thus, Copjec reads Lacan as proposing

that sublimation ought to be thought not as the substitution of a culturally valorized object for one that is immediately gratifying sexually, but as a changing of the object itself.

Out of nothing (no Thing) the drive creates an object

a thing in the very place where unified jouissance, das Ding, is absent . . .

Later she writes:

It is as if the very function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small fractures between things. . . . The drive continues to circle the object because the latter is never identical to itself, is split from itself. . . . It is not only the object of the drive that is split from itself; the subject, too, is fractures through the drive's repetitions.

At this point, I fail to see any totalizing effects here, unless totalizing is the same as fragmenting. Perhaps another way to say this is that Laclau posits a hidden S1 underneath the S2.

So Laclau's critique of Zizek on this point is not persuasive. Zizek does not presume the possibility of a new convergence with the lost maternal thing (which would be impossible since this is a retrospective assumption anyway, as Laclau acknowledges). Like Laclau (but contra Laclau's charge) he allows for the elevation of a contingent object to the dignity of a Thing.  But he recognizes as well the work of the drive in politics in terms of partialities with no totalizing effects, partialities that are nothings that deliver, affectively charged nothings in place where there is no unified jouissance or imagined fullness.

I know full well that Britney's traffic dilemmas are nothing. That's why I enjoy them.

Laclau might be right on one point: Zizek accuses him of resignation. It could be more accurate to say that what Laclau engages in is sublimation, the sublimation of revolutionary energies. This sublimation, then, is democratic drive or the sublimation of political desire into democracy. Democracy

Copjec and Laclau (third in a series on drive)

Crucial to Laclau's account of populist reason as an index of the logic of hegemony is the idea of the transformation of the particular in the name of a transcendent universality, that is, of a "moment of fusion between partial object and totality." As he writes:

This is why Copjec is absolutely right to insist on the Lacanian distinction between desire and drive; while the first has no object and cannot be satisfied, the second involves a radical investment in a partial object and brings about satisfaction. This is also why, as we shall see, later, political analyses which attempt to polarize politics in terms of the alternative between total revolution and gradualist reformism miss the point: what escapes them is the alternative logic of objet petit a--that is to say, the possibility that a partiality can become the name of an impossible totality (in other words, the logic of hegemony).

Laclau suggests that the partial object can become the name of an impossible totality. What does this mean? It seems easy to answer at first: the universal is accessible via a split in the particular between itself and what it stands for. But Laclau is employing a logic of drives here, so the matter is rather different. Is he saying that the object of the drives stands in for a totality, that is, for the inaccessible maternal object? Is he saying that the object of drives is indistinguishable from its name? Is he saying that a name can be an object?

It seems to me that Laclau is saying that the object of drives represents the object of desire, that it provides enjoyment whereas the object of desire is forever unreachable. It's like a vehicle for accessing the impossible object, for getting a little piece of it, for participating it or sharing in it.

But this is a mistaken use of Copjec. First, the drive depends on an object but is indifferent to it. The object is a means to enjoyment, but that enjoyment is not beyond it but in it (more than itself, like the weed a small child might give her mother). Anything could work (as a gift); but, not anything does (because it is not given). What makes something the object of drive is the relation to it, not the thing itself (the weed). Laclau, though, mistakenly emphasizes the object instead of the circulation of the drive around it.

Second, and more important, the object of drive does not stand in for an impossible totality. It is not simply a switch in relation to an idealized and impossible fullness. The switch in relation is also a change in the object; what matters is the relation to the new object, the enjoyment in and of this new object, not this object's (fantastic) role as a representative of the Thing. Copjec writes:

The first thing to note is that this idea of the drive's indifference to an external object is at odds with Lacan's definition of sublimation as 'the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing.' This formulation is admittedly confusing; it misleads Lacan himself at points to conflate sublimation and idealization. In these instances the ordinary object seems to become the representation of the Thing, of a noumenal beyond, and that has the effect of erecting a barrier to jouissance, which is now conceived as inaccessible.

Copjec's description here can be applied to Laclau's appeal to objet petit a: he views it as a partiality naming an impossible totality, a representation of the Thing, a marker of transcendence. This is not what Copjec emphasizes in her discussion of drive. In fact, it's the opposite (as if Laclau misses the point or only uses half of it):

But there are also moments when elevation does not seem to entail this function of representation but rather entails--in a reversal of the ordinary understanding of sublimation--the substitution of an ordinary object for the Thing. One seeks satisfaction from an ordinary object instead of waiting vainly for the arrival of the Thing. This is the only way to comprehend the satisfaction Lacan experiences on seeing a series of matchboxes, found objects, that were collected by his friend, Jacques Prevert. What strikes Lacan is the extraordinary dignity of these little cardboard boxes, the dignity of their thingness.

There is a change in the object. Drive circles around an object, getting enjoyment from this circulation. Without the object, it would not circulate (and get enjoyment). The object is not a means to something beyond it. The split is not between something that appears and a transcendent beyond; the split is in appearance.

The partiality, then, is not naming an impossible totality. It names itself.

Copjec and Lefort (second in a series on drive)

Copjec:

the inhibition that prevents the drive from achieving its aim is not understood within Freudian theory to be due to an extrinsic or exterior obstacle, but rather as part of the very activity of the drive itself.

The aim of the drive ... is death--or, as Freud alternatively puts it: "the restoration of an earlier state of things," a state of inanimation or inertia. Now, this state exists, according to the theory, only as a retrospective illusion, never as an actual state...Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

Copjec persuasively demonstrates Lacan's innovation in re-reading Freud. Lacan moves away from the supposition of lost wholeness or unity. Yes, jouissance (unity, the Thing, the Good) is lost (opening a hole in being) but there is a representation of this loss that itself provides enjoyment (representation other than the order of signifiers that seemingly captured jouissance, leaving aside as untranslatable some aspects of our primary relation to it). More precisely, there is a representation (Vorsteullungreprasentanz or ideational representative) that lets in or represents jouissance. In drive, jouissance is accessible, not out of reach.

This little representative is an object. The object functions as a little representative or delegate, but not of some primary unity or massive Thing-jouissance elsewhere. Rather, it is representative of the loss of the Thing (loss of the support of the organic body). Copjec:

It is the loss of these supports that causes the fracturing of the surface order of appearances, a splitting within being and not between being and its beyond.

There might be some resonance between Copjec's discussion of drive and Lefort's famous discussion of democracy as an empty place. Lefort's description begins with a primal unity, an embodied unity of the people in the prince:

Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a body.

Democracy results from the rupture and dissolution of this unity. What was one become many. In place of the substantial materiality of the prince is a new set of relations between power, law, and knowledge. As they

become disentangled, a new relation to the real is established; to be more accruate, this relation is guaranteed within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains of activity

Disembodied power operates symbolically. What matters:

the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty.

and

when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division.

The threat to democracy is the Thing, the fantasy of unity that has real effects. Totalitarianism, structured along the lines of an engulfing Mother, is the ultimate threat, a threat that must be posited to account for democratic desire for the law. Might, then, the threat or the place of the threat in the structuring of democratic desire be a retrospective illusion, never an actual state? And might not another account attend to democracy as drive, as the sublimation of the politics such that democracy is political inhibition?