I cite

Normal men do not know that everything is possible

Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

Noise

White noise. Signal to noise. The setting, the manifold.

And, the between signals: a space/time that has diminished so as to be barely perceptible. White noise has been cultivated, taken over, colonized, developed, made useful.

But could the becoming useful of noise, the development of white noise and occupation of what were spaces between, could this also be a becoming noise of the background? So that the fact of noise persists as an artifact of the limits of our attention and focus. By virtue of focus, components and blocks of noise become signals. They become for us. Our excision of them from the manifold, like a framing or sampling or remixing or collecting or archiving, is what distinguishes signal from noise.

The mistake we make is to think that their meaning is prior to this excision rather than a result of it.

But what about their truth?

If the symbolic always necessarily involves bracketing and exclusion, this not that, then what does this mean for the truth of what is included and what is left out? Currents in late 20th thought proceeded as if what were left behind had a more compelling truth, a truth that was more than a shaping and more than a necessary condition (a difference, then, between a fundamental fantasy which is Real because it insists rather than exists). So anything that was other to mainstream science, mainstream medicine, or mainstream politics was not just excluded in the production of the mainstream but true by virtue of this exclusion. It's as if a claim to truth somehow came to accompany critiques of exclusion, as if establishing the fact (and then the illegitimacy) of an exclusion depended on establishing the truth-value of the excluded.

What is the effect, then, of the setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency? A flattening and extension and re-manifold-ing (non-all) that occasions the end of games and procedures of truth and falsity and the proliferation of the neither true nor false.

One might think that the results are the possible and the credible, but these float away as well (or only flourish in the hothouses of insular communities of discourse, communities ever more porous even as they are ever more defended). Without conditions to determine the parameters of credibility and possibility, in fact, in the face of outright disbelief in the face of the actuality of the unlikely, anything is possible.

But if anything is possible, nothing is (as well).

A voice as something more

While I was in Belgium last week, I went to an exhibit at the Strombeek gallery in Brussels that highlighted work by Johan Grimonprez (director of Double Take). One of the pieces was a sound piece, an interview with Karen Black. One doesn't listen to the interview with headphones but in a small, round room with a platform in the middle. The room is dimly lit, with a paraphrase of a line from the interview (about Alfred Hitchcock not having a belly button) written in white on one of the dark blue walls. One can sit or lie down on the platform--I bet 4-5 people could lie on it without crowding each other. Most of the interview involves Karen Black's recollecting working with Hitchcock on Family Plot.

The piece feels intimate, maybe too intimate (I wonder if it feels the same to people who have never seen Karen Black). It feels more intimate than it would if one were reading it or even than it would if one saw the interview on television. The dark space, the enveloping sound, the vulnerability of lying down in a public space all amplify the intimacy, the intrusion. One gets absorbed in or enveloped by her voice, caught up in it, at risk of giving over to it. Her voice feels more intimate than it would if one were listening to it with headphones or earbuds or on a laptop in an office--with all those versions of personal media we are less exposed in our hearing, less vulnerable to others' seeing us and maybe hearing us hearing (hearing us hearing could be linked to a version of a primal scene or to hearing ourselves being heard).

She does impressions--of Hitchcock, of different accents. These seem risky, outrageous--why is she performing so much, why is she so over the top--but even quick attempts to dismiss them--well, she is an actress, after all--can't bracket the excess and intensity of her enveloping voice.

It's her voice, in all those impression; her voice, pretending to be Hitchcock.

And how is it, then, that with vocal doubles we experience two people but one voice? The pleasure is the imitation, the impersonation, the slight exaggeration and bringing to our attention the eccentricity or uniqueness of what now echoes as an original. But the uniqueness only resounds as 're', as a repetition, as the approach to the original that isn't. With the vocal double, we hear the one who is speaking and know that it is him, but we also hear another--only rarely do we mistake one for the other, we know the difference (and that knowledge is a component of the very possibility of impersonation, of a vocal double--we could compare the vocal double, then, with the voice-over or the voice of an animated character). 

I don't like hearing my voice. I don't listen to interviews or podcasts that I've done. I loathe listening to answering machines or voice mail when I have to hear my voice (although I should confess that this sometimes reverses itself as I listen over and over again to my greeting, somewhat repulsed, but still unable to stop listening and re-recording, perhaps in an attempt to eliminate the excessive part, the part that I can't quite control--and, no, it's not just the southern accent, although it could be related to the oddness I hear in the attempts to displace it).

Even doubled or impersonated, the voice is Real. Even recorded voices, taped voices, are Real--we can tell the difference. On the phone, we can hear if something is wrong--sometimes it's easier to hear that something is wrong than to see it--appearances can be deceiving. I don't like talking on the phone very much, either, wary of the exposure that is more intense than a face to face encounter, likely because face to face we see the reactions of the other.

Surrounded by music and noise, do we lose voice(s)? Or are we protecting ourselves from their intensity? Are we, vulnerable bare lives, barely subjects, whatever beings, at the mercy of the imaginary and the Real and denuded of Symbolic protections, do we need the noise to avoid the voice (and might schizoanalysis fail insofar as it risks trivializing the intrusion of voices without bodies)? And how has contemporary pseudo-politics worked to block from us the radicality of the Real voice, inducing us to refer to any misrepresentation or exclusion as a loss of voice or a denial of voice when really adding to the cacophony is the surest way for the voice not to be heard?

The voice is singular.

Can there be a Real voice of the people?

Double take

When we say that someone did a double take, we are saying that they looked again, looked back. They saw something and rather than assimilating what they saw into the manifold of impressions, they were pushed, impelled, to look at it again. With a double take, it's not that the person chooses or decides to look again, to look back; rather, they find themselves already looking back.

What makes one look again?

A rupture or a glitch, a disconnection or seam, a fault line in the manifold of impressions that, somehow, is more than that manifold. The plenitude of sensory impressions, the multiplicty in which one persists, at that moment exceeds itself. Some kind of excess in the field calls attention to the field.

The Lacanian term for that excess rupturing the field is the gaze. The gaze, then, isn't what the viewer sees; it's what makes her look and become aware that she is looking. The gaze confronts the viewer in her viewing, disturbing it, denaturalizing it, making what was formerly seamless appear with seams, with cuts, with splices.

In a media setting filled with interruptions, with cuts and splices, segments and seques, the gaze, rather than becoming more apparent, retreats. The field itself seems comprised of bits of footage, multiple layers of impressions impressing themselves into layers. Interrupting this field of interruptions thus becomes a challenge: what makes one interruption different from another, what lets it rupture the field of interruptions, what lets it become an opportunity for an encounter with the Real of the gaze rather than simply another moment in the imaginary?

Perhaps because I've been teaching the Republic, perhaps because my thinking looks back more easily than forward (or even around), I wonder if the interruption of the gaze in a field of interruptions depends on something like what Plato describes as a summons--a sensory impression that extends in opposing directions, that impresses a contradiction on the senses, calling forth some need to understand. On the one hand, we could describe this as a lack, insofar as their is a lack of understanding. On the other, it is just as easy to think of the situation as one of surplus, an abundance which pushes the one who senses in conflicting directions.

And the summons can only summon so long as it remains in conflict, opposed. If there is a resolution, the conflict or opposition becomes only apparent, imaginary, and not Real.

In a field of interruptions the gaze manifests itself as an interruption of the interruptions, perhaps as a bracketing that makes us say, 'but wait! there's more' and that in so doing calls us to look back on our looking. What makes this interruption the work of the drive is that we find ourself already lost in it, already having turned.

Open letter to Rachel Maddow

Hey Rachel,

I guess you didn't get the email I sent you about 6 months ago. Or maybe you are too busy to respond. That's ok. I don't take it personally.

But, there are issues here that are much bigger than the personal, issues of politics for those on the left, those in the US, those in the world.

We should begin by stating the obvious: your ratings are declining. The loss of your show will be a victory for the Right.

What is to be done?

In the spirit of criticism-self-criticism-unity, I'll start: I am one of those who has stopped watching. I've lost interest. In part, this is because the newness has worn off.

But that's not the only reason. It's bigger than that. 

The real reason is that if I wanted to watch Fox, I would. But I don't and I don't like having either my mindspace or my politics determined by Fox's news cycle. Stop following--that strengthens them.

You don't seem to get that. But you should. Don't let Fox determine the debate. Instead, you determine the issues that matter, the points of concern (and lame discussions of lame right-wing tactics are not enough; if these tactics are so stupid, then don't waste our time on them--tell us what matters). 

A second point: don't act like the rest of the media. You aren't mainstream. You're lucky to break 1.5 million viewers a show. So, don't mimic Obama and try to appeal to some middle by copying Jon Stewart or even Keith Oberman. Be the geek that you are and give us in depth discussion of real issues.

Follow the issues for more than a week. Make them key components of the show rather than extras like culture-related comedy or Fox bashing. You should provide a series on the Wall Street excesses and the resulting unemployment. Cover poverty in the US. 

And don't plead budgets--you know as well as I do that bloggers are doing all this research already and for free (it would be nice if you'd pay them, though). The reporting is out there. Find it and bring it into the television sphere. But don't do it by relying on polished talking heads or cynical election strategists--that's not what we, left viewers, want or need. We don't need to hear professional campaigners discuss campaigns all the time. Politics is more than that. But you already know that, so stop acting like you don't.

Make poverty and inequality and unemployment and the decay of US cities and utter neglect of rural areas the news that it is for most of the country. Let people know about the tent cities, the rise in homelessness, even as houses stand empty. Don't fall prey to the beltway mentality--that's not your role. Your role is to make sure that no one can look the other way, can't pretend that they didn't, that they don't know.

Cover racist and homophobic violence. Cover violence against women and children. Cover the effects of despair and hopelessness on who've we become. Report on the loss of dreams and aspirations. 

And what about the situation in colleges and universities, especially in the California system. Someone should be thinking beyond tomorrow's show. What's the big picture here? Mass education goes hand in hand with a strong middle class and a strong democracy. Right now, the top one percent is taking over ninety percent of the economic surplus. They don't need public education, so they are cutting it.

Democracy requires that people can read, write, think, that we have the skills and knowledge necessary for self-governance. Once that's gone, it will be gone for a very long time--and that's a victory for the very worst of the neoliberal and neoconservative right. It's worse than feudalism, it's a seizure from the people of their very capacities to think.

Cover the neglect of the environment, the problems with energy, the neglect of infrastructure, the failure to develop alternative energies and transportation models.

Cover the successes that other countries have had. A German friend of mine finds visiting me in upstate New York quaint--we are so nineteenth century! Even Estonia, he tells me, has passed us by. Report on how well other countries are doing--show people the groundlessness of the 'we're number one' chants. And then find those in the US who are doing similar work and make their voices heard.

You've done good work in the past keeping torture in the news. Do more with this--it's still wrong and the torturers have still been able to get away with murder.

For years, left media critics, like myself, have cried out for an alternative to the mainstream press. This kind of alternative isn't just a matter of the political perspective of the commentator or show; it's also a matter of how the show overall is done, how it sustains and repeats and counters all the tendencies of conservative and corporate media with their supposition that all of us have ADD. We don't--so don't exacerbate those awful tendencies. Provide an alternative.

You rose to prominence because of the 2008. That's an opportunity. Don't waste it.

Best,

Jodi

k-punk: Towards a new orthodoxy

I was thrilled to discover the following remarks on Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies over at K-punk. Mark makes some of the points more strongly and clearly than I do--I'm glad I read them tonight so I can repeat them tomorrow during an interview with Pacifica Radio

Reading Jodi Dean's excellent book on democracy and communicative capitalism, I was put in mind of Momus's recent remarks about blogging (as cited by Simon here). "Sure," Momus wrote, "Click Opera has been a sort of karate course, and its comment facility has taught me to be more dialectical and -- above all -- the skill set of prolepsis, of anticipating reader objections. But is a more moderate, accessible and dialectical me really what the world needs? Doesn't the world need an immoderate, outrageous and concentrated me, just laying out things that only I could think, no matter how wrong they may be?" For me, the answer is clear - I certainly don't want writers who "respond to criticisms", who patiently deal with "feedback", no matter how hostile and uncomprehending. I want writers who have the courage to pursue their own lines. What's interesting, I suppose, is the libidinal impulses at work in those who don't want that - who would rather have a writer spending their time on discussion boards and in comments boxes defending themselves, nuancing their position into innocuous irrelevance, or effectively abandoning it altogether in the name of some vacuous commitment to "debate".

Nothing illustrates the debilitating fit between "democracy" and "communicative capitalism" that Jodi analyses so well than this demand. Jodi's claim is that there is a necessary, not merely contingent, connection between the communicative landscape of Web 2.0 and the neocon and neoliberal right. (Note how grey vampires and trolls willl automatically appeal to the democtratic "right to be heard" the moment they feel that attention will be snatched away from; note how they will always describe those who are no longer paying them attention as totalitarians.) Jodi identifies an assymetry in the right and left approaches to democracy in the era of web 2.0: the right uses democratic openness to advance clear, divisive positions; the left appeals to the openness first, so that it becomes identified with openness as such rather than a set of determinate policies. Incidentally, what I liked about Nick's presentation at Militant Dysphoria, which met with a certain amount of British can't-do-ism, a good introduction to the UK for Nick I guess, was the crispness and clarity of its tactical suggestions - there's a punkish demystification at work here, as well as the echoes of management consultancy that Dominic heard: here's how things have changed, now let's change things ourselves.

Instead of skulking in the margins, celebrating "disruption", "diversity" and the instability of meaning (poststructuralist habits that the left finds it hard to kick), what the left needs now is the confidence and courage to plan, to impose a new orthodoxy in the way that the right did. I'm sympathetic to the argument that one can't completely transpose the methods that capital and neoliberalism used onto leftist struggle, because capital had resources and vested interests on its side which are not at the disposal of the left now. But one can overstate this: ultimately, Nick Land's view that capital is an "artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources" is closer to the mark than the view that capital had everything stacked in its favour from the start. Capitalism's agents were a revolutionary class which had to dismantle feudalism, undermine the authority of the Church, and challenge pratically every vested interest before they could succeed. Two important things that come out of reading Andy Beckett's book on the 70s are (1) how much was against neoliberalism then and (2) how hard the neoliberals had to plan and work in order to get their vision realised (with the Grunwick strikebreaking campaign a foretaste of everything that would be thrown at the miners). The left should leave behind "spontaneity" along with all the other relics of 68, which weigh so heavily on the brains of would-be militants. The alternative is not Stalinism, even if it might involve elements of conspiratorialism (how could any effective political strategy not involve some element of this?); and it will certainly entail a disciplined withdrawal from particular communicative circuits. What is certain is that it is imperative to escape the binaries that "democratic" communicative capitalism has imposed on our thinking.

via k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

Better off dead

Yesterday's NYT picked up a story out of LA about a man left dead on his balcony for five days.

“He looked fake,” said Austin Raishbrook, 33, who lives nearby. “It looked like somebody had thrown a dummy over the back of a chair.”

and

“I ran over there with my camera equipment,” he said. “There was blood on the balcony, and he was visible from the street. But it really did not look like a real person up there.”

Also reported in the NYT (in a recap from a blog) was that suicide has been increasing:

Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people — predominantly men — kill themselves

We cannot tell the living from the dead. Many of us choose death.

Popular culture is overrun by the dead--vampires, ghosts, zombies. They are more alive than the living, demonstrating the kinds of freedom and agency (or, more precisely, the fantasy of freedom in the undead circuits of drive) we can only dream about. After all, no worries about health insurance here--it can't get any worse.

Do we fear them, these dead, these zombies or vampires? Do we seek in them a kind of release from our own entombment? So are they fantasies of agency or passivity? Or is part of the fantasy the very posing of a choice or opposition?

I read The Lovely Bones. The freedom of the dead narrator, the one at the center of the horror who as that very center escapes it. The contemporary tethering to the dead has replaced American dreams of progress, manifest destiny, hope, change, a better world. The zombie banks that are Obama's obscene underside are the truth of embrace of the dead, are failure to distinguish between living and dead (there are other elements of this as well: enthusiasm for Antigone, a new book on the blurring between life and death, everything written by Agamben).

Can we come back to life (especially a life that is not biopolitical--as I posted here a number of months ago, biopolitics is best understood in terms of the death drive). Can we engage living and the living, without having to talk about valuing life, and thereby inserting it into arguments over economies? Can we hold onto living as a necessary element of the axiom of equality, without getting dragged into ridiculous arguments over fetishization of the human? What is the fear of life? A fear of responsibility, agency, accountability, of the day to dayness of its processes and requirements?

Don't bring out your dead. Our dead are already here and they are enough.

Hacktivism, uh, what is it good for, absolutely nothin', uh

I hope all the new media freaks and digital media democrats and netroots fans and participatory bloggers and their ilk are really feeling their democratic engagement, their Twitter revolution etc.

So, how many friends does health care have on Facebook?

Ooh! Move-on--really another great indication of the democratic potential of the internet, isn't it!

I can't count the number of times young Euro-geeks have lectured me on Move-On and meet ups, Obama and Facebook. They always want to convince me that the internet enabled the 'revolution' of 2008 (like it was an amazing feat that the party out of power in a 2 party system won against the party with the most unpopular president ever).

The amazing thing: the damn town halls are good old fashioned opposition, people showing up and making noise. Loud voices in small places. Signs, shout downs, totally outrageous claims--why get stuck on the facts if that's the way you are going to lose? Facts? Facts are for those who can't handle the political.

Feeling sick

From the WSWS:

The popular disaffection with the Obama healthcare plan goes much further, however, than the fanatical right-to-life constituency. The Obama administration has based its program for healthcare restructuring entirely on the argument that healthcare costs are bankrupting the US economy and that controlling and reducing these costs is essential.

The logical conclusion of this policy—even if officially denied by the White House—is that somebody’s healthcare is too expensive and must be cut back or eliminated. Millions of people fear that that somebody is likely to be them and their families. One opinion poll published last week showed that 53 percent believed they would be worse off or no better than before under the Obama plan.

People feel that they will be worse off, that something will be taken from them, that they won't be able to care for their families. They feel, in other words, that something will be stolen; they are worried about theft and about the theft of their life and livelihood.

Last night on Maddow, Oberman, and Stewart protesters were featured who were scared--of Obama, of the loss of their rights. They voiced anger and outrage. One of the most pronounced themes: we don't trust you, you are lying; even the smallest bit of respect or decorum (waiting one's turn, listening, raising one's hand) was gone. This strong current of mistrust, and of open statements of it, has less to do with Obama than with the larger collapse in confidence in governance--last year Congress's popularity was lower than Bush's. That collapse in symbolic efficiency is becoming more visible and pronounced.

I wonder if much of this outrage isn't displaced from the last couple of years of the recession as well as the last decade of escalating inequality. Yes, the outrage right now is taking, in some places, a racist form. The Daily Show was good on this point: yes, white people are losing. Admit it and get over it. It's kick off was a clip from the horrible Glen Beck: Obama's basic principle is reparations.

The racial politics at work might account in part for the failed outrage around the bailouts--bailouts meant that white people were still ahead, were winning, were on tops. Same with outrage fail over bonuses and the general Wall Street pillage: done by white people so still part of white hegemony (class struggle has always been ruptured by racism in the US). But, with health care, the basic affective dimension is that the white winners are having to pay for black and immigrant losers. This means that the worried whites are dealing with the barely repressed knowledge of their economic misery--their tax dollars paying out banks--and with seemingly undeserving black people, who are going to get something for nothing.

So from the perspective of middle whites, everyone enjoys--gets something for nothing, sets some kind of excessive jouissance--but them. This links to one of the biggest myths in the US: that people want everyone to succeed; the truth is that people don't want universal health care because they want some people to suffer, they want to have more than others, they are actually ok with folks dying for lack of health care. Positing death panels is a way of displacing the knowledge that we are the death panels.