I cite

Let it go, let it go, let it go

Could anyone be surprised that the corporate lackeys parading around as Senators have dropped the public option? Should anyone believe that this is simply because the notorious Joe Lieberman couldn't support the pathetically watered down excuse for a public option, the one held up as both significant reform and meaningful compromise? It's a lie that they have no choice: this is what they choose--a massive give away to the insurance companies that continue to deny coverage and increase premium costs to extort every last cent out of us (my copays and emergency room visits just doubled). The bill reminds me of the food in Brazil, the disgusting mush accompanied by images of delicious dishes. The scandal is that the charade proceeds as if something important were at stake, when that was ditched long ago, by Obama himself when he took single-payer off the table.

Escalating war in Afghanistan (in the name of peace!), failure to prosecute torturers, failure to reign in Wall Street (in the name of helping Main Street!), failure to deliver on climate, support for the worst in Haiti, and failure to deliver adequate health care. And all this with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.

This means that the Democrats are the bad guys. Why assume that they can't get what they want when they control both Houses? The answer must be that they are getting precisely what they want--money from the insurance sector, the finance sector, the arms and security sector. (In this respect, increases in obesity may be our best current resistance--if people are too fat to serve in the military, the military collapses; if obsesity puts too much stress on hospitals, the health system collapses; on the one hand, this doesn't make life any better for the poor and obese; on the other, at least they aren't reinforcing the system that feeds on their sacrifice and humiliation. So it's like another version of Bartelby and refusal. In the face of an injuction, one says, in a complete non-sequitor, Supersize Me!).

Clinton ushered in the reforms necessary for the intensification of neoliberalism. Obama is enabling neoliberalism to do its worst without repercussion. He is intensifying the authoritarian and militarist elements that attempt to control, that continue to develop strategies and technologies for control, and intensifying the already extreme inequalities that make control necessary. What makes Obama worst than Bush is that Obama leveraged progressive, democratic, youthful, anti-racist, multicultural hope that politics could still work for the people, that government could still restrain the strong and protect the less fortunate. He held out the promise that unbridled self-assertion abroad and at home would end. Neither glutonous banks, mortgage brokers, and credit card companies nor war hungry oil companies, private contractors, and neo-cons would determine our futures.

It's not ironic that Obama gave a highly publicized speech on education at the same time the CA system is crumbling. It's 1984, just like under Bush: anything that is praised is falling apart; anything that is criticized is really supported, endorsed. The same thing occurs with respect to finance. Obama wants to 'shame' Wall Street? Please. We know they have no shame. Who needs shame when you make over a billion a year? 'Shame' is what Obama says when the truth is that he has done nothing but feed the gall and hubris of Wall Street. 

Exploiting people's hope for change is key to the damage Obama has done and continues to do. Destroying any remaining sense of agency is crucial to ensuring total compliance. The thing is, last fall and winter, people were ready to make sacrifices, ready to be responsible, ready to grow up. The mood was almost one of relief that the pressures to enjoy, to consume, were over, that our decade long credit orgy had finally come to an end and that finding another way was possible. Green initiatives were not yet completely coopted. The financial system seemed broken nearly beyond repair, a clear indication of the ultimate failure of market fundamentalism--as even Alan Greenspan acknowledged: his entire world view was wrong. A reformed finance sector, green energy, single-payer health care, renewed public transportation and a shift away from car culture--these key programs for a new beginning seemed--and were--possible. Instead, the US of Goldman Sachs has chosen war and finance.

Maybe this collapse of our hope is the opportunity for its renewal. Maybe this collapse is the liberation from the fantasy that Democrats are democrats.

The newest surge isn't only in Afghanistan. It's here via the financial-military complex. And if Afghanistan will persevere (as we all expect it will, just like it has in the face of every foreign invasion), then we can too.

Comments on the necrosocial

I was re-reading The Necrosocial, an essay or polemic written in connection with the UC strike and occupation last week. I want to think about two aspects of the essay, not quite as a critique but more in an effort to push my own thinking. These two aspects involve shifting the terms from social death to death of the social and drive as a domain between the two deaths. I'll talk about the first aspect here and, I hope, discuss the second in a follow up post.

First, the essay describes the university as

a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated.

On the one hand, the discussion of social death incorporates Marxist ideas of dead, accumulated labor as well as from New Left critiques of the university's role in support the military-industrial-bureaucratic state machine. On the other, it includes a contemporary critique of identity categories (understood very broadly) as divisions enabling the division and domination of the people:

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.

This passage suggests a social life folded in on itself and intensified, amplified to the extent that the ever fragmented social dissolves in a multitude of singularities. These singularities are related through the slashes that separate them, as well as through the common acceptance of a dynamic of singularity, a becoming singular, becoming unique, to the point that absorbs and destroys in possibility of social relation, that is, relations that are not already contained in economies of profit and loss, domination and submission. The passage evokes the shift from disciplinary to control societies, suggesting thereby the ways that singularization itself functions as a mechanism of control as well as the ways that the university contributes to the maintenance and extension of control mechanisms as it repeats injunctions to identify and specify.

The death of the social in societies of control thus follows directly from the 'intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices; (Empire 23). Normalizing, though, should be understood in terms of norms of idenfitication and separation, injunctions to become unique.

Under in terms of the normalization of uniqueness in the society of control (a commodified, reified uniqueness that condemns newly formed and fragile individuals to isolation in a multitude of singularities, a kind of isolation radically different from the alienation criticized in the 50s and 60s), the university as a factory of meaning separate from reality makes a kind of sense. But I don't think that the primary problem at stake in the death of social is the production of the illusion that meaning and reality are separated. In fact, this is where the analysis in "The Necrosocial" begins to miss its target (and, in fact, in the later paragraphs of the essay, make this point: "Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning."). The meaning of the university is reality; the values of the machine constitute reality. Reality is the problem--and our failure to remake it into what it could or should mean.

I can put this differently, drawing--to no one's surprise, from Zizek's recent injunctions to think: part of the contemporary challenge is breaking the absorption of meaning into neoliberal capitalist reality, waking up from the dream that low taxes and beanie babies are the road to happiness, disconnecting from the illusion that efficiency measures and competition access the world we want rather than providing the language of our capture. The challenge is separating meaning from this reality in order to make a new one. Some separations are better than others.

If democracy is to come...

If democracy isn't here but is to come, then preparations are in order.

What kind?

First, acknowledgement of non-democracy. It's not here and now, so what is here and now should not be defended as democratic but rejected as non-democratic.

Second, insofar as democracy is not here and now, pretenses to democracy, here and now, are distractions, fantasies, efforts to displace the intrusion of the Real of non-democracy. They are lures into thinking that we are already democrats.

Third, democracy requires the production of democratic subjects. But this isn't a project of democracy (which would presume democracy here and now). It's a project for democracy. Don't pretend there is a 'we' capable of ruling itself (a multitude of singularities might be productive, but it isn't self-governing).

Fourth, the production of democratic subjects is a challenge; if it has been done before, it has only been achieved temporarily. The production is neither certain, secure, nor robust. There are lots of glitches and faux democrats out there on the market.

Fifth, part of the challenge is knowing what is necessary for a project or form of life that doesn't exist and when it has has been fragile. Some possible ways to produce democratic subjects:

--rule and be ruled in turn: being ruled is as important as ruling; in practice, this means frequent changes in position (to enable people to learn new skills in ruling and being ruled as much as to prevent the not yet democratic from doing really major damage);

--censorship: the not-yet-democratic too easily mistake their opinions for opinions that matter; if there are limits on what can be said, the not-yet-democratic have barriers to protest, battles to fight; they can learn from experience what is worth fighting for; they can start to desire something like democracy;

--installation of a lack: the not-yet-democratic will remain not-yet until they desire democracy; this desire has to be cultivated, installed, instigated.

totally/totalitarian

Last week, distraught over the end of "Mad Men," I watched some of "The Prisoner." What captured my attention was the sense of entrapment. The inhabitants of the village are made to think that there is nothing outside the village. This is all there is. Some, though, are dreamers. They think there is more beyond, something else out there. If they pursue these dreams, they are punished, tortured.

The decline of symbolic efficiency is a loss of the law that intervenes between the Real and the imaginary. The symbolic is the set of ideals, principles, norms that hold open a difference between what is and what else.

Hardt and Negri's smooth world of Empire, a world with no outside reminds me of the village. There is nothing else. We are here, in this place, with no where else to go. Just repeat, just continue, just do the same old thing, eating wraps, enjoying the sunshine, watching television, focusing on work and family. Just doing the same old thing.

With the internet, and with tourism and postfordist economic approaches that remake cities and towns attractive to tourists, everything is in reach, visible. If we can imagine it, we can find it. It's Real. Just search and click. If you're lucky, you'll find some other things that you hadn't seen before and those might distract you for thirty minutes or so. Then you can have another drink.

The good thing about limits that are explicit and acknowledged is that they maintain the space of desire. Yes, you are trapped on an island--but there is a world out there. There are secrets, things to discover, something else to find. The separateness is vital, the inaccessibility is vital, the mystery, the hope.

The problem of totalitarianism isn't its blocking of one from a world; it's in the foreclosure of the possibility of another world, of gaps or breaks or glimmers into something else. Some jobs or ways of being are totalitarian in the sense that they demand that the person be fully. The inability to turn off, be another way, install a public/private split, reserve parts of oneself from totalitarian capture, comes to be a way of life--for intellectuals, say, or for clergy, probably for many artists. Religion makes this kind of demand as well.

A dilemma: a split in being or its fullness? Fullness suggests totalitarian capture. Split involves alienation. More alienation could be a good thing.

the dust of collapsed towers

Progressive media focuses on Republicans--Sarah Palin's idiocy, the inanities of the party's non-position.

Popular culture highlights the end of the world, total destruction, complete annihilation, destruction of the planet.

Democrats focus on their opponents--not on what they support or offer.

And worst of all: those of us on the left wallow in our failure, our passivity, our masochistic enjoyment of 150 years of failure. We take heart from activists, from those who continue to try and hope and organize. But, we don't believe them. Our actions show what we believe--Sarah Palin in/and 2012. Same difference.

And why do we do this?

We enjoy devastation, the end, the spectacle. We became trapped in the circuits of its repetition, the repetition of failures. We enjoy it. We get off on it. The pain makes us feel alive in our passivity and deadness and hopelessness. At least by imagining zombies we have something from which to escape, and no responsibility to take--other than run, run, run.

Grand Unified Theory (blame it on Wark)

Blame: Wark

Credit: Ted Byfield

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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).