I cite

Consumerism is not the problem

Americans are given two messages: go shopping and spend responsibly. Measures of economic well-being include indexes of consumer confidence, consumer spending, housing starts, etc. At the same time, we read reports of out of control spending, outrageous credit card balances, the lowest levels of household saving in a hundred years. The American consumer is out of control and the American consumer is the lynchpin of the global economy.

The political form that these messages typically, but not necessarily, take in the US is that the right places all responsibility for the situation with individuals while the left blames capital. The conflict over the state is a conflict over the ways to direct policy, to regulate the behavior of individuals or to regulate corporations. This summer, beginning, though, in presidential primaries, there has been increasing commentary on the ways that the left and right are blurred, and blurred to favor finance capital: finance is bailed out and taxpayers (not to mention future generations) are posting the bail. Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" seems appropriate: the US as a whole is encountering the shock effects of neoliberalism's transfer of wealth from public funds and the work and savings of people to the pockets of the .001 percent, who continue to get richer and richer. It's what has been going in the former socialist countries, Latin America, and much of Africa. Now it's happening to us.

I don't know of much theory on the left that is helpful here. Think, for a start, of the messages of consumerism: go shopping and spend responsibly. Are these messages simple reflections of the contradictions of capital? Ideology's distorted image of a fundamental incompatibility? And, is a better approach one that emphasizes abundance, infinite productivity, the productive desire of the multitude (even considered in terms of the symbolic labor of hackers as a class ala Wark)? For me, these approaches are ever less convincing.

Americans produce debt. The capitalization of debt has been at the core of the economy for over 20 years. It is parasitic on consumerism, but requires much more than that. An article in the NYT today describes the ways that credit today is no longer based on the assumption that loans will be repaid. Rather, loans pay. From the fees for administering them, the penalties attached to them, the costs in refinancing them, to their repackaging in complex debt structures, debt is the primary US asset. It's what "foreigners" buy, what we export and they invest in. It's not an economy of abundance but an economy based on a hole or absence. It circulates around this absence and is premised on buying it, selling it, betting on it--or against it (selling short).

Some have seen this consuming for a long time: corporate "mergers" and the buying of companies only to strip them of their assets, fire their workers, take on their debt, and sell that as well. Commentators have been telling us for a long time that manufacturing has declined. There have been major layoffs in white collar idea-based industries (advertising, dot coms) as well. The economy runs on debt. That's what we make now.

So the idea of the consumer as producer so prominent in net critique isn't wrong. It just hasn't named what consumers produce. Consumers produce debt.

The very big Other

I'm frustrated with In Defense of Lost Causes. Zizek writes:

the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism--digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

and

The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a 'critique' only reinforces the big Other's hold over us) but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

These passages come from a section of the first chapter. One of the general ideas, I think, is Zizek's oft-repeated account of the claustrophobia that results from the decline of the symbolic, the loss of a space of appearances wherein something stands for something more than itself. The only way these particular passages make sense to me, then, is if one assumes a very different notion of the big Other to be at work. We could call it the very big Other or the psychotic big Other, designating thereby the monstrous imaginary other that merges with the Real when the paternal function is foreclosed. So long as no small other can appear as more than what it is, so long as it remains simply itself in its idiotic empiricality, we remain mired in immanence, seriality, strings and strings of S2.

The cyberspace example, though, doesn't work. Rejecting characterizations of contemporary media that emphasize the suspension of social ties, Zizek writes:

in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

Can the codes and connections enabling networked communications be understood as a form of the big Other? I don't think so. Not if the big Other is indistinguishable from the Symbolic. Part of the pleasure of digital media is the sense that what one does or sees or writes doesn't register to the big Other, that it connects or enables snippets of intensity without 'counting;' shoot, even 'counting' doesn't quite count (the big Other doesn't know how many returns I get when I google my name). It makes more sense to think of the internet in terms of the merging of the imaginary and the Real, the Real networks and transactions, the matrix, combined with what we imagine these networks and transactions to be for us. So it could be the very big Other, the scary, necessary, and now inextricables codes and protocols we can't quite escape.

What could it mean for Zizek to say that the true job of untying social ties is ahead of us? that the task of radical politics is "to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to unite the social bond the big Other sustains"? It has to involve some version of seeing or experiencing the ties as representing something else.  Perhaps it means that another has to be able to appear as symbolizing something more; so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones.

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. 

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.

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.

It's better not to know or yet more evidence Lacan is right

Class was disturbing today. Incited by Hegel's ethical defense of war, the students shifted to US militarism in Iraq. But that's not the way at least half of them described it. These students were more comfortable with a language of security, of keeping America safe.

More important than actual security, though, was the sense of security. That's what the students (again, about half or maybe just a third) really wanted to protect, the sense of security. One argued that the state does not have the right to tell the people everything. A couple said that they there were lots of things that they just didn't want to know. The state should take care of it, look after things, but not tell the people. It will just lead to paranoia.

One started to suggest a harm principle: the state should be mindful of causing harm. So it shouldn't tell the people too much about terrorists and airplanes because this will lead them not to fly and will hurt the economy. And what about carcinogens in the environment? Guantanamo Bay? Torture? It's better not to know. We can't do anything about it.

It seems what the people really want is protection of their right not to know.

At least they will have a struggle on their hands: the other half of the students opposed them, vehemently, fiercely, construing them as a fundamental aspect of the central problem, an aspect to be cut through.

Free the primaries

Last night Paul said something to the effect of "free the primaries," liberate them from their capture in an inadequate formation that makes people tire of politics. I think he had in mind a shorten campaign season, UK style. But what about a different kind of campaign, one that frees from the primaries from politics and lets them focus on what really matters, namely, entertainment?

The producers of American Idol could do a much better job. They can start out with zillions of contestants. Have the political equivalent of Hollywood week that narrows the field down to the top 24 (this might be a better produced version of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries). And then every week, we can vote off one or two candidates. "Fred Thompson, America voted, and you'll be going home."

There can be the little 30 section biography spots. Each week can have a theme--war in Iraq, climate change (what would you do?), and of course the three day American Idol Gives Back extravaganza.  The judges would say things like, "John, your poverty program is terrific, but you're just not connecting with the voters. At this stage of the game, they want to know who you really are" or "Barak, I love you, you are hot hot back in the hot, the real deal; this is what American Idol I mean American president is really about, man, love it!"

What has to remain the same: Ryan Seacrest.

Attention Deficit Recession

Walker Kirn in the Atlantic. Read the whole thing: Autumn of the Multitaskers

“Where do you want to go today?” asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations—some geographic, some social, some intellectual—that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software. It was further insinuated that where you went was purely up to you, not your spouse, your boss, your kids, or your government. Autonomy through automation.

This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking.

Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name:

Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.

For proof that these bundled minor virtues don’t amount to freedom but are, instead, a formula for a period of mounting frenzy climaxing with a lapse into fatigue, consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?