I cite

Rally

I've wondered why these rallies on the Washington mall are happening.

For a while, million something marches were happening. Getting permits and organizing marches is a little harder than provisioning for a large stationary crowd, particularly if the time is delimited in advance. So a shift from marches to rallies isn't strange in itself. And while I expect that anti-war marches and rallies and demonstrations will return, the so-called end of aggressive US military involvement in Iraq seems to have brought with it a bit of a down turn in anti-war events.

The current ones--Beck, Stewart, Colbert--are extensions of televisual gatherings (not events), that is, extensions of the imagined space of community of commentator and audience. The shared fiction is that he is talking to us. And this us, constituted as a collective by virtue of the fact that we are the ones he is talking to, seems now to need to be realized, made to appear as an us.

Worker oriented politics, politics centered in factories, made a lot of sense when people spent hours, days, weeks, months, years together in the workplace. Folks spent more time with their coworkers than their families. No wonder shared gripes, ideas, and alliances emerged. No wonder they were transmitted. Workers saw each face to face. They worked side by side. Even if a guy is a jerk, you feel bad when his arm is mangled because of speed ups on the line.

No wonder, then, that universities have been loci for action--lots of folks are there face to face (and it helps that their time might be flexible). Same with churches--congregations share mutual connections with one another.

Consumer spaces spread out workers, bringing them more into contact with the folks they 'serve' than with one another. No wonder they 'put customers first' (or use this ideological front)--folks who want to talk about the workplace detract from the outward focus on the customer, a focus that has detrimental effects on the capacities for workers to organize.

And the so-called 'social factory'? Perhaps easier to theorize in dense urban setting than in US sprawl.

So we get imagined, mediated, cinematic, televisual communities. And then social networks. We get community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when  you've moved on!).

Rallies might be symptoms of too much virtuality, attempts to make real what we imagine we are part of, but can't be sure about.

Cooking, hoarding, and decapacitation

This evening I returned a chuck roast about 5 minutes after purchasing it. I didn't know how to cook it. I called my aunt from the parking lot of the grocery store. I mentioned that my kids wanted meat for dinner. "Not tonight," she said. Chuck roast is too tough. It takes several hours to cook. I didn't know that. My capacities for preparing food have diminished in comparison to those of my aunt, mother, and grandmother. I don't know the differences between cuts of meat. It's a challenge for me to put dinner together. I'm pretty good with pasta and know how how to work the rice cooker.

The best part of APSA was talking about the television show, "Hoarders," with other political theorists. My own dirty secret, that I watch "Hoarders," was others' compulsion as well. We all watch it. I feel awful afterwards. Not everyone else does.  I feel compelled to clean and throw out, ill at ease by the proximity of total decay, of being completely overcome by objects that take control and in this taking enact my failure. I also feel the legacy of a couple of generations of class anxiety, of escaping from white trash clutter. The class to which we aspired enacted restraint, a kind of minimalism that demonstrated wealth, comfort, and security exceeding the tacky knicknacks of new money. Uncontrolled stuff was a give away.

What about "Hoarders," then? We easily agreed that it is symptomatic for a US trying to deal with a half century of consumerism. There are limits to what we can accumulated. It can be too much. "Hoarders" makes vivid an America suffering from over-consumption, from the accumulated effects of buying too much, of getting bargains and shopping early. It enacts system-wide failure, nation-wide decapacitation. People have lost the ability to organize their things, to clean up their messes, to pick up after themselves. They don't know how to run a household. They have lost their ability to govern their economy, now understood in the old terms of household management. Some feel shame. Some seem to have denied their situation, distanced themselves from it, as not to be able to fathom it at all. How did I get here? Why am I living in piles of trash? Isn't this where the US is? We are living in our own refuse and filth, unable to manage or organize or control our consumption and waste.

There's more, of course. Paul is on the side of the objects, the stuff, against the "experts" and "therapists" who want to take it away. This is not his usual theoretical stance, this orientation toward objects. But we both love(d) the man who saw the potential for art, the becoming-art, in whatever he would find in the dumpster. Through his eyes, a broken lamp was the potential for sculpture, for something new and wonderful. But there was so much potential, too much potential even. The potentiality of the objects becoming-art took over the man's dwelling space, at least according to his neighbors and those in charge of public housing.Perhaps the potentiality of the objects displaced his potential as they filled in the clearing of being.

Hoarders seem over-whelmed by the potentiality of objects. Anything can be reused, recycled. And there are bargains that can't be passed up. Saving money, saving things, costs them their living space. The injunctions of late consumerism--save, save, save--become a material that buries them alive. The therapists and experts don't seem to see this, though. For them the objects are only to be discarded.

What amazed me in the APSA discussion with other political theorists about hoarding is how we each expressed ourselves, for a time, in the theoretical languages of another. Someone who is non-judgmental turned to moralism and condemnation (I agreed, but moralism and condemnation don't bother me; I think we need more of it from the left). Another employed more psychoanalytic terms. And I retreated from psychoanalysis and thought about objects. Why?

Perhaps when encountering something deeply troubling, something that resonates and disturbs, we react by turning to a theoretical language that also disturbs. Perhaps we do this to protect our home language and the selves that dwell in it. Perhaps we do it because the strangeness of the issue, event, phenomena invokes for us the strangeness of other modes of thought. Perhaps we turn elsewhere because the rupture of the phenomena ruptures our thinking and calls us to think differently. I think each of these ideas seems right. Together they encourage me to think of the richness of combined modes of thought, not because each theorist should think in multiple registers or with multiple instruments but because we are each enriched and enabled through the different thinking of others. This would be diminished if we tried to make it our own, to bring it in as just another accumulated object of thought.

Exercises in facing reality: hoarding as faith in a future

I've become interested in the tv shows about hoarders and hoarding. The footage of people drowning in their things, overtaken by their things, evicted and oppressed by their things absorbs me. My own tendencies to hoard are minimal. I much prefer the satisfaction of throwing things away, giving things away. It's like the inside version of weeding a garden.

Paul views things rather differently. He appreciates people's regard for the things around them, particularly those hoarders who see something unique and wonderful in every broken lamp or old game ("well, we might find another one at a yard sale and then we can combine them and have all the pieces"). I had a friend in Vienna who lived above the flea market. When it rained, he would race down to the market and buy as many of the old toasters and appliances that he could carry. He hated the thought that the appliances would be left drenched and helpless. Anyway, Paul has viewed the therapists on these hoarder shows as the bad guys, that is, as a kind of ideological thought police trained to rein in the hoarders and make them into proper consumerist subjects rather than subjects whose consumption has become so excessive as to be an illness or syndrome.

Last night, though, Paul said something a little different. My daughter and I are painting her room and refinishing her floors (a nasty job that immediately redeems those who undertake it). This means that all her items are now in her brother's room (her brother is on a camping trip in the wilderness; I figure that if I'm not done when he gets back, at least he's become accustomed to roughing it). So the room is difficult to navigate. There is a small path through bookcases, toys, and mattresses over to the bed. Every surface is piled high with stuffed animals, baskets of girly things, pillows, paper, extra lamps. We look like hoarders. And Paul, who is in the process of painting of the kitchen in an apartment in the building he owns, noticed that the occupant of the apartment has saved lots of little packets of soy sauce and other condiments. She hasn't lived there in a year, but she had saved the packets in case she needed them. Or someone else, like one of her kids or a friend who might stay for a weekend, needed them. She saved the condiments because she was imagining a future where they would be needed. Don't must of us have a little bit of the hoarder? And if so, why the impulse to denigrate people for and cure them of their hoarding?

What if these hoards of items are not remnants of a past that cannot be let go, symptoms of loss, but instead elements of a hope for a future? On one of the hoarding shows, the expert convinced a woman to get rid of some of knitting needles and yarn stash. Those items are about a future, future projects, and a step toward undertaking those projects. Another hoarder was a dumpster diver and an artist. He saw a future in each wonderful object. It would become art. It might not be art yet, but that was the future he imagined for it.

I see these hoarder shows as sharing the current moment with post-apocalyptic fiction. Both mark the end of the future. Our capacities to imagine a future not overrun by zombies and violence seem too pathological, too fantastic. They have become evidence of an imagination unconstrained by reality. Throwing out things is a way to throw out options, alternatives, different futures. The lesson these hoardist missives impart is that one must consume properly, along one path. Futures are not allowed.

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).

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

The Daily Show, Obama, and cynicism or Jason Jones as a reader of Lacan

In its coverage of the inauguration, the Daily Show ran a segment with Jason Jones reporting from DC. The structure of the sequence was as follows: Jones would describe how wonderful Obama's speech was and then Jon Stewart would play a brief clip of a Bush speech with highly similar rhetoric. Stewart was pushing Jones to say something about why this was change, why Obama was different. Haven't we heard these words before? (Like, what's the difference between 'I'm a uniter not a divider' and Obama's calls for unity?) Jones complained, saying Stewart was a buzz kill, that it's different because it's Obama, and then, the clincher: it's different because we don't think Obama means it.

So we have here a situation where two statements seem to say the same thing. Their content seems indistinguishable. The difference is in the position from which they are enunciated, Bush v. Obama. A first reading would say that this means that there is no difference, that Obama does not provide any change at all, that in fact the one thing he does not provide is change (he provides everything but change). But, there is nonetheless a difference in the position of enunciation. The person is not the same; time has passed, etc. And this is where the Jones' point is surprising: we would expect Bush to be the cynic, but it seems that he is saying that Obama is or his supporters are.

But Jones must be a Lacanian. The problem of Bush is that he believes his words. There is no gap between himself and his words or his words and the world. He is fully identified with his words, completely certain, with no space for doubts or disagreement. This full identity of words and reality (White Noise) is properly psychotic.

But no one thinks Obama is crazy or psychotic. He is described as professorial, calm, cool, technocratic, a lover of argument and debate. We don't think that he views his words as indistinguishable from the Real. We know that for him they have symbolic efficacy, that they are chosen as elements of a common political rhetoric, that they assert this commonality and do not deny the multiple valences of rhetorical choices. Obama, then, enables a kind of distance or disindentification. He provides a kind of relief from the intense, all-or-nothing psychosis of the Bush years, the relief of a shared-lie, of disavowal, the relief that comes from the intervention of the Symbolic.

Obama's non belief in his own words is thus not cynicism (correlatively, the non-duped err). Rather, it's an attempt to reinsert Symbolic distance and authority.

Lessig on West Wing

Wow! Lawrence Lessig is the name of a character on West Wing tonight. The character is a constitutional law professor who wrote a book called the Future of Ideas. I can't think of the name of the actor playing Lessig, but he played the crazy scientist in back to the future.

Palast: CBS' Urge to Purge

Link: AlterNet: MediaCulture: CBS' Urge to Purge. More from Palast on CBS and the pathetically overlooked truth regarding Bush's privilege.

Greg Palast on CBS and fear

Link: Greg Palast - Blog.
CBS GETS STANDING ROVE-ATION AT WHITE HOUSE
DAN RATHER FEARED THE PRICE OF "ASKING QUESTIONS" BEFORE NETWORK'S PURGE OF INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS
     In contrast to the current bloggy celebration of new journalism's defeat of old media, Palast properly situates current problems in mainstream news in the political climate of fear. He writes:

This is really a story about fear, the fear that stops other reporters in the US from following the evidence about this Administration to where it leads. American news guys and news gals, practicing their smiles, adjusting their hairspray levels, bleaching their teeth and performing all the other activities that are at the heart of US TV journalism, will look to the treatment of Dan Rather and say, "Not me, babe." No questions will be asked, as Dan predicted, lest they risk necklacing and their careers as news actors burnt to death.

CBS News | CBS Ousts 4 For Bush Guard Story | January 10, 2005�10:14:19

Link: CBS News | CBS Ousts 4 For Bush Guard Story | January 10, 2005�10:14:19.
What will no doubt be lost in response to the 'ousting' of four CBS employees is the following:

"While the panel found that some actions taken by CBS News encouraged such suspicions, “the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content.”