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"A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions … apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" - by Harold Pinter
So I’m taking a moment here from the apocalyptic (well sort of!) to look at this recent interview with Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. He’s pretty much a household name at this point but if you are by chance unfamiliar you should know that he has been building an incredible body of work over the last 25 years looking at the relationship between humanity and consumer desires as plays out on geologic and maximal scales.
Here is Burtynsky on the quote above:
"Truth is open to a lot of interpretations in the artist's hands. I think, what Pinter is saying is that, as a global citizen you are responsible for asking a question: do I agree with particular politics, do I agree with a direction we are being lead. As a citizen you have to make a decision how you feel about the world, what you think is right. As citizens, it's our responsibility to move out of the domain of creating reflections on humanity into the domain of acting on our beliefs." "As a citizen I do take a pretty strong stand. I do believe that there are serious environmental consequences to what we do and what we don't. There are millions of little things we can do every day. We're making decisions about the kind of cars we drive, how we insulate our houses, how wastefully we use the water and what we do with our old computers. These are real things that make a difference, millions of these decisions done by millions of individuals." - Burtynsky
Christopher Grabowski has some great questions for the artist - here's a few that seem particularly acute for recent postings around the blogosphere.
On why the news media isn't really getting the big story: "Mainstream news media has a problem with it because they are searching for the breaking story that would sell papers. They're always on the search of headline grabbing material. At the same time, the news media are very top down hierarchal organizations that are not very good at allowing creativity. They are not very good at allowing the people who are on the ground, seeing things first hand, to become a feedback system to back up the organization's pyramid."
On why he decided not to photograph the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: "I've photographed several natural disasters in the past and have decided that it is to close to spot reporting for me. You're in and out very quickly. The thing I was interested in was the slow burn, not the ka-boom, the things and processes that gradually create the world we live in, the processes that we tend to see as normal, as opposed to a tsunami or a hurricane.
"I focus on a world that we're consciously creating. The Three Gorges dam under construction on the Yangtze River looks like a disaster but it was a conscious decision to tear all these cities apart, to relocate 1.5 million people and to build new homes for them beyond the flood area. It was a conscious, industrial transformation of the landscape.
"I don't think it's been adequately covered. As far as I know, I am the only guy who ever went there with a 4x5 camera. In many places up the river, I was the only professional photographer people said they'd seen."
[my post regarding this very topic: Soth, Polidori and Katrina]
On whether photographs reveal or conceal the truth: "I constantly face questions concerning truth and distortions. As an image-maker I have degrees of control on how I tell my stories. If there is a piece of plywood somewhere in the corner of my frame that catches the sun and burns a hole in my image, I may consider moving the plywood, or if access is difficult, to remove the reflection in the Photoshop. Now, if I take that same image and paste some people into it and introduce some staged narrative without telling anybody about it, that would create a challenge to the traditional trust in the relationship between the image, the creator of the image and the viewer.
"Having said that, photography can be used in various, non-documentary, forms depending on how the author wants to engage the audience. The meaning can be found in making something up completely, a flight of imagination can sometimes have more to do with truth about poverty than, let's say, a straight picture of a street scene."
On simplistic framing of images – and issues: "I started my work off saying: look these are the complex issues here; there is a definite disconnect between what we consciously do and what the global reality of what we do is.
"To me, if you build your polemics around the point that all corporations are bad, it lacks the necessary complexity, it is just too narrow and almost a caricature of a view. There are some bad corporations and some good corporations. There are some very bad people who work for the corporations but it is also quite easy for some environmentalists to feel self-righteous, to get up on the soapbox without the full grasp of the complexity of the problem.
"My goal is to allow dialogue, not to draw lines and start throwing things at each other again, because this has not gotten us anywhere all these years. It pleases me if my work does something to arouse consciousness, to increase dialog or to influence people to make real personal changes, which is the only thing that makes a difference, as far as I am concerned."
On whether a still image works differently on our consciousness than a documentary film: "Absolutely, I do believe that a still image fixes in the consciousness in a whole different way than a documentary film does. With a film we are caught up in following the narrative and we don't really pay attention to the images. The still image does fix into the memory, it locks in, it's easier to recall. It has a role in raising consciousness and it does it differently than a documentary film. One might say that film is more compelling because you're more driven to understand the theme but the film doesn't recall the same way in our minds. What I recall from the Vietnam War is not the video footage; it's Eddie Adams' images that stick in my mind."
On whether artists need to be analytical, like anthropologists: "People who are engaged in art are engaged in a process of thinking beyond the present moment, looking both forward and backward, reflecting on how the human story plays itself out. In a way, art is a research and development department. It shows us new places we can go in terms of thought; it makes us reflect upon our actions, our ethics; it questions our definitions of good and evil.
"I believe that culture is key to a healthy society. So many people are caught so entirely in the process of working and making a living that society needs somebody to put a mirror up, to open up our consciousness to the things that are out of sight, out of mind."
Full interview at the Tyee
image: Edward Burtynsky
via wood s lot
So this discussion on apocalyptic culture continues. The previous posts reference contributions by Alec Soth, Jodi Dean, Poetix, K-Punk, Larval Subjects and Rough Theory. (These are great blogs – read them!)To briefly summarize, here are the main observations from the previous posts:1. Peter Schjeldahl: The present widespread disarray and morbidity of the arts in Western civilization represent, it occurs to me, a long-term toxic effect of the atom-bomb terror of the last three decades…Most insidious of the terror’s by-products is what I’ll call the no-future effect. Conditioned to living on the eve of doomsday, we have lost the ability to conceive of a future stretching farther than our own most distant personal goals or responsibilities.
2. Jodi Dean: what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory? I need the first point in order to account for the persistence that is in the process of fading and dissolving. So we persist, but the distinctions are fading, and with it, the people we have been, the lives we have led. At any rate, the incompleteness of the theory, its failures, also indicate that it's right (in the grand tradition of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the disproof is the greatest proof): the failures indicate the process of dissolution in which we are caught. Clarity is lost, impossible now that the world has ended and we are but drifting components of its dwindling memory
3. Poetix(Dominic): Socialism or Barbarism: the slogan presents itself as if it were describing a moment of decision, a fork in the road. The decision cannot be deferred any longer, the slogan insists: it must be taken immediately. But nothing seems easier to believe than that there is now no choice: barbarism is what is, to an already frightening and intensifying degree, and it is even more what is to come. We have gone too far down that road, impelled along it by all that seems most intransigent, most unalterable, about our “nature” or our “condition”. Once it seems that the moment has passed when things might have turned out otherwise, does not the slogan lose its cogency? ...
The conventional form of the urgent call to action, in the face of some existential menace, is “no future, unless…”.
4. K-Punk: If it is increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, that is because the world has already ended. In this condition of mors ontologica, the world goes on, but nothing new can ever happen; what remains is a mechanical permutation through options that have already been fixed…The time to act was in the past; the damage is done; all we can do is await consequences which can no longer be averted...
5. Larval Subjects(Sinthome): considers collective apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. That is, could not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement).
6. Rough Theory(N Pepperell): presents Adorno’s considerations on socialization-All of these things, Adorno suggests, encourage susceptibility to forms of mass mobilisation that are directed specifically against the realisation of potentials for transformation, and that tap into impulses to destroy others (particularly members of vulnerable minorities whose social exclusion can be misrecognised as unmerited freedom from hated social constraints) as well as desires for self-destruction.
Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” - particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute.
I'd like to look a recent follow up on the previous posts by K-Punk. - After the end, again.
He asserts that there is a difference between the UK and US popular unconscious when it comes to apocalyptic dread (I think we can consider apocalyptic fetish as a parallel to that dread). K-Punk cites the Cold War as the truly apocalyptic era where the fear of nuclear destruction was a daily ritual of anxiety and nightly dreams of annihilation.Jodi is right that there is no British equivalent to the religious apocalypticism that features so prominently in American cultural life but this is less apocalyptic dread than apocalyptic ecstasy, a fevered anticipation of the Rapture.The kind of apocalyptic dread I am referring to was in any case far too pervasive to be reduced to particular cultural artefacts; nor was it confined to religious groups. There were, of course, innumerable films, novels and songs which explicitly dealt with apocalypse of one kind or another, but the dread was so widespread, so deep-rooted, that it amounted to a psychic climate. Jeff Nuttall's indispensable Bomb Culture went so far as to claim that the impulse behind postwar popular culture in its entirety was the virtual presence of nuclear war.
K-punk rightly observes that such ‘end time’ dread was pervasive background noise – not unlike what Schjedahl observed in 1978. However, for him this dread is no longer present now in the UK though assumingly still alive in the US. Certainly, Sinthome's remarks - in particular, his claim that 'apocalyptic fantasies' are 'omnipresent' in American culture - suggest that apocalypse has retained its hold on the American unconscious. The key passage in Sinthome's post is the following, where, in an echo of similar claims by Fredric Jameson, he makes the case that apocalyptic fantasies mask disavowed utopian impulses:
[C]ould not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement). - Frederic Jameson
Continuing, he mentions that alongside Larval Subject’s 'hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content', N Pepperell at Rough Theory suggests that 'we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously ... on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.' He wonders if the ‘fantasies’ mentioned by Larval Subjects are more aptly called ‘survivalist’ fantasies as the by product of a stripped down ‘self’ – a ‘minimal self’ resultant of continuing waves of catastrophe and threat.
I want to reflect back for a second on some of the links earlier and the type of environment imagined in Children of Men. I have pointed to Guantanamo, Corrections Corp. of America as well as the timely conceptual/political art of the zone-interdite project. In accordance with these notations on the budding exclusion and isolation zones – non-places purposed for containment and control - Nick Turse via Tom Dispatch.com writes of the future envisioned by the Pentagon.
Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums outlines the following philosophy and futures strategies of the US military.For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future - not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet. For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future - not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet.
The report is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA sees the following: the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or State Department types fear to go ... [T]hey now assert that the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor."
In fact, this past October the U.S. Army issued its latest "urban operations" manual. "Given the global population trends and the likely strategies and tactics of future threats," it declares, "Army forces will likely conduct operations in, around, and over urban areas - not as a matter of fate, but as a deliberate choice linked to national security objectives and strategy, and at a time, place, and method of the commander's choosing." Global economic deprivation and poor housing, the hallmarks of the urban slum, are, the manual asserts, what makes "urban areas potential sources of unrest" and thus, "[i]ncreases the likelihood of the Army's involvement in stability operations." And "idle" urban youth (long a target of security forces in the U.S. homeland), loosed in the future slum city from the "traditional social controls" of "village elders and clan leaders" and prey to manipulation by "nonstate actors" draw particular concern from the manual's authors.
It’s well worth the reading the whole as it mentions rumerous contractors building wildly futuristic weapons and intelligence systems that will transform life as we know it. Think Terminator, Robocop, Blade Runner etc. etc. The desire is to shape and control conflict as it unfolds.
As alarming as these plans and omnipotent gadgets are, what is terrifying is the FEAR and apocalyptism that is at the heart of these multi- $billion dollar R&D initiatives. That fear is the sending of troops into an enemy-friendly urban mega-slum which punctuates a future vision of international periphery zones for the elite and the scorned. The metropolis is the future battle field. As Nick Turse points out there is a dark irony at play here. Ever since the U.S. high command moved into its self-described virtual “city” – the Pentagon has had a distinct inability to decisively beat anyone save its weakest enemy. Though able to cause massive casualties and historical destruction, the war machine has proven rather unremarkable in achieving its goals.Despite this reality-
Now, the Pentagon has decided to prepare for a fight with a restless, oppressed population of slum-dwellers one billion strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25 million people per year. To take on even lone outposts in this multitude - like any of the 400 cities of over 1 million people that exist today or the 150 more estimated to be in existence by 2015 - is a fool's errand, a recipe for both carnage and quagmire.
These statistics should give us all great pause. I'll close this installment with what Larval Subjects has to say by way of Lacan.For Lacan, of course, the real must not be confused with reality. Where reality is understood as a combination of the symbolic and the imaginary characterizing the familiarity of our everyday lifeworld, the real is to be properly understood as the impossible or those formal deadlocks that haunt the symbolic and prevent its closure
painting: Franz Johnston
The place where they lay, it has a name - it has none
- Paul Celan
The previous installment ended with this by Jodi Dean:
Apocalypto imagines past apocalypse--not future. And, Children of Men imagines present apocalypse…. I came away overwhelmed by a cliche (which says nothing about the movie per se, in other words, don't blame the movie)--if Guantanamo is in the world, then all the world is Guantanamo. Although this is a cliche, it may apply more than we think…. the 'solution' of containment zones for troublemakers just seems obvious...
Are we living in macro-micro containment zones as pictured in Children? Consider some evidence in America as posted by Latina Lista on the holding facilities in texas for illegal immigrants. Also consider this alarming story by Subtopia on the booming business of border fences across the globe.
It seems almost every month there emerges from some border ‘zone’ a proposal to build a new fence. One might think the border fence is as popular to the construction industry today as the global skyscraper, the suburban tract home, or the gated community. In fact, who is to say they are not somewhat at least symbolically interconnected. Anyhow, this month it is Pakistan who announced “a new solution to the problem on its western frontier.” That is, according to this report: “mines and fences along the Afghan border, designed to keep militants from crossing in and out of the tribal zone.”
(The post goes onto link many previous posts on borders – well worth clicking)
Then there is this project - Zone*Interdite by Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud
as noted by Outside the Ivory Tower blog.
Since early 2000 the two Swiss citizens have been collecting data on military exclusion zones and presenting a compilation of the data on the website www.zone-interdite.org. The platform is linked up with a Google search function, meaning that information available via Google can be called up for the now circa 2.000 entries with just one mouse-click – a function that is as low-key as it is stunning, for it offers visitors to the site effortless direct access to a plethora of information and images about the individual zones, although the military obligation to kept restricted data confidential dictates that the general public should be kept in the dark as much as possible and certainly should not be told the truth via images.
If you go to the artist’s site : Zone Interdite - you can visit Camp Delta at Guantanamo, Coleman Barracks – Germany, an Islamic training camp – Sudan, and Bagram Airbase – Afghanistan. It’s a very interesting project and well defined in its aims at connecting/mapping the power apparatus - rather the complex phenomena of perception triggered by prohibiting such perception.
These micro- geographies, fragmented place/zones are starting to proliferate globally which seems to declare an entropy - a passage out of the traditional nation-state structure into something more reductive, barbarous and splintered. So to repeat Dean, if apocalypticism is present, does that mean that the world hasn't already ended?And what of "other worlds? It is precisely because other worlds have been that there remains a glimmer of hope for other worlds to come. David Graeber has suggested something similar in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He asks:
What sort of social theory would actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs?
- it would have to proceed from the assumption that another world is possible.
That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we'd all be better off as a result. To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible. But one could also say that it's this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative: Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today?
As Dean pointed out, Zizek takes a somewhat similiar commentary as he suggests that our political duty today is to keep these past traces alive, to recall past aspirations. This reminds me of Morris Berman’s assertion of the need for a new monastaticism to protect the best of Enlightment values and the pursuit empirical knowledge as a bunker against the decline in law and education and the increased reliance on "special" knowledge to explain the world - ie. ancient religious texts. * Zizek on Children of Men link.
The conversation on 'the end' takes a slight turn with a psycho-analytic musing on our new sense of apocalypse - Larval Subjects blog summons Freud to testify.
Apocalypse Now Redacted
The question revolves around the issue of whether or not the damage to the world is irrevocable and whether another world is possible (i.e., whether there's a limit to capitalism or an alternative to capitalism). Rather than directly taking a stand on these questions, I would instead like to approach the issue psychoanalytically from the standpoint of collective fantasies.
One of the things I began noticing a few years ago is that I was encountering patients whose sexual and amorous fantasy life was deeply bound up with visions of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization. For instance, I would encounter patients who had all sorts of fantasies about post-apocalyptic settings such as life after an eco-catastrophe, nuclear war, a massive plague, or a fundamental economic and technological collapse, where, at long last, they would be able to be with the true objects of their desire and their life would finally be meaningful (struggling to survive, to rebuild the world, etc). As I reflected on this phenomenon a bit, I began to notice that these sorts of fantasies populate the social space everywhere. In cinema there is an entire genre of apocalyptic films from both rightwing and leftwing perspectives such as Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Dante's Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, and many more I cannot remember. In the world of "literature" the Left Behind novels have been a stunning success, selling millions of copies and leading to popular television shows and made for television movies. In news media, of course, we are perpetually inundated with apocalyptic threats from eco-catastrophe, to the bird flu, to the threat of massive meteors hitting the earth or supervolcanos exploding or even a star going supernova and evaporating our atmosphere, to terrorist attacks employing nuclear or bio-weaponry. The Discovery and Science Channel regularly devote shows to these themes.
While I am certainly not dismissing the possibility of these threats, the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenerios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions of the present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the ubiquity of these scenerios in popular imagination... An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room?
In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud presents an interesting take on how we're to understand anxiety dreams such as the death of a loved one. There Freud writes that, another group of dreams which may be described as typical are those containing the death of some loved relative-- for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister, or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief, so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may even weep bitterly in his sleep.
Here, perhaps, would be the key to apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. That is, could not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement).
As such, these fantasies serve the function of rendering our dissatisfaction tolerable (a dissatisfaction that mostly consists of boredom and a sense of being cheated), while fantasizing about an alternative that might someday come to save us, giving us opportunity to be heroic leaders and people struggling to survive rather than meaningless businessmen, civil servants, teachers, etc. Perhaps the real question with regard to this pessimism, then, is that of how the utopian yearnings underlying these representations and the antagonisms to which they respond might directly be put to work.
Rough Theory blog follows this tack with a slight tangent by looking at Adorno as opposed to Freud. Here the concern is more about the importance of physochological theory to the general project of critical theory but does point out an interesting sub-text to the apocalypse discussion.
For present purposes, since the topic of apocalyptic fantasy started me on this tangent, I will explore only one: Adorno’s proposal for how a critical psychology might complement a critical sociology in making sense of the appeal of social movements that seem oriented specifically to destruction.
Since Larval Subjects’s post provided the immediate spark for these reflections, I’ll briefly draw attention to some elements of that post to get us underway. Larval Subject begins by citing examples of apocalyptic fantasies from a wide range of contexts, and then asks how we should understand this phenomenon.
Larval Subjects thus expresses the hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content - something more than the desire for destruction and death. I raise this point, not to hold up Freud’s text against LSs appropriation …but because I think it provides a good frame for understanding Adorno’s very different attempt to merge psychoanalytic theory with sociology in the service of critique. If Freud offers two interpretive paths, one of which LS has followed in the hopes that apocalyptic fantasy might signify a non-manifest content - a longing for transcendence - we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously on the second path - on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.
Adorno’s argument is complex - and not necessarily in ways that are productive for theoretical reflection by those not committed to Adorno’s own framework. For present purposes, I won’t attempt to outline Adorno’s interpretation in any comprehensive way, but will instead comment on just a few elements within a single text: Adorno’s “Sociology and Psychology”, published in the New Left Review in two parts, in Nov-Dec, 1967, and Jan-Feb 1968.
Adorno begins this text with a rejection of the concept of objective historical laws, and suggests - as I have suggested above - that this rejection implies the need to supplement a critical sociological theory with a critical psychology. Much of the article then revolves around two arguments:
1. a critique of other attempts to merge sociology and psychology
2. an often scathing critique of Freud and of various psychoanalytic traditions, in the service of an attempt to appropriate Freudian categories in a more historicised and critical form.
Adorno’s arguments are often brilliant and provocative, and I will try to revisit them in appropriate detail in another post. For present purposes, however, I want only to isolate out a couple of points that seem - to me, at least - to have potentially broader relevance for theoretical reflection on the psychological undercurrents of mass movements.(apocalypticism)
What I find particularly interesting and disturbing in this text is the very simple and, once stated, obvious question that motivates Adorno’s analysis:
What might happen, psychologically, to individuals who possess critical sensibilities in circumstances in which those individuals are too frightened or overwhelmed to act?
Adorno unfolds an extraordinarily pessmistic analysis in response to this question, focussing on the strain placed on an ego whose reality testing abilities enable it to discover both the potential for and the isolation and impotence of the individual to bring such a transformation about. Adorno argues - and I won’t elaborate on his analysis here - that much of what Freud took to be innate psychological structure derives, instead, from the violence of socialisation into such a context, from the scars inflicted by the ego on itself when, confronted with its own powerlessness, it responds by repressing conscious awareness of potentials for transformation, and driving emancipatory impulses into the unconscious realm.
Adorno suggests that several consequences follow from this form of socialisation:
1. a brittleness and attenuation of the ego, which renders it easier for the ego itself to be overwhelmed by infantile and irrational impulses; the presence of unusually strong barriers separating the unconscious from other dimensions of psychic life, which has the effect of “freezing” the unconscious in an infantile state and undermining the ability to sublimate infantile desires
2. because on some level the awareness of transformative potentials persists - an unconscious reservoir of rage at the unnecessary sacrifices imposed by an unjust society.
All of these things, Adorno suggests, encourage susceptibility to forms of mass mobilisation that are directed specifically against the realisation of potentials for transformation, and that tap into impulses to destroy others (particularly members of vulnerable minorities whose social exclusion can be misrecognised as unmerited freedom from hated social constraints) as well as desires for self-destruction.
Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” - particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute.
While fuelled in some sense by an experience of transformative potentials, these destructive desires are not, within Adorno’s framework, masks for utopian longing, but blind rage and pain at sacrifices unjustly imposed - a rage and pain that, can sometimes try to “rationalise” its own sacrifices through the destructive imposition of equivalent sacrifices on others. Rough Theory concludes:
In reality, I’m actually quite critical of this dimension of Adorno’s work. Specifically, Adorno uses this appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, among other things, to account for certain qualitative characteristics of forms of subjectivity that I think can be explained far more easily via sociological analysis. As well, there is a certain element to Adorno’s reworking of Freud that - for all its scathing criticisms - is a bit too literal and loyal… I’m not particularly drawn to the actual contents of his psychological theory - I am, however, drawn to his question –
the question of whether the experience of living in a society that suggests the potential for its own transformation might, under certain historical circumstances, render likely the emergence of abstractly destructive sensibilities. At the same time, I am cautious of elements in LS’s post - of how quickly the interpretation jumps from the claim that manifest fantasies of destruction might have some kind of non-destructive latent content, to the even more contentious claim that the specific latent content might be utopian in character.
More to come......
image - David Maisel
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
As many people have been murmuring over the past month, the film Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s book,The Road (still reading) have struck a major cord in the psyche. Regarding the film, I still find myself lingering over various images a month after viewing it. The 'illegal' immigrant zones seem to have the most staying power for me– the most horror – the most real, as they look to be facsimiles of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the lesser known – Corrections Corp. of America. The film is tragic and beautiful and violent. It also looks like a very familiar ‘future’. The final battle scene seems to put you directly in Fallujah or what Sadr City might be like should US troops go in hard against Al Sadr.
Many bloggers over the last few weeks have been thinking about ‘the end’, many spurred on by Children of Men, McCarthy, the Arctic thaw, and the potential for yet another ‘theater’ in the war on terror -which if you haven’t noticed is starting to flare up more and more in Africa.
Alec Soth did some good digging when he brings to light the following from Kurt Anderson and the eternal art critic Peter Schjeldahl.
“Apocalypse is on our minds,” Kurt Anderson wrote in New York Magazine, “Apocalypse is … hot…. Apocalypticism has ebbed and flowed for thousands of years, and the present uptick is the third during my lifetime…but this time, it seems, more widespread and cross-cultural, both more reasonable (climate change, nuclear proliferation) and more insane (religious prophecy), more unnerving.
Peter Schjeldahl made similar observations in his 1978 essay, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Terror, Narcissism, and Art:
The present widespread disarray and morbidity of the arts in Western civilization represent, it occurs to me, a long-term toxic effect of the atom-bomb terror of the last three decades…Most insidious of the terror’s by-products is what I’ll call the no-future effect. Conditioned to living on the eve of doomsday, we have lost the ability to conceive of a future stretching farther than our own most distant personal goals or responsibilities.
Schjeldahl goes on to explain how this has changed the role of the contemporary artist:
The personality type of our time is the narcissist. Obsessively self-regarding, self-referential, self-consuming, the narcissistic personality finds authenticity only in the moment-to-moment convincingness of bodily sensations and mental events. The narcissistic artist or poet offers to a shadowy public evidence of the dramatizations of these sensations, inviting that public to join in the self-contemplation. Anger, at world or self, alternates with a husky or antic seductiveness, a siren song of love and death or sexy fun, and with abject complaining, the cries of the abandoned baby within.
Good stuff from nearly 30 years ago! Now I have had the privilege of a painting critique with Mr. Schjeldahl not so long ago when he quipped something along these lines.
These are dangerous times. Some people are flocking to church and the rest are buying art!
An astute observation when you compare and contrast the $billion booms of international art fairs (and museums in China) and the swelling of Evangelical mega-churches and the international conversion growth within Islam, Mormonism and Scientology.
Over in the more cerebral corners of the blogosphere, an intense discussion has been volleyed between Poetix, K-Punk and Jodi Dean regarding the 'new' apocalypticism. It began with the post from Jodi thinking on patterns of dissolution.
Time, Entropy, and the Dissolution of the World
More on the pattern: the lack of distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and lies; the encroaching ecological disaster; the way that the US is giving up on democracy and people stay isolated in their homes; the lies about Iraq (Bush says that the deaths there are exaggerated by the insurgents' sophisticated media operation and those who hate America); the horror of Darfur that persists and persists and persists...
Two ideas:
1. physicists can't explain why time runs in one direction.
2. entropy, stuff tends toward disintegration or dissolution
Conclusion from the details and the two theories: what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory?
I think that I need the first point in order to account for the persistence that is in the process of fading and dissolving. So we persist, but the distinctions are fading, and with it, the people we have been, the lives we have led. At any rate, the incompleteness of the theory, its failures, also indicate that it's right (in the grand tradition of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the disproof is the greatest proof): the failures indicate the process of dissolution in which we are caught. Clarity is lost, impossible now that the world has ended and we are but drifting components of its dwindling memory
Poetix responds to this proposition with some very clear assertions:
No Future, Except…
Socialism or Barbarism: the slogan presents itself as if it were describing a moment of decision, a fork in the road. The decision cannot be deferred any longer, the slogan insists: it must be taken immediately. But nothing seems easier to believe than that there is now no choice: barbarism is what is, to an already frightening and intensifying degree, and it is even more what is to come. We have gone too far down that road, impelled along it by all that seems most intransigent, most unalterable, about our “nature” or our “condition”. Once it seems that the moment has passed when things might have turned out otherwise, does not the slogan lose its cogency? ...
The conventional form of the urgent call to action, in the face of some existential menace, is “no future, unless…”. Unless we reduce our emissions, eradicate global poverty and disease (good liberal conscience version); unless we do something about the massing barbarian hordes (bad hysterical racist version). But at least one plausible model of climate change asserts that all the emissions needed to change the climate irrevocably have already been emitted, and the effects of this change are even now ineluctibly unfolding: we pass from tipping-point to tipping-point. HIV/AIDS has already killed millions across the world, making orphans of millions more. None of this can be undone, and there is no possible future world unmarked by these catastrophes. The future designated by the “unless”, the future hoped for by the Western environmentalists and NGO workers of the 80s and 90s, cannot now come to pass. It “has already ended, and we are persisting in its degrading memory” - how many of the narcissistic disorders of our culture can be attributed to this awareness?
He concludes:
We should acknowledge that our world is doomed, that it has no future; but also that it is not the only possible world, that other worlds have been and will be.
K-Punk disagrees and takes a further turn of pessismism with some intriquing thoughts on the role capitalism plays in our inability to imagine to diffirent worlds.
The Damage is Done
If it is increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, that is because the world has already ended. In this condition of mors ontologica, the world goes on, but nothing new can ever happen; what remains is a mechanical permutation through options that have already been fixed…The time to act was in the past; the damage is done; all we can do is await consequences which can no longer be averted...
K-punk then quotes Poetix regarding climate change and concludes:
It's worth pausing here to reflect that, in the debates over climate change, it is no longer the apocalyptic potential of current trends that is disputed; what is doubted is whether any effective action could be taken to deal with it. Questioned about whether they will give up flying in order to combat climate change, people will often respond that there is no point, because others will continue to fly: thus runs the fatalism of capitalist realism. If Dominic is correct, of course, then they are not fatalistic enough.
Jodi Dean sums up and with the following:
First, I agree with Dominic on "other worlds." It is precisely because other worlds have been that there remains a glimmer of hope for other worlds to come. The traces of past hopes remain. At one point somewhere Zizek mentions that our political duty today is to keep these past traces alive, to recall past aspirations. Perhaps a way to say this is that ghosts matter and that as we linger in a world that has already ended keeping these ghosts alive is the only thing we must do. Or, we are responsible to the lacks in our ended world.
Second, I am taken by Dominic and K-Punk's emphasis on the pointlessness of action insofar as it is already irrelevant. This makes me think of Children of Men and the continuation of struggle even at the end of the world. Maybe, contra Zizek, simply persisting as dead, simply preferring not to act and remaining/becoming an obstacle, is actually not enough. Isn't it the case that once we recognize that we are choosing the worst, that we are not grounding our acts perversely in the service of a future history, that we are precisely then actually free? Differently put, perhaps only irrelevant action is free. (Of course, we need to be clearer about relevant to what--the operative notion here is relevant to a future; but, it may be that in a world already ended, the notion of relevance changes completely such that we have to think of it in terms of relevance to a past, to ghosts, and to lacks.)
Third, at one point K-punk writes:
Oddly, apocalyptic dread - so omnipresent during the Cold War - seems to have been extirpated from the popular unconscious….So, it seems to me that apocalyptic dread is alive.
But what does this mean? If apocalypticism is present, does that mean that the world hasn't already ended? I don't think so. Here's why: pentecostals and evangelicals are waiting for the Rapture. That they haven't been raptured means, for them, that the world hasn't ended. But, if one doesn't expect a Rapture, then it's easy to recognize that these poor souls are persisting in a delusion so as to avoid facing up to the brutal reality of an ended world. Apocalypto imagines past apocalypse--not future. And, Children of Men imagines present apocalypse…. I came away overwhelmed by a cliche (which says nothing about the movie per se, in other words, don't blame the movie)--if Guantanamo is in the world, then all the world is Guantanamo. Although this is a cliche, it may apply more than we think…. the 'solution' of containment zones for troublemakers just seems obvious.
Had enough? ......more tomorrow
image: Emmit Gowan
A few months back I posted on the redesign of New York City's taxi system in celebration of the centennial. The project is being managed through the Design Trust for Public Space, a great organization.So, tomorrow - Thursday, January 18th at 6:30 pm - the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will host a panel discussion entitled Taxi 07: Transforming an Icon. Participating designers from Antenna Design, Birsel + Seck, Smart Design and Weisz + Yoes will discuss their approach to the task of improving a globally recognized icon. Cooper-Hewitt members and students with valid ID: $5; non- members: $10
Registration required.
image credit: freestanding taxi stand rendering by Weisz + Yoes
I've been sitting on this post awhile and finally willing to delve into it as there has been some excellent discussion on the nature of Christianity recently on various blogs I enjoy (see recent posts).WAY back in September '06 Modern Painters published a pretty damn good (email) discussion between Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto on the legacy of Joseph Beuys and by extension its relationship to Barney's recent sculpture. I gotta confess I'm one of those Cremaster viewers that finds himself nodding off within 10 minutes - Tarkovsky they ain't. I know I;'m supposed to gush at over how importantly obtuse they are but I always feel I've been treated to something a bit sophomoric. They do very little for me but this conversation is about Barney's sculpture (which I generally like) which has turned my head and made me appreciate Barney much more as an object maker and thinker. That Beuys should be on people's minds seems very appropriate for 'these times' and I have to wonder if we will see any here in the States. On a recent trip to Berlin it was a great pleasure to see a ton of works by Beuys at the Hamburger Banhoff Museum.
I'll start with this basic observation by Danto:
There is what we might speak of as the world of Beuys. It is like a mythic overlay on our world, and serves as a kind of moral critique...
Barney: I continue to feel engaged with the problem of making narrative sculpture. Beuys’s oeuvre has one center, whether you consider that center to be Beuys, or if you follow his logic of the sun state. Which sketches his vision of a democratic state of interconnectedness and balance. Somehow that didn’t register for me when I first came across his work. Perhaps its that our current international political and environmental condition that makes one more conscious (and weary) of dominant religious structures. I’m told that the younger generation of German artists is not as interested in Beuys. I’m wondering of models organized with distinct center are less useful to younger people. An artist from Beuys’s generation could align his practice with the more binary philosophies of Hegel or Rudolph Steiner, for example, while an artist from the current generation would naturally gravitate toward something pluralistic, along the lines of Deleuze... my sculpture making system was developed as a tool to navigate through the world, and this tool definitely gives a privileged role to intuition. With this system, I have attempted to create a map of my creative process. This map feels necessary to me. There’s a way in which I fear that I will lose my ability to relocate the fertile point of initiation, the creative impulse that one must always return to, and this fear grows stronger the deeper I delve into any given project. Its narrative is more a proposal, and has an intentionally open-ended structure that invites the audience to complete the story. And as the primary objective of this system is to generate sculpture, the narrative remains abstract – a way to leave space for more specific distillation in the form of sculpture. I believe these ideas are sympathetic with those of Beuys.
Danto: For one thing, it would have never occurred to me that he was projecting a Christian structure. I always thought this message was religious in a diffuse and rather anti-denominational way. He seemed a kind of Druidic presence: ritualistic, shamanistic, primitivistic. Bueys wanted to undo all the technology that separated us from nature. His central thought was healing. He wanted to repeal Modernity, fraternize with animals, live by means of plants, and converse with birds. If he is Christian, he is like St. Francis. I think you and Bueys have a philosophy of salvation in common – overcoming gender boundaries, the human – animal boundaries. I agree that your sculpture making system gives a privileged role to intuition. I wonder whether Beuys would not have said something like that. He would not have used the word ‘system’, I would guess. But he would also not have feared that he would lose the ability to reconnect with his creative impulse. I think that is because he did not think of himself as making art in the first place. He thought he was doing something more important than art. In that way he was practicing a religion of healing, if you believe him, or just believe in him. I am struck by the difference, as I understand it, between sculpture as you think of it, where it is definitely art; and social sculpture, the organization of human beings into an ideal political community, of the kind Faust aspired to establish in the second part of Goethe’s masterpiece.
Barney:Beuys remains a cornerstone of my faith that art can provide useful models and tools for understanding the world, and that these models eventually proliferate into the broader culture and become functional in the collective consciousness. I wouldn’t argue that all art does this, or should do this, but only that it is possible. That said, I’m disappointed Bueys is not so present in the minds of the younger German generation, as this seems like a natural time to reconsider him, given our current ecological and political condition...I guess I think of Beuy’s body as being at the center of his practice. For this reason, I feel like I haven’t had a primary experience with his work, only secondary experiences with the sculpture and documentation of his actions. I accepted that Beuy’s body was a transformer, a conductor, and a transmitter. But this brings me back to the question about a Christian model. If this belief system is about healing and redemption, and if everything must pass through this central body, or transformer, it starts to suggest a Christian character, or at least a Christian structure. Perhaps I’m being too simplistic about this. Again, if this is true, I’m not condemning the work for it, but only wondering if it might suggest a reading that makes the younger generation uneasy.
Danto:
I guess I can see what you mean by Beuy’s body. It was typically present in the work, either when Buey’s was a performer, or when the work referred to Beuys as a physical presence – wounded for example, or teaching while surrounded by blackboards. So his body was transformative. Something passes through it, and that, to you, suggests the analogy of Christ, and ultimately to a Christian relationship between his message and his auditors. That has to be underwritten by his suffering, as Christ’s suffering is the means to our redemption....Maybe the young generation of artists disaffected with Beuys has something to do with the way Beuys made the war so central to his personal myth. I believe, like you, that healing the knife belongs to a much wider vision than its use as a weapon – a vision in which the means and the subject of sacrifice belong to a larger whole. I think the first generation of students were put off by his persistence in art making. German art students in my experience are pretty career oriented. Maybe Beuys was too idealistic to be a model!
Images Modern Painters; Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys
Of course Long Sunday beat me to the punch on this and I also noticed that this excellecnt blog by Gary Sauer Thompson covered an article on post-modernism's impact on marketing and retail. The Economist ran an article in December's issue called Post Modernism and Shopping which asserted that the the POMO philosphers inadvertanly are to blame/praise for a wonderful shopping experience! The article gives the riches to riches story of British retailer Selfridges and how they ditched a meta-narrative of retail for a fragmentary, DIY, eclectic shopping bliss. Snarkiness asside it is an interesting piece and critics of post-modernist critique may find much to agree with.
from the Economist:Lyotard's name would not be the first that springs to mind when tracing the roots of contemporary retailing and business. Of course many unlikely thinkers and doers, from Sun Tzu, a Chinese general and purveyor of top strategy tips, to Sir Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer celebrated as the ultimate team-builder, have been unwittingly roped into management. The sub-genres of marketing, branding, trend-spotting and business organisation all have their own thought-leaders.
That said, the French philosophers whose interest in accessories was limited to a Gauloise drooping stylishly from the corner of the mouth do not seem natural retail gurus. Yet there is a curious (and, given their contempt for consumption, somewhat ironic) relationship between today's shops and the ideas of the French post-modernists.
Pomo power
Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were all from the far left. The pomos (as they are affectionately known to adherents) wanted to destroy capitalism and bourgeois society. The students whom they inspired took to the streets in May 1968 hoping to do just that. Yet, paradoxically, the pomos predicted with eerie precision how capitalism would reinvent itself in the 1980s and 1990s. Even worse (for them), they gave modern retailers, advertisers and businessmen the tools to do so.
Perhaps though what is actually the most relevant part of the artcile is this assertion:
the “fragmentation” of narratives and the individual's ability to be “the artist of his own life”.
Modern business uses a different language to discuss the same ideas. In “The Long Tail”, an analysis of the impact of the internet on the music industry, with wider ramifications, Chris Anderson describes the “shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards”. The post-modern “fragment” becomes a “niche” and the mass market is “turning into a mass of niches”. “When mass culture breaks apart,” he writes, “it doesn't re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.” That is a good description of what post-modernists were trying to achieve, and pretty much what a shop like Selfridges actually aspires to look like.
Ok, I can forgive the cheesy nature of "artist of his own life" but the observation on fragmentation is getting at a real phenomenon. I'm just don't think 'liberated' choice is the natural result of mass fragmentation nor intrinsically a positive whether it is a result or not. This article is a glib appropriation of the post-modern "project' which I think can easily be argued as something not cohesive and even as a body of thought that is still largely yet to be 'decided'. Of course all concepts can be co-opted as nothing is immune to influence or coersion. Still I do think that looking at how capital under globalization, does embed itself into the fragmentation process and successfully trades on it - that is so apparent not only on the political level but on the artistic pysche as well. I think one could assert that the art market actually pioneered long ago the ability to incorporate myriad messages and styles and trade on them.
For fun, I'd like to close with this summary by David Graeber on POMO and the Global Market.
David Graeber:
POMO summary/caricature
1. We now live in a Post Modern Age. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.
2. One result of our postmodern condition is that schemes to change the world or human society through collective political action are no longer viable. Everything is broken up and fragmented; anyway, such schemes will inevitably either prove impossible, or produce totalitarian nightmares.
3. While this might seem to leave little room for human agency in history, one need not despair completely. Legitimate political action can take place, provided it is on a personal level: through the fashioning of subversive identities, forms of creative consumption, and the like. Such action itself is political and potentially liberatory
Globalization summary/caricature
4. We now live in a Global Market. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.
5. One result is that schemes aiming to change the world or human society through collective political action are no longer viable. Dreams of revolution have been proven impossible or, worse, bound to produce nightmares; even any idea of changing society through electoral politics must now be abandoned in the name of “competitiveness.”
6. If this might seem to leave little room for democracy, one need not despair: market behavior, and particularly individual consumption decisions, are democracy; indeed, they are all the democracy we’ll ever really need.
Does GOD pick winners and losers on Super Sunday? Does he really favor Republicans in every election? Are Evangelicals alone in their pursuit of morality as they narrowly define it and is this defining the political nature of a nation?This past week I mentioned the new book from Chris Hedges about the rise of fascist tendencies within the Christian Right. Timely as only the blogosphere can be! - there have been recent posts on the stirring of the Christian Left. Long Sunday/ Jodi Dean (again!) have cited this excellent interview with Jim Wallis at Mother Jones.Jim Wallis:
[Democrats] forget their own progressive history. Every major social movement in our history was fueled in large part by religion and faith. Abolitionism, women’s suffrage, child labor law, and most famously, civil rights. Where would we be if the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself? Here’s a party that was vitally connected to the civil rights movement, led by black churches, now has driven so far [away], they’re successfully portrayed by the Right as a secular party hostile to religion.
I think people who are religious or, say, even spiritual, have not felt like there’s much of a home on the Left. That’s at least a huge political concern. Even those who aren’t religious need to respect people of faith. The connection the world’s waiting for is to connect the hunger for spirituality with passion for social change. Because spirituality, when it isn’t disciplined by social justice, in an affluent society, becomes narcissistic. We buy the books, we buy the tapes. We hear the guru speaker. Barnes & Noble has a whole wall of how to be spiritual, balanced, healed, whole. Spirituality becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. So spirituality has to be disciplined by social justice.What I like about Wallis is his talk of current strategies and the emphasis that poverty and by extension environment are the key moral issues of the day. At root these are about stewardship, responsibility, respect and compassion - not gay marriage, not abortion or any other fringe project of the insolent fundies. What I have to take issue with though is his rhetoric that people of faith need to be included because they are people of faith -You know, you can be who you are, but just respect people who are people of faith and include [them] in the movement.” To the secular fundamentalists who want to exclude any religion, I would say, “Do you want to lose every election for the rest of your life? Get smart.
Look, I hope that there are progressive Christians left and that they are part of the debate and fueling positive action/activism as well, but there is a part of me that screams inside at this. Faith arguably is central to the problem. Faith dictates the "US" vs. the AMORAL THEM - we've got the answer and because of that we're victims of God's enemies. It's a familiar rhetoric from any religious political block that is frankly causing the lack of inclusion problem. I don't see any Christian persecutions my friend - not in this country. When are people of FAITH going to respect everyone else - that's what I want to know? He is correct that morality needs be front and center, and I despise rabid atheism - but this distinction of Faith still makes me uneasy
Dean says it perfectly.Jodi Dean:Are progressive Christians allies of the Left? I'll write this as if the term 'radical left' makes sense used in the context of politics in the US; in other words, I'll use the term 'radical left' aspirationally, wondering about the possibility of a left that could exist, that could be called into being.
One caveat--in the US, to speak of 'excluding' Christian progressives from politics is pretty nonsensical. They have been active in US history, are active now, and are likely to be active in the future. My reflections, then, are of the character of a kind of thought-experiment, wondering if this is something that leftists who are not mobilized on the basis of religious faith should applaud and should seek to ally with.
On the one hand, the politics of affinity groups suggests the importance of broad convergences and overlaps. Just as feminist, anti-racist, and queer groups have had to get over their disagreements and unite on issues of common concern, so should those either hostile to religion generally or hostile to religion in politics recognize their allies and march with them. After all, religious groups have a strong organizational network and committed members, activists who may be much more solidary and engaged than is often the case among the different affinity groups part of the broader left. Among African-Americans, moreover, churches have been key loci of political and social action. Marx's claims to the contrary, there have been and are Christian socialists. And, if progressive Christians are committed to working on a goals in common with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, atheists and others, shouldn't such a broad left alliance be inclusive?
Wallis's points in the larger interview have strategic currency. A Right that takes on religious language falls prey to Christian concerns for the peace and poor, a duty to attend to the suffering of others: "I was hungry and you fed me." They can't ignore the Good Samaritan forever. Additionally, given that the US is such a religious country, speaking to the people where they are, mobilizing the convictions they already have, makes more sense than trying to interpellate them as communists. They won't hear the call, much less answer it.
On the other hand, are their risks in championing the language of religion in politics? Risks that have to do with actually being in power, governing, making laws? Is it possible or likely that the embrace of religious language in politics is in and of itself regressive? My worry is that even in its progressive versions, a religious approach to governance installs in advance an approach to the world linked in faith not reason, a faith that is personal and while possibly shared with millions of others, is difficult to translate into non-religious terms--positions become 'justified by faith' alone.
Likewise, I worry about a conception of politics based on morality. I'm reminded of Schmitt's criticism of liberalism as a doctrine that degenerates into ethics and economics. Encouraging and extending even progressive Christian values into law and the state risks making the state into an agent of moral instruction rather than an agent of fairness and reciprocity (and, yes, I recognize that these are moral notions as well even as they can be defended in non-religious terms). Perhaps more to the point, I don't think the state should be religious (back to "On the Jewish Question"--such a state is not a state). If the left employs religious language, then, is it accepting its own permanent marginalization and failing to take responsibility actually for exercising power?
Read the Wallis article because it is substantial as is this general discussion.
Think flying can't get any worse? Well some evil genies have come up wth a pilot program - no pun intended- at LAX (Los Angeles International airport) which will allow companies to advertise to you at airport security checkpoints. That's right, you can't bring shampoo on a plane but you can certainly be targeted for products while you stand beltless and shoeless. As if the security charade isn't aggravating enough! “TSA plans to launch a one-year pilot program where airport operators may enter into an agreement with vendors, who will provide divestiture bins, divestiture and composure tables, and metal-free bin return carts at no cost to TSA,” said spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. “In return for the equipment, TSA will allow airport operator-approved advertisements to be displayed on the bottom of the inside of the bins.”
“Any airport operator is allowed to submit a proposal by Feb. 16, 2007, to TSA outlining how they will fulfill TSA’s requirements,” said Kudwa. “If the proposal is accepted by TSA, a memorandum of agreement will be executed between TSA and the airport operator.” — Aviation Daily
I mean fuck - ya know? tip via Homeland Stupidity and Law and Society blog
If you have never read Chris Hedges you need to! War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is required reading. It's very exciting to see a new title and what better topic for the author than tackling the threat of American theocracy - you may not know of the long established grass roots effort by many Americans to put in place a Dominionist rule. Haven't picked this up yet but there is a taste of the contents over at Truthout.org from Hedges in late December.
The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America's open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.
During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attack - the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as "satanic." All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society.
One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.
And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.
Also here is a PBS interview with Chris Hedges
A few days back Long Sunday did a post inspired by David Graeber's obeservation that Ego and Altruism are linked. I've just read this by Bill Willers on Dissident Voice which argues that there is a trend in American politics/discourse to manipulate the general desire to volunteer for the purpose of privatizing sectors/services that have traditionally been under governmental oversight. It's a pretty compelling argument when you consider the desires of lobbyists such as Grover Norquist to strangle all Govt. and permanently erase any memory of FDR. The idea is to present Govt. as incapable of handling any human needs outside of national defense therefore reinstating some neo-fuedal society of endentured citizens. When one considers the rise of private security forces and the outsourcing of wars and domestic crises to these companies, you have to wonder how long the Pentagon will be under Govt. oversight and legislation. (I know, as if it is now)
image: Walker Evans
Dissident Voice via wood s lot
A few days ago I mentioned the AP witchhunt orchestrated by various right-wing bloggers, a scandal otherwise known as 'Jamilgate'. Jay Rosen of Press Think has an excellent observation about this tendency of the right to tear down legitimate media as not only a crass act of destruction but a legacy of denial and victimization that goes back to the Goldwater campaign of '64 and famously embodied in the words of former VP Spiro Agnew.Jay Rosen:
About “the rightosphere’s Jamail Hussien witch hunt,” Digby said: “It’s an ugly story all around.”
Well, I agree. But when I sat down to think about the story, I didn’t start with Jamil Hussein, or the AP’s reporting, or the right-wing bloggers and their misdeeds, or even the larger shame of the cultural right’s attack on the press. In my own sorting through what USA Today called “the running six-week battle between bloggers and the Associated Press over the wire service’s report of sectarian violence in Iraq,” I started, not with the episode itself, but with the way we went into Iraq: on bad intelligence and cooked books and a phantom plan for the peace.
Leaps to large conclusions from thin and miserable facts are routine in the established record of how it happened. Discredited sources left in because they were critical to a faltering case— also routine. And we know maybe ten percent of what will soon emerge when the record of those years (2002-04, especially) comes out through Congressional oversight, memoir-writing, the Libby trial, score-settling among the key players and the inevitable decline of the President’s power and reputation as he lurches on to the end.
The intelligence fiasco in the build-up to the invasion is an exceedingly ugly story and rather than receding into the past, its significance grows every day. It’s like the decomposing body under the expanding executive house. More keeps coming out about the fraudulent case for war, and the consequences of having only an imaginary plan for the occupation.
For Bush supporters who soldier on, the choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting that’s gone on for years or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses and keep your hand alive. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the reckoning put off.
That a day of reckoning for the children of Agnew was overdue amid the mess in Iraq was the point of Rich Lowry’s column for The National Review on Dec. 19th. Speaking to fellow conservatives (and directly to warbloggers, I thought…) Lowry started slowly: “The conservative campaign against the mainstream media” has certainly “scored some notable successes.” Dan Rather’s national guard investigation and Newsweek’s Koran desecration story are mentioned. (And how great would it have been to add the Jamil Hussein saga?)
He’s right: we’ve had a conservative campaign against the mainstream news media. But has this campaign been good for conservatives? Not in Iraq. “The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit,” Lowry wrote. “It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.”
That such a discovery—hey, the press can be accurate, people—would be confounding to conservatives is important to know. I give Lowry a lot of credit for saying that. (Prompting Ed Morrissey to agree.) For it shows how far things had gotten.
In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.
Yes, and by helping to forestall that cold look they were helping to create the huge failure that our policy in Iraq has become.
full text here.
Art Blogging L.A. highlighted this fascinating look into law enforcement and early gang graffitti in 1970's Los Angeles. Each officer was given a manual to understand the turf. Seems almost innocent when compared with the Shield. Be sure to check out the Flickr stream. Excellent.
image: Kid Deuce
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