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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
image: Robert Polidori
Back in August I linked to an interview with Robert Polidori on Art:Info about what at the time was an upcoming publication, After the Flood as well as a brief exhibition of a selection of prints at the Met. I commented before that I think After the Flood is one the greatest publications I've ever gotten my hands on and certainly a highlight for last year. I think I look at it daily since purchasing it - it is that dense and that evocative. For me it faithfully illuminates the incomprehensive scale of loss.
Interestingly, today Alec Soth has a postrelated to a question he posed in Sept. "Where are the People" - about the lack of a human subject in much of the photography generated out of the Katrina disaster (among other events worldwide). He lists Chris Jordan, Katherine Wolkoff, and Robert Polidori as examples of artists focused on the scene - the destruction, not so much the direct human story of the aftermath.Soth:
think these are all terrific photographers. And they’ve done admirable work. But after awhile I find the absence of people in the pictures a little frustrating.
Katrina is a good example of why I often defend the efforts of photojournalists. Certainly photojournalism has numerous faults, but I admire the attempt to connect the subject (in this case Katrina) to real people.
“It makes it interesting to connect it with the life,” said Shulman. Of course! Architecture isn’t some frozen box, it is a home, a place where life is lived. While it is worthwhile to see the architectual devastation of New Orleans, I also want to see the people - the lives actually living in this mess.
I'm sure its an insight shared by many and ultimately brings up issues of exploitation and the voyeur that make many uncomfortable, as practicioners of art and as audience members to works centered around tragedy or violence. Soth goes on to link to a response from Robert Polidori, from the Sept. post - which I have to say is worth the read, it is a damn good rant! As someone who is a big fan of both artists I've gotten a kick out of the exchange for the obvious cheap reasons but more importantly for certain issues they mention.
Polidori counters in his comment from the above linked the thread:
What more are you really going to learn from having a person there?
My belief is that you should take stills of what doesn’t seem to move,
and take movies or videos of does.
It’s my opinion that people come off better in movies.
It is my belief that you have a lot more indices of personal values
by looking at what individuals place in their living interiors than
by looking at their face.
That is why I photograph interiors...
Like I’ve been saying for 33 years rooms are both metaphors and
catalysts for states of being.
The pictures I took in New Orleans are looking at discarded exoskeletons.
The great majority of these residents who left those homes are now somewhere else living an interupted life.
First issue, as someone who follows both artists works, I almost am beginning to see the Sleeping by the Mississippi series (Alec Soth) as a prelude to Polidori's After the Flood (not mention a contemporary parallel of sorts to Dylan's Chronicles).The two bodies of work are about the great Mississippi river which is a major foundation of our national pysche and has historically defined not only the regions it flows through - Minnesota to the Delta to the Gulf -but our national debate as a whole. It has always been at the center of trade, race, development and ecology for generations. The tragedy that played out with Katrina was a direct descendent of previous tragedies such as the 1927 flood, and points all the way back to the great engineering debates of the early and mid-19th century between the Army Corps. of Engineers and the then burgeoning private sector of engineering. The levee debate and subsequent policies of the 1840's-1860's created the Delta and ultimately put in motion a corrupt and scientifically unsound policy that through the generations of development and political hackery created a Frankenstein, leading to the nightmare unleased by Katrina. These two series for me are great documents of that history - the passage and drama of the people who have forged lives around the river and many times lost everything in return.
image: Alec Soth
Now as to whether people are better portrayed by video/film verus still photography, I have to say that depends on the artist. I can only reflect not only on Soth's work but so many others Eggelston, Frank, etc. who are highly successful at evoking the nature of an individual and their place. I don't think one can be limited to one approach as the medium - but given the power of documentary film, Polidori may have a point.. I for one don't find his images lacking in human dimension - at least in terms of his Katrina pictures, but I also see the need for portraiture as well to help tell the "story". That probably has as much to do with my familiarity with the region as any artistic connection but Polidori works seem very alive pictures to me and quite complicated - I like the lack of personage in this instance.
Soth brings up another point which is great to hear, that we must have images from events like Katrina in our galleries, museums, and libraries. With so much art talk and art quoting art, it is good to be reminded that these events and the documentation/artistic investigation of the events, are part of the broader experience and visceral reminders of how we need to hold leadership and ourselves accountable for who we are and how we shape our individual and collective experience.
There is a world out there that has nothing to do with the art market and our discilipinary conceits.
As to the commercial exchange of these sorts of works that is another topic that needs to be discussed... be my guest to take that on.
As chance would have it, the Geert Lovink essay on blogging and nihilism has finally been posted in full on Eurozine.com.(thanks Equanimity) Its nice timing have just read blah-feme and posting this. Everyone who blogs or reads blogs needs to read the Lovink piece- it is dense with many subtleties and probably controversial to many bloggers.
First let's revisit blah-feme's excellent question and my widdled down observations from the post.
In short, the question might be reworked here to speak that which it really wants to speak – what are the limits, boundaries, horizons of this thing that we do when we log on to post another post?
1.... it points up the radical openness and indeterminacy of agency in the blogosphere.The questioning of agency has many authors and its radicalisation in the last 20 years or so has been quite remarkable: gaming theory, theories of fields, institutions, habitus and, even, the sinthome – all these new theorisations have pulled the rug from under the Romantic construction of agency as in some sense always traceable to a small number of sources and addressing an ideal addressee.
2.What strikes me as potentially useful, though, at least for a short while, might be precisely the blogosphere's disavowal of simple (mono-directional) agency and its broader engagement with citing, pointing, referencing and quoting. One only has to subscribe to a small number of smart blogs to get a sense of the radical potential for this kind of practice.
3. The blogosphere is, dare I say it, ontologically at odds with modes of thought that seek to reduce, simplify or moralise the social field. At its best, blogging can and continues to hold the promise of refusing that kind of hectoring modality.
4. Of course blogging encourages a rather full-on and belligerent style of writing sometimes...but this is inevitable if something is to try to maintain a contentious relationship with mainstream journalism and pubic opinion. Of course, the blogoshpere does not guarantee anything and we must in the end take responsibility for is shape and contest its colonisers and censors; and even then, of course, there is no guarantee that these kinds of engagement will of themselves make the difference we want them to.
5. Agency has a way of biting back, of digging in just when you think its all over, and it often does so when a number of ideas authored over a large time period are drawn together as a uniform resource: the blogoshpere might form a large part of that resource.
6. So does the blogosphere have an unconscious? And what might that look like? It is undoubtedly structured, undoubtedly disparate and undoubtedly marked by a radical incoherence.
Lovink begins with this bomb (you may want some aspirin to go with this headache)
"Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What's declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. Sold by the positivists as citizen media commentary, blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of lamenting the ideological color of the news, as previous generations have done, we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit. As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pajama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.
continues:
Microsoft's in-house blogger Robert Scoble lists five elements that made blogs so hot. The first is the "ease of publishing", the second he calls "discoverability", the third is "cross-site conversations", the fourth is permalinking (giving the entry a unique and stable URL), and the last is syndication (replication of content elsewhere).[4] Lyndon from Flock Blog gives a few tips for blog writing, showing how ideas, feelings, and experiences can be turned into news format, and showing how dominant PowerPoint has become: "Make your opinion known, link like crazy, write less, 250 words is enough, make headlines snappy, write with passion, include bullet point lists, edit your post, make your posts easy to scan, be consistent with your style, litter the post with keywords."[5] Whereas the email-based list culture echoes a postal culture of writing letters and occasionally essays, the ideal blog post is defined by snappy public relations techniques.
Web services like blogs cannot be separated from the output they generate. The politics and aesthetics defined by first users will characterize the medium for decades to come. Blogs appeared during the late 1990s, in the shadow of dot-com mania.[6] Blog culture was not developed enough to be dominated by venture capital with its hysterical demo-or-die-now-or-never mentality. Blogs first appeared as casual conversations that could not easily be commodified. Building a laid-back parallel world made it possible for blogs to form the crystals (a term developed by Elias Canetti) from which millions of blogs grew and, around 2003, reached critical mass.
Blogging in the post-9/11 period closed the gap between Internet and society. Whereas dot-com suits dreamt of mobbing customers flooding their e-commerce portals, blogs were the actual catalysts that realized worldwide democratization of the Net. As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits. According to Jean Baudrillard, we're living in the "Universe of Integral Reality". "If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption."[7] If you can't cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won't be your cup of tea.
Here are some interesting reactions to Lovink's essay from earlier in the year (the the piece was presented at the Annenberg Center in April 2006)
- I cite
- Kazys Varnelis
Kazy's seems to think people are hung up on the Nihilism reference. He has this to say:
...one observation that I made after reading it is that for those of us somewhere in the matrix between the academy, architecture, and the Internet, there is a fatal trajectory from post-structuralism to identity politics to dot.com Deleuzeanism to blogging. I'd like to suggest that this isn't merely a conflation of unlike terms but rather that there is a steady evolution here. There is a desire in each of the subsequent movements to affirm the individual (through subject position, through productive agency, and through an active DIY voice), but instead each one actually does a more thorough job of wiping out individual subjectivity than the previous iteration (please slot the blob under dot.com Deleuzeanism... a million 20-40 year old students, all being original, all making nearly identical shapes).
...but, like Geert, what I am observing is not only the massification of the Internet but a more generalized cultural move toward nothingness that expresses itself through the medium of the blog. Through the blog, we attain a complete and fatal condition, making our comments into the void, thereby affirming our existence while we also emphatically assert our distance from any situation we might act in.
Jodi Dean of I cite disagrees on these grounds:
I don't buy it. It remains trapped into thinking of blogs in terms of dominant media paradigms of mainstream news or public relations (celebrity scandal). Thus, it misses new features dependent on the generation of new content, production of new conversations, weaving of different threads (I love Angela's notion of the blog weave), and the traveling carnivals. Because he remains trapped, Geert can only view blogs negatively and thus he reiterates European nihilism from the early 20th century.
More specifically, it's of course a fantasy that there ever was Belief in the Message. Critique of propaganda was coterminous with its introduction. And, hasn't distrust of rhetoric always been a concern of philosophy? Second, I don't think anyone associated the msm with Truth--in fact, positing such a view presupposes a kind of unified audience already put to bed with milk and cookies by cultural studies. Third, if printed and broadcast messages ever had an aura, and I'll say that some have for me, then the fact of a crowded media market doesn't mean that they lose it. It's just more of a challenge.
I personally don't see Lovink as a defender of old media(though it sounds like it here) but I do sense a tinge of European snobbery or perhaps just a contrarian view - blogs as masscult deadends. Nevertheless there is ample supply of important considerations here, especially as we consider the earlier idea of taking responsibility for the shape and scope of the "blogosphere" as an action and as resistance.
To borrow from a commentor on Icite, "the far more interesting rupture brought on by blogs has nothing to do with blogs and everything to do with their interconnectivity and the indexing functions that make the pretense and knowledge of that interactivity possible (Google, Technorati, trackbacks, etc.). If we're still having a debate over whether or not "the blog" is good or bad, we should be very sad". Blogging can be viewed as a corrective, perhaps the best hope for generating some semblance of the former public sphere. I would stil like to hear more about the charge of Nihilism - a social nihilism or political nihilism? or is this simply a critique of "radical democracy?
image: HLIB
I cite has posted today's Zizek editorial in the NY Times. Who knew! ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his daily press conferences during the invasion, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks only a few hundred yards from his office, he continued to claim that the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood special effects.
In his very performance as an excessive caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the hidden truth of the ''normal'' reporting: there were no refined spins in his comments, just a plain denial. There was something refreshingly liberating about his interventions, which displayed a striving to be liberated from the hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, ''Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?''
Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange truth -- when confronted with claims that Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: ''They are not in control of anything -- they don't even control themselves!''
Read on ...
Just a quick round up on Iraq as the there are some interesting things swirling about. Juan Cole has some upbeat news tied to the new leadership under Gates.
Bush is bringing in Ryan Crocker, a distinguished career foreign service officer, as the new US ambassador to Iraq. And Gen. David Petraeus will replace Gen. Casey as top ground commander in Iraq. Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing ambassador to Iraq, will go as ambassador to the United Nations, replacing the lying blowhard John Bolton.
I'm stricken with a case of the "what ifs" and "if onlys"! What if Gates had been at the Pentagon in 2003 and Petraeus had been in charge of the US military in Iraq and Crocker had been there instead of Paul Bremer? These are competent professionals who know what they are doing. Gates is clear-sighted enough to tell Congress that the US is not winning in Iraq, unlike his smooth-talking, arrogant and flighty predecessor. Petraeus is among the real experts on counter-insurgency, and did a fine job of making friends and mending fences when he was in charge of Mosul. Crocker has been ambassador to Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan, and knows the region intimately (as does Khalilzad). Bremer had been ambassador to . . . Holland. Despite all the talk of the resurgence of the Neoconservatives with their "surge" (actually ramped up occupation) plan, this team is the farthest from Neoconservative desires that you could possibly get.
Imagine that, hiring regional expertise? and don't forget the surge - rather bump.
* I just read this about another new apointee - Admiral William J. Fallon (this could be scary)
JamilGate:
Jamilgate?? What the hell? Well there has been a swelling in the right's blog ranks spearheaded by the shrill Michelle Malkin over an AP source - a man named Jamil Hussein (an Iraqi police officer). He has been cited as a single source by the AP on various killing attributed to the U.S. military. Malkin is supposedly going to Iraq to uncover the "conspiracy" of Jamilgate and bring justice to the AP for publishing insurgent propaganda. Well the AP apparently is vindicated.
No surprise. Of course he is losing his job now and will probably meet with an unattractive fate as a leaker of information but at least Michelle's curiosity can be quenched once and for all. Let's hope Malkin actually goes to Iraq and gets on the wrongside of some Blackwater mercenary on a Greenzone bender. The General has the usual funny take and some links to the right.
Remember that broadcast hanging a few days back by Rupert Murdoch and friends? Well sadly some kids have been paying attention. The second immitation death has occurred. The fine print reads: Saddam a martyr for Islam. Well done gang!!!
images: Huff Post, Jesus' General
Blah feme poses this fascinating question: In short, the question might be reworked here to speak that which it really wants to speak – what are the limits, boundaries, horizons of this thing that we do when we log on to post another post?
continuing: I think what is interesting about asking this question in terms of blogging is that it points up the radical openness and indeterminacy of agency in the blogosphere. Or, at least, it shows how that indeterminacy is played out in the blogosphere in a particularly intense and extreme manner. The questioning of agency has many authors and its radicalisation in the last 20 years or so has been quite remarkable: gaming theory, theories of fields, institutions, habitus and, even, the sinthome – all these new theorisations have pulled the rug from under the Romantic construction of agency as in some sense always traceable to a small number of sources and addressing an ideal addressee.
The deconstruction (for want of a better word) of such notions is perhaps the place where the left has had most difficulty – a strong theory of political action is difficult under such circumstances, political engagement much more complex and the terms and scope of any kin of offensive action always much more difficult to determine. What strikes me as potentially useful, though, at least for a short while, might be precisely the blogosphere's disavowal of simple (mono-directional) agency and its broader engagement with citing, pointing, referencing and quoting. One only has to subscribe to a small number of smart blogs like I cite, K punk or larval subjects, to get a sense of the radical potential for this kind of practice.
And, perhaps, the dreadfulness of the right's blogs does not have so much to do with its ideological underpinnings, but, precisely, with the extent to which the blogosphere is, dare I say it, ontologically at odds with modes of thought that seek to reduce, simplify or moralise the social field. At its best, blogging can and continues to hold the promise of refusing that kind of hectoring modality. (see this post on the right and art)
Of course blogging encourages a rather full-on and belligerent style of writing sometimes, and often, if one leaves comments completely open, one can be deluged with heaps of mean-spirited or even obscene comments. But this is inevitable if something is to try to maintain a contentious relationship with mainstream journalism and pubic opinion. Of course, the blogoshpere does not guarantee anything and we must in the end take responsibility for is shape and contest its colonisers and censors; and even then, of course, there is no guarantee that these kinds of engagement will of themselves make the difference we want them to.
But agency has a way of biting back, of digging in just when you think its all over, and it often does so when a number of ideas authored over a large time period are drawn together as a uniform resource: the blogoshpere might form a large part of that resource. So does the blogosphere have an unconscious? And what might that look like? It is undoubtedly structured, undoubtedly disparate and undoubtedly marked by a radical incoherence.
An yet, we all know what blogging tends towards: we have all said it many times before – the egoing, the self-analysis, the unbearable drabness of meing that makes up much of the blogosphere is at least testament to its commitment to a certain discursive tone, a to a certain politics of the ego, to a certain figuration of confession as productive.
This of course brings us round to Ego again....to be continued
image: Engineering News via bldgblog
[Image: Timothy J. Gattie, Boise, ID; "The $330-million Otay River Bridge in Chula Vista, Calif. rises into the morning mist. ].
We are still far away from the 2008 Presidential election but the mass media has already begun its tactics of selecting the nominees through subversive and derisive coverage. We've seen the Giuliani embarassment earlier this week but the most heinous "errors' have been committed against Senator Barack Obama. You know Osama??? It prompted an apology from CNN but now Yahoo has made the same "mistake" Nothing like muddling the minds and planting the seeds of doubt. On top of the blatant associations with Bin Laden, yesterday's news was teaming with Obama cocaine stories from the Senator's autobiography. So the smear season has begun with the MSM. These tactics are the way in which media shapes who the nominees will be long before the potential candidates even get their committees together and never mind that the public might want to have a say in who they support. McCain, Romney and Hillary must be luvin' this.
Original story line with TPM Cafe
Petition
W. H. Auden
Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward’s stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
Best wishes and new resolve for the year ahead.
I will refrain from a rant about the philistine nature of showing executions on television - something we somehow historically managed to avoid until this morning (FOX 3:55am). Instead I would like to express my exasperation at the continuing ability of the Pentagon and State Dept. to get everything wrong. I'm not simply speaking about morality, but about understanding the dynamics of the conflict (the Iraqi population) and ultimately misunderstanding the "enemy" because the enemy is an "other". We are in the middle of a civil war which we have helped to create and yet we still don't understand the rules of engagement, we don't seem to be able to understand the basics of this sectarian war. Why? Perhaps because we have too many wonks and painfully few regionalists in the ranks. In short we can't see the dynamics because we don't consider the "enemy" as an equal - but as an other, invisible and mysterious.Here is how Saddam's execution plays into sectarian divisions: The tribunal...had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday -- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.
The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a "sacrifice" for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public. (Juan Cole)
It is painful to watch as the situation bottoms out further and further and yet our ignorance charges full steam into the inferno.
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