tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181744662024-03-18T00:58:30.531-07:00Qlipoth"What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking."Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.comBlogger1674125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-26190094333849031602015-09-21T20:46:00.000-07:002015-09-21T21:02:26.582-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">INHERENT VICE</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Pynchon's Politics and Anderson's Movie</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: small;">IIb</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium;">
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</span><br />
</span><div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As we have seen, Doc’s career and
dilemmas illustrate consequences of the pleasure principle. In contrast, Shasta
Fay’s choices dramatize the reality principle. Her career and her careerist motives
are salient in the novel . Anderson drops Shasta Fay’s motives and omits almost
all mention of her career<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from the
movie. In their absence, the competition between the two principles and the
implicit political contrast between the ex-lovers disappears. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The novel repeatedly mentions
Shasta Fay the aspiring actress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
movie retains only two remnants of these references. In the more salient of
them, a voice-over describes the end of Doc and Shasta Fay’s relationship with
a metaphor borrowed from another scene in the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After Bigfoot Bjornsen calls Doc to
maliciously tell him Shasta Fay has disappeared, Doc drifts into a reverie of
the couple’s happier days. In the voice over, Sortilege tells us, “It wasn’t
any clearer what had driven them apart. They each gradually located a different
karmic thermal, watching the other glide away to different fates.” Anderson has
added the first sentence in this quote, and with this addition the image describes
a situation the opposite of that described in the novel. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rather than invoking an unfathomable
destiny, the novel simply attributes the separation to Shasta Fay’s ambition. In
the first of the novel’s back stories, we learn Shasta Fay was the prettiest
girl in her school, starred in high school theatricals, and “fantasized like
everyone else about getting into movies.” Like Doc, she is inspired to her
career by commodity entertainments. More realistically oriented than Doc, she
wants to emulate the actresses rather than the narrated characters. Shasta Fay
and Doc remain together briefly, then “Soon enough she was answering casting
calls and getting some theater work, onstage and off, and Doc was into his own
apprenticeship as a skip tracer, and each, gradually locating a different
karmic thermal … .” The forces that drove them apart do not perplex Doc and
never did. Their decisions on their respective careers separated them. The
metaphoric “karmic thermal” hews closely to the original sense of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">karma,</i> the emotional causality through
which those choices lead to their separation . </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The people around Doc and Shasta
Fay recognize this causal connection clearly. Doc’s mother Elmina, who does not
appear in the movie, expresses her lingering hope that Doc and Shasta Fay may
yet end up together. At the same time, she sympathizes with Shasta Fay’s
ambition and validates their separation, “She had her career, … It’s hard but
sometimes you have to let a girl go where her dreams are calling her.” To the novel’s
characters, as to us, Shasta Fays’s choice of career over romance forms such an
obvious, common sense corollary of the capitalist reality principle that we
barely notice it. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Shasta Fay’s commitment to the
reality principle entails a dilemma particular to it for her, just as Doc’s
commitment to the pleasure principle did for him. Her realistic choice does not
end Shasta Fay’s spontaneous humane, social impulses. Because she has chosen to
disavow affection and caring in the direction of her life, she must struggle against
instrumentalizing these feelings in her personal life and must attempt to deny
them a place in her professional relationships. Pynchon conveys this struggle subtly
and intensely in the two extended scenes in which Shasta Fay appears in the
novel. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Like Doc, Shasta Fay feels these caring
impulses deeply. Accordingly, the choice to subordinate romantic love to the
requirements of her career has profound emotional consequences for Shasta Fay.
She quickly recognizes the possibility of instrumentalizing her looks and
sexuality. After a year in Hollywood, her career seems to consist more of
dreams and ambitions than of successes. An encounter between Doc and head shop
owner Ensenada Slim gives us a glimpse of these limits. Slim asks if he had
really seen Shasta Fay’s car the previous evening, and Doc confirms she dropped
in on him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doc adds that he had thought that
when he saw her again, “… it’d be on the tube, not in person.” Slim concurs,
“Sometimes I think I see her at the edge of the screen? But it’s always some
look –alike.” Shasta Fay’s on-screen roles are scarce, her success limited. As
Shasta Fay confronts the economic insecurity of selling her abilities as an
actress, the reality principle quickly fosters a calculating employment of her
looks and sexuality. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Shasta Fay’s calculation leads to
her allowing Mickey Wolfmann to keep her. But she avowedly employs this rationality
more broadly in assessing her relationships to men. In the scene where she and
Doc have sex and talk, the talk turns to her connection to Coy Harlingen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shasta Fay had taken it on herself to ask Burke
Stodger for help in finding Coy access to treatment for his heroin addiction
out of a basic desire to help. Even then, she had to think over her feelings
for the sax player. She weighed romantic and pragmatic considerations, and
chose realistically “He was not, could never be the love of her life,” good friend
and talented musician though he be. Her choice follows from more than a
judicious caution regarding heroin users. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She sums up her attitude for Doc, “... I was
never the sweetest girl in the business, there was no reason for me to waste
half a minute on a sick junkie like Coy … .” She makes explicit the same
utilitarian calculation that motivated her relationship with Wolfmann, and implies
that if she had considered the opportunity advantageous, she would have cheated
on her sugar daddy. Shasta Fay strives to consistently treat her relations to
men as business relations.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Shasta Fay’s relationship with
Mickey Wolfmann also demonstrates the equivocal emotional outcome for her of her
utilitarian deployment of sex and the balancing of the pleasure and reality
principles that it demands. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first
chapter of the novel, before Shasta Fay has even told Doc that it is Wolfmann
who is keeping her, she describes his wife’s plot to gain control of his
fortune and her own ambivalence about the wife’s invitation for her to
participate in the scam. Doc asks whether she has had trouble deciding if it would
be right or wrong, and she replies, “Worse than that. … How much loyalty I owe
him.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coy presented no temptation worth
considering, but a share of Wolfmann’s fortune is another matter. In response, Doc
reduces the relationship to its essence, “Emotions aside, then, let’s look at
the money. How much of the rent’s he been picking up?” She answers, “All of
it,” and in a notably affluent neighborhood at that, in contrast to the
“low-rent living space in Hollywood” that she had so recently sought as she
started her career. Her entry into an unscrupulous milieu of property owners
and exploiters has amplified the dilemma of Shasta Fay’s instrumental ethics.
The potential she sees in herself scares her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Her request that Doc investigate the situation resolves her ambivalence
in favor of caring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By involving Doc she
acknowledges to herself that she loves Wolfmann and recognizes that her affection
and care have been subsumed into an unambiguously instrumental relationship. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Opting for the pleasure principle
gave Doc an emotionally satisfying career but did not pay the bills. Inversely,
opting for the reality principle pays Shasta Fay’s bills, but stifles her
fundamental emotional and social impulses, leaving them sublated, co-opted and unsatisfied.
Even when Shasta Fay can indulge her impulses to care and protect for their own
sake, the oppressive milieu into which her realistic decisions have brought her
ensures that the results still harm the people she cares for. Earlier in the
conversation in which she and Doc discuss Coy Harlingen’s recovery from his
addiction, she infers from Coy’s repeated visits to Chryskylodon that he might
still be using and reaches this realization ”With an unhappy look on her face.”
She reflects that Coy is incapable of handling addiction or recovery and that he
is thus putting his family in jeopardy, as she explains to Doc “… and that’s
why I’m worried.” From their first encounter, Coy’s addiction has appeared to
her as an opportunity to help, “ … it was luck, dumb luck, that had put them
each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary
was just to be helpful when you could.” Yet as Doc bluntly lays it out for her,
Shasta Fay’s well-intentioned intervention has resulted in Coy becoming a
police infiltrator and informant, complicit through his activities in three
deaths. Once rationally subordinated to capitalist ethics, the communist
impulses of the pleasure principle thwart themselves and serve the forces that
oppose them.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The subjective subordination of her
erotic impulses to the reality principle also has directly harmful consequences
for Shasta Fay herself. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As her
relationship with Wolfmann ends, Shasta Fay realizes how her prioritization of
the reality principle snared her into a perverse devotion to Wolfmann. “Fast,
brutal, not what you’d call a considerate lover, an animal, actually but [his
wife] Sloan adored that about him … we all did … .” After relating how Wolfmann
exploited her sexually, Shasta Fay masturbates Doc and herself to orgasm. At
climax, ““You fucker!” she cried – not, Doc guessed, at him, - “you bastard …
.” Deciding on intimate relationships in accord with the reality principle could
not immunize Shasta Fay against caring and affection. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unavoidably, the reality principle has tainted
her feelings, however tender or devoted, and infiltrated them with the
selfishness and exploitiveness of capitalist relations. Because Shasta Fay
still yearns for some comfort and sustenance within her relationships, her adherence
to the reality principle can only disabuse her cruelly and fill her with fury
at her exploiter and abuser.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The movie omits Shasta Fay’s
career, just as it omitted Doc’s. This omission removes the history of motives
and decisions that give emotional depth to her character and political
complexity to her emotions. Only two pieces of the characterization we have
discussed reappear. In the first scene of the movie, as in the novel, we hear
Shasta Fay’s unhappy perplexity at her willingness to consider betraying
Wolfmann. In the scene of Shasta Fay and Doc’s sex, we hear of Wolfmann’s
brutality as a lover. But we do not hear her fury at him. Without the history
behind her mercenary decisions and her charitable friendship with Coy, what
remains is an inexplicably thoughtless and selfish young woman of whom we know
only that she has rejected and hurt Doc. To flesh out her character, the movie,
as it did with Doc, adapts and adds material to elaborate Shasta Fay’s feelings
within her relationship to Doc, but at the same time to confine and focus them
there. Anderson concentrates this revision in two short scenes, which together
last barely three minutes and come late in the movie. Although very brief in
comparison to the scene in Doc’s apartment, they convey much about Shasta Fay’s
feelings toward Doc and her desire to reestablish their relationship.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first very brief scene follows directly on
the scene in Doc’s apartment and shows Shasta Fay’s delight in their reunion. In
the scene’s thirty seconds, Shasta Fay and Doc walk along the beach. This scene
adapts the final paragraph of the chapter in which they talk and have sex. In
that paragraph, Shasta Fay leads the way from the apartment to the beach, where
they walk in the dark and the rain. Doc trails her, seeing, “the nape of her
neck in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the
charm of.” Her bearing is actorly and generic, and shemanipulates the posture
of separation to create attraction. For Doc’s part, he “followed the prints of
her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s
attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on
into the future it did.” Shasta Fay’s trail leads to neither past nor future
and disappears before his eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doc himself
empties out bleakly, “The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his
spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever,
some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see
them or not.” He confronts the ambivalent outcome of his career, that, as
Shasta Fay has suggested, he has like Coy Harlingen become an agent of the
police and, as he infers himself, of the property-owners behind them.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The movie takes this scene centered
on Doc, suffused with his dejection at their irrecoverable romance and his
dismay at the ethical precarity of his profession and transforms it into one devoted
to Shasta’s Fay glee that they are reunited. Free of dialog, the scene is the
most carefully and strikingly choreographed in the movie. The camera follows
the couple down the beach in the light of day in relative close up, Doc on the
right in the foreground with his back to us, Shasta Fay to the left in the
midground and facing Doc and the camera. Their motion and the motion of the
camera brings them closer, separates them, lets her leave the frame to the left
and return. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This pattern evokes the
difficult history of their relationship. Shasta Fay’s face forms the expressive
center of the shot. Her gaze repeatedly turns and returns to Doc. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She smiles and smiles as the sight of him. As
they move to the left of the frame again, Doc turns about and walks down the
beach backwards. At this familiar frivolity, Shasta Fay’s smile bursts into a
grin. She circles him, reversing their original disposition. Doc walking
backwards and facing backwards deftly reverses the sense and feel of Doc’s
orientation to the past in the novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doc
can confidently advance while looking back, and Shasta Fay savors the intimacy
her initiative has restored. The simple but elaborate motion and Shasta Fay’s
radiant smiles convey clearly her desire to restore their romantic
relationship.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The second scene closes the movie
and reveals Shasta Fay’s desire as more trying and less happy for her. It traces
the tension in Doc and Shasta Fay’s reunion to an ambivalent conclusion. It
adapts the final scene of the novel so thoroughly that it becomes in effect a
new one. The conclusion of the story transforms from a vision of Doc’s
political solitude and longing to a portrait of Doc’s unsettling assertion of dominance
and independence in his relationship to Shasta Fay. In the novel, Doc drives
south on the Freeway through a thick fog. With the vision of all the drivers on
the road almost fully impaired, they form a spontaneous caravan on the highway.
Doc thinks, “It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town,
except hippies, do for free.” Doc drives on and imagines how the fog might last
for days and the small and great adventures that could result.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The final imagined outcome, in the most noted
words of the novel, is “For the fog to burn away, and for something else this
time, somehow, to be there instead.” This tender, nihilistic yearning ends the
novel on a subdued visionary note of revolution.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The movie, instead, places us face
to face with Doc and Shasta Fay in a tight close up as they apparently sit in
the front seat of a car, although the vehicle does not seem to move. From the
final scene between Doc and Bigfoot Bjornsen, a voice over bridges to this
scene, as Shasta Fay reminds Doc of the day they ran through a rainstorm and
then cuddled in a doorway, the scene which contained the image of the “karmic
thermal.” We cut to the close up of the couple in the car, and Shasta Fay draws
the parallel between that situation and the one we are watching, “Just us –
together. Almost like being underwater – the world – everything – [she shakes
her head] gone someplace else.” Her imagined disappearance of the world closely
resembles Doc’s imagined ending in the novel, but here the world vanishes to
make the lovers’ intimacy a world in itself, a conventionally romantic vision.
Doc looks at her, then away and suggests that Sortilege was simply attempting
to set them up (a claim inconsistent with the story’s chronology). But Shasta
Fay insists on the cosmic nature of their relationship, “She knows things, Doc,
things about us maybe we don’t know.” Doc looks at her, ahead, away to his
left, up to his right, and finally responds, “This doesn’t mean we’re back
together.” In both the novel and the movie, Shasta Fay said the same to him
after they had sex. The symmetry makes the ambivalent balance between their
past experience and their present desire the dramatic resolution of the story.
Shasta Fay replies “Of course not,” but with a grin, where Doc had responded
with these words solemnly in the earlier scene. Doc sighs. Shasta Fay looks
down out of the corner of her eye toward him, her brow furrows, and the screen
goes dark. This conclusion concentrates the substance of the story into the mutual
expectations and disappointments in a love vexed by a woman’s inexplicable
infidelity. Doc has turned the tables and asserted his dominance in a
continuing contest to set the terms of the couple’s relationship. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reformulation of the resolution to this wary
negotiation of a conventional romantic transgression removes the sense of the
story far from the novel’s inclusive social aspiration to a fresh start where
cooperation and care do not such forbidding odds. The dynamic interaction
between the pleasure principle and the reality principle within and between the
characters has become an exemplary power struggle in the battle of the sexes.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In adapting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inherent Vice</i> for film, Paul Thomas Anderson eliminated a network
of political themes that integrate the novel from its surface through its
substance. This revision does not merit criticism in and of itself. Movie
makers adapt literary sources when they find in them material suited to their
own concerns. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inherent</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vice</i> Anderson found much that appealed
to his interest in men’s emotional devotion and women’s disruptive impact on
them. Even Anderson’s reduction of the complexity of Pynchon’s writing cannot
be faulted. The movie does evoke much that the brevity of its form cannot
explore at length. Anderson’s reworking of the story troubles me on another
level where the political themes themselves contribute to a broader theme.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The movie’s viewers and reviewers saw the
movie foremost as a representation of the 60s. They differed on the appeal of
the image of that period according to the view of those years they brought with
them. Yet regardless of whether they find those elements attractive or
objectionable, Anderson has constrained the range of elements and of the
discussion. As Anderspm depoliticizes the story and deradicalizes its
characters, he impoverishes our image of the 60s and forecloses our connection
to deeply important experiences of those years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A story whose symbolic appeal derives from its
representation of an ideologically loaded history reduces those years to hair
styles, clothes, drug use and sex. Dressed in those stereotypical elements,
Anderson’s story reduces the revolutionary theme of the pleasure principle to
the conventional erotics of the romantic couple and this reduction allows the
capitalist reality principle to dominate the production of a story based on its
marketability. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Pynchon values the 60s for what
he calls the “prerevolution.” He has written about those experiences for over 40
years and has given increasingly detailed consideration to the prerevolution’s
virtues, failings and defeat. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inherent</i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vice</i> dramatizes roots and
contradictions of radical political aspirations central to the 60s and
frighteningly depicts the most determined opposition to those strivings for
freedom. The cold-blooded repression of those aspirations permeates the themes,
structures and characters of the story. The aspiration to freedom, to humane
self-realization in love and work collides in manifold ways with the interests
of the owners of real estate and corporations and with the governments that
enforce their interests. Ultimately, to defend himself and those he cares for
against those brutally repressive interests, Doc Sportello must kill. That vision
of the complex conflict between the forces of liberation and repression deserves
serious reflection as a lesson of the 60s. In obscuring this vision, Anderson contributes
signally to the ongoing conservative, commercial denaturing and trivialization
of the 60s. His movie gives a romantic story set in the 60s rather than Pynchon’s
story about and of the 60s. Anderson’s movie silences experiences of the 60s
that we should hold on to and cherish.</span></div>
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Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-54162739695217257492015-09-15T19:25:00.000-07:002015-09-15T19:25:47.233-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">INHERENT VICE</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Pynchon's Politics and Anderson's Movie</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 27.0pt;">
IIa<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Now we can look at the deeper
implicit politics in the novel. We will consider love and work in the stories
of Doc and Shasta Fay and how the movie redefines and rebalances them .
Anderson makes love the primary, self-contained theme of the movie and elides
work. In the novel, love and work share essential
emotional affinities, and the two commitments interact crucially in Doc and
Shasta’s relationships. Herbert Marcuse’s <i>Eros
and Civilization </i>provides a helpful orientation to understanding the
political nature of love and work and their connection to capitalism and anti-capitalism
in the novel.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The German Marxist Herbert Marcuse
taught at the University of California – San Diego at the time <i>Inherent Vice</i> takes place. His work was
widely read in the New Left, and Pynchon scholars have noted thematic
affinities between Marcuse’s <i>Eros and
Civilization</i> and Pynchon’s earlier work. The affinities are perhaps even
stronger in <i>Inherent Vice</i>. Marcuse merged
Freud’s theory of the psyche with Marx’s theory of capitalism to speculate on a
theory of feelings and values particular to capitalism. Freud argued that
humans need to live in society in order to more completely satisfy their
material needs. Life in society requires us to repress our impulses to pursue
our pleasure and subordinate them to the rational requirements of work and
social order. Taken as a whole, our urges to pursue our pleasure constitute the
“pleasure principle.” The counter-posed necessity to repress these urges constitutes
the “reality principle.” The constant effort to calibrate and reconcile these
two contradictory principles comprises the ordered dynamics of our emotional
lives.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Marcuse maintained capitalist production
has specific consequences for these emotional processes. He follows Marx’s
arguments that production in and of itself meets our need for food, clothing,
shelter and leisure, and that capitalist production must also produce profit. Capitalism must therefore impose more work on
us than is needed simply to meet those material needs. Competition additionally
requires capital to produce an ever greater amount of profit at an ever greater
rate. The growth in demand for work and repression knows no limit. As we increasingly
sacrifice free time to work, our leisure suffers. Work not only shortens our
leisure, the drive for profit replaces leisure activities particular to our needs
with commercially produced free-time activities. Capital necessarily increases
repression and decreases the scope for creativity and self-direction. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Marcuse’s diagnosis of this
emotional duress also enables him to see that possibilities for fuller, more
satisfying lives inhere in late capitalism. Remove the profit motive from
production, and the levels of productivity would allow us all lives of leisure.
Remove competition, and in all our pursuits we can practice cooperation and
care. The pleasure principle can outweigh the reality principle in every aspect
of our lives. In the Freudian terms that label all pleasure and prosocial
impulses as erotic, Marcuse anticipates “the erotization of the entire
personality,” a transformation that releases the libido, the instinct for
pleasure, from its limitation to sex and infuses it into all activities. Once freedom from work allows us to choose
our pursuits, the nature of what was formerly work transforms. We choose our vocations for the pleasures
they provide, and we organize them to maximize those pleasures. A society no
longer based on the exigencies of labor but on the materially transformed
mutual inclinations of its members is Marcuse’s emotional vision of communism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The attempt to live out these aspirations individually
and to balance them against the imperatives of work and money define the
emotional dramas within <i>Inherent Vice</i>.
As Doc and Shasta work and love, they must reconcile the imperatives of the
pleasure principle and the reality principle. They struggle to realize their aspirations
to affection and fulfillment while confronting the coercion to work and compete.
Doc attempts to live in accord with the
pleasure principle while struggling with the reality principle, and Shasta Fay
attempts to live in accord with the reality principle while struggling with the
pleasure principle. In Doc and Shasta’s daily careers and loves communist
erotics and its ethics confront capitalist erotics and its ethics.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Under the auspices of the pleasure
principle, work and leisure become one and the same. In the novel, Doc strives for
this erotic unity in his career as a private investigator, but his experience
demonstrates that work and leisure ultimately cannot fuse in capitalism. The
movie retains only disconnected vestiges of this theme. Anderson omits the glimpses that the novel
gives us of how Doc arrived at his career. He also reduces the indications of
how and why Doc performs his work as pleasure, although the movie still movingly
represents some of these emotions. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
In the novel, commodified detective
stories in radio, movies and television introduced Doc to the libidinal pleasures
of investigation. We hear about Doc’s first childhood pursuit of this pleasure
in the scene in which Doc asks assistant attorney Penny Kimball for access to
the sealed file on Adrian Prussia. In a stretch of dialog cut from the scene in
the movie, Penny needs Doc to reassure her that he is not angry with her for
having handed him over to FBI agents for questioning. She maintains she could
not have asked him first, because “You people all hate the FBI.” Doc disarms
this imputation with an absurd story of his antics in the first grade. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
His jocular anecdote assumes he was
a member of the Junior G-men, a club organized through a popular radio drama
about an FBI agent. He claims to have used his “Dick Tracy Junior G-man” kit to
fingerprint all the kids in his grade and ended up with detention for a
month. He has clearly fabricated this
story. Not just that he asserts the six year-old enjoyed his detention because
he got the chance to look up his teacher’s skirt. In fact, the comic strip
police detective Dick Tracy was never associated with the Junior G-men, and the
G-men radio broadcast had ended before Doc was born. The memory of the show,
however, still remained vivid, even in my own childhood a decade after Doc’s. Doc
can plausibly enough for comic effect cast himself as one more child absorbed
in a pervasive anti-crime movement initiated and organized through the
commercial media and inducing boys everywhere to imagine themselves exuberantly
investigating. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
At other times, Doc talks more
seriously and credibly about the impact of fictional investigators on his aspirations.
Deep in the novel, after Shasta Fay returns to Gordita Beach, Doc goes to see
her. She tells him about befriending Burke Stodger, the former owner of the
Golden Fang and blacklistee turned anti-Communist. She mentions having seen his
film <i>.45-Caliber Kissoff</i>, and Doc
exclaims, “That picture made me who I am today.
That PI that Burke Stodger played, man, I always wanted be him.” Burke
Stodger is a fiction within the fiction, but on another occasion Doc also names
fictions from the world of the novel’s readers, the prototypical hard-boiled
investigators Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade,
and the less familiar Johnny Staccato, “the shamus of shamuses,” a jazz-playing
private eye from a television series that ran at the end of Doc’s teens. The
vicarious enjoyments of media mysteries provided Doc with models for emulation,
and his mediated pleasure ultimately translated into real enjoyment. After just
one week as a skip-tracer trainee locating debtors, Doc remarks to Fritz
Drybeam, who has given him his first job as an investigator, “This is fun.” The
sheer pleasure of investigation, first as an object of medial consumption, then
as job, forms the foundation for Doc’s career.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Over burgers with Fritz, after
Fritz has given him the history of the Golden Fang, Doc even provides a little
detail about the qualities he esteems in the PIs of movies and tv. He admires
them not simply for their abilities, but because they excel the police in
investigation, PIs are “always smarter and more professional than the cops,
always end up solving the crime while the cops are following wrong leads and
getting in the way.” Doc aspires to the success that results from intelligence,
investigative discipline and imaginative skills unencumbered by institutional
regimentation and routine. He also laments
how the shift in television viewing from PI shows to cop shows results in respect
for and reliance on cops and in disrespect for PIs, with the result that “most
of us private flatfoots can’t even make the rent.” The career that fulfills his
desires conflicts with the realities of earning his living. But when Fritz asks
Doc why he sticks with it, Doc can only intimate how unhappy he would be
without it. The pleasure Doc finds in investigating outweighs considerations of
income, but he must endure the clash of the pleasure principle and the reality
principle, as long as work is the precondition of him investigating as he
desires.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Doc’s devotion to investigation
rather than to earning his living through investigation has deep roots. The
novel establishes early on that money does not motivate Doc’s career. It goes
on to show that besides investigating for the personal pleasure of fully,
productively employing his mind, Doc investigates out of friendship, a social
expression of the pleasure principle. Over the course of the story, Doc is
commissioned for six investigations. Two of these clients, Tarik Khalil and Coy
Harlingen tell Doc when they first request his services that they cannot pay. Doc
responds to Khalil, “Groovy with that,” and tells Coy, “When you can.” With the
other four clients, all women, money is never even mentioned. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
A pair of interactions with people
who know him closely establish that Doc’s nonchalance and silences express a deliberate
disavowal of money and that this rejection of mercenary motives is central to Doc’s
character. In their conversations with Doc, his Aunt Reet, very early in the
story, and his best friend Denis, very late, explicitly presume Doc’s disinterest
in money. These conversations frame the other examples of non-paying
agreements. Right after Shasta Fay has asked him to investigate the apparent
plot against Mickey Wolfmann, Doc calls Reet, a real estate agent, for
information about Wolfmann, the real estate developer. She fills in some
background, advises Doc against tangling with Wolfmann then bluntly asks
“Whos’s paying you?” Doc hesitates, “Well … .” Reet retorts “All on spec, eh?
Big surprise.” Doc’s aunt anticipates and views with concern his lack of
interest in paying work. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Similarly, as Doc and Denis
prepare to meet the Golden Fang’s agents to return the stolen heroin that will
secure Coy Harlingen’s freedom, Denis expresses his own concern at Doc’s
disregard for money. He tells Doc “… I know you’re not dealing smack and
probably not making any money out of this trip tonight either. But you should
be getting something for your trouble.” Doc responds to Denis’s worry, “I’m
getting their word they won’t hurt anybody. My friends, my family – me, you, a
couple others.” Doc prefers the intangible reward of caring for and protecting
clients, friends and family to earning money. Every one of Doc’s investigations
in the novel manifests this desire to help and protect. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Doc’s generous commitment to
caring motivates not just the six commissioned investigations. In the most
important and dramatic investigation in the story, Doc knowingly colludes with
Bigfoot Bjornsen as the police detective manipulates him into investigating Puck
Beaverton and Adrian Prussia. The climax
of that investigation almost costs Doc his life, ends only when Doc has killed
both Puck and Adrian in self-defense, and leaves Doc raging at Bigfoot.
Nonetheless, Doc remains irrepressibly concerned for the detective’s
well-being. After Doc has handed over the heroin to the Golden Fang agents,
Bigfoot tails them as they drive off. Doc watches him go after them and reflects
on the perils of the detective’s grief-driven vendetta, “Bigfoot’s not my
brother … But he sure needs a keeper.” Denis, knowing Doc too well, soberly
replies, “It ain’t you, Doc.” Doc assents, “I know. Too bad, in a way.” Doc’s bond
with a fellow investigator and his empathy with Bigfoot’s pain and rage runs so
deep, he can acknowledge the unbridgeable and perilous differences in their values
and ethics only with regret. Doc aspires to help all who need assistance solely
on the basis of their humanity. This
desire for investigation driven by caring rather than money is Doc’s
outstanding communist trait. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
No matter how soundly and firmly
Doc responds to the impulses of the pleasure principle, these impulses conflict
with the reality principle of capitalism. As we have seen, commercial
narratives channel Doc’s desire for emotional and social gratification into a
career inseparable from the legal institutions that serve the interests of
property. In fact, the interests of property open Doc’s opportunity to become
an investigator. Doc’s investigative career not only begins with him collecting
debts, Fritz Drybeam in fact hires Doc to become a debt collector, so that Doc
and can work off his own debts by skip-tracing. When Doc asserted that he
“can’t even make the rent,” he understated a bitter truth. The novel’s last
chapter reveals that Doc has such substantial debt that a $10,000 windfall will
barely cover them. The novel understates this conflict, but the Doc’s struggles
with his rent and his debt underscore the idealism of his investigations.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
At times, the movie conveys Doc’s
caring well, but Anderson retains only rudiments of the frame that contrasts communist
and mercenary motives, and he alters the significance of the trait. Reet and
Denis’s expressions of concern are cut from the respective scenes in the movie.
Without Reet’s reproach, we cannot hear the eloquent silences on money when Doc
agrees to investigate for Shasta Fay, Hope Harlingen and Clancy Charlock.
Without this frame Doc’s dismissal of Coy Harlingen’s express inability to pay
no longer belongs to a pattern. Thus the movie does not represent Doc’s
rejection of money and earning money as a consequence of his caring and caring
is not the fundamental motivation in Doc’s character. Nonetheless, Anderson still
emphasizes the importance of Doc’s caring and adds two scenes of his own to the
story to recontextualize it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The first scene, between Doc and
Sortilege, touchingly registers the depth of Doc’s concern for Coy and his
family. As Doc broods over a postcard he received from Shasta Fay while she was
missing, Sortilege gently, but probingly inquires after the feelings that
trouble him aside from his longing for Shasta Fay. Doc hesitantly identifies
his distress at Coy Harlingen’s undeserved separation from his beloved wife and
child. Sortilege urges Doc to act on his feelings, as he will. The scene is
poignant and affecting. But Doc’s reluctant resolve presents his motives not as
a constant and consistent personal trait present in all his investigations, but
as particular to Coy’s dilemma and rooted in Doc’s own similar loss. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The second scene forms a thematic
counterpart to the first. Doc drives Coy home from the treatment facility
Chryskylodon, and the two take their farewells in Doc’s car. Coy walks up the
sidewalk onto the porch, and Hope answers his knock. They embrace quietly, then
go inside, where jubilation erupts. In the foreground Doc sits pensively behind
the wheel. The scene emphasizes that Doc has brought Coy and Hope back together
because Coy’s situation mirrors his own separation from Shasta Fay. While Doc’s
success in restoring the Harlingens’ marriage may console him, it cannot
assuage his longing. Doc yearns to restore his own romantic relationship, not
to rectify the injustices his friends and clients suffer at the hands of the
propertied interests of Southern California. Doc in the movie is a sad and
lonely man possessed by his loss rather than choosing an exile from work and
wages in order to devote himself to assisting others. Anderson has divested
Doc’s caring of its social dimensions. Doc’s libidinal impulses are primarily sexual
and romantic and his social impulses derived from his internal emotional conflicts.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-38939497203689695662015-07-29T18:01:00.003-07:002015-07-30T07:12:00.873-07:00Inherent Vice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">INHERENT VICE</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Pynchon's Politics and Anderson's Movie</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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I<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I heard Paul Thomas Anderson
was making a movie from Thomas Pynchon’s novel <i>inherent</i> <i>Vice</i>, I was
tickled. I knew nothing about Anderson’s filmmaking, but I have been reading
Pynchon devotedly since <i>Gravity’s</i> <i>Rainbow</i> was published. It gratified me
to know a movie by a noted director would bring Pynchon’s writing to new
audiences. I looked forward to the movie for months. Yet I did not expect the
movie to satisfy me. Even Pynchon’s simplest writing challenges his readers in
uncommon ways and would challenge a film maker no less.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
On the way to the theater, we
listened to a podcast interview with the director. Anderson described the movie
as the story of the ex-lover you remain devoted to. His description confirmed
my expectation that the movie would not tell the story on the same levels as
the novel did. Watching the movie, I was struck by the near total absence of
the book’s political themes. In the podcast, the interviewer had raised the
question of 60s influences on Pynchon’s style and themes. This question nagged
me. He mentioned names like Lenny Bruce, but not Herbert Marcuse or Chairman
Mao, whom the novel actually mentions. I want to discuss this political
blindspot and the resultant difference between the stories Pynchon and Anderson
tell.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Politics figures in the novel on
two levels. The first level of politics is explicit. On several occasions, characters interpret experiences in terms of
“capitalism.” In their mouths, “capitalism” indicates their political
consciousness and thereby frames the story as political from their own
perspective. On several other occasions, private eye Doc Sportello’s
investigations turn up lengthier background histories of characters and
organizations. These explicitly political histories reveal deadly forces of
covert repression that threaten Doc, his clients and friends. On a second,
implicit level of politics, the dynamics of capitalism pervade the characters’
very feelings and their relationships. The explicit examples of politics suggest
the political themes that permeate every aspect of the novel and demonstrate
how Anderson’s adaptation systematically elides these fundamental themes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
On the level of explicit
politics, Doc Sportello, his lawyer Sauncho Smilax and the sex worker Jade,
whom Doc befriends, each interpret particular experiences in terms of
capitalism. For Doc, capitalism defines
the values that govern his complex relationship to the police, his most
important relationship in the novel. After talking to a witness about the
disappearance of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, Doc finds police detective
Bigfoot Bjornson waiting for him. They talk, and once Bigfoot leaves, Doc works
out that Bigfoot must have lost a partner and, torn up by that loss, now works
alone. The narrator elaborates in language that mirrors Doc’s thoughts, “This
bond between partners was nearly the only thing Doc had ever found to admire
about the LAPD. … No faking it, not question of buying it with favors, money,
promotions – the entire range of capitalist inducement couldn’t get you five
seconds of attention to your back when it really counted, you had to go out
there and earn it … .” Relations conducted on capitalism’s terms cannot secure
care and devotion. Doc prizes these intimate social values and the kind of
relationships that can only thrive outside capitalism. These emotional
consequences of capitalism and their significance for the pursuit of justice
form one of the novel’s main themes on the deeper political level.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Doc’s lawyer Sauncho Smilax watches
tv absorbedly while stoned and often interprets his viewing for Doc. During a
visit to fill Doc in on information he has gathered about the schooner Golden
Fang, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pJw3N4KmMQ">an animated ad for
StarKist tuna</a> unnerves Sauncho. The ad features Charlie the Tuna in his
ongoing attempts to impress the cannery StarKist with his cultural tastes and
ends as always with the punchline, “StarKist wants tunas that taste good, not
tunas with good taste.” Sauncho explains the ad’s distressing premise, “Charlie
really has this, like, <i>obsessive death
wish</i>! Yes! He <i>wants</i> to be caught,
processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist!
Suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be
happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking
us on the shelves of supermarket America, and subconsciously the horrible thing
is, is we <i>want</i> them to do it … .” Sauncho’s
absurd outburst expresses his fear of an unthinking acquiescence in the
destructive exigencies of commodified work and commodified pleasures. These
further emotional consequences of capitalism also form one of the novel’s
deeper political themes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The sex worker Jade might seem
less likely to grasp her subjection to capitalism conceptually. Sauncho has,
after all, gone to college and law school. Doc at least went to community
college. Jade, on the other hand, went to prison. But a consciousness of
capitalism as an exploitative, oppressive system is common in Doc’s circles. On
the night of Doc’s second meeting with the missing sax player Coy Harlingen, Jade
rides back to town with Doc and his buddy Denis. She tells the story of her
criminal and sexual career and cautions the men, “Just be advised, boys, …
you’ll want watch your step, ‘cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter
pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism – lowlifes
of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it’ll be them
who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol’ pearl
herself goes a-rollin on.” Jade responds to a society and a job that make her
accessible to men and to their abuse by hardening her feelings. This choice
allows her to protect herself as well as to inflict harm on those who would
abuse her. The interdependent emotional consequences of physical, emotional and economic dependence,
exploitation and abuse, form another of the novel’s root political themes. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
In their reflection on personal
relations in day-to-day capitalism, the characters of the novel express their
interest in living relationships with emotional substance beyond self-interest,
in finding gratification in activities beyond isolated consumption, and in
shaping their own lives to protect themselves. Their political consciousness
and the character traits it divines and guides are lost in the movie. So too is
the inescapable impact on them of the repressive networks and institutions that
enforce private control over property and lives. On the novel’s explicitly
political level, two nexuses of these repressive force interconnect Doc, his
friends and clients. The schooner Golden Fang and the murderous loan shark
Adrian Prussia embody these deadly networks. Doc’s investigations reveal these
focal points of power, and they emerge bit by bit in the narrative until their histories
are extensively disclosed. The movie omits the political histories that make
sense of the ship and the loan shark and the plots lines involving them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Doc’s investigation of the
schooner Golden Fang spans more of the story than all but one of his
commissioned cases. The movie retains the gradual introduction of the Golden
Fang: a note Jade leaves for Doc that closes
“Beware the Golden Fang”, a shadow apparently passing in the waterfront fog
behind the first conversation between Doc and Coy Harlingen, and the restaurant
meeting between Doc and Sauncho where the lawyer introduces the ship’s history. Uncharacteristically, the movie even keeps
the initial mention of the schooner’s political connection. The boat once
belonged to actor Burke Stodger, who sails
away on it when he is blacklisted. Anderson even explains the meaning of the
blacklist for the viewers, adding to
Sauncho’s account the gloss that Stodger was “branded a Communist.” However, we
hear little more than this simple fact, as the movie excises the boat’s
subsequent history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Later in the same chapter of he novel, Fritz
Drybeam, a loan collector who gave Doc his first job as an investigator and
remained a friend, has retrieved this history from the ARPAnet, precursor of
the internet. Stodger handed the boat over to the government as part of the
deal that allowed him to return to work in Hollywood. This much of Fritz’s information Anderson
transfers to Sauncho in the restaurant scene. But Fritz’s account continues. The schooner
reappeared off Cuba on a spy mission “against Fidel Castro.” Later it was
deployed on “anti-Communist projects” in Guatemala, West Africa, Indonesia and
elsewhere. It monitored radio traffic, delivered weapons to “anti-Communist
guerillas, including those at the ill-fated Bay of Pigs.” It ran “CIA heroin”
and also took on as cargo “abducted local ‘troublemakers,’ who were never seen
again.” The Golden Fang’s history recapitulates decades of the covert
repression conducted by the U.S. government against insurgent Communists and nationalists
and against its own citizenry. These operations drive the events of the plot. The
Golden Fang and the network of government agencies and propertied interests that
operates it produce the disrupted lives that Doc investigates.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The exposition of Adrian
Prussia’s career is more confusingly abbreviated in the movie. Neither
limousine driver Tito Stavrou, who first mentions Prussia, nor Doc’s former boss Fritz Drybeam, who
provides personal knowledge of Prussia’s ties to the LAPD, even appear in the
movie. Prussia is introduced in the restaurant scene in which Bigfoot Bjornsen
points Doc to Prussia and his Nazi biker henchman Puck in connection with Coy
Harlingen’s faked overdose death. As much of Prussia’s history as we are
allowed comes in the scene in which Doc’s lover, assistant district attorney
Penny Kimball provides him with a sealed file on Prussia’s collaboration with
the LAPD. From these records we learn that Prussia was responsible for the
murder of Bigfoot Bjornsen’s partner, Detective Vincent Indelicato, that he commited
the murder for the LAPD, and that in fact “he might as well have been working
for them as a contract killer.” The movie leaves the history of LAPD’s
collusion with Prussia at this.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The novel expands on this history
and its explicitly political character. In the novel’s climactic scene Adrian
Prussia and Puck Beaverton have abducted Doc and are preparing to murder him.
Puck cruelly toys with Doc before preparing a fatal injection of heroin for
him. We see this scene in the movie, but we do not hear Puck recount how
Prussia became LAPD’s contract killer. A small-time pornographer threatened
Governor Reagan’s administration with a blackmail scheme that would have
brought it down. To defend Reagan’s career, the Vice Squad commissions Prussia
to kill the would-be blackmailer. Adrian arranges a particularly perverse and
gruesome murder. The loan shark is
politically conservative and finds that killing for the sake of his political
values gives him a “cold keen-edge thrill” with “something sexy about it.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
Exhilerated
by this illicit pleasure, Adrian “felt like his life had turned a corner.” He
embraces his new-found career and happily continues to sell his services to the
LAPD. Over the years he “found himself
specializing in politicals – black and Chicano activists, antiwar protestors,
campus bombers, and assorted other pinko fucks.” When the LAPD asks him to kill
a cop, however, the prospect gives Adrian no pleasure, so he hands the job over
to Puck, who has particular grounds to despise Detective Indelicato. The
omission of this information eliminates the parallel between the covert
anti-insurgency conducted from the Golden Fang and the assassinations carried
out by Adrian Prussia. It eliminates indications that these foreign and
domestic operations are branches of a single network. It also eliminates the
defense of his political values as a powerful motive beyond personal animosity
and desperate self-preservation for Doc’s readiness to kill Adrian and Puck. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 27.0pt;">
The movie consistently excludes
the novel’s explicit political themes at the expense of coherence and depth in
the story. The characters lose features, the plot loses motivation and
continuity, and the thematic framework loses conceptual integrity. I could
present further evidence for Anderson’s treatment of the novel’s politics, but
this brief comparison establishes the point clearly enough. The anti-capitalist
perspectives voiced by Doc, Sauncho and Jade broach themes that generate the
novel’s implicit political substance. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s speculative
thought on the shaping of the psyche by the relations and processes of
capitalist production, in the second part of these comments we will next look
at how these deeper political themes fare in Anderson’s adaptation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-35688903256225667492014-09-22T16:23:00.001-07:002014-09-22T16:23:31.471-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><strong>MARX
DOES MEDIA ANALYSIS (2)</strong></span><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></strong></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In
the months after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times of London and
Lord Palmerston</i> appeared the topic of <em>The</em> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> and its political function came up
regularly in Marx’s journalism. Most often it was no more than a passing
mention, but two articles substantially supplement the analysis discussed in part 1.
Both articles comment on potential British military intervention in the
Americas. In an article about the Trent Affair, a diplomatic confrontation
between Britain and the U.S., that was published in the Viennese paper <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Die Presse</i> in December of 1861, Marx
returns explicitly to the question of how to read the London press in light of
its political connections. This article extends the analysis of these
connections beyond <em>The Times</em> to include ten more London papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the other article, written for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daily Tribune</i> in November of 1861, Marx
discusses at length the press coverage of the British government’s
plans for military intervention in Mexico. This article illustrates at length
and in detail both Palmerston’s strategic use of the press to prepare public opinion
and the editor’s “cooking” of the news.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1861/12/31.htm"><span style="color: blue;">The Opinion
of the Newspapers and the Opinion of the People</span></a> is the last of the articles
in which Marx reported<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trent_Affair"><span style="color: blue;">Trent Affair</span></a> for Viennese
readers. Earlier articles had discussed the legal intricacies of the case. This
final article uses the diplomatic contentions as a springboard to discuss in
detail the emoluments and access Palmerston used to exercise control over coverage
of foreign affairs. In passing, we should note that the opening sentence
“Continental politicians, who imagine that in the London press they possess a
thermometer of the temper of the English people, inevitably draw false
conclusions at the present moment” addresses another dimension of the political
function of the press. Just as foreign affairs reporting in the press creates
public opinion as a factor in British politics, these representations of public
opinion are aimed at the policy makers of foreign governments. As the product of
Palmerston’s covert arrangements the reports purposefully mislead both audiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
remainder of the opening describes how public opinion and editorial positions shifted
in opposite directions over the course of the Trent Affair. When the American seizure
of the Confederate emissaries first became news, the public called for war. As
the full implications of the issues were discussed, public support for war
dwindled. The press followed the opposite track. Initially the press urged
moderation. After a time it did an about face and enthusiastically supported
war. Marx correlates the position of the press with the development of
Palmerston’s policy. As long as the government’s lawyers could not find a legal
grounds for war, the press remained moderate. When the government finally had
developed a legal pretext for war, the press endorsed war. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
rest of the article explains how it was that the press synchronized its positions
with the government and why it adopted positions at odds with the views of its
readers. The explanation involves no complex theory. Today in fact it feels
like a familiar argument, although I suspect it was unprecedented at the time. Marx simply works through a list of ten daily papers and identifies
the source of their position. Not surprisingly, he begins with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i>. This time he introduces the
editor Bob Lowe by name and points out he holds a “kind of” position in the
Cabinet. Although out of place, at this point Marx also mentions the very
popular conservative satirical weekly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Punch,</i>
which was promoted by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>. In his Cabinet post, Lowe had in
turn secured a remunerative post for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Punch’s</i>
editor. The first two papers were secured for Palmerston through emoluments.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next paper, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Post</i>, was partly owned by Palmerston. Marx notes too that
the other owners belonged to society. The odd combination of society news and
foreign policy reporting underlines the significance of ownership for content. The third
daily paper, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Morning Advertiser</i> adopted
its pro-war stance after Palmerston began to invite its editor to his social
gatherings. In addition, the noble patron of the guild which owned the paper
was Palmerston’s son-in-law. The final example of direct control is not
connected to Palmerston. Agents of the Confederacy purchased the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Chronicle</i> so ownership likewise
determined the coverage. The sensationalizing tabloid the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daily Telegraph</i> was noted for its notorious rabble-rousing support
of Palmerston, but Marx does not explain the connection.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The list now moves on to pro-war papers of a
different kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three papers received
direct subsidies from Cabinet ministries. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Globe</i> supported the war because it was subsidized by the Whigs, the
party to which Palmerston belonged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Herald</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Evening Standard</i> had been subsidized by the Tories who preceded
Palmerston in office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These papers
agitated for war out of hostility to the U.S. and in hopes a war will bring
down the Cabinet, after which a new government would restore their subsidies.
The list closes with a pair of papers which oppose the war as a matter of
principle, both being committed to the positions of politicians other than
Palmerston.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">After
discussing the dailies, Marx briefly treats five weekly papers. Two exemplify
the war-supporting majority of these papers. One is paid by the ministries, while
the other advocates war simply to display “esprit.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marx defines this quality more specifically
as, “a cynical elevation above ‘humanitarian’ prejudices.” In other words, a
provocative attitude is one of the use values sold by the paper. At the last,
Marx mentions the three weeklies that oppose the calls for war, but passes over
their motives in silence.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">This
description of the affiliations and motivations of the pro-war coverage in the
London press goes beyond the mechanisms of manipulation presented in the first
article. It begins with the award of government posts and the provision of
social access mentioned there. But the roster of connections expands to include
out-right ownership, family relationships and government subsidies. At the same
time, the potential motives also include political principles and even what we might
today call pure branding. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/11/23.htm"><span style="color: blue;">The
Intervention in Mexico</span></a>, the second article, discusses in extensive
and careful detail six weeks of the coverage delivered by two London papers on
the plan for joint British, French and Spanish military intervention in the
Mexican Republic. The examination of “one of the most monstrous enterprises
ever chronicled in the annals of international history” begins with the
respective roles of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The London Morning
Post</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The London Times</i> in
introducing Palmerston’s plans to the public, as well as the responses of the
French and Spanish governments through their own press. The article then contrasts
the positions on intervention taken by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
in September and November.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After these
contradictory reasonings have been dissected, the second half of the article
addresses the crucial question about the intervention raised by these
incoherent inconsistencies, “What, then, is its real aim and purpose?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The London Morning
Post</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The London Times </i>practice a division of
labor. The analysis of their collaboration deepens the description of Palmerston’s management of the
press. As we have just seen, Palmerston was a part owner of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Post</i> and his ownership accounted
for its publication of reports on foreign affairs. Accordingly, Marx calls the
paper “Palmerston’s private <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moniteur</i>,”
that is his equivalent of the French government’s official paper. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Morning Post</i> published in detail the
first public account of the agreement among Britain, France and Spain to
intervene in Mexico. The French government denied this report through its
press. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> then responded with
a report that the French had indeed agreed to the intervention. The Spanish
government then clarified through its press that it was planning a unilateral
intervention. Finally, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i>
followed with a report that the U.S. would join the intervention, a claim
promptly denied by the American press.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Marx
deduces from this sequence of reports and denials that the plan is undoubtedly
an English creation, and demonstrates one of his protocols for reading the
press in this kind of situation. In the same issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> that publicized the three powers’ final agreement on
intervention in early November, a second article appeared that approved of a
recent French military intervention in Switzerland. This recognition signals a
diplomatic <em>quid pro quo</em>. Palmerston has given France a free hand for
intervention on the continent in return for French collaboration in the Mexican
adventure. It is not the content of the reports per se but their juxtaposition
that conveys this message. Beyond the mere content of foreign policy reports,
their placement in the papers has a political function and
inferable meaning. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Marx
draws an analogous but more complex inference from a comparison of the reports
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Post</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i>. In its first report, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Post</i> maintained that the goal of the expedition was to collect debts owed
by the Mexican government. Because the government no longer exercised effective
power, it was necessary to take military measures to occupy port cities and
claim customs revenues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> in its subsequent first report
dismissed the significance of the debt, and instead maintained that the intervention
would encourage the Mexican government in its efforts to restore order and end
the brigandage that victimized British subjects. Marx notes the contradiction
between the respective assumptions that there is no effective government and
that there is a government capable of action. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Marx
points out that the Times own reasoning contradicts itself as well, “To be sure!
The oddest means ever hit upon for the consolidation of a Government consists
in the seizure of its territory and the sequestration of its revenue.” In
Palmerston’s designs, these initial press voices were subsequently joined by “minor ministerial
oracles,” officials, spokesmen and sources, in the task of “systematically
belaboring him [that is, the public] in the same contradictory style for four
weeks, until public opinion had at last become sufficiently trained to the idea
of a joint intervention in Mexico, although kept in deliberate ignorance of the
aim and purpose of that intervention.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The volume of the reports and the contradictions within and among what
are known to be well-informed sources deflect discussion from the intervention itself to the spurious discussion of its motives, while at the
same time concealing the real considerations behind it. The orchestrated
pattern of disagreement and debate executes a calculated tactic. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">These four weeks of preparation ended when the official French press announced
that an agreement had been reached. The French papers announced that the Mexican ports
would be seized, if the Mexican government did not then cooperate troops would move
inland and occupy Mexico City, and “a strong government would be imported into
the Republic.” We might note that the latter two points had never figured in
the initial reports in London. In November after the governments have
officially committed themselves to intervention, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> speaks to the issue again. Marx underlines the absolute
incongruity of its response, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%;"></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Everybody
ignorant of its connection with Palmerston, and the original introduction in
its columns of his scheme, would be induced to consider the to-day’s leader of <em>The
Times </em>as the most cutting and merciless satire on the whole adventure. It
sets out by stating that “the expedition is a <em>very remarkable </em>one”
[later on it says <em>a curious one</em>]<em>.</em></span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 1em 73.4pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><em>“</em></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Three
States are combining to coerce a fourth into good behavior, <em>not so much by
way of war as by authoritative interference in behalf of order</em>.”</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: x-small; line-height: 150%;">Authoritative
interference in behalf of order! This is literally the Holy Alliance slang, and
sounds very <em>remarkable </em>indeed on the part of England, glorying in the
non-intervention principle! And why is “the way of war, and of declaration of
war, and all other behests of international law,” supplanted by “an
authoritative interference in behalf of order?” Because, says <em>The Times, </em>there
“exists no Government in Mexico.” And what is the professed aim of the
expedition? “To address demands to the constituted authorities at Mexico.”</span><br />
<br /></blockquote>
<div style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Absurdly contradictory
in its assumptions and ludicrous its euphemisms, the only way to find a
coherent intention in this report is to understand it, as Marx supposes a
substantial part of the public already does, as an expression of Palmerston’s
designs. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Marx singles out a
final decisive contradiction. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i>
still claims that satisfaction of debts and protection of foreign nationals are
the goal of the intervention, but then concedes that the measures to be taken
far exceed what is needed to achieve those ends. From this
disproportion between the military means and the ostensible goals, Marx
concludes that the purported goals “have nothing at all to do with the present
joint intervention in Mexico” and this discrepancy compels him to ask what is
really going on.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;"><span 0in="" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif>This question cannot be answered by even the most scrupulous reading of the papers alone. It requires reference to history. Marx first dismisses the question of the debt as a pretext advanced in bad faith. He briefly observes that Spain itself is a debtor notorious for its arrears and is at that very time the target of public pressure from its creditors in France. More significant, given the origins of the plans for intervention, is Palmerston’s own involvement in the Mexican debt. In a treaty with England in 1826 Mexico made its territories in Texas the security for its debt with private British lenders. A decade later Palmerston mediated the treaty between Mexico and the now independent Texas that assigned these lands to Texas and thus eliminated without substitute this security for the loans. This transfer of the territories to Texas left British creditors with no way to press their claims. To fabricate his initial, misleading rationale for intervention, Palmerston exploits a situation of his own making, but treats Mexico as responsible. Marx has thus dismissed the first argument for intervention.</span></div> <br /> <div style=;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Turning to the seond argument, Marx
reiterates that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> also disavows
the significance of the debt for the intervention. Marx rephrases his question
in sarcastic distress at the complete lack of sense on the surface of this
subterfuge. “What, then, in all the world is its real or pretended aim?” His answer
begins by picking apart the second putative goal of the intervention “an
authoritative interference in behalf of order."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Times</i> has expressed only one
reservation about the intervention, namely that the European “order-mongers,” as
Marx calls them, would not be able to agree on what Mexican faction to install
in the government, “The only point on which there may possibly be a difference
between ourselves and our allies, regards <em>the government of the Republic. </em>England
will be content to see it <em>remain </em>in the hands of the <em>liberal party
which is now in power.”</em> Marx examines this reservation carefully and shows
that in fact it assumes that there is a functioning government that has begun
to restore order. From these assumptions he draws the conclusion obvious to all
involved, that the intervention will “instead of extinguishing, restore <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anarchy</i> to its full bloom.” </span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Once “ in behalf of Order,’ is
substracted from the rationale, there remains only “interference.” The Civil War
momentarily prevents the U.S. from actively resisting intervention, and Palmerston hopes to
take advantage of this obstacle to American resistance to overturn the Monroe
Doctrine and establish the right of the European powers to use force in the
pursuit of their interests in the Americas. In conjunction with his pursuit of the
right of intervention Palmerston is strategic expanding of his
monopoly over the exercise of that right. He has launched his adventure while
Parliament is recessed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Palmerston is again
employing the same tactics of false representations and disregard of Parliament’s
power that he has used on previous occasions to initiate wars. He aims to reinforce those precedents for his prerogative to order interventions without the
approval of Parliament. Marx describes Palmerston’s ultimate goal in sweeping
terms, “With the control over foreign wars, Parliament will lose all control
over the national exchequer, and Parliamentary government turn to a mere
farce.”</span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;"></span><div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">Marx’s reading of the London press on
the intervention in Mexico assumes that these press accounts cannot be taken at
face value. They furnish evidence of foreign policy, but they do not reliably
describe the motives or content of policy. Press reporting functions as an
instrument in complex political designs. The press reports are intended by the
place and sequence of their publication and by their putatively authentic accounts to render the
ultimate intervention plausible while concealing its actual motives and goals. A
careful reading can retrieve even from deceptive press reports some of the suppositions about
the state of affairs that do underlie the unspoken goals. No matter how careful
the reading of logic and publication, however, only informed reference to the history of
governments and of politicians allows Marx to construe the policy that wields
these reports as instruments to attain public assent to “monstrous
enterprises.” </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong>CONCLUSION</strong></span></div>
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">When we read what Marx had to say about public opinion and
foreign policy, even after a hundred and fifty years his arguments evoke a
sense of recognition and familiarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This affinity of his analyses with our own experiences with politics and
the press easily furnishes reason enough to read and discuss these articles
today. Beyond the resonance of these insights, the articles provide a pertinent
example for communist analysis and criticism of the media. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They do not provide a theory of public
opinion. We cannot even extract a definitive model of communist media analysis
from them. History does no allow us that luxury. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">At the very least, though, Marx’s analyses do demonstrate three themes essential to our media
analyses: how the accumulation of capital and the capitalist organization of
the media establish the technical and social basis for the collaboration of
state and media; how this collaboration results not just from the social
relations and political institutions particular to a historical moment but from particular
individuals acting within those relations and institutions; and how editorial management employs specific techniques to
manipulate representations of foreign affairs in order to manufacture public opinion.
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because the accumulation of capital has advanced fantastically, because the
technologies produced by that accumulation have proliferated, and because the
social relations and political institutions in the U.S. today differ greatly from
1860s England, contemporary media criticism on these lines will necessarily
look different from Marx’s criticism of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Times</i>. But Marx made fundamental points about these processes that retain
their force. The ruling class and their political executives pursue “monstrous
enterprises.” When they organize these enterprises, they employ covert and
collusive means. Important among their collusions are the combinations of report-producers and politicians who manage the media and
manufacture public opinion. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Today these points have become harder to convey,
in no small part because the “opinion-mongers,” in order to protect themselves, have through their opinion-commodities
attempted to immunize their audiences against these very
arguments. The mere fact that Marx argued in this way does not make these
arguments more plausible or persuasive. Marx's analysis and criticism of the London press in his day does demonstrate that these arguments fall solidly within
the scope of a materialist critique of the media. Our challenge is to find the
audience for them and communicate persuasive arguments in which we connect concretely the opinion-mongers to the order-mongers and their reports to their enterprises.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span></div>
<br /></div>
</span><br />
<div style="margin-left: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 150%;">
</span></div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-69459637882415399072014-09-08T19:10:00.001-07:002014-09-23T10:27:11.337-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">MARX DOES MEDIA ANALYSIS (1)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The recent twitter controversies
about the tag #OpPornPixie involved some serious questions about how communist
criticism of the media works. As a follow up, I want to bring attention to some
articles Marx wrote in 1861 for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New
York Daily Tribune</i>. Marx had a long-standing concern with the press and its
political role. Marx worked as newspaper editor in Germany twice during the 1840s. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout the 1850s into the mid-1860s he was
a foreign correspondent for several papers. As an editor he regularly analyzed
and criticized the positions taken in other papers. As a correspondent in 1861
he began writing about British responses to the Civil War for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tribune’s</i> readers in America. During a
period in 1861 when Parliament was not in session, Marx wrote repeatedly about
the coverage of the war in the British press. In these articles Marx sketches a
brief, clear, and explicit materialist media analysis. The most substantial
part of this sketch appears in the article </span><a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/21.htm"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">The London Times and Lord Palmerston</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this article Marx aims to do
more than simply inform his American audience about<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>British attitudes toward the war. Instead of
just telling them what people in Britain thought or what the British press said,
he instructs politically interested American readers in how to read the British
press and to understand the connection of the press to public opinion. These
instructions explain the forces in British politics and their operations. The
article describes how the British press became one of these forces and how the
government integrated the press into its operations. Marx assumes that for politically
conscious readers to grasp the practical meaning of newspaper writing,
they would need to understand the press as an active element in political relations.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The article also exemplifies the
connection between Marx’s theoretical work on political economy and his journalistic
criticism of politics and media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1858
Marx had completed the manuscript known today as the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grundrisse</i>. In it he sketched a comprehensive, conceptually
integrated critique of political economy. In 1859 he had published </span><a href="http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.htm"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this short work he discussed two key
concepts in his critique, money and the commodity, but did not attempt a
systematic exposition of capital. In August of 1861, three months before he
wrote this article, Marx had begun work on what is today known as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863</i> [no
longer available at the Mars-Engels Internet<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Archive!], his next major work in the critique. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manuscript</i> comprised the first draft of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>. Thus when he wrote his article on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>, Marx had already begun to formulate his scientific theory of
capitalism as a fundamental process in bourgeois society. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The London Times and Lord Palmerston</i> we
see how this conceptual framework shapes Marx’s criticism of contemporary
politics.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The first long paragraph makes up
1/3 of the article and contains the political media analysis. It opens with a
quote about the influence of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
“English people participate in the government of their own country by reading </span><em><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The Times </span></em><span style="font-family: Calibri;">newspaper.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marx follows the assessment with his own qualification,
“This judgment, passed by an eminent English author on what is called British
self-government, is only true so far as the foreign policy of the Kingdom is
concerned.” This opening gambit establishes that the influence exercised by the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> is an established fact. Marx
will examine that influence, but it is not something he discovered himself. Although
Marx does not name Robert Lowe, who was the author of the quote, we should note
that in 1861 Lowe was the editor of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
and that he later served for six years as a minister in the Cabinet. This
estimation of the unique role and profound influence of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> came from a man who was a key
figure in the collaboration of the press and the government and who spoke with
an insider’s knowledge of that connection. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The opening quote also suggests the
specific historically and socially unique features of the press at that time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we think of “reading,” we think first of
the basic process of interpreting <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>words
and sentences by which readers cull information. But in a second more important
sense, the quote identifies a particular social quality of that process.
Through reading the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>, its
readers “participate in the government.” In a time when political parties as we
know them now did not exist, the right to vote was highly restricted by
property requirements and the means of communication were much more limited,
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> made unique information
about the government widely accessible and provided a surrogate means of
participation in government affairs. This participation consisted primarily of
holding a share in public opinion. Now, before this first paragraph is through,
Marx relates these informational and participatory features to the specifically
capitalist features of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> as a
business. So to apply that perspective from the start, we can say that
information and surrogate participation are what the paper sells. When readers buy
the paper for the use-values of political news and participation, they create
the relationship that is the basis of the paper’s strategic function for the
government. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This relationship is “public
opinion.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Following the quote, Marx qualifies
this claim by limiting it to foreign policy. To prove his point, he mentions several
recent domestic political reforms. While the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> had opposed all these measures, its readers supported them.
To maintain its readership, the paper had to reverse its editorial positions.
Marx then contrasts the way this mediation through the market determined the
domestic views of the paper to the way the paper determines the foreign policy
views of the readers. He makes this first, fundamental point, “In no part of
Europe are the mass of the people, and especially of the middle-classes, more
utterly ignorant of the foreign policy of their own country than in England… .”
When it comes to foreign affairs, the readership, which is constituted as a public
by reading the paper, depends on the paper for information and
political interpretations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Marx breaks the explanation down
into finer detail. In its details, the explanation is historical and
institutional. The history relates the class divisions of British society and
the effects of capitalist development on the middle classes. Thanks to the
enduring medieval features of British political institutions, the aristocracy
had maintained control over foreign affairs. This social division of labor and
the absorption of the middle classes in earning their living results in public
ignorance of foreign affairs. The exclusion of the middle classes from this
political power means “the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aristocracy</i>
acted for them … .” The confinement of the ideas of the middle class to earning
money means, “the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">press</i> thought for
them … .” Because the aristocrats and the publishers effective monopolize their
respective aspects of foreign policy they have a shared goal, “their mutual
interest to combine.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marx summarizes
the outcome of this combination, “since the beginning of this century, the
great London papers have constantly played the part of attorneys to the
heaven-born managers of English foreign policy.” The particular configuration Marx
describes an arrangement of shared power has existed for only sixty years.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Marx then identifies the stages
in this collaboration between the governing aristocracy and the opinion creating
press over those six decades. As political participation broadened through
bourgeois economic and political revolution, the aristocracy that exercised
foreign policy power narrowed into an “oligarchy.” The Cabinet came into
existence as the formal institutional representation of the oligarchy. Marx
characterizes the Cabinet as “a secret conclave.” The Cabinet was a political
innovation. It did not belong to the traditional constitutional order and it operated
beyond conventional controls over executive action. In recent decades Lord
Palmerston had assumed personal control over the cabinet and over foreign
policy. With Palmerston’s “usurpation” the political, institutional side of the
process is complete. In this very specific political conjuncture of 1861 Marx
highlights the ambitions and actions of a single man and describes the formal
institution within which he worked in terms of covert collusions. Marx’s close
attention to Palmerston in fact extended back for years. In 1853 he had already
written a seven-article series about </span><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/palmerston/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Palmerston’s career</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that appeared in both the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tribune</i> and in England in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">People’s Paper</i>. These articles were
subsequently republished as a pamphlet that sold over 20,000 copies. In this
sense, the article on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> is an
addendum to Marx’s earlier reports about Palmerston and his politics.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over these same years the developments in the “field
of newspaper-mongering” that enable the collaboration of politics and press result
from an inherent tendency of capital. Marx attributes the singular potential of
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> to play its role to “the
law of concentration” and its rapid operation in the sector of the press. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Concentration” is a technical term in Marx’s
theoretical critique of political economy. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grundrisse</i> Marx observes the phenomenon of concentration, but does
not derive a definition from his observations. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863 </i>the few references to
concentration are now collected in Notebook IV on relative surplus value.
Ultimately the concept of relative surplus value will provide the terms for the
definition of concentration, but in 1861 Marx still has not formulated this
definition. The reference to the “law” of concentration, however, suggests Marx
does have a particular systematic process in mind already. So let’s look ahead at the
definition of the concentration of capital in </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S2"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Capital</span></i></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> (see section 2 of the linked chapter) ‘Concentration’ labels the
distinctive aspect of accumulation in capitalism. It identifies the constantly
increasing application of technology as an expression of the inherent need to
obtain the greatest possible physical output from a constant amount of labor.
The incorporation of technology into production on an ever increasing scale
leads to, and at the same time results from, the accelerating growth of individual
capitals. As the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> employs more
and better presses and reaches a larger and more widely distributed readership,
it becomes the new and unique medium of “the national paper.” </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This conclusion about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> illustrates a fundamental
conceptual difference between Marx’s writing in his critique of political
economy and his political writing for broad reading audiences. In the critiques
his inferences about concentration are concerned exclusively with the
implications of concentration within the processes of production and accumulation. For example, in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863</i>,
Marx characterizes concentration as a “material determinant for production on
an expanded scale.” In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i> the
discussion additionally specifies consequences of concentration for the
employment of living labor. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this article Marx is equally concerned with
accumulation in the newspaper industry as the material determinant of a social
process. But from the ‘law of concentration’ he here draws an inference about
political relationships and processes. Their determination by the ‘law of
concentration’ means that these political processes are capitalist in their nature
and that their very form results from class relations. Yet these consequences of
concentration have nothing to do with the immediate process of production or with
questions of exploitation and accumulation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quantitative growth in the scale of
operations of the press determines a qualitative transformation in the character
of the print medium. This transformation in turn determines a new form of
political participation and this new form of political participation provides a new instrument for politicians
operating in the political institutions of bourgeois society.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Palmerston’s sole power over
foreign policy and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times’</i> sole
access to a national readership thus lead to a very particular combination of
the government and the press. Marx observes, “Lord Palmerston, who secretly and
from motives unknown to the people at large, to Parliament and even to his own
colleagues, managed the Foreign affairs of the British Empire, must have been
very stupid if he had not tried to possess himself of the one paper which had
usurped the power of passing public judgment in the name of the English people
on his own secret doings.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
observation has several significant implications about the combination of press
and politics in 1861. To assert that Palmerston would have been “stupid” not to
initiate the collaboration implies that the potential <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was self-evident. From the perspective of the
law of concentration in the press, it was inevitable, since the Times would
have needed “more than Spartan virtue” not to combine with Palmerston. Marx also
says that both Palmerston and the <em>Times</em> “usurped” their power. We can imagine Palmerston’s
usurpation of political power as the result of intrigue and manipulation. The usurpation
of power by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> results from
success in accumulating capital to expand operations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Success in competition in this particular branch
inherently produces an undemocratic outcome. In this one sentence Marx also points
out twice that Palmerston’s “motives” and his “doings” are “secret.” The
reasons and actions of the government are consciously clandestine. The
function of the <em>Times</em> is “judging them for the nation” and “representing the
public mind," yet in this public function it maintains that clandestine
secrecy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> provides a judgement of Palmerston’s motives and actions that does not describe,
explain or interpret them factually. This deliberate discrepancy between Palmerston’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">clandestine</i> motives and actions and
their representation in the press is a necessary, inherent feature of the
creation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">public</i> opinion.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this combination at the
initiative of Palmerston, Marx says the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
sought to “ally” itself to the minister but Palmerston treated the paper as his
“slave.” Palmerston achieved this one-sided relationship through two principal
means. To employees of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> he
gave subordinate jobs in ministries and access to his social circle. Marx sums
up the role of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> once this combination
was effected, “the whole business of <em>T</em></span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><em>he</em> <em>Times, so </em></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">far
as the foreign affairs of the British Empire are concerned, is limited to
manufacturing a public opinion to conform to Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy.
It has to prepare the public mind for what he intends doing, and to make it
acquiesce in what he has done.” The strategic political function of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> is not identical with its business
as a whole. The editorial positions and reportorial content of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> cannot be directly inferred from
its business interests or even from the more general class interests of its
owners. The content produced in the manufacturing of public opinion is determined
by political dictates.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the remainder of the article, Marx
uses two examples to illustrate how the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
edits its reporting on Palmerston’s behalf. He bluntly identifies the
mechanics of manipulation and spin. In the first example, three members of
Parliament had made speeches about Palmerston’s diplomatic maneuvers and
political methods in the preceding thirty years. In two cases the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> simply “suppressed” the most
damaging evidence. In the third, procedural parliamentary tricks failed to
prevent the speech from being given, and the paper then inadvertently reported the
speech in full because the “editor specially charged with the task of
mutilating and cooking the parliamentary reports” had taken time off. To cover
its lapse, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> attempted to
disqualify the criticisms. It argued that the attempts on the floor of
Parliament to prevent the speech were justified because the speaker was a
“bore.” Marx calls the work of this type done by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> “drudgery” because its writers must take the Parliamentary
reports and literally overnight “mutilate, alter, [and] falsify” them for
publication.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second example Marx discusses how, at
the drop of a hat the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> reversed
its support of the Confederacy and its opposition to the United States in
accord with Palmerston’s policy. Marx specifies significant features of this
reversal. The Times can even more easily employ “misstatement and suppression”
on foreign news than it did on domestic reports. This spin on the news does not
follow from any consideration of the business interests of “the British Cotton
Lords” nor of “real or supposed English interest.” Instead, the editorial
manipulation of reporting “simply executed the orders of its master.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In
addition, the reversal occurred simultaneously in a number of papers “connected
with” Palmerston. Not only did all the papers act at the same time, they reversed
their editorial position prior to any public statement by Palmerston himself. As
his agents, they were preparing public opinion for the change of direction. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both examples Marx charges the paper with
plain and simple misrepresentation. Facts are omitted, they are changed and
they are mendaciously misinterpreted. These manipulations are the mechanical
execution of the strategic motive driving the creation of public opinion. “Falsifying”
public opinion is the paper’s political function. Like the policies it justifies,
the process of justification rests on covert and collusive manipulation.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this first article, Marx establishes
the “subserviency” of the “public-opinion-mongers” to Palmerston. He targets the
influence exercised by a powerful official whom he singles out by name. Marx represents
the instrumentalization of the press as a process of personal corruption and
manipulation through “emoluments and advantages.” Both the policies the press
supports and the collusion through which they support them are products of
covert collaborations. Neither the policies nor the editorial positions toward
them can be deduced directly from economic interests of particular participants
or from national interests. The inherent tendencies of capitalist development
and the specific levels and forms those developments have reached in England in
1861 set the parameters for the political arrangements between the government
and the media. Marx criticizes those arrangements for the benefit of his
politically conscious readers so they can better understand the relations that produce
that reporting and its immediate political functions.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 27pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the months following this
article, Marx’s journalism often returned to the topic of the press. He relies
on this model to discuss further examples of politically instrumentalized
reporting and adds further detail to the model. In a second post I will follow
up on these writings.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
</div>
</div>
Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com84tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-14980614353238077882011-10-31T05:41:00.000-07:002011-10-31T05:56:06.721-07:00A Monologue: "Standards and Practices" by Jon Robin Baitz<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">They say a lot about the “integrity vacancy” in my profession, which is television. Networks…that’s my particular area. Standards and Practices. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[shrugs] </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">You find yourself listening to these people. Decent people, but they don’t have to face the unwashed masses that I do in standards and practices. I mean, we’re lawyers, you know? I’m no artist. </p><p class="MsoNormal">[beat] </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I have no pretensions about it. I have to deal with Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble and Nestlé and General Foods, and these are decent types, these are decent guys. Lawyers, okay, you get the picture. </p><p class="MsoNormal">[beat] </p><p class="MsoNormal">A little dry, maybe, a tendency to look at things as simply as black and white, but after years of having to go through law school, it’s not hard to lose your sense of humor. </p><p class="MsoNormal">[beat] </p><p class="MsoNormal">But ask yourself this: Who is out there calling the shots? You know? I mean, I really, really despise petty moralizing. I really do. </p><p class="MsoNormal">[beat] </p><p class="MsoNormal">And a lot of what I’m asked to do is fatuous even to me, and there is no doubt you could laughand me – a Jew - smart, you know, you can look at a guy like me and say “He inherited his liberalism,” because I have not lived through anything.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">But I’ll tell you something, and please, anyone who disagrees with this is – gotta be living in another world...<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">When you reach the age of about twenty-seven to thirty-two, you basically -- you’ve had to make all the moral choices…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">There is nothing you don’t have to confront. So listen – I want to ask you this – Who out there is calling the shots? Because met me tell ya’, if ya’ think it’s us guys at standards and practises, I can promise you this: You – are – wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">If you think it’s the guys at Proctor & Gamble, you – are – wrong. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Because, basically, what we are, we are men and women who sell certain things. But let me tell you: We get letters, and I mean, they are filled with rage. They are filled with a…a…a passionate anger toward…this coast. This business. What we do. They hate us. So much. Letters from people offended by homosexual acts. AIDS on the Movie of the Week. There are people who are fueled by this.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">And I read these letters and I want to take a shower.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">People who have this agenda. But they get together, they send these letters to the decent lawyers at Proctor & Gamble, who get scared, and they call me.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">We get letters. There is a tide of hatred out there, and you cannot understand it, you cannot fathom the depths. This is a country filled with letter-writers, people who stay up all night, writhing and twisting, people who drive very old cars and have the strangest of habits, and people who have no real control over those habits. This country has a seam of absolute maniacal viciousness, and let me tell you – because you are all really – we’re in the same boat – it’s you and me against the <i>treyf </i>out there - - understand this:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">They are stronger than us, they outnumber us, and they are angrier than we are; and they do not care about your – your “environment,” your “freedom of speech,” they want to kill. They want to kill your faggot brother, they want your sister to have that baby, and they – and they – are the people who buy all the shit I sell every night.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I have to make the world smooth for them.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">That is my job.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">When you hit – you know, age about twenty-eight, you have to make just about every moral decision there is to make.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Like today. Two men kissing?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I had them cut it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Anything that disturbs the beast out there. No way.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[beat] <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Just think of me as one of the guardians of your safety; I keep the animals happy. Because they will take over the zoo if we let ‘em.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">[picks up phone]<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Get me Colgate. <o:p></o:p></span></p>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-33478675481732415602011-10-29T01:19:00.000-07:002011-10-29T06:00:46.309-07:00Demands<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">A good piece <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/10/ows-vs-octopus-on-making-demand.html">here </a>defending the activity of making demands, but evading the fact that whether demanding is constructive or destructive, and whose interests it serves, depends on the demand.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"> "<a href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/654">Protect our Christian Legacy</a>", "<a href="http://observers.france24.com/content/20090213-british-jobs-british-workers-racist-movement-immigration-unemployment-uk">British Jobs for British Workers</a>" and “<a href="http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2010/11/wielding-clubs-guns-and-chainsaws.html">Zig Raus!”</a> are all demands, and they've all been expressed with passion recently. Of course the demands which emerge from the Occupy movement include many which stress the illegitimacy of the state: "Stop Killing and Enslaving Us" or fcuk the pigs, burn the banks, "expropriate the expropriators", "Stop Stop and Frisk", "Decolonize Wall Street". The demands the authors of the piece list tend toward this type: </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Univers, Zurich, 'Zurich BT', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Univers, Zurich, 'Zurich BT', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "></span></p><blockquote>That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education?</blockquote> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">These demands may not highlight as well as some others the violence, lawlessness and ruthlessness of the current ruling class and its absolute illegitimacy, but they don't tend to legitimize the state or the <i>status quo</i> of property and power. However, this list and the text in which we find it was probably written with the awareness of the debate into which it must enter, that is, in the knowledge that the concrete presently existing advocates of demands at OWS are rejecting (with contempt) these kinds of oppositional and accusatory demands (nixing for example reference to "the larceny of the 1%" as overly oppositional and likely to alienate someone of importance) and insisting on demands that do legitimize the state and that in fact require other people (not those who make the demands) to build things for the use and enjoyment and aggrandizement of those making the demands (the demand is the state put unemployed to work to secure the property and assert values belonging to those drafting the demands) and in all likelihood for expropriation as private property of the 1%.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Unfortunately around "the question of demands" has arisen a typical co-opting reaction - those whose efforts are principally to silence, mock, belittle, delay or deprioritize the demands of others are annointing themselves 'pro-demands' and denouncing their opponents, whose demands they are trying to gag or discredit, 'anti-demands', much the way those seeking to assert white supremacist patriarchal privileges do so by labelling feminists and anti-racists 'divisive' for objecting to the segregation benefiting the privileged and challenging their efforts to dominate and preserve these hierarchies. Though much is being done to combat it, and a great deal has been achieved in raising people's awareness and recruiting commitment to redress of these persistent injustices, one sees still everywhere the spectacle of all white groups or white individuals presenting themselves as universal and neutral, representatives of the norm and the commonweal, issuing dire warnings against the threat of and displaying eye-rolling impatience with insignificant raced people with selfish, unimportant concerns "muddying" this or that pure scene or analysis with their difference, undermining popular unity by spoiling uniformity, and hampering class struggle by challenging the domination or refusing obedience to the usual privileged petty bourgeois subjects.</p><p class="MsoNormal">It's in the unavoidable context of white supremacy and the US' particularly raced class society that the demands working group has specifically rejected suggestions they include any demands to protect those they recommend be employed providing services and rebuilding territorial US infrastructure (and US only, that is, not Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Haiti) from the repression and terror of the state or ensuring that this workforce who are proposed to be set to work making a better environment for those issuing the demands will be able to benefit <span> </span>from the wealth they create as well.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p>T</o:p></span>he demands working group at OWS have rejected the suggestion, most signficantly, of specifying debt amnesty for those to be employed by the public works scheme they demand be established. Without an insistence on debt amnesty, their demand in reality is that 25 million people be employed at their own expense and that of the rest of the public in order to guarantee (once again) the payment to the richest of the interest, fees, and debts to which those 25 million likely to take these jobs are currently obligated. Without debt amnesty, <span> </span>these “good union wages” must still fail to provide any kind of decent living standard, as all of those wages are already earmarked for the 1% via the indebtedness of the workers in question. The reason given for rejecting “debt amnesty” as a feature of this demand – this demand that is supposed to help the movement define the world it wants through the delineation of a policy that is actually practicable and desirable – is that it mars the “simplicity” of the scheme. That's a familiar defense of every kind of trickle down vision, and the proposal fits the pattern of trickle down in highlighting the inevitable consequences of the scheme to those least benefitting (but benefitting nonetheless, a little) and wholly ignoring that the bulk of the benefits of the scheme are monopolised by the ruling class and its courtiers and house servants. </p><p class="MsoNormal">That is, any measures that might ensure the 25 million workers benefit from the scheme are seen as an unnecessary complication - the scheme is a lovely machine one switches on and watches prosperity flow from, as is always appealing to bourgeois economists. This posture which defines all care to protect the interest of the propertyless as needless muddying and disfigurement of the beautiful simplicity of the Keynes/Fabian machine must be understood to confirm that the purpose of the scheme is the same as the purpose of every scheme inspired by this school of thought - to shore up the state’s legitimacy, secure property values, and boost growth to guarantee profits (and superprofits when the concrete products of the labour employed are privatised). The demand thus is objectionable with regard to content (the actual realization of the policy is not desirable, though it contains elements that would be part of many conceivable desirable policies) and as pedagogy (the demand as “impossible demand” tends to obscure rather than clarify present reality) and as political gesture (the demand is divisive and asserts the dominance of those who define themselves in opposition and distinction to “workers, the homeless, unemployed, undocumented” and who treat the expressed concerns of those groups as nuisances, the usual “laundry list” of particularist grievances, and needless “complexities”.)Without debt amnesty, the vision is one of effective enslavement of 25 million people set to work improving the public equity chiefly enjoyed by the richest 10%.</p>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-78881098632198419642011-10-18T19:14:00.000-07:002011-10-18T19:47:19.065-07:00The Particular and The ParticularJust can't seem to escape the question of the relationship between the particular and the universal. Or as this snippet of Marx seems to suggest, the relationship between the particular and the particular.<br /><br />It comes from the Theories of Surplus Value in the discussion of Adam Smith, the subsection The Distinction between Productive and Unproductive Labour, and within that subsection, the subsection 17 on Nassau Senior. Unfortunately this <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm">link</a> lands you far from the passage in question.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of every other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, modify <em>plus ou moins</em> all his functions and activities, and therefore his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities too. In this respect it can in fact be demonstrated that <em>all </em>human relations and functions, however and in whatever they may present themselves, influence material production and engage with it determinatively to a greater or lesser degree.</blockquote><br />For such a short passage, I have revised the translation at MIA pretty seriously. Specially in the last clause. What I have translated as "engage" appears there as "have decisive influence on." The German <em>eingreifen</em> generally means "intervention," like a military intervention or what authorities do in general. A very literal translation would be "in-grip," stick your hand in and grab hold. So it denotes and connotes a very active and forceful imposition from the outside.<br /><br />Marx says, the relationships of production, in other words class positions, are actively and forcefully shaped by all the circumstances, like race and gender, that affect humans.<br /><br /><em>Pace</em> universalism/class reductionism.Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-60384999582652175982011-10-10T20:42:00.000-07:002011-10-14T21:10:13.008-07:00The Secret of Secrets<div>In the discussion about Zizek's strategic rhetorical confusion of source, content and attitude, the comment about 'secret connections' reminded me of a passage in The Holy Family in which Marx analyzed an example of the use of 'secret' as a Hegelian construct.<br /><br />I have transcribed the passage from the MIA with a couple of revisions. The translation linked to there translates Geheimnis as "mystery" but "secret" is a more colloquial equivalent and the word I have used.<br /><br />What Marx says of Hegel and Mr. Szeliga needs to be understood of the Hegelianism of Zizz and the Zizzniks too. Above all, the characterization of Hegel's method as "masterly sophistry." Then, how Hegel executes this sophistry through the subordination of the particular to the universal. Finally, how Hegel articulates this subordination, "in the speculative world are nothing but <em>semblances.</em>" Zizzian sophistry does not need verbal legerdemain to effect this reduction of the material to the seeming. Images from movies and accounts from the media provide him with ready made semblances. As well as the ultimate conclusion, that all the complex mechanisms of the sophistry amounts to nothing more than self-dramatization. Even Zizzian stand up is consistent digital Hegelianism. But enough interpretation, let's get on to Marx.<br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" size="4">The Secret of Speculative Construction</font></div><br /><br /><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch05.htm#5.2"> The secret of the Critical presentation of the <em>Mysteres de Paris </em>is the secret of <em>speculative</em>, of <em>Hegelian </em><em>construction</em>. Once Herr Szeliga has proclaimed that 'degeneracy within civilization' and rightlessness in the state are 'secrets', i.e. has dissolved them in the category of <em>'secret'</em>, he lets 'secret' begin its <em>speculative </em><em>career</em>. A few words will suffice to characterise speculative construction <em>in general</em>. Herr Szeliga's treatment of the <em>Mysteres de Paris </em>will give the application in detail.<br /><br />If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea of "<em>Fruit</em>", if I go further and <em>imagine </em>that my abstract idea of "<em>Fruit</em>", derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc., then in the <em>language of speculative </em>philosophy - I am declaring that "<em>Fruit</em>" is the "<em>Substance</em>" of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea - "<em>Fruit</em>". I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc.,to be mere forms of existence, <em>modi</em>, of "<em>Fruit</em>". My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course <em>distinguish </em>an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences as inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple <em>the same thing </em>as in the pear, and in the pear the same thing as in the almond, namely "<em>Fruit</em>". Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence in "<em>the </em>substance" - "<em>Fruit</em>".<br /><br />By this method one attains no particular <em>wealth of definition</em>. The mineralogist whose whole science was limited to the statement that all minerals are really "<em>the </em>Mineral" would be a mineralogist only in <em>his imagination</em>. For every mineral the speculative Mineralogist says, "the Mineral", and his science is reduced to repeating this word as many times as there are real minerals.<br /><br />Having reduced the different real fruits to the <em>one </em>"fruit" of abstraction - "<em>the </em>Fruit", speculation must, in order to attain some semblance of real content, try somehow to find its way back from "<em>the </em>Fruit", from <em>Substance </em>to the <em>diverse</em>, ordinary real fruits, the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. It is as hard to produce real fruits from the abstract idea "<em>the </em>Fruit" as it is easy to produce the abstract idea from real fruits. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at the opposite of an abstraction without relinquishing the abstraction.<br /><br />The speculative philosopher therefore relinquishes the abstraction "<em>the </em>Fruit", but in a <em>speculative</em>, <em>mystical </em>fashion - with the appearance of <em>not </em>reliquishing it. Thus it is really only in appearance that he rises above his abstraction. He argues somewhat as follows:<br /><br />If apples, pears, almonds and strawberries are really nothing but "<em>the </em>subtance", "<em>the </em>Fruit", the question arises: Why does "<em>the </em>Fruit" manifest itself to me sometimes as an apple, sometimes as a pear, sometimes as an almond? Why this <em>semblance of diversity</em>, which so obviously contradicts my speculative conception of <em>Unity</em>, "<em>the </em>Substance", "<em>the </em>Fruit"?<br /><br />This, answers the speculative philosopher, is because "<em>the </em>Fruit" is not dead, undifferentiated motionless, but a living, self-differentiating, moving essence. The diversity of the ordinary fruits is significant not only for my sensuous understanding, but also for "<em>the </em>Fruit" itself and for speculative reason. The different ordinary fruits are different manifestations of the life of the "one Fruit"; they are cystallisations of "<em>the </em>Fruit" itself. Thus in the apple "<em>the </em>Fruit" gives itself an apple-like existence, in the pear a pear-like existence. We must therefore no longer say, as one might from the standpoint of the Substance: a pear is "<em>the </em>Fruit", an apple is "<em>the </em>Fruit" an almond is "<em>the </em>Fruit", but rather "<em>the </em>Fruit" presents itself as a pear, "<em>the </em>Fruit" presents itself as an apple, "<em>the </em>Fruit" presents itself as an almond; and the differences which distinguish apples, pears and almonds from one another are the self-differentiations of "<em>the </em>Fruit" and make the particular fruits different members of the life-process of the "<em>the </em>Fruit". Thus "<em>the </em>Fruit" is no longer an empty undifferentiated unity; it is oneness as <em>allness</em>, as "<em>totality</em>" of fruits, which constitute an "<em>organically linked series of members</em>". In every member of that series "<em>the </em>Fruit" gives itself a more developed, more explicit existence, until finally, as the "<em>summary</em>" of all fruits, it is at the same time the living <em>unity </em>which contains all those fruits dissolved in itself just as it produces them from within itself, just as, for instance, all the limbs of the body are constantly dissolved in and constantly produced out of the blood.<br /><br />We see that if the Christian religion knows only <em>one </em>Incarnation of God, speculative philosophy has an many incarnations as there are things, just as it has here in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the <em>existence </em>of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but <em>semblances </em>of apples, <em>semblances </em>of pears, <em>semblances </em>of almonds and <em>semblances </em>of raisins, for they are moments in the life of "the Fruit", this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract <em>creations of the mind</em>. hence what is delightful in this speculation is to rediscover all the real fruits there, but as fruits which have a higher mystical significance, which have grown out of the ether of your brain and not out of the material earth, which are incarnations of "<em>the </em>Fruit", of the <em>Absolute Subject</em>. When you return from the abstraction, the <em>supernatural </em>creation of the mind, "<em>the </em>Fruit", to real <em>natural </em>fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the <em>unity </em>of "<em>the </em>Fruit" in all the manifestations of its life - the apple, the pear, the almond - that is to show the <em>mystical interconnection </em>between these fruits, how in each one of them "<em>the </em>Fruit" realises itself by <em>degrees </em>and <em>necessarily </em>progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence, the value of the ordinary fruits <em>no longer </em>consists in their natural qualities, but in their <em>speculative </em>quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of "<em>the </em>Absolute Fruit".<br /><br />The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something <em>extraordinary</em>. He performs a <em>miracle </em>by producing the real <em>natural objects</em>, the apple, the pear, etc. out of the unreal <em>creation of the mind </em>"<em>the </em>Fruit", i.e., by <em>creating </em>those fruits out of his <em>own abstract reason</em>, which he considers as an Absolute Subject outside himself, represented here as "<em><em>the </em></em>Fruit". And in regard to every object the existence of which he expresses, he accomplishes an act of creation.<br /><br />It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determinng features <em>invented </em>by him, by giving the <em>names </em>of real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his <em>own </em>activity, by which <em>he passes </em>from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the <em>self-activity </em>of the Absolute Subject, "the Fruit".<br /><br />In the speculative way of speaking, this operation is called comprehending <em>Substance as Subject</em>, as an <em>inner process</em>, as an <em>Absolute Person</em>, and this comprehension constitutes the essential character of <em>Hegel's</em> method.<br /><br />These preliminary remarks were necessary to make Herr Szeliga intelligible. Only now, after dissolving real relations, e.g, law and civilisation, in the category of secret and thereby making "<em>Secret</em>" into Substance, does he rise to the true speculative, <em>Hegelian </em>height and transforms "<em>Secret</em>" into a self-existing Subject <em>incarnating </em>itself in real situations and persons so that the manifestations of its life are countesses, marquises, grisettes, porters, notaries and charlatans, and love intrigues, balls, wooden doors, etc. Having produced the category "<em>Secret</em>" out of the real world, he produces the real world out of this category.<br /><br />The secrets of <em>speculative construction </em>in Herr Szeliga's presentation will be all the <em>more visibly </em>disclosed as he has an indisputable <em>double </em>advantage over <em>Hegel</em>. On the one hand, Hegel with masterly sophistry is able to present as a process of the imagined creation of the mind itself, of the Absolute Subject, the process by which the philosopher through sensory perception and imagination passes from one subject to another. On the other hand, however, Hegel very often gives a <em>real </em>presentation, embracing the <em>thing </em>itself, within the <em>speculative </em>presentation. This real development <em>within </em>the speculative development misleads the reader into considering the speculative development as real and the real as speculative.<br /><br />With Herr Szeliga both these difficulties vanish. His dialectics have no hypocrisy or dissimulation. He performs his tricks with the most laudable honesty and the most ingenuous straightforwardness. But then he <em>nowhere </em>develops any <em>real content</em>, so that his speculative construction is free from all disturbing accessories, from all ambiguous disguises, and appeals to the eye in its naked beauty. In Herr Szeliga we also see a brilliant illustration of how speculation on the one hand apparently freely creates its object <em>a priori </em>out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the <em>object</em>, falls into the irrational and unnatural <em>bondage </em>to the object, whose most accidental and most individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general.</a></div>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-44763085483231368972011-10-07T09:40:00.000-07:002011-10-07T09:41:33.816-07:00Thank You Naomi Klein Well Said As Usual<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/07-0">Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now<br />by Naomi Klein<br />I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.<br /><br />I love you.<br /><br />And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.<br /><br />Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.<br /><br />If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.<br /><br />And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”<br /><br />That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.<br /><br />“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”<br /><br />Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”<br /><br />But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.<br /><br />Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.<br /><br />Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.<br /><br />Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.<br /><br />But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.<br /><br />We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.<br /><br />Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.<br /><br />The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.<br /><br />These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.<br /><br />We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.<br /><br />The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.<br /><br />What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.<br /><br />I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.<br /><br />That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.<br /><br />A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.<br /><br />§ What we wear.<br /><br />§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.<br /><br />§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.<br /><br />And here are a few things that do matter.<br /><br />§ Our courage.<br /><br />§ Our moral compass.<br /><br />§ How we treat each other.<br /><br />We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.<br /><br />Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.<br /><br />Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.</a>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-40107283412701260232011-10-04T02:32:00.001-07:002011-10-04T02:32:07.903-07:00<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2TF8L2DWhpw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-50709173793899822382011-10-01T14:28:00.001-07:002011-10-01T14:28:39.461-07:00<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pQonhh9jW3k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-34431042616107020342011-10-01T05:06:00.000-07:002011-10-01T05:13:33.841-07:00It's Always Football<object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.footytube.com/v/NTkwMjg="></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.footytube.com/v/NTkwMjg=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object><br /><br />So that's what happened. Early October 2010, Angela Merkel attended a match in Germany against the Turkish national team. A large contingent of the fans were supporting Turkey, for which several ethnically Turkish German residents kept their nationality to play. And every time Mesut Özil had the ball, the Turkey supporters whistled - in a German home stadium! <br /><br />So she basically made a beeline from the stadium to the television to tell the world MULTICULTURALISM HAS FAILED!!!!<br /><br />It's always football.Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-10893181633648274362011-09-30T17:34:00.000-07:002011-10-02T07:20:16.817-07:00Too StarkeySo instead of a consistent critique of anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny, we get from the Zizney crowd a constant stream of anti-Semitism, racism, Islamophobia, heteronormativity, homophobia and misogyny punctuated by isolated, ad hominem, ceremonial public whippings and pillory of individual sinners (often, like Atzmon, some or other sort of troll or provocateur*) whose material it is suggested ought to be suppressed as it taints pure environments like <i>The London Review of Books</i> or ZeroBooks imprint. These ceremonies serve not only to implicitly certify Zizney's own product as racism-free and ideologically fit for consumption, but they protect that product from the perils of proximity to the blueprints or specs that such product, when not wrapped in the Radical Left packaging and its alibis, can resemble. Zizek's "half ape blacks", "orangutan" cousin, or "incredibly painful birth of African-American consciousness" in Sethe's act of "killing what is most dear to her - her progeny", (not to mention all the prime time tv examples of this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBiP8j5vG4c">animalisation</a>) are easier for Zizney fans to pretend are unobjectionable or even insightful and "philosophically important" if not seen beside R W Johnson's baboons and the like. The Zizney pillory obstructs in fact the most effective and well-established pedagogical method deployed against racism in the culture wars, which is the exposure of themes and motifs and patterns across different works and media. A sincere commitement to anti-racism and against anti-Semitism would certainly involve using the occasion of Atzmon's new book to teach about the resurgence of these themes, which would mean showing the themes and motifs and tropes which connect Atzmon, Zizek, Mearsheimer and others. Instead, naturally, Zizney takes action to preempt and disrupt such an enlightening discourse - the kind that achieved in the first place everything against the old supremacist mythology and in favour of genuine truthful and emancipatory historiography that Zizney is trying now to dismantle - by isolating one of the most heuristically useful examples of the Zizney ideology (Atzmon's), which could be a really effective tool in exposing the resurgent discourse across many genres and national media, and insisting on viewing it as the opposite and enemy of the more successful versions of the discourse (Zizek's mainly). This theatre preserves the legitimacy of the anti-Semitic mythology itself against the threat posed by careless or too obvious versions (or versions that aren't designed to serve the main purpose, which is apology for US empire <i>including</i> Zionist colonialism and the usual displacement of public anger onto scapegoats). <div><br /></div><div>The right wing or mainstream version of these things may even often be more subtle and less lurid and baroque than the "radical left" versions, but they tend to be issued from a stable instead of a floated point of view, and this is key to the danger they pose to the new digimedia age postmodern racist ideological products. The newest stuff, that really works and is very popular, floats the point of view (<a href="http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2011/03/white-memes-and-white-dreams.html">Reckless Tortuga</a> is a vivid example) to give the consumer, who is reluctant to declare himself racist, the means of evading challenge or criticism. The floating, in text product, is accomplished by such tactics as un-assigned quotation marks ("scare quotes" are only one type) or preamble labelling like "the typical liberal counter-proposal is..." or "my first anti-Semitic reaction was...". This is an important innovation; the kinds of product Zizney attacks don't have it - in that product the point of view is stable: R W Johnson is himself observing/asserting/concoting in his own voice an analogy between baboons and Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, but Zizek offers his "half ape blacks" from an unidentified point of view that is actually several layers thick:</div><div><br /></div><div>the innermost position of articulation is some imagined revolutionary soldiers in Saint Domingue during the Haitian war of independence. Zizek puts on a "you've-heard-this-all-before" voice which is intended to be the voice of soldiers: they are saying "you see we the primitive half-ape blacks..."</div><div><br /></div><div>but he embeds this performance of those imagined revolutionaries within a caveat - in fact these imagined revolutionaries didn't say this. So what is he performing? This brings us the next layer of point of view in which the image is encased; there is <span style="font-style:italic;">another</span> set of revolutionary black French soliders who are singing the Marseillaise and (Zizek informs us) "it didn't mean 'you see we the primitive half-ape blacks'". They sing the Marseillaise, like the soliders Zizek perfoms making some odd gesture, but they don't say what he performs them saying.</div><div><br /></div><div>The speakers he does imitate are performed but disavowed; he shows them to us, he physically demonstrates some gesture of theirs, but denies they existed. What are they here for?<br /><br />.... so whose point of view is this? Who is imagining soldiers singing the Marseillaise in order to say "you see we the primitive..."? The point of view of this subject, the subject who imagines the figures Zizek performs, is hazy.</div><div><br /><br /></div><div>...and yet further out from this hazy subject who imagines soldiers singing the Marseillaise to show that they, though primitive half-apes, "can also participate in your...' there is yet another subject, another point of view, making fun of that point of view. And with this other subject making fun of the unidentified subject who imagines soldiers singing the Marseillaise in order to show that they are primitive but still can participate in your [trails off] the "mocking voice" acquires a second layer. The sound of the mockery is doing double service. It is not only the tone indicating the attitude the unidentified misinterpreter of events assigns to the soliders singing the Marseillaise envisioning themselves as "half-ape blacks", it is the mockery directed at that unidentified subject who is mocking, by yet another unidentified point of view.</div><div><br /><br /></div><div>All this disguises the lack of sense or reason or excuse for the lurid racist imagery and permits the audience to enjoy it, but only if things like R W Johnson's baboons are not also part of this audience's diet of discourse.</div><div><br /></div><div>The floated enunciating subject is a consistent feature of Zizney and it's key to its marketing to the audience it attracts: it allows that audience who takes pleasure in the symbolic racist violence to shift out of range when challenged and to present the racist discourse as a critique of itself. It evades all responsibility for the articulation by allowing the subject (Zizek and his audience, fashioned by this very complicity into a "we") to slip away into a labyrinth of perspectives built around the statements.</div><div><br /></div><div> The operation is so convoluted the consumer can almost always avoid having to explain why such a critique of the figments of the critic's own imagination and obsessions would be necessary or what it accomplishes, because discussion gets diverted into chasing the position of the subject who articulates.</div><div><br /></div><div>With this technique, which involves a heavy use of passive construction and generalisation, the text becomes interactive, malleable and immune to ordinary rebuttal (albeit not to rebuttal, although always the defender can accuse the critic of being "ungenerous", and this must almost always be for an evil, personal, possibly psychotic motive). </div><div><br /></div><div>The danger then the old fashioned material poses is that the floated-pov articulations can be pinned down, at least to a point, by comparison and situating within the context of the older material and the old fashioned current material. And removing the context for the reassertion of racist and supremacist material that is presenting itself as radical, fresh and insightful is essential. Each sentence must be considered, as Rodney King assailants' defence lawyers understood each blow must be evaluated, in isolation. In isolation from the statement it is rebutting, "it was not the Holocaust which left Ljuljana almost without Jews" becomes an assertion one can (just barely) defend. For example, Richard Seymour defends the statement by removing it from the context in which it actually appears and supplying it a new context - to suggest it is rebutting a statement like "the Holocaust was the first instance of anti-Semitism in Slovenia" -- and also a foil, that which it nobly doesn't say, which is "the Holocaust had no effect at all on Jews." Seymour deploys <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-anti-semitic">highly competent Zizney technique</a>, providing this new context for the statement he's defending and suppressing the actual context (the statement is put forward to prove that Kirsch's assertion "Zizek was born and raised in a town the Holocaust had left almost without Jews" is false and that stating it is "despicable".) </div><div><br /></div><div>This is the same technique Seymour used in his defence of Zizek's proposal to discuss whether exterminating gays would protect "us" from Nazism:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'helvetica neue'; line-height: 24px; "><blockquote style="font-size: medium; ">There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno – suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky’s infamous remark from his essay “Proletarian Humanism” (sic! – 1934): “Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear.”(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, “Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland,” in <i style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II</i>, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky’s inciting statement, as well as Adorno’s reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the “revolutionary” paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their “sexual depravity”… In order to function as the support of a “totalitarian” community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed “dirty secret,” shared by those who are “in.” Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of “Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless… (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)”? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the “essentialist” mistake of dismissing the Rightist “militaristic” homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the “authentic” subversive homosexuality.</blockquote><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />To defend this he isolates the statement <span style="font-style: italic; ">What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, </span>and he supplies it a new context, one in which it is a rebuttal to a statement like "is the 'gay libinial economy' inescapably left wing?" and a foil to "all gays are necessarily Nazis."<br /><br />So the individuals who must be pilloried and ostracised by Zizney interfere with this kind of evasion. They are those who produce the old low-tech type of discourse which do not have the wheels and gears that allow the defence against straightforward challenges - "Jews are plotting" not "this typical liberal position misses the irony that the paradox is that the very same Jews who are plotting once embodied what Kant called the public use of Reason" - the juxtapositon of which with the floated type can expose its effects.**<br /><br />So the latest is Atzmon who, wishing to be as brutally clear with his "shocking" remarks as possible, instead of saying, as Zizney does, "the paradox is" that the very same "Jewish intellectuals" who demand "all others" give up "their ethnic particularity" are Jewish tribalists (with despotic powers comparable to Stalin's with which they persecute their critics like Mel Gibson, etc), merely states this without the "theoretical analysis" regarding "the paradox" which effectively creates the illusion that the enunciator recedes a slight distance from the fact he is offering as fact, which then allows for the whole apparatus of interactive flexibility to be initiated. </span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Atzmon delivers many of the assertions that Zizney promotes regarding "the Jews" but without the Lacanian packaging (the psychoanalytic-flavoured "explanation" for example of why anti-Semitic and racist discourses are truths uttered for naughty pleasure, and indeed have "performative efficiency", so at least in the case of those advanced by "whites", <span style="font-style:italic;">must</span> be true). He is to Zizek's anti-Semitism (whom he really likes) as Starkey is to Zizney's white supremacism. Zizney/Zizek is actually more lurid, and the Zizney oeuvre (leader and acolytes) partakes of more of the fantastical and fabulous, while Atzmon's is closer in "realism" of setting to Mearsheimer, but Atzmon's discourse, especially when he evokes Zizek's psychoanalytic "theories" for support, is a danger to the carefully constructed but fragile inner mechanism of the Zizney versions which are intended to persuade not outrage. If you put the two side by side, the former serves to clarify the latter too visibly - like a drawing of an animal's skeleton placed next to the drawing of the great ball of fat and fur it appears from the outside - but also to halt its motion, to lock the gears. Atzmon, like Starkey, shows the bones if the apology for imperialism and the civilising mission of white supremacy of which the Zizney output consists, but he also contributes to a context that is difficult to ignore and therefore impacts the way the Zizney fables of "the Jews" - unique nation, ancient tribe, collective neurotic psyche - appears.<br /><br />Starkey really offered the clearest fixed-pov example of the Zizney story of the perils of multiculturalism. Zizney tells us frequently of the "universal mingling, multi-culti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity" allegedly foisted by "the Jews" who are "the original multiculturalists" on Europe even while these same Jews "ironically" or "paradoxically" (for this is "the paradox of Jewish Identity") preserving their own tribal particularity, is easily identified when placed next to a unabashed "right wing" statement:<br /><br /><blockquote>Starkey<br /><br />There's been a profound cultural change...the whites have become black...a particular sort of violent, destructive nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion...and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language <span style="font-style:italic;">together</span>, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois which has been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have the sense of literally a foreign country...this is the text sent by the young woman who was the olympic ambassador: "pigs shouldn't of killed dat guy last night innit, den dey wouldn't get blown up."<br /><br /><br />Zizney**<br /><br /><s>Alain Badiou</s> replaced by Angela Davis...women, race, what feminism did to communism, the proliferation of radical standpoints,.thinking with worms, alas poor Marx! communism from below, interspecies communism, weak communists, bell hooks: "Ain't I a commiunist?"</blockquote><br /><br />The list of Jewish corruption of Europe is all checked off - the White Male became the Black Female, the all white male elite was infiltrated by women and people of colour, and what flows from this is "universal mingling, multiculti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity" and of course the finale which exhibits this loss with the most sentimental alarm that the true Europeans have become foreigners in their own land and foreign speakers of their own tongue.<br /><br />We can easily see when these are set beside one another the contours of the trope at work, and from then on we can recognise it everywhere it appears. It is not a static image, but a narrative of corruption and degeneration which, typically, culminates in this performance of the hideously disfigured English, the national essence defiled in the comically inept, contemptible but disturbing mimicky of the sacred tongue.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />*<br />(I found it amazing at first that anyone would miss the tone of a guy who is suggesting we need to look into whether there is any truth to the blood libel, but then it occurred to me this must be perceived very differently by these hayseed devotees of the Slobbering Slovitzian who have had that thought actually pass through their heads and so are struck with panic and horror when everyone else is laughing.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**<br /><br />Zizek himself puts his propagandistic mechanism through all its paces, showing how to deny what he has said by shfting the position of the articulation.<br /><br />Adam Kirsch reads this: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility" as representing the position of Alain Badiou (Zizek's sincere straightforward paraphrase of Badiou).<br /><br />Zizek then claims, in high dudgeon, that it is not a paraphrase of Alain Badiou and does not represent his point of view, but he will not say whose thoughts he is advancing there. Instead he says, "what I do is provide a <span style="font-style:italic;">résumé </span>of how the French Zionist critics perceive contemporary Europe."<br /><br />What does this mean? The proposal about the 'final solution' (a phrase he does not quote but has introduced himself in quotes, to seem as if quoting, as if the term forced itself on his text from without, and then protests innocence of the suspicion it would be perceived as evocative of anything) cannot be accepted as the point of view of "French Zionists". Is he suggesting that "contemporary Europe" believes "the only true solution to the Jewish question is 'the final solution'..." or that <a href="http://www.freud-lacan.com/Champs_specialises/Psychanalyse_identite/Sur_Les_penchants_criminels_de_l_Europe_democratique_de_Jean_Claude_Milner">French Zionists</a> believe this is "contemporary Europe's" belief?<br /><br />Let's look at it marking the point of view as we go:<br /><br /><blockquote>[There] is an interesting struggle which has been going on recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France.</blockquote><br /><br />That's Zizek informing us from his knowledge.<br /><br /><blockquote>The struggle concerns the status of the "One" as the name of a political subjectivity, a struggle which has led to many broken friendships (say, between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner).</blockquote><br /><br /><br />Still Zizek speaking.<br /><br /><blockquote>The irony is that this struggle is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Lévy, Miller, Regnault, Finkielkraut), and between "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" intellectuals.</blockquote><br /><br />Who is being quoted as labelling the intellectuals Jewish or non-Jewish? Or are these scare quotes? What do these words mean?<br /><br /><blockquote>The question is, is the name of the One the result of a contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial particular identity?</blockquote><br /><br />This at first glance appears to be Zizek himself characterising a question that some unidentified intellectuals have asked. But it may be that it is Zizek's interpretation of the debate between the "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" intellectuals that some or all would not accept.<br /><br /><blockquote>The position of Jewish Maoists is that "Jews" is such a name which stands for that which resists today's global trend to overcome all limitations, inclusive of the very finitude of the human condition, in radical capitalist "deterritorialiszation" and "fluidification" (the trend which reaches its apotheosis in the gnostic-digital dream of transforming humans themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one hardware to another).</blockquote><br /><br />Zizek himself is speaking his opinions about what the Jewish Maoists believe about someone else's idea. Who has the idea that "Jews is such a name which..."? It may be the Jewish Maoists own view that "Jews" is such a name, but it may be the Jewish Maoists idea of how other people perceive Jews. Or, it may be Jewish Maoists idea of how other people believe Jews perceive themselves or how other people believe Jews believe other people percieve Jews. That floated position means what follows has no definite point of view assigned but can be assigned as convenient to the defence of the text against challenge. Who is quoted as using "deterritorialization"? Is it that same subject who asserts that the trend of fluidication reaches its apothesosis in the gnostic-digital attitude? Who is the gnostic-digital attitude attributed to? Is it assumed to be correctly attributed? Is it the Jewish Maoist assigning attitudes to a subject with a gnostic-digital perspective? Is the Jewish Maoist reliable on this? Is it even the Jewish Maoist who assets this?<br /><br />It continues:<br /><br /><blockquote>The name "Jews" thus stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is.</blockquote><br /><br />Who is speaking? Is this the gnostic-digital thinker, according to The Jewish Maoist or to Zizek? Is it the Jewish Maoist's idea of what the name "Jews" stands for? Is it Badiou's idea of what the name "Jews" stands for for the Jewish Maoist? Is it Zizek's idea of what the digiera gnostic thinks the name "Jews" stands for for the Jewish Moaist? Or what Zizek thinks the name "Jews" stands for for the digignostic? Or is it for Zizek himself that the name "Jews" stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is?<br /><br />Next:<br /><br /><blockquote>Along these lines</blockquote><br /><br />What lines? This is the final erasing of the trail, reaching the maximum ambiguity, before a new assignment of pov:<br /><br /><blockquote>Along these lines, François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jews (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they "yield with regard to their name" -- a reference to Lacan's ethical maxim "do not yield with regard to your desire"...[elipsis in original] One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer's later texts.</blockquote><br /><br />A point of view briefly emerges clearly Regnault says the "contemporary left" demands - only to vanish at once in the reference to some previous "shift from radical emancipatory politics to fidelity to the Jewish name". Who is recommending one remember here? We have a purported previous instance (to no specific later instance) of Jews repudiating universalism for Jewish particularism, but who thinks this appropriate to remember "here"? Regnault? Or Zizek? If Regnault, does Zizek agree? Is he suggesting that Regnault is making an insightful case for some intrinsic Jewish particularism? Or is he himself making that case?<br /><br />Now all the shifting gears are set in motion to unmoor the text entirely with the next statement:<br /><br /><blockquote>Jews here are the exception: in the liberal culturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity - except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism...[elipses in original]</blockquote><br /><br /><br />Who is saying Jews here are the exception? Is what follows a complaint from Regnault? Or an observation of Zizek's? And where is here? Is this again the Maoist Jews as a group attributing views to the liberal multiculturalists? Is it Zizek attributing views to the liberal multiculturalists? Is the attribution accurate? Is Zizek himself declaring that Jewish self-assertion is Zionist racism or endorsing that view? Is he endorsing the Jewish Maoists perception of the liberal multiculturalists as correct but not the content of the view the former attribute to the latter? Is he identifying a new party who holds the view that liberal multiculturalists insist (only) Jews can't assert their identity because it is Zionist racism? Is he interpreting the (disavowed) implications of the liberal multiculturalists or is he paraphrasing their assertions? Where is Zizek's own point of view here?<br /><br /><blockquote>In contrast to this approach</blockquote><br /><br />What approach? The approach of the Jewish Maoists complaining about the liberal multiculturalists complaining about the Jewish Maoists? Or the approach of the liberal multiculturalists complaining about the Jewish Maoists? Or the approach of the Jewish Maoists to Jewishness and Zionism?<br /><br /><blockquote>In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic of religious roots).<br /></blockquote><br /><br />In contrast to liberal multiculturalists who claim that Jewish self-assertion is Zionist racism but everyone else can assert their own identity, someone (Zizek or the Jewish Maoists or someone else) claim Badiou and others insist on something. What does Badiou insist on? Or are we still listening to Zizek's account of what the Jewish Maoists think? (This will all be characterised later as a résumé of French Zionists perceptions of contemporary Europe, recall). Is this statement regarding what Badiou insists on in fact the false accusation of the Jewish Maoists?<br /><br />Anyway, either Badiou insists on fidelity to the One which emerges in political struggle for naming and has no ethnic or religious roots, or Badiou is accused of this wrongly by someone.<br /><br />At this point I would say the text leans toward inviting the interpretation that Badiou is being accurately characterised by Zizek and not slandered by the Jewish Maoists, (but in his self-defense against Kirsch he will claim it is clearly the latter, and that this characterisation of what Badiou insists on is spoken from the point of view of Jewish Maoists and articulates their erroneous fantasy of what Badiou insists on.)<br /><br /><blockquote>From this point of view</blockquote><br /><br />That is, from either Badiou's point of view or the point of view Badiou is falsely attributed by the Jewish Maosists, (this is important as we are nearing the Kirsch selection)<br /><blockquote><br />From this point of view, fidelity to the name "Jews" is the obverse (the silent recognition) of the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles.</blockquote><br /><br />Someone may think fidelity to the name "Jews" is associated with the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. Then again, Zizek may be suggesting that nobody thinks this, that "this point of view" - which is another instance of refusing commitment to content ("this point of view" could say "JM's pov" or "Badiou's pov" or "this approach" could say "the liberal multiculturalist approach" or "my approach" or "Regnault's approach"; "along these lines" could say "the lines of Badiou's reasoning" or "the linbes of Jewish Maosist's contentions"; the ambiguity is deliberate and necessary for the text's equivocations and malleability) -- is the non-existent point of view that the Jewish Maoists wrongly believe is Badiou's.<br /><br />Whose point of view is it? one is forced to wonder fruitlessly. (In fact, we the readers know from material outside this text that this is the position Badiou has taken and which Zizek has reiterated often in a cruder racialised way that Badiou daintily avoids. So we can assume Zizek knows that's how most of his readers will interpret the sentence. But Zizek will claim that he is not paraphrasing Badiou at the crucial passage, and that this is obvious.).<br /><br />Onward:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement.</blockquote><br /><br />Jeez, who is this now? Now we have a sudden proliferation of layers of subjectivity, as if a prism had been placed on the text. Is this sentence:<br /><br />a) Zizek informing us the Jewish Maosists falsely claim Badiou says "no wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also.."? (That is, is Zizek still characterizing "this point of view" and is it Badiou's as seen by the Jewish Maoists? Could one accurately quote it "From this point of view [which Jewish Maoists attribute to Badiou]...[it's] No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" [Badiou's wrong idea of the Jewish Maoists according to the Jewish Maoists' paranoid fantasy] are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement"?)<br /><br />b) Zizek informing us Badiou says "no wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement"? (Is if "from this point of view" that is Badiou's actual point of view as far as Zizek understands it?)<br /><br />c) Zizek himself saying, given what he has learned from Badiou that it is no wonder to him that those who demand fidelity to the name Jews are also those who warn us etc? (Is it not "from this point of view" at all but a resumed direct statement from Zizek's own point of view after the digression into ventriloquism?)<br /><br />d) Zizek himself saying that given the way the Jewish Maoists misconstrue Badiou it is no wonder to him that they also warn us against "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement?<br /><br /><br />All of these possibilities are made available for the convenience of the defender of this anti-Semitic screed.<br /><br /><blockquote>Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins and Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror.</blockquote><br /><br />Now we are getting very close to Kirsch's excerpt, and where are we? Who is speaking? Zizek will claim to Kirsch that this is not his own voice or assessment, but that it is obvious that Kirsch has maliciously construed it as such, though he cannot say precisely what the quoted passage means and to whom it's contentions are attributed. What Zizek, under challenge for the exterminationist dreams offered by the text, will claim the sentence says:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"I Zizek claim that the Jewish Maoists falsely accuse Alain Badiou of believing falsely that their politics - the politics of the Jewish Maoists - consists in accepting the fundamnetal finitude..."</span><br /><br />That is, contrary to what appears to be the dominant reading invited (but not unequivocally - the whole text is equivocal and this is one of the cagier sentences regarding the enunciating position) this stuff about finitude and Christian love and Jewish Maoists and Badiou and the One is all nonsense, is all air, senseless stuff referring to nothing, the bizarre phantasmagoria that is the content of the slanderous paranoiac minds of the Jewish Maoists now Zionists, and it has no relevance to anything but a personal spat between them and Badiou and unnamed other "non Jewish" Maoists, a spat about exactly nothing. That is Zizek's reply to Kirsch - this is a <span style="font-style:italic;">résumé </span>of the meaningless nonsense in the heads of French Zionists who think Alain Badiou said something or other; what he may or may not have said Zizek won't waste time on.<br /><br />And then, once this is asserted, Kirsch is scolded as despicable for supposing otherwise.<br /><br />Yet we have seen these topics in Zizek over and over, even offered sometimes unequivocally in his own voice, and celebrated by his fans as brilliant radical Lacanian whatever and important philosophical insights.<br /><br />But in defence of his loathsome and incoherent propaganda image barrage, Zizek will claim to Kirsch that his claim is that<span style="font-style:italic;"> nobody's</span> politics "consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins and Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror." Rather this is the insane vision that Jewish Maoists have of what Alain Badiou and "others" think the Jewish Maoists own beliefs are.<br /><br />Now comes the passage Kirsch supposedly misreads:<br /><br /><blockquote>To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the Jewish question is the "final solution" (their annihilation), because Jews <span style="font-style:italic;">qua objet a</span> are the ultimate obstacle to the "final solution of History itself, to the overcoming of division in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.</blockquote><br /><br />Who thinks they are putting some succinctly? Is the speaker Zizek and is he putting his own views succinctly? Or Zizek putting the views of the Jewish Maoists succinctly. Or the Jewish Maoists putting their own views succinctly? Or the Jewish Maoists putting Badiou's view succintly?<br /><br />Kirsch thinks it's Zizek putting Badiou's views succinctly. Why is that less plausible than the other possibilities? It would seem to be the most plausible in fact.<br /><br />But in defence of his text, Zizek suggests (without stating or claiming clearly) this is a paraphrase of the paranoid fantasy the Jewish Maoists entertain regarding Alain Badiou's beliefs about Jews. It is part of "a résumé of how the French Zionist critics perceive contemporary Europe". But then who is speaking the next sentence?:<br /><br /><blockquote>But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews, from Spinoza to Marx to Freud?</blockquote><br /><br />Kirsch is accused of engaging in "a pure manipulation to read my [Zizek's] praise of the “universalist” Jews as an argument for exempting them from annihilation." (Of course the reply has the same ambiguity as the original - to whom is Zizek attributing the belief in "universalist" Jews? If he is suggesting that the "annihilation" of "the Jews" means the the transformation of particularists (Jews) into universalists, what could annihilation have to do with universalists? How is there such a thing as a universalist "Jew"? Why does Zizek refer to Spinoza and Freud as "Jews"? Or to whom does he attribute this description?)<br /><br />Who then is being quoted without quotation marks as saying "But is it not rather..."? Is this Zizek suddenly answering the Jewish Maosists? Or is he engaging a mock battle with their imaginary Badiou for their entertainment? Or is it still the Jewish Maoists speaking, now pleading with their imaginary Badiou not to exclude all Jews racially from the community of Christian and Stalinist universal love which they wrongly think he believes in and wished to exclude them from on the basis of his false belief in their fidelity to the name "Jews"?<br /><br /><blockquote>The irony is...</blockquote><br /><br />- continues whoever, or interjects someone else -<br /><br /><blockquote>The irony is that in the History of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a "homeless" and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms.</blockquote><br /><br />Who is talking (the Jewish Maoists notice an irony? They attribute the noticing of an irony to Badiou? Badiou notices this irony? Zizek notices the irony?) and about whose perceptions of what "the Jews" "stand for" (who have the anti-Semitism as a point of view? Zizek himself? Badiou? The Jewish Maoist's imaginary Badiou? Someone else? All?) And what has this to do with what came before?<br /><br /><blockquote>The first thing to recall</blockquote><br /><br />-- says the Jewish Maoist, or their paranoid imaginary Badiou, or someone new, or Zizek --<br /><br /><blockquote>The first thing to recall is that this struggle is also inherent to Jewish identity.</blockquote><br /><br />And so this assertion, against his critic, Zizek claims as his own:<br /><br /><blockquote>all I do in the passage from which Mr. Kirsch has torn out a couple of words ("fidelity to the Messianic impulse,” etc.) is to point out the debt of political and theoretical universalism (of what Kant praised as the “public use of reason”) to the Jewish experience, claiming that the conflict between the defenders of and skeptics about the State of Israel is inherent to the Jewish identity. </blockquote><br /><br />Or does he? Who is "claiming" this about Jewish Identity?<br /><br />And in all this of course what becomes impossible is to challenge all the many assertions, (since first one must figure out if they are asserted or reported, then evaluate whether they are reported accurately, etc) the refreshed anti-Semitic themes, imagery, motifs, the statements of pseudo-fact, etc.<br /><br />The upshot of all this is Zizek had made no assertions or observations on his own account; he is not responsible for the content of the text. He has merely set up the text like a tent and watched in dismay as it was invaded by unruly chattering hordes of other assertions made by people wearing masks he was unable to penetrate to positively identify who said what. The text was transformed into a record of this cacaphony and he watched this helplessly.<br /><br />The theme staged was The Jew and the motifs:<br /><br /><ul><li>Jewish tribalism as an obstacle to Christian universal love and communism </li><li>that Christian universal love and communism require the annihilation of the Jews, which alone is a final solution to the Jewish question</li><li>the Jewish tribalists manipulate the desire of European others for Christian universal love for the purpose of fostering capitalist alienation while they preserve their ethnic cohesion and collective identity to achieve supremacy</li><li>the "liberal multicultural left" who fall under the sway of the self-styled "universalist" Jewish intellectuals is anti-Semitic in resenting Jewish tribalism while promoting the tribalism of the inferior races (those whose "very being "is inferior as Heidegger explained)</li><li>the rootless cosmospolitan "uncanny Jew" continues to operate and live in the "<a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-palestinian-question-the-couple-fetish/">interstices</a>" of nations, and is the object of the anti-Semitism of the National Jew (this Jew and that Jew are then the secret sinister forces behind both the "old" and the "new" anti-Semitism)</li><li>this Jewish tribalist particularism matched to the fomenting of a pseudo-universalism which renders the <i>gentes</i> vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and prevents Christian love and communism is an historically demonstrable pattern of which the Jew Horkheimer is an example before the Jew Milner</li></ul><br />These motifs are paraded back and forth before the reader throughout the text but the author takes no responsibility for them appearing there. When challenged he suggests in fact the Jews are to blame for them - they are the figments of the imagination of Jews which have been forced into his book by mysterious powers.<br /><br />***<br /><span class="Apple-style-span">* </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span">Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities<br />"It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do" (B. Brecht)<br />ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM<br />(Updated programme!)<br />13th/14th/15th March 2009<br />Logan Hall, Institute of Education<br />20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL<br />"The intellectual impulses of the 90s will come from women"<br />Annette Frick. Action with Gaby Kutz in front of Gerhard Richter's 48 Portraits<br />Ludwig Museum, Cologne, 8.8.1990<br />Communism in the 2010s: a world where many worlds fit?<br />In solidarity,<br />riverside cells<br />Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities<br />ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM<br />(Updated programme!)<br />13th/14th/15th March 2009<br />Logan Hall, Institute of Education<br />20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL<br />Friday March 13<br />Registration opens at 11.30am<br />Costas Douzinas Welcome to the people<br />2pm Stuart Hall Opening Remarks<br /><s>Alain Badiou Introductory remarks</s><br />Angela Davis "Women, race and class"<br />Michael Hardt "The REproduction of the Common"<br />Lynne Segal "What Feminism did to Communism"<br />Bruno Bosteels "The Postcolonial Hypothesis: Frightened Communism?"<br />Nancy Hartsock "The Proliferation of Radical Standpoints"<br />Peter Hallward "Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Body"<br />Jean-Luc Nancy, Christine Delphy and members of migrant and feminist groups will be<br />present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.<br />6 pm End<br />Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities<br />ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM<br />(Updated programme!)<br />13th/14th/15th March 2009<br />Logan Hall, Institute of Education<br />20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL<br />Saturday March 14<br />Registration opens at 8.30am<br />10am Starhawk "Thinking with worms: Reclaiming the communist soil"<br />Alessandro Russo "Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?"<br />Subcomandante Marcos "Intergalactic Decentralized Communism"<br />Alberto Toscano "Communist Power / Communist Ignorance"<br />Toni Negri "Communisme: reflexions sur la pratique"<br />Silvia Federici "Creating Communities of Care"<br />1pm Lunch<br />3pm Vandana Shiva "Ecofeminism and the challenge to Western Communism"<br />Terry Eagleton "Communism: Leontes or Paulina?"<br />Jacques Ranciere "Communism without Communists?"<br />Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon "Communists without Communism"<br />Alain Badiou "Communism: an empty name"<br />Hilary and Steven Rose "Alas, Poor Marx"<br />6pm End<br />Drinks Reception and Street Party – Jeffery Hall and outside<br />Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities<br />ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM<br />(Updated programme!)<br />13th/14th/15th March 2009<br />Logan Hall, Institute of Education<br />20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL<br />Sunday March 15<br /><s>10am Slavoj Zizek "The view from up here: Communism from above is<br />no communism at all"</s><br />Sandra Harding "Communisms from below"<br />Donna Haraway "On Interspecies Communism"<br />Gianni Vattimo "Weak Communists"<br />Judith Balso "Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible<br />name for politics?"<br />bell hooks "Ain't I a Communist?"<br />12am Skill sharing workshop: Alter-communisms!<br />Bring your experiences and visions from local and transversal struggles<br />Concluding Collective Trance: Channelling Karl Marx<br />2pm End</span></div></div>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-3674401746802295262011-09-29T13:28:00.000-07:002011-10-02T16:37:35.974-07:00Good form<blockquote><br />[I]s it not that, in the “post-modern” global empire, what was hitherto the “Jewish exception” is increasingly becoming the stardard rule: a particular ethnic group which participates fully in the global economy while simultaneously maintaining its identity at the level of Milner’s Fourfold, that is to say, through its founding cultural myths and rituals, which are transmitted from generation to generation? Milner misses this key point insofar as he fails to grasp the actual functioning of the emerging global <span style="font-style:italic;">pastout </span>empire: in it, all particular identities are not simply “liquefied,” rendered fluid, but maintained – Empire thrives on the multiplicity of the particular (ethnic, religious, sexual, lifestyle…) identities which form the structural obverse of the unified field of Capital.<br /><br />This is the deepest irony that escapes Milner: he fails to notice the radical ambiguity about his thesis of the Jewish exception as resisting modern universality. When Milner posits the Jews as insisting on the Quadruple of the familiar tradition, against the dissolution of this tradition in the non-All of modernity, he thereby repeats [that is, he embodies] the standard anti-Semitic cliché according to which the Jews themselves [Milner himself being the representative Jew in this case] are always in the first ranks of the struggle for universal mingling, multi-culti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity – with the exception of their own ethnic identity. The passionate appeal of Jewish intellectuals to universalist ideologies is tied to the implicit understanding that Jewish particularism will be exempt, as if the Jewish identity cannot survive when Jews live side by side with other people who also insist on their ethnic identity – as if, in some kind of parallax shift, the contours of their identity can become clear only when the identity of others is blurred. The alliance of the USA and the State of Israel is thus a strange cohabitation of two opposed principles; if Israel <span style="font-style:italic;">qua</span> ethnic state <span style="font-style:italic;">par excellence</span> stands for the (Quadruple) tradition, the USA – much more than Europe – stands for the non-All of society, the dissolution of all fixed traditional links. The State of Israel thus, in effect, functions as the small <span style="font-style:italic;">a</span> of the US big A, the ex-timate core of tradition that serves as the mythic point of reference of the chaotic non-All of the USA.<br /><br />...Does not the idea of the Jews forming a nation-state imply the <span style="font-style:italic;">end</span> of Judaism – no wonder the Nazis supported the plan! The Jews stood for the “Fourfold” precisely in order to maintain their identity without a Nation-State. The only consistent position (theoretically and ethically) is to reject such alternatives, and recognise both dangers: “The critique of anti-Semitism or the critique of Zionist politics? Yes, please!” – far from being exclusive opposites, the two are connected by a secret link. There really is anti-Semitism in much of the contempotaty Left, for instance, in the direct equating of what the State of Israel is doing in the occupied territories with the Nazi Holocaust, with the implied reasoning: “The Jews are now doing to others what was doing to them, so they no longer have any right to complain about the Holocaust!” And there actually is a paradox in that the very Jews who preach universal “melting-pot” are all the more insistent on their own ethnic identity.</blockquote><br /><br />- Zizek,<span style="font-style:italic;"> the Parallax View</span><br /><br />So the Atzmon theatre reveals <span style="font-style:italic;">conclusively</span> that in fact the Zizney members <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> understand after all that this is anti-Semitic propaganda and have understood this perfectly all along; they are entirely familiar with the themes and can recognise them even when they are packed in various distracting ornaments and paired with declarations of benevolence and left commitments.Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-12253050976185159462011-09-16T09:54:00.001-07:002011-09-16T09:54:36.727-07:00<iframe frameborder="0" width="480" height="360" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xacsos"></iframe><br /><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xacsos_angela-davis-nous-parle-de-son-comb_news" target="_blank">Angela Davis nous parle de son combat (Octobre...</a> <i>par <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/Nzwamba" target="_blank">Nzwamba</a></i>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-76809748802928349352011-08-25T07:53:00.000-07:002011-08-25T08:10:26.104-07:00For Those Who Scoff at Heels and SneaksNazim Hikmet in 1931
<br />
<br />ON SHIRTS, PANTS, CLOTH CAPS AND FELT HATS
<br />
<br />If there are those
<br />who'd call
<br />me
<br />"an enemy
<br />of a clean shirt,"
<br />they should see a picture of my great teacher,
<br />The master of masters, Marx, pawned
<br />his jacket,
<br />and he ate maybe one meal every four days;
<br />yet
<br />his awesome beard
<br />cascaded
<br />down a spotless
<br />snow-white
<br />starched shirt ...
<br />And since when did pressed pants get the death sentence?
<br />Wise guys
<br />should read our history here, too:
<br />"In 1848, as bullets parted his hair,
<br />he'd wear
<br />pants of genuine English wool
<br />in true English style,
<br />creased and waxed
<br /><em>à l'anglaise</em> -
<br />the greatest of men, Engels ...
<br />When Valdimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin stood
<br />like a fire-breathing giant on the barricades,
<br />he wore a collar
<br />and a tie as well ..."
<br />As for me
<br />who's just another proletarian poet
<br />--Marxist-Leninst consciousness, thirty kilos of bones,
<br />seven liters of blood,
<br />a couple kilometers
<br />of blood vessels,
<br />muscles, flesh, skin and nerves,
<br />the cloth cap on my head
<br />doesn't tell
<br />what's in it
<br />any more than my only felt hat
<br />makes me a tool
<br />of the past that's passing ...
<br />But
<br />if I wear a cloth cap
<br />six days a week
<br />it's so that once a week
<br />when I'm out with my girl
<br />I can wear
<br />clean
<br />my only felt hat ...
<br />Except
<br />why don't I have <em>two </em>felt hats?
<br />What do you say, master?
<br />Am I lazy?
<br />No!
<br />To bind pages twelve hours a day,
<br />to stand on my feet
<br />till I drop,
<br />is hard work ...
<br />Am I totally stupid?
<br />No!
<br />For instance,
<br />I could hardly be
<br />as backward
<br />as Mr. So-and-So ...
<br />Am I a fool?
<br />Well,
<br />not
<br />completely ...
<br />Maybe a bit careless ...
<br />But all the time
<br />the real reason is that
<br />I'm a proletarian,
<br />brother,
<br />a proletarian!
<br />And I'll own two felt hats
<br />- two <em>million </em>-
<br />only when,
<br />like every proletarian,
<br />I own - <em>we </em>own-
<br />the textile mills of Barcelona-Habik-Mosan-Manchester!
<br />And if n-o-o-o-o-o-t,
<br />NOT!
<br />Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-527975334799764452011-08-20T12:32:00.000-07:002011-08-20T13:02:49.349-07:00Reading Z in 1936<div>This year New Directions reissued Louis Zukofsky's massive poem "A." I can't speak to the whole, but the first hundred pages deliver complex and, for Qlipothim, congenial compositions on revolutionary art and politics. Several times I have thought I should post passages here. But extracts from such a long and complex poem lose meaning in isolation.<br /><br />But today I was reading those comments on the rebellions in England by the renowned Zzk. And thinking about how vacuous the self-packaging of the image-commodity celebrity leftist'is. Particularly it's self-celebration of the psychoanalytic complexities of its own relationship to corporate image-commodities, to misogynist movies and racist jokes, and its disappointment in the vulgar desires for tangible commodities evident in the rebellion.<br /><br />Then I read Zukofsky, who has this to say in 1936:<br /><br />Untiring action, but free<br />From the lie that it can take the place<br /> of mass action.<br />We are not Xerxes who had the sea<br /> scourged with chains.<br />But to determine the facts does not<br /> mean to give up the struggle.<br />Learn, learn, learn!<br />Act, act act!<br />Be prepare, well and completely prepared<br />To make use, with all our forces,<br />Of the next revolutionary wave.<br />That is our job.<br /><br /><br /><br />Good day,<br />The 'left' really<br />Thinks the International is a faithful Penelope.<br />Well, our International does not weave<br /> during the day<br />To undo its work during the night. -<br />Thanks for such Marxism<br />Which immediately attributes all society<br />To its economic basis.<br /><br /><br />And I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles,<br /> dissertations, pamphlets ..<br />In short that .. literature which<br />Flourishes in the dirty soil of society,<br />I mistrust those who are always contemplating<br />The several questions, like the Indian saint his<br /> navel.<br />Arbitrary hypotheses .. personal need<br />To justify personal abnormality .. before<br />Middle class moralitym and to entreat its patience. </div>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-59447110227245154122011-08-11T04:33:00.000-07:002011-08-11T04:54:47.919-07:00Sheer criminality<span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.afinelung.com/?p=3109">A Fine Lung</a></span> on the current outburst of <s>free private enterpr</s> <s>Thatcherism</s> <s>deregulated shopping</s> shocking, inexplicable selfishness in England:
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<br /><blockquote>You start with a society in which material wealth is the only way to get ahead. You follow with a culture in which fame and money dominate. You bombard people with images of luxury goods that you tell them they must have. You create a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 20% of the country’s wealth whilst the least wealthy 50% own just 7%. You make that gap wider. You tantalise and take away.
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<br />You remove educational allowances from the young. You put a higher percentage of them out of work than at any time in the last century. You tell them that they must sustain £30,000 of debt to go to college to get a degree that isn’t even likely to get them a job. You spend ten billion on a sports event a few miles down the road that they cannot afford to even attend. You talk of Olympic Dreams (TM) as you close their sports facilities. You cut local services and their parents’ jobs to pay for the debts and disasters of your banks. You condemn their lives through your economic ideology as you sit in your cabinet of millionaires. You criminalise them for socialising in groups that you say are ‘anti-social’. You stop and search them over and over and over again and when they react you punish them. You turn one against another. You individualise and marginalise and alienate them from their neighbours. You talk of community but make it an illusion. You give no hope.
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<br />You do all this.
<br />
<br />And when they come out of the estates to which you confine them, to take the goods they cannot afford, from the shops that won’t let them in, on streets denied to them by the police who harass them, in defiance of the politicians who condemn them, organised on social networks and media from which you have made millions, filmed by your cameras for your corrupt media companies for our consumption; when they do all this, all you can say is: ‘This is sheer criminality’.
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<br />You bet it is.</blockquote>
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<br />Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-75181366928376011812011-08-08T23:00:00.001-07:002011-08-08T23:02:50.491-07:00Vile Logic In The GuardianEven in the context of CiF, the latest Ziz is amazing:
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<br /><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/anders-behring-breivik-pim-fortuyn"><blockquote>The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is "we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst".
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<br />The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first "multiculturalists": their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant.
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<br />But what if we <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> entering an era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion – that there is "no freedom for the enemies of freedom", as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle, this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, there was a vile logic to Breivik's choice of target: he didn't attack foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards intruding foreigners. The problem is not foreigners, it is our own (European) identity.</blockquote></a>
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<br />Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-52021893389965116592011-05-29T14:49:00.001-07:002011-05-29T14:49:55.097-07:00<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KubzkLs_pMk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-32457665876302041712011-05-24T12:25:00.001-07:002011-05-24T12:25:35.131-07:00Listen.<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TtU5TjPiyO0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-15904410421013682812011-05-24T11:12:00.000-07:002011-05-24T11:13:04.763-07:00<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Yfz20ZhOw4Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GEr-xXHVjKk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-30426272696224760352011-05-24T11:08:00.000-07:002011-05-24T11:09:05.461-07:00<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/epAv6Q6da_o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18174466.post-43707164857874956232011-05-20T02:16:00.000-07:002011-05-20T02:17:01.554-07:00<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed_show_v2/300/2011/5/19/story/manning_marables_controversial_new_biography_refuels"></script>Qlipothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17343878659776948134noreply@blogger.com2