(This is not our usual fare, for sure, but it is a wide ranging social criticism touching some things which have been on my radar, seriousness and the infantilization of capitalist society. bp)

Missing
MAY 11, 2015 | 4 COMMENTS

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Olivio Barbieri, photography.
“If before the 1970s (roughly speaking) buildings were primarily regarded as (public) expenditure, after the 1970s buildings became mostly a means of revenue – which fact ironically only contributed to further downward pressure on construction budgets. Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”
Rainier de Graaf
“Every generation must build its own city.”
Antonio Sant’Elia
Futurist Manifesto
“Everyday to battle
the weight of increasing dumbness,
insensitivity to new ways;
the joy
— not died — but crushd,
hushd in the dross of repeated
inarticulate scorn.”
Robert Duncan
“It is cruelly intimidating – Lacan writes of ‘the obscene super-ego’ – and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past (‘something there badly not wrong’, Beckett’s line from ‘Worstward Ho’, is exactly what it must not say) and it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about morality, and about ourselves. Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right.”
Adam Phillips
It is my sense that something very distinct has occurred over the last thirty years. There is no definitive threshold for mapping this societal shift, but the second term of Reagan, which began in 1985 is as good a place as any to chart what was happening. Reagan and Thatcher became the faces of a new erasing of the idea of quality, the erasing of of the idea of compassion, and the acceptance of a new ruthless selfishness. They were, of course, only the logical outcome of larger forces. But it all sort of came together in the mid eighties. With Nixon, there was a florid grand madness, a literal paranoid almost Shakespearean villainy. With Reagan, there was only banality. Naked Imperialist ruling class racist hatred. But somehow it was embodied in the idiotic figure of this former actor.

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Adam Cvijanovic (detail: Discovery of America)

The shift in popular culture, that coalesced in the American cinema of the 80s, can be traced back to the late fifties. The end of the post war cinema that featured the great noirs of German emigre directors like Siodmak, Lang, and Wilder and the sincerity of early TV drama, much of it recorded live, had been corporatized. But even through the 1970s there was work financed by studios that still retained a sense of both social criticism and aspirations of something transcendent. The 80s also signaled the perfection of a new model of political hegemony in the U.S. This was the start of a total control of government ‘message’. Marketing had taken over all of electronic media. One need only look at American film, though, to see that by the end of that decade almost nothing heterogeneous was being produced. This decad included two Indian Jones movies, Poltergeist, Top Gun, Terminator, E.T., Pretty in Pink, Goonies, Die Hard, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, and The Breakfast Club. It was the James Cameron, Harold Ramis, and Steven Speilberg decade. This was Reagan’s “New Morning in America” marketed to a pre-fabricated demographic called ‘baby boomers’. It was less the themes of these films, though that bears discussion, but more the aesthetic regression, the loss of craft.
Hilton Kramer’s essay “Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s”, written in 1982, sanctioned the official end of modernism.
“Bourgeois culture, for its part, acquired a finely developed sense of what could be absorbed and what deferred. For this process of selection and adjudication, it created special institutions—museums and exhibition societies, schools, publications, foundations, etc.—which functioned, in effect, as agencies of a licensed opposition.”
Hilton Kramer

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Max Pam, photography.

This may be the most important aspect of this coalescing of culture forces already in play. It expressed something of a new artistic and cultural careerism. This institutionalization of the avant garde had the effect of neutralizing not just opposition, but the idea of opposition. The loss of an avant garde conscience (sincerity) resulted, even in the 80s, in a constant process of cultural excavation. Earlier styles were resurrected, but without context. Earlier styles were bottled and re-sold, not as new, but as a kind of mock authentic nostalgia. Nostalgia which was never called nostalgia.
Quoting Kramer again…
“In the period that saw Andy Warhol emerge as the very model of the new artist-celebrity, moreover, sheer corniness was no longer looked upon as a failure of sensibility, nor was superficiality—or even vulgarity—regarded as a fault. Bad taste might even be taken as a sign of energy and vitality, and “stupid art”—as its champions cheerfully characterized some of the newer styles that began to flourish in the late Seventies and early Eighties—could be cherished for its happy repudiation of cerebration, profundity, and critical stringency. Try to imagine Arshile Gorky or Mark Rothko or Robert Motherwell countenancing such a turnabout in attitudes and you have a vivid sense of the differences separating the last stages of modernist orthodoxy from the very different moral climate of postmodernist art.”
and
“For the purposes of this conversion, no instrument has proved to be more powerful or more pervasive than the attitude of irony we call Camp, which has the effect of neutralizing the substance and aggrandizing the style of whatever it embraces. Irony ridicules, of course, and ridicule normally wounds and discredits. But the ridicule of Camp is a mock ridicule that contains a large element of praise, accommodation, and affection.”

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Kevin Francis Gray

Now Kramer rightly points out that the first victim of this new sensibility was *seriousness*. Remember this essay was written in 1982. One of the first effects of the loss of seriousness was that of an in-depth criticism. Not just an aesthetic criticism, but a political one as well. After all, Reagan was a moron, and he was President. Sontag’s essay on ‘Camp’, as Kramer notes, allowed for the pretense of seriousness in discussing junk and kitsch. The collapse of critical standards (per Jencks) paved the way for a corporate manufacture of everything from artworks to architecture to food to clothing. But contemporary society, that of 2015, is in the nether reaches of this cultural and societal shift that began, or solidified, in the 1980s.
“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated
woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows
that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already
been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara
Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false
innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he
will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves
her; but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
Umberto Eco

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Antoine-Denis Chaudet

Now post modernism was being talked about in the mid 1960s, and was the central topic of the 70s in most journals of architecture and aesthetics. Late capitalism though was increasingly about keeping down cost and maximizing profit. So different things were taking place in architecture than in fine arts or popular art. Still, there is a through line between Phillip Johnson and Peter Eisenman, Warhol, Koons, and James Cameron. And I could easily include, really, George Soros, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. And the common denominator is in a sensibility of strip mining the human, of rapacious careerism that sees in people little more than a disposable nuisance or the raw material for social advancement. In architecture, Norman Mailer (of all people) called post modern buildings “a landscape of psychosis”. Again, we are thirty years down the road from such observations.
As seriousness got lost, something else got lost with it. When nothing is investigated deeply, or rather, seriously — because you can go deep in a shallow fashion, and that is what I see a lot of. Endless serialization of the trite, in the name of thoroughness. Shallow is never exhausting, so you can do a lot of it. Hobbies are like that. You can collect 14 million candy bay wrappers or beer bottles, which is thorough. Mass production — an automated mass production now — seemed to demand to be replicated. The out of work worker could still have a hobby that imitated work. Instead of turning out Chryslers, beer bottles could be collected, or coasters, or swizzle sticks. So the loss of seriousness also ushered out an idea of maturity. Something else that seems a phenomenon that is quite recent, and that is the appeal of the infantile or childish. One sees it now in political (sic) corporate journalism, but one aimed at a youth market (think Molly Crabapple, FUSION, VICE, et al). The voice of this journalism is uniformally juvenile. The very idea of a ‘youth market’ is actually fairly recent.

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Puerta de Europe (KIO Towers). Phillip Johnson, architect. 1989

There is a loss of dignity. Perhaps this is conscious on the part of marketers. The flattering of an ever less educated public with adverts that make sexy an idea of stupidity and narcissism. The proletarian version is seen in beer commercials, for example, where the protagonist of these mini narratives appears always slightly befuddled; the state one might find oneself in after consuming a six pack. But the more pernicious version is the educated white infantile. The spoiled narcissistic twenty something who feels entitled to opinions, who is deserving of being heard regardless of qualifications, or simply by virtue of being cute. This is really not gendered, either. The *cute* trope is found in both young men and young women. In an image of Puer Aeternus. Peter Pan, the beautiful commodity-personage, self aware, at least as regards their own beauty, and it’s market value, but obdurate and petty in all relationships. There is a streak of self pity in this version of petulant Lolita cum Tadzio figure. And such self pity is the projection of guilt, and self hatred and fear.

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Riverside Museum, Glasgow. Zahia Hadid, architect. 2011.

The voice that seems to have gone missing is the voice of the serious. The public intellectual who is not going to appear on Good Morning America or Late Night with Pol Pot or whomever, Mily Cyrus. I am no longer sure the public can recognize the sound of maturity. For most Americans maturity is either senility, or simply the embalmed plastic celebrity. The horror of plastic surgery is probably only now, in the last few years, becoming obvious. For now those who got procedures done twenty five years ago, are seeing the effects over decades. But I digress. In architecture, if Phillip Johnson was the poster boy for the front edges of post modernism in building, then Zahia Hadid is the legatee some thiry years on. There is precious little difference in their visions, really. Hadid is only making Johnson less serious, and that’s hard to do, really. There are great architects working today; Wang Shu the 2012 Pritzker winner, really is an outlier for his work is so singularly serious. And others of the late 20th century deserve notice; Ludwig Leo for one, and Charles Correa, and Luis Barragan. I probably should appreciate the 2015 Pritzker winner, Frei Otto, more than I do, but I just can’t.
Ludwig Leo though is worth looking at if you don’t know his work. The Berlin based architect (born in Rostock in 1924) was a functionalist, and clearly influenced by Soviet design and Bauhaus. He wrote little and his output is small, but his buildings become more beautiful as they age. Everything was low tech, and that’s another quality that sets him apart. During the war he was badly injured on the Eastern front, and returned home to have his leg amputated. He worked quietly, almost completely in and around Berlin.

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T.U. Circulation Tank, 1974. Berlin. Ludwig Leo, architect.
Buro Schwinner writes of Leo:
“He was called a radical functionalist, but that’s true just in the sense that his major ambition was to make the buildings as usable as possible. He was far away from single-use definition of space, things turn into something else, a canteen turns into a lecture hall turns into an operating theatre. He was deeply involved as an architect in the reformation process of the German school system, especially with his study of the Laborschule Bielefeld and the Landschulheim am Solling in Holzminden, but also his competition for the French High School and a school’s gymnasium in Berlin.
Most of his work is an investigation into institutional changes. He’s a Protestant answer to brutalism, in particular James Stirling, and gives different answers to the phenomenons of the time like structuralism, High-Tech, Pop, Neo-constructivism, Rationalism, and the Postmodern.”
His greatest building was the DLRG headquarters (for The Society of German Lifesavers) in Berlin-Spandau. It is, like the Circulation Tank, a construction that defies definition. But never is it alienating. None of his work was.

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DLRG Headquarters, Berlin-Spandau. 1967. Ludwig Leo, architect.
Thomas Edlemann wrote of the DLRG:
“The second striking building Ludwig Leo designed, and like the “Umlauftank” it has a unique effect when viewed from afar, was the “Bundeslehr- und Forschungsstätte der DLRG” on the banks of Pichelssee in Berlin’s Spandau district, which was built at almost exactly the same time, namely between 1967 and 1973. The 11-story edifice with a triangular footprint and a stunning 44-degree angle to it served among other things to store lifeboats during winter – they were hauled upwards using a steel system on the west frontage and spread across specific stories. The structure also features teaching rooms with fold-out seating sections in a two-floor hall, a kitchen and cabins for overnighting.”
Ludwig drew his own designs, submitted them in presentations in a manner that was out of time; a man caught in the strange chasm between pre-war modernism, the Cold War, and whatever we call what has come after. Scarred both physically and psychologically, his voice is serious, modest, perhaps a bit melancholy. But for me the DLRG is among the very best of modern architecture. And the T.U tank, aging now, rust creeping in at the corners of the roof, is today more sublime than when it was built. He was an architect of human scale. His buildings became embedded into the communities in which they were built.

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Ludwig Leo
In a sense my bringing up Leo is not at all a digression. There is a sensibility expressed by Leo, which is independent of his influences, and of his era. Is Leo post modern or modern or neither? I think probably he is a sort of neo modernist, for what that’s worth. But never mind, really, because it is this sensibility that comes through, his visual voice (sic); and this is something that is operative just beneath the conscious analysis of his work. Can one talk of architecture the way one discusses novels or paintings or movies? I don’t know, but I think that there are obviously relationships between all of them.
The best buildings are narratives. I think it a mistake to deny narrative. It is good to keep in mind, when trying to talk about narrative, the shadow of this encroaching tide of kitsch/camp ethos, which has today (and this is the issue) shed one half of its dynamic — for mass culture today is no longer treated in terms like ‘its so bad its good'; there is simply *entertainment*. And entertainment is broad spectrum, all inclusive and hegemonic. The definition of ‘good entertainment’ is pretty elusive. One can find a number of mainstream publications that will talk about the upcoming summer TV schedule as if they are both discussing the Sistine Chapel, AND simultaneously discussing junk food. It’s the bizarre fusion of both ends of what was once the high/low dichotomy. The Walking Dead or season two of True Detective or Orange is the New Black are evaluated in terms that refer only to previous TV, and to their satisfaction quotient. Except the parameters of that quotient are never examined. And usually popularity is it’s own justification.

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Nobuo Sekine. Kobe, Japan. 1968
“Man’s first attitude toward language was confidence: the sign and the object represented were the same. The sculpture was a double of the model; the ritual formula a reproduction of reality, capable of reengendering it. To speak was to re-create the object alluded to. The exact pronunciation of the magic words was one of the principle conditions of their efficacy. The necessity to preserve the sacred language explains the birth of grammar, in Vedic India.”
Octavio Paz
The reason architecture looms as so primary in most discussions about aesthetics and culture has to do with its linkage of language, at its foundational level, and the social. Architecture is both political and mystical. The evolution of language and text is too complex to delve into here, but there is a sense that societies reach states of transformation or crisis when words lose their meaning. In a wider sense, societies undergo changes or revolutions of some sort when institutions lose their credibility. And credibility is linked to meaning. Paz, actually quotes the famous adage of Confucius who, when asked if here made Emperor what his first act would be. He answered, ‘to rectify the meaning of words’. The word for tragedy, in ancient Greek was meant to imitate the sound of a bleating goat as it was sacrificed. The significance of language is also evident in psychoanalytic theory. The unconscious, said Lacan, was structured like a language. In dreams symbols, images, words, all can have multiple meanings. The society that looks to control and dominate will first look at controlling the meaning of words. But more, it will look to control the usage of words. In contemporary society, that control has been, at least partly, also about eradicating meaning. Not just doing away with individual words, but doing away with a discussion of ‘meaning’. Of devaluing meaning as a concept.
Narrative is always mimetically engaged with, or at least ideally. It is that trigger to memory, to emotional or even epigenetic actions that order how the world is interpreted and felt. Everything is a story. Everything has a grammar. Architecture, then, is engaged with in perhaps the most complex ways of any artform, not least because it is so much more than an artform.

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Rolf Gunter Dienst

“It is telling that the most noteworthy architectural manifesto of 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the onset of an uncontested global rule of capitalism, is A Vision of Britain by Prince Charles. The modern age prefigured in ‘The Futurist Manifesto’, at the tail end of the Ottocento with its hereditary hegemonies, ironically concludes with an anti-modern manifesto written by a member of the British Royal Family.”
Rainier de Graaf
At 1 Hyde Park, London, a luxury apartment complex designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, is advertised (per de Graaf) as the most exclusive address in the world. Most of the flats (starting at 9 million pounds) are occupied by companies, and only nineteen are occupied as first homes (the majority are listed as second homes, which will illicite a tax break). One can find this phenomenon in most large cities in the U.S. or U.K. Most prestigious architecture firms are no longer even thinking of developing low income housing. And rarely are public buildings designed with anything more than cost in mind. Architecture is capital. The visual grammar of housing today is one in which history is a non-factor. The grammar of exchange value is risk avoidance, not just in material cost, but in ideas. One Hyde Park is the very least imaginative architecture you can find, but no matter, its good investment.

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Antonio Sant’Elia

When I try to grasp what I feel has gone missing, regardless of where I start I somehow end up back at books. People don’t read. When I was about sixteen (digression warning) I got a job at the old Pickwick Book store on Hollywood Blvd. It was a wonderful huge three story old building overflowing with books. I loved that job. My boss was an old man named Sidney. He has thick glasses and he had a genuine photographic memory. He never made any of us do too much work, but he wouldn’t tolerate our not knowing books and not helping people who were looking for books. There was not a title that Sidney did not know, nor its publisher, and usually what printing it was in, or if, in fact, it had gone out of print. I stood in the aisles on slow days reading. When I got to New York, at nineteen, I got a job at the Strand. I also loved that job, but not as much because I actually had to work a bit. But I was around book people in New York. We talked books, we bought books, we shared books. We found books exciting. I can barely remember that feeling. I remember there was an academic bookstore downtown somewhere off Cooper Square, at the time. I remember one day finding a copy of a Merleau Ponty title I had been searching for. I was almost deliriously excited. Or another time I had the job of cataloging a part of W.H Auden’s library. Books he had left in his apartment in New York. I was working for an Antiquarian Book store in the Village. Anyway, that was wonderful. I found a number of fascinating history titles. The point is that a certain form of attention comes into play when reading. Not when reading Vogue or Guns & Ammo.
“…adult infantilization, sysematically pursued by today’s cultural industries and resulting in the premature maturation of children and adolescents, whose psychic apparatus has purely and simply been destroyed by the psychotechnical systems of those same cultural industries — this infantilization is being manifested in an unprecedented regression.”
Bernard Stiegler

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*U* House, Toyo Ito, architect. 1976 Tokyo.
Reading with attention is a kind of meditation; in the sense that consciousness is directed in a way that triggers secondary retentions, and we house these, and access them later. Stiegler suggests the formation of attention is always already both psychic and social. We become individuals by learning, remembering, and storing the actualities of attention. Stiegler notes Foucault’s comment on the occultation of writing in Western society; but that he fails to take this observation to its logical conclusion. And this, I feel, is a critical point. Stiegler writes…“Public use of reason is not that of collective, social, and disciplined action but of individual thought manifested in the process of collective individuation within the critical space of ‘publication’…” What he is getting at is that the individual who has developed a maturity of reason, who has learned through attention, will then be able to articulate critical action with others, a critical public, who engage in some form of shared awareness. Of course this has not existed for a long time on any large scale. But today, there are ever fewer individuals who have not been strip mined of attention, of the ability to think. To absorb criticism — and there is a bit of a paradox here; for even in small communities of people who are working to organize for change, I see the exchange of ideas often succumbing to their own form of emotional obfuscation. Being criticized is less analysed than it is ritualized.

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*Towers of Silence*, Parsi burial platform. Edmund Bourne, photography. 1880s. Bombay India.

There is a connection between books and maturity. If architecture is an inscription of memory, of learned signs, and our individual testing and storing of experience in space and with space, then the process of attention, that which came or comes out of this psychic and social network of experience, is going to be reflected in the buildings of sanity, that are mirrors of attentiveness.
With reading comes a maturity and modesty. Even if that sounds sort of corny. All the experiences in the world cannot link one to those voices of the past. And there is in those readings a mirroring of our own primordial formation, our amnesia, and certainly our ambivalence. I am suggesting, I guess, that the ascension of a particularly ruthless super-ego, formed in a narcissistic dynamic, is linked to a lack of maturity — itself the result of atrophied attention (loss of reading) and hence a society of ugly brutal buildings occupied by ever more nasty mean spirited narcissists.
I am at least half serious. Of course the attention I speak of, can be found in non literate societies. Many people who never read are of transcendent awareness. Still, Western society is one that evolved through the Enlightenment, a republic of the written word, the Gutenberg Galaxy. So, the loss of reading is a bit like taking an Eskimo out of his environment and society and making him work as a tele-marketer. His sense of the world would suffer, and he would function almost as if suddenly blind and bi-polar. Contemporary Western white society is one taken out of its history in the republic of letters and sent out into this vast matrix of an information society, one of acute inequality and contradiction. The contradictions may be recognized but somehow elude the conceptual or interpretive grasp of the individual.

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Pottery fragment, ink writing. 7th century, Egypt.
Reading and writing are today, per Stiegler, hypermediated and instrumental. The nature of this mediation is technical, and that technical mediation is itself mediated by an economics of cultural capital. This is where the psychoanalytic aspect is quite relevant. Intelligence, or at least the ability to question oneself, to interrogate oneself about intelligence — to reach some form of maturity that allows for autonomous thought — is never an isolated issue. It is collective. If desire is a desire of the other’s desiring, then perhaps the tacit encouragement to posit a picture of ‘thinking’ that takes place alone is part of how a society of domination structures its consciousness industries. Mass culture today is electronic, and the collective is a simulacra. The direction taken by science, and new technology is one that affects sleep patterns, and alters perception. The capturing of attention by internet media, in all its platforms, has resulted in — for the young particularly — a kind of somatic panopticon. Time is a manufactured *now*. And attention is given a tacit definition that is in relation to instant circulation of data. It was Hume who first identified *sleep* as an obstacle to knowledge (along with madness). The control of human attention is a way to defer maturation.
Capitalist society privileges productivity, or the appearance of it and sleep was put down as some form of lower animal like behavior. It was unproductive time. Mass culture’s ‘capturing’ of attention has robbed the autonomous creativity involved in pre-modern ideas of reflection and dreaming. Both wakeful dreaming and sleep dreams. The entire society today has lost touch with its dreams. Anxiety is linked to sleep in contemporary society in the West. What am I missing? This anxiety might well extend to spatial perception. The architectural reflection today in the new securitized urban landscape is one of access to information. Not just being able to check your messages, but actual buildings that are themselves always somehow leading the occupant nowhere. But it is a nowhere that provides an illusion of endless data. There is a discussion to be had around the idea of ‘perspective’ today. Remember that Damisch argued the perspective paradigm, in Lacanian terms, was in effect making the vanishing point the plane of projection, and hence the vanishing point becomes the ‘gaze of the other’. Margaret Iversen writes of Damish…“This he {Damisch} thinks is demonstrated by Brunelleschi’s first experiment in perspective, as described by Antonio Manetti, in which he drilled a peep hole through a small wooden panel precisely at the vanishing point of a depiction of the Florence Bapistry so that one could see through it from behind and see an astounding illusionistic depiction reflected in a mirror. Damisch proposes that the vanishing point which is frequently marked in Renaissance painting by a depicted aperture such as a door or window, will from thenceforth have the significance of a look back, of a look that constitutes me as viewer.” Those apertures are looking back. Now this happens, I believe, on stage in another sense when the space off stage is what is returning the gaze and attention (!) of the audience. There is in writing, too, in grammer, and syntax, a form of guiding attention. There are Paleolithic cave art that demonstrate an awareness of perspective. So it was ‘reinvented’. The point though is the implied gaze of the other, the implied imaginary — has perhaps gone missing today. Or, rather, that perspective has become irrelevant. Heidegger did have this concept that man, in his technological world view, sees everything as a form of reserve-ready info. It is there to be ordered and cataloged and that the existential panic comes from a creeping awareness of oneself as part of that reserve-ready body of info.
The anticipation of interruption, as well as that strange very recent lack of ability to track narrative to not just resolution but to anything beyond the most basic first principle in play results in TV shows that begin and it is assumed never end. They are cancelled, or repeated, or continue on in stories that are careful to include their own possible failure to be renewed. Exchange value. The show’s meaning is in its concept. Oh, got it. The watching of the story unfold is secondary. So likewise the new celebrity architect is one creating massive structures that seem to never finally express anything more than ironic acknowledgement that there is nothing lasting or central or even significant in the space they occupy. They are a concept — and nothing more. They deny dream space. They are spaces that prohibit ritual even if advertised as being exactly that. The new mega sports arenas and stadiums are strangely impersonal and anti-community. But perhaps above all else much of this prestige architecture is there to stop you…stop dreams, stop access to the unwanted, stop thought, stop everything. It is a psychic checkpoint architecture.

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Allianz Arena, Munich. De Meuron and Herzog architects. 2005.

The idea of lifestyle — marketed as personal freedom of choice — is really a way to maximize control of time. This all echos Jonathan Crary’s excellent book “24/7″. I find that often my favorite artworks and architecture, today, are those that firstly, primarily, create a space, a channel or portal, to the unconscious. Often just that, for that is quite rare.
There was a small moment in one of the last episodes of Mad Men (which has not ended). It was a remarkable and moving scene. The ghost of Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse) appears besides Don Draper, while driving at night, otherwise alone. Cooper quotes Jack Kerouac..
“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?”
That was great stuff. So, it does sometimes happen.
We live in a landscape in which the militarism of the state often passes unnoticed. Orientation is fractured. The infantile narcissists must blind themselves to the omnipresent surveillance, and worse, to the reality of a society that is beginning to physically reflect its own undifferentiated psychosis. Crary says…“it is like a state of emergency, when a bank of floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night, seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never get turned off…”. The public now routinely accepts the infinite tasks it is given to prove their right to exist. There is literally less and less space for the kind of attention that allows maturation. There is no room to be adult.

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Curtis Moffat, photography. 1925

“As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
Robert Creely
‘I Know a Man’

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This is a very good piece. I am not sure I grasped all of it - I am not an artist type. But I enjoyed the lesson in architecture and style. The author's analysis appears, to me, to be solid.

This is a very good piece. I am not sure I grasped all of it - I am not an artist type. But I enjoyed the lesson in architecture and style. The author's analysis appears, to me, to be solid.

Welcome to the club, I am regretably rather tone deaf to a lot of what passes for art, but mebbe that ain't so regretable. With you on the architecture aspect of the essay too and certainly favor the 'function' school. I'm on quicksand when it comes to analysis of post-modernism but am fairly certain that the non-stop appeal to the infantile which is commercial advertising has a cumulative effect upon those subjected to it. And I'm guessing that the content in which the advertising is wrapped follows suit, as they are in the same business, selling shit. Constant stimulation for the conditioned low attention span, the 'youth culture' celebrated but don't read the fine print and now we all carry our own Skinner Box around in our pockets. Pigeons, indeed.

Damn! "We all carry our own Skinner Box around in our pockets." That is as good a depiction of our "social communications ball and chain" as I have heard. I am going to use that.

Damn! "We all carry our own Skinner Box around in our pockets." That is as good a depiction of our "social communications ball and chain" as I have heard. I am going to use that.

Ha, if I used it around here no one would know what I was talking about. But ya know, I still don't have one. At first you couldn't get reception where we moved to (that has changed) but I figure that if ya can't reach me at home or work where I spend the vast majority of my time then it can't be that important. The few instances where it might be useful are statistically insignificant, I'll get by like we did in the 'old days', 15 years ago, and forego that expense. And of course there's coltan but basically I'm an old fart.

Corrected Reality
MAY 20, 2015 | 2 COMMENTS

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Chapel of the Resurrection, Skogskyrkogården, Stockholm 1925. Sigurd Lewerentz architect.
“Belonging to or identifying oneself with a religious body in America today certainly does not mean that one thereby takes over the traditional Christian values of tolerance brotherhood, and equality. On the contrary, it appears that these values are more firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any religious group.”
The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al).
“It seems that Lewerentz was at various times leading and directed by this melancholia, and all that is inherent in its meaning. This fact became most explicit at Lewerentz’s Resurrection Chapel at Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. The pure starkness of the form is anchored in the studied geometry of the golden section, while the offset entry portico is pulled from the façade and held slightly off axis. These formal gestures are unprecedented in similar classical work of the time and inculcate the complex with a charged strangeness, appropriately reinforcing the program of procession from life to death.”
Thomas Ryan
I want to pull together several threads, or trends in thinking in the U.S. today, particularly the U.S. but it’s true in the U.K. to a lesser extent and perhaps in western Europe even. The ways in which anti intellectualism appear in the meta discourse of media and news outlets, and how the same anti intellectualism is applied to culture, and how, also, there is a growing attachment, or an almost obsessional sort, to images and stories and ideas of Empire, feudalism, and aristocracy.

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Jackie with Rachel *Bunny* Mellon.

In New York, at the Sotheby’s auction, a Rothko was sold for 75 Million dollars, a Warhol silkscreen sold for 16 million, a record for a work on paper, a Richter for 17.4 million, and a Francis Bacon for just under 30 mil. The reaction, if one were to survey social media, was uniformly to ridicule the artworks, not to criticize the auction house, the billionaire collectors, or the galleries involved. It was to blame the artists, the vast majority of whom are dead. Never mind Rothko was a strongly left leaning supporter of civil rights, a darkly depressive man, but one of great integrity; no, from most of this ever more philistine American class, the mildly reactionary white people class, there comes ridicule. From the left comes ridicule and hostility (and the almost pathological obsession with exaggerating and distorting the CIA attempt to co-op ‘the New York school’.) Why is this? Well, on both counts because it fits into easy to digest narratives. For the yahoos in Rubeville the snide “oh hell, I could do one of those a day” (which I actually read on a facebook thread) is the general response. The logic of which implies virtuosity as the goal — expertise and mastery of technique, but only a technique that results in recognizable realism. The left will point to the financialization of the art market, rightly, but also dismiss AbEx painters as inherently reactionary and/or masculinist, or whatever. For it’s always something. But see, what both these perspectives share is a dislike of enthusiasm for art.

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Jean Pascal Flavien

The left must point out the uses to which art-products are used — but also imply within that critique that the works themselves sort of inherently contained elements ASKING to be compromised and turned into decor for the CEO’s office at Exxon. A bit like blaming Muslims for wanting to be occupied because they wont control their culture (sic) or black people for being inherently criminal and irresponsible.
Capitalism can absorb anything. Turn anything into the commodity it wants it to be. Capitalism will also stigmatize the victims. At every every every every turn. Every one. The victim did something to bring calamity upon themselves. But how often do you hear leftists wax enthusiastic about art? Rarely. Some will applaud various obscure overtly leftist stories, but rarely if ever have I heard a leftist discuss Still’s work with color, or how to approach Stella’s black work. No, but I bet you *have* heard them praise the Mexican muralists.
Worth noting that Rothko’s work, or the majority of his important paintings, were bought by Listerine heiress Bunny Mellon, wife of Paul Mellon. Bunny planted the White House rose garden. I guess, as a sort of, let the old coot have a hobby gesture. But she owned two ten million dollar apartments in Paris, huge mansions in Antigua, Cape Cod, and Nantucket, as well as a massive 4000 acre estate in Virginia with its own landing strip for her private jet, and a Park Ave townhouse in NY. She financed John Edwards campaign, amusingly, and lived to be 103. The Mellons palled around with the Kennedy’s, and were an obvious part of the American ruling class. A parasitic vampiric ghoulish class of white WASP banking families whose tentacles extended into all facets of corporate America. This, this is who bought up Rothko, and paid, it is rumored, ten thousand to twenty thousand a painting — though she bought in groups. In Rothko’s later years his larger paintings sold for about twelve grand.

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John Haberle

There is a bad play now about Rothko, and snide really resentful articles by the likes of William Boyd. Why this hostility? Boyd of course is his own brand of self aggrandizing philistine. Still, such hostility at the art itself, never mind the long dead artist, seems symptomatic of the anti intellectualism I find everywhere. Adorno warned that Americans were prone to the appeal of mastery and technique — the residue of Puritanism and the Protestant work ethic. Practice practice practice. It is curious, though, how this notion of practice evolved in Asia, vs North America. In that stretch of time between WW1 and WW2, a certain coalescing of cultural attitude took place in the U.S. Evan Connell’s novellas Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge capture the stoic repressed flinty character of midwestern America. Dreiser did so a decade or two or three earlier. As a quick sidebar: Connell was always deserving of greater acclaim, but seemed in the shadow of Roth and especially Updike. As I believe Joshua Ferris once said of Connell, ‘he captured something of the boredom of the unexamined life’. In retrospect, Connell’s prose is clear, unadorned, and yet very fluid. Something I’d not say of Updike.
“Theory is theory in the authentic sense only where it serves practice. Theory that wishes to be sufficient unto itself is bad theory.”
Horkheimer

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Woodland Cemetary, Crematorium. Johan Celsing, architect. 2013

There is in this anti intellectualism a specific nostalgia for Victorian England and for colonial style, and an age of servants and what is perceived as refinement. Alongside this is another nostalgia for feudalism; an imagined sword and scorcery realm of castles and knights and serfs. In both the role of the servant looms very large. Penny Dreadful to Downton Abbey, to Mr Selfridge, to Game of Thrones, to the countless variants on Jane Austin-lite romances. It is of course more understandable that the UK produce some of this, it’s actually an organic part of their culture. More perverse is the U.S. longing for this. I am expecting a wave of network and cable drama with the gilded age as a backdrop. The Boss Tweed narratives, only with Carnegie and Mellon, Stanford, and Rockefeller as somehow the heroes.
The more germane factor in this growing fascination with the depiction of servants is that it is also projected forward into futuristic landscapes. Hence, it is deemed natural. There are servants and there are rulers. Natural law.

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Gregory Johnston

One of the issues with the new philistinism is its relationship to notions of realism. And realism with its foundation in mastery. In contemporary Hollywood film, awash in CGI and various techniques of color grading, realism has taken on certain cues related to technology. As Dan Seitz pointed out, Hollywood color codes according to genre (i.e. futuristic apocalypse films are grey and de-saturated, horror films are blue tinted, and sci-fi such as Matrix are green, etc). But everything else has been accorded teal and orange. This is because audience testing suggests teal and orange (opposites on the color wheel) are most *appealing*. The computer color correction has now, for big budget studio product, made everything teal and orange. I seem to recall ages ago that restaurant research, for many franchises, determined that purple and orange made you eat faster. Never mind this is more pseudo science, the result was a decade of fast food joints decorated in orange and purple. (here is the updated research https://www.swipely.com/blog/building-customer-loyalty-color-experts-rank-best-restaurant-colors/ The Cohn Brothers ushered in the era of DI (Digital Intermediary) with Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, the first feature entirely scanned into a computer for color correcting. But the point here is that these cues have been increasingly internalized for determining what is ‘realistic’.

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Color corrected Mona Lisa (courtesy of Into the Abyss blog).

There are literary equivalents, to a degree anyway. Margaret Iversen quotes Denis Hollier (From October 1994)…“{The shadow} is rigorously contemporary with the object it doubles, it is simultaneous, non-detachable, and because of this, without exchange value.”Hollier suggests that in literary work the first person is the equivalent of the shadow. The novel was what was called, at a certain point anyway, ‘descriptive realism’. It was, in theory, replaced..or subsumed in some way, by ‘performative realism’. I’m not inclined to actually accept this, but it raises interesting questions. And most of these questions seem today, a mere twenty years after Hollier wrote, problematic because of a basic confusion, I think anyway, about how people construct their notions of reality. And it speaks to just how threadbare Derrida is starting to feel today. My point though has to do with a manipulation of feeling in the public, the creation of narrative and of visual grammar that bolsters the propaganda of the state. Sy Hersh’s recent article on the death of Bin Ladin was either an example of *limited hang out* or it was in fact a small step toward revealing the workings of the propaganda machine. It was likely both, though certainly it was far from exhaustive and probably, in the end, as fictional as Zero Dark Thirty. For the public though, their enjoyment and appreciation of Bigelow’s film will not be diminished in the least. And this is because the mass public today, in the West, has developed an idea of realism and reality that is shaped by an idea of their own preeminence in what is meaningful. Consumption IS meaning. If I shop for it, I own it, and hence I have made it real. This is an adulterated version, and simplified, but basically the world is there to be shopped. The discarded inventory that didn’t sell is simply forgotten. Realism is synonymous with purchased. Or at least with the desire to purchase.
This connects in a way with Laura Mulvey’s The Index and The Uncanny. Still photography, per Rosalind Krauss stood at the crossroads of science and spiritualism. Which might be the best single line Krauss ever wrote.
“Hence the charm of family albums.Those gray or sepia shadows,phantom like and almost indecipherable,are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration,freed from their destiny; not however by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process:for photography does not create eternity as art does,it embalms time,rescuing it simply from its own proper corruption.”
Andre Bazin

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Karen Sander, at Esther Schipper Gallery.

In a sense Mulvey was asking what was the tense of the photograph. Benjamin was fascinated with this as well, and Barthes. For early photography seemed to capture some aspect of time that has gone missing in the age of the digital. The photograph lent itself as well to Lacan’s notion of the Real. Something outside what language could define. It may be that what this really was addressing was a sense of the uncanny, and it’s relationship to our own sense of mortality. There is no question that still photographs often inscribe an illusive quality that seems connected to death. I was thinking this week of the architecture of cemeteries and crematoriums.
“There is the difficulty of conceptualizing fully the inhuman nature of the camera machine and its ability to hold time,but there is also the resonance of death that culture and the human imagination have associated with photographic images.From this perspective,the slippage of language is a symptom of the presence of death and its inevitability.”
Laura Mulvey
The Nordic classicism of Sigurd Lewerentz reached its zenith in the Chapel of the Resurrection, built early in his career. There is the sense of death in the absent windows. The architectural grammar of the portico, the asymmetry of the entrance, and counter intuitive quality of scale. This is an uncanny building. But here there is a question having to do with the sense of viewing the still photo, and for that matter, the viewing of all artwork objects. But the photograph has a special place because of its quality of recording an instant. The viewer may stare for hours at the recorded *instant*. Somehow such contemplation invariably leads to an experience of the uncanny. Adorno saw a repression of the effects of modern art. A peculiarly modern experience that is given some credence by the growing sense of repression and denial in contemporary society of the trauma of life under a system of acute inequality. On the one hand there is a romanticizing of the feudal and of indentured servitude, and on the other a willful blindness to poverty and homelessness. The return, as Anthony Vidler pointed out (and Bhabha)of migrants and the diasporic, to the cities of the colonizer, have created a psychic rift and anxiety in the white educated classes of the West.

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Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.

“Trauma leaves a mark on the unconscious,a kind of index of the psyche that parallels the photograph’s trace of an original event.”
Laura Mulvey
So, there is an increasing desire for a doubled repression, which is partly expressed in this new anti-intellectualism. Bhabba insightfully writes…“that boundary that secures the cohesive limits of the western nations may imperceptibly turn into a contentious internal liminality that provides a place which to speak of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and emergent.” Vidler suggests architecture as the most acute metaphorical home for the uncanny. Looking at modern cemetery architecture would seem to reflect the truth of this.
“Years after coining “the culture industry,” Adorno (1967/1975) reflected that the word “mass” was excluded from the phrase because it was a dangerous word. The word “mass” might give the reader the wrong impression: that the culture industry contained “something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves” (p. 12). In the culture industry, the audience may select programs, buy tickets, or change channels, but in doing so, each person acts as “an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery” (p. 12). While some misguided analysts might see this as “even democratic, since it responds to a demand” (p. 16), in fact the demands are produced and ultimately shaped by the industrial apparatus itself. The culture industry is a sham democracy that solicits input only for its own ends. The culture industry produces the audience; it is not governed by them.”
Christian Sandvig
and
“…social media have also now evolved into an elaborate system that selects social products and makes them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. Social media platforms filter, censor, control, and train—and they may do so without the user’s awareness. Advances in computation now make a social media industry possible that is based on individual difference and action rather than sameness and passivity. But in other respects, the social industry resembles the culture industry: the co-option of culture has been superseded by the co-option of sociality.”
Sandvig

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Sergey Novikov, photography. Abandoned movie theatre, Moscow.

Today, the anti-intellectualism finds expression on both the right, and in a new faux left that assumes a posture of savvy entrepreneurial superiority. The truth is, of course, that this new left is only radical in its infantilism. Today, the escalation in the circulation of image has taken along with it the de-contextualizing of much of what was often the ideological formative impulse for its creation. Things are just packaged and sold and repackaged and resold again. Each time they shed some of the, often, radical political meaning of the original. Audiences in the U.S. are now expecting juvenile material, and almost always the familiar. Anything that demands real focused attention is usually dismissed or ignored. The post modern in architecture seems to have intuited that nostalgia was losing its traction and the missing was resurfacing in disquieting ways. As far back as the 1940s, both Adorno and Benjamin noted that ‘dwelling’ was increasingly impossible. Today there are experts in place to determine the colors and location of things such as windows or garages all in the effort to please the consumer. All based on testing and market research. Such research of course is itself an example not just of magical thinking and pseudo science, but of the alienation effect that lingers at the edges of most modern urban buildings. This is also an expression of the collective anxiety of the ruling class.

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House, London. David Adjaye, architect. (Dezeen magazine).

“A growing body of research indicates that race/ethnicity, class, and insurance coverage are key indicators of who receives an ADHD diagnosis and medication (Morgan, Staff, Hillemeier, Farkas & Maczugia 2013; Safer & Malever 2000). These factors play a significant role in the labeling of youth in particular; study after study shows racial disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD as well as other Disruptive Behavior Disorders, with the indication that teachers were most likely to expect and define ADHD as an issue for white boys (Currie 2005; Safer& Malever 2000). Since research has found no indication that African youth violate rules at higher rates than other groups (Skiba 2002), the persistence of stereotypes of young male males and ‘cultural miscommunication’ between students and teachers is oft cited as one key factor. 83 percent of the nation’s teaching ranks are filled by whites, mostly women, and stereotypes can shape the decision to suspend or expel. The highest rates of racially disproportionate discipline are found in states that have low minority populations, indicating that boys of color are potentially threatening to white teachers, even in small numbers (Witt 2007).”
Nancy A. Heitzeg
Anti intellectualism is, naturally, also a part of how magical thinking is constructed. ADHD diagnoses are a part of how white supremacism is maintained. Fear is being stoked all the time, and Ms Heitzeg’s article on race and a medicalized neo colonial narrative for education, is only another example. The colonial logic is working all the time. The image of black youth is imbued with menace, but also with ideas of deficiency and limitation. Black students are not able to study. White students sometimes have medical issues that interfere with their ability to learn.

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Maria Letizia Piantoni, photography.

So, Mulvey also mentions digital photography when she suggested that digitalization dis-indexes the photograph. There is nothing, no-thing, prior to the image. This total simulacrum is possibly resulting in a desire for the object. For the sense of materiality that has felt absent in culture. And perhaps, at least if I speak personally, this accounts for my increasing interest and attraction to work like Lewerentz or Ludwig Leo, but also to voices that express something magisterial in our mortality. Conrad wrote…“The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.” The anxiety of white America today is partly born of its utter triviality. The obvious need to deny that catastrophe looms at every turn; water shortages, toxins in food, and dying seas. Conrad’s sea’s cruelty is being felt in new ways today.
One of the crucial roles that art plays, it seems to me, is to make us aware, of mortality. Ronald R. MacDonald’s seminal book The Burial Places of Memory (Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton) writes “we are forced to concede that language is not a piece of glass through which we can serenely view an undistorted world, but inveitably a distorting mediation. In the mouth of an obscurantist it can become a destructive weapon.” Mass culture is the voice of the obscurantist. If Lacan is correct about Freud’s notion of the death drive, seeing in it the crucial element in psychoanalysis, by way of the subject’s relation to the signifier, then a society of such sadism and lack of remorse or conscience, is one in which an infinite regress is taking place. A society that is reducing itself to an exhaustion of energy, to that abyss and to the death drive. Freud realized early on, in his early idea of *binding* (later to become Eros) that repetition was relatively impossible to really explain. It requires something prior or anterior. Such a psychic journey for Freud is a journey, it seems to me, that is made by all artists of tragic character. It is Dante and it is Virgil, and it is Shakespeare. And it is is Melville and Conrad, and Rothko and Pollack and Neruda and Lorca and Pasolini and Dreyer. In all cases the forces of history interceded to create that synthesis that is also the character of great art. But it seems to me that Capitalism, in its later stages today, especially, is one of truly malignant repetitive regression. The art that is applauded today is always that which interrupts journey.

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Sebastiaan Bremer

It is worth a small side bar note on the concluding episodes of Mad Men. For a variety of reasons this show resonated in ways many other highly popular prestige series did not. For seven seasons the appearance of journey was taking place. And indeed, there were genuinely brilliant episodes, and scenes. But at the end of the Don Draper saga, one in which the past casts a long stark shadow, the end of the road is Big Sur, a caricature hippie retreat, where Don’s essential shallowness is exposed and his moment of satori is to divine a Coke commercial. A life recuperated by a marketing insight. The creation of Draper promised potential for something quite singular in TV, but it never materialized.
To read the ever trivializing Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker, this episode was sheer brilliance. Don is Emily and Emily is Don.
It is worth noting Nussbaum because she is the poster girl for a certain entrenched white elitist liberal attitude. Her voice is no different than the voice of Samantha Power or Victoria Nuland or Jen Psaki. And really this is the Obama’s voice, too, and that of most of Washington, and corporate media. They inbreed, these people. They marry their class. They have been trained to do this and they obey. Psaki married Greg Mecher, errand boy to Rahm Emanuel. The voice of The New Yorker in general is echoed in Nussbaum. It is Lena Dunham’s voice, too, and it the voice, partly, of studio Hollywood. These are the voices that safeguard the Empire every bit as much as Petreaus or Dow or Boeing or DynCorp or Lockheed-Martin.
Lacan said the death drive was foundational to the symbolic order. The imaginary is that of the narcissist and stays childish. But the death drive is also something more mysterious. The idea of binding, as Samuel Weber observes is linked at its core to ‘representation’. The binding energy must be bound to something, and so to exist really, it is, even in its primary state, bound to perceptual reality. Our primary relationship to desire, then, is perceptual, representational. For the purposes of this post, my point is that…if the ego organizes via narcissistic identification, then representations of identity, or self, are primary. And these representations, born of energy and stimuli, are recognized because of repetition. Only by repeating can this assembling process solidify. The child’s ability to endure and even demand endless repetition of their favorite story is suggestive of the pleasure their narcissistic little egos take from the familiarity of this feeling. Now, of course the representations that are formed are still shaped by the historical moment. The meta-anthropology of Freud sees society is in a dynamic of impulse or instinct modification. Out of that tension the various sublimations… including art…are a way of rejecting or managing aggression. Except that I believe that Lacan spotted something significant in how narrative and art, the narratives implied or embedded in all artworks, are ways of learning to navigate our own existence, and come to some relationship with our eventual death. And more, that the forces of aggression, of violence, are linked with an adjustment made by the narcissistic personality that seeks to master itself by first mastering others. There is a primal deformity that demands *others* be reduced in order for representations (of self, identity) to not self destruct. There are contradictions in Freud, and one of the most basic is, in fact, that of repetition. Freud sees the repetition compulsion expressing an energy and force of repressed material. And yet repressed material is always desire. And desire is pleasure. But, it is in such contradiction that truths are found.

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Frank Bowling

Art is always linked to repetition. Practice, rehearsal, training. Self denial, bordering on masochism. And stories are always repeated stories. The idea of representation leads on, of course to allegory and metaphor and symbolism. The creation of space, of ‘a’ space, in which language can form a grammar to describe our experience. Or, our experience shapes itself to grammar. The sense of leaving the womb, the trauma of not being home, becomes a variety of story. The figure of the exile is there throughout the world. Throughout history. The exile must escape danger and threat. The stranger is our first visitor. History is shaped and made by man, and in turn it makes man. Language is formed in conjunction with image, with the making of marks and then with text. But the stranger is also a strange language. In Dante’s hell, desire is more acute than anywhere else.
“and they are eager to cross the stream, for Divine Justice so spurs them that their fear is changed into desire.”
The Inferno
But the destructive nature of compromised story, of today’s mass cultural regression is in how story rejects journey. Don Draper goes nowhere to find nothing. Awakening is a cola commercial. A cynical one at that. In Wisconsin there are now acute limitations in what recipients can buy with their food stamps. You cannot buy most potatos. You cannot buy soy milk. Or ketchup. Institutional cruelty. Mass incarceration is not enough. The people who create this sadistic legislation are having to ramp up an erasing of the material world. The governmental racism is so naked and open that I suspect soon there wont even be fig leafs applied to cover it up. There are counter forces, certainly. Anti death penalty activists have made genuine progress. But over all this is a society of domination.

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Herbert List, photography. Bomarzo, Park of the Palazzo Orsini. 1952

“…what the drives repeat is neither a ground nor an abyss, but a violent process of inscription, alteration and perhaps above all: narration.”
Samuel Weber
Weber is saying that this unrepresentable origin, is in fact a representation of representation. This is why I continue to insist that aesthetics have an important political dimension. For stories involve very primary processes of engagement with the Other. If the stories that society today favors are stories meant to obscure, are being used as weapons to control and punish, then a failure to more closely read them is highly problematic. Deleuze said creation was an act of resistance. To death, but also to a paradigm of control in today’s society of domination. But it has to be remembered that this paradigm now counterfeits story. It is a paradigm of controlling narrative. It is easy to see the propaganda of Hollywood war films or TV, but it is less easy to grasp why so much prestige culture is equally, if not more, destructive.
Martha Rosler:
“A more general cultural delegitimization than the questioning of photographic truth is at work in the industrial societies. This delegitimization is as much a product of political failure as of image societies, and it entails the declining faith in the project of modernity and its religion of *progress*. In describing its material basis (though not, one must hope, in his totalized conclusions), Debord was surely correct to locate the genesis of *the society of the spectacle* in the process of capitalist industrial production and the dominance of the commodity form — despite Baudrillard’s attempted correction to Debord’s theory to the interchangeability not of commodities, but of signs…the real danger is that people will choose fantasy, and fantasy identification with power, over a threatening or intolerably dislocating social reality.”
Public (in the West) acceptance of political theatre is a by product of hegemonic control of the information industry. Today, the general public has become familiar with the cues and props of this electronic theatre and read the ‘stories’ of foreign wars and occupation as they read kitsch movies. Rosler’s point, really, was that ideas of evidence and truth are no longer seen as important. Reality can be color corrected, after all. Illusion IS evidence. The interior landscape of contemporary consciousness is now finding it easier to believe the obviously manufactured, and to view cultural works that demand interrogation and contemplation as needless and antiquated.

http://john-steppling.com/corrected-reality/

Life in the Rat Box
JULY 7, 2015

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Correggio, “Danae”, 1531
“When an individual becomes over-involved in a topic of conversation, others are drawn from the talk to the talker. One man’s eagerness is another man’s alienation. Readiness to become over-involved is a form of tyranny practiced by children, prima donnas and lords, placing feelings above moral rules that should have made society safe for interaction.”
Erving Goffman
“If Freud was ‘conservative’ in his immediate disregard of society, his concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society; he unearthed the objective roots of the private subject — its social content. Freud exposed the lie that the subject was inviolate; he showed that every point it was violated.”
Russell Jacoby
“There is no doubt that we are living in an epoch of nightmare aesthetic, from which oracles occasionally emerge. An example of this image-nightmare -reality to my blinded eyes; Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming Governor of California.”
Bernard Steigler
“I am not even saying ‘politics is the unconscious’—but, quite simply, the unconscious is politics!”
Jacques Lacan
Seminar XIV, 1967
I am finding, increasingly, that a certain madness has taken over Western societies. I think some psychological tipping point has been reached in the last two years. That sounds funny, but it certainly feels that way. I see it in the UK, I saw it in France, in Poland, in Scandanavia (less though) and certainly in the U.S. And it feels more and more as if one is always interacting with narcissism. But it is expressed in a sort of erasing of discussion. Its a personal attack, regardless of the situation or topic. It is a rigid alignment with a position and an insistence on *being right*. On winning the argument. But it goes beyond that, even. Its winning where there is no argument. Its a sort of rhetorical carpet bombing. Just aim the flamethrower and roast all in your path. Historically, I think, these tendencies have been the province of the right wing nutter parties, if we’re speaking of the U.S. The John Birch Society, or the American Nazi Party. Today, it is increasingly a part of the repertoire of the left, too. It seems, in fact, the activity of nearly everyone. I have written about irony and snark (and I notice more than few others on these topics of late, and for that matter quite a few over the last few years) but this is now something else, and its not just the white University educated white male who is snarky. It is now, nearly, everyone.
I believe this is a kind of psychological malady, a deformation or psychic disfigurement that is simply the effect of something that has happened at an almost primal level, an effect, too, of electronic media, and it has corrupted everyone at an almost molecular level. And its fed by and a creation of social media. It is now well past time to see the pathologies of social media. Of social interaction framed by avatars on the screen of your lap tap. And it is the accumulative affects of life in a system designed to feed extreme wealth.
Lacan saw a connection between knowledge and paranoia.
“The relation between knowledge and paranoia is a fundamental one, and perhaps no where do we see this dynamic so poignantly realized than in childhood. From the ‘psychotic-like’ universe of the newborn infant (e.g. see Klein, 1946), to the relational deficiencies and selfobject failures that impede the process of human attachment, to the primal scene and/or subsequent anxieties that characterize the Oedipal period, leading to the inherent rivalry, competition, and overt aggression of even our most sublimated object relations, — fear, trepidation, and dread hover over the very process of knowing itself. What is paranoid is that which stands in relation to opposition, hence that which is alien to the self.”
Jon Mills

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Gisela Erlacher, photography.

The recent rat box experiments by Bruce Alexander, in relation to addiction, are worth mentioning here. A digression:
“In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. They perfected techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever. This required tethering the rat to the ceiling of the box with tubing and surgically implanting a needle, or catheter, into their jugular veins. The drug passed through the tube and the needle into the rats’ bloodstreams almost instantaneously when they pushed the lever. It reached their brains moments later.
Under appropriate conditions, rats would press the lever often enough to consume large amounts of heroin, morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs in this situation. The mass media of the day were quite excited about these experiments. The results seemed to prove that these drugs were irresistibly addicting, even to rodents, and by extension, to human beings. The conclusion that illegal drugs are irresistibly addicting fit well with the fearsome images that were being propagated about them. The rat research provided additional support for the War on Drugs of that day.”
Alexander continues…
“First, the ancestors of laboratory rats in nature are highly social, sexual, and industrious creatures. Putting such a creature in solitary confinement would be the equivalent of doing the same thing to a human being. Solitary confinement drives people crazy; if prisoners in solitary have the chance to take mind-numbing drugs, they do. Might isolated rats not need to numb their minds in solitary confinement for the same reason that people do? Second, taking drugs in a Skinner box where almost no effort is required and there is nothing else to do is nothing like human addiction which always involves making choices between many possible alternatives. Third, rats are rats. How can we possibly reach conclusions about complex, perhaps spiritual experiences like human addiction and recovery by studying rats? Aren’t we more complex and soulful than rats, even if we have similar social needs?”
The result of Alexander’s experiments was that rats in social situations, not in isolation, but in friendly natural rat societies, stopped taking the morphine. He draws the parallel to colonial isolation of various indigenous people, that gave rise to bromides like ‘Indians cant handle liquor” etc.

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Ann Hamilton

Alexander again:
“Certain parallels between the problems of colonized human beings and the rats in Rat Park appear to provide an explanation. In both cases there is little drug consumption in the natural environment and a lot when the people or animals are placed in an environment that produces social and cultural isolation. In the case of rats, social and cultural isolation is produced by confining the rats in individual cages. In the case of native people, the social and cultural isolation is produced by destroying the foundations of their cultural life: taking away almost all of their traditional land, breaking up families, preventing children from learning their own language, prohibiting their most basic religious ceremonies (potlatches and spirit dancing in Western Canada), discrediting traditional medical practices, and so forth. Under such conditions, both rats and people consume too much of whatever drug that is made easily accessible to them. Morphine for the rats, alcohol for the people.
In both cases, the colonizers or the experimenters who provide the drug explain the drug consumption in the isolated environment by saying that the drug is irresistible to the people or the rats. But in both cases, the drug only becomes irresistible when the opportunity for normal social existence is destroyed.”
So, it’s not unreasonable to see a culture ever more isolated, more detached from traditional social interactions with their community, be in such pain that various self destructive behaviors will become habitual. Now, to return to Lacan and knowledge and paranoia; and how this relates, perhaps, to a growing sense of aggression in the West. The mirror phase posits the idea that the infant’s first organizational process involves the gaze of the other. The reflection of itself. This image sets the boundaries for ego and body differentiation. But it is a fiction, a mis-reading. But forever this shadows the development of the *I*. The ego is always trapped in a dynamic with the ‘other’, in a dynamic of being recognized. And here the idea of theatre is unavoidable. Lacan used, in various places, the term ‘staging’. What is important, though, is that the audience in theatre is able to experience something of its own dislocation in that peculiar space created by actors and acting. The actor is not representing acts, not completely, but rather (per Samuel Weber) actualizing a performance — which ideally is a form of revealing something, in the present. There is a lot of doubling of effects in theatre. An actor like Brando, as an example, is always both the character he portrays, and himself, and something inexplicable and destablizing. This is something, this strange exposing of self, that Artaud wrote about obsessively. Here is where Lacan advanced Freud’s notion of dreamwork, and suggested the third part of the dreamwork being translated as ‘considerations of staging’, rather than considerations of representability. Lacan saw that all representations were predicated upon a spectator.

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Luca Campigotto, photography.

There are other registers at work in all this. The Society of the Spectacle, per Debord, intuited the right metaphor, if that is what it was. The dreamwork is also, always, concealing what it is doing. It is hiding that it is hiding. This is complex, however, for the dream is also dissimulating its concealing, its distortions. The theatre is so powerful, when it works, because it is reproducing a primal construction of the psyche.
“Through the imaginary, the ego is no more than a return of an image to itself. The paradoxical structure of the imaginary is therefore the polarity between alienation and recognition. Lacan sees recognition as the recovery of the alienated image facilitated through the mirroring of the other. As the subject finds or recognizes itself through an image (insofar as recognition is the misrecognition of its autonomous ego as an illusory mastery), it is concurrently confronted with its own alienated and alienating image; hence this process becomes an aggressive relation.”
Jon Mills
The society of domination and control, under which the populace of the West exists, is one of colonial logic. And it is one that disguises its activities in multiple ways. Wendy Brown suggests how *illegible* much political activity has become. The dismantling of centuries of labor law and protections, benefits, and with it (per Brown) the foundation and origin and meaning of these laws and practices. As Reagan destroyed the last of real union power in the U.S., a mere thirty some years ago, today most teenagers have scant idea of labor history in the North America. Ask those teenagers what is in their self interest, and most will be confused even by the question.

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Titian, or from workshop of Titian. Apprx. 1520.
The paranoid and anxious, the individual unmoored from community connectivity, is susceptible to the image of the market. The economic model for existence. The corporate media is continually shifting blame from the powerful and wealthy elite, to the victims themselves. Children cant learn? More ADHD? It is the fault of parents (poor parents seem most inclined to bad parenting). It is the fault of the child him or herself. It is a genetic problem, curable with medication. It is everything except the thing it is, an insane society of manipulation, control, and punishment. The society of anxiety and fear. One aspect of this is what Katherine Hayles describes as the difference between deep attention and hyper-attention. One is a prolonged meditation on a single object. The other is a “rapid oscillation among different tasks, in the flux of multiple sources of information…”. It would be perfectly easy to create educational environments in which deep attention was possible, and some exist. But even in those places where it exists, it amounts to an island in a sea of constant stimulation and distraction. The idea that children complain of being bored is rather amazing and a commentary on how children mature in western societies today. If Lacan is at all correct, the ego is from its inception is in a kind of war with itself. Of course this is only true, really, for Western society as it has evolved. That threat, even if true, is actualized in a context in which uncertainty is reinforced throughout maturation as something to fear. The child as it acquires language finds that distrust of everyone is met with approval. It is worth noting that aggressivity and aggression are not the same thing in Lacan. Aggression is linked to the death drive, and aggressivity is the realm of imagos. But for the purposes here, I think the point is that children are taught that mastery is good, either over one’s own desires, and over others. Strength is the foundation for winning. The tension that results from that primal mis-reading leads to a persecutory position in relation to others, but also to knowledge. This would seem to be a foundational aspect of aesthetic experience, even if only semi-conscious.
“I may add that when a few days under nine months old he associated his own name with his image in the looking-glass, and when called by name would turn towards the glass even when at some distance from it.”
Charles Darwin
On watching his 8 month old son (A Biographical Sketch of an Infant, 1877)

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Michael Chelbin, photography.
There are a wealth of antecedents to Lacan’s mirror phase theory. Many from the later half of the 19th century. In most of them, observations were coupled to ideas of mimicry. So here is an alternative branch of this idea of mimesis, that Adorno wrote so much about. Our relationship to images, at least in Western society since the Industrial Revolution, is one of anxiety, rivalry, and tension. As well as paranoia. The experience of art, then, has a primordial basis that connects to our psychic formation and development. And however one trusts or distrusts both Freud and Lacan, I think it is fairly obvious that mimicry begins in children at a very early place before language. And it worth a final note, here, that we aren’t really speaking of a literal mirror. I mean it *can* be a literal mirror, but it is the sense of mirroring, mimicry, that matters far more.
So, then, the experience of aggression I continue to see in cyber road rage flame wars, which feel almost constant now, is partly the reaction to the validating of fear and distrust at an early age. A reinforcing of natural tendencies of the maturing process. It is also a spasm of terror at perhaps being wrong, being questioned really, because *wrong* is not exactly in everyone’s vocabulary. This is not the same thing are asking for a new age Pollyanna version of passivity. I don’t actually think humans can much avoid a certain degree of aggression, and I think a certain degree is probably even healthy. No, this is the rage, the vengeful irrational over-importance of dealing with disembodied names in cyber space. How is it possible so many people invest so much emotional energy into abstract relationships with avatars? I found myself arguing with someone using a pseudonym of a food — I don’t know this person, never met him, and not likely to ever meet him (or her). I literally don’t have any idea who it is or where they live or how old they are, etc. And they refuse to identify themselves because of security reasons. Besides the fact that is a fantasy — literally a fantasy — it is typical and hardly an isolated incident. Even with people one knows, discussions are invariably hostile, sarcastic, aggressive in the extreme, bullying, stigmatizing, shaming, insulting, and ridiculing. This is contemporary society.

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Charles Harbutt, photography.

Now, disagreement and debate, if that were possible in cyber space, would be a terrific thing, and there is a huge educational and political aspect to imparting and sharing information, describing events in real time often, commentaries on world politics is vital and in an another universe this might be how humans actually create public democratic forums. That does not happen, however. Usually only invective and scorn is being consumed….with at most a few hundred, or perhaps in extreme cases, a few thousand other social media users. Each platform encourages its own anger issues.
But there are broader considerations at work: from Stephen Marche’s article in The Atlantic, now sort of famous, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely. …“In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.”

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Jacques Lacan, & Henri Ey à Sainte-Anne.
Americans in particular perceive the idea of maturity as one of independence. Not cooperation with others in a collective, but independence from all collectives. This is again a Puritan legacy to some degree, although Quakers and Puritans were not at all independent from the collective but highly interconnected. It is more the morality of isolation, I think. The perceived purity from contamination. But all studies tend to indicate Americans, at least, feel more loneliness than they did a hundred years ago. The invention of fear, interestingly, and the creation of invisible predators, gives the lonely a focus, I think. But beyond that, people have clearly begun to ‘design themselves’ in the material world in the same way they design their image on facebook. Marketing has a lot to do with this in the sense that one is bombarded daily with images of ideal beauty, and sexual temptation, and titillation, and such images manufacture desire..or a certain kind of desire, anyway. And this is all linked to narcissism.
Nadkarni and Hoffman wrote, in a study from 2012 believe there are two reasons people use social media; the need to belong and the need for self presentation. The self presentation idea is the product of decades of marketing, and really isn’t all that different from Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). And Goffman was positing that people create self stagings, in a sense, whenever they interact with people. Especially strangers. Now in Goffman’s later book, Asylums, (in which he popularized, if not invented, the term *institutionalization*)he saw that one of the purposes for maintaining control in institutional settings was the creation of the docile, bland, harmless and non threatening and inconspicuous subject. In reflecting on these things in light of Lacan’s revision of Freud, I think it’s possible to see the primal role of that mental censor so active in dreamwork, and also why both theatre and narrative exert such a profound influence on humans, and why the state, the authority structure, feels compelled to control both. Now Goffman also wrote about how people conceal themselves in the rituals of daily interaction. The avoidance of stigma. In social media today, concealment is a given. There are no rituals connected to the body or face. The loss of *face* would, then, seem the singular lack of cyber sociability. In social media, the engineering of an identity is the primary activity. Imparting information is second.

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Gunther Brus

“In 2013, Rosen et al. studied the Facebook usage of 1,143 college-age students. The researchers found that major depressive
disorder, dysthymia, bipolar-mania, narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, and compulsive behavior were predicted by one or more Facebook usage variables (general use, number of
friends, use for image management).”
Amelia C. Strickland
Now Strickland also quotes various studies that indicate more use of social media exacerbates narcissistic tendencies and delusions of grandeur. There is no ‘place’ in social media, no face, and no body.
Strickland again…
“Also, younger generations were scored as consistently more anxious than older generations when they were unable to check their social networks and texts. A new medical term has been created out of this constant connectivity: Phantom vibration syndrome, defined as perceived vibration from a cell phone that is not vibrating, has been reported to occur with large numbers of people (Drouin et al., 2012; Rothberg et al., 2010).Phantom vibration syndrome may reflect a manifestation of the anxiety that cell phones elicit inthose who are obsessed with checking in on their social media and messages.”
Social media provides the illusion of activism, of belonging, and of friendship, but with none of the obligations. Anonymity is itself a kind of post modern ritual, now. But this connects, too, to what Bruce Fink, in writing of Lacan, called the ‘desire not to know’. The familiarity of neurotic symptoms provide a certain level of comfort. I’d argue that Western societies today, especially the U.S., are invested in reinforcing the idea that it’s perfectly OK, and in fact is a sign of independence and strength, to not investigate oneself too deeply. For all the self-help ideology out there, the truth is that even those seeking self-help don’t really want to know the truth. They want to feel better about not knowing. Now in social media there are additional layers of self presentation. Firstly, the limits of a twitter format are obvious, and in a different sense, on facebook — but cutting across all of this is a society of mass surveillance. The erasure of privacy seems a topic most people simply don’t want to think about. The best example is the use of avatars and pseudonyms…for self protection, even though, obviously, finding out the identity of someone isn’t really all that hard. Certainly the government knows who you are.

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Hiroshi Senju

I am remminded of a quote of Adorno, in his informal conversations with Horkheimer in 1956.
“Philosophy exists in order to redeem what you see in the look of an animal. If you feel that an idea is supposed to serve a practical purpose, it slithers into the dialectic. If, on the other hand, your thought succeeds in doing the thing justice, then you cannot really assert the opposite. The mark of authenticity of a thought is that it negates the immediate presence of one’s own interests. True thought is thought that has no wish to insist on being right.”
a little later Horkheimer responds…
“On the case of students you often miss the feeling that they are speaking on their own behalf.” and “The USA is a country of argument”.
to which Adorno adds… “Argument is consistently bourgeois.”
The rise of narcissism, in mainstream media and from the reactionary pundit and talking head club, is usually associated with and blamed on the permissiveness of the sixties. But this isn’t really true at all. Firstly, the counter culture movement (and its a terrible reductive label) was one that foundationally was still linked to and part of the idea of ‘high culture’. By which I mean education that based on difficult subjects, classics, history, and the demand of learning the appreciation of such things. The notion of ‘freedom’, as Rob Weatherill points out, was both Neo Reichian and associated with struggles for independence in the third world. The sixties were Utopian and optimistic, and while in one sense the radical re-thinking on parenting and freedom was in opposition to tradition, there remained a deep respect for that tradition. The counter culture was, in most respects, intensely serious. The changes that occurred over the next twenty years, especially during the Reagan years, was the result of both marketing and capital consolidation, but also the valorizing of a market based behavior and set of values. The commodity culture, where the consumer was defined by what he or she purchased. The post modern, as I’ve pointed out before, was perfectly in tune with this, and served as both cause and effect, with a focus on surface and de-historicized notion of meaning.
“So when one talks of permissiveness now, one is talking about a way of life that is adjusted to a free-market economy and therefore is essential for survival…a sell by date is imposed on all meanings and values.”
Rob Weatherill

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Francis Bacon

The paternal super ego is gone. Children no longer really internalize parental authority. Today, institutional authority subsumes all else, and institutions are organs of the ruling class. The problem, in a sense, was that Freud was right in terms of how the super-ego functioned. The denial of internal conflict (and the suggestion that it ALL came from outside) was wrong. Now strict Freudians are also wrong when they forget the influences of the outside world. But the fact remains, that in cultures in which community plays a large role, the proximity to many adults in the child’s life helps to regulate the often irrational impulses of the only half formed psyche of the child. The shift to marketing and commodity culture created the narcissism one sees today. It has little or nothing to do with permissiveness. But that narrative has traction because it aligns perfectly with a Puritan value system of sexual repression. The early super-ego is primitive and harsh. The child’s terrors of being eaten or cut in pieces by monsters is mediated by parental authority and stability. But as Weatherill points out, the real culprit here is marketing that now targets ever younger children. As parents often must both work, and as community is increasingly destroyed, the child is de-facto parented by corporate advertising and electronic mass media. One of the profound messages of the original Terminator film was that a killer android was a better parent than a biological one. The child is being targeted and in a way meant to stimulate unarticulated Id desires. The disproportionate rage of the internet warrior is the narcissistic child screaming for his or her parents. When these warriors are adults, the landscape really does darken.
This is why I feel Lacan is so useful in tweezing apart the malfunctioning adult of Western society. Of course the backdrop, importantly, is one of total brutal economic war on the working class. The degree to which neo-liberalism has eviscerated the last remnants of labor protection is astounding, and it is a reality that mainstream media works over time to hide. And part of how they hide this ruthless war on the poor is by inventing surrogate enemies. The black teenager, the Arab terrorist, the Russians, Chinese, or those hippies from the sixties, and always with bromides about the breakdown of values. The breakdown is the creation of Capital. It is not the fault of idealistic radicals from fifty years ago. Narcissism is linked to aggression; and Lacan saw this in the very way in which the mature ego developed from childhood, and from infancy, really. The endless tension of ourselves and our double. And it is here, again, where one can examine art, and particularly theatre, for the re-staging of our primordial conflicts. The actor is always us. Our double. The actor is always the audience, and his role. And the stage is our primordial representational projection.

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Adrian Ghenie

The ascension of a deeply narcissistic culture has also led to a society of scapegoating. The propaganda of the ownership class is designed to target the least powerful, whose pathologies they cannot afford to disguise or erase. The crimes of the wealthy far outstrip the crimes of the poor. But everyone is a criminal, for the societal context, always in all times irrational to some degree, is now acutely irrational and exacerbating this is the market model for behavioral normalcy. The rich are not in prison. I recently had someone close to me say “I am becoming so quiet”. He longer speaks to even people close to him. Or not as much. Beckett may have prophetically grasped the impulse toward silence that is the result of a culture of such massive contradictions, such massive alienation. Capitalism has created post modernity. Rob Weatherill correctly writes: “Capitalism in its third form, its most cannibalistic form — that eats tradition, eats referents, brings about ecstatic randomness, dazzling dispersions of everything that former generations once believed in.” The narcissism of the rhetoric of empowerment, lifestyle choices, and freedom thinly masks the deeper feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and irrelevancy. Social media is a mirror of all this, a non-place for non-people arguing in exaggerated emotional hysteria about often important issues, but whose arguing is driven by psychological deformation. As Terry Eagleton put it, the outside is colonized in advance. There is no outside. One cannot step outside the matrix. The feeling of having lost control, an adolescent fantasy in earlier times, now permeates adult society. The new childish social critic is finding popularity because the childish adult identifies.

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Gustave Miklos
“The we is seriously ill.”
Bernard Stiegler
Stiegler, in his idiosyncratic way, is saying much the same thing as Weatherill, and others. That a life led under Capital is now blocking individuation. In other words, the first step toward collective sharing and unity, solidarity, in the advanced West, is now stifled. As he writes…“The individual ill-being resulting from this state of affairs manifests itself in somatizations, neuroses, and obsessional behaviors of compensation or avoidance, or by various rationalizing logorrheas which may be imitative or reactive.” Image technology, as it is applied in this market model of existence, has now…as Stiegler says, “eradicated the very possibility of *seeing* images.”I have suggested (and a hundred others) before that the various technologically executed interruptions in early childhood development have resulted in strange dis-unities and fragmentation of the self, of the image of the self. It has returned society to a level of a ruthless punishing primitive super-ego. A nation of aberrant petty and sadistic children. Stiegler sees the destruction of primordial narcissism. Perhaps. I think certainly there is no question today about the level of conditioning, on just the most banal level of propaganda (I noted a THIRD series on TV now with a female character who is a Mossad agent…and again, she is sexy and better at martial disciplines than all the men around her) which is ever more reactionary, more flaunting of jingoistic cliches. The fascist aesthetic is now a familiar friend.

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Delbert Africa, one of MOVE 9, being arrested, 1978.

On a deeper level, there are affects that have accrued over time into secondary effects. There are now other versions of phantom vibration syndrome, and all of it falls, really, under the aegis of acute hyper anxiety. Adorno believed in the potential for artworks to recuperate a Utopian dream, and Stiegler calls the abandonment of politics by the art world and the abandonment of aesthetics by the political world, a catastrophe. The collapse of culture into commodity manipulations, into propaganda and vulgar kitsch has lowered sensitivities across the entire spectrum of experience. One can’t see Nature, can’t see the human face any longer, can’t recognize the human body. Stiegler is right when he describes it as aesthetic conditioning, instead of aesthetic experience. The leaders of industry, the political class, the telecom moguls and the Wall Street reptiles; these people live outside the world as humans know it. Certainly aesthetically speaking, they are creatures with interior deserts in place of souls and feelings. The inner Chernobyl. Look at Hillary Clinton and look at those mad insect eyes. Look at Samantha Power, and one can see the dry brittle career bureaucrat salivating and panting for approval, ready to act as consigliere for her Capo. Look at any of them. Look at photos of America’s cops. You don’t see what you see in Hollywood. You see thugs, you see Gestapo and SAVAK and Kenyan cops putting down the Mau Mau rebellion, because how far is that from WACO or MOVE or Ruby Ridge. Look at the Louisiana DA who kept Albert Woodfox in jail for no reason other than sadistic satisfaction. Look at the New Orleans cops after Katrina, or Ramparts division and CRASH. Or George Bush tittering at the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, or Hillary cackling at the death of Saddam. The ruling class no longer hide their cruelty. They delight in the suffering of others. Its in the open. One must be BLIND not to see it, right?

http://john-steppling.com/2015/07/life-in-the-rat-box/

Children no longer really internalize parental authority. Today, institutional authority subsumes all else, and institutions are organs of the ruling class.

Both of my grown children have expressed concern over my "anti-Americanism". Not that I am anti-American, but that I might "get into trouble" is I express myself to the "wrong" person. I asked if they thought it was a good thing to be afraid to voice one's opinions. My daughter answered that it might not be "good", but it would be wiser and safer. "Institutional authority subsumes all else."


“The we is seriously ill.” Bernard Stiegler


That a life led under Capital is now blocking individuation. In other words, the first step toward collective sharing and unity, solidarity, in the advanced West, is now stifled.

This is the thing that no Liberal nor Libertarian (if there is an actual difference between the two) understand. Collective sharing, unity, solidarity, and all real, actual socialization of human activity, production, and reproduction makes for the realization and activation of the individual. The individual can only be within the collective. The achievement of real socialism is the only pathway to individuality with any kind of reasonable meaning, at all.

Both of my grown children have expressed concern over my "anti-Americanism". Not that I am anti-American, but that I might "get into trouble" is I express myself to the "wrong" person. I asked if they thought it was a good thing to be afraid to voice one's opinions. My daughter answered that it might not be "good", but it would be wiser and safer. "Institutional authority subsumes all else."





This is the thing that no Liberal nor Libertarian (if there is an actual difference between the two) understand. Collective sharing, unity, solidarity, and all real, actual socialization of human activity, production, and reproduction makes for the realization and activation of the individual. The individual can only be within the collective. The achievement of real socialism is the only pathway to individuality with any kind of reasonable meaning, at all.

Individuals of a social species are inevitably disfunctional when denied that matrix for which the species has evolved. Same for ants, whose individuality is greatly maligned in the popular imagination. How much more so in a species of our complexity?

Steppling is an interesting writer, he nails some of the aspects and effects of capitalists society. When I can understand him anyways, well above my educational level.

Unstaging, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love World Government
JULY 23, 2015

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Ferrante Ferranti, photography.
“Today, Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil….individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government.”
Henry Kissinger, 1992
“Long live Christ the King.”
Reverend H.E.B. Nye
Church of England, 1933
“Communists are the vultures who scent the corpse of humanity from afar.”
Reverend H.E.B. Nye
Church of England, 1938
“I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
Kafka
Two stories struck me this week. First, photos of a youthful queen practicing a Nazi salute. The Royals are closely acquainted with Hitler and fascism. The front page tabloid-like stories appeared in almost all UK newspapers. However, this is a news story that was, in reality, carefully stage-managed, as it were. It has been a controlled leak. Firstly, you have to have lived in a cave, or be functionally illiterate, to not know the British Royal family are fascists. Honestly, this can’t really be a surprise. But I want to focus more on how media works in terms of propaganda, and stories such as this. The always perceptive and prescient Phil Greaves pointed out immediately that this story felt more like phase one of a ‘rehabilitating fascism’ project than it did a criticism of the royals. It was just youthful exuberance, same as many young people did in that era. Or just kids joking about that silly Mister Hitler. It makes no difference, really. And in fact it is likely it was a bit of fun for the girls. The message remains the same. Fascism appealed to certain people, young and old, and for certain reasons. And by the time that photo was taken, that graced the front page of the Guardian, 1933 purportedly; everyone in Europe was aware Hitler was a fascist and authoritarian, and race purist, a supporter of eugenics and Aryan purity. But the language of the UK papers tended toward words like ‘youthful’ and ‘dabbling’. There was a lighthearted tone applied to the *fascist* part of the story, but deep moral outrage in the language used to criticize those who doubted the Queen.

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Queen Elizabeth and Lord Dalhousie, on her visit to Rhodesia, 1960.

To understand the mechanisms of how this story gets *read* goes a long way in understanding how media works in the post modern epoch. Why Zizek is taken seriously, for example. Or why people pretend to take him seriously. Because it’s not really in the end about what he says. Or if any particular person believes what he says or writes. It’s about a cultural currency that has been put in circulation. One can point out until blue in the face that *what* he says is racist, for example. But that’s less relevant than the position he occupies in the intellectual marketplace — the manner in which the Zizek brand takes up intellectual shelf space, much like Pepsi and Coke do in major super-markets. Zizek’s rhetoric is intentionally obfuscated. Most of the time it can mean anything, really. There is just enough there, though, to deliver a message. There are other brands, of course. It’s probably more telling in the case of Zizek because he occupies a niche market, in a sense, but one that involves or is implicated in oppositional voices. Thomas Piketty is another brand, just now. But his resonance is more with liberals, with an audience that, in general, has a softer oppositional posture, a reformist position. My point here isn’t with defining these positions so much as with trying to unpack the manner of circulation and what it means. How these figures work as forces in the neutralizing or domesticating of radical criticism. How there is a hidden (or semi hidden) narrative attached to everything. The Royal family are treated as a grand institution. One of nobility and sacrifice. Never mind the queen mum has a billion dollar overdraft to draw on and has spent her life favoring fascists and other Euro royalty (much the same thing, I realize). Grandson Harry and his Nazi attire at a costume party is then given a narrative out of 50s Amnerican TV. The Queen scolding him, etc etc etc. As if. The narrative is one of distraction — nobody is expected to really dig into the actual history of these vile people. No, the cartoon tabloid soap opera storyline is anticipated and received. Like Princess Di, the people’s princess. Who, when she died, was dating the son of the world’s leading death merchant.


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Khosrow Hassanzadeh

I will return to this, but I want to mention the second story, and that was how international wealth was descending on Greece like carrion birds to pick clean the bones of a suffering country. Johnny Depp is planning to buy himself an island. A Greek island. Now, I cannot actually verify if this is true, but I suspect it is. And if so, Depp now belongs to that same class of fascist the Queen Mum tended to invite for tea. I seem to recall Pinochet was rather a favorite. Queen Frederica in Greece, back in the day, was a consort of various Nazis, and then later found the US equivalent in Allan Dulles, with whom she carried on an extended affair. Talk about taste. But, the point is that why would you do this, buy an island, if you had tens of millions? Why? Any sane empathic human would give, would share their millions. Not buy land and hoard it. I don’t think Depp or any other of these vultures intends to open free Universities or health care centers. No, they will buy elite private playgrounds (apparently Warren Buffet is buying one, too). It must be clear that such behavior is a main ingredient for fascist ideology. Buffet’s purchase is covered in mainstream media as a savy business decision. He’s just taking advantage of the market.
But Depp would be standing alongside, or partying with, in a historically equivalent way of speaking; Franco, Oswald Mosely, Prince Christoph von Hessen, Ante Pavelic, and members of Opus Dei. The Catholic Church is of course close to fascism. Again, this should be apparent. Eating off gold plates at the Vatican, with those floppy gem encrusted rings, is not a great distance from your own Greek island, and romps with the inbred offspring of a Grimaldi, or a relative of those hedge fund royals in Liechtenstein.

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Prince Bernhard and Mobutu Sese Seko, 1973.

I find it today, and have always found it, dumbfounding that so many people accept the notion of extreme inequality. That someone can go buy an island and prevent anyone else from coming to that island. These people will applaud a George Clooney or Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie (who also, one reads, wants an island, and who closed an entire country in Africa for the birth of her child), and then mouth rhetoric about democracy. How is this level, this magnitude of contradiction possible? Lest anyone think that real wealth does not cohere toward a class unity, it is worth noting a few things.
Peter Phillips wrote recently, on the topic of Bohemian Grove, which began again this July 18th:
“Private men’s clubs, like the San Francisco Bohemian Club, have historically represented institutionalized race, gender and class inequality. English gentlemen’s clubs emerged during Great Britain’s empire building period as an exclusive place free of troublesome women, under-classes, and non-whites. Copied in the United States, elite private men’s clubs served the same self-celebration purposes as their English counterparts.”

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Laurenz Berges, photography.


Bohemian Grove began in the 1860s, but didn’t take on its current incarnation until into the 20th century. This is where the 1% go. This is where Kissinger shares pussy jokes with Jeb Bush, or Gordon Brown. But really this is a sort of low rent frat house version of the Bildeberg Group (which is nominally more European). An informal corporate backslapping boys club. Reps from General Electric, Bank of America, Dow and General Motors, various presidents of airlines, governors and judges, a few Hollywood movers (Norman Lear went this year) and some White House lawyers. As G. William Domhoff writes: “First, the very fact that rich men from all over the country gather in such close circumstances as the Bohemian Grove is evidence for the existence of a socially cohesive upper class.”
But I want to examine more how increasingly, today, the master narrative is consciously being shaped by the ownership class. This is, really, what the Bilderberg Meeting is all about. It is worth noting that among the attendees to this years meeting, besides the usual Bank Presidents, the head of the Danish secret service, and various CEOs of major corporations, members of parliaments from several EU countries, and fellows from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Hoover Institute, was the head of LinkedIn, and the head of Google engineering. And of course the chairman of Goldman Sachs and the secretary general of NATO. Oh, and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands. Which nicely segues back to the youthful Queen Elizabeth and that Nazi salute. If one were to google Queen Elizabeth, among the first things you would read is how she fought for an end to apartheid. This is pure PR, it is exactly the sort of thing Johnny Depp’s press agent will do if there is bad press about that Greek Island (as he did with the fallout from The Lone Ranger). These are invented biographies. The old Queen adored Ian Smith, and Botha, and it really does stretch credulity to imagine her as a champion for African independence. Such history, though, has mostly been scrubbed clean. Today the creation of narrative resides less in what is actually said (the content, as it were) and more in the capturing of attention. The control of shelf space, to over use that metaphor.
And a final note on The Bilderberg Group. It was founded by Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands in 1954, which warrants mention if only because Bernhard was an enthusiastic friend of the Nazi Party in his youth. But the tentacles reach everywhere, and in the 1990s, the chairman of Bilderberg was Lord Carrington, the man appointed later by the UN as its first representative to bring peace following NATO’s assault on the former Yugoslavia.

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Ante Pavelic, Croation fascist. Circa WW2.

The title of a recent article at The Daily Beast was “Fascsim is Fashionable Again”. This is interesting, because the article did not say, ‘Fascism is Frighteningly on the Rise Again’. These details are not accidents. They are part of a media campaign by corporate owned outlets and their subsidiaries. The article just mentioned goes on to dutifully say ‘oh fascism is bad’, and intolerant. But, the real message of the article is FASHION, and the secondary title is “Weimer Moment”. The nostalgia for Empire, for colonialism, and now for fascism is to be found not just in revisionist histories, but in the style codes being layered over all this. The Queen’s nazi salute has a retro look to it, in the photo. Very little is explained to an increasingly sub literate audience, about what fascism really means, what it does, and has done. The Daily Beast/ article also manages to somehow blame all this intolerance on Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala. Of course, all this white ultra nationalism is the fault of an French speaking Camaroonian. Of course

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http://john-steppling.com/2015/07/unstaging-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-world-government/#comments

The Normal Non-Self - Excerpts:


…the key question is: Who do elected representatives represent? The answer is not the electorate, but the class that has the resources to invest in the political system—resources politicians need to get elected. This is none other than the class of capitalists.
Still, despite the glaring disparity between the promise of procedural democracy and its outcomes, most everyone celebrates it, or talks about democracy as if it had only recently been negated, as if the domination of capitalist society by capitalists is a recent phenomenon and not a necessity by definition.”
Stephen Gowans


But in a sense, it feels like the ideal film for a year in which the transparently deceptive Bernie Sanders campaign is being embraced by white America. The ‘new alternative’ is a nakedly venal and unpleasant man, one with a long history of opportunistic voting in congress but with a preternatural ability to push the right buttons for his targeted audience. Shane Carruth meets Bernie Sanders meets Marina Abramovic. This is the new *nothing* culture. It is also a culture of white privilege, it should be noted. Sanders is, besides his odious position excusing Israeli aggression, and the fact he enthusiastically supported the NATO aggression on the former Yugoslavia, a sort a non-threatening avuncular old Uncle from the very white state of Vermont. What is relevant here is that Sanders is the managed symbol of opposition. As I speak about later, the loss of self in contemporary society has taken the form of a kind of self objectification (on one level). An over-identification with commodities. The political arena is then simply more commodity shopping and Sanders signifies the most anodyne form of nominal opposition. He drains energy form those pockets of genuine grass roots organizing, and positions himself as a white man of a certain age from a state signified as an almost Norman Rockwellian symbol of cleanliness, with an added small town nostalgia. The details become irrelevant. His actual voting record irrelevant.
“Nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed.”

Sanders is nostalgia.

For the white population, Sanders is a trusted white brand in a sense. There is also the tacit understanding that ‘he won’t win’. Which I suspect comes as a comfort to many, but his running (not as an independent) is a controlled bit of faux resistance, and one in which the white voter can still feel white people are the ones making decisions. He de-facto authenticates the Democratic Party. The electoral shopper then has identified him or herself with progressive values, a nostalgic small town quaintness (much as many of the white affluent class shop for rustic natural fiber clothes or old farm implements to use as decor) and all without having to allow into the purchase any question of race or Imperial domination.
The control mechanisms in play help arrange a world view in which deceit, greed, selfishness, racism, and tolerance for authoritarian values are validated. And cutting across all this new cultivated and manicured *reality* is a sense that ‘perception’ (merely perception) is perfectly normal, even natural, and that perception is reinforced by the quality of acting the role of oneself. This is also a Kafka-eque trope, for ‘acting’ (as Weber observes) is to be distinguished from action, or an act. Benjamin saw the distinction as one of a dependence upon a script. Waiting for your cue — is part of the wide canvas of obedience and alertness to command. As Benjamin said of actors…“for them hammering is real hammering and simultaneously also nothing.” And this phenomenon extends to the idea of framing. There are paradoxes in this, but for the non-allegorical artwork the frame is crucial. It makes the actual place (and history) nearly irrelevant, and the artwork can float in a vacuum in which the audience may reflect on something cut off from the human and history. The theatre that looks to duplicate reality is the regressive theatre. Even where the intention to duplicate is highly artificial. Only in a staging in which the reality IS the stage, can allegory take place and where the ideas of both social history and individual awareness be exercised somehow. This is also something relevant in terms of art that tears away the deceptions of the cogito. All great theatre is, then, at least partly a theatre of pre-history.


The principle of the dominated world, of advanced capital, is one in which inner life becomes an owned private existence, a shift in subjective imagery. Adorno saw the pre-formed subjective experience additionally betrayed — in the sense that, for example, anticipation is rarely rewarded. In fact, even when the knock at the door, the knock of opportunity comes, the opportunity turns out to ephemeral. The promise is broken. Even chance random conversations today are so barren and anxiety ridden that something of a complicity with state controls is expressed. The loss of allegorical dimension means one is always trafficking and conversing in ideas and in a language that has been denuded and hence, as its shell remains, it is injurious and full of only sharp edges. For the instrumental language favors the simple metaphor, the simple simile, the war symbol. Adorno described affability as the discourse of a totally administered world.

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Michael Kenna, photography.

In contemporary TV, the anxiety of the entire culture becomes encapsulated in the exaggerated narcissism and self interest of many of the characters. I can think of two different shows in which teenage children discovered their parent(s) were secret spies or revolutionaries of a sort, or had some other secret — not immoral secrets, but just secrets. Other lives…in each case these other lives were, as I say, rather noble. In both shows the children are hysterical with self righteous anger. In another it is a wife. In fact two shows feature wives furious at husbands for secrets – not again, infidelity or illegal activity, just complicated secret activities. And again the response was a tearful sense of martyrdom. ‘How could you not tell me’? etc. Now, had I discovered my parents were spies or secret agents or had secrets of any kind I would have been thrilled. If my wife turned out to be a secret revolutionary, I think I might find that pretty sexy. But the white consciousness of the west today is one that can only know an ersatz victimhood. And the expression of emotion is allowed only in maudlin sentimental self pitying grief. White people problems abound. It is hard to think of a show in which some character is not affronted and indignant. And always with tears in their eyes. It is a substitute emotional release, probably standing in for a sub-conscious understanding of the massive crimes of the society at large. It is also a form of weird co-dependent neurosis. In a certain sense the idea of co-dependency is deeply flawed, and an expression of an ego psychology of adjustment. But in another sense, on a collective level, it seems an actual maladjustment, and one perfectly in sync with a society of snitching and shaming. But there is a second theme here, in the loss of experience and the representation of the shallow emotional — and that is the dialectic of participation. And this is again something Adorno was quite articulate about, especially in Minima Moralia.
“The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.”

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Lajos Vadja

Contemporary life is largely shaped by economic inequality. Everything else follows along in the train of that. That said, those secondary consequences hold great importance as the seeds of later resistance. For the left today, the class of academic and faux left and self promoting left, the disfigurement of the psyche is huge. The self examination (even when the critiques of social issues are good) is lacking. And there continues the anti-intellectualism lodged in much of the older white left. That factory Marxist mentality. The flip side of which is the Bhaskar Sunkara entrepreneur style-left. The used car salesman left. And running across all this is the branded liberal press celeb writers; the Laurie Penny or Molly Crabapple, or Danny Gold, or China Mieville kickstarter left. People who even when they are right, are wrong. But I digress…sort of. Christopher Bollas coined the term ‘Normotic’.
Bollas sees this individual fleeing from dream life, from imagination, and from, in fact, all risk. This is an echo of Randy Martin’s notion of a financialized model for psychological behavior. Risk management. Bollas says the psychotic has gone off the deep end, the normatic has gone off the shallow end. And really this is what I am trying to get from an aesthetic point of view. The new post experience administered psyche is flat lining emotionally, but more than that, it is a kind of self-reifying subject. Bollas sees this person as experiencing themselves as commodities. As Sherry Weber Nicholson quotes Joyce McDougall, who speaks of the ‘death of curiosity’. Nicholson writes…
“The patient talks of people, and of things, but rarely of relationships between people or things. Nor does there seem to be that intermingling of conscious and less conscious layers of meaning in the patient’s communication.”
The eroding of experience means really a loss of history. Both social and personal. McDougall says the patient displays “a banality of thought akin to mental retardation.” This is the new mass public, the new mass man. I suspect many people imitate a crude version of what they see in TV and film. Everyone is waiting, anticipating the Great Theatre of Oklahoma is about to start hiring. The society of the West today is so awash in entertainment violence, and so buffeted with constant news-speak, platitudes and disinformation, that as children this process of deadening begins as a protective measure. This may not be quite right, though, because there is also a sense that somewhere in the repressed material of these subjects their lurks the phantom recognition of the collective death wish embedded in Capitalism.

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http://john-steppling.com/2015/08/the-normal-non-self/

Society of the Meaningless - some excerpts

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Manuel Alvarez Bravo, photography. 1931.



This was the week of the Thayls *terror* plot, foiled by the *courageous* US Marines who just happened to be on the train. Call Liam Neeson’s agent, see if you can get him…
This is simply the most absurd level of propaganda now imaginable. The echoes of Operation Gladio. And it relates to how the public has lost the capacity to see and listen — to experience and evaluate. The rise in openly fascistic rhetoric, the kind Donald Trump now espouses, is only the vulgarized version of positions that are really no different than those of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. For the deep reality underlying all the campaign photo ops and staged non-debates, is U.S. foreign policy. The kind that has plundered Haiti, torn apart much of central America, and now is ravaging the middle east and Africa. How do those narratives remain so invisible?


The assault on the poor, today, in Western countries is expressed in revisionist narratives of the most openly fascistic sort. And this leads to another aspect of domination, one touched upon in an excellent article by Crystal Bennis in the current online edition of Uncube. The rise of companies such as Apple, for example, are promoted through a narrative based on the myth of eternal progress. Bennis quotes hacker/activist Tobias Revell who says “We are seeing new types of origin myths and future myths…”. It is the new narrative of *magic*. The idea of magic is invoked to describe the way algorithmic systems work. Researcher Natalie Kane is quoted on the example of Amazon — “why do we think Amazon reccomendation systems are magic?” Revell points to how one is not allowed to repair your iPhone, or iPad, and in fact not even allowed to open it. The myth of progress — of technology improving our lives somehow, or more, making us better than we were, is a deeply pernicious notion. The power resides in a very small circle of people. Those who own the technology. This is far cry from the Utopian vision of a Hannes Meyer.

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Rafael Coronel

“Its linked to the idea of haunting. We are installing devices in our homes which are not entirely under our control and we don’t understand how they work or how to fix them. That becomes deeply uncanny, because you’re then deeply suspicious of your own home.”
Tobias Revell

“Motifs of individual empowerment-through-magical-computers can still be found in Apple’s sloganeering. Their phrase ‘It just works’ angers me the most. “You don’t need to worry how it works,” Apple tells you, “just that it does.” The implication is that you don’t need to know what you’re agreeing to when you allow this device or software to work around you. You are positioned as the magician’s assistant, or rather, you’re not even that. You’re the nervous audience member dragged on stage that makes the magician look better, or clever, or supernatural. The advertisement for their most recent public campaign, ‘You’re more powerful than you think’, is nothing but a insidious obfuscation technique, making you think that you are doing the magic when in fact you’re a component, and an ingredient, in a much more complex set of darker magical happenings. When you choose to be part of the magic, accepting the terms and conditions of use, are you allowing yourself to be possessed?”
Natalie Kane


The signs of madness are everywhere. In representational art, the recurrence of faces of insanity, and in pop culture the zombie narrative, along with its other symbolizations, begins to feel increasingly like an expression of the culture’s own collective deadness. If zombies are both a ruling class projection of fear, their popularity is probably the result of identification — both with the the survivors (as in the desire to start over and wash it all away) and on a less conscious level with the zombies themselves. The appearance last year of I Zombie, with a sympathetic crime fighting (and cute) young zombie woman (who is romantically linked to a handsome young boy zombie) suggests this may well be a trend. Dead, meaning challenged, and fascistic. Perfect.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/08/society-of-the-meaningless/#comment-9873

When Did Today Begin? Posted on May 29, 2013 by Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill


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Book Review: Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa by Maximilian Forte
By Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill
21/05/13
When did today begin? A question many poets and philosophers have asked. For many, who had relied the soft resistances of the mind – the resistance of text, of music, of democratic spaces – for us, today started on the 20th of October, 2011.

Great writing engenders great writing, and Dan Glazebrook has been inspired to write one of the finest reviews of recent times – his review of Professor Maximilian Forte’s Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa. This fine review gives a concise and accurate overview of Professor Forte’s great work. I ask that everyone read it – and then read the book itself. Dan’s work already done absolves me of the usual duties of the reviewer. I will take the liberty to say less on what are the central issues analysed in the book, and say more on certain details.

2011 was the year that language was finally murdered, and its remains disappeared. Of course, it had been under attack for some time. But, even during the Invasion of Iraq, a lie was still a lie, i.e. the principle of verification still existed. Donald Rumsfeld mused on the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Such musings are predicated on the belief that there is some relationship between true statements and physical reality. This belief led to considerable effort on the part of the US occupation forces to verify the statement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. There was even considerable anxiety in the Bush administration when the facts falsified the statement, i.e. when no WMD was found in Iraq. But all changed, changed utterly, when Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton took the reigns of power. From that point on, total war was waged on the link between language and reality.

Professor Forte examines, in great detail, the grossly obscene lies that Obama and his cohorts heaped on the Libyan state, and on the majority of the Libyan people, who were simply dismissed as “Gaddafi loyalists.” But, being a “Gaddafi loyalist” was not the worst of all worlds. The worst of all worlds was saved for the one third of Libya’s population who happen to have dark skin, along with the over two million migrant workers in Libya from countries like Nigeria and Chad. The brand that Obama, the Little Son of Africa, gave to these people was “Gaddafi mercenary.” And open hunting season was declared on all who now bore that brand on their black skin. The lynch mobs’ noose trotted merrily behind NATO’s bombing runs.

Tawergha was a city of some 40,000 black people. They were the descendents of slaves who had won their freedom over the centuries. They were not weak or cowardly people. When the Brigades for the Purging of Black Skins—the grand title the Misrata militias gave themselves—laid siege to their city, they did not kneel down and beg for mercy. Far from it, they defended their city as true Libyan patriots. The Brigades for the Purging of Black Skins would have stayed camped in the desert until hell froze over if it hadn’t been for their allies in the skies—Obama’s bombers. For three days and three nights, NATO pounded the defences of the city until they finally broke. The gates were open and the Brigades for the Purging of Black Skins were free to do their work. Yes, Obama brought freedom to Tawergha—the freedom of the racist lynch mob, the ethnic cleanser, the torturer and the murderer. As Professor Forte points out, here was the Responsibility to Protect—but to protect whom? Today Tawergha is home only to hungry dogs and crows. It’s population scattered into the desert, or into refugee camps, or buried in shallow graves. The desert wind whistles through the shell holes in its burned out and looted (what were) homes.

Some black people tried to escape the racist Holocaust by taking to the seas in search of sanctuary in “civilised” Europe. Professor Forte writes: “In terms of the failure to protect civilians, in a manner that is actually an international criminal offence, numerous reports revealed how NATO ships ignored the distress calls of refugee boats in the Mediterranean that were fleeing Libya. In May 2011, 61 African refugees died on a single vessel, despite making contact with vessels belonging to NATO member states. In a repeat of the situation, dozens died in early August 2011 on another vessel. In fact, on NATO’s watch, at least 1500 refugees fleeing Libya died at sea during the war.” As Professor Forte writes, if the Responsibility to Protect doctrine was applied to Libya, it was only on the basis that black people are not human.

Obama and his crew were kept very busy making up atrocities to lay at the feet of the “Gaddafi forces”—otherwise known as the legally constituted defence forces of the Libyan state. They were kept busy, as the rebels were not at all embarrassed by their racist outrages. Far from it. They videoed their lynching of black people in the market squares of Benghazi and Misrata, and put the videos up on You Tube for a laugh. Some of the better Western newspapers were also allowing reports of rape, torture and murder, on the part of the rebels, to slip in among the column yards of condemnation of Al Gaddafi and all who believed that Libya was an independent country. Keeping ahead of very real rapes is best done by fabricating rapes of such imaginative excess that the very concept of reality becomes redundant. Al Gaddafi was now handing out Viagra to his “Gaddafi loyalists” to rape the heavily bearded Jihadi peaceful protestors. Years old Libyan porn movies became evidence of Misrata virgins being gang raped by “Gaddafi mercenaries.” And we all know how big the penises of black men are. To add to the farce, the clownish International Criminal Court (ICC) piped in to issue an arrest warrant for Muammar al-Gaddafi, on the basis of the porn movies – which, as Professor Forte points out, have yet to be seen by the ICC (though it has never issued an apology to the Al Gaddafi family for its outrageous slander.)

And here we see the deep psychology of the Obama administration. It is never enough to murder an enemy. His name must also be murdered. Not a trace of him can be allowed to survive – not even his bones. Obama already had form when it came to assassination and disappearing of bodies. Osama Bin Laden, we are told, was gunned down in his home, and his body dumped in the sea—Chicago style. Gangsters like to keep their victims in fridges—at least in the movies—and Obama seems to be a great lover of gangster movies. If he had been a man of the theatre, he would know of a play by Sophocles, a play in which a Greek marks out the dividing line between civilised people and those who have not achieved the status of civilisation. Civilised people allow their enemies to bury their dead. Antigone knew this.

As if to confirm that the Obama administration has turned its back on civilisation, has regressed to the ancient chaos, Hilary Clinton’s hideous cackle “We Came, We Saw, He Died,” sent the United States of America back to the year 46 BC—the year when the most noble of heroes, Vercingetorix, was ritually slaughtered before a baying Roman mob, for the crime of defending his homeland. He too was denied a grave. Perhaps Clinton’s knowledge of the Classics did not extend to knowing that Julius Caesar was the first man to be indicted for war crimes—for the bestial nature of his Conquest of Gall.

Professor Forte peers mercilessly into the minds of the Benghazi rebels, as the Benghazi rebels peered without mercy into the collective mind of the West. They knew us well—all too well. They knew that the fear of the black African penises touching the white skins of our women would be enough to make us throw all reason and logic to the wind, and put the killing frenzy in our blood. They knew we would not stand idly by while black men did to fair skins “what we all know black men always want to do”. But did the racism end there? Why did the West—both Left and Right—so readily believe that Al Gaddafi was giving orders to rape, and that professional Arab soldiers were following those orders without question? If David Cameron had been accused of ordering his troops to rape Afghan women, would we have believed it? Shoot them or blow them to bits—yes of course—but rape them, no. So, why did sophisticated Left wing commentators immediately believe that the Libyan government had given orders to the Libyan defence forces to rape Libyan women? Why? Because that’s what Arabs do! Isn’t it? Arabs are “filthy rapists”—and they love boys too. Al Gaddafi giving Viagra to the Libyan Army to rape? Sure, why wouldn’t he—he’s an Arab. Needless to say, Professor Forte does not express himself in these terms—these are not the terms of an anthropologist.

We tend to think of anthropologists studying the sexual mores of primitive peoples, or trying to find evidence for the origins of our pathologies in their more simple ways. We forget that we Westerners too are “a people.” That we too are subject to the currents of history—and that we are capable of falling backwards into chaos. Slouching Towards Sirte evokes the Yeats poem, The Second Coming. As in the poem, it is not The Word that is coming, but the murder of the word—the time before language. The time before the separation of truth and falsity. A time of terrible anxiety, when the rough beast does not know its own name, or the name of any other thing. This is the time when even the Left, those who claim some moral authority, fall into the all-consuming confusion. We have grown to expect little better of the Right, but when the Left fall too—or become even more venomous—what hope is there? I quote Professor Forte at some length here:

“The majority of the North American and European left—reconditioned, accommodating, and fearful—played a supporting role by making substantial room for the dominant US narrative and its military policies. Even here self-described anti-imperialists and Marxists conceded ground to the State Department which would then be used to amass support for intervention: Gaddafi, in their view, was a dictator, even a collaborator of the West, he should not be defended, and he had to go. They thus agreed to make an issue out of Gaddafi, not empire. The left joined the choir, and the State Department pointed to the choir in justifying the idea that ‘the international community’ was speaking with one voice against Gaddafi.

“Other supposed anti-imperialists and ‘leftists’ (including some Marxists, anarchists, and social democrats) even backed the military intervention to ‘save Benghazi’. In both approaches, the US and other NATO political and military leaderships would benefit from what was at the very least half-praise from supposed ideological opponents at home. These approaches were derided by Latin American socialists, Pan Africanists and African nationalists alike, who were the only real bastions of anti-imperialism in this entire story.

“The ‘neither-nor’ a la carte attitude—neither supporting Gaddafi nor supporting NATO (with some exceptions to the latter)—with prompt denunciations of ‘Stalinism,’ paid scarce attention to who stood up against US and NATO intervention in Libya: it was not Benghazi, which played an active role in legitimating and boosting the makeover of the US reputation among Arabs.

“Turning a blind eye to Sirte, and a racist blind eye to the plight of black Libyans and other black Africans at the hands of the insurgents, the European and North American left did nothing to oppose imperialism. They have suffered an irreparable loss of international credibility while cementing a North-South dividing line among socialists. It seems that the left of the global North bought into the dominant US self-image of being a ‘force for dignity,’ fearful that its status would be imperilled by seeming to support ‘dictators’ and being aligned with ‘Stalinists.’ (They were quick to adopt the cherished epithets of the very same ‘neocons’ that they claimed to loathe.) Instead, they effectively opted for the imperialism and for the global dictatorship of the US, with far more blood on its hands than any number of such ‘dictators’ combined.

“In denouncing Gaddafi, just as the US was gearing up to depose him, they legitimated the position that Gaddafi’s leadership was somehow the root or the pivot of the intervention, thereby inevitably even if indirectly, supporting regime change. They spoke as if all political systems must be identical to ours to be deemed democratic. They treated us to jejune formulas, with fatuous warnings to ‘Gaddafi supporters’: ‘the enemy of your enemy is not your friend’. Somehow, they failed to heed their own warning as they embraced the ‘valiant revolutionaries’ of Benghazi, paying heed to neither their racist outrages nor the presence of Islamic reactionaries”.

http://openanthropology.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/sirte-globe.jpg?w=300&h=249

So, for those of us who thought to resist with texts and music and democratic spaces, a new today began on the day Muammar al-Gadaffi, and over one hundred other Prisoners of War, where ritually butchered on the outskirts of Sirte. They had fought bravely, very bravely. At the end, 300 men, under the command of Mutassim al-Gaddafi, had held off thousands of rebels, Qatari regulars, and NATO special forces – and the constant bombardment of NATO drones and stealth bombers.

The civilians of Sirte too had suffered indescribable horrors—and still would not surrender. Many slept in the streets, as they had no way of knowing where shells fired by untrained and hash smoking rebels might fall. Where was the protection of civilians for them? Finally, Al Gaddafi was injured, captured, tortured and murdered. TV News rooms across the West held studio celebrations. Politicians welcomed the murder of a POW. Here too, the truth was murdered. The Western media, remembering Saddam Hussein, were not content until they had a story about Al Gaddafi cowering in a sewerage pipe. They crowed and crowed and crowed. Al Gaddafi—the Great Man—cowering in a sewerage pipe. And when Human Rights Watch investigated, and found that Al Gaddafi had not been cowering in any pipe, but had been fighting in a trench, as a true Libyan soldier and patriot—well, that didn’t matter. It was never mentioned. Because the truth never mattered in Libya. Or if it did, it was only in so far as it could be ritually butchered on camera. The ancient beast of chaos found its rebirth at Sirte.

The West, a decrepit parasite society, no longer capable of great art or philosophy, it recycles the glories of the past as meaningless commodities. As it collapses under the weight of its own senile greed and rank stupidity, it clings on with its few remaining broken teeth, cutting and torturing living flesh. It consumes its own young and feebly sucks the youthful blood of Africa. Muammar al-Gaddafi drove it mad, by threatening to cut off the supply of African blood.

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As in Iraq, and Yugoslavia before it, only the complete destruction of the native state can yield the chaos that the imperialists take to be their tabula rasa. For all the USA’s efforts to wrench Libya out of Africa, for all of its Anglo-Saxon Protestant jihad to impose “free market values,” it has turned Libya into the very cliché of a failed African state. Now, every little town is ruled by its own warlord. Instead of being the beacon of a new, strong and united Africa, Libya has become the African chaos the NGOs love to present to us on our TV screens when they are looking for money. Where Al Gaddafi’s GreatManMadeRiver had supplied Libya with as much fresh water as the Nile flowing for 200 years, turning the desert into rich green fields, today many Libyans don’t have clean water to drink or enough to eat. Garbage piles up uncollected in even the main cities and disease is rampant. Scores have died from drinking bootleg alcohol, and young men listen to Al Qaeda fatwas, with hash joints hanging from their mouths.

Libya suffered lynching by NGOs. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, they all joined in the lynching. Professor Forte writes:

“On February 23, 2011, mere days into the uprising and well before it had a chance to ascertain, corroborate or confirm any facts on the ground, Amnesty International began launching public accusations against Libya, the African Union, and the UN Security Council for failing to take action. Even more stunning, given what was described in the previous chapter, was Amnesty’s reinforcement of the ‘African mercenary’ myth that justified and provided cover for the lethal targeting of innocent black African migrants and black Libyans:

‘Amnesty International also criticized the response of the African Union to the unfolding crisis, which has seen hundreds killed and persistent reports of mercenaries being brought in from Africa countries by the Libyan leader to violently suppress the protests against him.

‘It is outrageous that the African Union Peace and Security Council has not even met to discuss the emergency taking place in one of its own member states,’ said Salil Shetty.

‘Amnesty International called on the African Union to ensure that its member states, particularly those bordering Libya, are not complicit in human rights abuses in Libya’.

“Amnesty, in making such specific accusations (echoing the Libyan opposition), in calling for an assets freeze and arms embargo and more actions with each passing day, was essentially representing one side of the conflict, namely the insurgents, adopting their representational strategies, and calling for measures that would benefit them. Amnesty thus effectively made itself party to the conflict”.

Indeed it did. The NGO felon-setting of every Libyan with dark skin, and of every black migrant worker, made it almost impossible for the African Union (AU) to carry out its function. By doing so, it could only add credence to the “Gaddafi mercenaries” myth. Jumping on the opportunity, Obama’s crew were very quick to completely sideline the AU, by declaring that the Arab League was the main regional association. This despite the fact, as Professor Forte points out, that Libya had, for many years, shown nothing but contempt for the supine Arab League, and had put its full energy and resources into building the AU—and precisely for the purpose of keeping the White Man from doing what he now planned to do to Libya and all of Africa.

In Libya, the White Man picked up his burden again. And every African knows what that means for them. As in 1873, the Capitalist system has crashed, and only the wealth of Africa can save it. US Army Africa Command (AFRICOM) had been slapped down by Al Gaddafi, when it had demanded its headquarters be built on African soil. It was forced to run with its tail between its legs to that other zone of occupation— Germany—to build its HQ. An Africa Command that was not even allowed into Africa? Al Gaddafi certainly knew how to put the USA in its place. But, the Anglo-Saxon is a vengeful creature, and has a very long memory. AFRICOM was presented with the bombing of Libya as its first military operation. And when it had reaped bloody vengeance on its foe, and utterly destroyed his country, it immediately announced a string of new military operations, all over north and central Africa. The New Scramble for Africa was on—with white officers and black foot soldiers.

One would think, from all this, that Professor Forte’s book is one long unrelieved catalogue of horror, but there are some moments of humour—if even of the gallows kind. There is always a monstrous clownishness about the tyrant, and the USA is no exception. Forte takes a wicked delight in recounting the contents of cables sent to Washington from the US embassy in Tripoli, and published by Wikileaks. Not all of the cables are funny in content—many of them show the murderous envy of the USA towards Libya’s growing influence and inspiring achievements in Africa—but many are quite hilarious in their peevish pettiness. I particularly liked the cables, marked secret, about the poor US and European conference delegates who were sent to sleep on foam mattresses in half-built apartment blocks—while the African delegates were feted in Libya’s most luxurious hotels. It seems Al Gaddafi too had a wicked sense of historical humour.

There are also obscene jokes in this book—like the one about the UN Human Rights Council—the council that brought all the NGOs together to sign on the dotted line for the lynching of Libya—and then banned Libya from speaking at the UN. Let me repeat that. The UN Human Rights Council banned the government of Libya from speaking about a crisis in Libya—but listened at length to NGOs, who had no legal status whatsoever at the UN, and, at the time, had no people on the ground in Libya. Indeed, according to themselves, these NGOs had no source of information from Libya at all, apart from the rebels. And yet, their bought word was enough to impose a “no fly zone” on the sovereign state of Libya. This farce was being played out in March 2011—a time when both the US government and NATO were publicly claiming that regime change was not on their agenda. It seems that, by then, the UN Human Rights Council had decided that regime change had already happened, and that US State Department funded NGOs were the nearest thing Libya had to a government. However, the Libyan government had a cunning plan to have its views heard. If Libyans were banned from speaking, then maybe somebody else could speak for them. The Libyan authorities asked former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister, Catholic priest and Sandinista Revolutionary, Miguel D’Escoto Brockman to speak on its behalf. He was entitled to do so. Things were looking bad for the UN Human Rights Council when D’Escoto was allocated speaking time on March 31st. Enter the US Cavalry to rout the Indians—in the form of Susan Rice. She let it be known that D’Escoto was in the USA on a tourist visa, and if he tried to speak at the UN it would be considered as work, which would violate his visa terms. Strangely enough, the UN Human Rights Council agreed, and D’Escoto was not allowed to speak. The truth was safely smothered—thanks to the fact that the UN buildings are on US territory. The big boy who owns the ball gets to decide the rules of the game.

However, the grotesque antics of Ban Ki-Moon and his crew have had a disastrous outcome for their beloved Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Professor Forte notes that R2P has died a death in Libya. Far from being the vindication of R2P that many of its cheer leaders claimed it would be, the Destruction of Libya, by NATO bombardment and NATO backed rebel atrocities, has brought in an era where R2P is simply regarded as a crude and brutal imperialist weapon. Indeed, D’Escoto said as much when, following the visa farce, he said that the UN has become “a lethal weapon of the Empire”. As we have seen in Syria, permanent members of the UN Security Council, such as China and Russia, are now determined to ensure that the founding principle of the United Nations, enshrined in Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter, i.e. the principle of the sovereignty of nations, is not subverted and destroyed by an ill-defined and easily manipulated R2P doctrine, which has no legal basis in the UN Charter. Professor Forte quotes from the address of Robert Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2011:

“The newly-minted principle of the ‘responsibility to protect,’ should not be twisted to provide cover for its premeditated abuse in violating the sacred international principle of the Charter, which is the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of states, because to do so amounts to an act of aggression and causes destabilization of sovereign states. Moreover, to selectively and arbitrarily apply that [R2P] principle, merely serves to undermine the general acceptability of it. Indeed, more than any other states, all the five permanent members of the Security Council bear a huge responsibility in this regard for ensuring that their historical privilege is used more to protect the United Nations Charter than to breach it, as is happening currently in Libya through the blatant, illegal, brutal, callous, NATO’s murderous bombing.”

Muammar al-Gaddafi, like Kwame Nkrumah before him, dreamed of an Africa united and strong, able to protect its own borders and provide a decent living to all its people. To this end, Al Gaddafi had challenged the neo-liberal dogma of private property, by showing Africans that massive state enterprise could achieve far more, and in far less time, than private enterprise ever could. All over the African continent, the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya invested public funds in everything from roads to hospitals to schools to agriculture to hotels to communications. These brilliantly successful state enterprises exposed the neo-liberal dogma for the scam it is, and let it be known to the world that there is a better way to live. For that affront to the Masters of Men, Al Gaddafi was ritually martyred on our TV screens. A brutal warning to all who would dare follow his lead. But, the Masters of Men have been terribly mistaken. Instead of fear, Al Gaddafi’s noble martyrdom has put iron in our souls.

The anti-imperialist movement of the 20th century had Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Today, we have Maximilian Forte’s Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa.

Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa
Maximilian Forte
Paperback and E-book: 352 pages
Publisher: Baraka Books (November 28, 2012)

zeroanthropology.net2013/05/29/when-did-today-begin/

From Steppling's twitter feed. That's what I call criticism.

Some excerpts from Kitsch Endgame'


The magical thinking of people in the West today is very close to the most obscurantist religious fantasies. And increasingly the idea of origin is simply not considered. A world in which everything is a fiction becomes one in which nothing is a fiction. And vice versa.
Justin Fantl, photography.
Justin Fantl, photography.
In a sense, this is also the structure capital took with the art market. Hal Foster observed twenty years ago that where once private art collections were turned into museums for the public, today the public arts are privatized. Very wealthy collectors (and dealers and gallery owners) work in unison with museum curators, and more, with politicians, to promote their brand. Art follows in its wake. There are often inseparable anyway. The landscape is owned, in other words.
This owned landscape is also, simultaneously an erasing of itself *as* landscape. Branded, but not there. The bad taste of most Americans is really closer to ‘no taste’, or the rejection of the idea of taste. There is a certain similarity to U.S. crassness, today, and early Nazi tastes. After all, *kitsch* is the offspring of fascism, of Nazi values. Hermann Broch was (besides being one of the three or four greatest writers of the 20th century for fiction) a remarkable cultural critic. And one that for some reason is read far too little. Broch said this of kitsch….“The artist pursues not a ‘good’ work of art, but a ‘beautiful’ work of art, what matters here is a beautiful effect. And this means that the kitsch novel, even while often using quite naturalistic language, i.e., the vocabulary of reality, describes the world not as it really is but as it is hoped and feared to be…”. Broch believed kitsch was substituting ethical for aesthetic. It is the exaggerating of emotion, but not any emotion, it the exaggeration of shallow emotion, fraudulent emotion, and that is its crime. For kitsch reinforces the essential untruths that sustain basic repression.


The rise of kitsch is linked to all of this. In my father’s generation (he was born in 1907) the educated were duly educated to have taste. If you were uneducated, you didn’t think about culture — not as the educated classes did. Having taste was elitist, yes, but these divisions existed in different ways in different societies. The American working class had access though, and a tradition, of learning. The difference, in a sense, from that generation to those born after 1980 is that with the rise of marketing came the pressure to own not just commodities, but opinions. And if you have none, buy some anyway. One doesn’t have to learn if one can purchase. The point is that with the rise of National Socialism came the state implementation of cultural propaganda as a tool. The assault on the public began in a sense with the appropriation of volk-kulture by the Nazi cultural ministers and its official sanctioning and validating, and the creation of set associations such as patriotism and obedience.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/kitsch-endgame/

We Interrupt Our Scheduled Programming to Bring You…
SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 | 1 COMMENT

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Cole Thompson, photography.

“Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
H. Rap Brown

“We see images on TV, and evaluate ourselves on the basis of what we see.”
Jena Gordon

“The culture’s habit of finding “seriousness” acceptable only if offered by people who are finally not serious is yet another way that our culture makes certain that nothing alarming will come of our newfound interest in heretical ideas.”
Curtis White

There is a certain type of white liberal (overwhelmingly white, but not exclusively) in the U.S. today, and they and their sensibility and values define Hollywood products. Film of course, but far more, really, in television. And they are increasingly defining electoral political theatre. The emergence of this particular vein of mass cultural product began about 1990. It may have existed to some degree before, certainly, but the distillation of this sensibility can be traced to the early 90s. It was there, in its crude form by the mid 80s, but more in feature films than TV. The Harold Ramis films, the Spielberg films, John Hughes, Ivan Reitman, these were the defining films of the Reagan era. But in the 90s, television became the concretizing medium for liberal values. Perhaps the quintessential franchise for the 90s was Dick Wolf’s Law & Order. First broadcast in 1990, this show and its spinoffs dominated TV drama for over a decade. And it is interesting to see just how deep the influence was, but also how it had inherited and reconfigured the reactionary cop dramas of earlier decades. It was the first *prestige* cop drama. It gave a patina of high minded seriousness to cop theatre; Starsky and Hutch or S.W.A.T. were self consciously juvenile 70s pulp, but Wolf implemented all the cues for prestige white smugness, affluent west side LA values, and police virtue in the somber stoicism of Law & Order. Now Hill Street Blues (1983) was the first cousin and precursor to the Dick Wolfe franchise, and Steven Bochco certainly can be credited with establishing the mock high seriousness and the exploration of cop inner lives, but Hill St.Blues was still an unapologetic genre show. Mary Tyler Moore Productions (MTM) was at that time creating a new niche audience; a ‘special elite’ audience in which hour long drama was set in tones appropriate to a better educated white viewer. But it was still genre. It was overtly *realistic* and it was recuperating the nobility of the honorable policeman from the cynicism of the Dirty Harry decade. Except of course the majority of those 70s crime films (Dirty Harry, Bullitt, French Connection, were only half cynical, and half authoritarian. They were also, usually, highly ambivalent. And in the case of Dirty Harry, of course, there was the additional fascistic trope of vigilantism). Hill St. Blues was ensemble and sort of archly gritty in his presentation. But the grit was really pretty mild. But this was also the first show to utilize the steady cam and a constantly moving p.o.v, which coincided with the large ensemble cast. The desired effect was to be read as *urban*. Urban was always moving, messy, but under control: and here the Wambaugh influence should be noted, too. The heroic urban cop, flawed, self destructive, but still, forming that *thin blue line*.

This also marked the black and white buddy theme in prime time. It was the TV echo of Lethal Weapon. The domesticated black hero-cop (often returned from Viet Nam) and his white partner are recreating their failed war in southeast Asia. But the black cop characters are never politicized. Never. In fact they are far more often, in such franchises, to be non threatening, bourgeois, and family men. It is the liberal alibi against the disproportionate number of black villains and the stereotyping of ‘inner city’ black youth. Often the black cop has, to a degree, been traumatized by the “loss” in Viet Nam. I am pretty sure not a single episode of Hill St. Blues ever touched on black activism.
And in Capt. Furillo one sees the precursor to Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston). Except Furillo is too tinged with traces of proletarian insecurity. That changed as the the liberal value system distanced itself from the working class.

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Mangelos (Dimitrije Bašičević).

Law & Order was presenting itself as ‘drama’, not genre. It came replete with somber repetitive sound cues announcing each new chapter, and in fact the self conscious presentation of chapters was itself a signifier for *serious*.
Hannah K. Gold wrote…“One 2004 study, which analyzed racial representation in Law and Order and NYPD Blue, found that blacks are shown as suspects 40 to 50% more often than as victims. They also found whites are about twice as likely to be shown as victims, rather than offenders. Furthermore, as the study notes, “even if blacks are not shown disproportionately as offenders, compared to Whites, their portrayals still reinforce the stereotype of the ‘young black male’ criminal.” According to Gray Cavender and Nancy Jurik’s paper “Policing Race and Gender, ”both prime time crime drama and reality television programs present crime in a manner that heightens fears by whites when they view persons of color,” which has more to do with how minorities are represented than how many, especially given the under representation of black and Latino actors on television.”

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Sam Waterston

It is not just the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, and the demonizing of the poor, it is also this establishing of a backdrop of crime infested big cities. This goes back to Reagan era propagandizing, but it was carried through in Hollywood film and TV, and intensified, but more, it was given the cover of prestige drama, of seriousness. And it was the manufacturing of a particular kind of moral world view. Not just in relation to the police and criminal justice system, but more, to the ways in which people interact. The idea of class balkanization was being routinized.

Now there has been a clear and marked increase in the overt nationalism and pro-military ethos of TV drama, and increasingly TV cops shows present police departments as if they were military cadres. The emphasis is on the private world of these new warrior priests. And the number of military shows (sci-fi or not) has increased dramatically. The focus on military technology has also increased even in shows not strictly military (see The Last Ship, Homeland, 24, Scorpion, The Following, Murder in the First, The Unit, Last Resort, Generation Kill, Major Crimes, et al ). But these shows are really still genre, and self aware about it. Law & Order was the first serious ‘crime drama’, one that was not seen as a ‘guilty pleasure’. This was marketed as (and seen by networks and its creators) as closer to Dickens than Mickey Spillane.

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Jen Mazza

“Individuals {TV audiences} have become more concerned with the
identification and satisfaction of their personal needs than developing a sense of
cooperation or community with others.”
Sheras & Koch-Sheras, 1999.

Adam B. Shniderman (in a paper for Law and Psychology Review) writes…
“The police and prosecutors in this view are portrayed as the “good guys” keeping the people safe from a dangerous world of criminals, and their tactics, regardless of how draconian and unconstitutional they may be, are necessary to get the job done effectively and expeditiously. On the other hand defense lawyers, the occasional by-the-book ADA, and even the Constitution are portrayed as impediments to justice. They obfuscate and distract from the correct outcome – a guilty verdict. The show suggests that if a suspect isn’t guilty, he or she isn’t brought to trial.”

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John Ford

Much has been written about the CSI franchise and the distorted depiction of forensics, but far less about Law & Order (which was Shniderman’s point, really) and I would argue that Law & Order is quite likely the most influential TV drama in history.

“The prosecutorial or police bias found in Law & Order and many of today’s police procedurals and legal dramas, as well as the inaccurate portrayal of a smooth, quick, and nearly flawless system, may shape jurors’ perceptions and core principles of the justice system.”
Adam Shniderman

There is a good deal to be said here about the masculinizing of justice. The portrayal of DAs and police detectives are almost always humorless, emotionally guarded, and borderline sadistic. But the clear implication is that such individuals are *needed* to keep society safe. The control of crime is the bedrock issue. And control comes from the authoritarian. Consistenly the Public Defenders and defense lawyers are shown as soft and feminized. It is probably not coincidental that the most sadistic cop on the show is played by Chris Noth, who also played Mr Big (the spectacularly rich and hence irresistible romantic interest on Sex and The City).

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H. Rap Brown

One clear trend in TV crime drama has been the fusion of crime procedurals and family melodrama. Depictions of police families, in particular has increased, but family organization is depicted regularly as a sort of benchmark for class and a symbol of virtue. And this is true, of course, in news reporting and on the opinion pages of major newspapers. The middle class and wealthy often have problems but they are depicted as abnormal. The poor are routinely expected to be dysfunctional. The rich are attractive and the poor far less attractive. The fact that, for example, child molestation has been increasingly discussed in society and media has meant it increased as a narrative theme proportionately. The creators of TV drama, as I mentioned last post, are an increasingly consolidated and narrow group of people and their preoccupations of the same ones as the national bourgeois white rich.

If you want to create your own show you have to apprentice under a veteran show creator (Dick Wolf, Bochco, David Simon, David Milch, David Kelley, et al — it apparently helps to be named David). In any event, this reflects the polorizing of wealth in society at large. A striking characteristic of this new sensibility is that the social issues addressed in storylines are exclusively filtered through a lens of an increasingly wealthy privileged white class. The world seen in these shows is the world of board rooms, studio offices and executive suites, and the world of gated rich communities. They may set these shows in the local precinct station, but it’s not reflective of those places. The creators of mainstream Hollywood film and TV are far more cut off from working class life than ever before. Almost none, and I mean literally NONE of the people writing and directing in Hollywood are from working class backgrounds, or did not attend an affluent and prestigious University. And the values of these white American liberals has shifted starkly to the right. This is perhaps the real starting point for seeing the effects on cultural generally of Hollywood TV and film. But back to Law & Order; the back stories for most of the police follow a pattern. Family man, and military veteran. The degree to which liberal Hollywood has embraced Imperialist war is breathtaking, actually. I can think of only two shows that focused on public defenders; one was the 2006 series In Justice (cancelled after one season) and the other was the excellent The Divide (2014), also cancelled after one season. The public has grown to expect punishment, not the withholding of punishment. As Shniderman points out, perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the cop show and lawyer show today is the erosion of the idea of presumed innocence. In Hollywood crime drama, the presumption is of guilt.

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Jack Beal

Post WW2, the white middle class (sic) was still connected to a unionized tradition of working class solidarity. Notwithstanding the systemic racism, that varied region to region, there was a sense of collectivism, however faint in places, that was the residue of a 79% unionized labor force. Factory work was collective, even if already splintering. The rising anti communist hysteria that found its ultimate domestic expression in McCarthyism had not yet shaped popular narrative. The cliched reading of 1950s America as intensely reactionary is misleading. The repressive conformism of the post war era was certainly true, but there were also large cultural forces of resistance. Those forces of resistance have all but disappeared in mainstream *entertainment* and media.

“In a 1998 study conducted on behalf of Children Now, a nonprofit children’s advocacy group, interviewers asked twelve hundred American children how often and in what roles do they see their race depicted on television. The results were revealing. Children more often associate positive qualities such as financial and academic success, leadership, and intelligence with White characters, and negative qualities such as lawbreaking, financial hardship, laziness, and goofy behavior with minority characters.
When children were asked about positive qualities, 58% of the children said that they see Whites on television as having a lot of money. Only 8% perceived minority characters as having a lot of money. As for negative qualities, 6% reported seeing White characters breaking the law or the rules compared with 47% of minority characters.”
Sherri Burr, Law Professor,
New Mexico School of Law

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Brian Day, photography.

The acting codes in Law & Order, actually sort of followed on the style, to some degree, of Hill St. Blues. The humorless and unforgiving smugness of Sam Waterston encapsulated a style that was a decade in the making. The entire cast, of course, shared this implicit presentation. The performances all avoid hesitation, or the appearance of doubt. Confidence and an absolute belief in the rightness of one’s actions is expressed in dialogue that anticipates the next line by a delivery that is a fraction of a second sooner than normal. There is never any *up speech*, the ends of sentences dip, if anything. But usually are simply flat. Speech is clipped, lips tight, expressions frozen in grimaces that parody seriousness. It is a parody of attention, really, too, and of concentration. But it has migrated from focus to Botox furrowing. The dark scowling face is to be equated with integrity. The criminals are portrayed as the exact opposite; they hesitate, look away, fidget, etc. Waterston became the iconic image of white WASP authority, and institutional certainty. He was Allan Dullus, Rockefeller pere, and Cotton Mather all in one. This sense of coldness and no-nonsense authoritarianism has bled into almost all prestige drama now. There are exceptions, stylistically, but not many. A look at Wolf’s most recent series, Chicago P.D., reveals the very same acting codes. The message is that the authoritarian character is one showing tough love. The clear implication is that society must show ‘tough love’ (i.e forgive nothing).

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Joseph DeCamp. 1883.

An interesting side bar to this is the proliferation of 12 Step story lines. I have no real idea of the number of producers, show runners or directors who are in AA, but my guess (based on personal anecdotal evidence) is that it is very high. And it’s not surprising, really, because the 12 step methodology is vaguely fascistic at its core. Putting aside whether it works, which is a huge other discussion, the methodology fits seamlessly into the self punishing individual who then corrects abuse of self the better to abuse others. Now I know people who AA helped, but that isn’t really the point here. The issue is the sense of Puritanical prohibition, of absolutes, of a sober (sic) minded view of the world. The liberal white authoritarian sees him or herself as pragmatic and *realistic*. And the first thing to remove is compassion. Of course the removal is justified by the ‘tough love’ bromide. All punishment becomes easier, even enjoyable (secretly) if one has a moral bluebook to fall back on, and power is an aphrodisiac in such situations. The contemporary edition of white liberal, that golden circle of entitlement that is Hollywood, almost entirely come from a certain class background. And those that didn’t quite, quickly migrated into this value system. And it is interesting to see the contradictions at work, too. David Simon came from relative affluence, but worked as a newspaper reporter (and union rep) in Baltimore. Dick Wolf was the son of ad executive. And attended Phillips Academy. Simon attended Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (rated best school in the country by Time magazine, 2005). Stephen Bochco is the New York born son of a concert violinist and attended Carnegie Mellon. David Milch attended Yale, and Yale Law, and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. This group formed the sort of ‘tough guy’ core of Hollywood television. You will note, there are no working class backgrounds. Fraternity tough guys. Now, make of that what you will, but my point has always been that the elite bourgeoisie and white wealth created the deeply racist and reactionary product you see in Hollywood. And while almost all of the above would describe themselves as liberal, the reality is that none of them create narratives of the working class. They aspire to it, certainly, but therein lies the problem. Aaron Sorkin was born and raised in Scarsdale, and went to Syracuse University. Both his sisters are lawyers. Again, the point is that social cache and entry level connections provide the access to privilege, and often the access is redundant. Mathew Weiner (Mad Men) attended Park School in Baltimore, then Wesleyan and USC. Of course there are many from relatively middle class backgrounds, even working class, such as Tom Fontana and Alan Ball. But those are exceptions, certainly.

The world view one sees today is shaped by Ivy league graduates, by Democratic Party interns, and the connections to the Pentagon and state department are a given.
Hollywood is not liberal. It is in-line with Democratic Party values; i.e. Imperialist wars and Capitalism, white privilege (unspoken) and the civilizing mission of the West. Now, the alibi remains the feel good stories of black characters who ‘succeed’, or who are seen as accepted and integrated into the white world (civilizing). Of all the above, Simon is perhaps the most contradictory figure, and one who at least in some fashion harkens back to a Union sensibility. But he is also the most paternalistic and bent on civilizing. But the point isn’t to dredge up these mini biographies, but to examine the evolution of values audiences consume today in product created by a certain class.

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Vandalized mural of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia.

The American psyche, as it is found in the literature of the U.S., starting with the adult male, was always conflicted in relationship to authority, and certainly to institutions. From Huckleberry Finn to Moby Dick, through The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying, these are books formed by the sensibility of resistance. Cultural resistance, anyway. There is a curious notion of responsibility, too, I think in the protagonists of American fiction. Ismael and Huck, and Tom Sawyer and Gatsby (and Nick Carraway) are none of them adults, or even desirous of adulthood per se. But it is always a question, and there are always dark portents about that place, that destination, adulthood. Without going into this too deeply, it is worth examining the idea of adulthood in contemporary Hollywood TV. The adult is uniformly either the authoritarian punisher, or the dissolving representative of kitsch patriarchy. This seeming contradiction (Don Draper and ..pick any Police Captain from any of a dozen shows) is between a fantasy figure of the past, of a fantasy past, and that of the controller of crime. Almost across the boards. The Aaron Sorkin protagonists (President or news anchor) are just the controller figure in drag. A drag that presents intelligence as synonymous with reasoned sobriety. That maturity is reactionary. The noble conservative is the new cool.
The figure of the adult male is simply invisible in Hollywood unless participating in violence, or ordering violence.

A.O. Scott wrote a piece entitled “The Death of Adulthood” in the N.Y. Times last year. He perhaps surprisingly made several good points, and raised talking points I’ve just touched on.
“The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved {Leslie} Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole “sivilized” world.
From there it is but a quick ride on the Pineapple Express to Apatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes of the 1960s and 1970s chafed against the demands of marriage, career and bureaucratic conformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, of adultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return a generation later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”

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Jungjin Lee, photography.

This is obvious in a way, but the mistake was in not seeing Updike and even, to a degree, Bellow, as messengers of conformity. Those protagonists were not really even semi-anti heroes. Which is not to say Bellow, at least, is not a significant writer (although if I’m honest I don’t probably think he is), but only to suggest that it is a long long ideological journey from Rabbit Angstrom to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and James Brown. And here there enters a serious regional trope — the new sensibility of the white liberal is uniformly East coast. It is white and WASP and Ivy League, mostly. If the culture heroes of the mid century were largely from the great plains, or Pacific Northwest, or Mexican borderlands, or deep South, the new domesticated version presented by Updike and Cheever and Roth were from the urban East.
From Pollack to Agnes Martin and Clyfford Still, to Charles Sheeler, to Coltrane (born in North Carolina) and Ornette (Texas), to John Ford (Maine), you don’t find Ivy league grads or fraternity brothers (Howard Hawks, off the top of my head, would be an exception). And you won’t find many from among the Black Mask writers or the best of the post war screenwriters. Ben Hecht worked in the garment district, and then later at a newspaper. His parents immigrated from Minsk. (Hecht would later become an almost irrational Zionist and wrote polemics defending the terror group Irgun, but such psychological deformation is perhaps an interesting topic to unpack in Hecht’s case). Charles MacArthur was the son of a zealot Evangelist in rural Pennsylvania, and then the dozen German/Jewish emigre directors who fled fascism, or poets like Theodor Roethke (son of a greengrocer and suicidal mother in Saginaw Michigan) or James Wright, (born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, to a worker in a glass factory). The domesticating of the wild is the unwritten theme, or rather sub-theme or sub text of American art from its inception. It simply turned inward at a certain point.

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Clyfford Still, The Still Museum, Denver.

So, the bastard and brain damaged (metaphor) children of Ben Hecht and Billy Wilder are Seth Rogan and Judd Apatow, the devolved legatees of James Cain, David Goodis and Faulkner are the middle brow white liberals like Lorrie Moore (more on her below) and Aaron Sorkin or Rachel Kushner. The descendants of Still and Martin are Jeff Koons and Lucien Smith. And one could go on and on. But to return to the cop franchises and the white privilege expressed therein, these other elements are not unimportant. In one sense the people who make Law & Order are the people who buy Rachel Kushner. Now the problem with A.O. Scott is a complete lack of political consciousness, and that is itself a symptom that one needs to track in all this. A number of years ago Curtis White wrote: “But the strangest consequence of the cult of Reason is in the effect it has had on public education. There the tradition of the Enlightenment has created not independent inquiry and “free thinking” but the strictest sort of respect for authority. For example, to return to the question of morals, it is true that we no longer teach Christian morality in our public schools, but neither do we teach Kantian morality. As Christians rightly complain, we teach nothing at all of morality to our children. This is so except that we teach by example the morality of obedience to authority whose first model for our children is the teacher and later the boss and the mass media. This is not obedience to church or obedience to a system of moral thought. It is pure obedience.” Later in this same essay, White touches on the contradictions that pure obedience breeds; the fear that the system (Capitalism) is failing, and the desire for it to fail. The message of most Zombie movies. Zombie films, as I’ve touched on before, are the ruling class vision (unconscious fear) of the masses coming to steal their money, AND the desire in the public to tear it all down and start over. Audiences, I have a feeling, don’t really object to being seen as Zombies if only because the working life of most people today is one of sub-Zombie standards. Not to mention the satisfaction of getting to eat the rich.

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“Full Metal Jacket” (1987). Stanley Kubrick, dr.

The creators of Hollywood TV are either east coast Ivy league, or they quickly adapt to those values. TV remains, even today, connected to advertisers. Marketing is complex, and entities such as HBO function in multi tiered ways. Owned by Time Warner, HBO operates with semi autonomy, and has packages available throughout the world (HBO Asia, HBO Nordic, HBO Latin America Group). A step over Time Warner is Comcast and Cox Cable, et al. Now HBO, as an example, has a huge subscription base, but it still relies on advertisers who want the prestige cache of association with such a blue chip label.
Curtis White is famous for his book length essay The Middle Mind. I often think of White’s essay when I write specifically about Hollywood. It is the empire of middle mindness. It is also a place, and I speak from experience, in which you must reproduce the same, again and again, and you must flatter the status quo. If ever there was an industry where grovelling and bootlicking helped your career, then its Hollywood film and TV. The white liberal sensibility remains both the purveyor of white privilege and reformist in nature. The valorizing of police is endemic to TV narrative. If there exceptions to this, they are treated as unusual. In reality, one need only look back on the history of police brutality and corruption in the U.S. Police chiefs such as Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, or Bill Parker in Los Angeles, or Joe Arpaio the Sheriff from Maricopa County, Arizona, or Garry McCarthy in Chicago, or Bill Gates also in Los Angeles, and the list could go on. And the list of police officer misconduct would fill a couple volumes. But the point is that the depiction of police is rarely, if ever, treated in a way that even remotely resembles reality. The staple of white liberal Hollywood remains that of *crime control*; the thin blue line, the police officer and detective as the last line of defense against the vast criminal underworld that threatens the safety of middle class America. There is no honest portrayal of systemic racism and corruption, of big city cops as an occupying army.

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Oliver Herring

A growing theme in U.S. culture today, often hidden, or partly hidden, is that of our own complicity in this administered world. I think there is truth in this, but it is also a dangerous idea if not explored in a context that makes clear the coercion most Americans endure. Actors willingly take any role offered because they need to eat (as an example). They cannot turn down even the most odious of police state neo fascist TV show. You turn it down, you don’t work again. It is only a short step from precarious to homeless. But the flip side is willful unawareness. The flip side is the abdication of all responsibility. Of political amnesia. The normalizing of torture, of racist police brutality, of inequality and Imperalist war propaganda is all found in the TV shows Hollywood churns out. The apology is always “its just a movie”. But nothing is just an anything. In culture the only thing that matters is the thing itself. The artwork. But the system avoids a lot of this by promoting the idea of *Entertainment*; of art as a leisure time activity like golfing or bowling. And often, in my experience, network executives, and writers, show runners, and actors are simply ignorant. These are coddled white people, intellectually sheltered and insecure. They don’t know more than what the 6 o clock news tells them. They instinctively side with their class. Samantha Power is one of them. PEN is now run by Suzanne Nossel, Ivy league, white, a willing bureaucrat to Empire. She is one of them. They would love such people to come over for dinner.

The “boards” of every non-profit organization, university, theatre, etc., no matter what the organization’s original goals were, are made up of the same tiny group of people, and they choose the organization’s leaders, presidents, artistic directors on the basis that those individuals would be good at “fund-raising,” i.e. getting money out of a few more people from that same group……Then even the once serious people in the organization begin to internalize the in-born belief of the corporate-minded board members that the most important thing for the organization is to grow, raise more money, get more members…”
Wallace Shawn

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Gerda Peterich, photography. (John Hunter Tavern, Topsham Sagadahoc County ME)

The arts organizations and Hollywood are joined at the hip. They recycle the same people, as do NGOs for the most part. Nossel once worked for Amnesty International.
Jeremy Corbyn’s surprsing win in the U.K. suggests promise. But the attacks on him have started, and they have started in the U.S., too. But that’s not surprising. Look at how Hollywood depicts Chavez or Castro. Or Putin and China. And of course how countries like Iran are portrayed. The public learns politics, largely, from Hollywood. The faux leftist and deeply creepy Bernie Sanders called Chavez a “dead dictator”. I cannot think of a single Hollywood TV show in which Chavez is not depicted as a dictator and South America not shown as backward. Not a single one. No leading character in prestige shows, even, has ever said anything not in agreement with U.S. Imperialist foreign policy. Not one.

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“Lone Survivor” (2014). Peter Berg, dr.

The U.S. and its foreign policy has not changed since WW2. But the world is poorer now, and if possible, even angrier. And the environmental cost is catching up with humanity. But the reason I continue to emphasize culture is because it ‘does’ matter. There is a great cynicism about art, today. And sticking with film and TV for a moment, it really is worth looking back thirty or forty years to see the way radical voices transform consciousness. Now one might argue that such forces of resistance failed. That may or may not be true depending on how you define success, but even if they failed by one criteria, that does not mean they were not valuable. And are not still valuable. Sticking with Curtis White for a moment, because his comments on Fassbinder are really relevant here:
“Fassbinder saw the importance of his own work not in terms of
a social criticism of a fascist or authoritarian state but in terms of
formal strategies for creating and maintaining an “outside.” For the
purposes of the argument I am trying to make, the notion of an
outside is critical because it is through a viable outside, a sort of
counterspirit to the spirit of capitalism, that the spirit of servility,
our captivity to evil, can be effectively challenged.”
I have written something very similar a number of times on this blog. An *outside*. That is what art creates. It is, really, what Adorno was focused on, too. Today, radical voices are usually absorbed, and integrated into the system. They are bought off. Resistance means not being bought off. But that is only the first step. The second step is creating work from a perspective ‘outside’ Capitalism and its inherent logic of domination. The seduction of celebrity is now so acute as to be a kind of virus. One sees this in all fields, there are celebrity journalists, celebrity athletes, celebrity politicians and celebrity philosophers and academics. And all of them must work to be celebrities. It does not fall out of the sky and stick to you. And this IS Capitalism, this promotion of self interest. It is money. It is exchange value. Anyone who willingly accepts what amounts to bribes from the system, will be destroyed. Fassbinder never did. Genet never did. One can find success, of a sort, and not be bought off. But so deeply ingrained is marketing that people view themselves as commodities and cannot image their artistic or creative labor outside the realm of marketing. If you speak of ‘developing your brand’, you are not an artist. I always distrust a certain level of success. There is good work that happens by artists who then become ‘celebrities’ of a sort. And immediately the subsequent work suffers. Without exception. Without a single exception. That is the rule of capital.

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Padrick Bentley

A long time ago, in some obscure interview I gave, I was quoted as saying “embrace failure”. The context was immediately lost and this idea became short hand for subtle ridicule. The point was twofold; losers are the most hated figures in contemporary Capital, and failure is not a topic that is seen as fit for narrative. Hollywood doesn’t like failure. Of any kind. Shows are cancelled in the middle of their first season, regardless of quality, because they don’t attract viewers. Nobody in Hollywood thinks long term. They don’t think about change. The idea is to NOT change. The idea is to perpetuate what ‘is’. And the homogenizing of culture is, today, far worse than it was even twenty years ago.

In the Sixties, the rebellion that followed on the Anti War movement distrusted authority. Today, the rapt obedience of boot camp trainees is presented as cool. Kubrick could ridicule the dehumanizing of military obedience in Full Metal Jacket, and today such obedience is recreated in countless TV shows. The Sunday school manners, the yes sir and no sir and the unquestioning respect for hierarchies of power can be seen repeated in virtually every crime drama on TV. The new protagonist is obedient. Whether male or female. Increasingly, in fact, female heroines are duplicate robotic punishers.

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Christine Boreland

One of the poster children for middle mindness is Lorrie Moore. Again, an MFA writing grad, white, non threatening and insipid. I want to quote from her review of Homeland, after the second season
.
“Homeland’s star is the brave Claire Danes depicting the brave Carrie Mathison, whose bipolar disorder is a secret she is trying to keep from the CIA (which would withdraw her security clearance if it knew) and whose second-guessing and sixth sense (the hunch sense) make her a kind of drug-sniffing dog for the counterterrorism unit that employs her. (People who do their work fully, and the only way they know how, are often apprehensive about being called “brave,” as if their underwear were showing or life-threatening spinach were in their every smile. Danes nonetheless has put vanity aside for this performance. Compare her with the always pretty analyst played by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.) The pressured speech and flights of ideas that are symptoms of the character’s disease are also useful in elaborate detective work, since really only an obsessive and insomniac can puzzle it all the way through.”
No, I don’t know why Claire Danes is brave. But this entire review never once touches on the politics of the show. Never once even raises the issue as a secondary consideration. This sort of divesting of context, is typical of mainstream media. (The above quote is from her review in New York Review of Books). The creators in Hollywood are readers of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and yeah, NYRBs. They are the educated white class who have slid ever further toward a middle mind totalitarianism, an acceptable incarnation that is really the new American fascism. And Lorrie Moore is a simply dreadful writer, so why is her work so visible?
Now, you don’t have to worry as much about Donald Trump as you do the Lorrie Moore sensibility, for Trump is just the clown-show, the opening act to the electoral circus. The real fascists today — Republicans or Democrats — all eat together at the same restaurants, read the same papers, and instinctively cleave to the Clinton era liberal white supremacism value system. Bill and Hillary are every bit as racist as Donald Trump. They are believers in civilizing the natives…both domestic and global. The new liberals are openly patriotic now, because patriotism is now cool, too. They are the children of Jack McCoy (Waterston in Law & Order). And they find Jack Bauer cool, and they might think the show is a ‘bit’ rightwing, but secretly they admire the idea of Jack Bauer. They love Aaron Sorkin, even if, you know, his depiction of women is worth talking about (over cocktails at EP/LP or The Clocktower, or lunch at O ya) The most serious cultural destruction has taken place at the hands of this small privileged white class of pseudo intellectual, the expensively educated well born hipsters of Hollywood, for they are also linked to galleries and arts organizations, to funding and by extension they are thrilled to be included in 500 dollar a plate dinners to raise money for some Democratic hack. And again, the working class is absent, as it is absent at the symposiums of most academics. And I think academics are barely even aware of this, the tyranny of institutional accreditation.

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“Rolling Thunder” (1977)
John Flynn,dr.

The tough guy cop in one sense is not just a white liberal symptom, it is also, in a strange way, the projection of lost fathers for a society in which familial organization has fallen apart. This is the phantom signifier of an Oedipal narrative that is dissolving. But that signifier is almost (!!) totally disconnected from the actual police in city departments across the U.S. It is too easy, in one way, to just dismiss crime narratives as surplus sadism or expressions of ruling class authoritarianism and racism. Because they are doubled figures, too. Of course there are qualities of difference. Nic Pizzolato writes a far different police detective than, say, Theresa Rebeck. I mean there *are* distinctions, and its very insidiously regressive to not make those distinctions.
Kaja Silverman writes: “A number of films made between 1944 and 1947 attest with unusual candor to the castrations through which the male subject is constituted — to the pound of flesh which is his price of entry into the symbolic order, as well as to the other lisses that punctuate his history.” Now, Silverman cites a number of films…everything from Spellbound (1945) to Pride of the Marines (1945) and Gilda (1946). These films are precursors to the crises of masculinity one sees so starkly in Law & Order. The hero of these films is always uncomfortable at *home*, and this was a post war theme. The home in these films is not there. These are the films of paternal failure (Silverman) and in that sense they are the antecedents to the prestige crime series of today. If these post WW2 films are the front edges of paternal failure, then the post Viet Nam noir of Cutter’s Way, Who’ll Stop the Rain, and Rolling Thunder, are the failure of recuperation. The paternal role now without a home, is faced with a more primordial lack. And it is worth noting that amputation figures prominently in both Rolling Thunder and Cutter’s Way. In this sense, the flaccid male organ returns home whipped. The subsequent rise of the puritanical WASP authority figure is the perfect replacement for potency — and in that sense, the works of Bochco, Sorkin and Wolf are the pure desire for patriarchy, the recuperation of the phallus, but also, as doubled, they must face their own homosexual panic. Desire is the desire of what has filled the lack. The white liberal embrace of same sex marriage is not born of an innate sense of fairness, but more a deflection of their own conflicted erotic sub conscious.
An interesting side bar note here, from John Patterson’s comments on the re-release of Cutter’s Way in 2011:
“Released in 1981, it’s like the last Hollywood movie of the 1960s, in which the aspirations and ideals of that long-gone decade finally soured irrevocably on its dazed, burnt-out survivors. It belongs alongside Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop The Rain (its perfect double-bill doppelganger), and Arthur Penn and Alan Sharpe’s Night Moves – both visions of a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American malaise.”
And indeed, something spiritual and literate, both, went out of studio films after this. That era, which was already looking back, was ending in real time, culturally.

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“Who’ll Stop the Rain” (1978). Karel Reisz, dr.

A final consideration of the Law & Order franchise, and those that have followed. Ernst Bloch has pointed out that the detective novel is predicated upon a shift from cui bono, from the encompassing suspicion of benefit from the crime, to the evidentiary trials of modern courts. Clues, evidence, and logic replaced extortion and torture. The eyewitness even failed to stop the procedure of collecting evidence. Here is the birth of the clever, at least as fictional narratives of detection are concerned. The Freudian unconscious coincides with the birth of clues and sub-sensory micro optics. The rise of detective fiction shaped not just jurisprudence and evidentiary trials, but it shaped all narrative, and the most significant aspect had to do with ‘something has happened’ BEFORE the story begins. This is follwed by guessing, unmasking, and finally discovery. Just how Oedipal that listing is, I leave to others. Bloch posits the idea of discovery and unmasking as the most significant and for the reason that reconstitution of meaning is the end goal. We imagine a perfect world and we try to piece it together. Bloch in conversation with Adorno, said every criticism of imperfection implies possible perfection. Or the desire for perfection. The detective was an outsider — from Father Brown to Sam Spade to the Continental Op. The police detective, with whom the PI shares a title, is the ultimate insider. He is, in fact, the containment supervisor who is meant to keep the ‘wild’ locked down. Crime is on the decline, and even if it weren’t, the definitions of crime are so suspect at this point as to be meaningless. There are people doing life for marijuana possession. The insider, the bull, that figure on horseback with shotgun keeping watch over the chain gang — that is the same figure as Chris Noth’s “Mike Logan”, or Jason Beghe’s “Hank Voigt” in Chicago P.D. (Beghe is another prep academy grad and former male model and pal of JFK Jr.) These are the fantasy figures of rich white men. Self identified as liberal, but in reality are nothing of the sort.

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Jerzy Lewczynski, photography.

I believe, and I think Bloch implies this, that all stories are crime stories…and all crime stories are preceded by a crime (or as Bloch puts it, at least ‘a serious mistake’).

“And once again the common denominator for everything is the process of uncovering, whereby in this case the presupposition is that a veiled misdeed precedes the creation of the world itself.”
Ernst Bloch

The manufacturing of ruling class vanities and compensatory desires for covering over a lack, enact narratives of uncovering a ‘thing’, a something gone missing, or hidden. The obsession with forensics in the CSI franchise suggests the repetitive/compulsive aspect to all this. Detection and what it uncovers must be handed over, in semi secrecy, to the Father. Sam Waterston in this case. The dark countenance of the primal Father, the pastors and priests who surround him, and finally the guilty. And the guilty is usually from outside, is a figure of otherness, and only punishment (in true Girardian fashion) can re-unite the fractured society.
Lastly, from H. Rap Brown, in 1969.
“For 400 years the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of white america have been dealt with through its institutions. In regard to race or color, these contradictions have always been on a national, never a local or individual level. Whites as individuals have always loved to be thought of as superior. They have always known that if they could justify and make their actions legal, either through their religion, their courts or their history (educational system), then it would be unnecessary to actually rectify them because the negro would accept their interpretation. White america’s most difficult problem thus becomes how to justify and not rectify national inconsistencies. If white nationalism is disguised as history or religion, then it is irrefutable. White nationalism divides history into two parts, B.C. and A.D. — before the white man’s religion and after it. And “progress,” of course, is considered to have taken place only after the white man’s religion came into being. The implication is evident: God is on the white man’s side, for white Jesus was the “son” of God.”

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/we-interrupt-our-scheduled-programming-to-bring-you/

Some excerpts from Steppling's latest, 'Dentistry of Art'


It may well be that post WW2 America’s most significant social action was union submission vis a vis the auto industry. Unions giving up iron clad control of the work floor, the shop, for what was in theory security. The steel industry, too, to a lesser degree. It turned out to be nothing of the sort, though. For the most significant aspect to that submission (if that’s what it was and I think it was) was that it signaled a real break with traditional patterns of community and family and neighborhood relationships. And that erosion distanced labor’s radical oppositional stance toward ownership. Of course this foreshadowed the total destruction of unions under Reagan thirty years later. So, labor’s hostility to management lessened, as it was also under bombardment from the increasingly powerful media, at the same time as those first generation psychoanalysts had gone into metaphorical hiding. Critique softened throughout the society. As Steve Fraser points out, the domesticating of resistance to Capital has been shaped by conscious media propaganda — featuring ideas like *freedom*, when what is meant is freelance job insecurity. Individualism is now beat on constantly because it mystifies the loss of union solidarity and organizing. In Hollywood, unions are depicted as something from the past. Unions are always in narratives set in the mid century or before. The implication is the very idea is antiquated. The aesthetic dimension was aligned with cold war anti communist hysteria. Conformity meant solidarity, but solidarity with Capital, not against it. Not with fellow workers. Anything smacking of Marxism or Bolsheviks was anathema. This signaled the beginning of the cleansing of context for entertainment. And for PR and the state. Then, post Reagan (and really, before) the financialization of capital began. The new underclass grew exponentially. And entertainment became geared to stultify the mind. And was increasingly open about it. Escapism became an acceptable idea, which when one thinks about it, is rather staggering.


The question of aesthetics then — and with Freud’s ideas on the unconscious — are ultimately about experience. Now, looking at the U.S. today, there is a reason for the constant and seemingly never ending drum beat of electoral politics. Voting is the constant reinforcement of the idea of equality. Everyone has a vote, therefore everyone is equal. This is of course not true, however. But the expanding of campaign season ( a bit like the expanding of Christmas shopping season) is serving to keep this illusion foremost in the minds of citizens. The act of voting is then a sort of magic elixir for conveying a sense of equality, and it is coupled with the idea of ‘responsibility’. It also reinforces a binary view of the world. But then, as Eagleton points out in a chapter on Adorno, this is what exchange value also does. And this is where aesthetics intersects to release us from the tyranny of exchange value. But there is another aspect here, before getting further into aesthetics, and that is the effects of the Enlightenment. Of instrumental reason and logic. And again, this is where Freud matters. And where those political Freudians in particular matter. The artwork steps outside instrumental reason and the experience of the artwork is not logical. It is non conceptual. (which is my problem with concept art). The ideology of neo-liberal Capitalism is one that is inflexible and narrows experience, and really, in its exchange value form, tends to deny the unconscious. Most people living in the West today would argue with this because their ideological attachment or identification is with their own sense of personal autonomy and freedom. And that freedom is synonymous with shopping. With owning ‘things’.


The instability of the self, as a construct, becomes increasingly exposed under capitalism. It requires more and more ideological training. And contemporary society can barely keep up with demand. What Jacoby called the ‘Americanization of psychoanlysis’ was really just the imprint of an ideological scientism on the once radical theory. Psychoanalysis was being re-purposed into an ideological system in service to the Capitalist state. And the fact that psychoanalysts participated in illegal brainwashing and torture during the Iraq invasion and occupation, suggest the truth of this. Learn to adjust became the mantra. Make your life work. (Here life was being equated with a working machine). The new professional class absorbed psychoanalysis and neutralized the radical political implications. I wrote last post about the U.S. TV cop franchises and how the backdrop was always one of *crime control*. In a sense that containment and control operates at the theoretical level, too, and certainly in terms of psychoanalysis is has been hugely effective. In Freud, the unconscious wish seeks expression, but the ego contains and neutralizes, in a sense anyway, and this is the constant tension of society, and it is also the constant dream work of the individual — everything is being exposed, or it is being hidden, or both. The problem is that ideological illusion is not some *thing* that is removed like ray-bans, it is a tension, a contradiction, and in contemporary Western society the *imaginary* (in Lacanian sense) would suggest exactly the course, the logical course, that capitalsm has taken via electronic media, via the ever more pervasive screen world, and ever more contracted ownership class. The missed appointment of Lacan is to be expected. Aesthetics, in the most originary sense, is a revealing of self, of self as body, as mimetic, and hence it is — to stretch this metaphor — scaling the outer walls of the containment area. As police today ‘kettle’ protesters into *free speech zones*, so the psychic mechanisms of conformity shrink the self in a tiny narrow bland colorless, ordorless, box of experience. The off campus influences are throwing rocks from….somewhere out of sight, in the shadows. That is the artwork.

Much more...

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/dentistry-of-art/

Some excerpts from 'Zombie Narcissists Have No secrets'

snip


My experience has been, over the last twenty years, that the West is becoming a society of withholding. It is, collectively, always close to passive-aggressive. The privileged classes of that educated white 20% are, so it feels, highly passive aggressive. Snark and irony seem linked to this. But the currents that run beneath the surface are narcissistic. And somehow in the make up of the narcissist is a seed of later cruelty, and the compulsive need for titillation.
My suspicion is that the early trauma of today’s narcissist is one of low grade cumulative trauma. But there is clearly a flip side, too, to the post modern parent. Those that do nothing EXCEPT provide ‘quality time’. But then this is it’s own kind of distraction. And its own form of narcissism. Taking care of my baby to be THE VERY BEST PARENT EVER. These are the white suburban mothers who emerge as vengeful and punishing toward the children of ‘others’. Those not fit to socialize with their own child.

snip


Contemporary western society is hugely efficient in turning out obedient, albeit highly alienated, individuals. But it is also true that as the oppressive nature and mechanisms of society become more effective, there are unanticipated side effects. The evolution of the family is one side effect; as patriarchal control wanes, mass culture has come to replace it, often with results that suggest ruptures in the desired conformity of the populace. Creating neo-Zombies, shorn of curiosity and empathy results in the U.S. anyway in a culture of mass shootings and rampages..both from individuals and from those in positions of authority. And perhaps this is all perfectly alright from the point of view of those in power. Rampages of the police, rampages of students, and a generation raised in a laboratory of alienation. The compulsive addictive use of screen technologies suggests a deep regression.
The waning of Paternal authority is a consequence of economic changes. The polorizing of wealth, the loss of job security, all translate on the psychic level of the child, to a hardened automatically narcissistic shell person. The child does not identify with the father, and in fact has trouble with identification at all, except in terms of brand loyalty. At the level of the psyche, reification now becomes a bedrock mental configuration. Exchange value is suitable psychic currency for the narcissist. But however one dissects the mechanisms of narcissism, the larger picture is clear enough; the inner directed ego, regressed and fixated at the narcissistic stage, lacks the ability or inclination to cooperation or collective organizing. It is the selfish self obsessed ego, compulsively repeating the activities that constitute its attempted manipulation of the world and the ‘other’. The products of Hollywood are varied, though with a distinct set of messages and based on focus group testing — but that the figure of the lone rogue CIA agent or law enforcement operative is now so popular makes a certain sense. Outside the system but working for the system. This figure may hate the system, but works for it anyway. This is part of ambivalence. The narcissist is both rejecting the residual scaffolding of the 19th century bourgeois family, and at the same time, working to find ways of presenting its *image* as part of this societal system of control. It rejects and embraces at the same time. The deep cover operative who works for the authority he fears and hates. The self image is that of the lone agent for the state (the new father); the secret that must be hidden is no secret at all. The narcissist’s absorption in self is really absorption in society — for the self is only the microcosm of the state. The narcissist is only concerned with himself…but it is a self created by advanced capital.

The very idea of health or sanity is ideological, and today such questions are increasingly redundant.


The whole thing here:

http://john-steppling.com/2015/10/zombie-narcissists-have-no-secrets/

Know Your Place
OCTOBER 10, 2015

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Jiro Yoshihara
“The world of supermodernity does not exactly match the one in which we believe we live, for we live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about space.”
Marc Auge
“I would propose instead the appropriation and redirection of the very technologies of distraction enforced by dominant culture… Hence, camouflage, mimicry, wit, guileful ruse, deception, and stealth — forms of qualified surrender — enter the lexicon of architectural means to reprogram the dominant logics of space in the city.”
Stan Allen
“…the happiness of travel is and remains temporary escape from home without subsequent demand…the traveller of the capitalist age must also be able to be a consumer, not a suitor, otherwise he loses the world of attractive strangers, among whom he has nothing to do, among whom he has no habit.”
Ernst Bloch
“Narajuna claims…that once emptiness or lack of *svabhava* in the self has been realized, it will be comparatively easy to understand the empitness of other phenomena.”
Jan Westerhoff (Introduction to The Madhyamaka)
It is becoming fairly obvious that the landscapes of the wealthier European countries, and that of North America, and especially the United States, are undergoing three critical changes. The first is the securitizing of space. The second is a new balkanizing of classes, under an almost feudal model, and the third has to do more with what has been erased. And the third is, perhaps, the most important.
“But if one defines “place” as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places.”
Marc Auge
And since my concerns are mostly with how this affects and is created by aesthetics, it is important to try to more clearly see how these changes occur and to identify in various examples how they are manifested. Foucault said there are only constraining architectures, no liberating architectures. Now, I think this is actually not exactly true, but his point is still correct. Michael de Certeau defined strategy in opposition to tactics. Today, the dominant class, the ownership class, strategizes — it is the world view of marketing and property, and the U.S. government. Resistance then, in these terms, makes use of tactical adjustments.

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‘Sitting Pits’, design by Walter Pichler, 1971. For Peter Novler.
“As such, space in de Certeau, can be seen as a metaphor that functions as an expansive imaginative tool for understanding and ordering our world…”
Cecilie Sachs Olsen
“Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicking, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss the dissolving modern identity.”
Bifo
Marc Auge’s notion of non-spaces is close to a number of other ideas out there, even I have written of the ‘dead now’, which is much the same thing. Steven Flusty, Neil Smith, Steve Graham, and others have all intuited this specific quality of hyper alienation that emerges out of both a deep numbing homogeneity in landscape, and the surveillance apparatus and fortress mentality of the state.

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Liu Di

Mike Davis was probably the first to really see the coming trends when he wrote City of Quartz. The creation of spaces that are impossible for certain classes to access, or if accessed, that cannot be occupied comfortably for any length of time. Flusty of course gave names to some of these, but the overriding point is that the authority over space in most large cities of the U.S. today is in the hands of the police, and they monitor everyone. The actual physical barriers matter, too, and increasingly there is now an additional aspect to barriers and check points and that is the stealth space. The hidden, or non existent location. I find one of the curious aspects of GPS, actually, is that they so rarely work. Once you are *there*, you often, if not usually, find you are not. But I am more interested in that comment I quoted from Franco Berardi (Bifo). I have many issues with Bifo, but I still find some fascinating perspectives in his work, and one is what I have tried to write about in most of my recent posts; the growing loss of identity, but not just identity, for that loss might really be a positive in some contexts, but the insertion of the non-self. And the non-self is quite comfortable in non-places.
Victor Turner somewhere said something to the effect that *communitas* is not just banding together, but is bonding together. And that one of the features of bonding is that of collective ritual, and that ritual is located in a ritual space. A ritual place. And Robert Bly once said ‘all learning takes place in ritual space’, which I’ve always found to be true. Now, the evolution of non-places in what Auge labels *hypermodernity* has occurred through a conditioning of the populace to the loss of history. A conditioning to amnesia. I continue to find both Jain and Hindu cosmogony oddly appropriate to such discussions. Perhaps because in both the idea of ‘creation’ is dismissed. And perhaps it is the psychic correspondence between non-place and the erosion of thinking about it that seems hard to avoid. For amnesia gives birth to this absent mental space, this conceptual hole. Edward Casey’s book The Fate of Place is very good on the primeval origins of cosmogony and void as ‘ideas’. As he says, once the panic of the idea of void is admitted, the second problem is how to master the void (which implies, always, a sense of filling it).

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Takashi Homma, photography. Tokyo, suburbia.

Now there is much to be said about the dialectical development of space and place. And Casey argues that Newton signaled the most significant shift toward scientific measuring of space and place, but also began the introduction of our modern ideas of time. The 17th century was the age of mechanisms. Of the mechanical view of the Universe. These debates (Locke, Descartes, Leibniz, et al) set the conceptual stage of modern notions of space. Out of this came, for the purposes of this post, a significant idea, and that is *position* and from that The Panopticon.
“Positional primacy manifested itself in diverse forms in 18th century life and culture. The rise of neo-classicism in art and literature reflected a new concern with the precise position of objects in the scenes in which they were set, and the dominant royalist and aristocratic politics of the period also had much to do with ‘knowing one’s place’ in society…”
Edward Casey

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Illustration from Ramayana, Thailand/Laos, 19th century.

Foucault rightly latches onto this moment as the birth of clinics, and all institutional logic. The surface was under the commanding gaze of the physician, and a moment later, the jailer. What Foucault called the surfaces of simultaneity — factories, hospitals, prisons, schools. All of them *spaces of domination*. The individual is located, and ‘observed’. The physics of the 17th century became manifestly the disciplinary space of the 18th. And Bentham, interestingly, never found much approval for his ideas in his native England, but it was in the colonies of the United States that his ideas gained popularity, and seemed to connect to a number of things having to do with the appeal of absolute vision of an entirety, and perhaps within that something of the purifying quality such gaze entails. What seems relevant for the new non-place of Auge and others is the seeds of this lie in several domains, I suspect. One is optics, and the development of optical technology, and the second is the growth of marketing and mass manipulation and propaganda by the ruling classes and third, the fragility today of the psyche, which is in fact the result of the first two…mostly.
It is impossible, almost, not to start to see the narrative implications of ‘place’, the oddness of it in relation to scientifically measured ‘space’. Casey is correct when he suggests that almost all post Descartes philosophy was about ‘mind’. And here is the intersection of representation and space, or narrative, for they go together I think. And this in turn leads to how the body enters the discussion. And that in turn, at least for me, leads to psychoanalysis. But before that, there is this idea of representation in terms of expression. It is very hard to ignore language, and that is an entire other discussion, albeit an important one, but if one just goes directly to narrative there emerges all the issues of metaphor and image and poetics. Bachelard was sort of the original thinker on psychoanalytic localities and art and culture. This is a territory that Benjamin was acutely concerned with, too. That children build their worlds, psychically, out of the intimate localities of their early life. The home, the empty room, the spaces of closets or cubicles, or carpets. And this is also linked to the body.

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‘Acoustic Mirrors’, Denge, Royal Air Force experiments , 1920s. (photo courtesy of Kite & Laslett)

Edmund Plowdon, at the start of the 19th century, articulated in precise legal terms the King’s body as identical to the Body Politic. Ernest Kantorowicz’s famous study, The King’s Two Bodies, delves into the history of Kingship and the core mysticism of Royal attributes. Plowdon was only the quasi culmination of several hundred years of medieval thinking on the subject of the King’s body.
“Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing. What infinite heart’s ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy?
And what have kings that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?”
Henry V
Act 4, scene 1.
There are a host of, actually almost infinite, examples of how space and place impact speech and are impacted by it. Adverbs alone are a huge issue. How the child develops understanding of ideas such as *in* or *out* is a complex topic. But it is clearly linked to the perception, in the mind, of the body. Of *our* body. Of course there is a primal relationship of ‘other’ in relation to our learned sense of self, and self-body. Foucault said ‘space has a history’. But whose space? And whose history? The contemporary landscape is one where place is increasingly ephemeral, because bodies — other’s bodies — are ever more fungible, or sometimes invisible. Now, Kantorowicz’s book is so fascinating for the details; things such as in 1130 in France, the idea of the ‘invisible crown’ was introduced. Throughout the history of Royal rule there are strange meldings of physical and metaphysical. But the people saw nothing unusual in an invisible crown (though they may have seen something contemptible in the King himself) or in ideas such as the ‘place of the crown’. Rex and regnum — the body politic, the territory, the crown, the King. Contemporary life has stealth spaces and CCTV, but it is just as metaphysical.


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Xia Xiao Wan
One of the implications of Foucault and the imprint of the dominant class on social space in the 18th century, is an architecture that has lost the quality of ritual and ceremony — but has revealed something of this hidden and inaccessible ‘other space’ of modern life. As if the controlled spaces of domination produced something unintended. Casey writes; “The prominence of place in early Greek thought having been subdued by the growing preoccupation with space in late Hellenistic and medieval philosophy, the very idea of place came to inhabit the underworld of the modern cultural and philosophical unconscious.” This cannot be separated from the compulsive repetitions of mass culture today. One of the chief effects of electronic mass culture is the removal of the human from not just space, but more significantly from place.
“In his book Mythe et pensee chez les Crees, Jean-Pierre Vernant shows how, in
the Hestia/Hermes couple, Hestia symbolizes the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself (and thus in a sense of its relations with itself); while Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of
crossroads and town gates, represents movement and relations with others.”
Marc Auge

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Catherine Yass, photography/media.
The infinite space of modern science is without place. That is both it’s comfort and its dread. This is where narrative is also reduced because there is no journey without place. There is not even exile. Narrative also manufactures a sense of passing time. Rituals and ceremonies, at particular places, occur on special days, and this, as Auge points out, helps define memory. Hence shrines and monuments remind the living of a past, of life that occurred before them, and they are places of history. The destruction of memory is the primary effect (along with massive death, of course) of Western intervention in Syria and Iraq. The House of Saud is destroying cities in Yemen that preceded their family by centuries. In the suburbs of the U.S., in planned communities, there is a sense of vertigo, for nobody living in these places built anything there, nor they have any connection at all with these areas. The unconscious hostility to suburbia is obvious in how little care is given to these places by those living in them. The anger is acute and it is impossible for those living in such areas not to feel themselves as abstract monads. And not only did nobody participate in the building of their community, but they cannot perform their story in such places for they have no story. Speech and writing become simple transactions, not statements of discovery, for there are only the calculations of survival, really. The image of the refugee camp is duplicated as ‘middle class’ and the gated communities of the wealthy are even more barren, psychically. There is one activity for the rich and that is protecting their property. And that activity is one in which nothing human survives.
The public is conditioned to view ideas of ritual as archaic, as somehow not modern, not serving any purpose. The patented absurdities that revolve around *efficiency* have become, even to the indoctrinated, glaringly obvious. Modern life — or post modern life, is repetitive and anti social, there are no spaces for memory in the landscapes of the West. People cannot remember what remembering is, or if it once existed. They spend inordinate amounts of time performing rote bureaucratic activities, or waiting. The contemporary idea of waiting means waiting frustrated. Waiting for what you don’t really want. But there is something else in all this alienated space, and that is leisure time, often spent as tourism, is constructed to exactly distinguish itself from the lives of the poor. Tourism is created as the anti-image of poverty. Except of course, it largely duplicates many features of poverty in the sense that experience is robbed. Leisure, as Adorno knew fifty years ago, resembles work today. But now, it is becoming not just a imitation of work, but an ersatz version of conquest. The snap shot or the selfie in front of a tourist icon must be part of the reduced narratives of being different than the natives. The narrative is WE are here, the photo is proof, and we are clearly different — and the difference that is embodied in images of the vacationer smiling in the foreground, as the subject of the photo. This is a simplified explanation, but the point is that manufacturing difference is an a 24 hour a day second occupation. The architecture of the West is more often now, in new construction, firstly a building shorn of memory. The very idea of building a huge new museum, for example, is one in which the capturing of attention is the first goal, followed closely by the defining of itself as NOT part of the history of the area. For history is backward looking. Progress must be implied somehow. But the future is now an economically defined future. The capturing not just of attention, but of attendance. As much as this is is clearly the goal, there is enormous ad copy devoted to explaining just the opposite. As quickly as memory is erased, the official stamp of MEMORY is written across the facade.

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Michael Schmidt, photographer.

Vernant, in writing of the fifth and fourth centuries, observes that theory of *mimesis* (introduced by Xenophan) culminates in the shift from making present the invisible, to the imitation of appearance. This is a hugely significant shift and one from which western society has yet to fully emerge. What is left behind is the world beyond our senses. As Vernant notes, it is from this period henceforth that illusion, the illustration of the world before our eyes, replaces religious reality. Or, in other words, the ritual foundations are removed. The earlier work, and Vernant is writing mostly of statuary here, was concerned with making present what was absent. Often this was death. The work of art, then, was to both create an identification, an identity, as part of a mythic narrative usually, but also to suggest something of the incommensurability of absence. This was connected, usually, to the statuary’s role as idol. The point for this posting is that which brought people together in shared experience was exactly what was absent.
“…the national security state develops ever more mechanisms for snooping, surveilling, and controlling populaces at home (as in the recent essentially unprecedented security lockdowns of major American cities “for” the pope), many of the country’s citizens are increasingly living inside a fact-challenged fantasy of a country, a victimized superpower. Boogiemen lurk around every corner, as do high crimes and dark conspiracies, and any sense of responsibility for what the United States has done in the world in these last years is missing in action.”
Tom Englehardt

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El Lissitzky, 1927. Design for Exhibition Room (The Abstract Cabinet).
“All places are vulnerable, if that is the word, to tourism.”
David Kolb
The spaces of today’s landscapes, in cities, are always pushing forward a manufactured urgency. It is the society of fake obligations. But they are not really, exactly, obligations. They are more reflexive attention traps. Once there, once attention is caught, the obligation is merely a rote activity that is encouraged, usually without reason. This is repeated endlessly, and partly it is capable of endless repetition because social relations are discouraged. The stealth spaces (I think Flusty coined that term) are really always in flux, and barely definable. And here is one of the paradoxes of contemporary space; in a culture of definitions and data, the living spaces of people are undefined and vague, they are constantly shifting to the extent that all ahistorical space cannot be pinned down.
The rise of automobile GPS has furthered the sense of signage replacing space. Highways are full of signs, and the rise of window displays in stores was due to the increase in cars (per Venturi), so travel became a endless stream of signs and advertising and instructions on where to be and when to be there. This corresponded with an increase in the use of passports and transit papers. Nobody bothered much with passports until surprisingly recently. But this was the disembodiment of life; loss of space was part of other losses, nature, the ability to read weather and to sense direction, the loss was replaced with representations about these things, or just abstract ideas about them.

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Charles Sheeler

It is worth remembering that place is not the same as space, although clearly the words are often used interchangeably. Derrida noted that place is never simply presented. It is revealed or it ‘takes place’ (revealed is more Heidegerrian). My feeling is that place only ‘occurs’ in social relationships. At least today. The making of endless strangers is also paradoxical, for the stranger next to you on the subway platform is not really a stranger. It is ‘not even’ a stranger, it is the idea of a stranger. And its not even really that, it’s the representation of an idea of a stranger. The appeal of android characters in TV and film is exactly this, for they are not really strangers, they are programs. I suspect one of the appeals of all sci-fi has some link to AI. Last season’s BBC sci fi mini series “Humans” was particularly good at capturing both the unnerving aspect of all anatoma and dolls, and also the repressed desire for intimacy with that which cannot be intimate. But such is the wish. Intimacy with an android. The implications are far reaching.

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Humans, 2015. BBC.
The idea of learning taking place only in ritual space is often argued. I happen to think Bly is right. One must be positioned to receive. This is both the body in a posture of reception, that of being the student, and in a ‘place/space’ where a sense of learning can occur. One of the problems with schools, besides metal detectors, cops and authoritarian structuring of the day, is that the lighting and feel of classrooms are close to that of a low rent clinic for venereal disease or drug addiction. I remember rehab houses always having this certain vibe, a very specific range of colors for the walls — walls which were always dirty near the floor, where the plastic baseboard ran. Beige, municipal green, or just industrial pale yellow. Schools are factories for indoctrination, and for learning the feel of formica and linoleum (and cheap linoleum at that, and as a side bar note: original linoleum was far better but too costly to make so the cheap “Parnacott” method became standard in the early 1900s, and today, many places use the highly toxic PVC instead) and fluorescent lighting. Students are intimate with this ‘space’, and a more hostile and insanity producing environment is hard to imagine.

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Bill Henson, photography.

One of the problematic reactions to the loss of *body* has been the presentation of reified bodies as artworks — the entire range of body art (closely associated with the dress up as someone else genre of Cindy Sherman) has been to ideologically color one’s body with various liberal messages or themes. At it’s best (and there are not many) one gets a Genesis P-Orridge, but mostly one gets the formica version of that. But I digress.
“I am parched with thirst and I perish.
But give me to drink from the ever-flowing spring on the right, by the
cypress.
“Who are you? Where are you from?”
I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.”
Gold tablet, Crete.
Date uncertain. (Orphic Cults, Magna Grecia)

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Jean Pierre Vernant
The early mystic cults of Magna Grecia were often migrant communities, so place was something that had to be established by narrative and ritual. Radcliffe Edmunds has an essay on the fragment above, which is a very smart and telling look at how narrative implicated the initiate and informed them of right passage through the underworld. What is clear, though, is the sanctified place of the ceremony involved the repetition of story. Katheryn Luchesse wrote on the cults of Demeter, in Italy, where (from Giovanni Cassadio’s introduction): “The thesmophoria themselves were offerings flung into a natural crevice or man-made chamber in the rock known as a megaron, left to decay, and then retrieved and ploughed into a nearby ritual field, thus securing the region’s fertility for the season to come. By metaphoric extension, the Thesmophoria became associated with the civilization that developed in the wake of sedentary agriculture, the “things laid down” (thesmophoria) being understood as a code of civil laws, and the goddess’ title being translated into Latin as legifera, “law-giver.”
Metaphoric extension was part of social relations. The religious and mystic cults of this era were usually secret, hidden affairs, and the secrecy itself was a part of the metaphoric meaning of the ritual. This is all related to ‘place’, that place was linked to memory, to the collective, to seasonal time and that nature and character were interrelated. In Plato, there is the beginning of an analytic discussion of appearance and apparition. The image as semblance. The point for the purposes here is that, as Vernant puts it; “The eidelon manifests both a real presence and an irremediable absence at the same time. It is this inclusion of ‘being elsewhere’ in the midst of being here that constitutes the archaic eidelon, less an image in the sense we understand it today, than as a double.” Again, what isn’t there is as important as what is. Presence cannot exist without absence, without an elsewhere, and this is the real heart of theatre. Now Plato also saw mimesis in the oral tradition of memorizing stories. For the Greeks of Aristotle’s time the actor was mimetically assimilating his character on stage, but more, this process is first noted on the part of the audience.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/hurvin_anderson_welcome-e1444337521313.jpg
Hurvin Anderson

The image says Plato, is not reality, and then warns “one will derive reality from mimesis..imitations begun in childhood and continued in life turn into character and nature for the body, voice, and thought.” There is an aspect of Greek thinking on image that actually touches on the idea of simulacrum. It is related to the archaic period in which image and idol meant much the same thing, and as image became associated with the idea of a double — which can exist in dreams, outside reality and imitating nothing real. And throughout the archaic period and 4th century, all of this had links with funerary rituals. The doubling though, through memorization, had nothing to do with appearance. It was the space created by the residue of repetition, the spoken word, aloud, was a form of imitation, but not of appearance. Doubling, but not image, only a semblance.
In the stealth spaces of Capital, today, there are stealth people. Generalized autism said Debord, and here resides something uncanny. But it’s probably a new uncanny of some sort.

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Tomoko Yoneda, photography.

A fascinating side bar here is that the god Artemis is one of those semi-monstrous deities that the Greeks situated outside, far away from *home*. She is foreign, from an alien culture, warlike and cruel. But once invited inside she becomes her opposite, the embodiment of civility and — she assimilates. As Vernant says, the *other* is only a component of the same. Artemis is the mistress of the margins, and becomes, eventually, a founder of cities. One way to see this idea in contemporary space is that without real absence, without that place from which one views an outside, and the outsider, there remains no chance for doubling, and only a kind of malignant scorn and fear. That fear that is expressed by a particular violence, the lashing out that causes sudden pain. The undoubled is only physical force personified. In terms of narrative, the oral memory became by the time of Virgil, a part of the near unconscious — Ronald R. MacDonald, in his wonderful book The Burial Place of Memory, writes…“Never have we to do with passive imitation merely, for the presence of the Homeric texts within the text of the Aeneid is part of the meaning of the poem, part of the way it achieves meaning.” When Aeneid journeys to the underworld he is met by Charon. Then soon, Sybil disdainfully comments to the ferryman…“Let the great watchdog at the door howl on/forever terrifying the bloodless shades.” Charon and Sybil are aware, to some degree, that heroism is of a new sort, that is of his time, of history, not of myth. He is the un-Homeric in a sense, but only by way of Homer. For in the underworld are only shades, shadows, projections of our own finitude. Two kinds of representation collide (says MacDonald) and Virgil is clearly on the side of future narrative progression. This is complex in a sense, but it is again relevant for the role of story and the reader or audience. The reader of Virgil intuited this, for they knew Homer by heart. And Odysseus traveled to the underworld, sword in hand. Virgil’s Aeneas raises his sword, pointlessly, before the frail bloodless dead, and then Dante and his pilgrim leaves indentations in the dust of a world of transparent and the dead who are barely there. The protagonist must go the land of the dead. The story is performed. It is performed when one reads it, in that theatre in our head. On that empty stage where we recite the familiar (usually) story. This has now wound down over six hundred years to the rapid recycling of stories, familiar, but still unknown in a sense.

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Geof Oppenheimer

And that brings one back to this idea of space as Bachelard wrote of it. A poetics of space, and then, today, the non-spaces of Auge and others. For these non spaces cannot be quite narrated, not to ourselves, for we cannot inhabit them AS ourselves. Recently someone remarked to me that they had seen a University art show…at a local state school, one that happens to be in the barrio, made up of the children of the working class. She said the work was surprisingly good, but all on small canvases because these students could not afford large ones. If you go to many University art shows, at high end prestige schools, you find BIG canvses and a thousand gallons of paint used. This anecdote is important. For the wiping out of the human takes place across all classes, but the creating of the machinery that wipes it out starts with the ruling class. The stealth people figuratively huddling in the new void of urban non-space are usually of affluent backgrounds, or educated at least. What passes for working upper middle class. The bourgeoisie. The working poor, those at temp jobs, minimum wage, or sneaking by and shopping at Costco, or Walmart, or those in prisons or the military, these people are the ones beyond the barriers usually, both literally and metaphorically.
“The high windows of traditional British school classrooms might be positioned in the optimum location for lighting (on the ‘left’ to illuminate the work of right-handed pupils—an ‘accessibility’ debate in itself), but the sills are almost always high enough to prevent pupils’ being distracted by events outside. This is a simple architecture of control.”
Dan Lockton

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Jacqueline Hassink, photography.

The hyper modern urban center is fortified, it is disciplinary and hostile. The hostility is directed at the majority of the population, in theory to protect a very anxious and almost paranoid ownership class. But running top down comes a new sensibility of authoritarianism. This is seen primarily in men, and acutely in men under thirty five. The cultural effects, however, are complex. The student who is introduced to socialization with strangers for the first time, does so in school, usually. And school is highly structured, repressive, authoritarian, and irrational. And, lest it be forgotten, often operated by highly dysfunctional instructors. There are good teachers and it is even possible that those I describe as dysfunctional might, in other situations, be good, too. But the situation is one of hyper alienation. The student’s first experience is rote behavorial adjustment. So, culturally, the saturation of Hollywood film and TV, and the addiction to texting and social networking, has ground up the experience of narrative to the point where I suspect the very concept or idea of story may disappear. The learning of obedience to command, coupled to the constant assault of image and noise, and the distancing of a narcissistic personality disorder, for a large number — the result is non space and stealth people.

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Anna Fox, photography.

But I continue to trace back some of this, because often in discussions of hyper modernity, something significant gets lost. Which is why it is important to understand conceptually how space and place change, and the ways in which narrative intersect. The non space can only be understood in some context of history. And then, one would hope, some kind of reclaiming of real space can take place, and I think that is partly the role of art. For art is narrative and memory, among other things. Hence my belief that being able to distinguish between kitsch and something more substantial becomes important.
The growth of faux news outlets like VICE suggests that in place of actual journalism (which is not to say the NY Times or Washington Post, et al, are actual anything, nor that they are anymore trustworthy, because they are not). But there is still a journalism that attempts, at least, to frame the story (the news) being reported in a context, and to verify to even some small degree the events being covered. With VICE one gets an imaginary story, usually replete with style codes of hip and youthful, and the intimacy is not between journalist and story, but between journalist and audience, but audience as captured — and reciprocally the audience’s intimacy is with adding to his or her self brand. The audience member is intimate with itself. There is a kind of self nullification going on. Plagiarism and self promotion are allowed because evidence is treated as relative, and the overriding goal is capturing the attention of the targeted audience. This is rife in such new-media sources(Gawker, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vulture, Slate, The Awl, etc) and it parallels much new architecture that is built to capture attention by positing an imagined sort of pseudo future, while simultaneously evicting history. Geof Oppenheimer said, in a lecture, something obvious but still rarely said; and that was that the way things are built and presented to us, build the rules and conversation of future civic discourse.
And this VICE sensibility, in a sense, is the quality that drove the Julie Taymor versions of Shakespeare. It was Shakespeare as video game, and then Game of Thrones imitated this fake Shakespeare, by just trotting out the signifiers for *classic* — British accents, castles, Royal houses and violence, lots of violence. Everything takes on a shiny sense of similarity. Shakespeare was similar to Shakespeare, but more fun. VICE is like real news, but more fun. Dame Hadid is like real architecture, but more fun. But this idea of fun, or entertainment is actually its opposite. Fun is a sublimated formation of lack (rivalry, castration, frustration, anxiety) — for this is true, too, of ‘beauty’ when it is merely beautiful (per Adorno). Fun and entertainment are socially acceptable neutralized transformations of the keenly felt non-space of contemporary life.

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Zabriskie Point (1970), Screenshot. Michelangelo Antonioni, dr.

This is where I want to return to the loss of doubling, but also back to what I suggest is a new uncanny. This new uncanny is more obscured, in a sense, but the anxiety of marionettes, for example, lifelike but not, is transferred now to, say, androids, which paradoxically are ‘meant’ to be lifelike, but are not. And the android narrative is almost always about the actual human knowing the android is an android, a machine, but not caring, and developing feelings for it anyway. I know you are not real, but I like it that way. The anxiety that is repressed is not found, really, in the object of entertainment, but in the disfigurement of the subject viewing it. Freud saw anxiety as an affect of a universal structure. The overwhelming amount of information and media today, has the quality of domination, eliciting a feeling of unimportance — but entertainment, fun, is self justifying, and the android intimacy of non-space is then extended. It is the anti metaphoric extension in a sense.
The early perception of space and place was always connected to theological beliefs and customs. The seculariztion of space, or resecularization of space, with Newton, colonized the realm of alchemy (per Casey). The single *universe* was an expression, not just of physics, but really of Roman conquest. The empire of the cosmos. The mind of man became infinite, too. The desire of the Greeks, was to explain everything, to find the origin, but to find man’s place ‘in’ the infinite. Christianity and Roman ideas projected that search outward. The evolution of these ideas is too complex for a single posting. The birth of trade, the explorations of the 16th and 17th century that fueled the vision of Shakespeare, continued on through Melville, and Conrad, and by the time of quantum physics has caught its own tail. The realm of Kafka and Herman Broch, and Beckett. The new frontiers were invisible, abstract, theoretical, and non accessible. Time had ended, but continued on. Socially, though, place is the site of the body, of ‘human’ time, and history. The 20th century has seen the erosion of an interdependence between man and place. The idea of non space and hypermodernity, though, is both the result of Christian linearity, and Capitalist expansion and control, and the consequent intensification of class segregation and the absolute planetary virus of advertising — of solicitation, for the conquest and occupation of attention, an attention that shrinks further into its shell, a victim of massive surveillance, acute anxiety, a crippling narcissistic pathology, and a nearly insurmountable distance from Nature and other people.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/10/know-your-place/

Excerpts from 'Gone Gone'



There was a cultural shift, a change of identity for American workers in the 70s. And a lot of this shift came out of anti communist ideology that was coupled to global shifts of industrialization. In the U.S. the south failed to unionize after WW2, mostly due to the deep racist values and persistent red baiting. By the 70s, the financialization of the economy intensified the disinheritance and marginalization of the working class that was already starting due to global factors; cheap labor in the 3rd world and reindustrialized nations recovering from the war, automation, and the fracturing of solidarity caused, no doubt intentionally, in part at least, by the ownership class. The Nixon years were schizophrenic in terms of labor’s self image, and racism really was the hidden engine behind so much of this by the 60s (not to mention the additional factor of Nixon’s opting out of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971). With Reagan came the crushing of unions and a new Gilded Age (Jackson Cowie). It is more complicated than this, but culturally the rise of marketing pushed the idea of American individualism. The hundred years of labor resistance was ending, and part of this revanchist myth of individuality was a new historicism. It is important to note, too, the stratification within unions themselves, or between unions. Business oriented unions were oppositional to rank and file, and the steel and auto industries, too, were, by the 70s, complicit with ownership. The point here is that culture in the 70s was changing, and it marked the start of a long trend of marketed images serving to replace reality — Hollywood and PR firms were re-shaping the working class consciousness, which was there to be reshaped due to the loss of jobs, wage reductions, and a sense of psychic fallout from the Vietnam war. The start of the 70s also included the Iranian revolution that ran a U.S. puppet out of power. My memory is that almost nobody really believed in the Vietnam war, but many worked overtime to try. The pro war reactionary white man never really bought in, their cynicism didn’t stop them from hating hippies and the anti war movement (and civil rights) but they knew, deep down, it was bullshit. This may well have signaled the start of a profound loss of community in real terms, but also psychologically. And the birth of the new cynicism.


It is interesting to compare Force of Evil, Abe Polansky’s 1948 New York noir with, say, Dirty Harry (1971), and then with contemporary cop shows. The representation of society has changed. From an almost Shakespearean crime version of ‘vaulting ambition’, to a vigilante proto fascist police drama, to the openly police state apologetics of Dick Wolf or Bochco. The shift in the 70s was the start of an erasure of narratives that combine society and the psyche of the individual. John Garfield’s torment, his voice over as he searches for his brother at the end of Force of Evil, is an indictment of society, but more of what it does to humans, to ourselves. Eastwood marks the elevation of a kind of white male anger. An anger caused by the broken promises of the American dream.

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Rona Pondick

The cultural shift that began in the mid 70s, effectively, matured under Reagan into a technological utopianism (Steve Fraser) that media promoted as a triumph of Capitalism, a populist capitalism where anyone *could* become a jillionaire. This was what is now often called Casino Capitalism. But its effects run very deep culturally, and this enthusiasm reported by media, was in large measure illusory. But not totally. The collective sense, in white males anyway, that the Vietnam war was a loss of potency, became rebooted as the victory of the Cold War. This was the Reagan era, and what separated it from the 1950s was a far deeper trust in technology, a justification for the depersonalizing of a cyber driven market, a stock investor dream defined by electronic logic. This only intensified in the 90s, under Clinton, whose terms as President were likely far more destructive psychically than even Reagan’s. At major universities, business schools saw a spike in enrollment and MIT started a *Financial Engineering* department (an entire department!). This was also the real birth of what Randy Martin has called the risk management culture. And that logic began to pervade the lives of individuals. A risk averse culture took hold. The image of the ‘new’ culture of technological stock investment cool featured guys like Peter Lynch (Magellen Fund) and Warren Buffet, and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway). In a sense, this was the reclamation of Wasp white male power and authority. A business techno Patriarch. This was also, of course, the age of Silicon Valley. As Steve Fraser rightly points out, suddenly under Clinton, finance was the new bastion of authenticity. The Steve Jobs myth, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and the opaque nature of these symbols worked perfectly because most of the populace that felt buoyed by the sense of restored American virility felt no particular need to really understand any of it.
The cultural effect in the 90s was evident in Hollywood; not just in obvious Wall Street locals, or stories of venture capitalists, but in a new white supremacism, one not of red necks and confederate flags, but of liberal internet sophisticates, and the fall out of this is still seen in many lawyer shows and even, really, in a lot of police narratives. The police were protecting this new authentic realm of American exceptionalism. Protecting it from those just not smart enough to participate. The poor were a threat, and that meant mostly black and latino poor. But it was also captured in an aesthetic that pretended a disdain for materialism. There were countless, and still are countless semitoic sub groups of liberal bourgeoisie that see industrial quality home kitchen as non-materialist. The rise in luxury SUVs speaks to this as well. In a sense, this was the aestheticization and individuation of politics; a substitution of actual political issues, of Imperialism and militarism with personal lifestyle choices. Natural fabrics and whole foods (sic) became a kind of commodity politics, but also an expression of personal taste. Individualism was shopping expertise. The fall out that came after things unraveled, didn’t really alter the course of U.S. culture. For that culture is in the hands of those who do not suffer from economic downturns.


. Hillary is the nightmare dark side of Nancy Reagan. The autocratic openly sadistic merger of Thatcher, Nancy and Madame Defarge.


Contemporary life is lived in the psychic rubble left after the nuking of consciousness under Bill Clinton, and now, soon, in the hands of the first genuinely insane person to be President. Trump would be a blessing compared to Hillary. This is life as metaphor, as allegory. Leaders are often blank canvases on which are projected various deflected wishes or fears. Nixon had a certain Shakespearean tragic/comic grandiosity, and his ugliness and awkwardness was also a bit Richard 3rd like — but Reagan and Thatcher is the apotheosis of grandeur. Their message, their image, was always partly that such things don’t matter. When Reagan, as governor, said something to the effect of ‘if you’ve seen one Redwood, you’ve seen them all’, and then signed away a chunk of remaining protected national park, he was eliminating lives of richness, eliminating metaphor, allegory, fable and myth. Just get me a good tee time at Indian Wells. He was spraying cheap plastering over the original medieval tiles of consciousness. He was making it alright to be ill educated and slow witted. As long as you were square jawed, white, and believed in the market.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/10/gone-gone/

What Is Impossible To Remember - Excerpts and comments.

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Donatello (The Prophet Habakkuk, apprx. 1430).

This essay makes great reference to the Dialectic, especially that of Art. I struggle to understand it unsuccessfully. Lot of psychoanalysis too, with which I am both weak and suspicious.


The tyranny of ‘common sense’ is insidious in this respect, for today, increasingly, dialectical thinking is dismissed as magical thinking. When in fact contemporary rationality and science is very much more magical, and not surprisingly is weighted with the ideology of the dominant system. The goal is understand the objects self criticism (self dissatisfaction says Hullot-Kentor) in an effort to move toward what is *not* an idea, and unearth its potentially transformative qualities, ones that can often be radical and disruptive.

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Antonello da Messina, (Detail, Virgin Annunciate. Palermo 1476).

It is important to remember that Adorno saw philosophy as having …“no other measure than the collapse of illusion.” For him, memory is always one of suffering. Additionally, and related, Adorno saw in Hegel what he called an ‘identification with the aggressor’. This is the ruse of reason. This has a complex but significant aesthetic aspect. When Hegel sees spirit developing through its otherness, through each stage, as a ‘cry of the ideal’ under domination, Adorno riffs off this as “the gasp of surprise that accompanies the experience of the extraordinary.” This is the transcendence of the unknown in an interrelationship with the known. The gasp is mimetic. Hullot-Kentor writes “the name initiates the distinction of sign and image that is the origin of the explanation and control of nature.” So the subject is a model, or made into a model, or makes itself into a copy of its oppressor, or oppression, but does so through a process of abstracting. Built into science and technics is control, it is a foundational principle.

Sure this guy is a hippie?


Adorno later, in a mini essay which was never published (left out of Minima Moralia), he touches on some of these implications for Marxist theory:

“Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive images of the proper society, of its members, even of those who would accomplish it…The leap into the future, clean over the conditions of the present, lands in the past. In other words: ends and means cannot be formulated in isolation from each other. Dialectics will have no truck with the maxim that the former justify the latter, no matter how close it seems to come to the doctrine of the ruse of reason or, for that matter, the subordination of individual spontaneity to party discipline. The belief that the blind play of means could be summarily displaced by the sovereignty of rational ends was bourgeois utopianism. It is the antithesis of means and ends itself that should be criticized.”
(New Left Review, July/Aug. 1993)

And this is, in a highly dense explanation, why I think art is radical and revolutionary in the end. But it is in this highly dialectical form that one can understand what negation means for Adorno, and identity. For myth in Adorno’s view is never static (political optics) but repetitive and changing, evolving. Myth is historical, and history is mythical (Hullot-Kentor). Adorno, in his last few years was highly discouraged by what he perceived as ‘pseudo activities’, political theatre. And the inability to distinguish political pseudo activity from material organizing can be seen in symptomatic form in an inability to distinguish the difference between Fassbinder and Darrren Aronovsky, or Pasolini from David Lynch.

Wish I could understand that, alas.

Lots more, which I think I'm understanding until Steppling mentions some goddamn philosopher.

Shit or shinola, I can't tell the difference.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/10/what-is-impossible-to-remember/

Lenin absolutely hated this shit. The thing is, these philosophers are having so many pillow fights against each other that it is impossible to tell who stands where.

Western Marxists wanted to rescue Marxism from the "magical" effects which the dialectic/Hegel (supposedly) imposed on Nature. To do so, they drudged up the *other* side of Hegel (see Dhal's comments about Subject/Object and Slave/Master).

In response, other philosophers who are less married to "rationality" come out swinging (with their pillows) to "defend" Marxism from this baleful new influence..some kinda which way. Are they defending Marxism WITH Hegel or FROM Hegel? Who the hell knows. Who the hell cares.

Why should we "demystify" the dialectic, you ask? Well, one good reason is so we don't have to listen to these wunderkunds prattle indefinitely (earplugs only do so much). You'd think they'd eventually smother themselves with their own pillows..but no.


Sure this guy is a hippie?

Guy might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says Long Hair/Don't Care

Lenin absolutely hated this shit. The thing is, these philosophers are having so many pillow fights against each other that it is impossible to tell who stands where.

Western Marxists wanted to rescue Marxism from the "magical" effects which the dialectic/Hegel (supposedly) imposed on Nature. To do so, they drudged up the *other* side of Hegel (see Dhal's comments about Subject/Object and Slave/Master).

In response, other philosophers who are less married to "rationality" come out swinging (with their pillows) to "defend" Marxism from this baleful new influence..some kinda which way. Are they defending Marxism WITH Hegel or FROM Hegel? Who the hell knows. Who the hell cares.

Why should we "demystify" the dialectic, you ask? Well, one good reason is so we don't have to listen to these wunderkunds prattle indefinitely (earplugs only do so much). You'd think they'd eventually smother themselves with their own pillows..but no.



Guy might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says Long Hair/Don't Care

Well, you know my take on philosophers in general. And best I can tell, except for the half made tool of the dialectic I cannot see any value in Hegel, his Philosophy of Nature is flat out wrong, for example.

So, explain that second quote to me, or at least pieces of it.

I dunno where you get your hippies, never seen such. Guess that's Baltimore for ya, huh? Hell, you weren't even around.

I dunno where you get your hippies, never seen such. Guess that's Baltimore for ya, huh? Hell, you weren't even around

The Kid hates the idea of hippies...heh,heh

Its because he's off in the clouds trying to convinces other (and himself?) that art is inherently revolutionary. Why doesn't he just go live in a tree already.


In Republican Spain they assembled a firing squad and excuted a statue of the Blessed Virgin. That's my idea of performance art.

Its because he's off in the clouds trying to convinces other (and himself?) that art is inherently revolutionary. Why doesn't he just go live in a tree already.


In Republican Spain they assembled a firing squad and excuted a statue of the Blessed Virgin. That's my idea of performance art.

I hear that Hitler painted postcards. Most of the scenes were of bank doorways...

Its because he's off in the clouds trying to convinces other (and himself?) that art is inherently revolutionary. Why doesn't he just go live in a tree already.


In Republican Spain they assembled a firing squad and excuted a statue of the Blessed Virgin. That's my idea of performance art.

Now ya see, that's my opinion of philosophy in general. Well, these artists seem the most self important people in the world, I hear these talk shows on public radio....who the fuck cares about your 'creative process'. I certainly don't, no doubt another learning disability of mine.

The guy is good for some well turned phrases and explores some of the effects of capitalism upon society which are of interest to me, I'm easily impressed.

The guy is good for some well turned phrases and explores some of the effects of capitalism upon society which are of interest to me, I'm easily impressed.

I like reading him. He has a perspective unfamiliar to me and I like seeing things that I have missed. Much of his stuff is indecipherable to me, but I am used to that...

Blind Sight
NOVEMBER 18, 2015 | 2 COMMENTS

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Pius Fox

“The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man—must return to be admitted in the creation of what we are.”
Robert Duncan
“No interpretive skill in the world can in fact eliminate ideal objects from our speech and thought.”
Edmund Husserl
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense ‘collection’ of commodities; the
individual commodity appears as its elementary ‘form.’ Our investigation therefore begins with the ‘analysis’ of the commodity.”
Karl Marx, Chapter One Capital
“Can this planet be entrusted to those who watch crap on their television screens, day after day – both Hollywood propaganda production, and news propaganda briefings? Can anything that comes from the West be taken seriously, after centuries of lies and murder?”
Andre Vltchek
I read two stories about people claiming to have an Aspergers condition, but in reality not having it. Apparently this has come up in divorce cases recently. How common this is remains an open question, but I think this is sort of fascinating because it allows one’s basic sense of overload, narcissist tendencies, and lack of empathy to be something over which one has no control or responsibility. This from New York Magazine:
“It’s become more frequent in the last five years,” confirms a Connecticut divorce lawyer who says she has represented parties in several cases where a wife accused the husband of being on the spectrum. “It’s women complaining, ‘He lines up my towels perfectly. He complains if his shoes aren’t lined up right.’”
Men have caught on and, in a kind of inverted gaslighting, begun to describe themselves as having Asperger’s as a way of controlling their spouses. “Having Asperger’s-like syndrome does not give you Asperger’s,” says David Schnarch, a Colorado-based couples therapist. “Having a big belly does not make you pregnant. I’ve not seen a single case of what I would consider to be diagnosable Asperger’s. But I have seen any number of cases of wives accusing husbands of it, any number of cases of husbands claiming to have it.” It’s the new ADHD, he says. “The wife doesn’t want to accept that the husband knows what he’s doing when he’s doing something she doesn’t like.”
There was even a riff on South Park where Cartman thought he heard *Ass-burgers*, and etc.
This does suggest that the contemporary therapy culture is simply finding new labels for various kinds of de-socialized behavior. As the New York Magazine asks, ‘is everyone on the Autism spectrum’? The answer is no, and more, the idea of spectrum is, I think, pretty clearly faulty. But in a society of acute narcissism, the idea of justifying your own sadistic tendencies, is very appealing. And that is really my point; the culture as a whole is ever more cut off from their own emotions, and living in an ever more shrunken perceptual world, and additionally, losing the basic cognitive capacity to *interpret* complex narrative and image. They are desirous of a cartoon world, one of simple foregrounded facts, and simplified or erased background and backstory.

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Andro Wekua

And the idea of control, the idea of controlling the emotions, has evolved into something that mirrors other contemporary ideas, ones which have changed and evolved over time, that seem oddly linked to a new tension that centers around containment. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that mental maps, or images, have become mini Panopticons. People increasingly observe themselves as they might observe a prisoner from the standpoint of the guard. And I suspect this is partly the influence of film and TV. And it also feels related to the Austism question. Just the form itself, it is the screen dominant system of experiencing psychological affect. The darker side of how this works, or rather *one* dark side of how this works, is what Gearoid O’Colemain calls (in response to the Paris bombings) a coming “intellectual terrorism”. Radical voices, politically radical, but also artistically radical, are going to be disciplined by the mainstream media, and governments. Calling everyone a *conspiracy theorist* as a pejorative term was the front edge of this tendency. But the very conscious containment of radical dissent is likely to pass unnoticed for many because they are already primed to mis-read such propaganda campaigns, but also on individual and micro levels those who view psychology as a series of processes tuned to containing and restraining and limiting emotions — wayward or uncontrollable emotion — are going to feel comfortable in this sort of diluated politics of self. And the equating of foreigness and threat with the emotions seems logical. My emotion is the *other*.
The open and overt propaganda of U.S. television drama now (let alone news) is rather shocking, actually. A new show called Agent X (Sharon Stone as the Vice President…sort of telling you most of what you need to know regarding its quality) made a tacit aside about the evil of Edward Snowden. I mention this particular one (I could always use Madame Secretary or a new Serb bashing drama from the UK, The Last Panthers, which is worthy a deeper analysis for it seems to be a long string of *prestige* cues, signifiers for quality without actually having any) because the message came as an aside. Ironic even. It was delivered with a wink. It was bro-ganda as it were. Probative male insider cool — fascism as cool, and patriotism as cool. This never, by the way, quite works even for the most wonky dullard frat boy or farm boy — because while one can sell Brooks Brothers suits as cool, you can’t sell conformity as cool. What you CAN sell is fear, of course. And my sense, which I state as almost anecdotal, is that most of white America is very scared. And perhaps an unpacking of that fear is worth doing. But for now I am interested more in how the post modern epoch grasps itself emotionally. How do the post modern maps for the emotions work? Or maybe the emotional GPS?

http://john-steppling.com/2015/11/blind-sight/

Much more, recommended.

Homeless Memory
DECEMBER 12, 2015 | LEAVE A COMMENT

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Mathew Simmonds
“Everything in this world reeks of crime:
the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Theories that level suffering by proposing that all subjectivity is born from subjection
and exclusion, however, cover over the suffering specific to oppression. In so doing, they risk complicity with values and institutions that abject those othered to fortify the privilege of the beneficiaries of oppressive values.”
Kelly Oliver
“If the print revolution heralded the beginning of the end for our memory retrieval capabilities, then the post digital world is arguably deteriorating our abilities to a state of amnesia.”
Fiona Shipwright
It would be hard to imagine Hollywood becoming more jingoistic than it is today. What is interesting, I think, is that for the fifteen years I worked in film and TV, as both feature writer and staff writer, I only met one person who had served in the military. ONE. One out of the thousand or more people I dealt with for over a decade. He was a Vietnam vet who had become a writer. A very interesting guy from the backwoods of Appalachia, he claimed not to have ever brushed his teeth until boot camp. He wrote virulently anti-military drama. But that was it. One writer. And yet, today, if one goes to network or cable scripted drama you will find an almost constant reference to the U.S. military and to the heroism of soldiers. And oddly, and perhaps its an anomaly, but there seems to a huge reliance on widowed wives of U.S. soldiers. It is a plot device in, literally, dozens of shows just this season. All from writers and producers who themselves have never served in the military. Curious.
Now, I have been bombarded of late with opinion from a variety of sources and people in the U.S. on the topic of Syria. Again, I am not sure why exactly this week, but happenstance perhaps. And what is shocking is that these are people, for the most part, who would self identify as liberal, and yet the information they have is wildly reactionary and Russophobic and almost nakedly and obviously connected to the U.S. state department. At least to the Democratic Party, and probably to both, and to the C.I.A. as well. Things like Pulse, which seems to have connections to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace (boy is that a state dept title if I ever heard one) and publishes writers such as Charles Davis and Idrees Ahmad. This is the newest incarnation of the cruise missile left. Except it’s not even nominally leftist. In fact Pulse published a piece by someone named Lelia al Shami. This piece advocates for the support of the moderate armed Syrian resistance (of whom scant evidence seems to exist) and the downfall of the evil {sic} Assad. But see, I find that anytime Assad is being castigated in print, it comes with a guaranteed anti Russian addendum. And a de-facto tacit (albeit hand wringing) support for the U.S. As Samir Amin once put it, a few years back, ‘it’s always a question how these groups get their guns’. Indeed. Why has ISIS not attacked Israel, asks William Blum. Yeah, how about that. The thing is, the left today is increasingly a branded hipster left. This is media manipulation, image management, not politics.

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Nicolai Crestianinov
I wanted to write about space in narrative, in light of this growing jingoism. I say that because there is a both simple and a complex pair of connections to the ways people *view* the world and then make it into a story. In a sense, space in writing is closely aligned with what is usually called ‘poetics’. But its far more complex than that (what is popularly known as that), obviously, and it is also something that I think defies any sort of systematic attempt at definitions, really. One of the distinct qualities I experience watching popular entertainment, meaning mostly Hollywood film and TV, is a sense of suffocation, or strangulation in the story and in the characters. One feels only in that mimetic sympathetic way a kind of constriction in the chest. In one way this is about changes in the idea of what character is meant to be doing, of what it ‘is’, exactly. And this is connected to the resurgent fascism that washes over Western societies today. And all of this is linked to the way amnesia, forgetting, loss of memory, seems to inhabit living space, and how stories are told. A space inhabited by amnesia is one that registers a certain blankness. I use the word *inhabit* metaphorically, but there is something that feels quite literal about it, too. Fiona Shipwright has a cool short essay over at Uncube about the importance of architecture to memory. And she suggests that the way most people use the internet, accessing vast stores of information, is the equivalent of non-place. And stories today seem to increasingly take place in non-spaces. Slightly different sorts of non-spaces, but related. A number of writers have taken up this idea of society losing a sense of collective memory. Jerome McGann writes about the loss of reading and the implications for convenient forgetting. The digital age privileges this ‘super present’, and it is attached to the solicitations of an age of marketing. One aspect of the erosion of community is the attendant erosion of memory as art of solidarity. But there is another aspect to rising amnesia and that has to do with the way stories are used. And maybe ‘used’ is the wrong word, although I think maybe it’s not exactly incorrect either. This is also a part of the general loss or reduction of experience. I read somewhere on social media the other week someone saying how the government was always pushing ‘crappy modern art’. I don’t even recall the context and it might well have been true in a sense, but that kind of remark is one I hear constantly; and it is usually expressed in a tone of hostility. And it is often the left as much as the right. In fact more because the right wing today, the new fascists, openly hate culture of any kind. But I think the causes of this hostility, across the political spectrum, has to do with a sense of not wanting to ‘waste’ the effort or time in engaging with difficult cultural matters. It is also just defensive.

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Matthew Brandt, photography.

It reflects a sense, in the U.S. anyway, of that long standing fear of being taken for a mark. It is easier to ridicule a Tony Smith, or a Mark Rothko than it is to really explore why they might be important. One cannot explain in three sentences why Rothko matters. Americans in general are terrified of being ridiculed. The age of snark and sarcasm, but also of shaming and ridicule. In literature there is a certain built in tolerance for hipster prose, the kind that writes about how pointless it is to be writing. But returning to Hollywood for a moment in this, the new jingoism takes place against highly unreal landscapes, but not just unreal, for they are unreal is a particularly disturbing way. Everything coming out of Hollywood, or nearly everything, is borderline camp. Shows such as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are steeped in irony and are, essentially, ironic cartoons with live action. The appreciation of this stuff is predicated almost exactly upon Sontag’s old definitions of camp.
The issue though is ‘character’ now, in mass entertainment, and it is something very different than what Tolstoy thought it was. There is a set system of behaviors and actions, and reactions, that are like paint by number templates. And nobody is very forgiving. If there is one single thing absent in TV and film today it is forgiveness. And if it does occur, it’s really not occurring. I watched one show recently in which a character made a long speech that ended with his saying ‘I forgive you’, and at that moment the audience realized the person he was speaking to was in a sound proof room and couldn’t hear him. This is the best metaphor for contemporary narrative I can think of.

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Malerie Marder, photography.

So if an entire society is actively ‘forgetting’, all the time, then the need for story is diminished. Or it has at the least changed dramatically. For stories now, in popular culture, are always stories the audience already knows. One might suggest the same was true of Greek tragedy, but there the knowness, as it were, was a part of a complex architecture of memory, of collective history. Here a narrow class of wealthy white writers and directors and producers are manufacturing a constant hyper repetition of the known, but of the amnesiac known. The audience knows this story of not knowing being told by non characters situated in a non-place.
So pervasive is this kind of product that the introduction of real characters in contexts of real history, appear intimidating and needlessly difficult. And this has given rise to a certain kind of conformist surrealism (David Lynch is the perfect example of this, but in its way American Beauty was another, or Fight Club). The manufacturing of the ‘weird affect’ is really a way to interrupt the actual uncanny, and to short circuit the deeper layers of collective memory. And on a psychoanalytic level this collective is mediated by individual histories of a sort today that suffer their own disfigurement. The shell of a person, which Joyce McDougall has written of so extensively. It should be said that the Palahniuk novel Fight Club is quite a bit of another ‘thing’ altogether than the film.
“Subjectivity is constituted through response, responsiveness, or response-ability and not the other way around. We do not
respond because we are subjects; rather,it is responsiveness and relationality that make subjectivity and psychic life possible.”
Kelly Oliver

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Vaslav Nijinsky, 1916. Eugene Druet, photography.

Kelly Oliver has written some quite cogent studies of how subjugation works on individuals and affects their development. I think finally she is wrong in some of her conclusions, but I also think she makes important observations about class and the long shadow of social hierarchical deprivations on both individual and community. And what she says of responsivness is very interesting in terms of writing. I used to say to students that character comes out of dialogue, not the other way round. It is the very same idea — people are not pre-formed and complete, but rather fluid, incomplete, and instinctive. The character, the subject, is always in the process of reacting, and this is also, I suspect, how languages develop. This is one of those questions with cave art raised by Leroi Gourhan. And more, with how memory is linked to knowledge in ways that it is not linked to digital information.
“The training of the body is based on behavioral patterns
learned from participating in the social life of a group. In some cases the training is
conscious and delibarate but in many cases the training of the human body takes place
within the context of the ordinary daily-life. Moreover, the gesture is not simply the
skilled movement of the body but also the knowledge that guides the skillful sequence of
actions. Leroi-Gourhan stressed the social nature of memory in human societies.
Memory is not the property of the individual but rather of the collective members of
society. Thus, to say that gesture is concrete and individual presents only one side of the
coin. While this is true, it is equally true that gesture is necessarily collective and abstract
in the sense that gesture involves not only the movement of the body but also the
knowledge that structures this movement.”
Michael Chazen
‘Leori Gourhan among the Cyborgs’
Gourhan also pointed out that today, under late Capitalism, people have stopped participating in the creation of aesthetics. They consume them, and perhaps in some second order or register they repurpose them, but mostly they passively consume them. This is an area Bernard Stiegler touches on when he suggests that politics is aesthetics, today. By which he means that if taking ‘aesthetics’ is the widest possible definition, and including taste and perception and feelings — that aesthetics is then social because we are living together and speak to each other and share opinions and judgements and experiences. And that’s right, but it’s also increasingly not right. What mass culture is doing (per Stiegler) is *syncronizing* aesthetic experience, and the most profound technical apparatus employed is TV. And even way back thirty years or so ago, Jerry Mander was saying the same thing in his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Daniel Ross, in an article on Stiegler writes:
“This is not only a matter of cinema and television. Industrialisation itself, the rise of industrial production, depended on nothing other, largely, than the grammatisation of human gesture and its inscription in the programs of industrial machines. What previously was a matter of the techniques with which the hand worked with tools, transmitted generationally, became the domain of machines whose techniques it was no longer necessary for workers to know or understand. We can speak of a process of the retreat of the hand, analogous to the retreat of the foot in the hand which characterised the prehistoric process of the conquest of the upright stance. This retreat of the hand is a grammatisation of gesture amounting to the destruction of skill, that is, of forms of knowledge of how to do and make, and it is what Simondon referred to as the proletarianisation of production (the key point here is that Simondon re-writes Marx to make clear that proletarianisation is less the creation of a new class than it is a process of the destruction of knowledge, affecting everybody).”

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Christian Rosa

So, here is a subject who is situating him or herself in relation to the social hierarchy and others in it, as well as suffering an increasing kind of deprivation born of losing the knowledge, the direct and physical intelligence of gesture, and memory. And both are partly collective. That quality of that used to be called shell shocked (after WW1) and is now called PTSD or some variant, is not always the shutting down of receptivity, but can be, and probably often is, the shock of having no gestural memory or skill. I see this, say, in airports as one watches the crowds passing. There is a generation of graceless youth. Some are remarkable athletically, but lacking in this gestural poetics. Watch film, the little there is (actually almost none), of Nijinsky. Perhaps this is not true but I cannot imagine a body or dancer of that sort being found today. But that’s a complex question, really. Nijinsky’s physical genius was inseparable from his psychic fragility, and his facial expressions which evoked a profound emotional openness. And maybe that was his erotic pull as well. The intelligence of gesture, skilled movement and the memory of something collective, not individual, in the body.
Dots and rhythmic line patterns were evident during the Paleolithic. There is evidence of the representation of figures from thirty thousand years ago. Twenty thousand years ago there were groups of figures and many stylized representations. Five thousand years after that, roughly fifteen thousand years ago, the sophistication in drawing was dramatic. By the time of the Altimira cave paintings, maybe ten thousand years ago, there were both stylized representations and a return to ‘realistic’ drawings of animals. There is really not much known, finally, about who made these drawings and paintings, but it is clear I think that language was born out of this interplay between graphism and drawing, that those rhythmic clusters, patterns, were becoming a kind of pre-alphabet. Gesture, a skilled hand at work. And it must have been recognizable to those in these early communities, that certain patterns meant certain things. Memory played a crucial if not essential role in the life of those people in the Paleolithic. Abstraction, as Gourhan says, led to both written communication, language, and branched off into a return to realism. The point here is that abstraction was always, for early man, a kind of ritual language. The memory of the individual was caught up with symbols and even with decoration (what today might be called decoration). The body is activated by recognition of pattern, the memory is activated, and one feels something personal in the collective. Today, I think perhaps it is the opposite. Mass culture like TV out of Hollywood, posits a collective that makes judgments based on what isn’t felt. The individual feels only a rote identification with the collective. The collective is not personal. It is that to which one subscribes, like buying a political abonnement. This dynamic, this is the sense of entitlement the bourgeoisie clings to — the purchase of the right to exist

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Mathew Simmonds

The mimetic feeling that is inextricably linked up with memory and collective history is largely absent. In its place is the certificate or commercial document that grants one permission. The contemporary Westerner is very caught up with permission. And this is partly the result of how Capitalism has trained the populace. For without active memory skills the subject is predicated on various immaterial (even implied) transactions of allowance. Permission to buy this house, to ride this bus, to own this car. And the digital archive that is the internet occupies no physical space, it forms no space, not even an image, really. One does not remember the history out of which one comes, but rather accesses, if needed, the data that verifies this. Verification though is increasingly tenuous. But this is partly the loss of the past, altogether. The hyper present is a non place where one still needs documents. A passport to nowhere. A passport granted authority by a structure, a state, that also exists in non space. If you asked the average American where his or her country was, the answer would be some kind of map reference.
“The black man lacks the advantage of being able to
accomplish this descent into a real hell.”
Frantz Fanon
The colonial mind set of the West intersects with memory, and with the formation of the subject, or identity. The white person who asks ‘what can I do’ to a black man or woman is exercising a final form of privilege. The underclass today, black, Arab, and Latino, and in differing ways, too, transpeople and immigrants of all kinds, are denied their own voice. It amounts to the final White ownership of suffering. And voice is hugely important, here. For the alienated white westerner the expression of their own suffering, anxiety, fear, or sickness (PTSD, ADD, etc) is exactly that for which they feel they have purchased permission. Their voice, their language, and their non-space is what makes up the ‘hyper now’. The subject formation of those deemed outside is one in which they are not even allowed their own psychic lack. This is the impulse for erasure that dominates Western imperialist politics. Erase not just history, or rather, doing so makes those whose history is erased into phantoms. The muslim is invisible, except as a template for the White westerner. The black inner city youth is invisible, and when he or she has the temerity of ‘appearing’, it means the appropriate action is to disappear them. So two things seem to be going on today; the loss of history, of space, and of memory is accelerating, but at the same time the privileged white westerner is making *their* anxiety, fear, confusion, into a kind of club to beat down those without the abonnement. The last bastion of privilege for many is in their narcissistic angst. This is the model for countless Hollywood TV shows and feature films. Actors of color, or writers, are granted day passes if they conform to dimensionless cut outs. The black characters in today’s TV are largely there, if not always there, to make the viewer aware of their own whiteness. Or, of their existence, finally. I exist because none of you do.

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Janina Green, photography.

This goes a long ways to explaining the quality of suffocation in narrative. For characters are not part of a landscape in which collective memory is be accessed, or in which the gesture and voice is that of the unpredictable. And here that sense of absent memory starts to literally erase the landscape. Shows like the recent Jessica Jones on Netflix (based on a Marvel comic) takes place in an empty and weirdly airless New York City. It is worth noting that the black character, the ‘unbreakable’ man, is one that I doubt any but a white writer would create. His grief is one dimensional (for a dead wife) and even the fact that his skin cannot be punctured or burned feels oddly like a colonial cliche trotted out in new attire. The show’s creator and head writer is Melissa Rosenberg, born in Marin County,and whose father is Jack Lee Rosenberg the psychiatrist. But I digress. The white lead protagonist is able to feel and get in touch with her emotions through her affair with the unbreakable black man. But really, this is a minor point because the real overriding quality of the show is that there are no characters. There is only this strange disconcerting melange of science fiction, fantasy, comic book and titillation. Even the logic of the super powers many of these characters possess is inconsistent. And perhaps this is so obvious in this particular show because of the use of voice-over narration. When Robert Mitchum narrates his fatalistic descent into eventual murder in Out of the Past, it is from the point of view of his own death, and it is about memory. How we remember and how we question our own memories and by extension our choices. In Jessica Jones the narrative voice over seems to come from no place. It is spoken from the sound stage. It is not a confession, even, but a sort of map to events. Except nothing is questioned. Not even having super powers.
“…the destruction of the past, or rather of the
social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that
of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at
the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any
organic relation to the public past of the times they live in..”
Eric Hobsbawm

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Nijinsky, 1910. Eugene Druet, photography.
The past is now only a digital archive. And this also accounts for the strange feeling of vertigo I find in a lot of contemporary architecture. The spaces for memory are absent. Mathew Simmonds’ small sculptures of ancient buildings are acutely haunting, for the mimetic experience is one of both individual childhoods, and of a past suddenly given form. A dream form, without people. They are like curious doll’s houses without the possibility of dolls. They deny the possibility of life. So perhaps they are funerary sculpture. But the mimetic narrative then is challenging, however one ‘interprets’ it, for it asks us how and what we remember in these spaces?
“The house is not only, therefore, a building in which a group of
people live. It provides more than a shelter and spatial disposition of
activities, a material order constructed out of walls and boundaries.
Over and beyond this it is a medium of representation, and, as such,
can be read effectively as a mnemonic system. Many anthropologists
agree on this point. The house has been compared to a book in which
is inscribed a vision of the structure of society and the cosmos…”
Paul Connerton
Buildings are always linked to Nature, of course. To ideas of boundaries, enclosure, exposure, safety etc. All buildings. And I think that one of the missing elements in much film and TV today has to with how architecture is ignored. I wrote of Antonioni and Bertolucci and how their films so profoundly integrate architectural space into narrative. I cannot think of a contemporary film that does that.
The invisible underclass today is inevitably going to recognize their own invisibility in the white world. Kelly Oliver discusses Lacan in this respect, somewhat incorrectly I think, but one part is very germane here. That essential lack, the split of inside and outside, which the subject then re-knits in various ways by manufacturing coherence in the outside world (at no small cost psychically) is for the abjected outsider a different sort of struggle. The mirror stage as a social reality (which Fanon articulated) means that for the outsider, the underclass child, the formation of the super ego is doubly toxic. For it always a white super ego. Authority is only white authority in white society. The colonial plantation owner is the modern patriarch. The figure of the sugar plantation owner on horseback, scanning the land he owns is an indelible image. For contemporary architecture always creates the open space as one under surveillance, not just from CCTV or other surveillance technology, but on a deeper level it is the place which is there to be viewed from a privileged vantage point. The open space offers itself to be surveyed, at leisure. Openness is entwined with leisure, with a respite from labor. It is a weird commingling of 19th century residual factory models for labor, and the rise in security spaces as forms of reassurance for the bourgeoisie. The public commons today, of course, don’t really exist. But in office complexes, the open atrium or outdoor square is to be viewed rather than inhabited. In a sense the privileged classes don’t ever inhabit commons areas anyway and those who resting on benches by the water fountain in the square are de-facto stigmatized as the laboring classes, as those who *need* breaks. Those who bring their own lunches. The idea of rest is one that is compromised today, anyway. Partly the legacy of a Puritan country, but also the sense that work is something highly mediated in terms of perception now. That all said, I think Oliver is right that oppression is a neglected aspect of subject formation because of the positing of a normative white male model for experience.

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Daido Moriyama, photography. (From Farewell to Photography, 1972).

Lacan saw alienation being interrelated with our existence in a world alien to us. A world we did not make. Of course this is why memory is so important, on a collective level especially, for the tending of those psychic wounds of childhood alienation are meant to come from the common history of a people, a society, a culture. And it is here that I think a common error takes place in regards to art and culture. That hostility I spoke of above, to modern art, is really a hostility to abstraction at bottom. And yet arguably abstraction is the primal expression of human beings. Why are there unrealistic cave paintings at all? Why did man develop patterns and substitute these decorative patterns at a certain point for grammar. We speak the language of abstraction. That is poetry in a sense. So when I say narrative and space are related, what I mean is that the ‘voice’ of the writer, or character, is a voice of exploration. It is not the voice of the known. If it were it would be an Ikea catalogue. The hostility to abstraction is Puritan, firstly. It’s seen as too easy. Aw hell, I could that. Give me a can of paint and a roller. I can do a Rothko. Secondly, it is the hidden fears of mimesis, which is something I’m coming to see as far more prevalent that I thought. And this is, I suspect anyway, because of how destabilizing is any interruption of the hyper-now. One must remember, a remembering not archived digitally. And it is, as a side bar, interesting that the concept of *remembering* has taken on a kitsch marketed reality today. Memorial ceremonies, or all state mediated offical acts of memory are really, without exception, really acts of forgetting. The sentimentalized memory activity, or pseudo ritual is one I tend to associate with things like the funeral of Princess Di. And even when genuine commemorative gatherings take place, at a grass roots level, there is an insidious creeping kitsch quality that needs to be better guarded against I think.
Things like the politicans marching together in Paris after Charlie Hebdo is an act of occupying grief by the state. Yes it’s a photo op, but it is also a stealth act of psychic occupation. Grief is held hostage by war criminals, arms linked, making *serious face*.

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Kasper Sonne

The political fables or propaganda of the West now resembles episodes of shows like Jessica Jones. For whatever reason this week I was thinking about Nijinsky. For what is often forgotten is that Nijinsky invented modern dance. The le dieu de la danse of the Ballet Russes, choreographed only four ballets. All short, and only one remains; the eleven minute Afternoon of a Faun. It is easy to forget how radical these works were in comparison to the Imperial Ballet or other Diaghilev ballets. They were not really ballet. They were to dance what Artaud was to theatre. And perhaps in another way what later Moriyama was to photography. The myth of Nijinsky was due partly to the tragedy of his madness, and part to the preternatural virtuosity of his dancing. In that sense Glenn Gould comes to mind, too, and Coltrane in that sense. Artists who projected a form of mystical insight because they had transcended notions of technical skill. In the case of Nijinsky, of course, there is like with Artaud, precious little left of their actual work. And perhaps that is partly the connection here to ideas of memory and digital age archiving. There is no archive, there is only the fragment, and the first hand reportage. And despite a surge of renewed interest in Nijinsky, the comprehension of him remains tentative. Paul Cox’s terrific film (The Diaries of Nijinsky) from 2001, with Derek Jacoby reading from the diaries, maybe captures better than anything the enigma of art and gesture and finally the cost to the vulnerable and fragile such as Nijinsky. I say that because one cannot contemplate Nijinsky without delving into the reality of absence, of what is missing, and of cultural memory. You cannot conjure Nijinsky without Russia, winter, and the looming Bolshevik Revolution, and WW1. Or of the Imperial Ballet and the teaching, of Balanchine and Pavlova, and Tamara Karsavina. Or Nureyev — and this is the central thing, here. Memory is not the Sherlock Holmes ‘memory palace’, nor is it hyper retention or memorization or super computers. The real space of memory is gestural, is shadowy, and changing, even. It is sensual, too. The collective, the communal and communistic, is always eroticized. It is Capitalism that strangles the sexual. Nijinsky was by all accounts quite well read, and even articulate when he chose to be, but he was socially maladaptive, and almost phobic about crowds and lack of space around him. He had tarter features, and that sense of outsider, of Pole and Tarter combined in him this odd ability (and need) to retreat into himself. He was not like most of those he went to school with. Today I am sure he would be medicated, diagnosed on a spectrum of something and forced to be happy.

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Mark Rothko

Capitalism, the rabid late stage Capitalism of today, requires this steady diet of pseudo porn, titillation, because it must compensate, fill in the clear cut and denuded spaces of the mega-super-ego. White men in tailored suits, wearing Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks, and three thousand dollar bespoke shoes are never as sexy as the kitchen staff. Therefore the kitchen staff must be kicked to the curb. For no other reason than that. Because, as Richard Pryor said, somebody gotta pay.
Kelly Oliver, quoting Fanon again, and apropos of the unbreakable black man in Jessica Jones:
“The morality of colonialism reduces the colonized to their bodies, which become emblems for everything evil
within that morality.This identification of the colonized with their bodies,and more specifically within racist culture with their skin,leads Fanon to call the internalization of inferiority a process of epidermalization.The black man is reduced to nothing but his skin, black skin, which becomes the emblem for everything hateful in white racist society.”
Watching that series I kept feeling this quality of unease. There is no space for character, for not knowing, in the writing, for a place that would allow the actors to breath. My sense, when I have taught playwriting, is that most dialogue is improved if cut down by half. The actor, who is functioning out of memorization already, must be able to react not just to the other actor, but to the language. To speech, both his own and other actors. And to remember his remembering, for that is always a part of performance. Great actors really are mostly listening. When one listens, one forgets the body; and the forgotten body, the forgotten body that is your own, is a body that resembles the monk or shaman. Listening is very close to meditation in this respect — and directors like Peter Brook or Kantor understood this, and in film Ozu and Bresson, Pasolini and Straub. In Hollywood today, in prestige products like The Affair or The Leftovers, there is a sense of anxiety in the acting. The eyes betray the actor. For when there is no breath, no listening, there is only information. One could be reading that Ikea assembly instruction sheet. For the actor isn’t listening, and therefor is caught thinking about what he or she is doing. Which is mostly collecting a paycheck. That form of thinking is just neurotic — and this is important in terms of narrative I think. The loss of memory and space for memory mirrors the actual loss of organic space. In a landscape of security and surveillance the populace are acting out a bad movie, for it is a movie without a story. As actors in their own bad movie there is no expectation that anything is other than a prop. Everything is a set, is a false front, and there is no expectation for depth, or something *behind* the front.
No sentient human should be able to tolerate the naked lies of Empire, should not vomit in the face of the speeches of Nurland or Samantha Power, or Joe Biden or any of a dozen generals and admirals. For these are bits of political theatre in which everyone but the speaker is invisible. Americans in particular have no *image* in their head to attach to the word Syria or Libya or Honduras. And one aspect of this hatred for Muslims that is erupting is that none of these people that scream in rage about terrorists and headscarves can remember anything. They do not have a memory of their own society, they only have an artificially manufactured *now*, and at best a mis-assembled bunch of data retrieved off one screen or another.

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Adriana Varejao

People are trained and hence normalize the absence of story. And if amnesia is normalized, as is the natural affect of absent narrative, then everything must be done faster and faster. It was Laplanche who, working off Freud, said that obsessional neurosis was an internalized sado-masochistic tension between the ego and the new more ruthless super-ego. The hatred of Muslims or Russians or black teenagers is all the same hatred; and it is obsessional. It is the new hyper accelerated obsessional dynamic and as Kelly Oliver observes, this is experienced by those who are targeted with this hatred as social trauma. The constant anticipated aggressions of the White privileged colonizer (essentially) is part of the anxiety experienced by all of the underclass today. There is only reflected back to the poor and outsider a set of ambivalent feelings. The crucial thing here is that white privilege, in an era of amnesia, is only supportable because the landscape of amnesia is one that reinforces one basic plot point — the civilizing mission of the colonizer. The rhetoric of the Imperialist is beating on that single theme, however it is dressed up for variety, and that is civilize the savage.
The popularity of privileged conditions, illnesses du jour, are expressions of being human, of proving existence in a sense. The savage cannot suffer sleep disorders or eating disorders or Aspergers or ADHD. For they cannot even be allowed that. This point is Olivers but also Spivak and Kristeva, too. And this is expressed another way, as well, and that is in the architecture of power. The events of memory, or military victory, are not built to remember but to forget. Rituals of memory are always about forgetting. Their role is, again, to grant permission to forget. And *entertainment*, in the form of Hollywood TV and film, is an industry of forgetting. Don’t remember, sleep. Responsibility is about yourself. This is the mantra of white privilege today. ‘Take care of yourself’. The institutionalization of self involvement. You OWN your condition. You bought the ticket. You’re a season ticket holder in fact. Recreation, tourism, both are part of the industry of memory loss. Nobody *vacations* (verb) in order to remember, to reflect, but rather to have fun and forget. The best party is the one that can’t be remembered. Hollywood comedies are turned out by the dozens now with this single theme. White men who can’t remember what assholes they were.

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Nijinsky, “Afternoon of a Faun”, 1912.

Community structures, and this means, really, mostly, pre-modern societies, but to a degree it includes in some partial way post industrial unions and guilds, are linked to ‘learning’ a trade. Apprenticeship is handed down often. And in another sense it is part of community knowledge, historical skills, which carry rituals of inclusion. Today, work is abstracted — the actual toil is all too literal, but the experience of it is just another thing to forget. There are no peer bodies of shared knowledge. This was one of the observations Mike Davis and Leon Bing made about LA gang culture; that joining a gang meant inclusion and access to trade secrets, to a special knowledge. As Leon used to say, the Crips and Blood don’t have to hold recruitment drives. The life of the contemporary working class in the West, in the U.S. most acutely, is one of constant unrelenting coercion. And this is relevant for how and why culture and art is treated with such hostility. That crappy modern art. I so don’t care. Etc. Well, of course not. Because the necessary investment in reaching that threshold that is autonomous experience is one that is perceived as much too difficult. It is also time consuming. Art is time intensive. And there is no paycheck at the end of it.
It is, as I said at the top of this posting, impossible to imagine mass culture being any more reactionary and jingoistic than it is now. And so internalized are the these forms of substitute gratification and instant distraction, that the appreciation most people have for it is indeed highly mediated. Few people value mass culture, but they are granted permission to consume and *enjoy* it. Some of that enjoyment is to ridicule it, to some degree. And so internalized are the forms of ridicule that many are only barely aware that they ARE ridiculing it. One eventually comes to pass grades on the excellence of the ridicule before even the product. The culture industry is controlled by a relatively few relatively affluent white people. They create work that reflects their values. This kind of conditioning is now nearly total. And the idea of culture as an element of resistance barely registers and when it does, it is rejected. The conditions for discrimination in culture are blurred now, and as Jerome McGann says, the complex artworks of the past are now relics in the digital museum/archive, only to be examined as one might examine a early Etruscan stone carving. Dostoyevsky is no closer to the 21st century Westerner than are the cave paintings in Borneo.
The endless mini narratives of propaganda do far more than push the ideology of the Imperialist West, they also are at work sucking the air out of the environment, literally and metaphorically. And judging from the wholesale reactionary reading of Syria these past few months, the ability to read is lost with and to the same degree as memory.
“I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.”
Vaslav Nijinsky
Diary

http://john-steppling.com/2015/12/homeless-memory/

The Never Complete Fascist
DECEMBER 27, 2015

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Louise Nevelson

“The hunter could have been the first ‘to tell a story’
because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent
(though not imperceptible) signs left by their prey.”
Carlo Ginzburg

“It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the
Nazi régime, should the argument regarding the one-party dictatorship be
more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely
from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi
discourse derived. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially
the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and
successfully exported to the United States.”
Dominico Losurdo

“Horkheimer and Adorno consider the stages that paved the way to Nazism
to be not only the violence perpetrated by the great Western powers against
the colonial peoples, but also the violence perpetrated, in the very heart of
the capitalistic metropolis, against the poor and outcasts locked in the
workhouses.”
Dominico Losurdo

“Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus UrFascism is racist by definition.”
Umberto Eco

“[w]e will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.”
George Jackson

The end of this year seems marked by a particular coalescing of several very reactionary trends in the U.S., and to a lesser degree in Europe (though Europe now has several of their own, though different, reactionary themes surfacing). But all of it is related.
One of the hallmarks of fascist thinking is a fusing of bigotries. In the U.S. today, there is the surge in Islamophobic rhetoric, accompanied by a resurfacing of antisemitism, and also with a cagey kind of new Colonial branding (see Bacardi graphic novel below). The antisemitism is representative of something else, though, too. Mary Ann Henderson and Brian Platt had a piece recently at Counterpunch that touched on a side bar issue to this; where they write: “The war on Christmas is more than a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, it is a gateway into a conservative politics that exalts capitalism, racism, and nativism while attacking the Left.” Now, before I get into their cogent analysis of the origins of this veiled antisemitism, I wanted to look at the peripheral ideological elements that serve to link Colonial nostalgia, racism, white privilege, and Imperialist war, militarism, and the re-emerging of pathological paranoia. A paranoia that is rooted in the hyper regressive state of ‘forgetting’ today in the West.

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Sophy Rickett, photography.

The vulgarity of FOX News and Roger Ailes, Murdoch, and for his part, Trump, is one that is not hugely different than that which Henry Ford promoted back in the 1920’s. Henderson and Platt give a nice summation of Ford’s antisemitism, which was directly targeting Bolshevism and unionizing domestically. In the 30s, however, the left was still quite vibrant and strong in the U.S. and trade unionism certainly was, and Ford made little real headway with his tract “The International Jew”, a book miraculously still in print. Today however, the FOX News racists have a huge and growing audience of mostly white lower middle class and underclass viewers. Ford, and later Baptist Preacher Gerald Winrod, in the late 20s, also disseminated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (a fictitious text written in Russia, in 1902) touring the country handing out free copies. This was the great depression in the U.S. and there was a sizable population in dire conditions, and looking for scapegoats. The unionized Left of the 30s and 40s however were well organized and with the New Deal, the workers in the U.S. formed a strong movement. What I want to look at in all this, though, were the earlier manifestations of antisemitism, and then the links to Colonialism, both aesthetically, and culturally, and also with the anti Muslim hysteria of the moment. And then the effects on aesthetics and culture overall today.

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Valerie Blass

Islam hating is the new antisemitism, and its not as if antisemitism ever went away. But with the ratcheting up of Israeli brutality, and open ethnic cleansing, and with virulent hate speech from Israel’s right wing leaders, the resurgent antisemitism (borrowing tropes strategically from Henry Ford and others) has found a new source of material handed to them by Netanyahu and Likud. The fact that Israel is at heart a colonial project, an occupying force, is, in reality, not a problem for a great many American supporters. For white America remains crypto-colonialist. They will always identify with the colonizer. So there is a fundamental contradiction in this; a support for Zionist occupation, while still holding onto a basic antisemitic prejudice. There is certainly an increased criticism of Israel, and the BDS movement, but this often marks, in places at least, the surfacing of latent antisemitism through a conflating of Zionist and Jewish. This also relates somewhat to Adorno’s notion of secondary antisemitism, and Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas regarding the projecting of taboo impulses onto the Jew, and thereby creating this ambivalence made up of equal parts admiration and denigration. Also, part of viewing ‘Jews” as the ‘colonizers of today’ deflects attention away from the crimes of former colonial powers. Just as denying Zionist colonialism serves the same purpose, really. And in a way this is what makes the U.S. Imperialist factor such a source of confusion. Remember too, that the neo-liberal agenda in the U.S., that ascended to power in the 80s, then in the 90s took over Israeli politics. Zionism was always colonial but not always neo-liberal. The even more intriguing aspect of this new artificial memory of the white bourgeoisie is that it is coupled to a stealth reactionary and racist rhetoric that also comes from the pseudo left (Zizek comes to mind, firstly). For Zizek manages to smuggle into most of his articles or interviews an aesthetic, and usually a grammar and vocabulary redolent of those early Henry Ford/Gerald Winrod tracts, and which later found expression in right wing televangelists like Billy Graham, as well as libertarians of the Alex Jones fringe variety. Zizek is not all that far from Alex Jones in certain of his style codes and dog whistles. But Zizek’s followers (and one need only read comment threads for any of his articles) justify anything he says because they construct elaborate (as needed) houses of logic to account for it. The Alex Jones side of this, a crude purveyor of ZOG style rhetoric, which as his popularity grew he has toned down, is related to all anti-communist libertarianism. But Jones also pulls jargon and style cues from white Aryan survivalists, and the Klan. Zizek appeals to University students by trotting out Lacan and and calling himself a Marxist and a leftist, though there is scant evidence in any of his writings that this is true. But he also is canny enough to talk about movies and pop culture, embrace Pussy Riot and position himself on the U.S./NATO side of the Russia question.
Post WW2 antisemitism migrated to the borders, the fringe, where white survivalists employed Nazi rhetoric and symbols, but in and to a different means and end. Jones comes out of that sensibility. Whenever one hears Federal Reserve and tax freedom, you can be pretty certain that an antisemitic article is coming. But there is a certain tone, and a certain way of framing enemies that Zizek shares with the fringe antisemites and that have come down from the Henry Ford pamphlets of the early 20s. There is a subtle formulating of *hidden* enemies. Zizek is more sophisticated in a sense if only because one has to pass through two or three doors to get the inner secret, which usually houses a threat of some sort, and by extension an enemy. And his message is often one critical of softness. One must make hard decisions, what is needed is a Thatcher of the left, or his recent analysis of immigrants coming to Europe wherein such immigrants pose a threat to European way of life (sic). Let me quote Zizek here…

“We should avoid getting trapped in the liberal self-interrogation, ‘How much tolerance can we afford?’ Should we tolerate migrants who prevent their children going to state schools; who force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; who arrange their children’s marriages; who discriminate against homosexuals? We can never be tolerant enough, or we are always already too tolerant.”

Sounds far more like European right wing parties than anything else.

Umberto Eco, in his essay Ur-Fascism points to fascist movements usually being syncrenistic. Meaning, they tolerate contradictions. The enemy, through rhetorical shifts of focus is both too weak and too powerful. Too backward and too cunning. But this also means the combining of traditionalist material and literature in ways that create a new way of pointing to some primeval truth. And that there must also be *plot*.

Eco writes:
“Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot,
possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve
the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

But the plot usually also comes from the inside. As Eco says, Jews traditionally are useful targets because they are both inside and outside. Today, there seems to be a fusion between Jew and Muslim. However this new fascism develops, however, it will contain new aesthetic forms.

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Otto Dix (Dr. Mayer-Hermann. 1926).

The Alex Jones conspiracy fringe also borrows heavily from Lyndon LaRouche and his group. LaRouche is, in one sense, the ‘reactionary racist’ link to the left, for LaRouche was active with both the Spartacists and Gerry Healy, and various Trotskyist organizations in his early days. But LaRouche also exemplifies that certain white American male of the mid 20th century. He is not all that different in the end from L.Ron Hubbard, if for no other reason than cultic personality traits and personal delusions. They are anti institutional, except when it is useful, anti government, anti communist (mostly), and with barely camouflaged racist beliefs. LaRouche at bottom, though, is a fascist. He and his followers hate banks (Jews), environmentalists and leftists (notwithstanding his early years with Trotskysts), and organized labor. There are dog whistle attacks on queer culture, and a clear set of symbols and rhetoric that sounds curiously like the Freemasons, which is also what much of Alex Jones sounds like. In the case of LaRouche it is often hard to know exactly where he stands, I suspect, because opportunism has been the overriding ideological imperative. What is most unsettling in all this, from Jones to Zizek to LaRouche to publications such as Pulse (Pulse media) or organizations like MoveOn, is that even a blind squirrel gathers some nuts. A broke watch is right twice a day, etc. So, even Jones is right about certain things, and those things are often stuff that is covered up by mainstream media. The fact that his conclusions are ALWAYS wrong soon ceases to be the point to many of his followers. For the same reason many Scientologists continue on with the Church (sic) even though, really, they know its a lot of sci-fi mumbo jumbo quack technological nonsense. Across all of this is a strange confluence of the half educated, the electronically literate, but sub literate in all other things, and the paranoid. One does not subscribe to Alex Jones or LaRouche if one is not paranoid.
In the new pseudo left, from the likes of Charles Davis (shockingly published by Counterpunch this last month) or Idrees Ahmad, or Molly Crabapple, Laurie Penny, or Zizek, there is, lurking right beneath the surface, a kind of hostility to the masses. A subtle elitism, and white privilege. It consciously looks to sound populist and brands itself with an aesthetics of *unpretension*, even while promoting with the other hand a very clear aura of cool (more later on this specific sub phylum of cool). Cool but not pretentious. That is the semiotic register for all this. But this targets the University educated, who, even if some of them think Jones is onto something, will still not take him completely seriously. They ‘will’ take Zizek or Charles Davis seriously, though, and Crabapple. For they represent the correct class. It is a sort of fraternity boy real-politik; meaning they are leveraging that posture of instrumental no-nonsense rationality. This also includes TV personalities like Bill Maher. But I will come back to this…

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Julia Kunn

To return to antisemitism, specifically, for a moment, as it interfaces with Islamaphobia today, the LaRouche people are also harkening back to a kind of neo-Puritan sensibility; they decry hedonism and are virulently anti drug. And in an odd way, LaRouche is the third cousin to Walt Disney and Hubbard. White men, non mainstream really, reactionary and anti union, and strong believers in science (LaRouche is pro nuclear energy), self made (by their definition, anyway), pro-Industry and pro-progress, and pro White. They are homophobic, antisemitic, and anti communist. Those are the base markers in play. In the 60s, they hated the hippies and counter culture, even while taking diverse stances on the war. And again, today, Zizek cleverly always finds a way to express his fondness for rank arch conservatives and outright racists (Houellebecq for example, or Thatcher). The pretense to dialectical cleverness is in reality a one dimensional defense of authoritarian neo-police state Imperialism. And that includes racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. And it is more than a little curious that the faux left today can defend a Houllebecq, and not see any problem because they are so liberal in their self branded tolerance and progressiveness. There is throughout this grouping, consistently, a focused soft criticism of U.S. Imperialism, in inverse proportion to the exaggerated and blanket demonizing of Muslim *terrorists* or *dictators*. Except of course there is little historical perspective, unsurprisingly, on Western colonialism. And when it is there, again, there is a strange absence of conviction about the crimes of Imperialism. And as always there is a tacit anti Russian bias.

Andre Vltchek correctly writes:

“During the Second World War, the Soviet people, mainly Russians, sacrificed at least 25 million men, women and children, in the end defeating Nazism. No other country in modern history has undergone more.

Right after that victory, Russia, alongside China and later Cuba, embarked on the most awesome and noble project of all times: the systematic dismantling of Western colonialism. All over the world oppressed masses stood up against European and North American imperialist barbarity, and it was the Soviet Union that was ready to give them a beacon of hope, as well as substantial financial, ideological and military support.
As one oppressed and ruined nation after another was gaining independence, hatred against the Soviet Union and the Russian people was growing in virtually all the capitals of the Western world. After all, the looting of non-white continents was considered a natural right of the “civilized world”.

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Nasareen Mohamedi

You cannot be even nominally leftist if you uncritically embrace Pussy Riot. If ever there was a litmus test, they are it. And yet, Zizek will continue to find op ed space in countless *left* journals and on countless left panels. And he will be asked to write the introduction to books by radicals, communists, and Marxists (see his intro to the works of Mao). There is a real question here as to how this happens. What are, exactly, the mechanisms by which this happens? Well, a good example is to be found at Salon (quelle surprise) in the person of Andrew O’Hehir. He quotes Zizek extensively, attacks Vltchek and Chomsky and what he calls the *desiccated left*.

Allow me to quote:

“Philosopher Slavoj Žižek does not mention Cohen or Chomsky by name in his provocative essay on the Ukraine crisis and the Stalinist roots of Putin’s neo-nationalism, published in May in the London Review of Books. But Žižek’s target is very much the “so-called anti-imperialism” of the desiccated Western left, blinded and choked by the ideological dust storms of the Cold War.”

It is worth reading the entire article because it is so representative of the pro Imperialist red bashing pseudo left today. Except, to be clear, O’Hehir is not a leftist. Not even vaguely. He is a reactionary hipster white man who is of a generation more craven than any in memory for approval by the status quo. He has a career after all. O’Hehir writes for Salon. (Pause for reflection). His bio tells us he has also written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and Hollywood Reporter. Essentially he is a film reviewer. It is therefore hardly surprising that his politics are standard mainstream media hipster white pro-Imperialist. One does not gain favor with the New York Times or Salon by expressing original or radical ideas. It is permissible, even encouraged I think, to criticize Obama (to some degree) and Bush and even Clinton. That speaks to his cynicism, and cynicism, as Adorno put it, is only another mode of conformity.

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Assyrian relief from Nimrud, 728 BC.

Now since I began with a quite overview of Henry Ford’s vicious anti-semitism and anti-union policies, it is worth quoting O’Hehir again…

“The days of American specialness and bigness whether you’re talking about Cecil B. DeMille or Henry Ford or Gen. Douglas MacArthur are pretty much gone, and voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee in November won’t bring them back.”
So to be clear, if you count Henry Ford and Douglas MacArthur among your heroes, you are deeply and teeth achingly reactionary. You are very close, ideologically, to Ronald Reagan. And even if you later write a bad review of a pro war film, that really doesn’t change your basic reactionary politics. O’Hehir has also written, in his review of Secretariat (the movie) how it is a paean to American whiteness and power. How, then, does this fit? Well, it does fit, because O’Hehir also, in that same review makes an offhand reference to the Watergate Hearings. It is the implication of belief in the system, the idea that the U.S. is flawed, but savable. It is, in fact, the standard liberal position. It fits perfectly with those who will vote for Hillary because Trump scares them. It fits perfectly with those who are outraged at police violence, but think there has been progress in race relations. This is that very specific but widely found American liberal who in the end will always side with Imperialism, will always believe in the system (because the system provides for their privilege) and who will always defend their privilege because they believe since they have the right to criticize movies, it proves America is a great democracy.
And as Robert Paxton, in his analysis of Fascism, points out; both conservatives and liberals will be the ‘coalition partners’ for any new fascism. Replacing brown shirts, black shirts and swastikas will be Stars & Stripes and Christian symbols, and Fourth of July parades. But the new fascists will also hold onto new ideas, marriage equality and multiculturalism. For in one sense, there is a kind of sleight of hand going on if all anyone pays attention to are the Christian fundamentalists and right wing of the Republican Party. Liberals will be willing partners and even a part of the driving force of this new fascism. (This is the problem with writers like Chris Hedges in fact). As living standards deteriorate for the majority of Americans, as the prison gulag and police grow in power, as whistle blowers are increasingly punished and as threats to U.S. currency grow — conditions are perfect for a new American fascism.

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Koji Enokura

“In ancient Greece, the historian’s autopsia, or direct visual experience
of an event, was conveyed by stylistic “vividness”. This is a far cry from
what we are used to call “evidence”, which is invariably based on an act
of inference. Historians (like judges or policemen) make more or less
reasonable inferences about events they did not witness, relying upon
evidence as diverse as newspaper articles, fragments of pottery or cigarette
butts. But notwithstanding the obvious differences, a certain continuity
between our present and antiquity is undeniable, since both our notion of
evidence and the Latin evidentia emerged in the sphere of rhetoric,
especially judicial.”
Carlo Ginzburg
Now, the 20th century evolution of fascist aesthetics is linked to the industrialization of thought. But allow me to digress a bit and try to explicate aspects of the evolution of this a bit, and to touch on a few other things. Ginzburg has a terrific essay on Sherlock Holmes and Freud. And he points to the simultaneous rise of police detective and art connoisseur (of the modernist era). But then Ginzburg touches on something I find articulates with amazing clarity many of my beliefs on mimesis, by way of Adorno, and on aesthetics generally. Ginzburg speaks of the hunters of antiquity, and …“In the course of endless pursuits hunters learned to construct the appearance and movements of an unseen quarry through its tracks – prints in soft ground, snapped twigs, droppings, snagged hairs or feathers, smells, puddles, threads of saliva. They learnt to sniff, to observe, to give meaning and context to the slightest trace.”This knowledge is passed down, one presumes, and it is likely, I think, that much early cave art is related to this knowledge. And that these bits of observational detail also leaped to large gestalt concepts having to do with tracking prey. Hunters as the first narrators. This is also an echo of Robert Bly’s ideas on ‘leaping poetry’. The concrete detail is linked, mysteriously, to something seemingly unrelated that is conceptually of another register altogether. Ginzburg then touches on early Mesopotamian divination; and again there is the close study of minute details. Bird droppings, hair, footprints…anything, and the difference is, of course, that here these skills are employed to divine the future.

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Domenico Ghirlandaio (1488, detail from Adoration of the Magi. Self portrait?)

Pharaonic Egypt, too, clearly saw ritual readings of cuneiform writing, or pictographs, as having an intimate link with not just daily life, or even the future, but with the after life. So here there is analysis of clues, or symptoms eventually; diagnosis, medical prophecy. And at the same time, the establishment in a sense, for humans, of mimetic narratives. The invention of printing served to de-link a number of things that were occurring in oral traditions. For one, something reductive took place that changed the nature of mimetic engagement.

“Among the ‘conjectural’ disciplines one – philology, and particularly textual criticism -grew up to be, in some ways at least, atypical. Its objects were defined in the course of a drastic curtailing of what was seen to be relevant. This change within the discipline resulted from two significanturning points: the invention first of writing and then of printing. We know that textual criticism evolved after the first, with the writing down of the Homeric poems, and developed further after the second, when humanist scholars improved on the first hasty printed editions of the classics. First the elements related to voice and gesture were discarded as redundant; later the characteristics of handwriting were similarly set aside. The result has been a progressive dematerialisation, or refinement, of texts, a process in which the appeal of the original to our various senses, has been purged away.”
Carlo Ginzburg

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Martin Parr, photography. (Epsom The Derby. 2004).

This probably has had even more long term affect than even Ginzburg allows. But the point here is that a desire for standardization, for scientific and rational categorization served to abandon certain kinds of narrative knowledge. As Ginzburg says; “Knowledge based on making individualising distinctions is always anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and liable to other specific bias.” And mimesis, the mimetic response is buried, consciously, in places less accessible, and less acceptable. But there was another shift, culturally, that reflected advances in standardization, in definitions of Nature and man; and this came about in the 18th century. From Ginzburg again:

“In England from about 1720 onwards, in the rest of Europe (with the Napoleonic
code) a century or so later, the emergence of capitalist relations of production led to a
transformation of the law, bringing it into line with new bourgeois concepts of
property, and introducing a greater number of punishable offences and punishment of
more severity. Class struggle was increasingly brought within the range of criminality,
and at the same time as a new prison system was built up, longer sentences were
imposed. But prison produces criminals. In France the number of further offences
was rising steadily from 1870, and towards the end of the century was about half of all
cases brought to trial.86 The problem of identifying previous offenders, which
developed in these years, was the bridgehead of a more or less conscious project of
keeping a complete and general check on the whole of society.”

And this sort of brings me back to the contemporary fascist aesthetics, and to the kind of denuded consciousness in huge chunks of the populace in the West. The growth and intractable quality of *identity* today was solidified in 18th and 19th century England and France (and one could and maybe should add Holland and Germany). And this can be traced back to the disproportionate trust in detail. Detail that was foregrounded through optical technology. And in a sense this was a collectively defensive phenomenon. There was a growing societal anxiety, among the ruling class, about control of the underclass. The whole was impossible, in a sense, but details afforded a psychological cushion. This also further entrenched the idea of the *expert*. The modern diviner of readings of normally insignificant detail.

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Susan Derges, photography.

Diagnosis, the interpretation of reality, and more, of individuals, based on clues became a psychological model for understanding of not just the disciplines of control and punishment, but of self. The controller better understood himself. The increasingly murky idea of the whole, the distrust of grand overviews, too, results in — at least in one respect — a reaction of and embrace of annulment. But side by side with this pseudo existential relativism came a doubling down on scientific (rational) definitions of individuality. And today, one might argue that this idea of *expert*, which has a foundational bias toward things technological, is a primary paradigm for Western society. Authority resides in the hands of experts. Historians are experts on history, Doctors are health experts, Generals are experts on war, and so on. Then the second tier expert is found in those who analyse data. The functionaries of the security state are now exalted as *experts* on things like facial recognition, or algorithms for spotting suspicious behavior, or of just computer code. And such people are oddly, usually anonymous. But their invisibility, their illegibility, goes a long way toward bridging that early structure of narrative knowledge. The expert is now like a bird dropping in one sense. Structurally they are studied by other experts, those technicians of accumulative information, themselves anonymous, who compile and parse apart the useful from the not useful. Society is entrusted to the hands of anonymous experts, who themselves are served by further anonymous experts, and then this diagnostic data is given a imprimatur of authority. Detail as was true in the 1700s is a clue, part of a puzzle of clues, and eventually the expert divines the meaning. People feel the familiarity of that outline, that shape of knowledge delivered mysteriously. They have no idea, themselves, of what bird droppings mean, or what those invisible techno bureaucrats are going on about — but it must be important. The previously unseen then takes on both an almost cultic importance, while at the same time forming a part of an accepted mosaic one might title ‘The Non Importance of Everything’
.
The fascist sensibility of today finds cultural expression in a nostalgia for Colonialism. See this new graphic novel from Bacardi…
http://mashable.com/2014/08/07/bacardi-graphic-novel/#WKhMPjCbfkqX\

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/joeseph-cornell-Hobartframeenlargement.sm_1-e1451131337706.jpg
Joseph Cornell (frame enlargement from Rose Hobart).

Dominico Losurdo’s essay on Totalitarianism, from 2004, is really germane here. For substituting the term *Totalitarian* for fascist allows for a generalizing and ill defined confusion that, as Losurdo says, “turned into an ideology of war, of total war,
one that has helped to increase the horror it supposedly condemned, thus falling into a tragic performative contradiction?” For the U.S. the general public today sees totalitarian in this vague way as a one party state, anti democratic, and hence dystopian and Orwellian. Images come to mind such as concentration camps and dark colorless tenement blocks. In other words, the U.S.S.R. The fact that the U.S. had their own concentration camps, for Japanese Americans, not to mention the *Indian schools* that followed on a genocide of native American tribes, passes unnoticed. But the real heart of societal violence is found in the surfacing of this nostalgia for colonialism. And it is hardly just Bacardi. Hollywood spews out a non-stop stream of Colonial narratives, usually featuring Victorian style codes and bathed in a nostalgic amber glow. But this is a fantasy Colonial era, and there is in reality precious little real narrative drama that involves the greater context or story of European occupation of Africa and Central America, or the middle east.

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David Zink Yi, installation MUDAM, Luxembourg.

And that is what is most culturally interesting and most telling. The U.S. today never depicts itself as an occupier. It is a rescuer and a teacher. Maximillian Forte has a nice series on the U.S. military and how it markets itself over at Zero Anthropology. As Forge writes;

“The trick is to achieve superiority by being at once both engaged and removed. Being engaged shows you actively involved in the uplift and upkeep of other peoples’ lives, thus coming down the mountain to these peoples’ very low station in life. However, you need to stay removed–by never showing yourself being in need of others. Show photographs therefore of us feeding them, but avoid showing any photographs of us eating. Show us giving them water, but show us seemingly persisting in tough, arid climates, without ever so much as stopping to take a sip. Gods do not eat, drink, or bleed.”

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Crimea, Soviet Union, 1950s.

The natural superiority of the white savoir. And this is the shape, the predicate, upon which most thinking stems when the topic is Imperialism. And of course, the idea of White superiority doesn’t end there. It extends to almost all formats and genres of storytelling, and even of thinking. Lena Dunham is a colonial savior, albeit a self ridiculing one (well, I’m not REALLY making fun of myself, that’s just my persona). There is another aspect to this manufactured Imperialist *real*; which contains both a revised history, but also must constantly reassure the present. Forte writes of military propaganda focused on showing soldiers babysitting locals in occupied countries, or playing hoop with some teenage boys, or singing with children etc. Even playing Santa Claus, although this set of photographic installments is more targeting the soldiers themselves. And this is important to understand because it goes a long way to understanding why Hollywood makes so many characters either ex military or currently military when so few of the actors, directors or producers themselves have ever been in the military.
Forte again:

“The function as intended may be for domestic recruitment purposes and internal morale boosting, but I would argue that there is another, broader, unspoken purpose, or perhaps more than one. One broader purpose, rooted in the official one above, is to stabilize and pacify emotions around the military and war. To do so, one has to create an unreality, a virtual utopia of merry soldiers dressed as Santas and elves. This is a very “American” principle, evidenced in many Hollywood movies that will, for example, show adults at NASA goofing off, rolling their eyes, acting like big children or cartoon characters, with a limitless supply of snark and appropriated black talk, “oops, my bad,” “oh hell no”.

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Carlo Ginzburg. (DeMarco Photo).

There is another sort of semiotic register here. For in Hollywood film today this childishness is usually set against workplace activity, and then also it is an attempt at this new populism. Hollywood producers have never had to work at a discount shoe outlet, or McDonalds, or dish washers. They know as little of that world as they do of the military. But it all presented in nearly identical terms. And since the most oppressed community is arguably the urban black community, it stands to reason that this snarky goof off sarcasm should appropriate from urban black communities. Except of course it’s not really any recognizable black community, it is a TV or movie black community, just as the military is a TV military, not the real military. They talk the same everywhere, and they are infantile everywhere.
I wanted to touch again, briefly, on this question of mimesis and clues, of an idea of mimetic experience that started to atrophy with the loss of memory associated with the oral tradition, and then more acutely with the invention of printing. When I see, as an example, the work of Louise Nevelson (and I have mentioned this before) I feel my chest tighten. My breath is momentarily constricted. There is a certain cruelty in Nevelson, and I’d imagine her work touches on something masochistic in one. It is that foreclosed space, that sense in her monochrome work that we are suffocating. It is claustrophobic, too. In fact it is just generally phobic. And Nevelson is an example of an artist who instinctively, I think, gravitated toward something pre-grammatical. Here is the terrifying night sky of early nomads. It is inarticulate in that sense. Sounds are muffled. They are there, but we cannot hear them. When Panofsky noted, in 1927, that Roman painting gave us a perspectival organization or system that *consumed* the objects in those paintings, and that in Roman landscapes there is something unreal and *inconsistent, like a dream or a mirage*, he was also registering something akin to this idea Ginzburg introduced with the bird droppings and details. The clues. For the Roman artist, there was no assurance that such details, such unconscious clues, existed — but an unreality or uncanny is introduced anyway. In the early 20th century, travelers to the middle east or Africa, or just southern Italy and Greece, would buy postcards of famous ruins or sculptures, even landscapes, and paste them into novels they were reading. Self illustration. For the artist of Pompei, the detail was implied, instinctively, from a connection, historically, close enough, to nomadic search.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Schwitters-collage-pic-601x444-e1451084240528.jpg
Kurt Schwitters

“The flowing robes of Florentine paintings in the
15th century, the linguistic innovations of Rabelais, the healing of the king’s evil
(scrofula) by French and English monarchs (to take a few of many possible examples),
have each been taken as small but significant clues to more general phenomena: the
outlook of a social class, or of a writer, or of an entire society.’02 The discipline of
psychoanalysis, as we have seen, is based on the hypothesis that apparently negligible
details can reveal deep and significant phenomena. Side by side with the decline of the
systematic approach, the aphoristic one gathers strength-whether through a
Nietszche or an Adorno.”
Carlo Ginzburg

Ginzburg mentions the Arab concept of *firasa*, which is taken from Sufi philosophy. It means the ability to leap from one small detail to somethihng larger, but unknown. A spiritual insight. Derrida, in a critique of Heidegger, criticizing the latter’s privileging of speech and poetry over the other arts (meaning space and architecture) wrote “…there is a certain Heideggerian phonologism, a noncritical privilege accorded in his works, as in the West in general, to the voice, to a determined ‘expressive substance’.”Mark Wigley points out that Derrida accuses Western metaphysics of subordinating space to the privileging of immediate speech. For Derrida there is a sublimating of space in the entire Western canon, and as this relates to artworks in the context of clues and details. For space, says Wigley (interpreting Derrida) is associated with death, decay and degeneration. Speech is life and space is death. But whether one accepts this or not, the idea of space here is relevant. For writing per se excludes space. It prohibits it. Space is outside of writing. Again, this is not to get into an argument around Derrida circa Grammatology, but rather to see the idea of space is one of expansiveness, of that search for marks, for bird droppings or paw prints. It is foundational to writing. Space is an effect of inscription, as Wigley puts it. This is, I think, clearly correct. And yet, in another sense the opposite is true. But what does this mean for a culture that no longer really writes or speaks? The screen life is one of reading image.

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Alfred Eisenstaedt, photography. (La Scala, Milan, 1934).

This is linked to that impulse of control that comes out of standardization. The instrumental logic is a logic of control. And it is not space, but the containment of space. There is another idea Derrida introduced later, in a piece on Lacoue-Labarthe’s work, where the concealment of space, psychically (to be reductive) is symptomatic of repression. This is really sort of the heart of the issue and it ties together the standardized instrumental tacit rejection of intuitive space, of experienced mimetic space, and that of control and domination, of the mentality of those — here meaning an Imperialist West — who gravitate toward punishment and domination.
There is a mimetic history to spatial conditions; thresholds, entrances, borders, containers, enclosures, and per Wigley again, the more particular figures like labyrinth, column, aperture, plaits, whorls, and nautilus. And it is not *space* per se here that is denied, it is that which follows upon the search. For the clue, the mark left, an effect that is an aspect of duration, that is productive of how *space* is experienced. And that experience is conditioned and shaped by historical conditions. And naturally enough the mimetic leads at some point to the interrogation of identity. For interity is conditional in a sense, it is always ‘my’ interior. And here there are double registers of meaning because, if one were to allow Derrida into this discussion, the marks of the text are already there, and the erasing of these clues forever will fail. This exceeds the intent of this posting, but the brutality of the West, of Capitalism and coercive exploitative class conflicts, are carried out in the contemporary non-space of the security state. And this warrants a final couple thoughts on the uncanny.
That ‘which does not belong in the house’, the familiar, but too familiar, and which haunts the subject, scares the subject. Space is associated with absence, with death. The double is a portent of death, but only by returning, and returning the subject to a repressed earlier scene. Or place. Freud’s ideas of the institution of the family, shaping desire, contradictory forces that produce ambivalence. The family is the space of contradiction, as the personal history of life and death instincts — union and separateness, independence and dependence. The space of unity is disrupted in childhood, the parent/child relationship recuperates that which was split, but at a cost. The drama, the stage of this drama, is in a space. The home is the theatre of anxiety.
The question here then is to understand the shrinking psychic stage, and a near enforced regression for most adults, today. It is not too much, certainly, to see the images of soldiers and the children of occupied people playing games as a kind of representation of death, but neither is it too much to see most sit-coms as representations of death. Lena Dunham is no less morbid a figure than Dick Cheney or Hannibal Lecter. The smiling Bagram Santa in Forte’s astute analysis of military propaganda is a representation of 21st century grim reaper, but then so is Adam Sandler the composite figure representing a post modern metaphorical Torquemada. The killer of culture.
“Anti-Semitism is based on a false projection. It is the counter- part of true mimesis, and fundamentally related to the,repressed form; in fact, it is probably the morbid expression of repressed mimesis. Mimesis imitates the environment, but false projection makes the environment like itself. For mimesis the outside world is a model which the inner world must try to conform to: the alien must become familiar; but false projection confuses the inner and outer world and defines the most intimate experiences as hostile. Impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object-the prospective victim. The actual paranoiac has no choice but to obey the laws of his sickness. But in Fascism this behavior is made political; the object of the illness is deemed true to reality; and the mad system becomes the reasonable norm in the world and deviation from it a neurosis.”
Adorno and Horkheimer

[img]http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/eisenstaedt-03-la-scala-34-e1451089658124.jpg
Joseph Cornell

Laura Cummings wrote of Joseph Cornell:

“Joseph Cornell (1903-72) had the mind of a visionary and the methods of an archivist. He accumulated odds and ends from the real world – a bird’s egg, a marble, a foreign stamp, a thimble – and assembled them into enigmatic dreams.”

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/eisenstaedt-03-la-scala-34-e1451089658124.jpg
Joseph Cornell

Perhaps Cornell most perfectly, literally, captures this quality of details, clues, and space. Cornell never moved out of his mother’s house in Flushing, Queens, but born in Nyack, New York (Hopper’s home town, too) he wandered the big city, a solitary taciturn spectral figure. He was not asocial, just very reserved and perhaps withdrawn. But for all the acclaim he received for his assemblages and shadow boxes, his most startling work might be the re-edited blue tinted 20 minute fragment of the B-film, East of Borneo, that he created, titled Rose Hobart, and which is decidedly haunting. Unforgettable, in fact.

“But the root of Cornell’s genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell’s version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart’s clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.”
Brian L. Frye

Cornell’s brother was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life, and Cornell tended to him. Somehow, this idea of confinement is always present in Cornell’s work; sadness, anxiety, enclosure. I can only look at Cornell’s work for short amounts of time. Too long and I begin to feel that claustrophobia, and like Nevelson, there is cruelty. But with Cornell it is far less grand or expansive. That is the part one must leave, that pettiness or smallness in Cornell. He was visionary, to be sure, but also disfigured somehow. Proximity comes at a cost, as it must have in real life as well. But that sense of pinched hermetic angst is opened up in the few experimental films he made. Suddenly, the hunter of clues occurs in time. The inscription, the film, constitutes a space, because we read these films, perhaps more than any others of which I can think. Rose Hobart is accompanied by a kitschy Brazillian dance music soundtrack (Nestor Amarale, of Three Caballeros fame)and somehow this is perfectly evocative of what happens with cinema, the peculiar and particular dream sense that one slips into.

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Richard Tuttle

Cornell’s films in the end are very minor. And part of that comes from the uncomfortable sexual fetishizing that drives each of them. Obsessive and slightly unwholesome, and yet this would not feel at all problematic if Cornell were a Genet or Burroughs, or Richard Foreman or even a had taken something of the erotic bravura of men he knew as friends, DeKooning for one, or simply submitted to his mania in some more fulfilling way. The potted palm soundtrack and the blue filter, the slowing down of the projection; all of it is oddly too close, perhaps, to camp. And that Orientalist kitsch quality is both intentional, and a commentary, and not. And as I watched it this time I felt well, it *is* in fact a kind of deeply strange inscription, a private language, a genuinely unconscious artifact. Cornell is a bit like many other formally untrained artists and writers of mid century; Cornell Woolrich comes to mind here, repressed, living at home, sexually ambiguous and oddly Mother fixated. It is that isolation that I think one feels most with Cornell. Nobody with a healthy social life makes thousands of little boxes with junk inside them. His work didn’t develop. It was as it is, and that is that. I don’t think anyone would want to live with a Cornell box in their house. Cornell was to be seen as a Henry Darger figure, but then also was to be seen as a Man Ray figure. The socially odd savant aspect is what cannot be avoided somehow. He ends as a profound footnote to 20th century art, but a revealing one in light of thinking about details and clues and detection.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/12/the-never-complete-fascist/

Answers Without Questions
JANUARY 4, 2016 | 1 COMMENT

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Rut Blees Luxemburg , photography.

“According to a 19th century theory, the pain of
separation could be reduced by having a portrait of the deceased;
it served as a way to preserve a mental picture of them. Because
of the relative expense of photography most families did not have
many such portraits. Death portraits were often the only portraits
families would have of infants or elderly people in the 19th century.”
Heather Cameron

“I think my generation shares this ironic position, even after the sincere enthusiasm of the sixties, which, after all, led –
ironically – to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush.”
Martin Jay

“I think a literary translation will capture some of what has
been lost in Freud: an unconscious and a conscious
ambiguity in the writing, and an interest in sentences, in
the fact that language is evocative as well as informative.”
Adam Phillips

“…is the general principle of a new “political anatomy”…. The celebrated, transparent circular cage with its high tower, powerful and knowing, may have been … a perfect disciplinary institution; but … one may “unlock” the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body.”
Michel Foucault

I think that film and TV, and internet and iPhones have altered how people see, or look at things. Altered our gaze. And not too many people would dispute this, I don’t think. But I also think these alterations have come with an ideological imprint. And additionally, they have therefore affected how stories are told, but also how people listen. It may be that people’s ability to listen is more affected than the gaze. The idea of hearing comes out of Judaic antiquity, and seeing, as the primary organ of perception is Greek. This has always been the general and reductive inherited wisdom. I am not certain it is entirely true, but there is something, certainly, in the visuality of the Greeks that has been passed down to the contemporary Western world.

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Teresita Fernandez

From the Greeks came images as metaphors; that the *truth* was something revealed, unclothed, naked. The Greek visual was one that supported a model that resembled an onion, a peeling away of superficial or obfuscating images in order the better to *see* the naked unadorned truth at the core or center. Now, Hans Jonas (and Martin Jay) believe that from this Greek visual emphasis came ideas of Being, a fixed truth, privileged over Becoming, and that there was a general de-temporalizing of thought. I am not sure I fully accept this, but I suspect it is largely not incorrect. That idea of a visual distant, a horizon, a perspective, was Greek, from Parmenides to Plato, and this sense of visual primacy clearly influenced Greek writing, the poets and dramatists, as well as the philosophers.
That surveying gaze seems a particularly western notion, and one that may well have started with the Greeks but seems more directly substantiated by the class relations born in feudalism, and then depicted in a sense in Renaissance painting, but also was influenced, or was given a narrative, in a sense, by the Christian church. And then that ideological addition is one that perhaps came with optical technology, but has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, or 30, with the rise of a surveillance state.

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Birde Vanheerswynghe


Foucault’s writing on the Panopticon exercised a good deal of influence, and it has planted the seeds for several strains of thinking vis a vis optical technology and societal control. One distinct branch has to do with Deleuze’s ideas of predictive analysis, of CCTV and various panopticon technologies, and which is at heart a sort of science of manipulation. The other branch is control by way of more passive computer sorting of images; employment of facial recognition, etc. Mass classification. But all of this is grouped under authority and state management of crowds and the masses. How much these realities are changing actual individual perception is unclear. But I suspect more than is assumed. I also think, and Deleuze suggests something like this, that this surveillance model is already partly obsolete. The architecture of control, the accelerating of class polorization, and the brutal militarized domestic police apparatus (in the U.S. anyway) is now so acute that CCTV is redundant. But it is also accepted now, if rarely spoken, that surveillance technology doesn’t work very well. This is very rarely posited in discussions of growing authoritarian policing and crowd management and disciplining. The surveillance technology doesn’t work. Facial recognition does not work. I have written about this several times, so I don’t want to repeat the obvious here, but the effect of this tacit understanding of the flaws in surveillance technology, and in mass classification (think California DMV for example) is that new forms of control, more draconian solutions to managing the poor masses, are developing rapidly.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/BIRDE-VANHEERSWYNGHELS-8.jpg
Angelina Pwerle

Culturally, there is a counter trend I suspect, or I sense, in how the Panopticon model, and the idea of an inherent authoritarian quality to the gaze, is being tacitly rejected. There is a sense in much abstract art, actually, of the elided gaze. The gaze that does not work as a gaze that is expressive of visual primacy, but one that is a gaze of scoptic failure; of doubt. The art of visual doubt. And this is not, to be clear, the message of the work I am thinking of, nor the provincialisms of identity themed manipulations. The new gaze, the post panopticonic gaze, as it were, is one of an aesthetics of the non-classificatory.

“…the functioning of panoptic power rests in its essence not upon visibility (the fact that the
subject is visible to the eye that observes), but upon the visibility of visibility i.e. that conscious registration of being observed on the part of the subject (seeing and recognizing that he is being seen) is what induces in the subject the disciplining of his own conduct.”
Majid Yar

The modern, or really the post modern, over the last thirty years, has really demonstrated that Foucualt’s description of visibility, for the inmate, to be the desired condition for his incarceration. And as far as that goes, it’s true. I am conscious all the time of being observed when I am in the U.S., at least in bigger cities. That is, however, partly a subjective paranoia. And that paranoia is also manufactured, of course. But I think the issue here is what one means by visibility. The fact is the Panopticon model is only useful as a metaphor, really, for structurally the surveillance apparatus works in completely other ways. As Majid Yar puts it, the core issue is the visibility of visibility, the conscious awareness of being visible. Statistically, something like only 35% of people are aware of any particular area of their city being under CCTV surveillance. Hence the deterrent and disciplining aspect of close circuit surveillance is limited. Except that I think this is both wrong in terms of percentages, but also wrong in terms of the causality of disciplining the masses. One may not be aware of a CCTV system, but one is still aware of being visible. All the time. That is what paranoia is and does. The conscious awareness, of temporal visibility, might be close to nothing. But the unconscious and well trained guilt of the citizen is always there, and in that respect the contemporary CCTV system does not exactly alter the Dostoyevskian reality of life in the city.

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Bellevue Hospital morgue, NYC. apprx. 1890.

And visual surveillance technology doesn’t exist in isolation. Surveillance is, today, a system. And it is a system that relies on a lot of secondary sub systems that enforce this goal of control. The state — thinking of the U.S. anyway, is always bent on *total* control. The stated or often unstated goal is always *totality* of some variety. The intention is conscious and really never varies. The government doesn’t say they want to cut down on this or that, they say they want to eliminate this or that. Total information awareness. That is the ideal and that’s been the ideal since WW2.
Notwithstanding this goal of totality, the CCTV systems in urban centers in the U.S. and UK are thought of as having minimal impact on people’s behavior. That is what security experts tell you anyway. It is interesting that in Yar’s short essay on visual entropy (via an analysis of Martin Jay’s book Downcast Eyes)that an example that is used to explain the marginal affects of normalizing behavior under surveillance scrutiny, is the Big Brother reality TV franchise. I am not sure, really, just how many layers of weird are contained in that example. I mean, its funny in one way, but it also makes a certain sense. Except I am not sure it makes the sense that the author intended. Contestants on TV shows, or maybe one should call them participants, are in a situation far removed from daily life. So far removed that as an example, it is pretty much worthless. Nobody living in NYC or Los Angeles or Chicago or London is living in a situation that mirrors a reality TV show. Except…except from a subjective narrative standpoint. And this is perhaps the crux of the matter. For the stories people employ to describe their lives to themselves, or to family and friends, are increasingly, I think, stories that are culled from mass media. And people behave as if they are in a reality TV show, even if their idea of what a reality show might be like is highly distorted and personal. The distortions then become a kind of Rorschach test, on the one hand, and a form to newly inscribe reality, and more narrowly, of newly imbuing images with meaning.

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Harry Mitchell, photography.

In other words, I think for many people in the U.S. today, and U.K., behavior is starting to mimic that seen on reality TV. I hear people talk in ways that sounds as if they think they are being recorded or filmed. The most obvious example is in the way people will hold opinions. I hear people express opinions in a way that sounds as if they are answering a question. Except there is no question; but that is exactly how reality TV shows are often edited. The question is cut, and the viewer only hears an answer. The question is sometimes cut out but it is obvious what is was, and in other cases the question is completely mystified. Partly this feels like how *identity* is established, or built, today. I-am-what-I-answer. Reality TV is often built around the mundane and banal holding of opinions. Someone doesn’t like the blue wallpaper in their newly redecorated kitchen. They hold forth on this dislike of blue, explaining their feelings, but rarely analyzing where these feelings originate. There i s almost no psychoanalytical self examination in reality TV. There is very little questioning of anything on historical or social levels.
There is another layer of subjective perspective here, and that is how participants in reality TV talk to the camera. That conceit is so commonplace now that it barely registers as curious or unusual. But who is being addressed? The viewing public? What does that mean? And here there is a confluence of several factors relating to photography, and to rituals that have developed out of photography and photographic images. Yar quotes DeCerteau in relationship to resistance. And DeCerteau was essentially pointing out that Foucault had a rather one dimensional description of the individual subject. The idea from DeCerteau was that subjects can, and usually do, have multiple and even conflicting or contradictory relationships to authority and even more to ideas and practices of surveillance.

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Rena Effendi, photography.

Going back to Descartes, actually, there is a philosophical position that relates to how the subhject *views* the world; that the *I* is taken out of the world, in a sense.

“By lifting the ego out of its immediate entanglement in the world, Descartes establishes the
apodictic certainty of self as a result of the clarity and distinctness with which it perceives itself.”
Rudolph Gasche

But perhaps it is Lacan that is the best reference for talking to the camera. The mirror phase, without getting into detail here, posits an idea of how young children begin to understand themselves in relation to their reflection. Elena Cologni writes: “Anyone looking in a mirror, even seeking to discover their true identity, discovers first of all a fixed image of themselves, a persona to which they try to restore movement and life by a whole range of grimaces, facial gesticulations and minuscule, perverse gestures of defiance. They are
attempting to act and influence their persona. It is the same in photography. Every self portrait is inevitably by its very nature a doubling, an image of the other.”

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Simon Hantai

More germane is a quote from Merleau-Ponty that Cologni uses:
“Thereupon I leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself
constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the
specular image is the first outline. In this sense I am torn from myself,
and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious
alienation, which will be the alienation by others. For others have only
an exterior image of me, which is analogous to the one seen in the
mirror.”

There is a connection here, obviously, with the instrumentalizing of language. One that even precedes Descartes. Lacan saw the mirror image relating to a sense of self alienation. Just how much the derealization of the other impacts the subject’s sense of inner self is a huge question, but clearly the child is situated in a specific social matrix that reinforces certain aspects of fear, or of losing oneself. There is a sense in Lacan, as in Wilhelm Reich, of the building of character armor to protect the self against this uncertain world, and potentially destabilizing other. Now Martin Jay sees a tradition of optical privileging playing a role in western philosophy and reinforcing a distinct experience of alienation. That the subject is stuck in this rivalry of the mirror stage. And Cologni perceptively points out (as does Jay) that in dreams the subject is not as reliant on this optical primacy. Dreams accept the subject who is both viewed and viewer.

“One of the aspects of representation relevant to self-portraiture is the
characteristic straightforward gaze looking outward. This specific gaze is at
the very centre of the major system of representation introduced in painting
during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries and carried through the
Renaissance to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries and beyond. This
system, called ‘one view point perspective’ or ‘single vanishing point
perspective’, for centuries fixed the painter’s position in front of the model.”
Elena Cologni

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Magura-cave-art-in-Bulgaria-e1451858055155.jpg
Paleolithic art, Magura Cave, Bulgaria.

The contestant in Big Brother, speaking to the camera, is a form of self portraiture. It is also not. For the portrait is part of a manufactured narrative, and one of audience manipulation. The portrait is part of an entire system of entertainment. And such entertainment contains something morbid in its edited fragmentation. The contestant is not at all clear who he or she is speaking to, or why. As useful as Martin Jay is, his political understanding is pretty limited. And it is exactly at this point, where ideology imprints the ways our reflection looks back at us that his vaguely liberal academic vision is to be questioned. For there is something in this that brings to mind Adorno and disenchantment. As an almost side-bar observation, I continue to be amazed at the hostility that Adorno elicits in the U.S. even now.
The development of prints in the 15th century allowed for a production of stable repeatable images. This provided a sense of stability for science, but the impact extended far beyond just science. The development of graphs, maps, and other inscriptions provided visual codes that carried a certain authority. It was also optical privileging in a sense. And vision was narrowed, images were ‘read’ more than seen. But the important thing is that graphic codes took on authority — this was, as I wrote last time I think, an establishing of evidence. Objectivity was visual. But it was graphically visual. And here one again returns to questions of cave art and early alphabets and the role of visual stability in forms that could be reproduced, after a fashion. Consistency. Now one of the things that a narrowing of visual experience entails, through a reading or lexical system, allows for abstract *unseen* concepts to be ‘explained’. Early graphical expression was often simply mimetic, at a rudimentary level. Later more complex language systems, obviously, extended the realm of meaning. Knowledge production, as Johanna Drucker puts it.

“Our visual and cognitive capabilities conspire in a radical pre-selection of visual stimuli. And our organism adapts itself, lazily–but sensibly–ignoring visual “information” that it seems not to need.”
Johanna Drucker

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Edgar Martins, photography.

But in a highly coercive world of mass manipulation and solicitation, the subject’s relationship to his or her own reflection, or the ‘idea’ of this reflection (Big Brother, the TV show) becomes obsessive and fetishized. So to return to the surveillance state, this system highly predicated upon ideas of the evidential authority of data, of specialized graphic codes, or of computer produced information, is going to be one that is ever more distant from actual lived experience. And this speaks to my suspicion that contemporary behavior and self performances are linked to something morbid and even masochistic. The nihilism of graphic reading based on earlier graphic reading that is based on still earlier graphic reading seems enormously important.
Here is another quote from Drucker:

“The history of perspective and representation of space encode the subjective position of a viewer in their schemes.
The metacritical language for describing the way these systems work defines dynamic principles functioning in all images (every image is produced from some point of view or standing point). Seeing a landscape and its legible but complex logic as a way of ordering and organizing information emphasizes its structure as a knowledge system rather than a representation or illusion.”

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Angelina Pwerle

This is the hidden significance of a surveillance society. The logic of the landscape, the very idea of the landscape upon which the subject gazes is one in which history is embedded in profound ways. One can imagine a future hyper surveillance state in which arrests are (sort of like Phillip K. Dick’s pre crime department) predicated on algorithms and where guilt is a given, so that random people are arrested, all of whom accept their guilt, and have anticipated their own arrest, relieved to finally be chosen. De Certeau pointed out that authoritarian states liked to ridicule the poetics of space; that is the local folklore and knowledge of neighborhoods and small communities. They like to call such things *superstitions*. And such non-quantifiable experience is now spoken of in derogatory terms.
London cab drivers call it ‘the knowledge’, the skill and memory of that vast city. Same for many tuk tuk drivers in Bangkok, or guides to the medina in Fez or Tangier. Today anything other than GPS is treated with scorn. Anything else is quaint, at best. The U.S. instinctively has shown a hatred for what the Puritan imagines is superstition. It is part of this nose to the grindstone sobriety of Protestant labor, and it is somehow a part of what makes American masculinity what it is. In any event, De Certeau is very cogent when he speaks of tactics and strategies. When he speaks of the ‘deserted places of memory’ it is in conjunction with travel, and with walking, and with that activation of memory and of the exploration of space (poetic space). Angelina Pwerle is a very interesting artist, in that she comes from the communities of indigenous people in Australia, in Ngkawenyerre, Utopia in the Northern Territory. The sense of labor intensive care is quite compelling, and something unmistakably ceremonial comes through in her work. She worked, like many Aboriginal artists, in Batik, and later on canvas, painting with bamboo sticks mostly. The theme is always a collective dream. The Hosfelt Gallery somewhat fatuous copy reads “The Bush Plum is a native shrub found throughout the drier areas of Northern and Central Australia. Because of its significance as a food source, the Bush Plum is a totem for many Aboriginal people and has a Dreaming story associated with it. In Pwerle’s paintings, the Bush Plum is depicted as a field of minute dots or particles created with the fine point of a bamboo stick. The meticulous execution of the painting becomes a performative and meditative process. The miasma of dots creates a sense of depth that evokes topographical or cosmological imagery.” Now this connects to both De Certeau and to the burgeoning surveillance state. Total information awareness it the exact opposite of its title. Partial misundertanding non awareness. I have had many disagreements with both leftists and right wingers regarding the technological capabilities of the West. And in a sense I subscribe to a position that both accepts a sort of hegemonic control apparatus, backed up with a massive custodial system of gulags, while at the same time recognizing that this giant octopus of disciplining and punishment is inherently haywire, is short circuiting constantly, is the manufacturer of a constant stream of misinformation.

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Craig Phillips, first winner of “Big Brother”, UK. 2001.

Surveillance somehow begs questions of the uncanny I think.

“In an almost totemic way, historiography is infected by what it touches as the past always seems to overhaul the present. And thus the real not only reveals itself in discourse, it also makes a disturbing appearance when writing is confronted with its own limits or, in other words, when the factory of history suddenly has to face its industrial waste. In psychoanalytic terms, we could speak here of the return of the repressed.”
Alex Demeulenaere

The subject addresses the camera. Reality TV is the most un-real of experiences. The new landscape of reality TV is one in which ‘non-actors’ perform the role of themselves. They are situated in some nether region of mass culture. All reality TV carries with it a quality of the Inquisition. Participants feel compelled to confess, to anything. The non actors speak their lines, unscripted, except that whole issue becomes problematic, and they are talking to *you*. Of course Big Brother remains the most acute recreation of a Panopticon landscape. That was in fact its entire point. I was living in London in 2001 during the original UK edition of this franchise. It is hard to describe exactly how huge this show was that year. It was the daily topic for all water cooler conversations in workplaces. The country was in thrall to this curious exercise in humiliation. But then it was more than that. It touched on an uncomfortable unconscious recognition of captivity. It was both sado-masochistic, voyeuristic, and exhibitionistic, sure, but it was more about the arbitrary guilt or innocence of the contestants, and the ability to reward or punish people one didn’t know, and yet felt you did know. People suddenly sensed they knew Craig Phillips better than most of their friends or family. And with that came an uncanny experience of losing grasp of oneself. But that experience, the unsettling one, was managed. For after all one could vote. The show would return the following evening.

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Bernard Piffaretti

Natalie Collie writes…..“De Certeau’s framework thus rests on a central distinction between the ordinary practitioners of the city, living “below the thresholds at which visibility begins”, and the city as place, as an abstract concept and map produced and imposed from above by the panoptic eye of the planner or cartographer. The bodies of walkers “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.”
This is the waste product of instrumental language, and maybe of all language in the sense that images come to be read, become lexical. And the mimetic re-narration of reality TV is one in which the author of the existing text is both unknown and unknowable. The surveillance system, of mostly hidden cameras, renders the landscape one in which the viewpoint is obscured, it is as if that optical privileging that began, perhaps, with the Greeks is now subverted. At least operationally. The language of this public spectacle is increasingly free of material and concrete description. At least the media text one encounters. The urban landscape today is one in which class segregation is acute, but also in which bureaucratic social production is more pronounced, and more linked to security. The precepts of the security state are that control is about identification — keeping track of threats in the person of this or that criminal or terrorist. Except, again, the system mostly does not work. So identity is conjecture. Identity is fluid, and only a tool for surveillance and the authority structure. Human software for the Domination System. The racist underpinnings are also rather obvious and draconian. The numbers of black men, in particular, but also brown and native american are so disproportionately huge that it defies comprehension, really. Surplus humans, needed fuel for the authority machine. The rest of the population simply adjusts to the endless cordons and restrictions and funneling strategies of the police and government. One is not even remotely free to go where one chooses in the American landscape. There is an order, a progression, and a set of instructions to follow.

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Benoit Aquin, photography.

Most people hardly notice any longer the spatial manipulations of today’s urban areas. In a sense people unconsciously navigate through these micro systems of discipline. Gilles Clement, in The Third Landscape, opens with: “The Third Landscape – an undetermined fragment of the Plantary Garden -designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc. To these unattended areas can be added space set aside , reserves in themselves: inaccessible places, mountain summits, non-cultivatable areas, deserts; institutional reserves: national parks, regional parks, nature reserves.” This is interesting in terms of aesthetics, I think. For one of the qualities of artists like Pwerle, but a host of others, everyone from R. H. Quaytman to Dan Walsh or Toba Khedoori, is re-inventing a lost visual grammar, a lexical index that is almost tantric; it suggests another sort of abstraction, really. This can be found in narrative, certainly, in a sense Robert Walser was one precursor, and even Bernhard. In all mediums I might find examples of an idea that constitutes resistance to the occupation of space, and of *reading*, by the authority apparatus, by the state.
Part of the fascination with ruins is linked to Clement’s notes. There are several photographers today, Lynne Saville, in New York, Dhruv Malhotra in New Delhi, who wander night landscapes excavating the uncanny and often unseen characters of a new visual script. Clement himself is not politically radical in any sense (Parc André-Citroën is a very nice space, though, in the 15th, in Paris, off Boulevards des Marechaux). It is important to understand that these interstices in the familiar landscape of mass social occupation are often unintended, are the residue or surplus or waste of the machinery of the government. They are almost always non-institutional spaces.

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Paul Noble

Mladan Dolar observed that one is ‘always already’, meaning one is always already something, and something obedient. As soon as one listens, one already obeys. But *not* listening is tacit obedience, too. Hence, the listener, or the viewer, must be open to see or hear (per Benjamin) in a certain way. That is not just mushy new age sensitivity training, it is an idea that posits concentrated listening of some sort, or viewing. And being able to hear what is behind the command, what is beyond the kettling area.
The American image of landscape is pastoral. It is a nostalgic imaginary of English pastoral life circa 1820. Perhaps later, 1860. It is the rural landscape of Thomas Hardy, and as Raymond Williams points out in the opening chapter of The Country and The City, this idealized pastoral or neo pastoral vision was one that even the British literary establishment wrote of romantically as early as the late 19th century. In fact, really, all this was occurring even earlier. The point here is that mass culture today, certainly from Hollywood, is awash in idealized pastoral landscapes, often ideologically colonial, but cosmetically accessorized with 19th century trappings. As a side bar, it is now part of the total culturally fungible that classic works of literature are made into TV shows that bear ABSOLUTELY no relationship to the original. Currently Beowulf is upon is, a CGI monster fest, as is Jekyll & Hyde, also a special effects monster series, the latter with an extra helping of colonial set design. One wonders at this because I am guessing very few people who watch Beowulf have ever heard of Beowulf –not even in junior high school. End side bar. Williams also points out that the conceit of a ‘golden age’ is a comforting fiction. The reality has been, in England anyway, of a gradual enclosing of commons, and a emphasizing of punishment and control. Also that the ruling class, the aristocracy, has always reserved their deepest scorn for what he calls the luxurious poor. This is a hallmark of U.S. ruling class sensibility as well. In fact the U.S. Brahman class hates the idea, above all other ideas, that anyone in the working class ever get to share in the privileges of the rich.

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Dhruv Malhotra, photography.

But I want to return to two things here; one is the sense of resistance that is found is rejecting the tacit parameters of mass culture, and two, the specific sense, for many, of a psychic cancellation that is being reached today.

“…what’s behind the growing obsession with a zombie apocalypse in popular culture. And this may require exploring this genre’s popularity as expression of anxieties about a world revolution. Am I reading too much into yet another zombie movie? Perhaps. Yet the fact that insurrections are mystified as the result of a “contagion” triggered by a “virus” that abruptly turns humans into uncontrollable crowds of zombies should not totally surprise us. This is how elites have always regarded insurrections: as pathological events inexplicably created by irrational hordes blinded by primitive, unsophisticated, impulsive desires. This is how Gustave Le Bon, the father of the “sociology of crowds,” responded to the uprising of the people of Paris in 1871: by claiming that radicalized multitudes are nothing but zombie-like, scary “hordes.”
Gaston Gordillo

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Masato Seto, photography.

Now Matt Davies wrote an interesting piece on Hollywood and the security state, in which he said…“We found that the tendency to assume that international politics and popular culture are separate and that international politics has priority and more gravitas was shared by most of the proliferating studies in IR that have looked to popular culture. We argued instead that international relations and popular culture lie along a continuum and that to treat artefacts of popular culture as illustrations of international politics strips the popular and the cultural of the politics they produce and express.” And this is correct. If anything, often anyway, politics are illustrations of popular culture. Now, Gordillo makes an excellent and really perceptive point when he says that the Zombie franchise is a fear (among others) of not being prepared. Prepared for the Zombie apocalypse, except that the Zombie is *us*. Prepare to prevent your own organizing of resistance. Prepare to abort your own revolution.

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Lucas Rahn

The kitsch landscape of Hollywood is one reflected in much contemporary art, only in what is called (perphaps not surprisingly)’zombie formalism’ (per Jerry Saltz); a minimalist decorative market driven and decorator friendly (as well as easily reproducible) brand of bland abstraction. In a sense then the work of Lucien Smith is to painting what CGI unintentional neo pastoral settings are for Hollywood. This stretches a point perhaps, but the unseen can carry an unsettling material condition. Gaston Gordillo wrote…“The people of Gaza have long been punished by the Israeli state for refusing to live in a ghetto, but in July and August 2014 the punishment was particularly severe, for Palestinian dared to use militarily the only space they can control: the underground. One of the most powerful militaries in the world became vulnerable to attacks by combatants moving through an invisible network of tunnels carved out in the crust of the Earth: the only part of the terrain that the Israeli military cannot master. In response to the tunnels, the Israeli military unleashed such levels of violence on Gaza that it killed 2,300 people, most of them civilians, and reduced thousands of homes and Gaza’s civilian infrastructure to rubble. This destruction was the reactive response to the perceived power of the underground to help poorly armed men outmaneuver a high-tech military that can see almost anything except what lies underneath the planet’s surface.”

The whole piece is here; http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.no/2015/08/the-insurgent-underground.html

The surveillance state is an effort at normalizing captivity. It is also intended to make people self monitoring. And this is partly the appeal of Big Brother, I think. In fact, all reality TV. The shared behavioral aspect, but also the normalizing of this fragmented narrative and picture of the self. The answering of unasked questions, the sense of speech as a form of constant interrogation, and the assumption of visibility. This is exactly Foucault’s point, I think…
“…to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers.”

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Dan Walsh

The effects, however, are tied into how people now digest narrative, and experience space. And more, the effects create new forms of invisibility, psychically, and a kind of mental illegibility.

“In rendering all mixed-up cities as problematic spaces beyond the rural or exurban heartlands of authentic national communities, telling movements in representations of cities occur between colonial peripheries and capitalist heartlands. The construction of sectarian enclaves modeled on Israeli practice by US forces in Baghdad from 2003, for example, was widely described by US security personnel as the development of US-style ‘gated communities’ in the country. In the aftermath of the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in late 2005, meanwhile, US Army Officers talked of the need to “take back” the City from Iraqi-style “insurgents.”
Stephen Graham

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Hans Haacke

But there are cultural and aesthetic correlations to what Graham lists here….“Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity checkpoints, computerized CCTV, biometric surveillance and military-styles of access control protect archipelagos of fortified enclaves from an outside deemed unruly, impoverished, or dangerous.” The new immigration crises, as it is perceived by the West, is an extension of colonial logic — what Graham has called *Inner city Orientalism*. The sense of infallibility of new technology, and the tacit belief in bureaucratic efficiency (Internal Revenue, NSA, et al) all goes toward normalizing a form of discontinuous ‘reading’ of images and this in turn finds reinforcement in things like reality TV. Still, the artistic expression today that finds most resonance is that which mimetically engages with those opaque interstices of landscape. The landscape that is no longer a nostalgic Euclidean pastoral — the space of non-ownership and mystery.
There are dangers in romanticizing obscurity however, and in blankness being its own justification. And more, in a celebration of vacuity. The recent reports (which I wrote about) of people pretending to Asperger’s condition speaks to the latent anxiety inherent in societal training of obedience. The social production of the compliant and reasonable adult. Compliant and reasonable is actually talking to an invisible audience in answer to questions you haven’t heard. The basic mimicking of the fragmented psyche. To be alive means to be visible on CCTV.
The schadenfreude of Reality TV in one of inversion. It is not only enjoying the misfortune of others, it is enjoying one’s own relationship to such spectacles, in the sense that viewing is tightly wound up with being viewed; one cannot watch without being assured one is being watched. People have come to identify with the camera. Not only with the implied authority of the camera, but with the technology itself. Bourdieu noted the power of habit, the comforting quality of familiar activity and relationships. Today, that geometric space of 20th century Capitalism (skyscrapers, and military hardware) has gradually become the recorded geometric, except it is also gradually losing the quality of phallic narcissism, and is being replaced with financial lexical surveillance — the loss of self has become the acquisition of security.

http://john-steppling.com/2016/01/answers-without-questions/

Return of the Great Fear
JANUARY 12, 2016

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Gina Beavers

“…one could see the extermination camps as the culmination
of a long process of the ‘destruction of reason’ – of the
humanist reason inherited from the Enlightenment – to use
Georg Lukács’ phrase. But their structure, at the intersection
of several modern experiences and institutions (barracks, penitentiary,
slaughterhouse, factory and bureaucratically rational
administration), and their ideology (racial biology) remained
the product of a European historical trajectory spread over
several centuries, whose general line had been traditionally
interpreted as humanity’s forward march towards Progress.
This trajectory now proved to be the antechamber to hell.”
Enzo Traverso

“For the interregnum of the post-war years is over. We are experiencing a return of the great fear, as if it never ended—and perhaps it never did.”
Robert Hullot-Kentor

Here in Norway, recently, several members of the new government, including the education minister, spoke of people who had influenced them growing up. Three of them, including new education minister Torbjørn Røe Isaksen listed Ayn Rand. Isaksen also listed Hayek and Edmund Burke. This, for him, constituted a sound place to start one’s socio political education, he added. Now this is the first time the Labor party hasn’t held power in something like 25 years. And the new pro corporate party (Hoyra) formed a coalition with a further right part, the FRP, who are basically the Norwegian version of an anti immigration party. Of course the former head of the Labor Party, Jens Stoltenberg, is now running NATO — so maybe this shift is pretty miniscule, actually. My point is not to go into Norwegian politics, but only to suggest that this shift (because seriously, Labor still retained certain very traditionally Scandinavian qualities, for the good) is representative of a cultural shift toward the new fascism. I don’t think that that is at all too strong a statement. I mean liking Ayn Rand just makes you a philistine, someone with no taste and maybe a lot of resentment, but Burke? Hayek? This is deeper and more telling. And all together, with no Marx, no Freire, no Fanon…that’s distressing.

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Maya Lin

In a country that suffered the Anders Breivik attack, it also suggests a certain cognitive dissonance. But then, I find that quality in U.S. culture, too. This week also saw Sean Penn write an article about his clandestine meeting with cartel boss El Chapo. If you happened to read the Penn piece, the most striking quality was the 5th grade level prose, the really rather jaw dropping immaturity and narcissism — and, perhaps most sadly — the terrible need to be taken seriously. The second most striking quality of this *story* is that it does not fully add up. Whatever collusion occurred, clearly the DEA and CIA had a huge hand in finding the right narrative and tone. But my favorite passage of Penn’s is this:

“It became evident that the peasant-farmer-turned-billionaire-drug-lord seemed to be overwhelmed and somewhat bewildered at the notion that he may be of interest to the world beyond the mountains.”
De coded this reads…It became evident that peasants and drug lords alike are stupid and backward, especially in the presence of a MOVIE STAR.

This was also the week of the No-Snack militia in Oregon. And much has been written on the Bundy take over, and most of it correct and obvious. But one thing I wanted to note, odd as it may sound, is that all these guys look alike. Beefy (overweight), bearded, wearing those Chris Kyle shades (which you see on literally every Blackwater employee ever..Wiley X Saint if you are interested). It is the gestalt image of white resentment. In all of them there is something that registers as both angry and terrified. And insecure. Hiding behind beards and dark glasses and usually fourteen thousand ammo belts and combat knives and canteens etc. And usually in camo of some sort. And in shades. Nothing is revealed. The caricature of hyper masculinity is acutely painful, really.

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Church of St. Bernadette. Nevers, France. (Parent and Virilo, architects). 1963.

So, on the one hand, these stories are distractions. But all of the above, together, is part of a general sense of this normalizing of fascism that is occurring the West.
Enzo Traverso wrote, in 1999, an interesting and often profound, if not unflawed and in places problematic, book called Understanding The Nazi Genocide. A few years later he wrote The Origins of Nazi Violence. Both are compelling reads. One of the things Traverso focuses on in the first book is the idea that firstly, Hitler’s final solution was not foundational to National Socialism. It developed in stages. And second, that Hitler came to conflate Jew with Bolshevik. That the camps of the *final solution* were mostly on the eastern front, essentially, seems an instinctive gesture from the high command. But Traverso also sees Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the other two poles of modern barbarism. The Nazi *conveyor belt* — work camp to killing camp, was a product of both Hitler’s own long standing hatred of Jews, but also an expression of the Nazi ideal of efficiency and progress. I.G. Farben, maker of Zyklon B, had factories employing Jewish camp labor. And the camps themselves were modeled on factories. The fact that it became clearly MORE expensive to exterminate Jews and Gypsies and others did not prevent the Nazi’s from doing so, and hence under this patina of organizational expertise lay a hugely irrational system of racial hatred and homocidal mania. A regression, yes, but a product of an evolution in irrationality and barbarism. The Nazis and fascists in general were representing the Volkish nativism of Aryan kitsch legends, but also a fetishized belief in progress. There is a curious contradiction that National Socialism expressed, and that is Teutonic regressions of an idealized super race against a backdrop of sun dappled Alpine meadows — but also a meticulous and deep belief in progress, in technology and rationality. It was not simply a regression to some former fantasy. It was a new fantasy making use of old material.

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Zach Harris


Traverso writes…“far from overturning bourgeois civilization, socialism would complete its work by going ‘beyond’ it, and thus realising all its potentialities. They thus forgot Marx, in whose eyes the Russian socialists should have drawn inspiration from the Slav peasant commune (obshchina) rather than from English industry.”

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto even, points out the bourgeois tendency toward an immersion in “the icy
water of egotistical calculation”. For Marx (especially writing on colonialism in India) saw both the civilizing mission and social regression.

Marcuse saw in the death camps…“the unrepressed implementation of the achievements
of modern science, technology, and domination.”

“Traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-semitism
… led to pogroms, which were to the Nazi murderers what
knives are to the atom bomb. The seeds of the gas
chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of
Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of
the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors.
In such cases, the term genocide is fully justified.”
Ernest Mandel

The colonialist felt their technology *proved* their superiority. No manner of crime was too great, too vicious and sadistic and wanton to dent this deep seated sense of European superiority. The British in Kenya and India, the French in North Africa and the Caribbean, and the Dutch in south east Asia, the Spanish all over the new world…all of this contained the most savage cruelty and barbarity. But nothing made a dent in the idea of European science and progress. And it culminated…per Traverso…in WW2. Now, the real fulcrum is probably more WW1 (which is the focus of Traverso’s 2nd book), but that’s another entire topic. For what interests me here is this idea of what constitutes *progress*. What images are associated with this word and term? And how progress interfaces with domination. And what post moderrn progress might look like.

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The Burgler (Wendkos, dr.) 1957


Much 20th century art, meaning mostly Modernism, but not entirely, was an expression of distrust in progress. And that today, the idea of scientific progress has reestablished itself in both the post modern world of theory (despite much ostensible disavowal) but also in a surging wave of very right wing white historical writing and in mass media and entertainment. It is also ‘geek progress’. Steve Jobs is enshrined as one of the great men of his day — despite my not grasping what exactly he did that is so remarkable. Bill Gates, the same thing; but there is another branch of this idolatry of science and technology, and that is the military. Science gave the world Hiroshima and THEE most efficient device for human extermination. Progress is linked up with notions of what is efficient. And that in turn is linked up with Capital and waste…mostly wasting time, but waste in general. And maximizing profit means lowering the amount of time wasted by your workers. So, here there are contradictions in the sense that nobody wastes money quite the way the military does. And yet, NOT wasting things is a sign of progress itself. So the narrative that is produced here is one in which the military is depicted as high tech, and wired, and a model for futuristic efficiency. It is not seen as menial and boring and routine. Chris Kyle meets Steve Jobs meets Gordon Gecko.

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Ursula Von Rydingsvard

Adorno saw in his essay (or his collaboration) on the Authoritarian Personality, the following qualities in the reactionary, or those raised in fascist or authoritarian climates; conventionalism, submission to authority, aggression, susceptibility to superstition, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and outsized and Puritanical notions about sex. Sounds like the Bundy militia. But never mind, the authoritarian personality must believe, finally, in progress — no matter the amount of nostalgia for foundation myths or kitsch fairy tale narratives of one’s own race or class that one is steeped in. Looking back at the mid 20th century phase of modernism, I would argue, for example, that much brutalist architecture is actually a protest against progress, against the hegemony of technological achievement. Virilo and Parent’s Church at Nevers, France, looked at today feels oddly like a defiant child who refuses the clothes his mother bought for him. There is a curious production of ‘backward’ affect. A sense of neo primitivism, but it is also, simultaneously, albeit subtly, both gentle and almost nurturing. Brutalism is always teetering on some thin line between purification and excess, between austerity and hedonism. And this is true, too, of much painting from this period. This marked the last collective distrust of conformity. For everything that came after, say, 1970, had almost by default, contained some kind of ironic perspective. The Church at Nevers is not ironic. And I think the best of Brutalism is never ironic. But it is, even the good work, often hostile to the scale of the human. There felt a reaction against Brutalism, from the 80s onward that is only now reversing again. The best Brutalists buildings suddenly look pretty good when compared to much contemporary architecture. Buildings such as Le Corbusier’s government complex in Chandigarh, India, are recognized, rightly, as masterpieces, while others have gone through varied critical positions, or like the Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, a building I happen to think is quite significant, are demolished. The best of Brutalist architecture today appears almost modest, and certainly emphasizes a material place in lieu of self marketing.

There is something lurking in discussions on power and authority that has to do with how we *look* at things. I actually think Chris Kyle’s being a sniper was the perfect storm of sorts for a new archetype or symbol of the new fascism. Kyle is the unseen killer, the viewer of death. He is an individualized A bomb. A long distance Zyklon B. Stanley Cavell has said the voyeurism of film has to do with not presenting the world, but by allowing the viewing of the world, privately. So that it is not a wish to dominate, but a desire to not have to dominate. And there is certainly, I think, truth in this. For in the surveillance age, the ability to lose oneself in a cinema is very seductive. I do think, however, that Cavell is wrong in the sense that the relief felt from not having to dominate, is more like relief from not having to dominate, while still dominating. It is a relief from being yourself seen while dominating. Being watched watching cinema is always slightly unseemly, even pornographic. Film narrative, storytelling, had throughout the evolution of the medium been the predominant means for film expression. Cinema always felt closer to the novel than theatre, for example. Why this is, to me anyway, remains something of the mystery. However that may have happened, or evolved, the ascension of film as the quintessential art-form of the late 20th century is impacted by, and impacts everything else, because of actors. Or rather, performers. An actor in a film is simply doing something very different than an actor on stage. Putting that aside for a second, the saturation of film and TV has meant a saturation of performances. Daily life today is profoundly influenced by *acting*. By recorded acting. And it is the acting of a narrative. And perhaps one has to further tweeze apart the particular kind of narrative that can be acted on screens.

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Marshland (La isla minima), 2014. Alberto Rodríguez Librero, dr.

Acting in film (on film?) has to do very much with absence. In that sense it is a migration of that quality of listening found in acting on stage. The film actor does not listen, but he looks. He looks at, often, a *nowhere*. A place off screen. But that is far too simple. The actor looks — and perhaps it is irrelevant what that actor looked at the moment this scene was filmed, but more important is that that place, the place of the look, is going to always be an historical look. And if that is true, then any number of actor’s looks in films are allegorical. This raises certain rudimentary technical questions; the reverse shot, or reaction shot, is exempt in this sense. But the actor alone on screen looking out past the audience is always looking at a place in the past. It is the psychoanalytical past, however, it is the missed appointment. But it likely many other things as well.

And this then, touches on a number of additional issues. I wrote last time about reality TV. And in reality TV, as in all improvisation for actors, the sense of place disappears. For the look is linked to the recited text. The scripted text. And this is the deepest mystery, possibly, in all discussions of film and TV. Sound — recorded sound — in film is critically important, in the sense that it must meed the technical threshold for the removal of identifiable ambiance. The actor must, via technical means, be talking to us. If we hear the residue or vestiges of the set, of location, of that day, that hour, that moment in which the scene was shot, then all of the magic of the cinema is gone. In this sense the voyeurism of film is about the production of intimacy. Monica Vitti in her Antonioni films is always talking to us. She speaks to us in such intimacy that it becomes almost unbearable. When Welles narrates in Lady From Shanghai, the intimacy forecloses on the story. We must acquiesce and submit. The voyeuristic submission is the existential fact of cinema art, I think.

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Goebbels & Riefenstahl, 1937.

One of the reasons that Cahiers du Cinema lost importance when Bazin died, and after the short periods of Rohmer and Rivette’s editorships, was that the magazine abidicated the primacy of the auteur theory. But the auteur theory was never really about the auteur theory. And what got lost under Comolli and Narboni was the sense of filmic allegory as an approach, which was contained in the approach of auteur theory. If much was gained in the investigation of the material production of the film business, the losses (and Godard knew this) were much greater. For the auteur theory was a sensibility about cinema. And that sensibility recognized, intuited, that an Edgar Ulmer or Paul Wendkos directed films that transcended all rational explanation in the experience of viewing them — it was never to suggest Wendkos was a genius. But for a complex of reasons and factors, Wendkos was the man with directing credits on several remarkably surreal movies from the late fifties and early sixties. Cahiers, during its seminal period was transcribing something significant about the predominant art form of the century. Nobody else would have grasped the importance of a Sirk, or of the early Preminger.

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Christoph Ruckhaeberle

The out of frame effect, what Barthes called the *punctum*, in photography, is not at all the same thing as I suggest is involved in cinema. The relation however does involve something of this lost gaze, or interrupted gaze. The missing element, cut off by the edge of the photo, and a castration symbolized by the click of the shutter; in that sense, in cinema, the punctum is produced by dialogue. The click of the shutter is unnecessary because there is the residue of repetitions, that recitation from memory, performed speech that exists nowhere else but in theatre and film. And in film it is once removed from the immediacy of the stage, but in that distance something else accrues, something to do directly with being visible to the recording camera. A submission to be an exhibit. To be open to further investigation and study. And that quality of longing, of melancholy, that is in Bresson and Ozu is directly related to excessive rehearsal. The actor, again, as a vehicle for the return of the repressed. But all this occurs in the most elliptical and nomadic manner. Christian Metz said film was too big to be a fetish in the same way as photography.
Cinema, however, also carries with it something linked to ideas of progress. It is an obvious technology, and one that is constantly innovative about its own technical parameters. So much so, that contemporary film feels as if it is suffocating beneath the weight of its relationship to the technical. The best films I have seen over the last few years are uniformly modest in technical terms. Most recently, Marshland (La isla mínima), from 2014, a Spanish noir directed by Alberto Rodríguez Librero. Set in post Franco Spain, the story of the murder of two girls in an Andalusian small town is more about the legacy and shadow of years of Fascist rule. It is a reflective and unsettling and finally very painful portrait of how societies, like people, cannot escape their past. Not right away, anyway.

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Elementary School, Aesch Switzerland. Forderer, Otto, & Zwimpfer, architects.

Leni Riefenstahl’s vision was one that in its own peculiar genius, resided in am embrace of the fetishistic that only an unapologetic authoritarian could express. Her late color photos of the Nuba people in the Sudan are perhaps the quintessential fetishizing by the white colonial. The oddities of Riefenstahl’s later life (she lived until she 101) include a film project with L. Ron Hubbard (a remake of The Blue Light, her 1930s drama as a musical, which fell apart due to funding shortages) and celebrity portraits such as those of Mick and Bianca Jagger. That Hitler’s visual stenographer could navigate the ruling class until her dotage should hardly be surprising, but I mention this because in a sense her two Nazi films, especially Triumph of the Will, and her 1954 curiosity Tiefland, a melodrama about a Spanish dancer (played the forty-ish Riefenstahl herself), are both to be read as fascist mythology (in very different ways) but also register as uncomfortable and morbid due to a mise-en-scene that both fixates on bodies, but eliminates that which animates them. Actors, performers, simply don’t look in Riefenstahl’s cinematic world. She might well have been the perfect director for Terminator.
Judith Thurman wrote of Riefenstahl:

“Her love for the Führer was the paradigm of her self-entrancement, and she never disavowed it, although she later expressed some mild distress at the atrocities perpetrated in his name. Her life after the war would have been much easier if she had, but to do so was to betray something more essential than loyalty to a dead master. It was to endanger the ruthless suspension of self-doubt that her identity had, from childhood, depended on. And in one respect it was logical for her to love Hitler: he had the insight to recognize what her love could give him—a perfect reflection of itself.”

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Guo Fengyi

Progress, it seems to me, cannot really be separated from the contemporary form of acute narcissism. In that sense, like Traverso’s insights on National Socialist mythology, today’s new crypto-fascist semi stealth mythologizing is interconnected with a deep almost slavish worship of self and the self’s progress. Albeit a phantom self, but more on that below. It is the logical outcome, though, I think, of the deformed development of science and Capitalism. Progress was and is inseparable from the narrative of the self.
“The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of profoundly historical time, because this is the time of economic production which transforms society, continuously and from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the central activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base of society nourishes the coalesced forces of tradition which fetter all movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was written as the history of events, is now understood as the general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals are sacrificed. This history which discovers its foundation in political economy now knows of the existence of what had been its unconscious, but this still cannot be brought to light and remains unconscious. This blind prehistory, a new fatality dominated by no one, is all that the commodity economy democratized.”
Guy Debord

The narrative of the self as one of self improvement. Progress. Progress toward completion. There is only the vaguest of ideas associated with what this completion would look like. Society, following the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, is viewed today as a narrative of progress (well, white Western progress). The regressive factor in the myth of contemporary versions of the Enlightenment is one that has returned to a belief in certain unchanging Natural laws– only now these are increasingly expressed in personal terms — human nature (and its stunning how much new-age mush filters into popular discourse and gets hardly a notice). The self, the subject, whose progress stands in for society, is working on self improvement while understanding that this self improvement leads to a union with and more perfect realization of the Natural self (which is variously defined as fulfilled, thriving and happy, or at peace). The vague ideas of completion are vague ideas of restoring a union with Nature, with natural law, and in this sense the new reactionary revisionists of history are working to restore nostalgic volkish mythology in new techno but natural fiber clothes. The core new age posture, evolved over a thirty year period, is at heart a pretty regressive and conformist one, but also one redolent of most fascist mythology — it is fetishizing self by way of self help industry bromides, yoga classes, spin classes, and vegetarianism. (Remember Hitler was a vegetarian, at the end anyway…but then so am I). In one sense, the popularity of cinema and TV is that within this voyeuristic submission there is found a reproduction of submission to eternal forces of nature, which also not coincidentally are racial and class based, and nationalistic. This new nationalistic jingoism that one sees in Chris Kyle and the Bundy Militia, and one saw in Anders Breivik, is highly regressive and almost infantile, and it is entrenched in working class white males. The men hiding behind beards and teflon vests and Wily X sunglasses are enraged fat kids who feel everything they are entitled to is being stolen from them. Their story, their mythology is being stolen (at the crudest level this is found in stuff like The War on Christmas, etc). The University educated white classes, smugly tolerant (up to, you know, a point) are the ones importing whatever version of Werner Erhard is available, coupled to a worship of ruling class pedigree. Increasingly the affluent classes openly acknowledge their love for the rich. This may well have always been true, but it was covert. Today it is not.

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Sungfeel Yun

The domination factor, the occularcentric tradition of Western culture is then one where screen narratives substitute for praxis of any sort. Spectator life. Except in private. Voyeuristic, but dominating. In fact, what Cavell suggests, that relief from *having* to dominate remains true, I think, only domination is now so normalized that it is misidentified. American football, the agent for brain trauma, and steeped in a homophobic misogynist culture of abuse and stigmatizing and shaming is described as character building and healthy. The University rape culture is one in which scapegoating mechanisms now operate in hyper speed and intensity. The mechanisms of scapegoating have no time or space to actually work. But no matter, because another action of domination is waiting. And another. The endless stories of predator priests in the Catholic Church are simply compartmentalized because the kitsch version, Hollywood version, of that narrative cannot be stopped. There is no pause button.

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Wiel Van der Randen, photgography.

“Adorno and Horkheimer thus highlight the paradoxical situation of individual
existence that arises within the modern rationalistic age—to survive
men must at one and the same time annihilate themselves. This relationship
between ‘self-preservation’ and ‘self-destruction’ is explained through reference
to the nature of modern science, its application to the natural world
through technology and the capitalist economic imperative. The argument
rests on the inversion of man’s domination over nature into its opposite. Modern
means of production reflect this inversion through the repetitive cycle
of technological production. Through technology, human beings work incessantly
upon what ‘is’, i.e. that which through positivist science is perceived as
unchanging and formal nature. In their relations to the machine (as a virtual
appendage) they reflect the never-ending sameness of nature through their
own repetitive and unchanging work.”
David Seymour (Adorno and Horkheimer: Enlightenment
and Antisemitism)

And Debord’s well known quote here…

“The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.” Here the stage is set with the false exit of generalized autism.”

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Prentice Women’s Hospital, Chicago. Bertand Goldberg, architect.

The narrative of the self is spoken on screen by fictional characters. Listened to, preferably, in private. The images themselves now read not viewed. And that sound, the performance, is increasingly suppressed. In a stunning number of new TV shows there are characters who are managed from a control room — or advised by an all seeing expert (usually a sexy young woman). The expert functions a bit like a drone pilot, directing the protagonist to his target. Or destination, which is in fact usually a target. The normalizing not just of surveillance, but of voluntarily giving away the ego. In a sense this is the new technological super ego.
Adorno and Horkheimer saw one aspect of the dialectic of Enlightenment being the suspension of metaphysics. And this sense of the self critical has gone missing in art for the most part, today. But that missing self interrogation is felt, and therefore replaced with pseudo self criticism. Much conceptual art, and much performance art and now much of that second or third generation of performance and identity art is what has come to stand in for metaphysics. Cindy Sherman ushered in (partly) this new appearance art, or the appearance-of-critical-self-examination art. Someone once asked me in a workshop the difference between Mamet and Pinter. This was during the early Mamet period. And I had to think on it, but the answer was metaphysics. There is no metaphysics in Mamet because there never is in fascists. I shouldn’t say never, but almost never. The evolution of Western art from, say, 1950 to 2016 has been one in which there has been a steady removal of a genuine *outside*. The outside is that which science and rationality cannot master, and politically it is the unruly masses and the poor. Hence they are made invisible. In the narrative of the self, the masses and poor are consigned to the periphery the better to stay focused on ‘taking care of myself’.One paradox in this is that science, theoretical physics for example, has increasingly become about what cannot be seen and maybe can’t even really be there. And this induces a kind of panic because if the most rarefied theoretical mathematics and physics is going to end up as pure philosophy, then the society that erases that which it cannot master is going to have to erase such rarefied disciplines. And perhaps that is already happening.

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Lygia Pape

The double character of progress, as Adorno termed it, is really only the idea that emancipation, liberation, and autonomy carry their shadow opposite within them. And when artworks can no longer distinguish between conformity and anti-conformity, the society itself has reached a place of regression. For at some point, there is an accumulative affect that cannot be fully repressed in people. And contradictions can no longer be so successfully hid. In the U.S. today the mass shooting phenomenon is treated with theatrical shock and surprise. How could this happen? What are we to do?? The asking of such questions, and in fact the asking of any rhetorically structured general question, one directed tacitly at society itself, is already an agreement to be obedient. And much of social media, oddly, reinforces this internet subject position, notwithstanding the shocking number of doxxings and outings and shameings and trollings that go on. But that is only cyber road rage in a sense but it ties in with a larger current running through popular culture in the form of social media which is a consensus with the status quo. In both the right wing (where the jingoism is most pronounced and sort of old fashioned) and in the soft left and liberal left, who are not really leftist at all (where common sense has replaced fascist myth making almost exactly) the inclination is always to see the status quo, the government, or mass media, as correct and to be sided with. The consigning of disruptive forces is accomplished by, in most cases, tagging them with the label of *conspiracy theorist*.

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SESC Pompeia São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi, architect.

The influence of cinema and TV is almost certainly even greater than most critics, and myself, imagine. I think at times, maybe it is almost everything, in terms of how we think and what we say. So a final observation or two on this idea of intimacy in cinema. I think all great directors grasp this, intuitively at the least. It has been said that the ear is efficient for up to twenty feet and that after that its effectiveness, certainly for conversation, erodes. The eye can, obviously see far further. Possibly the most seductive aspect of film is the ability to be whispered to at a distance usually reserved for vision. All conversation, all quiet talks between characters — even if on TV or your laptop, and certainly on a cinema screen, has a hypnotic quality and I suspect this quality accounts for a certain appeal associated with certain settings; offices or workplace areas. For these are usually alienated and oppressive areas, stress inducing, but rendered *intimate* and personal and private. And private even if one watches it with someone else or several other people on a laptop screen. This is the uncanny aspect of the reading of screens. Of actors reciting lines, documented by a camera and reproduced countless times.
At the same time, this is a faux intimacy, a pre-recorded intimacy. And while there is mimesis, as a fact of almost inter relationships with an artwork, there is also a sense of seer and seen, and in screen mediums it is not reciprocal. In psychoanalysis it is also not reciprocal. But it is non-reciprocal in a different way. And this is a continuation, however mediated, of the guard and prisoner. This is the Panopticon model again, but also the model of all clinics. And it is the base structure of all surveillance. The hidden microphone that records conversations raises questions that, I think, immediately come to mind. The sense of optical penetration feels far deeper and more violent than audio eavesdropping. The visual verification eludes audio recording. One does not feel as if one can re-narrate and situate a space when just listening (and this speaks to the much neglected magical quality of radio drama). The visual is the watcher and watched, known or not, and it is closer and quickly closer, to notions of control.

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Peter Wegner
The phallic aspect of optical privilege is secondary, but one instinctively senses the aural as more feminine. One seems to absorb sound. Close your eyes and concentrate on the music. Shut off sounds and only watch. One remains an attack and one a retreat. The well trod theoretical path of Mulvey and the male gaze is apt, to a point, but I think there are far more complex factors involved in film, and often they are overdetermined, and that in fact is another quality of film and TV. In a late letter Horkheimer wrote to Adorno, he said…“Language intends, completely independent of the psychological intentions of the speaker, that universality that has been ascribed to reason alone.” He goes on to add that language, if it is to support the status-quo, must constantly contradict itself. And this is where we are today with a lexical hegemony of screen product and creation. Horkheimer also added that to speak to someone is to recognize them, and to recognize them as potential colleagues in social change. He used the speech of the concentration camp guard as an example of this contradiction that must occur in the dominated society. The film actor speaks to nobody, but he speaks words that are not his or hers, and this recording now shapes this evolving field of human discourse — speech and performance. For when is speech not a performance? How is a pogrom narrated? A lynching? In the death houses of U.S. prisons, the chamber for lethal injection is sound proofed. Curtains open and the ‘audience’ views the show.

http://john-steppling.com/2016/01/return-of-the-great-fear/

The Tolerant Fascist - some excerpts


Donald Trump is expressing in his 4th grade way the deep panic of white men in the U.S. today. More interesting is the figure of Hillary Clinton, a clearly psychopathic sadist whose delusions of grandeur are linked directly to the performance of those myths that were foundational for National Socialism (as is Trump, but at a lower grade level). This is the week of both the NFL playoffs and of a Democratic debate (starring Hillary), and the announcements of the Oscar nominations. These are the ceremonies of white America. Not a single actor of color was nominated, again, this year. Now, that is almost beside the point really, because what is more significant is to examine the films that WERE nominated (more below). The masculinity that is felt weakened and under siege finds expression in the gladiatorial spectacle of American football. A game now proven to cause catastrophic and long lasting brain trauma. In fact, there was even a film out this year on this very topic; Concussion, with Will Smith. The film has been hugely successful. A contradiction? Sure, but then this speaks to the ways in which mass media entertainments are read, and how a form so familiar and with actors identifiable in their celebrity, supercede the message — or rather, the message is not the message.


Today’s American Exceptionalist and Tolerant fascist is functioning from a greatly different set of historical precedents. The first is Puritanism. For the American male ideal has always been sexually immature and repressed. He would rather be with his horse or gun than his girl. That emotional witholding and stoic character is one for whom weakness is less an infection in the Nation/body than a failure of discipline and willpower. The American fascist is one for whom there is no greater good than business. And business acumen. Alone with his horse and his gun, gazing out over the great praries or rocky mountains, this Marlboro Man has always been crafty, and cunning — not a rube, but wised up, though only to a point. And without much sexual expertise. He is wholesome and virtuous, and a man of few words. For words are a teeny bit feminine. But over the course of the last forty years, this image, though always violent (Indian killer, rancher and beef eater, friend of manifest destiny) has taken on a far more jingoistic quality. And today, the evil Bolshevik is reincarnated as Putin, and the Jewish infestation is now Arab. In fact its remarkable how closely imagery of Arabs today resembles the imagery of Jews in the 1930s. Dirty, conniving, hook nosed, swarthy. Where the Jew was reviled as a banker and hoarder of gold, a merchant, Fagin, the contemporary Arab is closer to old stereotypes of Asians. Calculating, unfeeling (life is cheap in Asia etc) and ruthless. Arab Fu Manchu.
But intersecting this sense of American exceptionalist as cowboy/rancher/ homesteader is the new urban Dirty Harry version. In fact a case could be made that Eastwood has come to incorporate both threads of masculine ideal. The fact that Eastwood’s offscreen narrative, true or not (cough) is that of abusive to women, reactionary politically, and vaguely racist. A side bar essay is begging to be written on Eastwood directed movies and animal eroticism. I digress. America today is almost the anti-Berlin 1928. It is sex negative, repressed, and driven far more by fear of interior infection than outward threat. But not exactly *infection*, but more a kind of pre-screened lack of wellness. The American sees lack of attention to self interest, not infection. Oh sure, those Arab terrorists might be a worry, but the country is falling apart. Black unrest, Latino unrest, illegal immigrants, and no jobs. The jobs were stolen, sent away, something. The white man in America today in general wants to cauterize the internal bleeding before nuking Arabs.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Palazzo_Braschi_Fascist_Poster_1934.png
Palazzo Braschi, Poster for Fascist party. 1934.


The tolerant fascism of today has replaced the excess rage of humiliation, circa 1928 Germany, with an anti-depressant eating, and affectless blank callousness. This is the fascist who has eliminated the very last vestiges of Dionysian energy, and replaced it with a hyper rational obedience to power, a slightly campy retro blankness, in which the transgressive is projected outward, in which cleanliness matters, giving up smoking is important, while you sanction Disposition Matrix and TPP. But who in the end will submit, prostrate in symbol, because it is better, anything is better, than giving up their racial privileges. White men dream a return to greatness, even if suffering under a generalized autism, as Debord put it, and with a 4th grade vocabulary. It occurs to me that Trump is much closer to Mosely than Mussolini. Trump is a dilettante, and wealthy. Ted Cruz is closer to Il Duce, and even then, its a sort of less operatic version. The chief caretaker of the Fascist legacy is Hillary Clinton. That slightly pop eyed hysteria, the sense that the sight of blood, or thought of it, increases salivation. She is the new tolerant fascist, though. She appeals to liberals, not the working class whites or minorities. I don’t think she even appeals to proletarian women much. No, she appeals to college educated younger women, entitled, and selfish, and angry. And to a degree she appeals to some liberal white men who imagine this political theatre is something else, something like real life. But Hillary is the serious fascist in this And her cackling response to Gaddafi’s death, the now infamous ‘we came, we saw, he died’, resonates as the closest thing to Shakespearean villainy since Nixon. Except by way of Mickey Spillane. And Jimmy Hoffa. The cultural and aesthetic signature of this age is Clintonian. The deep state goes on, regardless. But the style of this new fascism is Bill and Hillary. And then Chelsea married a banker, a hedge fund broker with ties to Israel. Bill scans the horizon for opportunities to plunder. To pillage. But there is no artistic reality in Western culture to match this. Nothing sordid enough, venal enough. This is the Clinton age, and there is no writer yet (or filmmaker) to chronicle it, to give it expressionistic space. Pinter is dead. He might have. No American certainly. And that is a huge problem.


http://john-steppling.com/2016/01/the-tolerant-fascist/

The masculinity that is felt weakened and under siege finds expression in the gladiatorial spectacle of American football. A game now proven to cause catastrophic and long lasting brain trauma. In fact, there was even a film out this year on this very topic; Concussion, with Will Smith. The film has been hugely successful. A contradiction? Sure, but then this speaks to the ways in which mass media entertainments are read, and how a form so familiar and with actors identifiable in their celebrity, supercede the message — or rather, the message is not the message.

See, here; I kinda' get what the Kid was saying up thread. Either this guy isn't an American or he is not of the working class (the vast majority). "Masculinity that is felt weakened"? "Gladiatorial spectacle"? One, most working class people don't give a damn about the injuries - not in the context he is saying. If the injury happened to themselves or one of their own, they would care, but an injury happening to some guy who makes millions of dollars? Workers in this country are injured everyday on the job, by practices and equipment that everyone knows is dangerous injurious, and ought to be criminal - but no one at any position above them gives a good goddamn. And these workers face this danger for a pitiable fraction of the money - with no recourse. Is it terrible that football players get hurt? Sure. What else ya' got?

I think that this guy talks about the privileged, not the masses. I think he is speaking in terms of the creators of our "culture" not us slobs who clean the toilets, wash the dishes, go down in the mines, run behind harvesters and combines all day long. He thinks "we" don't get the "message"? We live the fuckin' message.

Sorry, that just hit me the wrong way.

See, here; I kinda' get what the Kid was saying up thread. Either this guy isn't an American or he is not of the working class (the vast majority). "Masculinity that is felt weakened"? "Gladiatorial spectacle"? One, most working class people don't give a damn about the injuries - not in the context he is saying. If the injury happened to themselves or one of their own, they would care, but an injury happening to some guy who makes millions of dollars? Workers in this country are injured everyday on the job, by practices and equipment that everyone knows is dangerous injurious, and ought to be criminal - but no one at any position above them gives a good goddamn. And these workers face this danger for a pitiable fraction of the money - with no recourse. Is it terrible that football players get hurt? Sure. What else ya' got?

I think that this guy talks about the privileged, not the masses. I think he is speaking in terms of the creators of our "culture" not us slobs who clean the toilets, wash the dishes, go down in the mines, run behind harvesters and combines all day long. He thinks "we" don't get the "message"? We live the fuckin' message.

Sorry, that just hit me the wrong way.

Well, he is an intellectual, after all....and ya know he's big on psychology, so I think he's speaking of the subconscious, could be wrong. For sure, working class does not consciously think like that. But the contradiction is there, between 'love of the game' and knowledge of potential outcome. And you're right, we don't care so such cause of what they get paid.. I think what he's saying is that we will not criticize he game cause we don't want to be seen as pussies, because this society emasculates us in so many other ways. Could be wrong. But I got no problem calling football a "gladitorial spectacle", it is, and has become an upper class experience live.You can't even get a cheap seat at a preseason game for waht my old man paid for a Colt's season ticket in 1965.

Well, he is an intellectual, after all....and ya know he's big on psychology, so I think he's speaking of the subconscious, could be wrong. For sure, working class does not consciously think like that. But the contradiction is there, between 'love of the game' and knowledge of potential outcome. And you're right, we don't care so such cause of what they get paid.. I think what he's saying is that we will not criticize he game cause we don't want to be seen as pussies, because this society emasculates us in so many other ways. Could be wrong. But I got no problem calling football a "gladitorial spectacle", it is, and has become an upper class experience live.You can't even get a cheap seat at a preseason game for waht my old man paid for a Colt's season ticket in 1965.

Yeah, I don't really buy the "contradiction". Boxing, wrestling, other contact competitions have been held, viewed, and enjoyed for as long as there have been Human Beings. The idea that these exhibitions are exclusively masculine is not born out by close inspection and has become a kind of "caveman taunt" by the more "advanced" commentators. There were always near as many women as men in the bleachers of the Coliseum and football stadiums today are no different. The idea that because someone can get hurt participating in an activity the "normal" person, therefore, should want that activity ended certainly does not extend to mining or logging or rough-necking or farming or any of the innumerous jobs that everyone knows will consistently, kill or injure people performing them. "Accidents" on the job are no less predictable than head injuries in football, but no one wants to ban mining or logging, and no one voices any kind of "contradictions" involved in these activities (except may, some of us). I may be an absolute Neanderthal (almost no doubt), but the art of Mohammad Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard is of a higher level than a lot of the "art" I've seen in museums.

Human Beings live in a world where death and injury are inevitable, they are constants, they always have been part of our existence. Wanting people not to get hurt doesn't make you a "pussy", but thinking that there is a remedy for people getting hurt and dying makes you unrealistic, maybe, or, at least, not materialistic.

Yeah, I don't really buy the "contradiction". Boxing, wrestling, other contact competitions have been held, viewed, and enjoyed for as long as there have been Human Beings. The idea that these exhibitions are exclusively masculine is not born out by close inspection and has become a kind of "caveman taunt" by the more "advanced" commentators. There were always near as many women as men in the bleachers of the Coliseum and football stadiums today are no different. The idea that because someone can get hurt participating in an activity the "normal" person, therefore, should want that activity ended certainly does not extend to mining or logging or rough-necking or farming or any of the innumerous jobs that everyone knows will consistently, kill or injure people performing them. "Accidents" on the job are no less predictable than head injuries in football, but no one wants to ban mining or logging, and no one voices any kind of "contradictions" involved in these activities (except may, some of us). I may be an absolute Neanderthal (almost no doubt), but the art of Mohammad Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard is of a higher level than a lot of the "art" I've seen in museums.

Human Beings live in a world where death and injury are inevitable, they are constants, they always have been part of our existence. Wanting people not to get hurt doesn't make you a "pussy", but thinking that there is a remedy for people getting hurt and dying makes you unrealistic, maybe, or, at least, not materialistic.

I take your point, as per spectator sports, but we are talking big time football, pro and college. In theory as natural as rain but in late stage capitalism metastasized into massive distraction and a money tree for the owning class. . We don't need to make a fetish out of these entertainments, but there ya go. The silly addict like behavior make for a predictable income stream. Still, I remember how much fun it was and wouldn't deny anybody. A mere accident of capitalism that I don't give a shit about such things any more.

I met Johnny Unitas in the late seventies, a few years after retirement, and the phrase 'punch drunk' comes to mind. Was that worth all of those high and low moments of entertainment? Don't think so but I doubt I'd change it if I could...

Looked at from a labor standpoint, these guys get hurt on the job and are not reasonably compensated by the bosses raking in the cash. Labor aristocracy of a sort to be sure, but still they deserve the consideration we give to loggers and miners. Yet it seems that the consumers of this entertainment could give a shit as long as the product is delivered, like anything else out of a sweatshop.

Injury might be risked in all sorts of ways but the premeditated violence of American football seems exceptional, maybe a totem of our capitalist society. And it has changed greatly over the past 50 years. It was always a brawl but the size and speed of these optimized behemoths has increased the force applied. Maybe another society would do it a little differently. I am reminded of the difference between Soviet and North American Hockey.

Excerpt from 'Lost affinity'

The Super Bowl is the most watched television event of the year (112 million viewers this year), of every year. Advertisers pay more per minute for Super Bowl airtime than anywhere else. And increasingly the event has taken on a martial jingoistic flavor that is no doubt the biggest recruitment tool available for the U.S. armed services. The halftime show has grown in size, duration, and cultural importance with each passing year. But, this was also the year Hollywood cashed in on the story of traumatic brain injuries incurred by what is probably a clear majority of players (with the film Concussion). The NFL is a 12 billion dollar a year business, not counting the probably tens of millions made on secondary marketing sales. The league is 67% african american and 27% white. All the owners are white. The commissioner, Roger Goodell, is white. He makes 12 million a year in salary. OK, the halftime show has featured the likes of The Rolling Stones, Prince, The Who, Tom Petty, and U2. Performers are not paid for their services, but figure, you know, over a hundred million eyeballs is just good business. Which brings me to this years halftime show featuring Beyonce and Coldplay. Without belaboring the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of the music, the performance of Beyonce included a *tribute* to the Black Panthers. Well, sort of. That there is even a discussion about this performance speaks to the poverty of cultural discourse today, but more, this was essentially dancers in Hot pants and berets (black mind you) forming an *X* on the field, and Beyonce herself in tight black leather with bandoliers criss crossing her chest. The ever parochial Deray McKesson praised what he saw in a tweet….“The #Formation shout-outs to Malcolm X & MJ were excellent.” Now, one can unpack all the many layers of signifiers in play here, but it is useful to recognize that NFL players, 70% black, are at high risk for CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) and that the their careers are curtailed anyway by a variety of other injuries, and that this game, like all NFL games, is saturated with Pentagon and military propaganda and symbols; the same military that coerces poor kids to join as, essentially, cannon fodder for one or another imperialist aggression. And the Super Bowl takes place in various locations (this year San Francisco) which usually entails the displacing of homeless and poor, and a huge expenditure of public monies to pay for policing and traffic control.

There is no shortage of players. Injury risk or not. What does that tell you? It is a naked spectacle of American patriotic fervor — and at the center of it this year is a billionaire black singer, married to another billionaire black singer/producer/whatever, who appropriate images of dissent and repackage them, repurpose them, and in general are applauded for doing so. Their entertainment empire serves, among other things, the plantation system of the National Football League. And maybe even more dispiriting is the right wing media response to this halftime show, the Michelle Malkins and FOX News blondes who take great umbrage at this insult to American law enforcement, or something (I mean who knows, really). The point is that a good deal of time was spent, in mass media, dissecting this trivia. People actually *cared*. And yet, scarcely a mention of the Panthers or what they actually stood for and accomplished. As Ron Jacobs put it…
“The Black Panthers were arguably the most important revolutionary organization in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their presence was an inspiration to millions of men and women around the globe, especially those living in colonial and neocolonial situations. Furthermore, the Party was a key element in the movement in the United States against imperialism and its manifestations of war and racism.”

What struck me is something else. For most of the social media commentary I read was along the lines of either what a revolutionary feminist Beyonce was, or the ‘dont be a hater, its great visibility for black people’, or just a general refusal to critique something that is *entertainment*. In other words, there is increasingly a dismissal of even pop culture as something worthy of analysis. It was less that people refused to ‘hate on’ a favorite pop star but more that criticism itself was unpalatable. And the massively popular are now officially immune to any form of criticism or judgement.

“The truth being that nearly everyone seems agreed that the so-called Liberal age, this celebrated time of democracy and freedom dating from the Industrial Revolution, has not merely failed, but, in fact, has never existed as such. The advent of technique, markets, business, and consumerism did not herald the dawn of an era of freedom but rather the overwhelming mechanization of production and of the exercise of power, which has remained dynastic. “
Guido Giacomo Preparata

http://john-steppling.com/2016/02/lost-affinity/

Excerpt from "In the homes of strangers"

There are also hardly any jobs. The employment future is one of service sector jobs, but more, its really a servant sector. The economic inequality has reached max — but the telling reality in this is that the elite 1% seem as miserable as the unemployed who scrounge to find jobs waiting on them. For the elite ruling class is 90% white. Cutting across all of this is the erosion of curiosity, and access to education. And additionally, as Curtis White and a host of others have pointed out, the reliance on computers has resulted in a decrease in actual human skills. Doctors cant diagnose, pilots can’t fly (in crises situations), and architects can’t draw. And I would add, writers can’t write stories. And the mass audience can no longer follow even relatively simple stories. Audiences cant audience, if you like.

http://john-steppling.com/2016/02/in-the-homes-of-strangers/

'Servant Sector', perfect.

I have always been very uncomfortable with the practice of having personal servants. It seems downright creepy, "Can't you do that yourself?" Why would you want to have some one all up your ass like that?

For a couple years I was weird about restaurants with table service. Seriously. Whadda maroon.

I read something by George Kennan once(& only once!) where he explained that the rich & powerful are like, too busy to dress themselves.
I suppose that given a sufficiently complicated social ordering that might be plausible, the stuff of the old aristocracy. But in truth it is an affectation, you have the power to subordinate people, so you do. A naked display of the class relationship. The entourage of the celebrity is mere aping of the truly wealthy and powerful and seems that as the wealth disparity reaches towards and beyond medieval levels that such display is feasible and part of the zeitgeist.

The rich put us in uniforms, that their vaunted individuality might contrast but we will make them a badge of solidarity. And we will have uniforms for them too, orange ones.

An excerpt from Steppling's latest, 'Utopia or Abeline?'

“The events of 1989 mark a decisive shift in the Zeitgeist: History
has zigged or zagged. No simple lesson follows, but it is clear that
radicalism and the Utopian spirit that sustains it have ceased to be
major political or even intellectual forces.”
Russell Jacoby

In other words, the fall of Communism completed a psychological disenchantment in the West. The rhetoric of the West, especially perhaps the U.S., is filled with lurid tales of Soviet horrors and crimes. This from the nation that bombed two civilian Japanese cities with Nuclear bombs, and has done nothing but wage endless aggression against the poor nations of the world ever since. A nation founded on genocide and slavery. But never mind, the image of communist crimes is seemingly indelible, even on much of the left today. Even reactionary social historians like Daniel Bell or Francis Fukuyama admit that society today has lost the capacity to dream of a better future, of a future different from the present.

“I hope that we can banalize the entire vocabulary of leftist political deliberation.{ } We must drop the term capitalism and “conclude that bourgeois democratic welfare states are the best we can hope for.”
Richard Rorty

Submission to the status quo, the end of history, the internalizing of Western bias and exceptionalism. Learn to love your banality and anxiety. As Habermas pointed out a decade ago, even the vocabulary of liberalism is now obscurantist. Words like *public* or terms like *public space* do not mean public at all. Public housing is not open to the public. And public opinion is that which attracts public interest by way of mass media. Submission to control. So, what exactly do people like Sunkara think socialism means? I guess he means its part of a brand that he sells. Because he never misses a chance to denounce communism. And I suspect this is in recognition of the fact that saying anything good about the Soviet Union would elicit an outcry from this growing liberal/anarchist white audience of University educated readers of his brand.

Today, most Americans, and probably a good many Europeans, adhere to a default position that sees communism as *totalitarian* and conflate it with Nazisim. Except rarely is much said about the Nazis ideology. All countries with a communist party in control are labeled *totalitarian*. The word ‘communist’ is radioactive if you are hawking a magazine that one must pay for to read. The remaining Imperialist power is the U.S., the only nation with military bases circling the planet, and the only one actively engaged in non stop aggressions. The clear assault on Latin America; from a coup in Venezuela, to covert destablizing in central america, in Ecuador and the removal of a president in Haiti, are never seen as totalitarian actions. For this word is only one with aesthetic meaning. Nations with “drab little lives”, that Chiat Day commercial for Apple, the Orwellian movies of Hollywood — which are treated as close to factual rather than as sci fi.

Mass media works constantly to demean and demonize and trivialize radical movements such as The Black Panthers, and the Bolivarian Revolution, the Sandanistas, the Zapatistas, and certainly anything with the word communist in it. Bernie Sanders, a soft liberal who is right of Nixon in fact, is described as socialist. Socialist is turning into a term for those not OVERTLY racist and Imperialist. Now, I want to return to this idea of audiences below, because its fundamental to what is wrong with aesthetic thinking in the West today, but first this idea of manufactured narratives applies to science, too. The question of ‘overpopulation’ is rife with racist underpinnings and the odor of eugenics, forced sterilization, and coercive birth control. But it is also simply incorrect. There are not too many people in the world. There are too many living in slums on the hills of Sao Paulo, or in mud floored poverty in Lagos, or the slums of Mumbai, but there are not, globally, too many people. Ian Angus has written quite cogently about this. And it fatigues me to go over this again, so just read him…http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2011/10/26/overpopulation-myth

But what is interesting is the turn toward bad science by much Green Party writers and activists. Someone sent me a piece about the food crises and how if the population keeps increasing (which it won’t but never mind) humanity is doomed, and I read it, and then bothered to read up on who funded the research. It was part of CGAIR, funded by the World Bank and with people in decision making positions who once worked for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Now, this is often the result if one bothers to dig a little because the vast majority, the vast vast majority of scientific research in the West is underwritten by big western NGOs or the government. Most scientists, even ones with integrity and who want to be unbiased, still depend on employment by Universities underwritten in part, often a large part, by these same actors, and corporations, or who trained by people who worked for them. Science is heavily influenced by corporate and government existing policy. Now much of the green narrative these days is highly alarmist. And perhaps its all true. I’m not a scientist and maybe the coastal towns are going to be under water in a decade, but somehow I doubt it. And one does wonder at times if someone isn’t buying up a lot of coastal land very cheaply now. But maybe I’m just too cynical. And to be clear, I don’t doubt the earth faces a crisis. There is no question. And I have no doubt that it is man made. But the consequences of this crises remain unclear to me. But, there are two other factors involved in these narratives of overpopulation and climate change. One is that rarely is the U.S. military accused for its absolutely excessive pollution and monumental use of fossil fuels, not to mention depleted uranium and just the environmental costs of everyday weapons testing. And second, to even ask about this is to release the lynch mobs. I was accused of being an *overpopulation denier* the other day on social media. The term denier is really insidious. There has to be something to deny to be a denier. But this is the shutting down of thought. One cannot even question climate change, even in terms of consequences, without being attacked. One cannot voice any skepticism. Liberals accuse you of being a right wing denier — and this is the stealth fascism of writers like Jared Diamond. He is particularly blameful for shaping a kind of narrative that brooks no opposition. The comfortable white liberal class, those who recycle and drive Prius and eat vegan are ruthless in their intolerance for disagreement. I have never, personally, seen such rabid exaggerated outsize moral indignation as I have about green issues today. I have never seen indignation or outrage about dead Arab babies or child slavery or Western imperialist war that I see about things like overpopulation. And always, always, this narrative is decorated with scientific studies and numbers and projections. This goes along with the fear mongering about disease (always from Asia or Africa) such as Zika or Ebola or Bird Flu.

So, in a recent article over at Dissident Voice, a writer named Steven Salmony, writes about overpopulation. He keeps referring to Nature throughout and I wonder at what he means? Phrases like *nature’s balance* are pretty much meaningless new age babble. But Mr Salmony is one of the founders, or maybe *the* founder of an organization called (sic) AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population. I can’t find much about this organization. But there are a number of other groups and foundations devoted to fighting *overpopulation*. At the top of my search page was something called Population Matters. Ok, well a quick perusal of their advisory board shows links with the African Institute for Developmental Policy, the University of California, World Health Partners (with direct links to TATA corporation in India, Ricoh Innovations in Silicon Valley, and someone called Leith Greenslade, whose bio is worth reproducing in full….*Ms. Leith Greenslade is a Vice-Chair at the MDG Health Alliance, a special initiative of the UN Special Envoy for Financing the Health Goals in support of the UN Secretary-General’s Every Woman, Every Child movement. Leith served on the US Board of Gavi and in several positions with the Australian Government, including as Policy Advisor and Speechwriter to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health; as Economic Adviser to the Leader of the Opposition; and as Chief of Staff to the Shadow Minister for Social Security and the Status of Women.*), and best of all is that the founder of Population Matters is one David Wiley (now dead)— who is described in his official bio as a believer in Bentham and as an avid Malthusian. Also it should be noted that Population Matters has called for *zero net* immigration into the U.K. and for cutting benefits to families who have more than two children. Sir David Attenborough is a big supporter, too. In other words these are rabid racist elitist Eurocentric crazies. And yet, the casual reader of Salmony’s article, appearing in a good leftist online site, would think this was all very *progressive*. Very left and responsible, but in fact its fucking loony right wing neo colonial 21st century Eugenics.

http://john-steppling.com/2016/05/utopia-or-abeline/

Utopia or Abeline?

What is the meaning of Abeline?

What is the meaning of Abeline?[/COLOR]

"There is a phrase common in military culture; *the bus to Abeline*. Its also referenced a lot in management courses and the like. Basically, it goes like this…as explained by Retired Colonel Stephen Gerras:"

“A family sitting on a porch in Texas on a hot summer day, and somebody says, ‘I’m bored. Why don’t we go to Abilene?’ When they get to Abilene, somebody says, ‘You know, I didn’t really want to go.’ And the next person says, ‘I didn’t want to go–I thought you wanted to go,’ and so on. Whenever you’re in an army group and somebody says, ‘I think we’re getting on the bus to Abilene here,’ that is a red flag. You can stop a conversation with it.”

Yeah, I don't really buy the "contradiction". Boxing, wrestling, other contact competitions have been held, viewed, and enjoyed for as long as there have been Human Beings. The idea that these exhibitions are exclusively masculine is not born out by close inspection and has become a kind of "caveman taunt" by the more "advanced" commentators. There were always near as many women as men in the bleachers of the Coliseum and football stadiums today are no different. The idea that because someone can get hurt participating in an activity the "normal" person, therefore, should want that activity ended certainly does not extend to mining or logging or rough-necking or farming or any of the innumerous jobs that everyone knows will consistently, kill or injure people performing them. "Accidents" on the job are no less predictable than head injuries in football, but no one wants to ban mining or logging, and no one voices any kind of "contradictions" involved in these activities (except may, some of us). I may be an absolute Neanderthal (almost no doubt), but the art of Mohammad Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard is of a higher level than a lot of the "art" I've seen in museums.

Human Beings live in a world where death and injury are inevitable, they are constants, they always have been part of our existence. Wanting people not to get hurt doesn't make you a "pussy", but thinking that there is a remedy for people getting hurt and dying makes you unrealistic, maybe, or, at least, not materialistic.

Missed this the first time around. Now you're getting to the heart of why partisanship and ideology -- CLASS partisanship and ideology -- are so important. Before you can focus on what matters, you have to ASCERTAIN what matters.

As much as you guys may disagree, everything we've been trying to do for the last decade has revolved around HOW to accomplish the first part (ascertaining). Translating that into the actual doing is when Jewish schoolgirls get their wings.

One day you'll all get very nice perfumed invitations to my Bat Mitzvah. I'll be a very different sort of Bat Man -- my secret identity will be Bruce Wax.

An excerpt from Steppling's latest, 'Utopia or Abeline?'

I don't know whether it's the subject matter or his being a little pissed-off, but this is the best I've read from John, so far. It was all clear and on the ground - no cloud flying, here. And he was almost totally dead-on.

I don't know whether it's the subject matter or his being a little pissed-off, but this is the best I've read from John, so far. It was all clear and on the ground - no cloud flying, here. And he was almost totally dead-on.

The subject matter, I think. Art & philosophy fly over my head. Sometimes I think I'm retarded or something. Other times I think they're just blowing smoke up my ass.

Dreaming of Pirates, part 2 (or Capitalism and Fun)
JULY 3, 2016 | LEAVE A COMMENT

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/4b16f668043fd581141d7f6c030ef805-e1467425204687.jpg
Franz Xavier Messerschmidt

“Death is especially awkward for modern intellectuals who are likely to find themselves swept over by traditions they fought and measured themselves against.”
Michael Taussig

“The barbarism of the present was already germinating in that period, whose concept of beauty showed the same devotion to the licked-clean which the carnivore displays toward his prey. With the advent of National Socialism, a bright light is cast on the second half of the nineteenth century.”
Walter Benjamin

“Imperialism gripped the world as totality – a total market and completely exploitable productive source. Imperialism was unifying the world through trade routes and commodity exchange or plunder.”
Esther Leslie

This has been a particularly disturbing last eight or ten weeks. One senses a collective rupture in the psychic membrane that covers bourgeois society like a cheap condum. The first and primary symptom are the reactions to the Trump and Hillary electoral theatre. But almost as if ordained by cosmic correlation and parallelism, the Brexist vote comes in with an unexpected *leave* verdict. And I think the public response, the social response to both of these narratives has been one of near psychosis. Many many people I know, and many of whom I like, and many who I genuinely respect and even admire, have seemed to have come unhinged. There is an obvious layer of white affluent condescension regarding Brexit; how dare the multitudes not vote as Empire wished them to vote. My first response to that was why do these white liberal clerks to power *want* a continuation of the EU? As if suddenly we are to believe they care about racism and xenophobia? But the second storyline here is related to my last post on Duende, and the Orlando shootings. And on the public outcry of faux grief. And Andrew Wimmer comes along with a very good piece here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/killer-grief/

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Paul McDonough, photography (Priest with dark glasses, NYC 1970).

But many of the people I know and respect are coming out with strangely unreasonable positions on all this. And I suspect this has to do with a kind of cultural failure. A society that cannot rise above the level of Game of Thrones or Harry Potter culturally, is one that may well have a hard time integrating the deep and complex emotions of mass death and violence. And several artists have come to mind during this period. Hilton Als has a nice article at the NYRB on Agnes Martin. And Martin, in retrospect, simply gets better and better. The second artist is Franz Xavier Messerschmidt the 18th century Bavarian born sculptor. Often when people first see one of Messerschmidt’s bronze or tin alloy busts they assume, with good reason, that this is a contemporary artist. For the madness of Messerschmidt is a very contemporary madness. His is the madness of the Enlightenment.

“There is an infinite sadness to the art of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Perhaps it is the lead and tin alloy from which he created his grey-glinting heads that weighs on the soul. Perhaps it is the resemblance to death masks that haunts his microscopically detailed reproductions of human physiognomy. But more likely it is the prison of his mental illness whose door slams on you as you are drawn into his extravagant monomaniac vision.”
Jonathan Jones

Messerschmidt somehow feels very contemporary, the *hyper-realism effect* that is really a subtle exaggeration of certain aspects of physiognomy, creates a sense of self absorbed mania. But Jones is right when he suggests the connection to death. The sense of theses busts as death masks is acute. And this in turn reminds me of Antonio Gaudi’s death, and Benjamin’s own death, and finally it links in a way to Agnes Martin. For Martin was that most hermetic and solitary of painters, and one who, in her own words, turned her back on the world. And Martin is the artist, to my mind, who most connects to the sorrow of societally unintegrated grieving. The inability to grieve sort of kicks the grief can a bit further down the road. Gaudi died in the pauper section of a hospital because he was mistaken for a beggar. As if beggars deserve no better. And Benjamin’s death which now has resulted in a small cottage industry. In fact, Benjamin’s death fits neatly into his Arcades project. If the arcades were built for Napoleon’s return from Egypt, they were also the repository of colonial looting and conquest and subjugation. All was put on display, as display itself was put on display and as those strolling through the arcades became part of the displayed plunder. Today, Benjamin’s own death feeds the niche market of academic post graduate writing, and by extension today a kind of regressive political identification with the status quo. That status quo that allows stipends of a sort, enough, to keep the younger professional academic from the street.

[/img]http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/agnes-martin-sos-e1467432429790.jpg[/img]
Agnes Martin, in her studio, apprx 1953.

Benjamin said that death sanctioned everything the storyteller has to say. And yet, today, the erosion of narrative — both its creation, and more importantly, its interpretation, is acute. You would think the constant reminder of death would elevate a structural relationship to the subject, but quite the opposite has happened.
Esther Leslie, writing on Benjamin….“Such a task is undertaken by Benjamin in a lecture for children from 1930. ‘Rental Barracks’ is an exploration of the architecture of Berlin, drawing on the work of Werner Hegemann in Das Steinernde Berlin. It begins by noting how the city’s forms have emerged from military needs. Since the reign of the Hohenzollerns, Berlin has been a military city and, at points, a third of its population was connected to the army, either as soldiers or their dependents. In the early days, the soldiers and their families were billeted in the homes of other Berliners, but by the late eighteenth century there were too many to house this way. Barracks were built for combatants and their families, and all remained inside these structures under virtual house arrest. The architectural solution of the barracks, Benjamin goes on, was adopted across the city, as Frederick the Great commanded the city be built into the sky to house a growing population. The Prussian military state condemned many people to overcrowding, lack of air and light and miserable housing conditions.”

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Adam Pendleton

The military and architecture, the military and capitalism. These are trajectories in which can be found the hidden tracings of collective insanity in Western society. Today, the presence of the military in the U.S. is hegemonic, it occupies every representation, every story. Everything. Hollywood has not made an anti war film since, perhaps, Sidney Lumet’s The Hill (1965). Today, the token anti war film is rarely that, and more a dissection of bad apple syndrome. There has been a pronounced…drastic increase, really….in depictions of camaraderie and loyalty among those in uniform. There is never NEVER a criticism of the uniform. Never. There is a fawning obsequience demonstrated to those who wear uniforms as well as a validating of all expressions of unthinking obedience. Much is made of *yessir* and *no sir* and the like. Hollywood has come to almost traffic in subtle sado masochist ritual. Even a film such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, would today seem wildly subversive.

The point is that capitalism has reached a point of incoherence, from a theoretical point of view. The irrationality of a society that pits (what James Petras calls) a political psychopath against a clownish misogynist millionaire celebrity, and have the greater fear directed at the clown is a society that is now engaged in an auto pilot self analysis. Everything feels as it is a bit of psycho drama. In social media I am daily appalled at the expressions — pitched at the level of hysteria — of fear and desperation regarding Trump. And this is from otherwise very intelligent and educated people. Now, it is not that fearing Trump is wrong in and of itself, but that it is wrong to so little fear Hillary Clinton, to not include in this reaction of horror the figure of death that is Hillary Rodham Clinton. For if anyone needs to feared it is Hillary.

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Gregor Hildebrandt

But perhaps the problem resides exactly there. The figure of Death. The Enlightenment began a long process of instrumentalizing thought, of cateloguing and measuring and defining. And science came to be more than just an effective tool for solving and even controlling Nature. It became a cult. And it began to harbor secrets the better to imbue its high priests with special gifts and powers. At the same time, the removing of religious dogma removed not just the irrational, but the very idea of ritual. Ritual space was lost, and with it a part of social history.

“…with the occurrence of death a dismal period begins
for the living during which special duties are imposed upon
them. Whatever their personal feelings may be, they have
to show sorrow for a certain period, change the colour of
their clothes and modify the pattern of their usual life.”
Robert Hertz

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Chris Keeney, photography.

The shootings in Orlando, and the Brexit vote are connected. And they are connected by the reactions of the bourgeoisie in the West. The shallowness, the superficiality of the collective. Without meaningful rituals the best the educated classes can up with are calls for gun control, calls that are expressed with an almost religious intoxication. A kind of zealotry almost. The affluent gay white male in the U.S. is one caught in a class contradiction, in a sense. There is, as Andrew Wimmer pointed out, a reflexive appeal to the police, to the uniforms. And how deeply that identification or attraction goes is anyone’s guess. And two a mourning for those shot at the gay nightclub Pulse. Shot by the son of a crazy zealot father. Again, assuming the cover story is the truth. But there is no solidarity with the Israeli occupation and incremental genocide of Palestinians. No solidarity with those caught in the U.S. gulag prison system. No solidarity with the victims of right wing militarism in places such as Honduras — courtesy of a coup designed by Hillary Clinton and Obama. Why? Most gay white men and women I know, and most polls I’ve read, suggest overwhelming support for Hillary Clinton.

On social media the last few weeks I have read the increasingly shrill white knuckle writings of the half educated phantom middle classes in America. The barely employed or half employed who toil in acute anxiety all the time. ALL THE TIME, but who identify with the imaginary country that Hillary Clinton has drawn up for them. I knew someone who once said, apropos of LA Dodger’s iconic broadcaster Vin Scully, “I want to live in Vin’s world”. And I understood that. It was a happy place of normalcy. Well, for the marginally educated Hillary’s world holds a lot more appeal than Donald’s world. But this is all illusion. And why is it not read as illusion? Id suggest because everything is illusion and hence most people seemingly cannot distinguish.

This does not account for the serious critics of Empire who seem to have lost sense of proportion regarding Donald Trump. But the same logic is at work in the reactions to Brexit. And it is in these reactions that one can really gauge the contempt that the liberal class has for the poor. How dare they not vote as they should! There is no winner in the Brexit referendum, but the vote at least was an expression of genuine anger. Often at the wrong people, certainly, but still a call of anger. And that is something. And yet for many, if not most Americans the vote was being discussed as a huge blunder. For whom? It is a neo colonial mind set that is very slowly surfacing in this — the trace memories of the plantation overlord. The chain gang boss. You do as you are told boy.

[/img]http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/18_Museum_Of_Childhoods_Small_Stories_Exhibition-e1467459263270.jpg[/img]
Victoria & Albert Museum. Small Stories; History of Dollhouses. 2016.

And when I say that culture intersects in a meaningful way here, I think it is worth going back to Agnes Martin and Messerschmidt again. What an Agnes Martin achieved was not accidental. Hers was a story not unlike any number of other major 20th century painters, of difficult childhoods in wide open spaces. The west and mid-Western (and in Martin’s case the Canadian prairies) plains and deserts were the places of spiritual pilgrimage for countless artists. Martin was also linked to a generation of gay artists in NYC (she lived at Coenties Slip for almost a decade) such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jasper Johns. But Martin was the least interested in fame or approval. And finally in people altogether. She lived most of her later years in rural New Mexico in a house she built herself, without electricity or TV or much of anything else. And that distance, that quality of autistic psychological isolation is seen in the substantiality of her work. It is not, as Rosalind Kraus might have it, the thing and not the representation. Rather is is the thingness OF the representation. It is ur-painting. Now, what does this have to do with the Brexit vote or Omar Mateen, or Trump, you ask. Well, to answer that means to more deeply track the growth of mental illness and character disorders in the bourgeois West. For that is what I think, partly, is happening.

“For Freud, every mental structure contains movement, in which a ‘psychic conflict’ can be isolated. Consequently, his idea of structure comes down to this immanent dynamic and not to some ahistorical constellation of rigid relations. The minimum of structural stability can be located in the processes of condensation and displacement, which find their linguistic equivalent in metaphor and metonymy.”
Samo Tomsic

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Maik Wolf

Tomsic’s term is one I quite like..’The Capitalist Unconscious’. This unconscious has found expression, increasingly, over time, in socially conditioned ways, with socially vetted structures.

“Lacan introduced and deployed his controversial thesis that
there was a wide-reaching homology between Marx’s deduction of surplus-value
and Freud’s attempts to theorise the production of enjoyment. The production of
value in the social apparatus and the production of enjoyment in the mental apparatus
follow the same logic and eventually depend on the same discursive structure.”
Samo Tomsic

And this in turn relates to the unreality of death for contemporary westerners. And that unreality is part of what makes people crazy. The manufacture of enjoyment (and it is worth exploring enjoyment as distinct from distraction, etc) is compulsive today, and it becomes a search for tension, for ever more tension. The paradox of anxiety feeding off that which is compulsively sought.

“Among the Dayak of southeast Borneo, the final resting place of the body is a small house, made entirely of ironwood, often finely carved, and raised on fairly high posts of the same material; such a monument is called sandong, and constitutes a family burial place which can hold a large number of people, and lasts many years.”
Robert Hertz

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Thomas-Ruff-Nacht-5-III-1992-e1467485002999.jpg
Thomas Ruff, photography.

There was a show at The Victoria and Albert Museum (also, perhaps coincidentally, reviewed in the NYRB) on the history of dollhouses. This exhibition focuses on mostly Victorian English miniatures, but there is a place for such shows on north German and French miniatures, too, certainly. Dollhouses are death houses, which is why children play with them. Boys can’t play with dolls in the West, but they do, only they call them *action figures* with names such as G.I. Joe and the like. I remember having a castle I quite liked when I was a boy. And little molded plastic soldiers to move around in said castle. But the point is, the overriding import of miniatures is, so I believe, death. When Hertz (whose book on death remains essential reading) writes of the Dayak people of what was then Borneo, the rituals of burial included transformative effects for the living. Periods of being forsaken and shunned, and then later, if later, reintegrated into the societal fabric. The dead do not live on, they reside in death, as death, in their funeral homes on stilts. One of the curious factors in Western Christian notions of death is the idea of manufacturing a false eternity for the departed. So many Western rituals are based on creating an eternity — it is a massive denial of death’s finality. It is not exactly eternity, however. It is a kind of kitsch after life, the point of which is to mediate and lessen the need for grief. And hence, western art is always dealing with very sharp and pointed representations of death, both intentional and unintentional. All these factors are coming together, I think, in a new social madness. The creation of doll houses is the pursuit of domination mediated by a hidden violence I associate with the sentimental.

How to explain the conversations one has, and the Op Ed pieces one reads, the over all discourse on event such as Brexit? Or on Hillary. Or gun control. I mean the bourgeoisie in the West, meaning mostly the U.S., are terrified of their own terror and feelings of contempt, for the underclass. This mock middle class congratulates itself in various cultural production for its tolerance and values, but all the while a deep seated terror is driving toward the surface (as it were). And the natural reaction is to repress such unacceptable ideas. But my suspicion is that these mechanisms of repression no longer work. The educated white liberal class fears its own animal nature, but even more it fears that all people are bad and savage and eventually will become marauding hordes (ISIS essentially).

The manufacture of enjoyment is pathological under Capitalism. It is also, perhaps, not very enjoyable.

“Capitalism is inscribed in the mental apparatus—this was already Freud’s insight,
when he found the best metaphor for unconscious desire in none other than the
capitalist, meaning that psychoanalysis began with a fundamental critical and political
insight rooted in the rejection of the opposition “unconscious—conscious” or
“private—social.” The unconscious is no archive or reservoir of unclear representations
and forgotten memories; it is a site of discursive production.”
Samo Tomsic

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Simon Boudvin

And this is not a matter of ideological position, or opinion; it is, regardless of opinion, the intensity of the expression. I have never in my life felt so many people wanting to fight over the slightest disagreement. There is a growing sense of panic.

“So, too, Death, repressed through medicine and hygiene, has reinfected our sexuality with a hitherto unheard of virulence…finally, accompanied by anxiety, despair, and violence, death has gained a foothold within the psyche itself. The forces of destruction and self-destruction, latent in each individual and society, have been reactivated in our anonymous urban milieusl multiplying and amplifying the solitude and anxiety of individuals, disinhibiting a violence that becomes the banal expression of protest, rejection and revolt.”
Edgar Morin

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Hede Xandt

The legacy of the Enlightenment has meant that, as Morin puts it, a paradigm of disjunction/reduction controls our thinking. And this has led, in a general sense, to an isolating of objects and phenomenon from not just their environments but from history.

“Conformism here refers to the energies of conventional interpretation.
These ensnare tradition and the receivers of tradition in
tales devised, or at least approved, by the ruling class and its
ideology-mongers. The accumulated experience of the oppressed
is overwritten in histories that re-transmit the existing balance of
power: business as usual.”
Esther Leslie (Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism)

Today, it feels as if this overwriting that Leslie describes is no longer legible. The status quo is writing in invisible ink. But more, there is an inability to actually practice interpretation. On a rudimentary level this is the result of decades of disinformation in mass media. The age of marketing and spin has inured the public to distinctions of historical fact. The world is viewed from the subject position of someone watching their favorite TV show. And this is partly my appeal for the importance of artists such as Agnes Martin. And there are of course many others. It was Benjamin who, following the failure of the Spartakus revolt, began to seriously investigate the influence of technology (Tecknik) and the assumptions about the idea of progress. And as Leslie points out, he prioritized the role of culture and art as a form of training for revolution. In this sense he was quite in accord with Adorno, however much they may have disagreed about specifics. What mattered, thought Benjamin, was coming to understand the relations of production, and the conditionings of mass culture.

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Dinh Q. Le

“Benjamin warns that the 1914–18 war cast just the shadow of a brutality soon to be superbly outbid. The armies of the future will deploy technologies of far greater destructiveness; troops will be immeasurably more sadistic and bloodthirsty; war will be total, and inescapable – it will be fought by new technological means.”
Esther Leslie

This echos Enzo Traverso’s reading of the first world war as the defining shift in humanity and its relationship to technology. Human relationships were being subsumed by the anonymity of technology. Benjamin came to see that a level of anger was necessary to cut through the conditioning of disinformation in mass culture. And this seems particularly relevant just now. One of the primary characteristics of contemporary Western society — or the contemporary bourgeoisie, is an expression of false courtesy. The panic that is gripping the societies of the West is under pressure to appear polite and reasonable. And this is not unrelated to how technology has come to create new ways of remembering (or not remembering). For we (those of us old enough) are exiles from our own history. The world of even fifty years ago is only a distant memory and a memory that contemporary culture works overtime to erase. For what has changed culturally over the last fifty years in the West, certainly in the U.S., is acute, but it is also constantly being obfuscated. We are being told over and over to not remember. That memory is suspect. And so it is, but not in the way corporate owned media would have us believe.

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Mathias Olmeta, photography.

This false politeness is, however, it should be noted, mostly an illusion. But it does remain a kind of weird ideal. For the tenor of discourse on social media is awash in a kind of hysterical demand for agreement. And as a sort of side bar note, the meme about Democrats being inherently, no matter what, better than Republicans is one that is seemingly indelible. But I digress…for this sense of being exiled from one’s own past was prophetically outlined by Benjamin, and by Karl Kraus and Kracauer both. It was Kraus who saw the reporting of the first world war and the manner in which the subject shifted from the war to the coverage of the war. Benjamin pointed to the erosion of language, and most specifically the spoken word, in this mediation of the event by a press that in the hands of the wealthy. For Benjamin the mediation itself was not the problem. Rather, the mediation was inevitable, but memory could still be rescued. The fulcrum for representation of reality was the 1920s — for Benjamin saw the substitution of the snap shot memory by a cinematic memory. And this cinematic memory was more artificial. For experience is not processed in any kind of real continuity, but rather is fragmented and non linear. The Freudian idea of the unconscious was one out of time. The implications are enormous, if Benjamin was correct. Today I suspect people DO remember in cinematic terms, and it perhaps accounts for the rise of uncanny experience in still photography.

“The youth experience of a generation has much in common with
the experience of dreams. Its historical form is a dream form.
Every epoch possesses a side turned towards dreams, the child
side.”
Benjamin

The sense of panic, of exaggerated tension — the same one sees in Hollywood film and TV — is expressed as something of unique importance. It is always the most important election, the most important speech, the most important decision, and so forth. For anything less does not rise to the level of enjoyment. This very particular late Capitalist *enjoyment*.

And Leslie quotes from a late letter of Benjamin..
“The objects given by monastic discipline to friars for the purpose
of meditation were designed to turn them away from the world
and its affairs. The train of thought that we are pursuing here
emerges out of similar considerations. It intends to free the
political worldling from the ensnaring nets of those politicians
in whom hope had been placed that they would be opponents
of fascism, but who in this moment lie flat on their backs,
affirming their defeat with the betrayal of their cause.”[/i]

[img]http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/paul-winstanley-man-talking-e1467498122553.jpg
Paul WInstanley

Agnes Martin’s phrase of turning her back on the world seems very apt today. For as Leslie noted, to Benjamin, the classless society is not the end of progress but rather its interruption. And such an interruption was also, it seems, what Guy Debord and the Situationists sensed was crucial to waking from the nightmare. Only now, the nightmare isn’t the cartoon theatre of western politics, but rather the inability of those caught in the nightmare to wake up. And unable to awake the dreamer flays about in desperation and demands of those in the same dream to reassure and verify that all is well. The industrial level use of anti-depressants and various other drugs, both legal and not, suggests that something is now breaking through that tissue of manufactured *reality* that is disseminated every minute of every day by the caretakers of unreality.

The narratives of the state are uniform in their falseness. But they accompany representations of disproportionate official significance. The public senses, deep down, that this importance is not all that important. But to reflect on that fact fractures the cinematic process of enjoyment. Only the most excluded today are, at least partially, free of the directed dreaming. Prisoners, the homeless and insane, these are part of a demographic of no interest to the dream clinic. Consumption is pleasure. And everything becomes consumption. And consumption becomes manufacture, at a certain point.

The cruelty of an occupied dream life is slowly dawning on a public that has accepted the cinematic portrayal of their own life. And there is a sense that this *enjoyment* idea is mostly just a kind of stress.

Lorca wrote, in his essay on Duende….“The Duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible.” Lorca, in another essay on Deep Song, suggests the deep memory that is alive in Spanish and Gypsy music. The memory of ancient Arabian sensibility. Throughout his prose Lorca is consumed with images of graveyards and crypts, with funeral rituals, and with the collective memory of Spain. Such thinking is alien today. Artists search out business models and talk of brands. And the sudden fear that is in the air, a fear of *fascism*, a word scorned for decades, is driven by several things that are converging at once. One is guilt. An intuition that liberal collaboration has caused immeasurable suffering. And two, this recognition that we aren’t having fun. The endless efforts to dull these feelings has only served to intensify them.

Hollywood produces endless films and TV that are *suspenseful*. There are music cues and rapid edits, and all manner of manipulation — all in the service of providing suspense. The effect is not really suspense, partly because of the familiarity of these techniques. Audiences anticipate what comes next. Some version of the same. This anticipatory phenomenon exists with cues on when to laugh, or cry, too. So, really, the audience for these cues is reading the cue representations as one might have read hieroglyphics. The tension or suspense in thriller films is not experienced, it is read.

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Tilman Riemenschneider, 15th century, Germany.


Today there is a quality of this false suspense in electoral theatre. But more significantly there is a quality of this false suspense in daily life. The obsessive texting and checking for emails, the selfies and the billions of apps — it is micro suspenseful. At a mall recently, in Prague, I stood looking down from the railing on the third floor, at a coffee shop on the ground floor. Every table was taken and at every table sat someone looking at their smart phone. What were they seeing?

Samo Tomsic in an essay Laughter and Capitalism …
“But for Freud the unconscious processes were all about a specific form of labour. Operations like condensation and displacement are no simple automata; they demand a labouring subject, which, in the given regime knows only one form, labour-power. Hence, to talk about unconscious labour is far from innocent. Freud refers to the same economic reality and to the same conceptual apparatus as Marx.”

The coffee shop of mobile phone addicts was the new factory of unpaid labor. And nothing is enjoyable because the unconscious is suffering its own version of austerity. Capitalism cannot allow real culture. Eventually it must substitute the artificial version as it substitutes real tension with artificial suspense in its endless nearly identical product. Art and culture are the radical communists of the unconscious economy.
Franz Xavier Messerschmidt’s busts, fifty of which survive, were made during the last decade of his life. He had retreated from the Hapsburg Empire to a remote provincial outpost (Pressburg, now Bratislava) and began his obsessive focus on extreme emotional states. Most of the busts were likenesses of himself modeled off a mirror he sat before. What is unnerving is the modernity of these busts. Messerschmidt turned his back on the Empire and got on with it (another Agnes Martin expression). No doubt Zoloft might have helped Messerschmidt and kept him from creating. He might have continued in Vienna taking small commissions for busts of the Royal family. Messerschmidt is close in spirit to Goya and Bosch and even Donatello. But in an odd way the real precursor to Messerschmidt is fellow countryman Tilman Riemenschneider, a carver of wood. Riemenschneider worked at small projects, mostly around Wurzburg, and was a contemporary of Michelangelo and Durer. What sets him apart from other northern Gothic artists of the 15th century is the inwardness and sense of grief in his figures. This was something very different, really, from Durer, or any of the southern artists in Europe; and Riemenschneider can also be seen as one who had turned his back on the court. He favored, almost exclusively, limewood and rejected the idea of painting or adding polychromy. During his own time his work was described as *’altfrankisch’*, meaning old fashioned and Franconian. Riemenschneider was imprisoned after The German Peasant’s War, a revolt associated with the early Germanic capitalism and the birth of bourgeois society.

http://john-steppling.com/2016/07/dreaming-of-pirates-part-2-or-capitalism-and-fun/

A lot in this one. Talking about middle class politeness reminds me of much of Chlamor's postings a few years back.

A quote here from "The Morbid Voice:

Now as a footnote of sorts, Jacob Levitch (whose book is coming out this year on Monthly Review Press, I believe, and which I recommend ahead of time since I know Levitch and there is no better analyst of this stuff) has written extensively on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their activities in India and Africa. And this is the linkage I am speaking about in terms of coercive ideological consensus. Overpopulation is a hot topic just now, and it is almost always a stealth ruling class agenda masquerading as Green concern. And what is most disturbing in a sense is that I know several University professors (admittedly at discount Universities) who teach this ideology. And they do it as part of a construction of the house of identity. Let me quote Levitch at some length here…

“In a 2012 Newsweek profile, Melinda Gates announced her intention to get “family planning” back on the global agenda and made the dubious claim that African women were literally clamoring for Depo-Provera as a way of hiding contraceptive use from “unsupportive husbands.”89 Boasting that a decision “likely to change lives all over the world” had been hers alone, she announced that the Foundation would invest $4 billion in an effort to supply injectable contraceptives to 120 million women – presumably women of color – by 2020. It was a program so ambitious that some critics warned of a return to the era of eugenics and coercive sterilization.90

Bill Gates, at one time an avowed Malthusian “at least in the developing countries”91 is now careful to repudiate Malthus in public. Yet it is striking that Foundation publicity justifies not only contraception, but every major initiative in the language of population control, from vaccination (“When children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families”92) to primary education (“[G]irls who complete seven years of schooling will marry four years later and have 2.2 fewer children than girls who do not complete primary school.”)93

In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services.” The argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of the environmental damage that underlies climate change. The economist Utsa Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from the advanced countries. The Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”

From Malthus to the present day, the myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth. As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people.” In recent years BMGF’s publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about “climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb.

Yet the sheer scale of BMGF’s investment in “family planning”” suggests that its ambitions reach beyond mere propaganda. In addition to the multibillion dollar contraception distribution program discussed previously, BMGF provides research support for the development of new high-tech, long-lasting contraceptives (e.g., an ultrasound sterilization procedure for men as well as “non-surgical female sterilization”). Meanwhile the Foundation aggressively lobbies Third World governments to spend more on birth control and supporting infrastructure. while subsidizing steep cuts in the price of subcutaneous contraceptives.

These initiatives lie squarely within the traditions of Big Philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation organized the Population Council in 1953, predicting a “Malthusian crisis” in the developing world and financing extensive experiments in population control. These interventions were enthusiastically embraced by US government policymakers, who agreed that “the demographic problems of the developing countries, especially in areas of non-Western culture, make these nations more vulnerable to Communism.” Foundation research culminated in an era of “unrestrained enthusiasm for government-sponsored family planning” by the 1970s. Less discussed but amply documented is the consistent support for eugenics research by US-based foundations, dating from the 1920s, when Rockefeller helped found the German eugenics program that undergirded Nazi racial theories,102 through the 1970s, when Ford Foundation research helped prepare the intellectual ground for a brutal forced sterilization campaign in India. { } …Population control is, in another sense, one of the instruments of social control. It extends ruling-class jurisdiction more directly to the personal sphere, aiming at “full-spectrum dominance” of the developing world. Like laws regulating marriage and sexual behavior, such interventions in the reproduction of labor power are not essential to capitalists but remain desirable as a means of exercising ruling class hegemony over every aspect of the lives of the working people. Whereas the ideology of population control is intended to turn attention away from the existing distribution of wealth and income that causes widespread want, population control as such directly targets the bodies and dignity of poor people, conditioning them to believe that life’s most intimate decisions are outside of their competence and control.

The relationship between bourgeois ideology and imperialist practice is dynamic and mutually supportive. As David Harvey has observed: “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic, and social repression.” Seen in this light, BMGF’s promotion of population control is doubly pernicious because it is cloaked in the language of environmentalism, popular empowerment, and feminism. Melinda Gates may evoke “choice” in support of her family planning initiatives, but in reality it is not poor women, but a handful of the world’s wealthiest people who have presumed to choose which methods of contraception will be delivered, and to whom.”

(full link here. http://www.rupe-india.org/57/gates.html

http://john-steppling.com/2016/08/the-morbid-voice/

Fear Level Trump
by JOHN STEPPLING


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I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.”
― Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot

This election seems to have traumatized the usually, and increasingly, somnambulant public in the US to the degree that a number of various mental affects are activated, and maybe even some old wounds finally surfacing again, but most of all it has generated a new level of panic among the bourgeoisie.

There was a piece in the New York Review of Books on Trump the candidate, written by Jonathan Freedland. And it touches on the strange almost surreal resiliency of the Trump campaign. There was another odd bit of fluff at the Guardian (where fluff is becoming the norm) on Claire Danes bottled and excessive tan at the Emmy awards show, which the author attributed to, or equated with Trump and his sun lamped skin. One TWEET (quoted by the Guardian) went…“Claire Danes’ bronzer is threat level TRUMP,”.

The NYRBs is, of course, a pretty reactionary rag these days, notwithstanding my fondness for the minor esorterica it includes (Mesopotamian art exhibits or reviews of obscure medieval history books, etc). But Freedland (arch liberal though he is) pretty cogently summed up Trump and the seething anger that drives his followers. Or the visible followers anyway. For there may be more. And if Trump, as even I have wondered, isn’t in it to win, then he could well be playing out the political version of Mel Brooks The Producers. And the possibility of polls being wildly wrong this election is, I’d say, very high. But Trump the candidate is now, at the least, part of american folklore.

Trump’s tan is the semiotic read for success — gold, Vegas, penthouses and fake tans. Claire Danes was only looking to enhance her brand, even if unconsciously, or sub consciously.

Now, running through all of this are questions of pedagogy.For perhaps the most glaring deficiency of contemporary life in the West is education. For this is now a generation (and maybe its more like the second or third generation) that no longer reads. I’ve had conversations both in person and on social media with students from Oxford and NYU and in all cases (for there are others) there is shocking inability to reason. Fifty years ago Debord suggested the Society of the Spectacle was creating a generalized autism. And in a sense I think this is true and that it is almost the opposite of schizophrenia. People read text as if it is code. They are stunningly blind to tone and metaphor, to irony (its only “irony”) as well as simply employing a not very expansive vocabulary. They cannot make distinctions. And this is true on the left and the right.

This election has revealed as never before the ugly reactionary core of white american liberals. Their silence on Clinton’s crimes is shocking. And one suspects there are two explanations involved. One is that their hysteria about Trump is fueled by seeing far too much of themselves in Trump’s racism and bigotry and even style. For while they abhor his vulgarity, they also know this is the aesthetic endgame for America. And they are, or think they are, the gatekeepers of those aesthetics. The other reason is that they fear the losing of their own bourgeois privilege if Trump wins. These are white educated liberals who support gun control, and were shocked at the Brexit vote, support same sex marriage, and have exactly no idea why the lumpen proletariat in the US is so angry. Or why workers in the Eurozone are so angry. Or what it means to be poor and black in the US today. Because if they did they would fear Hillary just as much as Trump. More. No, Hillary represents their own privilege. She is the candidate of the status quo. And in a weird kind of meta ironic metaphor, her illness and perhaps mental incapacity, is the perfect expression of the morbidity of the Democratic Party today. The DNC is an unbalanced aging wreck on the verge of collapse.

So, the white liberal bourgeoisie is voting Clinton. And the pretext is to save us all from Trump and fascism. But this is the strategy for the Democratic Party every four years. There is always a bogeyman. And there is always the demand to not *waste* votes on third party candidates (the metaphors and similes of popular culture always reflect finance capitalism). And the result is that the Democratic Party continues to veer to the right. Today Nixon would seem a liberal Republican if not a moderate Democrat. The lesser evilism strategy is simply capitulation. And even those who encourage voting for Jill Stein tend to see in Trump something genuinely fascistic. And I am afraid I don’t. Firstly, it is impossible to know exactly what Trump believes because he contradicts himself weekly and sometimes daily. One of the reasons so many neo-con Republicans are voting for Hillary is that they fear what Trump would do to the economy. None of them care about U.S. foreign policy, certainly, or an intensified domestic authoritarianism. And 99% of Americans don’t care either. Ask the average American about the Saudi war on Yemen and you will get blank stares. But in fact the U.S is deeply complicit with the crimes of the Saudi military in their attack on Yemen. There are U.S. military advisors who meet daily in Riyadh with Saudi military personnel to coordinate the attacks and bombing on Yemen. Attacks that targeted schools and hospitals. It is now estimated that over 320 thousand children are severely malnourished in Yemen. The U.S. sold 90 billion in weaponry and aircraft to the Saudi’s over the last five years. The UK has done the same. There are U.S. advisors in Yemen. But nobody cares. Secretary of State Clinton has all but put a hit out on Bashir Assad. And has openly suggested attacking Iran, and supports the most extreme policies of Israeli aggression. She has a long and close relationship with the Saudi monarchy. But nobody cares. This is all far away. But Trump, the Donald, is right here. On TV, with this ridiculous hair and outrageous pronouncements. And the liberals, and many on the left too, and many I admire, are warning of the dire consequences environmentally if Trump is president. Except, Clinton is a cheerleader for TPP and TTIP (and the back up TISA aggreement) and most of all is the most hawkish candidate for president in history — and the U.S. military is one of the worlds great polluters. Ask the people of Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia, or Libya. Ask how depleted uranium has effected their lives. She also supports fracking. So neither major candidate is exactly green.

And while in the purest sense, all reform is bound to fail in the end, the landscape has changed over the last forty years. When millions went out into the streets in that period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there followed a sense of numb resignation when the U.S. invaded anyway. The state, this pretend democracy, had utterly ignored them. Many blamed Bush. And sure, the neo-con cabal was awful and fascistic, but then Obama was elected and nothing at all changed. In many ways most everything got worse. Deportations increased, the military expanded and even more military bases were built on foreign soil. Draconian trade agreements were written in secret and drone assassination was normalized. And now, after 8 years of Obama, the Clinton machine has returned. Like the return of repressed material, like a foul nightmare, the unbalanced (literal and figurative I guess) war monger that is Hillary — after a disastrous stint as secretary of state — is the democratic nominee. Like a dog returning to its vomit. After stealing California from the fraudulent loud mouthed Bernie Sanders, the only thing standing in her way is Donald Trump. And Trump is the most contradictory and strange phenomenon in the history of US electoral politics. All of which is to say, there is much in this current climate to applaud about concrete reform. Real people are provided with, at least, some temporary relief. And those at work with prison reform and anti penalty work, as well as BLM activists are the only positive coming out of the current U.S.

Trump is not Hitler. He is Berlusconi. And aides like Roger Stone are right when they point and say ‘the factories are closed’. But most liberals don’t work in factories and many sort of just don’t work. What do liberals fear so much from Trump that they seem not to fear from Hillary? A wall? There is already a wall. Deportations? They are already at record levels. What exactly? Reproductive rights and the Supreme Court? Ok, I suppose women’s rights is valid point…sort of. I mean the women murdered and the families destroyed in Honduras after Hillary’s coup might argue this. Same in Haiti, and Libya or Gaza. But here is where the liberals start a campaign of shaming those who want to vote for Jill Stein. Firstly, the binary vision of politics is deeply embedded in the liberal class today. More so than on the right even. A vote for Stein/Baraka is seen as a *wasted* vote. Why? Because there can only be two candidates. Ever. Period. Two parties ensures there is only one party. As Mumia Abu-Jamal said, if the cost of killing off neo liberalism is a Trump victory, so be it. And Margaret Kimberley said, she will vote Stein and hope for the death of the Democratic Party. And I am with that sentiment. But for the white bourgeoisie, this election is about much more than a fear of the guy with the bottled tan. It is about their sense of impending loss of privilege. And that privilege is baked into the erosion of education, the growing police state (which does not patrol affluent white neighborhoods) and with an expanding permanent war state globally. And most of all because WINNING is what matters. Period. Full stop.

Hillary Clinton has called Putin a new Hitler. This is hardly the language of mature statesmanship. Does none of this sink into the brain of the white liberal? I think it is simply a matter of not caring. White educated liberal America doesn’t give a fuck about the rest of the world. They care about their own position in a failing America. Now, it is scary on one level to watch a Trump rally. But not for the casual racism, because that is everywhere everyday in the USA. No, it is the sense of suppressed rage in the lumpen working class finally coming out. And how long it must have been festering. And this brings me back to my first point, really. The sense of things surfacing — and in a way its like Vietnam. The trauma cut across all classes. Everyone was hurt. This election is for a variety of reasons reactivating old traumas, guilt, shame. Pain.

The hostility of this culture. The angry snarky bitchy self involved narcissistic hostility. The only places I find deep comradeship is in the social justice movement. In BLM and in prison rights. Not on the left, not in left parties or left intelligentsia . Mostly I find a tacit policing of thought on the left.

The largest prison strike in US history is going on but there is a media blackout. I don’t hear much about it in left circles. There are new death penalty legislation being over turned. But I hear little about it in any media, left or right. These things have to be taught. Milosevic was exonerated (even if it was to justify a bogus conviction of Karadzic..also innocent) and the media ignored it. What was once the trial of the century, the trial of the *Butcher of the Balkans* is now simply ignored. Claire Danes’ tan mattered more.

And that is the Trump phenomenon. He is a vision of success to the masses in 2016. He is the kitsch King of Success. Never mind his deep ignorance (and his sons….oh geez….) or his crude bullying. He IS success for the New America. Flashy, vulgar, and loud. That makes him rather perfect in a sense. I don’t care. I fear Hillary much more is all I know. A vegas President? Who cares. Kennebunkport becomes Atlantic City. The logic of finance capital results ….after everything…in Donald Trump.

Andrew Levine wrote recently:

“If the debates this year were run, say, according to the old League of Women Voters rules, Stein and Johnson would be in. Even if they were, Clinton would still win the election – she has too much media support and too many political machines working for her to lose, no matter how awful a candidate she is. But the quality of political discourse would improve a hundred-fold or more. The benefits of that, especially after the election is over, would be incalculable.”

Pedagogy. Levine goes on to make on the best observations of this entire election season. And that is, when speaking of Trump … “What comes out of his mouth are not policy prescriptions at all; they are emotive utterances. He is not voicing ideas; he is conveying an attitude.”

And that is the heart of this. The King of Success, gold tan, gold hair and gold checkbook. And finally,ignorance. He has already picked the vile James Wolsey for his team. So the same guys will run things whoever wins. Which is why it makes sense to vote commitment and vote Stein/Baraka. At least, at the very least, you can feel less complicit in the final solution looming for Gaza or the nuclear confrontation with Russia, or the destruction of Syria when Clinton wins, or the total destruction of Yemen. For Hillary will make regime change the national pastime. And I suspect that deep down most Trump supporters know their man is an ignoramus. But they are angry. And nobody, on a deep instinctual level, could get behind Ted Cruz. His hips were wider than this shoulders. There was something deeply unwholesome about Cruz. And actually the same might be said of Rubio. Or even Sanders. This was a charisma vacuum. And in walked the mack daddy of Atlantic City. Mr Trump Towers. The man with the tan.

The fact that Trump is so deeply ignorant and yet so popular is sort of unsurprising. I mean Bush was ignorant. Reagan was ignorant. Is Trump dumber about world affairs than Reagan? Its too close to call. The problem with most discussions of Trump vs. Clinton is that such discussions are reductive. Pick any issue you want. Gun control? The U.S. is the worlds leading exporter of weaponry. The defense industry is the biggest in the world. Can one really separate that fact from guns on the streets of America? Especially in the hands of the police. Many police are returning Iraqi or Afghan vets. But it is more than that, it is the ideological vision of conquest and class segregation. The U.S. authority structure treats the poor, especially the black poor, as colonial subjects. Poor neighborhoods are viewed much as the U.S. military views towns in Iraq. There is a need for pacification. One cannot be the worlds leading maker of guns and bombs and bullets and expect your own streets not to be infected with the same violence you impose on the poor of other countries you invade. Take the environment. No major candidate save Jill Stein has said anything remotely coherent about the environment. You cannot support destructive trade deals and militarism, not to mention the defense industry, and then say you want to protect the environment.

So, no, Trump is disturbing in his off handed misogyny and bigotry. He is a mean spirited creep. But at the same time he said he wants to talk to Putin, not attack him. So there is that. Still it is likely the exact same neo-con war architects would inhabit his administration as would Hillary’s. But none of this is, finally, relevant. Because Presidents are not Czars. They do not rule by decree or fiat. It is a system of rank exploitation and naked corporate fraud, of a racist judicial system and a growing gulag with the most prisoners in the world. How much worse, even domestically where presidents traditionally have little real power, will life be under a Trump? Will he amp up the surveillance state? Perhaps. Although its acutely bad already. Can he unleash the National Guard on protesters? I sort of doubt it. And who will either of these two candidates pick for their cabinet? Trump tapped the vile James Woolsey, already. Clinton is eyeing Michelle Flournoy and already picked Ken Salazar. These are horrible choices. Neo fascistic choices. Does that sound good? And the recent U.S. attack on the Syrian army at Deir ez-Zor suggests (as Diana Johnstone observed) that Hillary, the presumptive winner anyway, is already exercising decision making power. Why validate more of this same Imperialist blood letting globally, and more of the police state violence domestically. Both major candidates reach peak nightmare status.This is why it matters to vote with a conscience. Vote for Stein and Baraka. Its not about winning. Because electorally you all have already lost. It is about a vision for a future without these ghouls

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/27/fear-level-trump/

Pretty good piece, with a few problems. I take his point on voting for the Greens as protest and pallative, given the current situation that might have weight, however repulsive. Still I could do so as I'll be there anyway to vote against the sheriff and if none of the small socialist(?) parties are on the SC ballot, what the hell.

The other issue is Steppling's tendency to confuse the lumpen with the working class. I have long thought that the line between those groups to be blurring, largely based on personal experience. The gray/black markets are huge, the number of folks working under the table significant as is the number of people supplementing their income with illegal activities but not 'career criminals'. Hell, my old man was a 'basket man' for a numbers guy and bought excess 'breakage' from beer truck drivers for re-sale. Of course I see a lot of this in my life today but my sampling could be off. In this case I'll cut Steppling some slack.

The Unwoke: Sleepwalking into the Nightmare
by JOHN STEPPLING

“The view that Syria is under attack because it isn’t a western puppet state, and that Washington wants Assad to step down to make it one, cannot be so easily dismissed. There’s plenty of evidence that states that seek to remain independent of US prescriptions on how they ought to organize their economies and foreign policies are uniquely targeted for sub-critical warfare (sanctions, sabotage, demonization, diplomatic isolation), or—where a military victory can be secured with impunity for the aggressor—by outright military intervention.

The Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who NATO forces worked tirelessly to depose, told Canadian lawyer Christopher Black that Washington sought his ouster for two reasons: Because he was a communist. And because he told the Americans to go fuck themselves. Which is to say, Milosevic refused to turn Yugoslavia into a western puppet state.

Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi was overthrown because he insisted that foreign investment in Libya work to the benefit of Libyans, an attitude that threatened to cut into the profit margins of Western investors. The US State Department complained that Gaddafi was practicing “resource nationalism,” while oil companies reacted bitterly to the tough bargains he was driving. This was hardly behavior befitting a western puppet state (which Libya wasn’t.) For telling Western oil companies that they could go fuck themselves if they thought they were going to get rich on Libyan oil while leaving Libya with nothing, Gaddafi, in the view of the Western foreign policy elite, had to go.

Stephen Gowans, 2014

The last Presidential non-debate is mercifully over and the Clinton regime can rest comfortable it is about to assume power. Questions remain as to just how committed (if at all) the Donald was to winning this election, but whatever the case, whatever mechanisms were employed to put him at the top of the Republican ticket, the one clear thing is that the Republican Party is dead. Or maybe it has simply merged with the Democratic Party. The Republicans could offer no alternative save the fanatic Christian Ted Cruz or the squirrelly Paul Ryan as an alternative. Oh, and poor Marco Rubio. Remember that the previous election featured a wealthy Mormon and the laughable figure of John McCain.

A leaked DNC memo in fact listed Cruz and Trump as potential *pied piper* candidates who would help erode credibility in the Republican Party (not hard, that) and lead the children (to keep to the metaphor) back to the Democratic Party, regardless how awful its own candidate. In any event, Trump can return to his new media empire (with new money and new partners such as Steve Bannon). Meanwhile the spectacle of U.S. electoral discourse has been reduced to a barrage of anti-Putin propaganda and a cartoon level public dialogue that treats the election as if it is a schoolyard fight where the tough girl gets to kick ass over the rapey rich kid. Richy Rich is punked by war hungry Imperialist and a lifetime criminal who happens to be a woman. This was the week that saw an endless series of memes featuring Hillary as a triumphant feminist heroine. The *competency* theme seemed to have picked up momentum, no doubt due to Trump’s history of archaic sexist treatment of women in his employ and even not in his employ. You’d almost think he WANTED this stuff to get out there. To get out there right at this moment, right before the election.

But then I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being handled. That every wikileak and email and revelation of groping was being calculated and served up to direct attention away from the fact that the U.S. military is now actively involved in the Saudi war crimes in Yemen and that Clinton (who seems more in control of foreign policy than Obama at the moment) is ratcheting up the provocations with Russia and Putin. And the arena for this new cold-soon-to-be-hot war is Syria.

And that brings me back to the cultural perception of Syria and the Arab (and Persian) world in general. Syria was both a product of colonialism in the sense its borders were drawn up by the French and English and the shadows that cast, but from which came (again) an anti Imperialism and Arab nationalism that featured a hybrid socialism and a fierce independence. The U.S. has never tolerated those leaders of small and even not so small countries that refused to “liberalize the economy”. That is short hand for becoming a client state. Chavez embraced Assad because he recognized an ally in the fight against global capital. The road to socialism is not easy. Ask the Sandinistas.

As Roger Harris wrote in July of this year…

“But even more important for Venezuela, as for any other capitalist country, is that the commanding heights of the national economy are controlled by an owning class whose antipathy of social change is immense. This includes not only the manufacturing, service, and major agricultural sectors, but a privately owned and rabidly hostile mass media.
In addition, the Venezuelan economy is integrated with the world economy, which is dominated by institutions with a neo-liberal agenda of all power to capital. And over-arching all of this is the US government organizing, funding, and directing the domestic and international opposition to the Chávista project.”

Assad rejected the Qatar oil pipeline deal in 2009. From there on out there was never going to be but one conclusion to the story. And Hillary Clinton has openly said this. Assad must go. And yet the U.S. public seems far more interested and worried about Trump and his theoretical broship with Putin. Or the supposed hacking of the DNC by Putin, except any cyber expert will tell you its impossible to determine attribution. But people believe it anyway. Qaddafi cancelled that billion dollar deal with Bechtel and found himself tortured and murdered courtesy of Madame Clinton. Assad faces a similar fate.

Chavez is dead, in circumstances not so different from Milosevic. On the other hand look at U.S. allies, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where gay men are beheaded and women still can’t drive. Or Israel, where a many decades long ethnic cleansing is being carried out while proudly remaining a racist apartheid state. This is just fine. The narrative is always the same for the U.S. If you want to stay in power remember to create a climate friendly to western Capital, and buy U.S. weapons, privatize your resources in some fashion that allows western companies to make a huge profit, and then, hell, do what you want. And this is where I am reminded of what Cornell West said not so long ago…“…the crimes of the occupier always outstrip the crimes of the occupied”. I may be paraphrasing a bit. The point is that leaders like Assad face enormous pressure to obey. Look what happens when you don’t. Milosevic, Qadaffi, Lumumba, Arbenz, Allende, or Brazil in 64 where the U.S. feared (in the words of ambassador Lincoln Gordon) that Goulart would make the country ‘the China of South America’. Or Iran in 53, or Guatamala, or Greece or Haiti. The list is very long. Or Vietnam. Remember Vietnam? It seems many Americans no longer do remember Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem is another disobedient foreign leader. Assassinated in 1963 with the CIA fingerprints all over the hit.

“Some very complicated discussions are not being had about the nature of agents of change. I am suspecting that, at least for many of those who fancy themselves as leftists in North America and Europe, they prefer to wait for a messiah: a pure, saintly figure, beyond all reproach, without the complicated past of a real human being who lived a real human life. The architect of utopia must be perfect. This is a new puritanism.”

Maximillian Forte

Many on the left (and god knows many on the right) like to refer to Assad’s government as a *regime*. This is an orientalist code for expendable. Chavez was elected three times but was labeled a dictator. Milosevic was the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’. Qadaffi went in and out of favour with the U.S. (and France) a number of times, but his economic reforms were just a step too far. And he served as the perfect object lesson in disobedience. If you don’t do as you are told, you will be driven into a hole and beaten to death. Saddam could gas his own people and get trade breaks, as long as he flew U.S. made helicopters to do it. Eventually it was expedient to lose him, too. Clinton has now famously boasted of the Qadaffi hit. We came, we saw, he died. Those words and her cackle afterwords will linger in the western imagination for decades. And the handling of these narratives always employs a certain very specific Orwellian vocabulary. And there are always lurid tales of chemical weapons or rape and there are always poor dark skinned suffering children used to gain sympathy. Remember the babies torn from incubators in Kuwait story? Or the rape camps in football stadiums in the former Yugoslavia. And now the western funded fraud that is the White Helmets and the ash covered boy in the orange seat. Fictions, created by Madison Ave firms; but you know what was real? Abu Ghraib. A story that has mostly faded from media memory. At what point does the U.S. public decide to remember any of this? To remember that the media lies. I guess never. And even on the left there is often a curious adherence to U.S. state department storylines. Whatever Assad has done, remember the situation. Assad is called out because Syria had torture sites (allegedly) in service to the U.S. You know who else did? Poland. But Poland is not a regime. As for repression and the litany of western accusations against Syria, I would only say remember the position of those countries looking up at the Imperialist boot heel of the U.S., AFRICOM and NATO.

A side bar note here on Qadaffi, who Reagan once called ‘the mad dog of the middle east’ and who made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate him. Muammar Qadaffi in hindsight looms as a figure of some importance. A defiant Arab leader, a Bedouin pan Africanist and pan Arabist and Nasserite who planned to create the Gold Dinar, a single currency for the entire African continent, and a highly pragmatic leader who survived four decades.

As SMubashir Noor writes (in the Daily Times of Pakistan)…

“He subsequently helped the US gather intelligence on Islamic radicals, gave up his nuclear programme and paid reparations to the victims of Lockerbie. The White House, (Pete) Hoekstra rues, “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” when it decided to dislodge Gaddafi because he was “doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years”.”

But for Obama, Clinton, and the Pentagon..and the defense industry in the U.S., the symbolic and literal sodomizing and murder of Qadaffi was more important. Lest other uppity Arab leaders get any ideas. Send a message.

And then we have ISIS. or Al Nusra or whateverthefuckever they are called, or whatever the sub phylum of the sub set wants to be called. The Islamic radicals sure seem to spend a lot of time rebranding. But then they are very good at videos. They are media savy, as they say. And shit, someone tell me where that caravan of brand new Toyota trucks came from? And someone might ask Toyota come to think of it. I know I can’t afford a new Toyota pick up. The so called moderate rebels seem to turn up at inopportune times (like at the beheading party….where a young Palestinian boy was murdered, on the back of a pick up come to think of it). Where does the funding come from? One certainty is Saudi Arabia — chief donor to the Clinton Foundation. An ally of the U.S. And yet, remarkably enough not a single question in these debates addressed this fact. The U.S. is theoretically fighting *terrorists* who are holding U.S. manufactured weapons. ISIS supply lines have been photographed back in 2012 even, travelling through Turkey to Syria, with hundreds of trucks per day loaded with supplies. But clearly ammunition and grenade launchers as well as the truck of choice, Toyota, are gifts from the CIA and its proxies. But none of this sticks. Here in Norway, Loretta Napoleoni appeared on a nighttime news show to discuss terrorist funding and over the course of 20 minutes managed not to mention the possibility that CIA or Mossad might have, you know, played a part in this. No, we are to believe its all kidnapping and human trafficking. Such are the fairy tales of mainstream media.

The U.S. public would rather spend time on hash tags about Kick Ass Bad Ass Nasty Ass Hillary humbling the Donald (as the awful Ezra Klein put it in the paper of record) that deal with questions of who creates the simplified narratives they read. The White Helmets are the Syrian intervention version of incubator babies or Fikret Alic. Hill & Knowlton, Rudder-Finn, PURPOSE. But this should be no surprise, really. Look at the sentimentalism of Hollywood TV and film these days. And look at the stenographers for Empire, like Klein, or Kristoff or Brooks, but also look at the writers of VICE and SALON and then look at what passes for entertainment criticism. And I say that because those who write for pop culture have, perhaps, surprising amounts of influence. Not in what people watch or don’t, but in the *way* things are presented. The framing, as media scholars like to put it. The tacit assumptions, the omissions, the fawning tone or bitchy snarky attack. All of it is written at about a 4th or 5th grade level. The gatekeepers of corporate driven populism look to see if the right message is sent. Be cheerful, and funny if possible, and elevate the military to the status of heroic at all times, and the police, and manufacture domestic threats in the person of inner city black youth, or Chicano, and if possible Russian. Do not tarnish the integrity of the White House.

Michelle Obama delivers an unctuous speech about Trump’s sexism. And the liberal press and public fall over themselves in adulation. I twice heard the word *goddess* in social media. The white liberal loves Michelle. She is well behaved and perfectly nice. The way black people SHOULD be. Obama over his eight years has now been revealed as a malleable and opportunistic reader of the winds of political power. He adjusts his position in a heartbeat. In a hundred years, if anyone is still around, history will look back at Obama as the most gifted consigliere for corporate power in U.S. political history. The 21st century version of Warren Harding. Go along to get along. The only difference is the degree of calculation. Obama is a slippery back room lawyer. The reliable black man the establishment can count on. After all, Obama has actually weakened and outright rejected more environmental regulations than Bush. He has escalated all military interventions and established the precedent for extra legal assassination. And Hillary promises to be even worse. She actually does promise this. The support of fracking is one part (she lobbied globally for fracking while secretary of state), but her overall environmental policy is completely in line with the corporate interests that fund her. She often sounds like Ronald Reagan in fact.

The current War on Terror is so generalized, perceptually, that it seems to shape-change at a moment’s notice. Is anyone surprised the public can’t track the threat beyond the signifiers (beard, black flag, Toyotas, AK47s and videos). And this is what Hollywood reinforces. Count the network and cable shows that feature Islamic terror threats. And the advanced high tech espionage that helps keep America safe. This theme is repeated so consistently that it has reached a level of religion. A ritualized incantatory mantra that is repeated so often that it serves in the minds of much of the public as a sort of proto reality.

And yet. And yet as Carol Dansereau wrote:

“Far more people now identify as Independent than Democrat or Republican. Sixty-nine percent of 18 to 29 year olds and 50 percent of 30 to 49 year olds in the U.S. would now vote for a socialist. We are actually very close to being able to build the movement for economic and political democracy that we need, including but not limited to a political party of the 99%. That’s why we’re being subjected to the charade that characterizes this election season. Only through intense manipulation, and only by pitting an outrageous bigot against a right wing militaristic corporate hack like Hillary Clinton, can those who have been pushing humanity towards the brink of disaster maintain control.” (The Greanville Post, Oct 20th 2016)

And this is again a part of the mainstream media’s effect on consciousness. Those rejecting this electoral circus are invisible in the media. The majority of people, and certainly younger people, have no trust in the system. And while that visible educated {sic} 30% Chomsky once identified as the demographic target of Madison Avenue are growing in hysteria, there are many, very many, who sense they are being consistently lied to and cheated and exploited. The white liberal is now as big an impediment to social change as the far right followers of Trump. Bigger, in fact. One of the reasons so many people ignored the sexism and xenophobia of Trump was that they just wanted to express their anger. And their trauma. Vast numbers of Americans have almost no savings and live month to month. Many live week to week. But they are invisible in media. Meanwhile the attacks on Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka continue as if on auto-pilot. The corporate media found a framing that worked and they doubled down. Stein is a kook, an anti science fringe whacko. That none of this is true seems utterly beside the point.

Trump never wanted to win. And while, yes, many of his core base are bigoted misogynistic white men, there are others who simply wanted to voice their rage. The U.S. now affords a highly militarized police apparatus almost complete immunity. Poor black neighborhoods are occupied and terrorized. But Hollywood never tells that story. I mean never. There are a few bad apple stories, but nothing addressing a systemic racism of domestic police departments or the growing gulag that is mass incarceration. There are a few documentaries made on such subjects, but they are rarely widely viewed and rarely have a political critique. Nobody in corporate media says Capitalism sucks the life from the working poor, Capitalism breeds inequality and poverty. Capitalism is intensifying the polarization of income.

I mean, this TV season featured a fairy tale story of Queen Victoria on the ITV in the U.K. (produced by Rebecca Eaton, who was awarded an Officer, Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth). You know Victoria, the Empress of India, the sovereign of colonial plunder and suffering. A monarch who over sixty some years on the throne controlled over thirty percent of the worlds industry and something like fourteen million square miles of territory. But you see none of that. This is a, well, a *love* story. Why does anyone want to see this white washed fairy tale? I see no U.S. or U.K. projects about the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the revolt on Hispaniola? Curious that. The selling of narratives on the aristocracy is a long standing tradition in English speaking entertainments. And we are not talking Shakespeare, here. These are the normalizing narratives of inequality. Like Downtown Abbey, a show about how some are born to be servants and are glad of it. A quick glance at this seasons shows and films from Hollywood feature mostly police and military themes, or soap operas of the rich and stupid. The Donald Trumps of the world. And the Hillary Clintons. Or, fairy tales about princes and queens. Why is this so acceptable to so many?

And while I suspect more and more are, in fact, rejecting this obviously rotted system, the single biggest obstacle is the bourgeois white liberal. These are the Clinton bots, the ersatz feminists who seem to forget woman have no rights in the Kingdom paying the most into Hillary’s bank account. And these are people with scant knowledge of foreign policy. Now, it is also possible that not too far down the line the Kingdom itself might prove expendable. But not just yet. The liberals, both men and women are entranced with Barry and Michelle. Still. And it seems there is a complex set of repressed guilt and resentments involved, and barely repressed validation of their own liberalness and post race-ness. But I’m not at all sure. Justice Ginsburg, an Obama appointee, derides Colin Kaepernick’s protest as stupid and disrespectful. She later walked that back a bit, which only made it worse. Justices are presumably not supposed to be careless with their public remarks. And this institution, the supreme court, is a reason often given for the essential importance of voting Democratic.

Do those applauding the defeat of Trump realize at all the coming conflagrations? Do they stop to reflect on the seven hundred military bases around the world housing US soldiers and weapons? Seems not. Or that Russia has only ten, and all of them in former Soviet countries. Do they know or care at all what Clinton means to the people of the Arab world, Central America and Asia? Seems unlikely. Perhaps they so actively adore Michelle and Barry as a psychological defense mechanism to keep guilt at bay for the millions of dead Africans and Arabs murdered by the U.S. state. And their guilt for not waking to the two million people in prison in the U.S. Most of them people of color. All of them poor. But let the coronation begin. It is, in fact, a tad like Victoria. An unpleasant widely disliked and distrusted monarch married to a womanizing louche political operator of sorts (well, ok, Bill WAS president). Remember too, that Victoria’s marriage to Albert was brokered by King Leopold of Belgium. Remember him? The man who murdered a third of the Congo and stole its resources, mutilated and tortured tens of thousands of Congolese slaves. How romantic this story. The media is the most powerful entity in the political landscape of the 21st century. And it remains a display of white privilege and jingoistic authoritarianism. The world view is a reduced story of good guys (us) and bad guys (Islam, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran in particular, and black and brown youth). One would not know anything of community organizing and grass roots resistance because the media erases it. It is simply omitted from discussions. The Clinton dynasty is a remarkable feat in many ways. That so unlikable and dishonest a figure as Hillary Clinton can reach the Presidency speaks volumes about the state of American culture. But look at Europe, from the odious ruling party of the U.K. (with their own version of Trump in Boris Johnson), a former neo Nazi party is in power in Sweden, and fascist parties are part of government in Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, and France. The European/American axis of evil, as it were. Tell Americans that the sole remaining Imperialist nation is the U.S. and you get vociferous argument. But then ask most Americans to define *imperialism* and you will find mostly blank stares.

But as I say, I don’t trust anything anymore. I’m not in Syria, and I don’t know, really, what is happening. I can guess, of course. I can make educated guesses based on history. I have no idea the conversations in private between …well, anyone in the political realm. I don’t trust what I hear about Putin but I also don’t trust what I haven’t heard. I don’t even trust what I hear about the environment. So awash in alarmist narratives that one would think the world is ending as I type this. Or that WW3 is coming. That is possible, given the sociopathy of the American ruling class. But I don’t know. Do I trust Assange? Snowden? Not really.I don’t know what was said at Bilderburg this year. I wasn’t invited. This is maybe the real truth of the contemporary world. Or two truths that are coupled. For real revolutionary change the media telecom giants must be taken over or just done away with. And the second truth; we are being handled. For what and by whom is less clear. But again, we can guess. We can make educated guesses if we want. Or, we can sleepwalk into the coming nightmare. For that is something I feel relatively certain about. The coming nightmare.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/24/87796/

The Long Shadows
by JOHN STEPPLING

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

— John 14:27

The protests against Trump feel oddly class mediated. Because, lets remember, that for the last eight years a liberal {sic} democrat has been in the white house. And for those eight years there have been something like triple the number of black men dying (and women, and even children) by police deadly force. Statistics are stunningly difficult to get, actually (which even FBI director James Comey admitted). And for the last four decades inequality has steadily grown overall. But the real story of domestic policing is that of income inequality. That inequality, between whites and blacks in the U.S., is greater than in apartheid South Africa. The poor neighborhoods of the U.S., both black and Latino and Native American, have been punished by loss of welfare, deterioration of infrastructure, and a history of racism. And it is useful to look at that in terms of an American culture of violence and oppression.

Loic Wacquant (despite a recent bit of victim blaming in a letter to the regrettable Molly Crabapple) wrote of the four phases of black oppression in the history of the U.S.

“1. Slavery (1619–1865). Slavery is a highly malleable and versatile institution that can be harnessed to a variety of purposes, but in the Americas property-in-person was geared primarily to the provision and control of labour. Its introduction in the Chesapeake, Middle Atlantic and Low Country regions of the United States in the 17th century served to recruit and regulate the unfree workforce forcibly imported from Africa and the West Indies to cater to their tobacco, rice and mixed-farming economy.{ }
2. Jim Crow (South, 1865–1965). Racial division was a consequence, not a precondition, of US slavery, but once it was instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency of its own. Emancipation thus created a double dilemma for Southern white society: how to secure anew the labour of former slaves, without whom the region’s economy would collapse, and how to sustain the cardinal status distinction between whites and ‘persons of colour,’ i.e, the social and symbolic distance needed to prevent the odium of ‘amalgamation’ with a group considered inferior, rootless and vile. { }
3. Ghetto (North, 1915–68). The sheer brutality of caste oppression in the South, the decline of cotton agriculture due to floods and the boll weevil, and the pressing shortage of labour in Northern factories caused by the outbreak of World War 1 created the impetus for African-Americans to emigrate en masse to the booming industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast (over 1.5 million left in 1910–30, followed by another 3 million in 1940–60). But as migrants from Mississippi to the Carolinas flocked to the Northern metropolis, what they discovered there was not the ‘promised land’ of equality and full citizenship but another system of racial enclosure, the ghetto, which, though it was less rigid and fearsome than the one they had fled, was no less encompassing and constricting.”

The fourth is what Wacquant calls the ‘hyper ghetto/carceral system’ of today. Mass incarceration was oddly invisible as a topic during the recent presidential campaigns. And it is important to remember that Bill Clinton signed that crime bill that helped spike mass incarceration, as well as once (1998) bragged in his radio address of cracking down on inmate fraud in receiving social security checks. Clinton family race baiting is breathtaking when one looks back on it, but then today’s white liberal rarely looks back at anything. The systematic creation of zones of exclusion, or hyper marginalization, has followed on the neo liberal policies of Democrats and Republicans alike. The withdrawl of services to these zones of marginalization began with Reagan and has not stopped.

Wacquant defined ghetto as … “it is a relation of ethnoracial control and closure built out of four elements: (i) stigma; (ii) constraint; (iii) territorial confinement; and (iv) institutional encasement. “

In other words it is a sort of racist de facto prison. And the ‘projects’, the low income housing in big cities have increasingly come to resemble carceral camps or detention sites.

“…In this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.”

Glenn Loury

So what is it exactly that everyone fears so much about Trump? Well, the obvious answer is the empowerment of his base. How that plays out remains an open question but I’m not personally worried that it can actually get much worse than it already is. The economic violence against the working class in the U.S. is being in a sense obscured by the Trump hysteria, as if he invented discrimination and exclusion. Trump only reflects a system that has lurched ever further to the right since the early 1970s. And that is not to suggest that it was ever some workers paradise. The post industrial worker, though, has been subjected to a steady process of a downsized social safety net while prison and police funding has steadily grown. And since Bush, through Obama, the power of police has only increased. In effect for the poor, especially the black poor, the police are judge, jury, and executioner.

The Trump base, to be clear, is surburban bourgeois whites, and rural whites, and a fair number of affluent white men who traditionally vote Republican. And more than a few are educated. Though it is worth examining what anyone means by educated today. The Republican financial elite, for the most part, abandoned Trump to sign-on with Hillary.

I have had friends, liberals, white, become infuriated at any stigmatizing of Hillary Clinton. I was told it was reproducing the sexism of Trump. Now I find this interesting and I think what interests me the most is that it reflects the not so deeply buried colonialist mind set of liberals. I also got a very polite and intelligent letter from a woman regarding my last article. But she, too, complained that I was minimizing the sexual violence against women in the U.S. But see, it is important to examine how that violence operates exactly. For much of what is behind the systemic violence against women is a deeply entrenched idea of privilege. Remember, too, that the Clintons (both) have inflicted massive state violence on the poor in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia, Honduras and Haiti. These are facts. One cannot separate the fact that police deadly force on the streets of poor America is reproducing the military violence on the streets of Iraq and Libya etc. and the legacy of the violence of chattel slavery. The U.S. is the worlds leading manufacturer of weapons that kill. We are the death merchants for the world. But the white bourgeoisie that is so up in arms about Trump were never up in arms when the U.S. bombed the civilians in Yemen or Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor were they up in arms about mass incarceration. And not a single word, not one, not ONE word during the presidential non debates about the massive prison strike going on across the U.S. prison system. The white bourgeoisie doesn’t care. What they do care about, apparently, is the casual sexism they have endured and the workplace insults and misogyny of their employers. And, rape. And no larger culture of rape exists than the U.S. military. I trust that the contradictions are becoming clearer. One cannot turn a blind eye to the violence inflicted on the poor globally, on the women and families in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, and remain, also, silent on the subject of military rape, and complain about Trump’s sexism. YES he is sexist. But the new wave of shaming turned on Melania Trump has been truly appalling. The body shaming of Trump, the ridicule has been pretty extensive. But behind all this is the fact that the global periphery (from the point of view of western capital) is mostly black and brown, and Muslim and most everything except white. This is the colonial aspect. So deeply engrained is colonialist thinking that violence against muslims is normalized and accepted. The white liberal will decry Islam’s treatment of women, though often with little grasp of the history and culture of Islam. Most have never been to an Islamic country. Hollywood does nothing except vilify Islam and glorify the U.S. military. Also, it is not insignificant to recall that under Bill Clinton, the U.S. supported the Raul Cedras junta in Haiti that instituted a systematic policy of rape and sexual violence against the women of Haiti (the Lavalas movement, led by Aristide, was mostly driven by women). There were an estimated fifty thousand rapes directed at the political opposition (see Junta, Rape, and Religion in Haiti, 1993-1994 Terry Rey, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Vol. 15, No. 2 Fall 1999). This is who Bill and Hillary supported.

And then there is the question of Hillary’s close ties to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as well as her top aide Huma Abadin). They behead queers in Saudi Arabia. Woman are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia was the single largest contributor to the Clinton Foundation.

The intolerance of the Trump base is, of course, huge. And this touches on not just this U.S. election, but the Brexit vote, and the rise of white wing anti immigration parties in Europe. The rejection of globalization is now nearly complete. Except for the privileged white voter in the U.S. who remains *confused* by this wave of populist xenophobia and racism.

Patrick Higgins wrote recently:

“As the United States and Europe violated the sovereignty of postcolonial Middle Eastern states at will, they raised their own borders more vigilantly than ever, eager to keep out the “barbarian hordes.” Right-wing culturalist tropes began to be raised about the ostensible threat the dispossessed masses of the Middle East posed to the “traditional values” of “Western civilization.””

Higgins adds…

“in order to reclaim the internationalist and anti-imperialist legacy bequeathed by Marxism-Leninism, it will be necessary to reiterate and explain that right-wing “anti-imperialists”— Third Positionists, American constitutionalists and libertarians, and so on—are in fact not anti-imperialist at all, only appearing to be anti-imperialist in the face of left media networks in service to the interventionists, from ’68 leftist intellectuals such as Bernard Henri-Levy to old-style Yankee crusaders for the White Man’s Burden such as John McCain. The concretization of regime change as official policy comes out of the demands of finance capital, but there is nonetheless an ongoing debate within imperialism about how it should be managed. It must be kept in mind, for example, that right-wing libertarians in the United States, while objecting to regime change doctrine, wish to save the United States, not to put an end to the settler-colonial prisonhouse of nations built on genocidal property claims.”

The reality of U.S. Imperialism is the huge forgotten piece in public discourse today. The Hillary Clinton supporter, the idiotic Gloria Steinham or the opportunistic Michael Moore, or a dozen others, are pro Imperialists. Just as the pseudo left once seen in the signers of the Euston Manifesto, were pro Imperialism. The rise here in Europe of right wing parties is firstly a rejection of globalization and all austerity measures, but this dissatisfaction is delivered in the dress of nativist jingoistic volkish populism. Blame the immigrants is the call of the European bourgeoisie. They clothe such sentiments in rational discussions of protecting their fellow citizens from various diseases, or in the irrational language of pure racist demagoguery — all the while blissfully ignorant of the fact that Western imperialism has created the current refugee pseudo crises. And its clear Europe, for the record, could take in far more refugees. The total refugee numbers still amount to less than 5% of the population of Europe.

In the U.S. the Trump base is doing much the same thing, albeit with a particular near obsession with rolling back the rights of the LGBT community. And this suggests something else, culturally. Loic Wacquant made the observation that where over four decades the ghetto came to increasingly resemble the prison, that over the last two decades the prison has come to resemble the ghetto. This is something Eddie Bunker once said to me, too. While this is, I think, only partially true, it served as justification for more and more draconian human rights violation (solitary, super max joints, etc). And the new populist political movement also reflected, increasingly, a kind of gangsterism. The gangster model of social organization has taken root across the political spectrum (save for socialists). The Clinton machine just as much, or more, than Trump, operates like a mafia or the Aryan Brotherhood. Even Obama instituted a kind of *omerte* code on his administration. Public discourse of any meaningful kind has all but been completely erased. And behind this, again, is the engine of Imperialism and neo liberalism. The inflicting of austerity and privatization, and the rest of financial capitalism’s strategies for extracting maximum value from people and planet link up directly with the original colonial project and the slave trade. The privatized for profit prison is quite simply the new plantation with slave labour.

“Having no economic function, incarcerated black bodies are now simply warehoused, abused, and left to die–if not a physical death, a social death.”

Cynthia Nielsen

“Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.”

Glenn Loury

The homophobia of the Republican party is worth noting. Mike Pence seems the poster boy for homophobic panic. But again, the bourgeoisie overall still retains a certain degree of class protection. That said, the Campus Sexual Assault Study, 2007, saw that 1 in 5 women experienced a completed or attempted rape while in school. (National Institute of Justice). Globally the numbers are even worse. In 2014, 23 per cent of non-heterosexual women (those who identified their sexual orientation as lesbian, bisexual or other) interviewed in the EU indicated having experienced physical and/or sexual violence by both male and female non-partner perpetrators, compared with five per cent of heterosexual women. There is also the global issue of human trafficking. But a reminder here, that almost always the worst rape and violence against women and homosexuals occur around or near military bases. And the U.S. has close to 800 military bases worldwide. Much like gun control, violence against women cannot be separated from the violence of war and occupation. There is a very needed psychoanalytical exploration of white patriarchy as it expresses itself culturally, and in how and why it reproduces such a magnitude of violence. And indeed, the prototypical Trump follower is an exemplar of patriarchal privilege. However, its important to also remember the white liberal privilege overall in the U.S. And that includes all sexual orientations. The most vulnerable and marginalized in the gay community are poor queers of color, and transfolks. This hierarchical structure of privilege mirrors the structures of privilege overall.

The Brexit vote and the Trump victory have sent shock waves of anxiety through the ruling elite in financial institutions globally, but in particular in the crumbling EU. And the ongoing Imperialist project of the U.S. and its sidemen in Europe, particularly the U.K., that control over a trillion dollars in mining rights across Africa is ignored. Not surprisingly the largest spike in military base building has taken place in Africa over the last decade. In other words, the upset white liberals wringing their hands at the Trump victory and his threats against immigrants have been perfectly alright with the U.S. and UK bombing African and middle eastern countries as a means to control resources. As Tim Anderson put it, its *vanity anti-racism*.

The colonial white liberals so up in arms about potential Trump effects domestically have remained stone dead silent about war crimes against women and children in Yemen by Saudi Arabia (and now directly the U.S.) and U.S. and NATO crimes against civilians, women and children in Libya (where U.S. backed militias lynched countless black refugees) and U.S. and NATO bombing of Iraq. Silent. The only conclusion one can arrive at is that Muslim women don’t really count. Unless of course its a protest against poverty or child soldiers or genital mutilation, or some other issue to which white paternalism can be applied. And then of course, one could discuss Honduras and Haiti. Or Obama’s relentless erasure of civil liberties.

The legitimate fear of violence against queers, and an uptick in hate crimes in the U.S. cannot, in the end, be separated from six decades of institutional neglect of the poor across the U.S. A neglect that rises to the level of sadism. Nor from the realities of mass incarceration, and the militarizing of police. All of which took place during both Democratic and Republican presidencies. Nor can it be separated from a culture and entertainment industry that manufactures endless narratives valorizing male violence, militarism, and tropes that posit the police as the last protection from a criminal underclass (nearly always black and brown). The American public has been trained and inundated with popular entertainments that are now so saturated with excessive sadism and violence that it is weird when one doesn’t see such violence in film and TV. And its not violence per se, as I have often said, it is a particular form of casual violence, usually in the hands of men in uniform, that is given legitimacy. Violence in the hands of anyone else is transgressive and unnatural.

The real question is, finally, how do such grotesque immoral people control the government. Trump is picking from the same class of neo con hawk as Hillary planned to — Bob Corker replaces Michelle Flournoy. I don’t personally see much difference. Gingrich or Nuland? The same privately funded think tanks churn out these ghouls. The Enterprise Institute, CATO, the Heritage Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institute, The Center for American Progress, The Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Hoover Institute. The list is pretty long. Whats pretty funny, but also revealing, is that think tanks labeled *liberal* (like Center for Strategic and International Studies) include members such as Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak. The point is that the entirety of this gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, from Wall Street to the NGOs have been in the service, for sixty or seventy years, along with the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and U.S. State Department, of destroying any socialist movements globally that happen to occur. And with squashing dissent domestically. And with disseminating a constant never ending stream of anti communist, and anti socialist propaganda, and with the dissemination of propaganda to label alternative views and values as crazy or fringe (the smearing of Stein/Baraka is the most recent clear example).

So forgive me if I can’t find it in me to care much about Trump. If protesting Trump expands to become a protest against neo liberalism, against militarism and war, and against white supremacy — then count me in. Or lets have some teach-ins. Until then we can all try to educate ourselves and others.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/15/the-long-shadows/

Just want to point out that ya don't have to be 'educated' to be petty booj, don't take no degree to run(and actually work at) a small company, manage some franchises. These complement and outnumber the 'professionals'.

Degradation

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Nicholas Rubinstein

“…men have less scruple in offending
one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of
obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity
for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment
which never fails”
Machiavelli

“The endgame can never be played with the same conviction with which it was played when the game was being invented.”
Donald Kuspit

“In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.”
Ernest Becker

The *fake news* speech Obama delivered recently, and the accompanying articles in those organs of Imperial rule, the NY Times and Washington Post, are only the latest, albeit most extreme, expressions of criminalizing dissent that began, really, if one wants to go all the way back, with the Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1917 and the Espionage and Sedition Act also of 1917.

Geoffrey Skoll wrote…
“The Smith Act, also known as the Alien Registration Act of 1940,
made political beliefs and activities conditions of immigration, and made
advocacy of overthrowing the government a crime (Goldstein 1978; Preston
1963). These laws, although couched in the apparently objective language of
the Anglo-American legal tradition, aimed at suppression of what authorities
deemed dangerous ideas held by dangerous people, particularly the recent
immigrants from Eastern Europe and Black migrants from the South to the
North. The confluence of politics, political beliefs, and status identities did
not just apply to nationalities or ethnic groups, it also applied to salient racial
categories in America.”

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Edvard Munch (Dance of Life, 1899, detail).

All of these government legislative acts were expressions of ruling class anxiety about the masses getting the wrong ideas into their heads. The attacks on organized labor in the summer of 1919 included a ramped up racial element as the black migration north was creating worry in the white worker, and acute worry in the guardians of Capital. Following WW2 the anti communism that can be traced back to the 1860s was re-branded in a new hyper jingoistic paranoia with the McCarthy witch hunts. Then in the 1960s the FBI began pro actively targeting black radicals. But cutting across all of these phases of manufacturing fear was a growing emphasis on exploiting social anxiety. People were encouraged to distrust each other. To fear their neighbor. The post 9/11 propaganda, while certainly pushing an Islamophobic sentiment, has also ratcheted up a generalized fear as a normal and even salutary psychological state. The haute bourgeoisie have been the most responsive to this latest *fake news* ploy by the government. Because firstly, it is Obama saying it, and second because it flatters their well marketed sense of self. That self is the new rational man, the sober realistic individual. And nobody has delivered that sense of sobriety as well as Obama. In the coming decades, if any of us survive, Obama will be looked back on as the most perfect marketing creation in history. (I suspect Michelle Obama may well be a Democratic Party candidate before too long).

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Helena Almeida

The average white liberals response to Fidel Castro’s death speaks to this idea of propagandized white individuality. Castro’s support of African independence, his solidarity against apartheid and the achievements domestically in the removal of illiteracy in Cuba, and a world class health care system are mostly ignored. And part of this is linked to the underreported rightward lurch of the Hollywood entertainment industry. And one part of this rightward lurch was to re-configure the white supremacist backdrop to American social history. The noted *Southern Strategy* that Nixon employed was to later morph into a more stealth racism that sought to present itself as a progressive integrationist trope. And indeed on certain levels this was true. There was a certain clear progress. But the backdrop remained white. Hollywood has never really capitulated its white supremacist model for story telling. And by the time of Obama this deep racist history was simply omitted. The omission was not total, of course. But the ‘white savior’ theme did become pronounced, but even that was not the real story. The severity of the U.S. political class’ racism was muted — films on J. Edgar Hoover smoothed over the virulent hatred Hoover had for blacks and latinos. And the viciousness of U.S. police racism and a deeply racist judicial system were all but ignored. In a sense this was Hollywood doing a ‘limited hang out’ on white supremacism. The very phrase ‘white supremacism’ was reserved for hood wearing Klansmen and Aryan nationalists. The deeper racial resentments of institutional America were invisible in media and in Hollywood film. And increasingly along side this was a gradual removal of working class voices. Today Hollywood is the provenance of the very affluent white bourgeoise. Class is acutely segregated in Hollywood film. The most honest depiction of working class America in Hollywood is likely The Simpsons. A show like Orange is the New Black can serve as the default and accepted position of whiteness in Hollywood. And with Obama as President, the affluent educated classes can congratulate themselves on their progressive entertainment products as well as point to the fact that a post racial America must exist because, after all, the President himself is black.

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Janine Antoni

The post Vietnam policies of the ruling class was to merge Communists, blacks, and later Muslims — along with hippies and anything that smacked of anti-establishment values into one basket. All of it was to become associated with anti-Americanism. The now volunteer military was to be very consciously fawned over and this militarized hyper patriotism theme was seen in everything from Hollywood film to sporting events and journalism. And while the right wing outlets like FOX were obvious targets of derision for liberals, the fact is that the liberal media (CNN and MSNBC et al) were actually just as jingoistic. With the advent of 9/11 the entire apparatus of propaganda in the U.S. merged into a single message: the war on terror must be fought. And it must be won. And that war is a war on the global south. The side bar effects included an exaggerated coverage of any kind of social transgression or crime. From sexual predators, to high crime inner cities and black gangs, to immigration threats and even super viruses lurking at the gates to the white world. Fortress America was born. And even the weather became criminalized (Killer storms, etc). Drug addicts and the homeless were targets. This marked a resurgent Puritanism that saw that which waited at the gates to the Fortress as being not only dangerous and violent, but also unclean. The rise of health care concerns with allergies was just one by product of this. I knew people who claimed tests had proven they had an allergy to trees. Alongside this ran the dramatic spike in the use of psychoactive drugs. The white class were taking industrial level amounts of serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). The culture of anti depressants became an almost fashion in the white professional class. By 1990 over 650,000 prescriptions were being written for SSRIs. In 2009 it was estimated that close to 15% of adults took SSRIs, and that figure does not include those under the age of twenty. And there are increasing numbers of teenagers who are prescribed anti depressants. There are currently studies underway to see if triple reuptake versions might be even more effective. But effective at what, exactly? The notion of depression itself is very opaque and a society that is this depressed might well want to examine what they mean when they say they are depressed. But to ask that, of course, means asking a whole lot of other questions. In the society of manufactured fears the notion of depression is mitigated by an anxiety that rises out of a completely mystified idea of the social good. Of what society itself means. What meaning means.

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Haroshi

The postmodern critique of modernism always included the idea of modernism as totalizing — and that it propagated the metanarratives of the white bourgeoisie. This critique was both right and not right. The ‘not right’ part is a lot of what I have tried to write about in this blog. The modernists of the late 19th century were already driven by a desire to find a way out of the social matrix of linear perspective, the Renaissance framing of the world had become ossified in the Western psyche. Geoff Skoll wrote….“Thoroughly bourgeois, they also strove to escape the incunabula of capital and the market.” There was in many artists an acute awareness of their class and race. But more, there was a search for revelation — for some way out of the dynamics of capital, of industrialism and rationality. Increasingly I have come to feel that the mid century exhaustion of modernist energy marked an exhaustion of resistance. And in a sense this is misunderstood by the left as much as the right. Or rather, the right never cared anyway. The reactionary who validates by rote the hierarchies of the white paternalist Capitalist system are quite indifferent to the expressions of artists. The left however never really could admit the importance of art. Even today I hear words like *precious* tossed around with a sneer. How that happened is, I suspect, very complex.

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Blow Up (dr. : Michelangelo Antonioni) 1966.

The financial phase of Capitalism reflected the schism in modernist art by mid century. And the growing neurosis of the bourgeoisie. The sense of unreality, of confusion that came from separating the ephemeral from the concrete, was a huge factor in the arts — from Abstract Expressionism to the Theatre of the Absurd. And in film, the most collective of art forms and the one most linked to Capital, it was the secondary and buried anxieties of Western society that were coming to eclipse aspects of even the most commercial products. Antonioni, in hindsight, looms as the chronicler of bourgeois neurosis. Blow Up was the search for that which isn’t there, that which the system of exploitation had removed. What was it that was removed? On the surface (as found in the Cortozar short story on which the screenplay is based) the answer is a murder. In this sense, it resembles Highsmith’s novel Tremor of Intent, Coppola’s The Conversation, and probably a dozen black mask crime novels. But it is echoed in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, as well. And in a perverse way, Strangers on a Train, and I Confess. The Freudian primal scene now looms as the shadow narrative. And the sense of Capital’s lack of concrete representation is now tied in directly with libidinal repression. Antonioni also included scenes referencing Guy Fawkes Day — not arbitrarily to be sure. The trust of that which we cannot see is imprinted from Old Testament writings. Paul on the road to Damascus. Blinded by the light but hearing the voice of Christ. Throughout the King James Bible, old and new testaments, there is a sense of voices without location, and of something very like cinematic reality.

Peter Goodman writes, in a short essay on the film:

“The new economy portrayed in the film is based on style and marketing, not the production of commodities. The worn-out relics of industry have become the target of Thomas’s talent for aestheticizing. Early in the picture, Thomas {the photographer} emerges in disguise from a flophouse where he was surreptitiously taking black & white photographs for his photo book, which will be presumably be a high-brow project establishing his credentials as a serious artist. He photographs the derelicts of working-class life, dispassionately presenting their grotesque bodies as aesthetic spectacle. Nineteenth-century novelistic realism or Italian neo-realism would have represented the lives of such people sympathetically and in-depth, as the victims of industrialization. For postmodernity, industry is somehow not as “real” as marketing, the aesthetic “value-added” that makes the difference between success and failure in an economy which has largely solved the problem of production.”

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Lori Nix

The Horkheimer and Adorno riff on sacrifice is germane here, too.
“The level of mythology at which the self appears as sacrifice to itself is an
expression not so much of the original conception of popular religion, but
the inclusion of myth in civilization. In the history of class conflict, the
enmity of the self to sacrifice implied a sacrifice of the self, inasmuch as it
was paid for by a denial of nature in man for the sake of domination over
non-human nature and over other men. This very denial, the nucleus of all
civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality:
with the denial of nature in man not merely the telos of the outward control
of nature but the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged…”

But narrative in Hollywood no longer operates this way. It is anti narrative in a sense. The 19th century novel developed as monopoly Capitalism and colonialism developed. The consumer, a member of a market, was becoming defined by purchasing power. The observer, the tracker of market trends, the detective in a search for financial clues. The Hollywood film of today is almost post financial capital. It is the story of the commodity viewing the viewer. And perhaps this is the secret of a surveillance state. The ostensive viewer is really being viewed viewing. Stories almost do not exist today without recourse to closed circuit camera footage. The trope of facial recognition is one that *identifies* subjects, who are otherwise without identity. The photographer in Blow Up is looking for something, and an aspect of that is an identity. Today the public is like that which was removed in the park of Blow Up, a predictive effect of algorithms, a subject waiting to materialize. And there is the linkage with guilt. To materialize is to be accused, somehow.

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Ferdinand Hodler

Skoll quotes Franco Moretti…

“It is, therefore, completely logical that stream of consciousness is eminently
paratactic: the absence of internal order and of hierarchies indicates its
reproduction of a form of consciousness which is subjugated to the principle
of the equivalence of commodities. It indicates that use-values—the concrete
qualities of any given commodity—are by now perceived as secondary. . . .
What is left to fire the imagination and inflame desire is only the overall
attraction of the chaotic and unattainable collection of commodities…”

The post modern elimination of liberation as something of material realness was the product, in the end, of corporate and ruling class interests emphasizing the abstraction quality of identity as the real. But by also substituting a pre-made self as stand in for self in general. The shopper-man, homo-praestino perhaps. My latin is almost non existant. But this subject position was one that needed constant updating. The white self, that which unconsciously *knows* that Castro was helping liberate Africa, a former colonial holding of Europe, of white Europe, must demean and stigmatize. Today the bourgeoisie in the U.S. is in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown.

“Just as a part of every analysand fears analysis and resists it, mature adults in contemporary societies fear losing the securities of hierarchical
control. It is safer to keep things as they are. It is safer not to know how elites control people to extract wealth. It is safer not to take responsibility

for their own lives but to hand it over to someone else whom they can blame if things go wrong….{ } The analogy between psychoanalytically defined repression and societal level political repression is not just simile or metaphor. Despite psychoanalytic concentration on the personal and psychological, much, if not all, psychological repression finds reinforcement—and often even its origins—in massive, orchestrated social, cultural, and political repression..”

Geoffrey Skoll

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Achilles Gildo Rizzoli


This is a crucial aspect of understanding today’s cultural meltdown. The end of modernism, which for the sake of discussion can be said to coincide with the social upheaval of the sixties, has ushered in the post humaness of today. One of Skoll’s most brilliant observations is that social control is about repression. Psychological repression and political repression are inseparable. They are interdependent. Micro systems of enforcement reflect larger, even global, systems of enforcement. Today, the micro systems of coercion are mostly invisible to the average American (and European, really). And this leads Skoll to the very perceptive observation that the post modern critique of Hardt and Negri serves as counter revolutionary. This is also the failure of more obvious counter revolutionaries like Zizek. When the oppressor exists nowhere, there is nothing to revolt against. Which is why so much post structuralist thought instinctively supports globalization. Why the educated bourgeoisie are appalled at the Brexit vote. Why so few applaud the legacy and achievements of the Cuban Revolution.

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*Donut Queen*, photographer unknown. 1950s.


But to return to the idea of culture, today. Hollywood produces a never ending non stop stream of reactionary police state apologia. But none of it is convincing, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because narrative and art in general is no longer grasped or engaged with as it was only fifty or sixty years ago. Much as Obama represented a black man as manufactured by the Cosby Show (per Skol) the new gay rights movement is subsumed by TV and film to help with reinforcing a hierarchy of social status that leaves whiteness at the top. Civil rights was absorbed by Obama, as queer rebellion was absorbed by TV characters who comply with the status quo but happen to be gay — everything is now a reflection of simulacra.

“Discourses about race in the United States are not just the products
of structuring influences and regulatory technologies. They are produced
in the representations and logic of commonsense racial knowledge
constituted in media such as television news and entertainment.
Law and legal discourse is crucial as a subject of media representation.
The dramatic investment in law enforcement and a fascination with
legal discourse are timeless staples of American television. With this
investment, television programs about crime and the criminal justice
system function as a means of establishing the normative legitimacy and
moral propriety of the present legal system no matter how corrupt and
abusive. So, for example, story lines about the lives and antics of the
rich, famous, and corrupt are commonplace, as are narratives about the
arrest and incarceration of black males. Stories about the unbridled
growth of global corporate capital, the increasing concentration of the
ownership structure of the telecommunications industry for example,
are rare. In matters of race and representation, law and legal discourse
are especially crucial because they are the structuring scenes or sites in
which organizing narratives about fairness, civility, propriety, transgression,
and responsibility are framed.”
Herman Gray

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Andy Warhol

The frame is always ruling white elite, and even when its not, it is. By which I mean that so pervasive is this dominant frame that all countering frames are just subsumed into the single frame of white rule. The language of Television, today, is one of nearly absolute bourgeois whiteness. It is hard to even notice how uniform and homogenous is the dialogue for 90% of studio product. Subjectivity, the subjectivity of the underclass is non existent. The lower classes, the marginalized figures and the images of decay are always narrated by the ruling class (even when silent). The average American largely goes about his day to day life narrating his own sense of identity and place using this borrowed vocabulary. These are broad statements, and not accurate in their totality, but they represent a growing basic truth; the screen life of the West is white corporate and affluent. And screen reality is more important, holds more authority, than individual experience. The sense of this was part of the prophetic vision of late modernism. The rise of Pop Art was already expressing a sense of this loss of expression — the missing experience, the missing primal scene, the primal murder, was all being erased. In its place stood soup cans. And in a sense, those soup cans of Warhol have come to feel menacing and malignant. Warhol was not just displaying the commodity, he was doing something akin to a reverse Xray. The sense of the viewer being viewed congealed in the best work that came of Pop. There was a deep sense of social anxiety in that work. The well known ‘gold Marilyn’ made in 1962, the year of Monroe’s death, looms as something like a Byzantine momenti mori. And this comparison is likely not accidental (I’m sure I read that somewhere, but can’t remember where) because Warhol’s work starts to feel like the post script to Antonioni. The photographer of ‘swinging London’, an empty man in search of relevance (per the opening sequence at the homeless shelter) finds the mystery in the series of photos he takes — where it no longer matters what is there or what isn’t. Fincher’s one really rather good film, Zodiac, is another study of this almost Warholian anti mystery. The identity (!) of the killer ceases to be the point. It is that gnawing sense of unease in contemporary Western society that what you look for can’t be found. And this inability to secure a definition, or to find solutions, is the quantum world that marks the end of something, the end of Newtonian physics. But it is also the rearing of the ugly head of the Death Drive. Advanced Capital is now so thoroughly contaminated with premonitions of apocalypse that it is hard to find one’s way out of it. The detective trope that began with scientific advances in optics, revealing a world of previously unseen details is ending in the culture of surplus details.

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Jasper Johns

Warhol would have loved Trump. In fact Trump is a Warhol artwork come to life in some strange reverse osmosis. For the death drive culture of Capital today is also the culture of waste, of refuse, or anality. The late Pop period luxuriated in shit; both as allegory and literally as mock outrage or scandal. Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ is perhaps the most notable example. But Donald Kuspit was right to note that the sort of post Pop avant garde was reactionary, and self loathing, finally. The debased, or the abject, were not allegory, but simply shit.
“…the avant-garde became reactionary the moment it was completely swallowed up by capitalism — they’re just shamelessly perverse, like the sex-scandal and corrupt politicians and violent and sex-mad movies that American society seems to mass produce. And also, like them, tragicomic: their shit symbolizes the comic tragedy that art has become and the tragic comedy that America has become. To hide behind a symbol is a form of shame, and shame is socializing…”
Donald Kuspit

I should add another quote here, from Kuspit, from the same short essay…

“The advanced work of art has become a luxury item, the artist’s expensive gift to the advanced capitalist, the most esteemed person in our society, all the more so because making money has become an advanced art in the minds of many, suggesting that the wealthy businessman has a creative gift. Thus the divine rights of the rich. The rich capitalist is a god in all but name, and he must be worshipped and appeased with the fruits of art — a form of tribute and homage — who rewards the artist by making him a rich capitalist — deifying him. “

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Richard Hamilton

Thus, the gift to the ruling class is one’s own feces. For this is the real allegory of the art market. The psychic strip mining of consumer culture has reached new levels of violence.

“For this is the essential meaning of private secret: that entry
must be invited. Consequently the spaces in which we are
exposed owing to undress, lavatory or sexual functions, the
requirements of quiet or undisturbed activity, tend to be
enclosed, lockable. We may even resist telephone intrusion by
leaving the receiver off. We may browse among a friend’s books
on the shelf but will not look inside his desk. We knock before
entering the closed door of the bath even in our own homes. The
establishment of this boundary of privacy and secrecy is conventional
and if we traverse it unawares we avert the eyes and
hastily retreat with apologies. “
Donald Meltzer

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British sailor removing leg irons from slave. Late 1800s.


The search for the missing self, from Antonioni to, perhaps, Warhol, can be traced back to that most prophetic of narraters, Herman Melville. Whether Bartelby or Ahab or Ishmael or Billy Budd, the sense of an impending social violence never leaves. Meltzer suggests that a theory of violence is predicated upon boundaries and secrecy. Violence is violation of the boundaries we create, and socially, at a macro level, this is also what Capital does. The movement of Capital is one (usually) of penetration. The symbolism is difficult to ignore. Nor is it arbitrary. One of the ways individuals manufacture protective screens is through meaningless talk. Pinter was the great explorer of the menace of meaningless conversation. Bion and Klein both wrote of this screening protection in terms of generalized group behavior. One can look at social organizing on the family level and extrapolate from there. Violation is critical to childhood development in the sense that it must be adjusted for. Reich wrote extensively about what he called *character armoring*.

“The social armour that presents as comradery and my-life-is-an-open-book is typical of the politician in our culture, just as the facade of typical-family man is often the screen for dedicated perversity.”
Donald Meltzer

The assumed authority of institutions, and their political representatives is rarely given much consideration today. This, in one way, is the story of *fake news*. The NY Times, with a long history of proven lies is still the benchmark for authoritative reporting. As Metlzer notes, the display of rank, of uniform, is inherently intrusive. Uniformed police assume and are given a degree of confessional conversation. There is much more to say about all this, and I hope to do so next posting. Bion wrote a good deal about narcissism, and the narcissistic organization of the infantile private body. And more germane perhaps is the topic of degradation. For this is one of the cornerstone realities of contemporary society, I believe. What Meltzer calls the coarsening of ethical values. The age of Trump is really the age of neo liberalism, the age of the death of whiteness. And of patriarchy. Capitalism is death, and itself is dying.

In dreams there is a logic of degradation. The splitting of the self, and this is an important aspect of aesthetics.

“But alertness to the manifestations of aesthetic conflict soon makes one recognize that the most important aspects of the degradation occur in this very dimension: degraded beauty of the objects and degradation.”
Meltzer

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Vasudeo Gaitonde

The logic moves from known or identifiable person, to unknown, to inanimate object, to vegetable or mineral, to feces. Degraded beauty is the arena of keenest insight. In a society of hegemonic surveillance, of constant accusation, the shame of the private — both of body and soul, is the real violence of contemporary life. The physical violence of the state is enormous, of course. It is now, at all times, sadistic. But behind even that is a kind of contagion of psychic life. Secrecy is outward directed. Privacy is individual, is the construction of the self. When a society grants authority to the invasion, the penetration of privacy, the result is a loss of capacity for intimacy, a loss of understanding of the boundaries of the self. Shakespeare, the greatest practitioner of the private, is performed today as if he were the author of a DC Comix. Strindberg and Melville are incomprehensible, I think. Dostoyevsky an enigma. Hierarchy itself is sadistic.

“The other reason to fear the empire stems from its role in class war. From
its beginning, capitalism had to gain surplus value from labor. The same
holds true in the twenty-first century. The empire ensures that the supply of
value from labor continues uninterrupted by enforcing labor discipline and
protecting against revolt. The burgeoning of militarized policing, surveillance,
and support of death squads and other terrorists organizations serve in
the global class war at least as much as their employment in imperialist
adventures and aggression.”
Geoffrey Skoll

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Wolfgang Laib

Trump is a figure that triggers associations with rape. Capitalism is the macro story of rape. If Hillary Clinton was actually the more clearly dangerous political leader, Trump is the better symbol for the end of Capital. The allegory of penetrative capital is already being written and Trump is not even sworn in. The degrading of culture and the intentional and almost aggressive trivializing of art is not insignificant. Any dismissive attitude toward art is revealing of individual pathology, I think. I end with this lengthy quote from Meltzer, taken from a lecture he gave in 1963.
“We are agreed that the successful work of art is compelling; it
induces a process in us, an experience whereby the viewer’s
integration is called upon in the depressive position to restrain
his attacking impulses, for the sake of a good introjection; it
means allowing the good object to make a good kind of
projection into one’s inner world: It requires judgement to
distinguish the good from the bad processes of sadism in the
artist; and masochism in himself, the viewer. I think it follows,
therefore, that the experience of viewing art can be extremely
taxing and extremely hazardous, but that the art-world, as an
institution within our culture, provides a medium for people to
carry out this introjective process in an atmosphere of relative
external safety, corresponding to the safety of the little infant in
the relative restraint of the mother’s arms. When one walks into
an art gallery, one is surrounded by other people and there are
guards and so on; all this constitutes a continual external
support to one’s internal safeguards against attacking the pieces
of art that are exhibited there. Similarly at a concert. It is well
known that, in contrast to this safe viewing of art, at times of
revolution or warfare, pillaging includes a wholesale destruction
of everything of artistic value. There are instances when
people of extremely unbalanced mental state have attacked
priceless works of art in galleries. “

http://john-steppling.com/2016/11/degradation/#comments

To Go the Way of the Great Auk: the Clintons and the Media
by JOHN STEPPLING

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Plantagenet, I will; and like thee, Nero,
 Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.

Shakespeare, Henry VI

A number of writers and critics have noted the astounding smugness and outsized indignation of white liberals during this election season. The Clinton supporters, basically. And I think it is useful to examine the relationship between the media and the Clintons. For no political mafia has ever penetrated Hollywood and NY media to the extent the Clintons have. Shows such as Madame Secretary and House of Cards could well have been scripted by the Clinton inner circle. Hell, by Bill himself. And outlets like Huffington Post and MSNBC and CNN operate as the press outlets for the DNC.

But the real nadir of media capitulation and bad faith was the response to the brutal murder of the Russian diplomat Andrei Karlov in Istanbul, on video, at an art opening. The western press spun this as a freedom fighter attacking the brutal Russian empire and defending Allepo. Almost nothing was said about the family of the slain Russian, or about terrorism. I guess terrorism doesn’t exist if its directed at the enemy du jour. The celebrations on the streets of Aleppo seemed to have been erased by western TV and print editors, too. And all of this is in line, of course, with Hillary Clinton’s (and her advisors) pathological and obsessive hatred of Putin. And with the Clinton imprint on mainstream media.

So, back to those white liberals. Every single person (save one) that I once knew in theatre and in Hollywood, are liberal and none of them really do much in the way of research or political reading. All of them are arch Democrats. And never before, I don’t think ever, has an election so starkly revealed the stratification of classes and sub classes, even, in the U.S. I have found a just amazing, almost surreal level of wilful and intentional blindness on the part of liberal america to the crimes of the Clintons, and to the basic corruption of the Democratic Party. One can say over and over and over and over and over that Clinton orchestrated a neo nazi fascist coup in Ukraine, a fascist junta in Honduras and an illegal assassination of a foreign leader in Libya. You can say this again and again and I guarantee you will get no response. The stunning silence of white liberal America to the crimes of the Clintons stands as the most profound element in the entire scenario of this election.

The propaganda against Russia, culminating in the truly grotesque coverage of Karlov’s murder, has been pitched at levels that I’ve personally never seen or heard before. And then there is a strange sort of cognitive dissonance regarding the *fake news* issue, launched, of course, by Obama. And this was the lame duck Obama, a figure that actually the public has not seen before, or seen very little. The urbane repressed buttoned down lawyer is being gradually peeled back and an oddly callused cruel figure emerges. A borderline sadist even. And while we know for certain that Hillary is a sadist, I think Obama is at least her equal. But of late Obama has exhibited a curious if not unsettling lack of proportion between his comments and his relaxed manner and style. It is the relaxation, one must say, of a sociopath. I don’t say this glibly. But during the fake news remarks I felt as if this must have been how detectives felt interviewing Ted Bundy. All smiles, winks, and good natured charm. But he was discussing a new open war on dissent. Obama initiated drone assassination and discussed it in the same tone as he discussed his vacations. In fact he joked about drone killing at the Correspondent’s Dinner a couple years back. There is, in this lame duck version of Obama, the sense of letting his character armoring slip just a little. And it reveals just another layer of armoring. There is such an empty core to this man that I think he made the perfect chameleon. He was the black Max Headroom. I am reminded of the Book of Job…Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue.

That the economy is now a disaster cannot be hidden. In fact, 90% of Obama’s new jobs were part time. Women were hardest hit during his eight years.Traditional fields for women workers in medicine and education were the biggest losers. Full time employment, the traditional 9 to 5 secure fixed job is all but extinct. There are fewer of those jobs today than during the great depression. But this is not anything that really affects the haute bourgeoisie, the affluent white liberals from Connecticut, Long Island, or Westchester County, or Bel Air, the Pacific Palisades, or Westwood. Or Menlo Park and Mill Valley. The educated classes. They don’t work day gigs. They don’t punch time clocks. They inherit and their family helps find them managerial positions or something akin. These are the people disproportionately visible in media. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck. And this is the point. The stratification of classes. And the markers for these class divides are becoming more fixed. If you use public transportation, for example, you are part of the lumpen masses these days. Nobody rides a bus to work at NBC or SONY pictures or Time Warner. Except maybe the kitchen staff.

Now, Trump is obviously, if we can judge from the last six months, a very thin skinned and rather terrified man. The son of a slum lord and a man who constantly seeks attention, and who wanted to be the biggest swinging dick in the house…well, once the Casino, now the White House. But he knows he’s not. And that can be a very dangerous personality flaw for someone with power. Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric are perhaps the greatest indictment against Trump. I keep finding myself thinking of Roger Ballen’s famed photos of the Plattland farmers in South Africa; in particular Dressie & Cassie, the unfortunate twin brothers of the Transvaal. Don Jr and might well think, ‘there but for fortune’. But I digress.

The protests in the street, the agitation around counting ballots, and the open charges of treason — this is the stuff of a Capra movie on acid. It’s a strange dystopic vision. (And as ridiculous in its way as the catered sit in for gun control earlier this year, also courtesy of the Democratic Party leadership). And all in service of somehow getting Hillary Clinton elected. As, I guess, these people feel was ordained by a higher power, and hence their sense of the world coming apart at the seams. Why has god forsaken them, one can almost hear such screams in the night. Honestly, the degradation of electoral politics has hit bottom. It has to be clear, to even the most indoctrinated, that the voting system is broken. The problem is, for all the Diebald troubles and hacking claims and the electoral college; the real problem is simply basic inequality. Period. There are a fair number of people with relative wealth and there are a shit load of people with nothing. People who have no savings, and who live week to week, even with a family. People who pay rent, use food stamps if they can get them, and who if they get sick, stay sick. Or die. People who, if their children get seriously ill, will borrow themselves into lifetime debt to save their child. A debt they cant hope to ever crawl out from under. People who count pennies to buy their Copenhagen or Skoal — and weigh that against another tin of coffee. This is the America who didn’t vote. They didn’t because they are busy surviving. And the average liberal heaps scorn on these people as apathetic or selfish or whatever. The truth is, the average professional class white liberal has no fucking idea what poverty feels like. None. And the poor know what the affluent liberal does not. And that is that Hillary doesnt give anymore of a shit about them than the Donald.

The obvious take away from this has been touched on by several writers; Diana Johnstone wrote

“The entire Western establishment, roughly composed of neoconservative ideologues, liberal interventionists, financial powers, NATO, mainstream media and politicians in both the United States and Western Europe, committed to remaking the Middle East to suit Israel and Saudi Arabia and to shattering impertinent Russia, have been thrown into an hysterical panic at the prospect of their joint globalization project being sabotaged by in ignorant intruder.”

and Jonathan Cook noted…

“Much more significantly, the systematic deceptions perpetrated by corporate media for many decades have left swaths of western publics distrustful and cynical. Social media has only added to widespread alienation because it has made it easier to expose to readers these mainstream deceptions. Trump, like Brexit, is a symptom of the growing disorientation and estrangement felt by western electorates.
But the claim of “fake news” does usefully offer western security agencies, establishment politicians and the corporate media a powerful weapon to silence their critics. After all, these critics have no platform other than independent websites and social media. Shut down the sites and you shut up your opponents.”

And Andre Damon summed it up best, however…

“There is not an ounce of democratic content in the positions of either faction of the state and intelligence apparatus and nothing to choose from between the arch-reactionary Trump and the veteran warmonger Clinton. However the disputes are resolved, the result will be a massive escalation of war abroad and the attack on the working class within the United States.”

Indeed. And again, the leaked emails were real, the content was real, just as were those strange connections between Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Clintons have long had close ties with the royal family and never once have either of them made mention of the gross human rights violations of the monarchy. Obama, too, has said nothing critical of the Saudis. These politicians all answer to the same people and places. (read Hillary’s speeches to her Wall Street backers!).

Now a recent poll indicated, interestingly, that almost 70% of Americans didn’t buy the Russia hacking claims. And half of America doesnt trust either party. And why should they? The new star of the DNC appears to be Keith Ellison of whome Bruce Dixon wrote… “Ellison is black. He’s the first Muslim elected to Congress, he’s smart enough and telegenic. He votes infallibly to support the apartheid regime in Israel, and he says if it were up to him there’d have been a no-fly zone (and possible shooting war with the Russians) a long time ago.” In other words, Ellison is another pro-interventionist, a friend of foreign war profiteers, and a man who has done everything in his power not to offend anyone. You don’t get to the top tier of the DNC without following the script.

The anger of the bourgeoisie then is about something else. Its not really policy, its about their own entitlement. Its about their sense of affront and insult. This is what I keep seeing and reading. They are insulted and hurt. I’ve never seen such hostility and anger on social media. Never. I see a constant stream of insults directed at Trump. I see his wife insulted, and his children. And while it is easy enough to hate and even fear aspects of Trump (and his taste and vulgarity) the real anger seems directed even more acutely at anyone who disagrees with their demand for the coronation of Clinton. The underclass in the U.S. has been brutalized by an increasingly militarized domestic police apparatus, and by a nakedly racist judicial system. They have seen whatever small safety net they once had be reduced to almost nothing. And they are right to fear Trump’s appointments. Just as they would have been right to fear Clinton’s. This is now an institutional machine of control and domination, and in many ways it is running on auto pilot now. The stand off at Standing Rock was representative of the ruling elite’s strategy. If it becomes a big enough nuisance, then just adjust course and get what is wanted another way. The resistance at Standing Rock was important, however. Perhaps mostly symbolically, but important nonetheless. For it demonstrated a level of awakening for many. Anytime the underlcass organizes, they achieve victories. And this is because the great giant is actually very weak.

Trump’s appointments are actually pretty predictable. No president in fifty years has not chosen from the banking elite, and the upper echelon of the military, and over the last twenty or so years from the corporate CEO class. And since Bill Clinton the very worst millionaires that can be found were put in positions of influence, and certainly since Bush/Cheney the neo-con group has retained considerable power. There is an inexorable drive toward purely authoritarian policing of what is now viewed as a disposable population. It is happening regardless of who is elected. There are no jobs and there won’t be any jobs. There is an environmental crisis and pollution crisis, and none of that would have been made any better under Clinton. One cannot keep hawking military hardware, fighter jets, and battleships and be at all green. The desire for this ruling cabal is global hegemony. That is the delusional dream of the U.S. ruling political class of both parties. Hence the over 4 billion dollars a DAY spent on defence. The U.S. leads the world in weapons sales. We sell to Saudi Arabia first so they can destroy the poor and helpless nation of Yemen. And in fact, the U.S. sent advisors directly to Riyadh to help coordinate the vicious bombing of that small country that left a half million children starving (liberals compassion is more concerned with public restroom choices). The U.S. helps sell to ISIS, too. And to Israel. There is nobody we won’t sell to in fact. Business is business and war is the biggest business in the world. So all the chatter about the Paris climate talks, and all the health care cut backs that are coming, and the intensification of this war on free speech — all of that was in the cards either way. The attacks on minorities, women, the LGBT community is coming under Trump — it was going to come, but in another fashion, under Clinton. AGAIN THEY BEHEAD GAY PEOPLE IN SAUDI ARABIA. And Clinton is basically underwritten by the House of Saud. Women have suffered hugely in places like Haiti and Honduras and Libya and Ukraine from Secretary of State Clinton’s policies. And nothing is going to help climate change except a radical and total change in living. And the death of Capitalism, frankly.

The authority structure is afraid. They are afraid of China and Russia and they are even more afraid of the unhappy and now more and more desperate American working class. And the poor. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. And its growing. And it is reaching a kind of maximum limit. It is a gulag of made up of the poor, primarily black and brown, and it is a place to which the rich are never invited. How many people exactly can the system keep in containers? We may well find out. Jeff Sessions will want as many as possible, thats for sure. Trump is an ignorant man and no doubt it is dawning on him just how over his head he is now, and since I actually believe he began this with no desire to really win, he is probably in a state of near panic right now. His advisors, people like Steve Bannon, sense their own lack of ability to run a country, too, I would guess. Recent photos of Bannon reveal that deer caught in the headlights look.

The thing that will become the signature of Trumps first 100 days is going to happen at the nuts and bolts level. I suspect things, daily bureaucratic things are going to grind to a halt. This is the 100 days of incompetence in the most basic operations of government. Trump will escalate his twitter output, though, and perhaps the eventual Trump library will all be tweets. And built in Vegas.

What comes from all this depends on people deciding to emulate the small symbolic victory of Standing Rock. It does not come from an entitled elite petulantly demanding their war loving sociopath replace the other parties vulgarian and authoritarian clown. This is 21st century post modern fascism. Its only which style code you feel best with. Reject this binary world view. Reject any candidate who endorses U.S. Imperialism and 800 plus military bases throughout the world. Stop all U.S. intervention and stop believing the manufactured narratives on Syria, about Russia, about Castro, and about China. Most everything MSNBC tells you can be turned on its head…and it will be closer to the actual truth. The U.S. is far more guilty of everything it charges other countries with doing. As such Samantha Power deserves a special seat in hell. The U.S. commits more war crimes, more human rights violations, more interference in the affairs and elections of other countries, than anyone else. And we prosecute dissent more ruthlessly, and are the least transparent of any country in the world save maybe Uzbekistan. We have intelligence agencies fighting proxy wars with other of our intelligence agencies. The U.S. is now a massive societal dinosaur. To go the way of the Great Auk or Woolly Mammoth might not be such a bad thing for the planet.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/23/to-go-the-way-of-the-great-auk-the-clintons-and-the-media/

Future Crimes
by JOHN STEPPLING


http://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/dropzone/2016/11/7811014076_c7f95c0e98_z.jpg
Photo by Marc Nozell | CC BY 2.0

“Precrime Analytical Wing: Contains the precognitives and the machinery needed to hear and analyze their predictions of future crimes.”

Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”

Martin Luther King

“The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies,’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government”.

Gramsci

There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

Joyce Carol Oates (for whom ten words is usually better than the right word) described Obama as…“Brilliant and understated, urbane, witty, compassionate, composed..”. Siri Hutsvedt (who honestly I had to look up…finding her most notable achievement was being married to Paul Auster) wrote…“For eight years, we have been represented by an elegant, well-spoken, funny, highly educated, moderate, morally upright, preternaturally calm black man”. Richard Ford wrote…“This cold morning, when I think about Obama, immersed in what must be a decidedly mixed brew of emotions – mixed about his deeds, mixed about his effects on the US, decidedly mixed about our future – I’m confident he is thinking, right to his last minute in the office, as the president, and not much about, or for, himself. That’s what I expected when I voted for him – that he’d be a responsible public servant who’d try to look out for the entire country.” I know, I know, but that’s what he wrote. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Perhaps this is what a career of University teaching does to one. Edmund White called him one of our great presidents (love the use of *our*).

Jane Smiley, who at the least mentioned TPP and drones, but ended with…“As a national leader, he has engendered more chaos, but it is necessary chaos – a loud and meaningful return to the question of what constitutes the real America.” A necessary chaos? The fuck does that mean? I ask that sincerely, sort of. By the time I reached the end of this saccharine mind numbing bathos I thought back to the 1968 Democratic Convention and to Esquire Magazine, in its golden era, who sent William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Terry Southern and John Sack to cover the convention. I thought back to Robert Bly and his organizing of Writers against the Vietnam war. The readings he gave with Galway Kinnell and Ginsburg, and a dozen others. And to the way Bly spoke of art and the role of art in a society. In an interview with Michael Ventura, around the time of the Iraq invasion…

Bly:I don’t think we believe that a Great Mother is lying to us. It’s a father who’s lying to us. Thee whole system, in a way, is a father system.
Ventura: It’s a patriarchy, so it’s a father who’s lying.
Bly: Exactly. And we eventually get the sense that our own
father is lying to us. { } Whenever you have a culture completely run by gross
capitalism, all of the gods are driven away. Well, then what?
What does that mean when those gods are not present?

Later Bly says…

“When I talk about the world being mad, I tell people,
“You won’t believe how bad television is going to be in ten years.
You’re going to literally have to protect your children from it.”
And we’re not going to be able to change that. The only thing
we can do is recognize that it’s mad, and reach inside ourselves
and bring out our own genuine madness in the form of art,
and then teach our children to do the same.”

In 68, a corporate owned magazine, and hardly a socialist magazine, thought it reasonable to ask Genet or Burroughs to discuss a political convention. I mean even Norman Mailer wrote intelligently on Kennedy for Esquire, and Mailer isn’t exactly Gramsci. My point is, or I hope my first point, is that it is not always crucial to demand ideological analysis. For art’s radical nature is outside ideology. Just speaking from a radical perspective, an anti bourgeois perspective, can be enough. But in 1968 the U.S. still had artists. What artist could you invite today? What public intellectual? The Guardian picked Sarah Churchwell (who again, I’d never heard of) who wrote…

“The Obamas changed the rules for what it means to inhabit the White House, and not only because they were the first black family to do so. They were also the first modern family to do so, to be informal yet classy, upright yet kind, and, most important, themselves.”

That’s it then, just be yourself. But the lesson here, if there is one, is that the radical tradition in American life has been rendered invisible. Just as the history of labor and unions and strikes has been erased. There are plenty of great artists out there, actually. Tons of intellectuals, but they aren’t invited by corporate media. Was anyone from Black Agenda Report asked to comment? Or from, well, CounterPunch? Was Harry Belefonte asked? The manufacturing of an image of a culture, rather than an actual culture, is what organs of disinformation such as The Guardian are in the business of doing. And this is also what Hollywood does, of course. Look at the stuff that gets on in the flagship theatres of the U.S. What is the season at Lincoln Center? Does it matter? No, it really doesn’t. And running across all of this discussion is the question of class. In fact, that may be the most important aspect in all of this. The working class voice is erased. In total. And this is hugely significant. Even fifty years ago the stages of American theatres were filled by work from playwrights who did not have MFAs. Novels were written by criminals and outsiders. This is no less true, really, in the U.K. From Brendan Behan to Martin Amis is the road travelled. Now of course one can site exceptions to this, I think anyway. There are always celebrity outsiders, branded renegades. Usually this takes the form of a confessional. My time on oxycodone while writing Sit Coms. I was a teenage prostitute and was addicted to anti depressants, but then I found a higher power. But god forbid you express condemnation of the bourgeoisie. For that is the greatest of all crimes.

When I worked in Hollywood, I felt the class estrangement acutely. But I did get work and had some modest success. And I remember when a major cable producer of the era asked me, during a pitch meeting, for the names of writers I thought would be good to employ for an anthology series they wanted to put together. I said, well, Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck) and John Rechy. A silence fell on the room. I was very very naive. Hollywood today seems infested with lawyers, former political interns, and business school graduates. Most from Ivy league schools. And the world that is manufactured is one that reflects their class. And the effect this has had is to alienate the younger artists who do not come from affluent backgrounds. It has also normalized the a vision of the world that belongs to perhaps ten per cent of the population. The rest are strangers in their own land. Strangers to the official sanctioned culture. And in that sense, Hollywood has sort of merged with Madison Avenue.

The class divide is being starkly revealed this last few months. And it has also served to put in stark relief the real impetus of U.S. foreign policy (and to domestic policy, too, only not as drastically). After WW2 and the formation of the CIA, the shaping of a political intention was being finalized. This came from George Kennan and the Dulles Brothers. And Henry Kissinger was the premier exemplar of this thinking. Kissinger, who supported the Shah and his death squads in Iran, and chaired the Presidential Commission on Central America in the 1980s,(employing Ollie North) and which unleashed an unimaginable terror on that region, and who orchestrated the Pinochet coup in Chile to protect ITT and, as a side bar, to teach a lesson to any government not readily obedient. This has been the seamless and never changing foreign policy of the U.S. for seventy some years. Punish the disobedient (meaning anything smacking of socialism or any nation even the tiniest bit resistant to Western business) and to continue toward global hegemony, and at the same time perpetuating conflicts which make both defense contractors and giant service providers such as Halliburton a lot of money.

The U.S. has cultivated compliant nations (Australia, the U.K. most notably) to enforce its policy (think East Timor, Iraq and Libya et al) and now owns a complient organization with international standing: NATO. And NATO serves as a legitimizing international (sic) institution of pacification.

John Pilger writes…

“The other day, an Indonesian friend took me to his primary school where, in October 1965, his teacher was beaten to death, suspected of being a communist.
The murder was typical of the slaughter of more than a million people: teachers, students, civil servants, peasants. Described by the CIA as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”, it brought to power the dictator Suharto, the west’s man. Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia’s economy was redesigned in America, giving western capital access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour. “

Stephan Gowans writes…

“The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country’s fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement came to power in 1963. Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were committed to that movement. Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly. It was a threat to Washington’s agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations throughout the world.”

The rise of the neo cons, which rather officially began with Project for a New American Century (just prior to Bush Jr’s presidency) was really just an extension of that original plan for global domination. At that time this was articulated by a seething nearly hysterical hatred of the Soviet Union. And the structural aspect of this remains in place with today’s rabid and massive propaganda campaign directed at Putin. And indeed even on the left one hears the echoes of a Russophobic sensibility. It is as if these faux leftists can not allow a critique of U.S. imperialism (in Syria for example) without off handedly smearing Russia, too. One need only look at who is surrounding whom with military bases. And the same holds true, with slightly less hysteria, for China.

In 2012 Ed Herman, speaking in a radio interview, said

“…humanitarian intervention {has} been used strictly for the interests of the United States and other Western powers and Israel. Strictly. So there’s no intervention in Saudi Arabia or Israel or Yemen or Bahrain. There was none in Egypt…And there was Egypt, here you had a miserable dictator for decades, and then you had an uprising where a lot of people were being beaten and killed in the streets, and you never had Mrs. Clinton ever asking for any application of humanitarian intervention. Not once. Never. They’re getting away with the most unbelievable double standard imaginable.”

This is, none of it, new. And yet, despite the obvious record of Obama in furthering exactly this world vision, the liberal organs of *real* news continue to paint their revisionist narratives of American heroism and goodness. And it is breathtaking in a way to read this new class of quisling artist, the court eunuchs for the Democratic Party establishment. And Obama’s apparent anger and petulance belies, certainly, descriptions such as ‘preternaturally calm’, and ‘dignified’. But there is a thread of liberal guilt running through this as well. Obama’s race (and his perfect wife and kids — and one longs for Ron Reagan Jr or to go back to James Madison’s son John, and shit, even the Bush girls might be a relief from these Stepford children.) is the psychological glue for a visibly excessive adoration. And this is a white liberal class that is haunted, I suspect, in their heart of hearts, by the knowledge of their own privilege and that that privilege has resulted in oceans of blood, and the knowledge, if they were ever to question themselves, that they would sell out anyone to retain that privilege. They love Obama and Obama is black, therefore…etc.

As Ajamu Baraka noted

“In the face of the Neo-McCarthyism represented by this legislation and the many other repressive moves of the Obama administration to curtail speech and control information — from the increased surveillance of the public to the use of the espionage act to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers — one would reasonably assume that forces on the left would vigorously oppose the normalization of authoritarianism, especially in this period of heightened concerns about neo-fascism.
Unfortunately, the petit-bourgeois “latte left” along with their liberal allies have been in full collaboration with the state for the past eight years, with the predictable result that no such alarm was issued, nor has any critique or even debate been forthcoming.”

The openly Imperialist U.S. state has tortured, illegally kidnapped, and simply murdered both leaders of sovereign states as well as countless innocent victims. That Samantha Power’s motorcade in rushing through a village in Cameroon happened to run over a ten year old boy, and didn’t stop — this barely made the evening news at all (but hey, they did send the family fifteen hundred dollars by way of an apology). They have acted covertly to destabilize governments and have manufactured enemies at a rate that is staggering to contemplate. Obama’s tight relationship with the most odious autocratic and murderous country on earth, Saudi Arabia, speaks to the cynicism of the political elite.

And yet, the artistic communities by and large continue to focus on identity issues (once they have attended to their career moves and spoken with their agents), most of which affect their own class. The dire suffering of the poor makes good voyeuristic source material, but the segregation of classes is enforced zealously. Token exceptions are simply that.

How is it possible to become so alarmed by Trump, while supporting Democrats? Those millions on the street protesting the looming invasion of Iraq must have noticed that every single Democrat in government voted FOR the invasion (save for the honorable Barbara Lee). And yet here they all are wringing their hands in dismay that Hillary lost. Here they are constantly repeating the litanies of Trump evil and never noticing the crimes of earlier democratic presidents and administrations. So, yes Trump’s appointments are awful. But I refuse to even dig into that until a discussion of Obama’s appointments are dissected. First came Rahm Emanuel, former memeber of the IDF, all around thug and bully and lover of never ending war to help expand Israeli power. Penny Pritzker, heiress and elitist and friend to the 1%, or Robert Rubin or Tim Geithner (!!!) or Tom Daschle, the senator from Citibank. I’m just scratching the surface. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The point is that I am coming to feel that almost any focus on Trump feels misplaced. Certainly now it does since he isn’t even president yet. The deconstruction of liberal Obama is far from complete and the propaganda apparatus is working overtime to rewrite not just recent history, but the present. And the anti Russian propaganda is so absurd, so transparent, that this feels far more important than the predictable stupidity of Trump. I mean Obama is massing troops near the Russian border. Obama is ramping up the building of purpose built navel bases near China. Obama is still looking to prosecute Chelsea Manning and every other whistleblower. And he is still signing draconian legislation to curb free speech and institutionalize legitimacy for the new McCarthyism. Talking about Trump is a form of forgetting. I can’t do it. And if there is an easier target for parody or even non parodic narrative than Donald Trump, I havent met them. And easy is never an act of rigorous self examination.

Thomas Bates writes, discussing Gramsci…

“Gramsci retained a skepticism towards these alienated fils de bourgeois, a
skepticism which was not, however, mere prejudice, but was an historical
judgment informed by the experience of the Italian labor movement. How was
one to explain the passing of entire groups of left-wing intellectuals into the
enemy camp? More precisely, how was one to explain the phenomena of socialists
entering into bourgeois governments and of revolutionary syndicalists
entering into the nationalist and then the Fascist movement? Gramsci viewed
these puzzling events as the continuation on a mass scale of the ‘trasformismo’
of the nineteenth century. The “generation gap” within the ruling class had resulted
in a large influx of bourgeois youth into the popular movements, especially
during the turbulent decade of the 1890’s. But in the war-induced crisis
of the Italian State in the early twentieth century, these prodigal children
returned to the fold…”

And Gramsci adds..

“The bourgeoisie fails to educate its youth (struggle of generations). The youth
allow themselves to be culturally attracted by the workers, and right away
they … try to take control of them (in their “unconscious” desire to impose
the hegemony of their own class on the people), but during historical crises
they return to the fold.”

White affluent self identifying liberals believe they are the decision makers. That is their destiny. They believe that. One must build a new culture. Not endlessly ratify a decrepit and atrophying one. One must stop perceiving *liberals* as being on the side of change. For they are not. Guy Debord began his situationist masterpiece (1967) by quoting Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity:

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. “

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/09/future-crimes/

A few excerpts from ' Exterminationist Game

So, again, *origin*. And in the U.S. today the danger is not in what Don Trump has to offer (which is bad enough) but in this release of bourgeois self loathing and fear. For the anti Trumpism of the liberal bourgeoisie is far more fascistic than Trump’s cartoon authoritarianism. That Trump could even become president is proof of the growth of a shadow culture, of reserves of latent untapped rage and racialist mania. When Adorno wrote in the 50s of a *half Bildung* … a sort of half education…he stressed that such energies can only exist in opposition to a dominant system that serves as a repressing force. In this sense Trump was a necessary invention for the built up rage and hysteria of the white bourgeoisie in the U.S. Without Trump, as it was under Obama, the affluent gatekeepers of culture and the managerial class were increasingly stultified in their expression. The system could barely manufacture, in cultural terms, good comic books. If the idea of an *artificial negativity* has any merit, it will reveal itself in the coming years as a by-product of the simple minded expressions of narcissistic rage from the liberal class. A by product that will represent the death of culture itself.

****************************

The mass regression of today’s culture is of course assisted by what Buzby calls a habituation to domination. And one form of this habituation is the insistence on clear one dimensional meanings and *proofs*. It is no wonder that SNOPES is now employed by facebook to curate (per Obama) disputed content. Whatever that might mean. The very idea that disputing content is presented as de facto bad tells one everything. Absolute certainty is then comforting. True or false. And all argument is dismissed because everything must be totally true, or totally false. And Buzby notes that guilt plays a huge role in this demand for certainty. For everyone is guilty in their own private court of law. It is hard, when thinking on all this, not to be reminded of Dostoyevsky, yet again. The inability to work through one’s guilt will derail all attempts to accept even the idea of social change. Again, the current hysteria surrounding the election of Trump feels very much like a projection of guilt. It is also partly an aspect of scapegoating. I have read repeatedly on social media the various complaints about Trump and symbolic reactions — everything from burning L.L. Bean flannel shirts (I guess because Linda Bean was a supporter) to the Rockettes refusing to perform at the inauguration — it is the symbolism of distraction and a society of trivia. It is also a white guilt, and it is part of a shadow culture that is reaching a terminal state. For culture, art and expression of any kind, is complicit with social guilt.

***********************

There is also a rising sense of imaginary solidarity among the anti Trump groups. All the meanness and shaming directed at this new President, and unsurprisingly his wife, is not only permitted, it is enjoyed.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Valerie-Hegarty-e1484480971108.jpeg
Valerie Hegarty

The mass anger directed at Trump is a part of a national narrative of white supremacy. As paradoxical as that perhaps sounds, I believe its rather obviously true. That Trump is a racist is utterly beside the point. The overt hood figure of the Klan is but one artery of a white supremacist hierarchical social infrastructure that continues to reproduce the basic slave owning plantation system that emerged out of the 17th century. When I read various Trump protests I am reminded of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who protested the slave owning plantation system of sugar growers in the Caribbean by not sweetening her coffee or tea.

This narrative is one in which tens of millions of brown and black people perish at the hands of white Europeans and North Americans without ever a collective outcry or gesture of collective remorse. Not a peep. Silence. For this is another aspect of this psychic movement toward silence. The shadow culture cannot read, and cannot almost not speak. It tweets and texts. The totalizing aggression of the collective (per Buzby) is unchecked by individuation. The culture of individuality is completely without it. And without any access to Dionysian erotic release there is only the death instinct. And advanced Capitalism has reached a point in this grand narrative where the self-promoted exceptional American has an ego so weak that he or she cannot cry out. Hence the increasing anger at those who do cry out. The poor, the criminals, the marginalized — these cries incite anger in the bourgeoisie who want EVERYONE to join them in condemning the wrong neo fascist in the White House. Or in hating Putin, or whoever is being sold by media today as evil. The poor are blamed for not following instructions on hatred. The role of guilt has changed, however, to the degree that early submission to parental punishment is now delayed or mediated in various ways. Therefore the therapeutic age today has adult children still ambivalent about authority to some degree, or rather ‘more’ ambivalent, and who look toward improving themselves in one or another form of therapy. This self is examined as if its a DIY TV show. The guilt of Trump, which is glaringly apparent, allows for feelings of virtue in those who protest him. The also obvious crimes of Obama and Clinton allowed for no such feelings of virtue. But it DID allow for a more easily buried sense of guilt in those who voted for them.

http://john-steppling.com/2017/01/exterminationist-game/

Civic Death
JANUARY 29, 2017

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/MORIYAMA_1978_Untitled_Tsugaru_Straits-1-e1485560273548.jpg
Daido Moriyama, photography.

“The view only changes for the lead dog.”
Norman O. Brown

“The more I looked at fractal patterns, the more I was reminded of Pollock’s poured paintings. And when I looked at his paintings, I noticed that the paint splatters seemed to spread across his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices.”
Richard Taylor

“A role is not a role. It is social life, an inherent part of it. What is faked in one sense IS what IS the essential, the most precious, the human, in another and what is most derisory is what is most necessary. It is often difficult to distinguish between what is faked and what is natural, not to say naive (and we should distinguish between a natural naivety and the naturalness which is a product of high culture).”
Henri Lefebvre

John Berger writing of the painting in the Chauvet Caves;
“Their space has absolutely nothing in common with that of a stage. When experts pretend that they can see here ‘the beginnings of perspective’, they are falling into a deep, anachronistic trap. Pictorial systems of perspective are architectural and urban – depending upon the window and the door. Nomadic ‘perspective’ is about coexistence, not about distance.”

I have been thinking a lot about cities, today, in both Europe, and in North America. Perhaps because I rarely go to the city anymore. One thing is noise. The silence of the world as it must have existed for those anonymous painters of the Chauvet caves is very rare today (well, THAT silence is gone), if not impossible to find, even in the most remote parts of the world. Where I live there are few people. It is farming country, mostly. I hear tractors often, and a few automobiles or trucks. Rarely do I encounter actual traffic however. In winter, now, I hear the ice. I hear the winter sounds. The constant low level struggle of the fjord and the ice. Norway is one the most sparsely populated countries in Europe (only Iceland has a lower population density) so I have become accustomed to far less talk than when living in the U.S. Talk tires me out, now. When I teach I am exhausted afterwards. And the modern idea of city is one that necessitates a good deal of talking.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gerrit-dou-1631-e1485212602591.jpg
Gerrit Dou (1631). Detail.

Increasingly leisure has become more aggressive and violent. The play has gone out of play, replaced by substitute forms of domination. Leisure is treated as a training exercise for domination. In the U.S. today there is less actual leisure time and that which exists is ever more the development of skills that serve to reinforce hierarchical systems of subjugation.

Obsolete skills are repurposed as entertainment. And within such repurposing there is a partially hidden layer of self domination. The plethora of reality TV often focuses on tests of mock courage and survival techniques, of returns to some fantasy past that is part nostalgia and part self abasement. Except it’s a sort of mock self abasement that is then, by virtue of its counterfeitness, all the more self abasing. The privileged 1% today, and their minions and clerks, put poverty to use as a propaganda tool to demonstrate the need to cleanse the squalor produced by lesser people. Except again, the filty poor are also fetishized and eroticized for service in psychological and social/erotic bantustans of leisure. And this is almost no longer propaganda, for the ruling elite make little effort to hide their sense of superiority. And the clerk class, the managers aspire to a proximity to the segregated pavillions of wealth. No longer do this class even dream of actual elite wealth, they are content to not be intwined with the poor and their *ugliness* even if it means bowing and scraping before those with wealth, and never uttering any expression of dissent.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/kounellis-e1485391862606.jpg
Jannis Kounellis

“Within every class-based society the constraints that one class imposes upon another are always a part of the inhuman power which reigns over everything. On that level, the individual sees himself ‘divested of his real individual life and filled with unreal universality’.”
Henri Lefebvre

The liberal managerial class, the white collar professionals, those who own a condo, maybe, but live in the major urban centers of the U.S.; these are people for whom the American dream is just access not to privilege per se (except relatively speaking) but to the privileged. It is amazing how readily these clerks and stenographers will express their respect. The rich are referred to as *Mister* or *Misses*, or sir or whatever. The proles are hey you, or Jake, or Tom, that guy. This is the self loathing of the liberal class and the necessary hatred of the poor.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Lauren-Marsolier-e1485560759535.jpg
Lauren Marsolier, photography and construct.

You will hear pro athletes, black and white and other, all refer to owners of pro teams as Mister so and so. Never ever does Dan Snyder get called *Dan*.– its always Mister Snyder. Mr Bennet, Mr Angelos, Mr Steinbrenner etc.

But back to this idea of Nature and its relationship to alienation. For this is something that infects architecture certainly. But the manufacture of alienation is built into ideas of pleasure, as well. And to sexuality. And part of the multiple levels or layers of identification that surround political figures and celebrities, is both a critical factor in this, but also its effect.

“A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature”.
Ezra Pound

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/tumblr_lrb4gjWjYJ1qzrkvzo1_500-e1485536656505.jpg[
Hilda Doolittle

Somewhere Robert Duncan noted that even though we know astrology is junk, it still reveals something about the typology of character. But when Duncan said this writers and artists imagined that creativity was a province outside of science. For Duncan, or Olson, or even Lowell, science was a useful resource for their writing, but not insofar as it WAS science. The imagination was cosmic. And even if one looks to Soviet writers, to Japanese or Mexican — this was always the case (its strange in fact how so much of the communist left abandoned art as something of importance, if they did not not develop outright hostility to it. And those who do love art, and appreciate it, tend to keep this fact rather private). For the right, hostility to art is mixed in with misogyny and a general xenophobic mind set that also embraces an extremely regressive idea of masculinity. It was sissy stuff, and it was somehow anti business. And one of the things that happened over sixty or seventy years to Western art, at least lets say literature, was the mistaking of effect for the experience. In other words, to quote Duncan again; “When we first come into the attraction of words in poetry, it is the craft of the net, the novelty of usage, the knot effect, often, that strikes us. We mistake the effect for the art…” Of course there were other things going on, and perhaps even more noticable or even significant things. But these other things were about perception, and the rise of a new ruthless super ego as well as the general loss of curiosity and attention (of a certain sort).

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/kahn-e1485537779343.jpg
Wolf Kahn

And this is important I think. The effect. The writer or painter achieves an effect, often of novelty (there is no more pernicious trend in arts than valorising novelty or, put another way, originality). Much of the best of Asian aesthetics has to do with erasing effect, not emphasising it. And to return to Pollock for a moment; the effect of Pollock (and Rothko, and even Kline) is minimal. For when I think of effect, I think more of that which adheres to message. The message always has its effect. Norman Rockwell has an effect, and in his case the effect and the message are pretty superficial. The message and effect of Hopper is greater, but Hopper is great because he subverts his own effect. It is the mysterious uncanny memories evoked in Hopper. The philistine will write that Hopper is about (pick adjective) loneliness, say. But this is like saying Tolstoy was a great writer of war scenes. Or that Pinter had a great *ear*. The appeal of the bourgeois critic is always to something everyday, a certain kind of everyday. The parochial everyday. It imparts the message that one’s boredom has value and importance. It does not say boredom is the by product of a system of exploitive labor and repetition. It is the generalizing view that extracts banality and praises it against a backdrop of ahistorical sameness.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/virginia_site1318003745070-1-e1485537989636.png
Kenneth Noland

But this becomes semantic in a sense. And it begs the defining of *affect*. But what Duncan really meant was that the real poem was there beneath the poem that got everyone’s attention. Its like pre click bait click bait. Originality or novelty or innovation in the arts is equivalent to click bait in internet marketing. But in a way this is a logical progression from the shifts away from Nature as a subject for art, and toward man as the ultimate subject. All the way back to the 1930s Adolph Loos wrote that “the purpose of art is to take man further and further, higher and higher, to make him more like God.” In poetry, when Bly began critical writing in his own quarterly(ish) The Fifties, he was criticizing poets he liked, but who he saw as awful influences (Auden, Eliot, and even Milton). Though he reserved his deepest scorn for academic poets. He specifically noted the turn from, say, Spanish surrealists (Neruda is always embedded in Nature, as is Lorca and Vallejo), or Sufi poets of ecstasy, or Basho …and toward the dry intellectual studies of human behaviour ( Drydan, Marvell, Ben Jonson, through to Hopkins and Clare and even Browning). In the U.S., if we speak in broad strokes, there was Whitman and Crane, perhaps above everyone else (and the Frost branch and the Cummings branch as borderline kitsch). And for all his ostentatious outpouring about Nature, I’d not consider Whitman a poet *of* nature. And many of these borderline branches became entwined by mid century. And they entwined at the University and its English departments. Lowell and Berryman, and Plath and ending with John Ashbery, I suppose. But something happened in a sense by the sixties, and its the same thing that happened to other art forms. And that is that too many people were making a career or art and career poets must teach to have a career. How many great poets are alive today? In english lets say. I’d say none. But I am very picky about poetry (I blame Ork for this). Bly is a great teacher and a very good poet. Not a great poet. A great translator, however. James Wright was close IMHO. Wallace Stevens and Theodor Roethke were both great and marked the last stage of modernism. But I don’t want to make lists here. Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a narrative poem of sorts. Its outstanding on many levels. But it is an expression, among other things, of the impossibility of writing as Dante once wrote, or Shakespeare, or Donne. Nor is it possible to write as Goethe did.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/takanashi9-e1485560389533.jpg
Yutaka Takanashi, photography.


Ondaatje is, in a sense, expressing something deeply nihilistic. The end of literacy. There will be post literacy literacy. Maybe there already is, and maybe that is why so few people even looked up from texting to roll their eyes when Dylan won the nobel prize. Now, the complexity of a certain kind of cultural death is possible to exhaust in any meaningful way here. But I hope I’ve been writing about it for the entirety of this blog’s life. But the point is that this shift toward man as an alienated being really took hold in the late 19th century, I think. The fuller version was the product of post WW2 U.S. culture as it was being manufactured on the spot.
The idea of this loss of Nature needs to be seen as a Western invention, if that’s what it is (or really it is the product of late Capitalism). And it is intriguing to sort of sample various side bar writing on the subject of nature’s intersection with the contemporary psyche as it is expressed in art.

“In“Anal-Erotic Character Traits” (1918), Jones locates a “primitive smearing impulse”
as the basis of all “molding and manipulating,” “painting and printing.”
And in “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money” (1914) Ferenczi sketches a
phylogenetic development of “copro-symbols”—whereby the child plays with
excrement, then mud, sand, and pebbles in a sequence of ever more pure materials…”
Hal Foster

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/TATE_TATE_T01057_10-e1485561455248.jpg
Morris Louis

Richard Taylor wrote a sort of interesting if not terribly rigorous piece on fractals and Jackson Pollock..
http://oregonquarterly.com/the-curse-of-jackson-pollock-the-truth-behind-the-worlds-greatest-art-scandal

But this does touch on something significant about experience and art. And it brings me back to Berger. I think a lot of people are re-reading Berger now, after his recent death. And this can only be a good thing.

“In the 18th century, long-term imprisonment was approvingly defined as a punishment of”civic death”. Three centuries later, governments are imposing – by law, force, economic threats and their buzz – mass regimes of civic death.”
John Berger

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Wesley Willis

Civic death includes the eradication of silence, too. While at the same time eliminating Nature. They go hand in hand. Of course the death driven morbidity of advanced Capitalist nations is trending toward a kind of silence, but it is the silence of stasis, of death and decay.

“One has only to think of the poems of Chaucer, Villon, Dante; in all of them Death, whom nobody can escape, is the surrogate for a generalized sense of uncertainty and menace in face of the future.
Modern history begins—at different moments in different places—with the principle of progress as both the aim and motor of history. This principle was born with the bourgeoisie as an ascendant class, and has been taken over by all modern theories of revolution. The twentieth-century struggle between capitalism and socialism is, at an ideological level, a fight about the content of progress. Today within the developed world the initiative of this struggle lies, at least temporarily, in the hands of capitalism which argues that socialism produces backwardness. In the underdeveloped world the “progress” of capitalism is discredited.”
John Berger

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/lawyer-in-his-study-e1485613890633.jpg
Adriaen van Ostade. (Lawyer in his Study, 1637).

Capitalism is the perfected distillation of all systems linked to *progress*. And the cultures of progress imply what Berger saw as point of view of expansion. Pre-industrial cultures were cyclical, and for peasants were focused on survival. But today expansion is being retrofitted for a *green* rebranding, and this is really the origin of this fixation on novelty and innovation. Innovation is not necessarily the engine of economic development, but it is the idea that serves as caretaker for the endless actual failures of economic development under capital. There not being, really, any free market the reaction was to find symbolic mechanisms to veil this fact. Airlines can’t survive without subsidies, but to talk about this means discussing all the ways Marx was right. Instead it is better to just write about innovative low cost airlines, or new luxury jumbo jets flying to high end resort destinations. In a sense this is just marketing. But on a wider societal level it is also *how* the world is seen.

The literal scope of the gaze looks forward expansively, while the survivalist culture narrows. Bentham invented the early panopticon control (Berger calls it accountancy in ethics) and this was followed on by schools, hospitals and factories. If the transition of peasant culture to the bourgeois societies of the West were best chronicled by the Dutch and Belgian painters of the 16th century — per Berger– it is intriguing to see Hals, or a Van Ostade as either the R. Crumbs of their age or the Oprahs. Van Ostade never seemed to tire of tavern settings, but perhaps these are the paintings of the society of non alienation, or non HYPER alienation. Dickens later chronicled the idea of meetings at the way station, the tavern or inn, too. This was the setting of allegorical fatalism. The road travelled by coach, the inn, the escape from the urban civic duties — for the bourgeoisie. Chance encounters. The uncanny stranger. By the 20th century travel was commodified and made into leisure. Escape was symbolic escape from work that imitated work. By the 21st century leisure imitated conquest and sadism, since there was really no work.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Sho%CC%84mei-To%CC%84matsu-e1485615162771.jpg
Shomei Tomatsu, photography.

The road of the 16th century through the early 19th was still a road without presumptions about progress. The industrial revolution set forth the new alienation (Haussman rebuilds Paris), and optical discoveries shift primacy to the eye, to details one cant see without optical instruments. Experts are born. The new priests of expertise on ‘techne’. But the self narration of our lives shifted when there was no longer an escape from commodified movement, and the greater digital panopticon. The loss of nature to the primacy of man that took place in poetry was seen in literature as well. Part of the psychological disintegration of the second half of the 20th century is connected to the loss of *place*, the sense of traditional custom, of a human scale in the face of Nature and of history. Kafka certainly wrote with a preternatural and prophetic insight about the coming insect age of the giant panopticon — the loss of silence is also, obviously,the loss of contemplative access.

The Utopian vision of 20th century architects was constantly failing, even in its most noble exercises. Brasilia was the gaze sent forward toward a widening future. But the progress imagined was cold and desolate and unnatural.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/brasilia-construction-Marcel-Gautherot-14-1-e1485626992955.jpg
Palácio do Congresso Nacional. Brasília, 1960. Marcel Gautherot, photography.. Oscar Niemayer, architect.

The anal universe, for Freud (and Norman O. Brown and Marcuse) is the place before not only progress but sociability — it is the realm without limits. I can never look at Trump (who had gold curtains installed at the White House replacing Obama’s blood red choice) without thinking of his anality. That ‘golden showers’ became a meme is hardly surprising. But neither is it surprising that the U.S. ended up with Trump. His pseudo Versailles/Vegas taste is more revealing than his nativist rhetoric. And that both he and Berlusconi took to industrial level tanning sessions is plain disturbing. They exclaim, behold, it is my face of shit.

“…excrement is the most charged of symbols, a wild sign that the infant might take as a penis, a baby, a gift, money, and so on, all terms that are “ill-distinguished” and “interchangeable” in the anal zone. The anal-excremental, then, seems to oscillate between the physically literal and inert and the symbolically arbitrary and
volatile—a difficult oscillation psychologically. Moreover, in either register the anal zone suggests an indistinction that is also difficult to bear.”
Hal Foster

But I digress (slightly).

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/61fb1a50-e6c5-43cf-8dc3-2949f69b51b9-e1485630372370.jpeg
Louise Nevelson

"Consciousness reflects and does not reflect: what it
reflects is not what it seems to reflect, but something else, and that is what
analysis must disclose. Precisely because the activity that produced
ideologies was exceptional and specialized, they came out of social
practice – of everyday life – in two senses: it produced them and they
escaped from it, thus acquiring in the process an illusory meaning other
than their real content.”
Henri Lefebvre

Contemporary society has now begun to function as if there are no hidden layers to anything. Solutions are meant to be seen as total. Side effects are no threat to their completeness. As I’ve argued before, Abstract Expressionism was the last sincere expression of cosmic reach. The last Dionysian engagement. And hence it is the most acutely attacked. It is attacked from both right and left. From the right it is snickered at (Oh shit, give me a roller and some canvas and I’ll turn out a dozen Rothkos in one day) and from the left (Oh the CIA wanted to steer people away from real revolutionary art…meaning realism and mural painting etc). And since everyone is under the gaze of the Panopticon, nobody escapes.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PatrickJoust19-e1485635055441.jpg
Patrick Joust, photography.

“There is in the height of my fantasy, not an obcession but a thought that persists,
a fancy that psychoanalysis has found entertained by many children, of an other more
real mother than my mother.”
Robert Duncan

See Mere Virtual Presence (h/t J.L.)
(http://server2.docfoc.us/uploads/Z2015/12/26/ktsVvyRlCQ/ceb55bcf2a596ab4a86c0cbc16dcc5c3.pdf)

The novel today only exists in any relevance in crime fiction. Intentionally minor and transient, there one can at least fine some kind of discovery. Ideas are avoided in much contemporary fiction and this is because ideas are avoided in the individuals own self narration. The journey has gone from Man before Nature, to Man as the only fit subject for study, to Subjectivity before an invented Nature (or generic mass produced Nature). The bourgeois educated class in the U.S. is acutely unaware of the rest of the world as a living collective of experiences. They operate within a vision that is no longer exactly about progress. It is no longer a gaze directed at that widening road ahead but rather a gaze directed at a screen with an image of a widening road.

“The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical: it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life – precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve.
What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it – or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce – from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.”
John Berger

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2012_up4x5_samantha_french-e1485703823213.jpg
Samantha French

The culture that today has normalized torture, while simultaneously inventing a history in which *we* don’t torture is the perfect example of this new empty self narrative. And of civic death. When Manadel Al-Jamadi died in custody and later had his body photographed on ice, battered and bruised, the description of his interrogator was ‘shabbily dressed overweight white man’. A CIA operative, but not a covert one. Al-Jamadi was alive, hooded, but walking under his power and coherent and answering questions when he entered the interrogation tier at Abu Ghraib. When he was untied (after being hung up, his hands tied behind his back) blood gushed from his mouth as if a faucet had been turned on. That was the description of witnesses. This murder is just one of many, but one that came to public attention. Except it didn’t really come to attention. Hollywood does not cast CIA ops with overweight unkempt white actors. The official narrative is one seen on screens. And the backdrop is artificial and manufactured.

This is all rather obvious. So the artists who painted animals on those cave walls were directly transcribing something of a Nature that surrounded them, and with relatively few filters. They did not gaze with the eyes of progress.

http://john-steppling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/children-1937-e1485636069646.jpg
Balthus

Berger again…from Ways of Seeing, written in 1972:
“Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it.”

The paradox is that what happens, in art, does happen outside it. What is true, though, is that one can no longer experience it within the cultural panopticon.
The anal sadistic character of fascism was exhaustively explored by Pasolini and Genet, and a dozen others, and it is increasingly apparent in contemporary America. And in this sense Obama and Trump are flip sides of this same coin.

Steve Shaviro (oddly perhaps) wrote a nice short piece on Norman O. Brown a while back…
“The very idea of sublimation — moving from something “lower” to something “higher” — involves stunting the potentialities of the body, and setting up a hierarchy between mind and body, or even a total Cartesian separation of mind from body. For Brown, a radical desublimation is the only way to go: a return to the wisdom of the polymorphously perverse body, a rejection of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment; an acceptance of death as part of life, instead of our dread of death which ironically turns life itself into a living death.”

The living death of the U.S. is found not only in super max prisons, or in a political class of zombie humans, from both parties..but it is found in the sexually desperate frat boy culture of VICE or the saccharine near autistic fairy tales from Hollywood…most of which are so depressing that the mind shuts down. Reading Norman O. Brown today, or Ernest Becker or Marcuse’s book on Freud, is to see that even they were under the spell of disenchantment. For them the polymorphously perverse body is still sort of imagined in a genital conception. It is still a bit too much like a Hefner playboy mansion orgy but with incense and taking place in a muddy field. Marcuse said, later, that we cannot imagine what a non repressed society would look like. And this is the truth of it. The desublimated self is probably closer to something like the silence of the desert, a coptic underground temple no longer in use, a cave perhaps.

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Gary Fabian Miller

The contemporary culture of entertainment is not interested in those trompe l’oeil effects so popular with the producers of niche paintings in the mid 1600s. The birth of bourgeois collectibles, and patrons found something important in being momentarily fooled by an illusionist trick. Perhaps the best of those practioners was Gerrit Dou, a painter I find oddly but completely fascinating. And convincing. His later works in particular betray his early training in glass engraving and stained glass (his father manufactured stained glass) and then his apprenticeship with Rembrandt. And Rembrandt did not suffer the less talented. Dou’s portraits consistently teeter on illusion, as did all the Dutch *fine* painters of those decades. These were popular paintings, and bought by visitors to Holland, including royalty. Dou was in a sense the J.J. Abrams of early bourgeois society (European anyway). The difference is that Abrams and Hollywood overall today are not in the business of skillful illusion (by itself not an indictment) but rather are in the business of representing an illusion — and an obscuring of reality, not representing by way of an illusion a reflection of reality. Or…Dou was the early version of Thomas Kinkade. Take your pick. There is something in these (probably bogus) comparisons that touches on the general loss of a discriminating eye, and an ability to seek more. To soberly evaluate the emptiness of every gesture. The overriding dissatisfaction with one’s role.

“And in life itself, in everyday life, ancient gestures, rituals as old as
time itself, continue unchanged – except for the fact that this life has
been stripped of its beauty. Only the dust of words remains, dead
gestures. Because rituals and feelings, prayers and magic spells,
blessings, curses, have been detached from life, they have become
abstract and ‘inner’, to use the terminology of self-justification.
Convictions have become weaker, sacrifices shallower, less intense.
People cope -badly- with a smaller outlay. Pleasures have become
weaker and weaker. The only thing that has not diminished is the old
disquiet, that feeling of weakness, that foreboding. But what was
formerly a sense of disquiet has become worry, anguish. Religion,
ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the ‘spiritual’ and ‘inner’
festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of
anxiety – and towards what abyss? “
Henri Lefebvre

The Mysteries Remain

Hilda Doolittle

The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.

http://john-steppling.com/2017/01/civic-death/

The Violence of Silence
by JOHN STEPPLING

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Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

“Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that.”

— Dylan

The age of cognitive dissonance. Sunday, the American public (millions of them) watched the NFL Super Bowl. This spectacle is, of course, rife with all manner of jingoism and military symbolism (as is the game itself). But this is also a game, American football, that has proved to destroy the human brain of those who play it. In fact there was even a Hollywood movie, a popular one, about the doctor who led the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); the brain trauma caused by the collision of man and helmet. Great players such as Mike Webster and Junior Seau died by their own hand; Terry Long drank anti freeze as his brain went into full melt down. Here is a list of NFL players with CTE.

None of these facts have put much of a dent into the NFL profit sheet. Or the popularity of the pro game. In fact, the dark shadow hanging over this spectacle is that its popularity may well have been enhanced by the facts surrounding the cost of playing. A league that is over 60% black starts to serve as something of a gladiator sacrifice ritual. One with links to the American slave owning past. Never underestimate the deep lacerating and ugly racism of the U.S. public.

This was the same week that Donald Trump notched his first war crime, though I suspect he was only dimly aware of it (a common attribute, it is becoming clear, for The Donald). An 8 year old girl, the baby sister of a teenage American citizen also killed, a couple years back, by drone. This took place in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Why, you might ask, is the U.S. killing people (including children) in Yemen? Well, the U.S. is helping the murderous monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Why, you ask again….and the answer is because, well, that’s how foreign policy operates. Why are there 900 U.S. military bases around the globe? I will return to that a bit later.

This also marked the week where the anti Trump forces (well, the ones funded by various front groups, a good many of them the product of George Soros’ long tentacles) went into hyper drive. One meme I saw was mocking how Trump can’t read. And look, I don’t think he can, either. I think he is borderline functionally illiterate. But so was Ronald Reagan. So was Dan Quayle. Republicans must long for the age of literacy under Bush Jr. What is becoming clear, however, is that Trump has no idea what he is doing. I mean he thinks Frederic Douglas is still out there doing a ‘helluva job’. Trey Parker of South Park confessed he cant find a way to satirize Donald Trump. So he’s giving up for the time being.

I feel ya. But Trump is now surrounded by nearly equally sub literate advisors. Jerry Fallwell’s kid is now going to helm a task force on education. What this portends is anyone’s guess. But before getting too disturbed, one should remember the actual state of public education in the U.S. under Obama or Bush or Clinton. It was Reagan, again, who pretty much had already destroyed any semblance of a real education for america’s children. Trump cut arts spending, too. Gosh, no NPR? Am I supposed to care? I have to tell you I don’t. I mean the National Endowment for the Arts already had a budget less than the US Marine Corps band. And basically the entire arts infrastructure was monopolized by the white bourgeoisie and had excluded, for a long while, all voices of any radical nature. So I don’t care, really.

The problem is that with Trump, the message — the optics — the symbolism if you want, is what is so pernicious. The elevation of this rapey buffoon to the Presidency is a culture shock (Trump as a younger man actually liked Roy Cohn!). So I get that shock part. I’m shocked in a sense, too. But the reality is that Trump has no idea what is going on. So who is calling the shots then? Who wanted to bomb a group of people in Yemen and snuff out the life of a beautiful eight year old child? What sort of sociopathic personality does that? The answer is that the corridors of power in the U.S. — the deep state — never really changes its actors. And those actors are sociopaths, in fact. I think that is not hyperbole. Maddie Albright and the famous ‘it was worth it’ reply to the death of millions of Iraqi children suggests I am right.

The *War on Terror* has not abated since its inception, and really it was only an intensification of already existing U.S. foreign policy. The majority protestors against Trump almost never mention U.S. imperialist wars of aggression. They DO care about further shredding an already pathetic health care system and what will now be an even more egrigious assault on women’s reproductive rights. And that is certainly legitimate. But stepping back just a little would reveal that the war on the poor, on black neighborhoods, and the installing of draconian surveillance systems and a constant ever receding list of civil liberties is a part of this. You cannot separate the attack on women’s rights from the death of that 8 year old girl. Or the vicious coup in Honduras courtesy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Or the proxy war in Syria. The neo cons in positions of influence have never gone away. They were there before 9/11 and they are there now. Few in those protests have any grasp of the destruction of Yugoslavia. Most still think Milosevic was a war criminal. How many bother to mention U.S. black sites and those military bases around the globe? Do they wonder what goes on in those places? I think such facts only appear in their consciousness when watching a TV show or Hollywood film. And mostly they are perfectly fine with killing Arabs just as they are perfectly fine with mass incarceration and with eroding civil liberties. Do any of them protest the U.S. and especially the Clinton’s, grotesque plunder of Haiti?

If you love the Super Bowl, then you probably don’t dwell in any depth on the depravity of the U.S. government and its crimes around the world. And I say this because to enjoy the sight of young men turning their brains to mush should not be enjoyable. I say this knowing my own contradictions. I was close to the boxing world for much of my life. I admired the beauty and sacrifice and courage of great fighters. I still do. But I am aware of the problem with this. And if you asked me today I’d say ban all boxing. But I will watch fights again. (there is a side bar discussion to be had about why boxing feels tragic and heroic and MMA feels simply violent). But one needs to examine why young men are still willing to participate in these sports. The obvious answer is that for many of the poorer families in the U.S., the possibility of comparative wealth can come no other way. (And boxing at least rarely displays any jingoism. It is, as someone said, the red light district of sports).

But Trump is doing and saying pretty much what all presidents before him have done and said in foreign policy terms. Oh, he switched from Russia to China, but eventually he will get to both. So there is a cognitive dissonance to attack Trump but not have attacked Obama. And this is the core problem. The protests are about Trump the man, not his policies. Or rather, not his foreign policy. And really, even his domestic policy really doesn’t stand very far outside what is already mostly in place courtesy of the last six or seven U.S. presidents. They are not anti war protests, not even anti torture. Not anti Imperialism, except in a minority of cases and not anti Capitalist.

Edward Curtin wrote of the recent protests….

“At the call of organizers, they were roused from their long liberal naps. Reacting to Trump’s gross comments about “grabbing pussy” – sick words, macho aggressive in their meaning – they donned their pink hats, made signs, and took their newly awakened outrage to the streets. Rightly disgusted by being verbally assaulted and afraid that their reproductive rights and services were threatened, they pounced like tigers on their verbal attacker. Massive, very well organized, media friendly marches and demonstrations followed. It was a hit parade.
Yet as others have forcefully written, something is amiss here. During the Obama years of endless wars, drone killings, the jailing of whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, etc., these demonstrators were silent and off the streets.
A large number of the women (if not the vast majority) who marched against Donald Trump – and the recent women’s marches can only be described as anti-Trump marches – were Hilary Clinton supporters, whether they would describe their votes as “the lesser of two evils” or not. Thus, opposition to Trump’s aggressive statements toward “pussy” was implicit support for Clinton’s and Obama’s “feminism.” In other words, it was support for a man and a woman who didn’t publicly talk aggressively about women’s genitals, but committed misogynist and misandrist actions by killing thousands of women (and men and children) all over the world, and doing it with phallic shaped weapons. Trump will probably follow suit, but that possibility was not the impetus for the marches. The marches centered on Trump’s misogynist, macho language, and his threats to limit women’s access to health services – i.e. family planning and abortion.”

Trump is the logical culmination of the rightward drift of U.S. liberalism over the last fifty years. He is the sunlamped face of Capital.

The Democratic Party systematically purged left voices and anything that lent support to communist goals and organizations, worldwide and at home. The fall of the Soviet Union signaled the onslaught of neo-liberalism in hyper drive. Enzo Traverso, the Italian historian, noted the failures of liberalism in assisting the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. And the deeply engrained tendency of the liberal to gravitate toward the fascist right. The liberal bourgeoisie had a dog in the fight for the status quo. Michael Parenti’s cogent article on left anticommunism (from 2014) noted

“In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).”

From Nicaragua to Yugoslavia, the anti communist hysteria was given credence and legitimacy by the right AND by much of the left. Or, rather, the non communist left. Watching Trump carry on the same policies as Obama, which in turn were carrying out the same policies as Bush Jr and Clinton and Bush Sr, it is remarkable the outrage coming from the liberal classes today. The privatizing of education and the further disempowerment of labor, along with a continuation of mass incarceration are all things that began back in 1989. And the endless search for new markets for Western capital has not halted since Reagan.

Norman Pollock wrote, here at CP just last week….

“This raises the question, applicable to Trump and his predecessors (for he cannot be examined in a vacuum), of the connectivity in America of power, wealth, and fascism, possibly from the time of Truman onward, and certainly, from Reagan onward.{ } America is fast crumbling into a boiling cauldron of hate, selfishness, and combativeness, Trump the perfect articulator, implementer, further executioner of capitalism…”

That Trump is so obviously incurious and ignorant suggests he will turn to others for advice, and likely some not officially within his administration. Ron and Nancy looked to the stars. One obvious voice for the Donald will be Benjamin Netanyahu. The other obvious candidate will be Eric Prince, late of Blackwater and insider pal to Trump and Pence both. And I suspect Pence almost serves as a life insurance policy for Trump. If anyone can be found to be more unstable and deranged than Trump, on a personal level, then it’s Pence. The logic of U.S. thinking on global hegemony, from those myriad think tanks that dot Washington, is one that will dovetail nicely with the fanaticism of a Netanyahu. The Israeli leadership has never had a problem working with anti semite fascists. And Trump is not an anti semite (that would be Steve Bannon, who’s influence may already be waning). In any case the targeting of Iran is directly linked to Israeli interests and the choice of General Mattis was quite possibly already a whispered suggestion.

It is fitting that the New England Patriots (sic) won the Super Bowl. Tom Brady and Coach Belichick both are Trump supporters. It’s the whitest team in the NFL, for what that’s worth (3 white wide receivers! Come on.), and somehow the entire spectacle of Super Sunday was one that suggested U.S. grandiosity and white supremacism.

I was thinking of Ryszard Kapuściński’s short book on The Shah of Iran (Shah of Shahs)…Reza Pahlavi was a U.S. client and his, Pahlavi’s, secret police, SAVAK, trained by the CIA and lend-out interrogation experts from Fort Benning and The School of The Americas.

“They would kidnap a man as he walked along the street, blindfold him, and lead him straight into the torture chamber without asking a single question. There they would start in with the whole macabre routine–breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, forcing hands into hot ovens, drilling into the living skull, and scores of other brutalities–in the end, when the victim had gone mad with pain and become a smashed, bloody mass, they would proceed to establish his identity. Name? Address?”

The CIA invented Pahlavi (Āryāmehr, The Light of the Aryans, the King of Kings) because Mossedegh had the temerity to nationalize the oil industry, and it feels oddly like a future foretold. Trump brings the nouveau riche desire to be a sort of American Shah. The same gold and cherebum, the same kitsch aristocratic trappings — though in Trump’s case these things mask the deep insecurities of the son of a brothel owner and slum lord. Trump is the counterfeit Shah. He embodies something of the crappy taste of all banana republic dictators. It is sort ‘despot cool’ ala Mobutu Sese Seko. Except one thing Trump will never be is cool. Never.

The entire shift in the ruling financial sector before the election; the shot callers in Wall Street boardrooms and the Pentagon, seemed to have thrown their weight behind Trump. The reasons remain obscure. But I cant shake the feeling Trump never intended to win. In any event, he cant be enjoying this. He is a daily endless 24/7 object of derision and ridicule. His consigliere, Bannon, appears himself a bit shaken. They woke up and suddenly a world beyond their preparation lay before them. Donald doesn’t know there is a country called Yemen. But he signed off bombing them. Didn’t he? Presumably. Trump is the 21st century version of a Shah — the shah of Atlantic City and reality TV, a bone ignorant crude and louche operator who did fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as preparation for this new role. But I suspect Trump sees himself as The Donald of Donalds: and the Art of the Deal as this eras Profiles in Courage — though perhaps not. Former cast members from SNL take time to make fun of him, now. And look, on one level I get it. But these same people continue to fawn over Obama. They voted Hillary. They have only barely little more grasp of Yemeni politics than Trump. They just cover it up more successfully. They know the right desert fork. They went to good schools. And what was once called middle America, or ‘the heartland’ are now the flyover states, and this populace today (what are really just white petty bourgeoisie and not swastika tattooed Klansmen) hates the entitled liberals who make fun of Trump. They are, for the moment, ready to forgive Trump. They don’t like him either, but they hate those making fun of him. For how long they will forgive him is unclear. But for now their hatred of the white liberals who manufactured the master narrative for America and made fun of NASCAR and duck hunting and college football tailgate parties trumps (sic) all else. There is enormous and complex cultural overlap, of course. But the reality is, some people somewhere backed Trump. The Clintons were thrilled he was running. Hell, I suspect the Clintons might have encouraged him to run. For the DNC, the leaked Podesta emails verifies they wanted him or Ted Cruz. Even they couldn’t lose to a Don Trump, so the reasoning had it.

But they did lose.

Bannon, remember, once produced a documentary on Reagan (In the Face of Evil) and honed his carny pitchman skills at both Goldman Sachs and Breitbart media. Bannon is the voice of, or at least serves as stand-in, for a shrinking class of American worker who vaguely still dream the American dream. Trump is the latter day Reagan in that sense. The Trump base are really, in their own way, social climbers. And the great miscalculation of the DNC in this election was to wildly underestimate the anger of middle America. The petty bourgeoisie who watched in rapture as Tom Brady orchestrated a historic comeback. A comeback to beat the team of the blackest city in the U.S. (well, the one with a football team anyway); these were people who instinctively rejected all that the Clinton’s stood for. Remember, too, that half the electorate didn’t vote. That is the other lesson in all this.

John Pilger wrote of the recent protests by quoting firstly journalist Martha Gelhorn (circa 1930s)…

“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, “must be a man of action now… A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.”
Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions.”

Pilger added..

“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.”

This is what the Democratic Party, all of it, was silent about. Decades of removing communist and socialist and really, even just working class voices from what was supposed to be the party of ‘labor’ has resulted in the silence of bourgeois culture in the face countless global crimes and military aggressions. The age of humanitarian intervention stripped the patina from the deaths head of liberal apologetics. Cognitive dissonance. The complicity in war crimes in Yemen, with and in support of the most odious regime in the world, Saudi Arabia, passes in silence. Total media silence. Total. Hillary Clinton’s comment about deplorables reveals a mind set that sees poverty as something to ignore. One is led to expect such contempt from a Barbara Bush, but Democrats were supposed to different. The imprisonment and murder of radicals, from Fred Hampton to Leonard Peltier is simply not a topic at the Democratic convention. The cynical tolerance of a brutal never ending assault on the global south is not protested.

So, until protestors begin to find solidarity with those hundreds of thousands of malnourished children in Yemen, or the displaced and suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, or Honduras or Haiti or Gaza, or who pledge solidarity with the two million jailed in the U.S. prison system…then these protests are just as morally bankrupt as the Wall Street ghouls and Christian zealots who are salivating at the opportunity to punish women, the poor, and all people of colour domestically. These things cannot be separated. Ferguson is Port au Prince and is Fallujah and is Tripoli. The violence of such silence really cannot be tolerated anymore. The rights of women matter in central America and the Middle East, too. Trump, the cartoon Shah of TV reality entertainment is just a symptom. Covering up the symptom does not cure the disease. And the disease is Capitalism.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/08/the-violence-of-silence/

This is very good.

Some excerpts from Behind the Nightmare

Behind The Nightmare
MARCH 7, 2017 | LEAVE A COMMENT

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Luca Giordano (Fall of Rebel Angels, 1660. Detail)

“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
Walter Benjamin

“Within the universe of Bay Area startup culture, the Elon Musks are the heroes. They seem to have a broad, sweeping vision of the future. But their true pedigree is measured how they manage to amass massivewealth behind their ideas — their ability to do. They believe they have the necessary tools to game reality. Their thinking is built on top of a hyper-commodified religious devotion to the transformative powers of scientific rationalism and a faith in the sanctity of numbers.”
Liz Ryerson

“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft.”
Gerrard Winstanley

The ascendency of Trump, a reality TV show host, vulgar real estate billionaire, and the first president with his own cologne line, is described personally, and repeatedly, as a narcissist. And I wont argue with that, except that I think narcissism is too complex an idea to just attach to the new celebrity President. For it is a condition that is intwined with history and with social controls and conditioning. Freud introduced the idea of secondary revision in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the section on dream work. Secondary revision is, as a short explanation, one of the processes of symbolization that allows the dream to both reveal and conceal at the same time. Samuel Weber, the best reader of Freud alive today, points out that ‘secondary revision’ is not unique to the unconscious. It is something most everyone does all time during their waking lives. In its crude form it is the manner of layering a faux rational explanation over a conflicted idea or emotion. What Weber calls a ‘specious intelligibility’. In dreams the revision creates a false meaning that helps to hide the more uncomfortable and truer meaning, and in fact this false meaning is usually very far away from the actual meaning of the dream story. In other words, the secondary version is usually too easy, too obvious and facile. The ‘too coherent’ quality of secondary revision can be extrapolated outward on a social scale. Freud makes clear that in waking life there is a desire to make an intelligible whole out of the world around us. So, in a sense, contemporary capitalist society is a sort of tromp-l’oeil manufactured world — and in post modern late capitalism this pseudo real has taken on deeply pathological dimensions.

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Lieko Shiga, photography.

There are two branches of this revisionism going on in the West, today. One is the imposing of an official mass produced cultural and political narrative. The other is the personal as it has absorbed and overlapped with an ideologically tainted narrative. In the end they are both the same phenomenon but they operate in different ways for different effects and consequences. Now part of this is, as Freud put it, an innate intellectual function that demands unity. And this relates all the way back to animism and early notions of magic. But as Weber said, how can a function *demand*? The short answer today is that consensus has been added to all intellectual activity, at least in nominally social contexts. And here there is a capitalist aspect in so far as unity implies systematic completion, and completion means making sense of everything. Nothing must be wasted. There is an economic model that saturates western thinking today. Its related to risk management. This is the residue of late capitalism that leaves its fingerprints on all mental activity. But there is another cultural aspect to the general secondary revisionism of western society — and this is the need for manufacturing ever deeper horrors and carnage, fictionally, the better to offset the horrors of everyday life. When homeless men freeze to death outside of Hotels, the media covers it as if it were a TV show. The homeless are symbols of failure and laziness, and the new ruthless super ego feels more ingrained in the popular imagination that ever before. This harkens back to Dirty Harry, which may have been an even more significant symbol of psychic and political shifting than was thought at the time. And even at the time it was called fascistic.

snip

The bourgeoisie is the class of perceptual cohesion, if not actual cohesion. The unity of the system is a first priority for this is the class with both a stake in the status quo but also a vulnerability, one that the ruling elite hasn’t to worry about. It is that ersatz respectability that the liberal white American craves. And it is this that marks the biggest departure for mass culture since the realignment that took place in the 60s. Those shaped by the counter culture idea usually find it very hard to understand the submission of the following several generations; and I feel this when I run into people in their 40s or even 50s sometimes. I am surprised at the tacit respect for authority and the desire, so it seems, for conformity. With this comes a disproportionate respect for institutions. And not just the obvious ones, the military or government, but even things like the PTA or Cal Trans or whatever. Now I’ve been thinking of late about the Levellers and Diggers, and by extension the English bourgeois revolutions. But I think this is not an accident, and I suspect it is worth returning to the ways in which the Levellers coalesced into a movement. The Levellers, and True Levellers, were not a class as a traditional Marxist would define it, but rather were made up of small business owners (or what passed for that in the 17th century) and tradespeople and craftsmen, and also modest landowners. Without going into the ideas that drove aspects of this resistance (and the *Norman Yolk* etc) the desire was more for a tearing down of the ruling class and its privileges. With Gerrard Winstanley and the True Levellers, the revolt became more radical and more relevant for today.

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Oliver Cromwell, by Robert Walker, 1649.

Daniel Johnson, in a good short piece on Winstanley, writes….“Winstanley and the Diggers also saw such an incompatibility, though from a distinctly rural and pre-industrial perspective during the development of agrarian capitalism in England. At a time when the enclosure of common lands threw vast numbers of peasants off the land and into wage labor and grinding poverty, Winstanley developed a radical philosophy that associated private ownership of land and wage labor with the exploitation and degradation of people and the earth.” The relevance resides in the inherent ecological dimension of Winstanley’s ideas. He saw the ownership of private property as intrinsically unfair and that somehow the oppression of workers was inseparable from the destruction of the environment. Wage labor itself was immoral and oppressive. By 1650 the Diggers were forming autonomous agricultural communities for the poor, and designing a return of the commons to the people.
Johnson again…

“In the spring of 1607, thousands of people in the Midlands of England rose to prevent the enclosure of their common lands. Participants (mainly rural laborers, artisans, and small farmers) referred to themselves collectively as “diggers” and “levellers”—up to that time terms of elite derision and contempt. Anti-enclosure riots were not, however, new to the early seventeenth century. Large-scale popular opposition to enclosing (the privatization of common lands) and engrossing (the amalgamation of two or more farms into one) dated to the fifteenth century. The conversion of arable to pasture land with the expansion of the cloth industry, a rapidly growing population, and changing class relations in the sixteenth century signaled the rise of agrarian capitalism in the English countryside.9 It is often forgotten that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was in large part a work of social criticism aimed at landholders who enclosed the commons for the production of woolens. The idle English nobility and gentry enclosed all land possible, leaving nothing for food production. Former tenants whose labor was no longer needed in the fields were forced to wander, beg, or steal for their survival, and many found themselves unemployed in “hideous poverty.”

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Polixeni Papapetrou, photography.

This marked a class consciousness that in retrospect seems surprising only, or mainly, for its lack in terms of unity of vision. It was highly pragmatic and intuitive almost. That Trump is the son of a slumlord and himself a real estate mogul is probably not exactly an accident. His is a view that sees enclosing the commons as quite reasonable. The tenants are to be driven out, put on the other side of a wall if need be.
Goebell’s Gleichhaltung— or the Nazi-fication of culture, drove many writers and artists and thinkers out of Germany in the early 1930s. That Nazi sensibility about culture was a resolved and unified vision for all expression of any kind. Enzo Traverso writing of Benjamin….

“It was not enough to defend the legacy of the Enlightenment against fascism, because an effective struggle should recognize the links connecting fascism to modern rationality itself. Technical, industrial, and scientific progress could transform itself into a source of human and social regression. The development of productive forces could reinforce domination and its means of destruction, as the Great War had clearly proved. Fascism was neither a reaction against modernity nor a new fall of civilization into barbarism; it was rather a peculiar synthesis of the counter-Enlightenment—the rejection of a universal idea of humankind—and a blind cult of modern technology. ”

http://john-steppling.com/2017/03/behind-the-nightmare/

Democratic Domination
MAY 25, 2017 | 2 COMMENTS

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Zwelethu Mthethwa

“The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation…”
Guy Debord
“When in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he boldly proclaimed that distribution according to need, rather than strict equality, would herald the crossing of “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right,” Marx meant what he implied: that equality was an extrapolation from the presuppositions of capitalism. He had said as much in The Holy Family, declaring that the idea of “‘equal possession’ is a political-economic one and therefore still an alienated expression.”
Patricia Springborg
““The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrange*ment; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradictions be*tween its human nature and its conditions of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that na*ture”
Marx (The Holy Family)
“Marx believed that the working class was the most alienated class…. [He] did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people…. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter’s functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his “personality”, his smile, his opinions in the bargain.”
Erich Fromm
“Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance.”
Nietzsche
One of the great mystifications of the West, and certainly this is true in the U.S., is this idea of democracy. If you google Cuba or Iran or any nation not subservient to the US, you will find countless, nay, ENDLESS articles about the authoritarian nature of these countries and how they are not democratic. But I want to examine this a bit. In the US today nobody runs for national office (certainly not for president) without a huge bankroll.
The Federal Elections commission estimates…to run for congress….
House members, on average, each raised $1,689,580, an average of $2,315 every day during the 2012 cycle.
Senators, on average, each raised $10,476,451, an average of $14,351 every day during the 2012 cycle.
Elizabeth Warren spent 42, 000,000. Just saying.

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Peter Bleeker (1850s)

Ok…so in other words one has to be or sell yourself to a millionaire, essentially. But the point here is about democracy. Chavez was elected several times but is still called a dictator (Bernie Sanders called him a dead communist dictator). And yet, Venzeuela is among the most democratic nations on earth. Russia is democratic. But all these places suffer problems, too. Corruption usually at the top. But who is the most corrupt nation on earth? Im guessing the United States (saudi arabia just pledged a hundred million to Ivanka Trump’s company…and Obama just did a speaking gig for three million…THREE FUCKING MILLION DOLLARS to talk at a climate change conference?). So clearly corruption exists throughout the institutions of governance in the US. Look at the courts, the racial bias, and clear inequality of the make up of those in prisons. Rich people do NOT go to jail in the US. Is that democratic? Or how something like 90% of judges and lawyers in capital cases are white. But ok…then we come to US allies. The US loves to speak of european democracy. And yet Belgium, Sweden, Norway, England, Denmark, Luxembourg, Spain, and the Netherlands all have Kings or Queens. And the influence of those monarchs vary from country to country, but its not without influence in any of them. And symbolically, Id say that sends a pretty strong message about privilege and class hierarchy. But thats just my opinion. Mostly I find people have been conditioned to adore royalty. Its partly the selling of a narrative of romance and partly just dreams driven by unrealistic desire for wealth themselves.
“…we live in increasingly individualized societies, characterized by weak ties that generate many psychological, ethical, cultural and political problems. And second, social weakness is related to mercantilist processes. Market competition destroys the social fabric, the anthropological basis for the survival of any group of people.”
César Rendueles

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Paa Joe (Coffin maker, Ghana).

Exchange value is the cornerstone of Capitalism and freedom really means the freedom to sell your labor power. This is the source, after all, of capitalist wealth. And exchange value is the meaning of equality in capitalism. This seems a rather trenchant idea just now. The two signifiers of Democracy, at least for the western bourgeosie today, are tolerance and equality.
Bourgeois liberal democracy then creates a framework for viewing the world. Kill someone (unless perhaps poor and black or latino) and you are arrested for a crime. Kill someone while in uniform as part of military service and you are applauded. Take someone and lock them in your basement and its a class A felony. But if the basement is a cell in D block, then it is simply a legal punishment by the state. I was thinking of India recently, the world’s largest democracy, and one that has perpetuated military war on its own people, as Arundhati Roy has noted, all tribal peoples in Punjab, in Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Kashmir. And this is also the legacy of colonialism. Democracy is indifferent to equality or tolerance. One does not lead to the other.

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John Ruskin

In the US, in a system rife with extreme corruption, where innocent men are executed with veterinary chemicals, and where economic polorization is growing….and where racism is institutional and police power almost unlimited (a former slave owning state remember)….the system is constantly heralded as the best in the world. Israel, where a slow motion genocide is taking place in Gaza, is always talked about as the only democracy in the middle east. Iran is attacked in the West for it being a theocratic state. Yet Israel, also founded on an exclusionary religious and ethnic principle is lauded as Democratic. And yet the US works closely with the least democratic nation on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (and Qatar and the UAE and Turkey)….I mean human rights violators are used as proxies by US military planners all the time. But back to democracy…in the recent Iranian elections the turn out was massive. In the recent US election less than half the population voted.
If Iran is so tyrannical, why do so many people enthusiastically vote? Same with Russia? Or Venezuela? The campaigns of misinformation on those countries is staggering. Just staggering. The American animus toward all three is nearly mind numbing. I run into people who froth at the mouth when the name Putin comes up. I ask why they hate him so much and usually i get blank stares. Or a generalized non answer that he is a thug or dictator. Unlike, you know, Tony Blair or Trump or Hillary Clinton or Obama or Boris Johnson or Teresa May or Thatcher and Reagan for that matter.

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Queen Elizabeth II inspects the Queen’s Own Nigeria Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force, at Kaduna Airport, Nigeria, 1956.

Cuba is always called undemocratic. And yet people vote on far more things relevant to their lives than do workers in the US. Its only that they don’t vote for president. But in the US you get to vote for one or another millionaire bought and owned by wall street and you do not get to vote for your minimum wage or rights in the workplace. Sometimes Im dumbfounded, really, by the lack of knowledge in most americans regarding the political process. So hidden by propaganda and media are other forms of social organization that most in the US, at least this is what I find, know ONLY the U.S. two party system.
In Iran the supreme leader and his council have final say, in theory. In Norway the King, in theory, has final say on all things, too. And yes, they execute a lot of folks in Iran. And in Norway they don’t. Still, Norway is participating in US Imperial NATO aggression in Syria.
In the US, the president just sold 100 billion dollars of military hardware to the #1 human rights violator in the world. A nation where women have no rights, none. The cant drive even. Where nobody votes for anything. NOTHING. Where beheadings are regular and carried out weekly. Where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. And where there are no trade unions, no parties, no anything. Oh well, ok, yeah there is a lot of oil. And hence an obscene amount of money. Now, Iran’s gross national product grew by nearly 7% last year. So, in terms of this hybrid system the capitalist side is doing rather well. And everyone knows China has done well with its hybrid capitalism. And Russia for that matter. The percentage of people living below the poverty line in the US is…according to somewhat untrustworthy statistics, around 18%. I’d say its more like 25%. In Russia its 14% and in Iran, as of 2007, its 17%. I don1t trust any of those figures, actually. In Niger its 43%. In Iraq its over 30% In the Congo its 50%. Estonia is 21% and Chile is 14%. The stats for Cuba are not available. But im guessing, despite 40 some years of embargo the statistics are very low. But nobody escapes western capital. The US remember has 800 plus military bases around the world. We patrol the globe.

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Vintage toys. Location and date unknown.

Israel has a very mediated and exclusionary form of democracy. But then it is, as I say, like Iran, a religious state. And inherently religious states are fundamentally undemocratic. But who has Cuba attacked lately? Or Iran for that matter? It is claimed, by men like R.H. McMaster (and John McCain and Obama et al) that Iran is a sponsor of terrorism. The problem is, again, like democracy, one is going to have a hard time defining who is a terrorist. Was the bombing of the King David Hotel an act of terror? Was the Stern Gang a group of terrorists? Were the English occupiers in Ireland justified and was the IRA a terror organization? is Hamas? One person’s freedom fighter is another etc etc etc. But all of this is caught up in the justification for Capitalism. All of it. And the class struggle that ensues. The problem with most of the bourgeois class in the U.S. is that they fail to analyse their life and world with anything resembling a class analysis. This segues into a discussion (far too large to do properly here) on identification and identity politics.
Marx, at his most pessimistic, concluded a speech in April 1856, to commemorate The Chartist People’s Paper…
“In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, aretumed into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background if ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in encJowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. “

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Viktor Kolar, photography.

There are a dozen policy papers written over the last several decades in think tanks in the U.S. that openly call for global hegemony. That openly suggest the destruction of any rival as totally justified and even rational. These are the wonky men (and a few women) in flannel suits and wingtips that come out of that vast cauldron of thought that has as foundational members Friedrich Hayak, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, but also Bill Buckley and Ayn Rand, and Alan Greenspan and Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinksi, and Samuel Huntington and Paul Volker or Ludwig Von Mises and the whole Austrian School. These are the spiritual ancestors of the Clintons and Bushes and certainly of Reagan and his gang. And before that we have the Dulles Brothers, whose long shadow looms over everything, still, in the US government. And in U.S. society.
Would the French have left Algeria without violence and radical terror? The British left India because they were sick of it and losing money. Remember that England and France and Belgium and Germany and Holland and Spain mostly controlled the world for a couple hundred years, or maybe longer. The scale of the violence Europe inflicted on Africa and parts of Asia and all of Latin America is almost incalculable. The white man has destroyed and raped and plundered and oppressed tens of millions for hundreds of years. But this is the suppressed narrative. Go ahead and *google* the genocides of the last two hundred years. What do you find? Oh, Stalin and Mao. Such are the algorithms of corporate media and telecoms. The West propgandizes constantly by erasing chunks of history. You wont find Van Diemen’s Land or the Belgian Congo (not on the first page anyway). Or Britain and the famines of India. And I doubt many will have heard of Canada and first nation peoples. Sterilization and the displacing of children into proper white schools, exactly as happened in the United States with Indian Schools (sic). These were democracies of course. Not like those icky North Koreans. Those horrid Chavistas or Sandanistas or Maoist rebels in Nepal. Never mind each is, in fact, democratic. Or the authoritarian Russians. And then ask who the Ayatollahs have invaded exactly? Or who Russia invaded? And don’t say Crimea. They didn’t. My point is not that Russia is a paradise of equality and transparency. Or that Iran is not a theocratic state with severe and bloody state punishments. My point is that they are no worse, and probably better than the United States. Yes, Russia has a significant corruption problem, and so did Venezuela. Are they as authoritarian or corrupt as Saudi Arabia or Qatar? And what of Israel, what of the whole story of the founding of that nation. It was not an empty desert. A significant population was displaced, some murdered, and nearly all driven from their land and homes. Homes that were stolen outright in almost all cases. Moral calculus is indifferent to democracy.

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Leo Strauss

If the U.S. cares so much for democracy why did they install the Shah in Iran? Why did they support Mobutu and Papa Doc and Rioss Mont? Why install Pinochet? Why are they supporting the Neo Nazis they put in power in Ukraine? Why does mainstream media not talk of this? Why the silence on Saudi beheadings for that matter? Does Rachel Maddow wax smugly and hector her audience about the authoritarian Knesset in Israel today? That the defense minister is a rabid frothing racist and gangster? No. Of course not. Other terms are used …*hardliner* is one. Does Brian Williams discuss the beauty of Hamas rockets as he did of U.S. rockets? Of Kim Jong Un’s missiles? The terrible beauty of the Saudi executioners blade as the sun glints off the blood soaked silver? Does he question the propaganda on Syria? At all, even a tiny bit? No. Amy Goodman doesn’t either. And she is theoretically alternative. If democracy mattered at all to the ruling class in the U.S., then campaign finance reform would have happened two decades ago. But this is the point. Electoral politics is always going to take place within a frame of Capitalism and private property and class hierarchies. Always. It is inextricably tied together with it.
Even today the nature of the violence of slavery in the U.S. is minimized. People were treated as livestock. Worse in fact. But the reality is incrementally mediated by Hollywood, and in literature. Go ahead and read of the treatment of workers on sugar plantations in the early 20th century Caribbean, or of the diamond mine workers today in southern Africa. Such research requires effort. It is not officially sanctioned narrative.
Elections do not intend for equality and fairness to be the end result. That is not why America has elections. The U.S. has elections to sustain the control of the propertied classes. It is there to further the draining of everything into the pockets of the 1%. Did anyone expect Donald Trump to be any different? No, the only surprise is how scared he looks half the time. But as Ray McGovern noted, Leon Panetta and Obama looked scared too. Capitalism cannot survive equality. Capitalism creates poverty. Capitalism creates inequality and manufactures and needs exploitation. Imagine as a thought experiment if somehow Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka had been elected. Think how long they would be able to govern. If Trump is under assault by various factions in the Intelligence community, and Pentagon, and the now much discussed *deep state*, imagine how much worse it would have been for ANY third party that found itself in power. But of course Stein never ever would have been allowed to be President.

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Jon Rafman

This is also a good time to re-read Marcuse’s essay on tolerance (1968). Marcuse wrote it after Nixon was elected.
“Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence
and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced; and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo. “
This was written fifty years ago almost. Preservation of the status quo. Equality is fine, as long as it’s the right kind of equality. Malcolm X said “I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate.”

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Brendan Smith

Today the culture of trigger warnings and academic restrictions on unpopular opinion is outraged by the vulgarity and open misogyny and racism of Trump and his appointees. But nobody questions his military actions. For those actions are identical to all U.S. presidents since WW2. Nobody questions Trump’s military budget. Nobody questions his blind extreme support for Israel. Emanuel Macron, the recently elected President of France, has removed two appointees, his appointees, for their voicing support of the divestment movement against Israel. How is that possible, exactly? How is THAT racism, the racism of Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman or Tzipi Livni or Naftali Bennet acceptable? In fact, Western states are required to punish those who criticize Israel. So, really, there is nothing democratic or tolerant in the Western policing of thought. And how is it seen as in any way normal for Trump and R.H. McMaster and Rex Tillerson to pray at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem during a state visit? (as did Bush and Bill Clinton and every other modern president). Such things, going to the wailing wall, or participating in a sword dance for christ sake, while in the absolute monarchy of KSA is alright, –but a phone call to a Russian official is a scandal. I have said before that this is the era of cognitive dissonance.

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http://john-steppling.com/2017/05/democratic-domination/

Global Detention
June 16, 2017

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Photo by Ninian Reid | CC BY 2.0


“Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism…”

— Max Horkheimer

Nikita Khrushchev: The difference between the Soviet Union and China is that I rose to power from the peasant class, whereas you came from the privileged Mandarin class.

Zhou Enlai: True. But there is this similarity. Each of us is a traitor to his class.

There is now a clear genocidal intent in the Saudi attack on Yemen. An attack assisted by and designed in part by the United States. It is worth noting at the top that once King Abdullah died, and Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud took the throne, the shape of the Saudi power structure was changed. And the most important part of that change was the ascension of Mohammad bin Salman to defense minister. Bin Salman is all of thirty one, and in addition has retained the title of Minister of State, and added secretary general of the Royal Court. A rather astounding and nearly unprecedented consolidation of power in the hands of a thirty one year old. Additionally the eighty-one-year-old King is already suffering dementia and is not expected to long survive his tenure as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques {sic}. Bin Salman is second in line to the throne.

Also worth noting that a week after Trump visited the Kingdom and did the sword dance and touched the orb (and seriously, what the fuck is all that?) the president appointed clear-cut nut job Michael D’Andrea to head up Iranian affairs at the CIA. A guy nicknamed ‘The Undertaker’. And a chain smoking abusive bully who converted to Islam (I mean there is a real story in unpacking D’Andrea). And a short time later a terror attack hit Tehran. Not to mention that secretary of war James ‘Mad Dog” Mattis is a longtime anti-Iranian zealot. You connect the dots. The U.S. is now ramping up an already breathtaking assault on the Arab world, and on the global south overall. And barely any of this is even mentioned in the mainstream press.

The logic at work, from the U.S. assault on Yugoslavia (which looms as the real trial run) to Libya and Iraq and now Syria, has been not just to defuse pockets of developing resistance to Western capital, but to dominate labor markets and control resources. The penetration of Western capital is the engine behind this massive wave of attacks on the global south. All of this began, in a sense, at least in its current incarnation, after 1989 and the fall of the U.S.S.R. But the hyper escalation began with 9/11. And it was Obama, far more than Bush, that implemented the structural and tactical policy that Trump has inherited. And to return to the Saudis for a moment; Obama oversaw a cooperation with the Saudis in channeling money to Takfiri mercenaries as part of the assault on Syria. To the tune of billions of dollars (or as one analyst put it, over a hundred thousand dollars a year for every single anti Assad terrorist mercenary). And it was Obama who had U.S. military advisors in Riyadh, from day one, of the Saudi attack on Yemen. An attack that has left millions suffering starvation, and an outbreak of Cholera — a proxy biological attack itself, and a totally destroyed infrastructure.

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Crown Prince bin Salman: liable to rule for a long time. We must wonder what kind of shadow he will cast.

And remember, too, that Saudi Arabia only exists in its current form because of the U.K., and because of subsidizing from the West. And the British saw some sort of logic in supporting the minority fringe fundamentalism of Wahabbist Islam. A short bit of history here: it was in the 1700s that Ibn Saud formed an alliance with itinerant religious fanatic Adl al-Wahhab and this alliance formed into a movement of fanatic reformists who terrorized the peninsula until the start of the 19th century. And once destroyed by Egyptians (and Turks), the Wahab doctrine survived underground in small enclaves of nomadic tribes. But it was the start of the 20th century that saw the return of Saudi power and Wahabi ideology.

Johnny Grant wrote…


“…Abd-al Aziz, the then Saud leader, returned from exile determined to reclaim the family’s former power. In doing so he used much the same tactics as his ancestor, Ibn Saud, namely employing fear under the banner of jihad. But there were two other important aspects to Aziz’s strategy that can’t be overlooked: the Ikhwan project, and the support from the British.

A major part of Abd-al Aziz’s strategy for reclaiming the peninsula was to extend Wahhabism through radical teaching into the surrounding Bedouin tribes. The traditional tribesmen were considered theological ‘blank slates’ by the House of Saud. Primitive and unenlightened, the Jahiliyyah were opened up to Wahhabi conversion by Saudi clerics with great enthusiasm.”

Aziz courted the British, who saw the wisdom in having a fanatical puritanical autocrat control the restive tribes and signed him up as part of a British protectorate. In 1932 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was born, and a few years later oil was discovered. The formation of the Kingdom also saw an early cooperation with Israel. Common goal drove this partnership and it was Israel, with of course U.K. help, that fought the revolutionary republican forces in Yemen that wanted to overthrow the authoritarian Imam of the time – forces backed by Egypt’s Nasser.

Asher Orkaby writes…


“Since neither London nor Riyadh wanted to openly support the royalist forces, they needed a partner that would be willing to organize airlifts clandestinely over hostile territory. They turned to Israel, the only country with more to lose than Saudi Arabia from an Egyptian triumph in Yemen. Israeli leaders, for their part, believed that supporting a proxy conflict with Egypt would forestall an Egyptian-Israeli confrontation in the Sinai, keeping Nasser too preoccupied to attack Israel.

The celebrated Israeli transport pilot Aryeh Oz, then serving as the leader of Israel’s International Squadron 120, led the mission. Using a retrofitted Boeing Stratocruiser, he oversaw 14 flight missions to Yemen’s northern highlands between 1964 and 1966, carrying vital weapons and supplies that, in numerous cases, helped turn the tide of battle in favor of the royalists. Israeli pilots charted a flight path directly over Saudi territory, avoiding Egyptian fighter jets patrolling the Red Sea.”

Israel and Saudi cooperation continues, especially in regard to Iran. And the influence of Saudi money extends to every corner of the Imperialist West. Let me quote Fintan O’Toole…


“Wahhabism was born in the 18th century, Salafism in the 19th. And they are not “Islam” – Salafis and Wahhabis make up 3 per cent of Muslims. One of the more bizarre aspects of this ideology is that it involves attacks on things most Muslims regard as sacred. When western liberals wring their hands about giving offence to Muslims by depicting or representing the prophet, they miss the most important point. Cartoons in Charlie Hebdo are vastly less offensive to most Muslims than the destruction of early Islamic tombs by the Saudis. But of course self-appointed defenders of Islamic sensitivities, funded by Saudi largesse, won’t tell you that.”

Western governments abide by the dictum, just don’t mention the Saudis. The vast majority of Iraqis and Syrians believe ISIS is a western invention. And so it is, by way of Saudi Arabia. The modernist blog notes…


“These are precisely the populations which the western media universally insisted ISIS drew its support and sympathy. These are the people who the Western right insist simply spawn such savage groups periodically from the depths of their Oriental inscrutability, and of whom Western liberals parrot the equally racist absurdity that they are just so constitutionally barbaric as to morph into head-choppers after a certain sum of bombs have been dropped.”

The Western mainstream press and good deal of the left in the West continue to express the generalizing Orientalism that links Milosevic, Qadaffi, and Assad as all the same, and all somehow inherently despotic and creations outside history. The demonizing of Islam is linked to the Western (meaning U.S. and U.K.) need to bury the reality of Saudi influence, and the history of Wahabbi fanaticism. But it is also a part of the hidden security apparatus (or deep state, a term predictably being ridiculed in mainstream media now) that works to defuse and squash any organic grassroots movements of resistance.

Ole Tunander wrote….


“US Rear-Admiral James Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations, in 1984 set up a ‘terrorist unit’ — known as the Red Cell — recruited from his own naval special forces (SEAL Team Six), to attack naval bases worldwide. This unit set off bombs, wounded US personnel and took hundreds of hostages as part of its operations. According to Lyons, it was necessary for US forces to get ‘physical’ experience of the terrorist threat in order to ‘change the mindset’ and ‘raise the awareness’ of the troops to prevent a possibly even more devastating attack.

Once again, the US was developing a security system that included both sides of the coin. With the end of the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet threat, however, many Europeans believe this ‘dual structure’ — with its specifically tasked terrorist units — may have evolved into an instrument for establishing not only internal Western stability but also US global hegemony.”

Ya think? The recent Manchester bombing is a perfect expression of the mechanisms of the hidden security hierarchy. John Pilger observed…


“The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.

Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”. The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.”

When Hillary Clinton ordered the assassination of Qadaffi, the killers were part of this same group that the U.K. protected and employed, in theory, when necessary. Again, this imperial policy goes back to WW2. And the goal was to stop secular states, to stop Pan-Arabism lest control of resources fall out of Western control. And the creation of Israel was part of the plan. Pilger adds…“Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest.” The truth is Mu’ammar Gaddafi never intended to massacre anyone. But the fact he controlled massive oil reserves served, among other things (like wanting to create a new currency to replace the dollar), to put a target on his back. The destruction of Libya included massive bombing of civilian areas and an estimated death toll (including a high percentage of children) in the tens of thousands. Obama ordered troops to South Sudan, the Congo, and the Central African Republic…a de-facto invasion of desperately poor nations, all with total invisibility in U.S. media. The western narrative on terrorist attacks never varies. Lone wolf acting alone. Product of a barbaric Islam, a culture of violence, anti modern, savage and anti democratic.

Jim Kavanagh wrote…


“The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.”

The attack in Tehran, the one applauded by Trump and the craven imbecile Dana Rohrbacher, was claimed by ISIS. And ISIS, as must be clear by now, is the creation of Saudi Arabia with huge amounts of help from the U.S., Israel, and U.K. And secondary assistance from NATO, Turkey, Jordan, and the other gulf monarchies. When Trump blames Iran for the terror in its capital, he is part of the inversion of reality that is now daily fare in western media. Iran is the largest democracy in the region and the greatest opponent of fanatical Salafi terrorism. Israel continues to be a crucial actor in the global Imperial project of the U.S. They support ISIS financially, but also with safe passage through the Golan Heights, and with free hospital care; not to mention the intermittent air strikes by the Israeli air force. With Netanyahu under investigation for corruption, one can expect Israeli aggression will only increase in an effort to distract from his domestic problems.


“…more than seventy American companies and individuals have won up to $27 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three years, according to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the study, nearly 75 per cent of these private companies had employees or board members, who either served in, or had close ties to, the executive branch of the Republican and Democratic administrations, members of Congress, or the highest levels of the military.” — Garikai Cheng

So what is the conclusion one draws from all these facts? Well, firstly, the United States is the #1 world aggressor. The Saudis, like ISIS, like Kagame, are just a tool. Iran hasn’t invaded anyone for 300 years. It isn’t Russia that has 800 military bases around the world. That would be the U.S. And it was under Obama, who now looms as the worst president in history, that the constitution was essentially shredded. The U.S. now assassinates anyone anywhere in the world without due process, advocates indefinite detention of anyone, even U.S. citizens, without trial, and can label any American a terrorist without due process (you can be labeled a terrorist for paying cash at an internet cafe).

The U.S. has entered a gilded age in which the affluent classes, the managerial class (now increasingly elitist, and including a kind of new technological expert priest class ) who live largely in big urban centers, have grown ideologically and culturally apart from the underemployed working class, are aligned with the impossibly rich 1%. The haute bourgeoisie are now not just structurally opposed to the working class, but culturally as well. They are white professional gentrifying educated and anti socialist. Race and gender cut across this, too. The violence against the third world is the same violence vented on black communities in the U.S. And I’ve seen essays arguing that racism is at an all time low (and argued this with a pseudo leftist in fact) when of course it is only a certain kind of manufactured image of anti racism that has grown. The real racism against black people is reaching new levels of sadism. The academic left concerns itself increasingly with identity issues while ignoring the massive uptick in direct violence against the global poor. No country the U.S. has attacked has offered even the remotest threat. Yemen was and is the poorest country in the Arab world. And domestically, despite various liberal laws now providing protection (and Dean Spade is very good on this with regards to trans people) there has been a growth of material punishment and marginalization of the most vulnerable. The mythology that passing laws changes something, like racism say, is actually one that ends up justifying racism because now, supposedly, in a post racist society if you fail it is because you are lazy or somehow just not up to the task. And running alongside this is the growing prison population. The violence against black communities is the same violence directed at Yemen, and Libya and Syria. There remains in the U.S. a dire housing shortage, food insecurity has grown, and stripped down welfare benefits. The state is the great punisher today, both domestically and globally. And the global violence is masked because much of it takes place through the hidden security apparatus, and domestically through the illusions of legal faux legitimacy. That Obama succeeded in sustaining an image of progressive liberalism is one of the great propaganda achievements of the modern era. For Obama did nothing for the poor, and globally intensified the imperialist drive for global hegemony. And that is the story in one sentence. Globally the United States has destroyed secular governments, supported monarchies and dictatorships, propagandized against all secular socialist minded leaders and in fact against any leader not prostrate in obedience. Our allies, such as Israel, are exactly the same. Expansionist and racist and militant. Or like Saudi Arabia, degenerate and morally bankrupt societies of bigotry and cruelty. That is the company the U.S. keeps.

Gordon Huff, a Vietnam veteran, wrote…


“Every day my father would return from the Ford factory, describing 120-degree heat and air steeped in carcinogenic solvents. His friends and coworkers died in their 50s. By age 55, he had suffered half a dozen heart attacks and was on disability of $60 a month to support a family of 4. This is a common story, not an exception, this is how my generation grew up, mowing lawns, shoveling snow for money for shoes, working to support a family as early as 10. This is the American generation that went to Vietnam and it was the generation that taught the Pentagon that their games would not continue unopposed.

Today it’s different. The public questions little, those in the military question nothing. When America’s invading armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, under bush never found WMDs or the massive underground terrorist fortresses Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke of, what was the downside? Thousands of American military were killed over not just nothing but abject lies.

When billions in cash was stolen in both Iraq and Afghanistan, when 250,000 AK 47’s purchased by the US government for the Iraqi military simply disappeared, nobody saw it. When Haliburton Corporation furnished the US Army with drinking water taken unfiltered from the Euphrates River, one of the most polluted bodies of water on Earth, hundreds infected with Hepatitis and other diseases, nothing was said, certainly no congressional investigation but the Pentagon was silent as well. Also silent were the troops in the field, silent then and still silent.”

And Hollywood deserves a fair share of blame for the effectiveness of the propaganda. The endless repetition of Imperial lies and the fawning adoration of militarism has helped create a nation run by a sub literate gangster billionaire. A president who appoints only other billionaires or just old fashioned regressive cracker racists like Jefferson Sessions. Raw meat tossed to the xenophobic right wing. And I will tell you now, Trump will get re-elected because the class segregation is now deeply entrenched and the collaborator liberal class will in the end defer to their own self interest. They will vote Democratic (Chelsea Clinton? Michelle Obama? Cory Booker?…who is the next Democrat to run against Trump? It won’t be Hillary because I think her health will prevent it). But whoever it is, they will lose. And for the same reasons Hillary lost this time.

This is a society of extraordinary denial and self delusion. Global aggression and the artificial Salafi terrorist mercenaries are the result of Capitalism and Imperialism. They are the proxy warriors in the West’s irrational lust for more. Of everything. And of the barely concealed death instinct of the western psyche.

http://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/06/16/global-detention/