jane dark's sugarhigh!

quotables

"...dangerous toys from Communist China..." threatens the comically-named Kitty Pilgrim on CNN, encoding in a single phrase the nation's transparent shuddering delight that the Cold War is still on! — but now without any political dimension whatsoever — to be fought entirely on the terrain of the commodity...

more teaser, less firecat

As much as we love Bobby Christgau and believe him to be not just decent but heroic, Latifah's had it up there with "democratic vitality." We assume he is not referring to any recent candidate's debates, and means something about the energetic breadth of the year's music. We find ourselves curious as to what traits distinguish this empirical phenomenon as "democratic vitality," rather than, say, "the current regime of niche marketing."

And voting Kala numero uno at the same time? The cognitive dissonance could just kill a man. Stay tuned for our year-end note...

evolution: five paragraph essay

It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.

Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.

After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.

But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."

In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

stranger than fiction

A more confusing fable than it first seems. In the core narrative, a guy stops going to work and his life gets a lot better in every way except he fears he will die soon. He is an IRS agent In the shell narrative a woman discovers she can no longer do her work, or at least can't do it in the way that everyone agrees makes it meaningful work. She is a novelist. Both of their realizations pivot around the "reality principle" of his imminent death.

It would seem on first pass that we have thusly a tale about the primacy of first order, or "actual" labor over second-order cultural work — an old theme, seemingly renewed here in the mildest way by the insertion of the information worker into the role that, 20 or 50 years ago, would have been a manual or industrial laborer. Even the feint wherein Dustin Hoffman — mediating between the two orders (which is, apparently, the destiny of the English Prof; holy mackerel does he have a huge office!) — ruefully proclaims the social priority of great art and seems to sentence the worker to death, only serves to underscore the apparent conclusion, in which it becomes clear that decency is on the side of the IRS agent (ironic, innit?).

The film isn't quite that simple or resolute; at a minimum, it's clear that the agent's life has become worth saving exactly because he has, confronted with his own death, become for the first time truly alive — and the necessary condition for this is not showing up for work. A life worth saving is an autonomous life; it's the autonomy from work that makes the life real enough to be a matter of import to the novelist. This import, this caring about his actual life, is what grounds the author's relevance — is what gives culture a meaningful relationship to social reality. His autonomy is the condition of possibility for culture's famed semi-autonomy.

This is why he must be an information worker, of course. He already dwells in the intermediate zone between labor and culture, between the real, exploited proletariat and the purely exploitative owners of the means of production. He is an instrument which information and capital, both in utterly abstracted form, use to get from one place to another. It's no coincidence that he works at the exact juncture of "the economy" and "the government." He is, in short, a representative of the supposed "new class" much ballyhooed in post-Marxist social thought — a class which is literally a middle class.

This existence of this new class is, one fears, a fantasy, designed to allow the imagination that the era of fundamental class conflict is somehow over (a fantasy that the movie baldly restates in the inverse: the love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an actual laborer — a baker! how prole can you get? — who nonetheless stands in the place of non-alienated labor, because she is pursuing both her pleasure and her vocation and, get this, abandoned the emptiness of law school for said pursuit. Take that, information workers!)

Thus the movie gets to have it both ways. This new class of information workers is socially unnecessary, and — just like artists and other cultural workers, who in fact are also members of this class — could cease to work on the morrow, without toppling the system of daily life (confirming the suspicions of many of the wealthiest and poorest members of society). However, they are far from irrelevant. Exactly by being able to abandon work without disastrous effects, they demonstrate that social existence is in fact not entirely determined by work. That is, they fulfill their "new class" duties not by doing new class work (for aren't tax collection and storytelling quite old jobs, really?) but by showing, not singly but collectively, that class struggle is itself an old idea, no longer consonant with new conditions.

Both of them — him with his freshly uncovered pleasure in the texture of daily existence, her in her final choice of a single life over a great artwork — embody the virtues of universalist humanism, which is the film's completed and total proposition. From the perspective of labor and capital, this middle class doesn't exist. But from the perspective of the social imaginary, they have serious work to do: their true function is to express outward the basic antirevolutionary ideology of liberalism itself, a message that must be endlessly received by the actually existing classes so as to not recognize themselves as such.

logicbomb

If one were looking for reasons to be leery of Slate article "Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll," a good clue might be found in the casual background assertion: "George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician." No offense, Mr. Brown! None taken, we're sure.

But this is not the article's topic. It's a discussion of how "sample trolls," like "patent trolls" before them, hustle about acquiring rights to pieces of music for the express purpose of suing or settling with musicians (or their corporations) who have sampled these pieces, or hope to. The example in this case is Bridgeport music, which just turns out to be some guy named Armen Boladian, after an easy buck:

Since 2001, Bridgeport's shotgun approach has led to many dismissals and settlements, but also two major victories. First, in 2005, Bridgeport convinced Nashville's federal appellate court to buy into its copyright theory. In that case, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune "Get Off Your Ass and Jam," changed the pitch, and looped the sound in the background. (The result is almost completely unrecognizable—you can listen to it here). The Sixth Circuit created a rule: that any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Righteous outrage etc etc. No argument here. But Tim Wu's version of the story proceeds from quite an odd assumption:

The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation.

This is a troubled assertion on the face of it, since it assumes something that millions of hip-hop (or music) fans are far from certain of: that copyright is, as a general rule, a friend of musical innovation, insofar as (in the case of hip-hop) the original copyright control of sampling raised massive barriers-to-entry for hip-hop artists, corporatizing the genre and, by many accounts, bringing an end to the form's era of innovation.

Assumptions aside, there is a more pernicious (and more comedically absurd) error in this claim. It proposes that there is no logical connection between the abstraction of "copyright" and the concrete fact of Bridgeport. This is self-apparently false from the perspective of logic, and from the perspective of law. Indeed, the author eventually wends his way to this realization, realizing that people tend to take advantage of laws to make money, rather than using them as vague suggestions about honor. At which point he proposes this or that sort of legal patch. But even in this motion, he turns back as if magnetized toward his basic orientation: copyright is good as long as it isn't perverted. If it could just be made to serve individual artists and not corporate profit-takers — a few small changes, and this little problem will be behind us.

There must be a word for this. For this invocation to never think systemically, historically, at all costs. Surely there is some term for the belief, against all evidence, that laws legislating ownership of ideas, and right to profit, do not tend toward enriching the wealthy while increasingly disenfranchising the remainder? There must be some kind of concept for the ability not to have this thought, and thus to experience the legal system as independent of the people it serves, as being indeed fundamentally disconnected from its manifest outcomes? For assigning each increasingly generalized episode — S&L scandal, Enron, WorldCom — to the bad faith of bad individuals? To not knowing history as having a directionality in which the law participates? No, really, we can just fix it with a patch! We can extract the bad apples!

There's got to be some kind of name for this, like we have a name for phantom limbs and snow-blindness...

the framers

Near the end of October, cognitive linguistics guru George Lakoff, who writes books about how the Democrats can close the framing gap with rhetorically savvier Republican speechifiers, wrote this in The Gray Goose (reprinted at The Huffington Post):

"Stay the course" is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions. Because physical actions require movement, we commonly understand action as motion. Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place -- to the refrigerator to get a cold beer, say -- we think of goals as reaching destinations.

Another widespread — and powerful — metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral. In modern conservative discourse, "character" is seen through the metaphor of moral strength, being unbending in the face of immoral forces. "Backbone," we call it.

In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, "stay the course" evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he'd been acting — and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.

This is perhaps the pivotal case of an idea Lakoff has been hammering for quite some time: the idea that language is connotative as well as denotative, basically, with specifics about how some language is better at motivating unspoken/unconscious images and attendant emotional freight, and thus more capable of persuading people of positions before they can be arbited in the full light of reason. Moreover, in classic cog-sci fashion, these responses are proposed to be more-or-less hardwired, as the cognitive activity happening in the shadows underlying rationality is quasi-automatic. "The laws of language are hard to defy," as he has it. His sense of the nature-of-the-beast quality of these linguistic actions verges on the absolute, and permeates his own rhetoric, as in this not from a year earlier, plumping his own product:

Negating a frame activates it in the minds of hearers, as Richard Nixon found out when he said “I am not a crook” and everybody thought of him as a crook. The very title of my book, Don’t Think of an Elephant makes the point: if you negate a frame, it reinforces the frame.

Charged with certainty about the invariable effectiveness of certain successful metaphors, he concluded that June 29, 2005 piece, "The Democrats can learn from Bush and Rove: Stick to your guns and stay the course." Meaning: get a well-crafted message that sends out the right cognitive codes, shows a clear and strong direction, and don't waver from that. To drive his point home with a rather obvious irony, he again highlighted the excellence of the Bush slogan, which works not just as a specific emotion-motivating phrase but as a general rhetorical strategy. Stay. The. Course.

If the phrase and strategy is such a winner, how did it lose so baldly earlier this month? The Democrats, as has been more than well-remarked, never found — much less hewed to — a vision to articulate beyond entirely vague forms of We're not them; after the election, one still heard the Party Chairman proclaiming "this was a call for a "new direction"; that was our slogan, and the American people have blah blah blah." Meanwhile, "stay the course" turned out to be the albatross around the neck of every Republican candidate, if not the anchor.

So how does a cognitive linguist explain that? That is the conundrum — and the occasion for Lakoff's late October essay quoted above. It turns out that "stay the course" stopped working because the president failed to stay the course in his speeches:

The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

"That is not a stay-the-course policy," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday....Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said "stay the course."

What the president is discovering is that it's not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

This is to say, per Lakoff, that the presidential team had made the fatal error of saying "Don't think of an elephant" (indeed, he repeats wholesale that passage from a year earlier, book title and all). Bush's reversal, his failure to stay the course in his rhetoric, becomes utterly damning:

To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination -- that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to "complete the mission" and "achieve the goal."

"Stay the course" was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses.

Here the conundrum comes into full flower. The phrase can produce only one set of pre-rational, emotional responses. It always works. To abandon the phrase is to doom yourself; as Lakoff himself says, it's this "negating of the frame" that's "fatal." So why would the president even consider abandoning the phrase? Why would anyone trouble to change a successful formula with automatic, guaranteed results?

The answer passes swiftly amidst all framing stuff, and Lakoff buries it in a dependent clause, a bagatelle: "given obvious reality." We would not care to arbit the status of "reality" with Lakoff, insofar as our ideas about it are likely to be so divergent that there would scarcely be grounds for debate. But on this occasion we may find ourselves in a sort of agreement: the phrase "stay the course" stopped working because it referred to historical circumstances that changed. It indicates an idea, and the idea came more and more obviously to suck: to be fatal for bodies, to produce no pragmatic or ideological gains, to indicate a tangle of lies and manipulations.

This is not to pillory Republicans for the morass in the Middle East just now, but to hope to have done with Lakoff's lucubrations. For he himself has conceded, albeit in a three-word aside, that these powerful metaphors work until they don't work anymore; that the response is automatic and pre-rational until it isn't. Despite the scientistic frame that Lakoff invokes about his own studies, it turns out that there's no strong correlation between input and output; that cognitive science in fact can't give a steady account of how connotation works; that while metaphors may be "emotion-laden," there are no fixed (or even quasi-fixed) emotional responses. It may be the case that the phrase "don't think of an elephant" causes one to think of an elephant; how one feels about that elephant depends rather on shifting information about which cognitive linguistics may wish to keep silent, for fear of embarrassing itself.

One last averral. We do not wish to extol the primacy of the fact — to reduce this to the simplicities of Ah, but the real world had its way with language, eh? The historical conditions that changed, largely in Iraq, so as to change for a while the connotations of the phrase "stay the course," can't be reduced to "fact." They too involve rhetoric, spin, symbol management, "propaganda of the deed." The conception of a perfectly real world independent of language seems insupportable, and unnecessary; it's as futile as the idea of a sphere of language tied entirely to wired cognitive functions, fixed within a "frame," independent of the real of history — an idea that Lakoff has himself invalidated, against his own initial claims. Language, it would seem, is a mediation with history, and the way it works will apparently require negotiations at every turn. This is not a fresh proposition, except insofar as it is news that stays news.

The promise, from whatever political position, that symbol management is a total and self-determining reality, a frame that has achieved ultimate closure, has no historical truth — except as a symptom of a quite legitimate fear that there is no outside anymore, no history, no semi-autonomous sphere, no possible form of resistance other than participation at the level of symbol management. This is a basic banality of the spectacle, of course; one takes some small comfort in recalling that the spectacle itself is, if perhaps a kind of fact, necessarily one that is in all ways historical.

no love is not dead

"Ideological purity" is indeed an impossible fantasy. But not a fantasy of some radical leftist position; rather, it's a fantasy that aligns the liberal-progressive with the corporate-conservative — appearing not as a demand, but as a twin foreclosure of thinking. One the one hand, it's longhand for "Stalinism," generalized such that the insult can be used to smear anyone who doesn't accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order. On the other, it's the shorthand of the whisper campaign concerning the lack of this supposed ideological purity, a negative seduction which always runs something like, you're complicit too, we saw working to pay your rent, we saw you buying a Coke, you're not so pure are you, nobody likes a hypocrite so why don't you just accept it and accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order? The fact that some turn this accusation against themselves as a justification of their activities proves nothing other than the proposition that Althusser really had a point when he wrote of the "Ideological State Apparatus."

In its very form, it proposes a Manichaean worldview of the pure/impure — stacked against the former, who are inevitably elites, tyrants, messianic crackpots, and/or hypocrites. However, even if it leaves these suggestions at the level of the implicit, it negotiates the binary via a second binary of impractical/pragmatic, with its rhetoric about striving for possible gains, actual alleviation of suffering, along with the usual apologetic promises to change things from the inside. It's the boilerplate, that is to say, that valorizes the idea of "the lesser of two evils," and proposes its apparent content.

Ironically, such Manichaean thought is at great hazard of finding itself quite contentless. If one first accepts the terms of the decision as being between "two evils" (having foreclosed the only remaining possibility, that of "ideological purity"); and if one will always choose "the lesser" regardless of the content of that position (regardless, that is to say, of its avowed stance on, e.g., military spending, universal health care, or capitalism); then the decision turns out to be purely formal. It finds itself on a slippery slope without any method of slowing its descent; there's no mechanism for knowing when one should stop preferring the lesser of two evils, and think about the entire system of choice in some different way.

An unceasing preference for the lesser of two evils, and for the worldview in which that seems like an accurate description of the choices, would mean that, for example, one would support the Vichy government, insofar as they would be likely to treat the population better than the National Socialists would, even if many concessions would have to be made. Indeed, this was how the case was presented, and it was persuasive to many.

History, alas, has judged these persons harshly: "collaborator" is the term that springs to mind. This is not by way of hurling further invective at the current avatars of "the lesser of two evils," but rather of noting that history is rather clear in showing more than two choices on offer. There were at least three: Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, or resistance. History suggests that, as a general principle, there are at least three choices; there is no crypto-ethical binary. History teaches as well that it requires no ideological purity, nor claim of same, to make the third (or any other) choice; that such choices are humanly (if not ideologically) open to everyone; and that such choices might be seen as supremely pragmatic. They require no test of purity at all, but the merely posing of the question, What would refusal look like, what would negation look like in this intolerable situation?

No matter how gracefully one might distinguish that political constellation from our current conjuncture, this final question presents itself with no less force.

It is perhaps also to-the-occasion to point out that every member of the resistance died (or will die all too soon), just like every Vichy sympathizer, and every Nazi. This includes the poets. Some are buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, or Montparnasse; some are not. Some are remembered; some are not. These are some poets who did not choose the lesser of two evils: Philippe Soupault was imprisoned and Breton fled; Rene Char, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos fought and wrote in the resistance.

No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouth

hereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.

Listen, I've had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.

Love's what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.

Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

Everything's transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouth

But still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

And if some day you happen to think of it

Oh you, exact form and name of my love,

Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,

When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,

or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,

One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,

Or on some rainy day

At dawn just before getting into bed,

Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than any

other man did, and that it's a shame that you didn't realize it.

But tell yourself, too, that there's nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard and

Baudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly dead

women who despised even the purest love.

But as for you, when you die,

You'll still remain both beautiful and desirable.

I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparable

image present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other hand

should I outlive you

Your voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,

The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,

will still go on living in me

Yes in me, a poet who's neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,

Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so well

Have become their equal.

Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn't want to be remembered for doing anything else

he's ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.

weltsystemangst

Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There's something nicely easygoing about it. You've got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people's inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they're still lazing around at the end of a Sunday.

This remarkable passage begins a Slate "diary" by Deborah Fallows, written from Shanghai. The weeklong travel journal takes as its opening gambit the consideration of how it feels to be a good worker. It might be understood as a sort of meditation of a maxim of Adorno's — "Every Sunday is too little Sunday" — but with the values reversed. Adorno wrote:

The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

It turns out that, in Shanghai, Sundays are satisfying — exactly because every Sunday is too much Sunday, and allows one better to keep up with (and, for a phantasmal moment, race ahead of) "the pressure of the demands of commerce." (Here we can't help but recall the Soviet science fiction novel translated as Monday Begins on Saturday).

The caricature of Marxist lit-crit's discoveries — that all writing these days (a couple centuries worth of days) is in some way about work — seems no longer caricatural, but merely quaint: why bother reading for the drama of labor, as opposed to, say, the emotional life of the characters, when these have become one and the same? Moreover, given that this confluence has not just perfected itself but fled the subtext for the text — rendering the concept of, say "the political unconscious" all but moot — why do we need literary criticism at all, anymore? In this passage we find an achieved position of such ideological purity that ideological analysis can be retired.

If any curiosity survives in Fallows' text, it's the seeming lack of specificity. After all, the diary is presumably somehow about Shanghai, cosmopolitan center of the new China. For the purposes of her unfolding of the conditions of her sense of wellbeing, it would seem that any spot in the time zone would do: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Perth. The solution to this polite puzzle comes swiftly; the above-quoted passage is merely the first half of the first paragraph of the first day's report. It completes itself thus:

But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, "OK, gang, up and at 'em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!"

If there is any figure of speech in the entire paragraph, it's the term, "camp counselor." For surely she means foreman, or manager, or factory whistle. But of course she can name everything but her specific job; to do that would be to see it as something limited, something she occasionally is not.

That one displacement aside, the motion of the thinking remains extraordinarily clear about its location. For not only does she identify herself and her happiness perfectly with her fate as pure labor (and isn't happiness, these days, always based on the success of that identification?), but she swiftly moves to identify her specific labor with its general place within, and contribution to, the world economy.

And this is the truly revelatory move — revelatory not in the least, again, because of how consciously and unproblematically it happens. This is why the report comes from China, and it's not simply nationalism in some abstract, patriotic form. One finds oneself in Shanghai, the laboratory and showroom floor of China's race toward becoming the leading regime of accumulation on the face of the globe. Every detail of Shanghai speaks of it, of the race forward; the pockets within the city of of foot-dragging tradition, in their charming difference, speak with equal force of the same race. These details, the sensuous here and now of it, serve to orient you in Shanghai no more and or less than they orient you to your place in the space of flows, the world economy. This is what it means to be a "traveler." To be a world citizen, albeit a world citizen of the managerial class, tied to the currency of the United States.

The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find relief in being always at work; that sense fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work and experience its sufficiency within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital. And this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that this sensation, this happiness that is always melting and resolving itself into weltsystemangst, is an echo of 2001, of the hole punched in the United States' horizon of sight so that it must look uneasily across the map — a view mostly banished after 1989. Indeed, Deborah Fallows' motion from "nicely easygoing" to "a bit of anxiety" begins to narrate something like weltsystemaffekt from the position of the United States over the years 1989-present, ending in this new feeling, this tomorrow-yesterday, this new Sunday of the world.

nexus etc

The scenario recounted via the chain of emails here is all too familiar: an ideologically-loaded text (often art, though not always) gets displayed within an institutional context, and then someone complains that it doesn't behoove the institution to support and/or lend credence to the text's ideological position. Structurally, the fear is that an object that is purely rhetorical can gain substantial force through the context of its display, and more easily cause people to believe stuff that they shouldn't believe.

This claim is easily and sensibly shrugged off, as the Institute for Cinema and Culture has done. There are certain absolute debates underlying this sad scene, and those cannot be easily resolved: Is there a real historical truth, for example, which representations must either get right or wrong? Does art really get people to do anything anyway? But beyond these issues, which must remain undecisive as long as they are undecided, more immediate — dare I say "pragmatic"? — concerns make the concerned citizen's position incoherent.

What would it mean, according to his own logic, to regulate "particular description of [a] film"? Who would be in charge? Would that not involve controlling, institutionally, the rhetorical weight of the movie? Is the goal to produce a rationalized balance to make sure no one is ever threatened with being convinced of something? Would this balance assure that texts would never threaten the truth value of absolute historical fact (which would be known methodically via...)? — and would that be a good thing? Really, the attorney's stance is not a stance at all, just a sense of aggrievedness that makes a convenience of the very instability of rhetoric — of the uncertainty of art and propoganda and all other forms of contingent communication — while purporting to object to excessive stability. All messages are spinnable; spin this another way, because the way it's spun now I don't like it and what's worse it doesn't appear to be spinning. That's not really an argument, now , is it?

And yet, as I am fond of saying. The attorney's intuition is not finally one that I would dispute. Signification doesn't happen in parallel; as a given object, the poster in question forms a complex of signs which achieves meaning — which is rhetorical, that is to say, like a film or an email — through the relations between the parts (as well as in relation to surrounding matter). The director's squib description of the film is indeed part of a meaning that includes what institutions' names appear alongside. That Hayek has interpreted this meaning-complex in a banal, univocal manner is merely the sign of a weak reader, not of a failed understanding of how social meaning appears in the first place.

Hayek's intuition, alas, goes thoroughly unexplored, because of a very particular slippage: the slippage in the contemporary usage of the word "ideology." It's not a word Hayek employs, but it's what he means when he says "politics": the commitment to a prescriptive line about how social relations should be organized, before which historical truth — objective reality — is cast down. This is the meaning mechanism by which, most famously during the last century, communists are ideological but capitalist humanists are not — and, in a hysterical farce of recapitulation, the New York Times is ideological while Fox News is not.

The Times is ideological, of course, as is communism and Fox and capitalism and the poster at the University of Iowa announcing the film Blood of the Condor. The use of ideology described in the previous paragraph is more or less the second definition in the American Heritage dictionary: "A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system." But as it's come to be used, this use of "ideology" is purely ideological, per the main sense of the word: "The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture." That is, "ideology" as used by the current President (and former Prezzes), Bill O'Reilly and, implicitly, by Matt Hayek, is itself little more than a bludgeon used to discipline anyone who would threaten the body of ideas reflecting their own social needs etc.

The main function of "ideology" is to conceal the workings of ideology.

Another way to put this would be that Hayek (as a representative for a familiar strategy) doesn't wish to protect the truth from rhetoric, but rather to protect his preferred rhetoric from the truth of its own rhetoricity. To do so, he must produce a privileged category (what usually gets called "art") that is at once separate from the basic truths of daily life and capable of threatening them. Having done so, he must demand that all the meanings in this sphere replicate Moretti's Lukacsian account of the modern novel, that does the endless work neither of casting doubt on, nor lending credence to life, but of modeling conciliation, of showing us how to modulate the demands of the radical and of the daily life on offer so their distance is made tolerable. The Iowa poster's failure of modulation is in fact its only failure; the content is scarcely relevant. It's ideological — "political" — to Hayek not because of its expressed politics so much as because of its distance from the activity of conciliation that must define the supposedly non-ideological. That distance must be closed. (There is no radical activity, one notes in passing, that does not promise irreconcilability; a fact that goes equally for "art" and "politics").

What Hayek's intuition, structured by such interests, thusly must turn away from is the application of his own initial logic beyond the space of the University's arthouse. I note for example that various seals of the United States are generally present when the President speaks on television; does that mean that the US endorses the President's claims? Am I in fact being forced to play a part, as a citizen of this nation, in endorsing the President's expressly rhetorical and ideological claims? This is quite disturbing. But moreover, when I watch such speeches on, say, NBC, and the little NBC floater-logo appears in the corner of the screen, does this mean that NBC is endorsing the truth-value of said claims?

I could poke fun at Matt's initial ire, because the answer to all of these is, Of course not!

Except that the answer is, Of course! That's exactly how truth-value is produced (and we are enlisted to endorse it "against our will" every day), replete with its internal fractures, its disavowals, its proleptic recuperations of dissent and its cosmetic self-doubts. When Fox News announces itself as "fair and balanced" night after night, and then the FoxSearchlight logo appears on a poster for the film The Dreamers, this is an aggressively ideological labor, and I resent the ensuing effort to persuade me that the spirit of 1968 concerns free love with a little hullaballoo downstairs as a backdrop, a meaning I necessarily understand Fox to support and propose as "fair and balanced" — that's pure ideology! It's a lot more pernicious than Blood of the Condor, and it's got to be stopped! And this is true, in various ways, of every movie and its poster ever!

If you believe in the dangers of complex ideological signs, you can do a little better, sir. And there is indeed work to be done. One more try if you want to be a social critic...