Žižek in-cite

2012-02-19T08:18:00.001-08:00

Everyone is a Ventriloquist

2012-02-18T20:08:00.001-08:00

An Interview with Mladen Dolar

http://metropolism.com/magazine/2009-no2/everyone-is-a-ventriloquist/

Aaron Schuster:
One of themes running through A Voice and Nothing More [see above] – perhaps the main theme – is that, from the psychoanalytic viewpoint, the voice is not a form of self-affection or self-presence, but precisely an obstacle to the subject’s identity: it is the objective correlate of what Lacan calls the split subject. Part of the difficulty of grasping the voice lies in its peculiar topology, which you describe as a precarious border between the inside and the outside: while the voice emanates from within the body, it is also a part of the world, an uncontrollable outside, a ‘missile’ with its own trajectory. My voice is never simply my own, but there is always, as you note, a ‘minimum of ventriloquism’; it is not so much I who speaks, but rather I am spoken, the voice speaks in and through me. How strongly do you see this notion linked with psychopathology? Is not the paradigmatic case of the voice in psychoanalysis that of auditory hallucination, an extreme instance in which the voice appears as a form of otherness or hetero-affection?

Mladen Dolar:
‘As far as the general argument of my book is concerned, your question states it very well, and I couldn’t put it better myself. You also point to what I see myself as a certain deficiency of my book, namely the question of the status of the voice in psychosis. This is indeed, as far as the analytic practice is concerned, one of the most frequent and spectacular tell-tale signs of psychosis, presenting probably the most compelling instance of the voice as an intruder, the alien kernel which immediately imposes itself as real. It points to the sheer impossibility of sorting out the inner and the outer, for the voice heard is experienced as more intimate than the inner and more compelling than any exterior voice. In this sense, there is something psychotic in every voice, and psychosis only amplifies, or rather distils something which is usually kept at bay – the difficulty of distinguishing the inner and the outer and the persistent ambiguity of this division.

A simple reason for this lack in my book is that, having no clinical expertise and technical knowledge, I lack the competence to elaborate it, beyond embroidering on what many illustrious clinicians have already said. But this reason is not enough, and it is not enough to confine the voice to psychopathology. This compelling voice beyond one’s power has had a long history as a divine sign, before it became a matter of psychopathology. Consider the paradigmatic figure of Socrates, a man whose ‘hearing voices’ is intimately linked to the very foundation of philosophy (I have dealt with him far too briefly in the book and have tried to remedy this since). Lacan speaks somewhere of 19th century psychography1, which took Socrates as a case of madness (as Lélut put it, roughly, “If a philosopher claimed today to be in direct communication with divinity and to hear its voice—would we appoint him a chair in the University or a cell in Charenton?” Indeed).

The history of hearing voices was intertwined, up to modern times, with the history of divine signs, the authority of wonders and the wonders of authority, which could have the shattering resonance of Joan of Arc, or of the mystic visions (and Lacan had a special predilection for the discourse of the mystics). Hegel says somewhere that the Socratic “daemon stays in the middle between the exteriority of the oracle and the pure interiority of spirit”.2 This puts the question in “ontological” and structural terms rather than in terms of psychopathology, and the point of psychoanalysis is not so much to explain psychopathology, but rather to restore its ‘ontological’ value, as it were. Modern spiritual interiority allows for no divine voices and relegates them to nut-cases, and no doubt Schreber, this great ‘hearer of voices’ [a judge who around 1900 took notes on his mental illness, later interpreted by Freud – ed.], can serve as a paramount modern nut-case, endowed with the value of a harbinger, a token of modernity, a very troubling sign of a transformation of authority, investiture, the function of the father. His “hearing voices” has an emblematic value—this is also taken up by Deleuze, and I will just point out Eric Santner’s “definitive” book on it, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity 3 So to answer your question properly I would have to write another chapter on the history of hearing voices from Socrates to Schreber, and if Socrates presents the foundational moment of philosophy, then we must bear in mind Schreber’s proximity to the foundational moment of psychoanalysis.’

Aaron Schuster:
One of the main ideas explored in your book is this ambivalence of the voice, at once terrifying and pacifying, siren song and call of conscience, vehicle of the law and its transgression. One could conclude that the voice’s ethico-political significance is strictly ‘undecideable’. However, beyond this ambivalence there also seems to be a ‘good’ voice, which you qualify as ‘mere voice’, ‘pure enunciation’, or the silent voice of the drive. This voice compels us to assume responsibility, but – crucially – without dictating what form our engagement should take. This looks like a mixture of Heideggerian authenticity and Badiousian fidelity, though here what one must assume responsibility for is the unconscious.

Mladen Dolar:
‘The “object voice” is on the edge, at the crossing. It’s not the voice of the Other, nor the subject’s own voice, but emerges in a strange loop between the two. It is unplaceable, yet one has to ascribe it a place and assume it. Speaking schematically, there is one way which turns it into the point which sustains the Other – hence the figure of the superego, or various figures of political authority; and there is another way which turns it into the pledge of one’s own presence and authenticity, “finding one’s own voice”, as the phrase goes. The two can go together, or even structurally support each other, as Althusser’s concept of interpellation tries to show: finding one’s own “authentic” ego by submitting to the call of the Other, assuming the posture of its addressee. But the subjectivity which is at stake here is something very different from the ego and it emerges with tackling the edge and the crossing point.

So how can one show fidelity to something which is neither the subject nor the Other? Or maintain the authenticity of the experience of “inauthenticity”, so to speak, a dispossession or a dislocation? Both Heidegger and Badiou deal with this in certain ways, very different ways – let’s say with an “alien kernel” as the core of “subjectivity”, although neither would be happy with this formulation – and I am aware of the pitfalls which may lie on the way. If you say “the voice compels us to assume responsibility”, this may be understood as the response to the enigmatic call of the Other which exceeds us, in relation to which one is always responsible and also always deficient. This is the logic of Levinasian ethics, and although it maintains the alterity of the Other as an infinite and enigmatic opening, it still strangely reproduces, in a roundabout way, the logic of what psychoanalysis has called the superego. The Other is an enigma and poses a demand – demand as such, not some positive injunction – and one has to respond, although one can never measure up to it. The responsibility is infinite and it grows with its accomplishment: “The better I accomplish my duty, the less rights I have; the more I am just and the more I am guilty.” 4 So the subject responds, but never enough, never adequately, and the Other infinitely exceeds one’s response, one’s permanent responsibility, reproducing one’s permanent guilt. Psychoanalysis differs from this, it doesn’t sustain the enigma of the Other as an infinite demand, but rather works at dispossessing the Other of its enigma. One could say that the object is the limit of the Other, not something perpetuating its infinity, and that the object doesn’t pertain to the Other any more than it pertains to the subject. It is their link, but this link is a practice, a constant renegotiation of the limit. The voice may not be mine, but it has the power to operate in the Other, to dislocate its enigma and its demand, rather than maintain it as the infinite abyss of otherness and transcendence. Response and responsibility is not quite enough to get to what is at stake in the voice.

To give a more cheerful line on this, one could think of the practice of comedy, which hinges on constant renegotiation of the object between the subject and the Other (as opposed to e.g. Heidegger’s complete lack of comedy, to say the least), and which is closer to the psychoanalytic bone than the usual vision of tragic loss and guilt. This line is magisterially developed by my friend Alenka Zupančič in her book The Odd One In (MIT, 2007).

Aaron Schuster:
You warn a number of times against the aestheticization of the voice, and even give the impression that art, as opposed, for example, to philosophy, does not allow access to the voice in its most radical dimension. On the other hand, you turn to literature, Kafka in particular, in order to gain insight into voice – yet even here, in the story of Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk you find a kind of parable of art’s failure. My question is thus, bluntly put, can there be an ‘art of the voice’, and if so, do you see any examples of it in contemporary art?

Mladen Dolar:
‘I didn’t include a separate chapter in my book on the aesthetics of the voice, along with the ethics, metaphysics, physics, politics of the voice, and in retrospect I am a bit sorry about it, for certain formulations, warning against the inherent fetishization of the voice in music, have given rise to a criticism from various quarters and even raised a suspicion about my hostility to art. Yet, I have co-authored a book called Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek),5 where I deal at great length with the problem of the proper aesthetics of the voice, of staging the voice, of operatic voice as the bearer of social fantasies and its capacity for provoking and registering social transformation. And yes, I am a great opera lover, as well as a follower of various contemporary artistic practices which tackle the voice. In the last months, I participated in a strange exhibit at Manifesta 7 and engaged with the work of VALIE EXPORT, Smadar Dreyfus and Katarina Zdjelar, among others. I am not listing these names as model examples, their work is extremely different, just stating that I gladly engage, theoretically and practically, with people working as artists on the voice in various manners.
Is art doomed? Absolutely not, and the parable of the singer Josephine is there as a warning against a certain trap: the confinement of art to a particular glorified place within the social, turning it into a cultural good. One could even roughly say, although this is a bit quick, that culture basically functions as a domestification of art, endowing it with sense, a higher meaning, and allotting it a socially recognized and codified place. To worship art in this way is to condemn it. It only exists as a constant question mark displacing its own boundaries (“a social antithesis to society”, to again quote Adorno), and hence necessarily trespassing on the political.’

Aaron Schuster:
The final chapter of your book Kafka’s Voices ends with a tantalizing suggestion about how we might rethink freedom from a psychoanalytic perspective. As you remark, ‘freedom’ is hardly a word that looms large in Kafka’s universe, and yet there it is at the conclusion of Investigations of a Dog – you even go so far as to call it Kafka’s fin mot, the key term that in its very absence resounds throughout his writing. The same might be said of Freud and Lacan. Both of them rarely speak of freedom, and when they do, it is usually in a dismissive way; Freud denounces free will as a narcissistic fantasy, and Lacan famously stated (inaccurately, I might add) ‘I have never spoken of freedom’, letting it be understood that he considered such talk naïve humanist ideology, a misrecognition of the subject’s radical dependence on the Other. Yet one could argue that the whole wager of psychoanalysis is precisely to create a ‘freer’ relation to those desires and fantasies that move one so inexorably. I wonder if you could elaborate here a little on the conclusion to your book: what is the new conception of freedom you see in the wake of Kafka and Freud?

Mladen Dolar:
‘Lacan was notoriously a man of extremely difficult style, but this arduous side was as if counterbalanced by his great talent to produce a number of short and striking slogans (like “The Woman doesn’t exist” or “There is no sexual relationship”). And one of these slogans is Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche: “There is a cause only in something that doesn’t work”, 6 or “There is a cause only in what limps”. The line is paradoxical and I suppose counterintuitive. For it would seem that causality is what works in a network of causes and effects which constitute the basis of regularity and law, and so that which doesn’t work or doesn’t add up would appear to be a breach of causality, a crack in the causal chain. Yet it is in the place of this break, this glitch, that Lacan places the question of the cause. This is indeed something that has to do with the very origins of psychoanalysis, since the first phenomena that it dealt with were tiny things like slips of the tongue, or dreams as slight slips of conscious life, something appearing in a crack of normal causality, a momentary hitch, which hinted at another kind of cause, irreducible to both the causality of nature or the intentional causality of consciousness.

Yet, Freud insisted on the strict determination of psychic life, so that even such slight phenomena must have a determinist explanation, and therefore it would seem that there is no space for freedom. Still, what is a slip determined by? Is the unconscious the name of another causality determining us behind our backs? If we look at it more closely, we can see that the basic problem is that no such substantive, objective, independent causality exists, that it cannot be spelled out as a latent content or a latent cause simply to be unearthed behind the manifest one. Rather, the spelling out of the latent content makes the paradox of the cause even greater: it shows that the distorted form of the unconscious formations cannot be explained away with the latent content, so that the form itself is endowed with a surplus of distortion which testifies to a glitch, a crack of contingency within the regularity of laws and rules.

This is where the object appears, precisely the object as cause, “object cause of desire”, as Lacan would insist, and the object voice is one of the ways of getting to it. So the object appears as cause at the point of the missing cause, and there is subjectivity only insofar as there is a missing link, a glitch in the seamless chain. And this is the trouble with the talk about freedom in psychoanalysis: it is not to be posed in terms of the freedom of the will or as an abandonment of determinism – relying on sheer will-power or glorifying the decision can easily lead to condoning repression and the self-delusion of the ego. It is only by working through, by repeating, by engaging with the object that one can work towards the point where necessity and contingency overlap, and where one is far more free than one can imagine, or more than it is supposed by the usual theories of subjective freedom. This is where Kafka takes on a special value, for it seems that his universe is the epitome of non-freedom, of total closure and entrapment, yet he works all the time towards an opening in midst of the very closure. One could say that what both Kafka and Freud have in common is the following: to look very closely at the ways of entrapment, and through this to work towards the way where the seemingly objective causality crushing us itself involves contingency and subjectivity, and the way we are inscribed in it gives us more power than we could ever hope for.

Notes
1 Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 258.
2 TWA 18, p. 495
3 Santner, Eric, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton University Press, 1996.
4 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totalité et infini, Paris: Le livre de poche, 1987, p. 274.
5 Dolar, Mladen, and Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death, New York: Routledge, 2002.
6 Lacan, op. cit., p. 22.

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, MIT 2006, ISBN 9780262541879

Aaron Schuster is an art critic and philosopher based in Brussels

Conference Object of Comedy

2012-02-18T19:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.janvaneyck.nl/tagged/Mladen-Dolar

Conferentie Object of Comedy

Wat brengt ons aan het lachen, en waarom? Welke mechanismen spelen een rol bij komedie? Kan komedie subversief zijn? Wat is de relatie tussen komedie en ideologie? Deze tweedaagse conferentie beoogt het OBJECT van komedie te vatten. En dat is geen grapje.

Met bijdragen van Jamila Mascat, Gregor Moder, Alenka Zupančič, Robert Pfaller, Keston Sutherland, Evan Calder Williams,Luisa Lorenza Corna, Robert M. Ochshorn, Anca Parvulescu, Aaron Schuster,Mladen Dolar, en Tim Etchells.
Voor het volledige programma, zie de agenda.

Object of Comedy
8 & 9 March 2012, 10:30 - 19:00
Jan van Eyck Academie

Conference Object of Comedy
What makes us laugh and why? What kind of mechanisms are at play when it comes to comedy? Can comedy be subversive? What’s the relationship between comedy and ideology? This two-day conference aims to tackle the OBJECT of comedy. And it’s not a joke.

With contributions by Jamila Mascat, Gregor Moder, Alenka Zupančič, Robert Pfaller, Keston Sutherland, Evan Calder Williams, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Robert M. Ochshorn, Anca Parvulescu, Aaron Schuster, Mladen Dolar, and Tim Etchells.
For the full programme, see the agenda.

Object of Comedy
8 & 9 March 2012, 10:30 - 19:00
Jan van Eyck Academie

2012-02-18T19:07:00.001-08:00

Interview with Mladen Dolar

2012-02-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.wiegehtkunst.com/?p=599

“I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. There’s a cut in the continuity of being, in the continuity of survival.“

Mladen Dolar is co-founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, together with Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Rastko Močnik. Conny Habbel met the Slovenian philosopher in June 2009 in Ljubljana.

WgK: Is there an artwork that had a lasting effect on you?

Dolar: The work of Samuel Beckett – if I have to single out just one. It is both the importance it had for me and for the particular historic moment of the end of the twentieth century. I think he is the one who went the furthest in a certain way. There are various reasons for this, and one of them has to do with an enormous will to reduction. What Beckett did was to create an infinitely shrinkable world.

There is never little enough. You can always take away more.

Take the The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In the Beginning there is some sort of plot and some sort of characters. Then in the second novel you have just Malone, who is dying alone in his room and who is inventing stories as he is waiting for death. The space has shrunk, there is no more travel. And then you have the third novel, where you don’t even have this. You don’t even have a space, you don’t even have a character, you just have a voice. A voice which just rambles on and continues, and it doesn’t matter what it says in the end. It’s just the sheer thrust of perseverance, of persistence, which carries the whole thing. So just persist. You have to go on. And you know how this ends, it ends in the most beautiful way: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on“.

I think this is an incredible point, I don’t think literature has ever gone this far this radically. This is so completely reduced to a bare minimum, what Beckett has called ‘the unnullable least’. And extremely powerful.

WgK: So what is art actually?

Dolar: I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. This would be the simplest way of answering your question.

But there are different ways of answering. One of them would go to Freud’s theory, which looks at art through the spyglass of sublimation. I think what Freud conceives as drive, ‘der Trieb’, actually has to do with the transition between something natural and a creation of a separate space, and that everything he describes as the specificity of culture actually has to do with the structure of the drive. The drive is like thwarting of a natural hang, it gets thwarted towards a different sort of end. This is like a supposed initial natural need, but which in the process of its satisfaction actually gets thwarted. It produces something else than merely the satisfaction of a natural need. If you look at the way Freud describes culture in Unbehagen in der Kultur, he defines culture with a list of features.

The first on the list would be the question of tools. We’re getting more and more tools in order to be the masters of nature, so that we can do all the magic things, we can look at far away distances through the telescope, we can see the invisible in the microscope, we can talk through distance with the telephone, we can do absolutely magical things. And Freud uses the wonderful word, he says: “Der Mensch ist ein Prothesengott“. So he’s a god with prostheses. You just need some prostheses to be a god. So you have these extensions of the body. And what actually the drive to master nature produces at the same time – something more than the simple mastering of nature – it produces prostheses, a sort of ‘in between space’, a space which elongates your body, prolongs your body into the world. The eerie space between the inner and the outer is libidinally invested.

And, to cut it short, this is also the area where culture comes in.

WgK: Do you have any idea of what good art is? Which art do you regard as good?

Dolar: Well, this is not a subjective question. There is a strong tendency to reduce art to the question of taste. And the question of taste is kind of dangerous because it always goes down to the question of narcissism. There is something profoundly narcissistic in the judgement of preference. ‘I prefer this, I am a connoisseur, I prefer the late Beethoven quartets against symphonies.’ The difference which means difference as such and which means that you are distinguished and that you can distinguish yourself from the common lot of people by being the man of refined taste, to see all these differences that the others don’t see.

I have this conception of art, which is that art has to do with universality and infinity. It introduces something into the continuity of being, into the continuity of our survival. A break. Which is a universal break. A break to universality. It can speak universally. What is important in art is not a question whether it is an expression of a certain individual or whether it is an expression of a certain ethnic group or nation or of a certain age.

I think that the break is such that it makes the universal out of particularities.
But the problem is how to do this with the subjective means at your disposal, within the nation to which you belong, or language, or culture, within a particular type of civilization, within this historic moment – which are all very finite and singular things. How to produce universality and infinity out of this? And this I think is the moment of art. This is not a production of spirit, this is a material production of the break. I like very much this saying, which is on t-shirts like: “Art is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it“. You have to get your hands dirty. This is a very material thing. You produce the idea with the material, with the matter. Art has always worked with the sensual. If one tries to get immediately to universality or the infinity of a beyond, an idea, the sublime or whatever – this is, I think, a big mistake. You cannot do this. You just have to produce it the hard way. But it depends on being able to produce a break.

And this sets the standard by which it can be judged. I don’t think it can be judged on the basis of taste, it’s not just a question of whether I like it or not. It has the power to produce universality. It creates a potential virtual audience which goes far beyond this audience here. And I think the awareness that it goes beyond this, beyond my particular taste and reaction, is what makes good art.

WgK: Is art a benefit for society? Why does there have to be someone who does this dirty job?

Dolar: Well, I think that in the question with which I started, the question of drawing a line, making a cut in the continuity of our animal or social being, of our finite being, that this is what defines humanity. I’m not saying that art is the only way to do this. I think thought is something which does this also, it breaks with the conditions of its own production. This is the practice of philosophy. I think philosophy, similarly, but also very differently, makes a conceptual break in the continuity of particular received ways of thinking.

We have the definition of man as homo sapiens, the thinking animal, but the trouble is that thought is very rare. It’s not that men think all the time, it happens very rarely. There are very few occasions when thought happens and when it does, it seriously changes the very parameters of the ways we conceive the world, ourselves, whatever. There’s a handful of thinkers. This is a strange thing in the history of philosophy, there’s only a handful of thinkers with which we have to deal continually. But I don’t think – this is important – that thought is some sort of prerogative of philosophy, that philosophers are very special because they have this specialisation in thought. I don’t think that at all. I think thought can happen anywhere. In silence and…

WgK: Does it also happen in art?

Dolar: Oh yes. It does most definitely. It has a different way and the question of art working with the sensual, with sensuous material means is very important, this is a materialised thought. It’s the thought which works within the matter and shapes the matter. It is attached to matter, and matter thinks in art. This is very important, the materiality of thought. I think thought actually happens in a number of areas of human endeavour. And art is one of the most reflected.

WgK: Which are the others?

Dolar: Do you know the work of Alain Badiou? He has made a list of four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.

These are: Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities. Then: Poetry and art as such. Then politics. Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea. And then there is the question of love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event.

Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

WgK: I just had this spontaneous thought if humour might be one of those areas too?

Dolar: Well, you have an old suggestion which goes back to Aristotle, that the man is a laughing animal. You have various proposals for the definitions of man, one is the thinking animal, another one is the tool-making animal, which goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Marx takes this up that one can define the man through the tool which conditions his capacity for work. And then you have Aristotle’s suggestion: Man is a laughing animal. The only animal that can laugh – laugh at what? To laugh, precisely, at being able to produce a certain break.

The break in meaning, in the very parameters of making sense. One way of describing this could be where I started – to make a break, to make a cut – which is also to make a break in meaning in order to produce sense, if I may use this Deleuzian opposition between meaning and sense. And sense is the sort of unexpected thing which emerges. In order to produce this you have to cut down the usual expectation of meaning. The very horizon of meaning in which you move, in which you live your life. And this is the capacity of art.

As far as humour is concerned, I would just point out that there’s a question of humour and there’s a question of ‘Witz’. Freud has written a book on ‘Witz’ and a different paper on humour and he says that those things are absolutely not to be confused. Additionally there’s a question of comedy and there’s a question of irony. So we have four different things which are not the same. We may laugh as a result, but there is laughter and laughter. Laughter itself does not have to be subversive. It can also be very conservative.

WgK: Who becomes an artist? What is it that makes people become artists?

Dolar: I don’t think there’s a rule. There is the capacity, well, the break-making capacity. The way that we relate to ourselves is always conditioned by a break, there is a question of redoubling. Culture is always a question of redoubling: it redoubles the ‘normal’ life. It reflects it into something else, but redoubling is always already there.

WgK: But still there are some people who don’t become artists or intellectuals.

Dolar: No, no, of course. I think the capacity is there, and it is a capacity which defines humanity and subjectivity. And… how the hell do you become an artist? What particular things have to come together? I think what makes the greatness of art is precisely its singularity. Which means that if you could establish this rule art would stop being art.

WgK: But couldn’t it be that there is some reason why people start to make art? Robert Pfaller once suggested that artists might have some traumatic experience that they – all their lives – try to handle by making art.

Dolar: Don’t we all have to handle some sort of traumatic experience? It’s very hard to say. I mean, the question has been asked many times, so you have art schools which precisely can teach you everything except what is essential.

WgK: Yeah, but art school starts at a moment where you already decided to go to art school. Who is likely to go to art school? So there are two aspects of this question. The one is: How do you become a good artist? The other question – which actually interests me – is: Why does someone want to become an artist? No matter if good or bad, if successful or not: What makes a person take up this way?

Dolar: If you want to become an artist, what do you want to become? If I take some of the greatest musicians of all times, like Bach and Mozart or Haydn. You can see what? Who was Haydn? He was hired by the Esterhazy family as a craftsman. I mean, did he want to become an artist? I don’t think he ever thought of himself in that way actually. He was a paid craftsman. And if you look at Mozart, he was all the time trying to get hired by some court or something. If you look at Bach, he was employed by the St. Thomas church in Leipzig to produce a piece of music for mass every week.

It was not a question of genius or inspiration. You were hired. Because this was another craft and I don’t think anybody would look at themselves this way today. If you want to become an artist you don’t want to become a craftsman. You see yourself as a person with a special vocation, which goes beyond all usual vocations. This is due to the romantic model of art and then to the modernist conceptions.

WgK: Let’s stick to today’s understanding of art: Do you think artists are narcissistic?

Dolar: The question of art and narcissism… I would say that on the one hand it’s profoundly narcissistic. It’s usually linked with a project of profound narcissism of self-expression and the precious treasure I have in me and want to disclose to the world.. But I don’t think that this is what makes art. As I said before: Art is not expression. It’s not an expression of yourself. People may want to do it to express themselves, but what makes the break and what makes the universal appeal, the claim of art, is not a question of whether they express themselves well or not. It’s just not the question by which art is ever judged. So on the one hand I’m sure that the motivation for doing this is in most cases narcissistic.

WgK: Did I understand you right when you say art is not an expression – could you say art is one of the ‘Prothesen’?

Dolar: Yes. Oh yes.

WgK: I really like this picture.

Dolar: The ‘Prothesengott’? Yes. But, well, Freud uses this in the context of technology and tool-making.

WgK: I have the feeling that it’s very good, maybe not only for tools.

Dolar: Yes. It’s a good thing. It’s not just a question of tool. A tool is never a tool. It’s a libidinally invested extension of the body.

WgK: So you could also say art is a libidinal extension of yourself. Of the body.

Dolar: Well, it has something to do with the libidinal extension. The way Freud introduces the notion of prosthesis, it has more to do with technology than with art. But I think it’s nevertheless a useful metaphor also to think about art.

WgK: Could you also call it objet a? Art as an extension towards objet a?

Dolar: Well, yes. I didn’t want to use the heavily technical Lacanian language for this. I mean this could be described in another language, but what Lacan calls objet a is precisely the object of transition between the interior and exterior, which doesn’t quite fall either into interior or the external world out there; the objective world. I mean it’s neither subjective nor objective. In this sense it’s always in this zone of indeterminacy, in the zone which opens in between. And which is the zone of ‘Prothesen’ if you want, I mean, the Prothesen always fill the zone: you put something between subjects and objects. You extend your body into the world, and at the same time the world extends into you. Still, what Lacan calls the object a doesn’t coincide with any existing object, it has no substance of its own, while art produces existing objects whose task is to evoke this impossible object. To evoke the impossible.

WgK: Would you agree that artists and philosophers share similarities in the realities they live in?

Dolar: Yes. I think there’s a lot of common ground. The tools with which they work are different, but I think they work on a common ground and that they can’t be neatly delineated. One way of differentiation – which I particularly dislike – is to say that artists have the passions and the feelings and they work with this and philosophers have the reason and understanding and they work with this. I don’t think this opposition is worth anything. It never works this way. I think that any human activity has both: indiscriminately passion and reason inscribed into it.

If you look at the history of philosophy – look at Plato, look at Spinoza, look at Augustine, look at Hegel, Marx, Kant, Wittgenstein – there is always a huge passion. This is terrible passion you have in this. They are all passion-driven. To describe this as works of mere intellect is completely misguided. This is the erroneous common conception of philosophy, rationality and concepts. If it doesn’t involve passionate attachment and passionate involvement, then it’s not philosophy. There is very, very serious passion at work in this. And at the opposite end I think there is very, very precise thinking involved in art. If it’s not, it’s just not good art.

WgK: We were talking about passion and reason – do you think artists or philosophers can have a family? Do you think it can be organised to do such an ambitious or passionate work and to have love for people?

Dolar: On the general level I don’t see why it should be exclusive. But this is not a question which concerns only art. I think it’s a question which concerns any sort of passionate attachment to your profession. I mean it could be a lawyer, a politician, a scientist, a teacher, all kinds of things. It can be sport, it can be all kinds of things and it does produce problems, very practical problems, how the hell you then deal with your family, with your love, with your private life. I suppose it very much depends on what kind of person you are. There are people who would somehow erase everything else and there are people who would always find ways, no matter how. They can work twenty hours a day but they will nevertheless find a way to have a private life.

WgK: And what can you tell me about passion? Where does it come from and what can you do to prevent its disappearance?

Dolar: To prevent its disappearance?

WgK: Can anything be done?

Dolar: Have you ever read Ovid? Remedia Amoris, the remedies against love. The question that he asks is the opposite. Not how to keep the passion going but how to prevent it happening.

You can see this through thousand years of antiquity: It’s not the problem how to keep your passion alive. It’s the problem of detachment. “Remedia Amoris“ are rather humorous. Ovid’s advice is: don’t go for it. Keep your mind aloof, otherwise you go crazy. Passion is folly. This is a bad thing for you. It would completely ruin your life. So you have a history of passions. This is a stage of antiquity and then you have a certain stage of Christianity which again is very differentiated in itself. I mean the passion is the passion of Christ. So the passion worth having is the passion in this other sense. There is a passion worth having and which is this suffering you must undergo in order to be worthy of redemption.

The ultimate passion to sacrifice all other passions. This gives the word passion a very different meaning. It comes from ‘patior’, ‘passus’, which means suffering. Like ‘Leidenschaft’ comes from ‘leiden’.

If I put it in this very reduced, simplistic way, the question of passion which drives you, the question of passionate love is a question of romantic love, a certain conception of romantic love which we deal with. It emerged only in the 19th century.

WgK: It’s a very interesting point that you made about the difference between trying to get rid of it or trying to keep it alive. You said before philosophy is always passionate, driven, so in this way it’s actually necessary to keep it. I didn’t only mean passion in private life, also as an activating thing like in your work.

Dolar: Yes, there has to be a passion which drives this. There’s an interesting passage in Helvetius. Helvetius was a philosopher of the French Enlightenment and he has written this book De l’esprit in 1759 – the book was actually burnt at that time and banned. He has a passage there which I always found terribly funny, he says: “Why are passionate people more intelligent than others?” He completely overturns this common view that you either have intelligence – and then you can control your passions – or if you let the passions have the upper hand, then you lose your head. He puts these two together and he says: People never use their intelligence unless they are driven by a serious passion. It’s only the passionate people who are intelligent. Otherwise they are lazy. Come on, why use your head? You can always get along somehow. So it’s only the passion which actually drives you to use your reason. And this is just a funny way of putting it that you can’t see the two as being on opposed sides.

WgK: Do you have an influence on it, can you do something to keep it or to feed it?

Dolar: I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.

To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in. The passion is what makes a break. But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.

What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear. So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance. I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’. So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

WgK: It has a place then.

Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this. They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this. You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

WgK: You were saying that one has to be courageous to proceed with passionate work. I have the feeling that there is another big thing, besides from missing courage, which might be a cushion for passion: The desire for containment, for feeling secure. I don’t know the best translation, I mean ‘Geborgenheit’.

Dolar: Geborgenheit?

WgK: Yeah. You know Geborgenheit? Feeling secure.

Dolar: Security, yes. Sicherheit.

WgK: A warm feeling.

Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the aera of progress and prosperity’, etc. I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology. Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.

WgK: At that point when you feel content.

Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.

WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.

Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.

WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.

Dolar: For home?

WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?

Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

WgK: So then I can come to my last question: How can one become happy in life?

Dolar (laughing): It beats me!

WgK: So this is why I kept it till the end. Is there a good strategy?

Dolar: Ah, god knows! But I am an atheist.

Mladen Dolar

2012-02-18T18:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/wiki/Mladen_Dolar/ref=ntt_at_bio_wiki

Mladen Dolar (born 29 January 1951) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist, film critic and expert in psychoanalysis.[1]

Dolar was born in Maribor as the son of the literary critic Jaro Dolar. In 1978 he graduated in Philosophy and French language at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated under the supervision of the renowned philosopher Božidar Debenjak. He later studied at the University of Paris VII and the University of Westminster.

Dolar was the co-founder, together with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, whose main goal is to achieve a synthesis between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the philosophy of German idealism.

Dolar has taught at the University of Ljubljana since 1982. In 2010 Dolar began his tenure as an Advising Researcher in theory at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands.[2] His main fields of expertise are the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (on which he has written several books, including a two-volume interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind) and French structuralism. He is also a music theoretician and film critic.

Books in English
Opera's Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), co-authored with Slavoj Žižek.
A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

References
^ "dr. Mladen Dolar" (in Slovene). Zbornik ob 80-letnici, 1919-1999. Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani. 22 March 2001. Retrieved 23 September 2009.
^ http://www.janvaneyck.nl/4_4_cv/cv_t_dol.html

Dr. Mladen DOLAR

2012-02-18T18:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.ff.uni-lj.si/hp/ff/zbornik/o/DOLAR.html

(Maribor, 29. 1. 1951)
Po maturi se je leta 1969 vpisal na Filozofsko fakulteto, kjer je leta 1978 diplomiral iz filozofije in francoščine. V letih 1980–82 je bil stažist na Oddelku za filozofijo FF, nato od leta 1984 asistent. V šolskem letu 1979/80 je bil na podiplomskem študijskem izpopolnjevanju v Parizu (Université Paris VIII), v letu 1989/90 pa v Londonu (University of Westminster). Doktoriral je leta 1992 s tezo Heglova Fenomenologija duha, Dialektika zavesti in samozavedanja. Od leta 1992 je bil docent za nemško klasično filozofijo, od leta 1996 pa je izredni profesor za filozofijo in teoretsko psihoanalizo. Na Oddelku za filozofijo predava nemško klasično filozofijo ter strukturalizem in psihoanalizo.
Član uredniškega odbora revije Problemi (v osemdesetih letih je bil mnoga leta njen glavni in odgovorni urednik) in knjižne zbirke Analecta. Je soustanovitelj in mnogoletni podpredsednik Društva za teoretsko psihoanalizo in soustanovitelj Društva za kulturološke raziskave.
Glavna dela: Struktura fašističnega gospostva, Ljubljana 1982; Heglova Fenomenologija duha I., Ljubljana 1990; Samozavedanje, Heglova Fenomenologija duha II., Ljubljana 1992; I shall be with you on your wedding-night, Lacan and the uncanny, October 58/1991, str. 2–24; Beyond interpellation, Qui parle 2/1993, str. 75–96; The phrenology of spirit, v: Copjec (ur.), Supposing the subject, London: Verso 1994, str. 64–83; At first sight, v: Salecl & Žižek (ur.), Gaze and voice as love objects, Duke UP, Durham/London 1996, str. 129–153; The object voice, v: Salecl & Žižek (ur.), Gaze and voice as love objects, Duke UP, Durham/London 1996, str. 7–31; Woher kommt die Macht?, v: Liepold-Mosser (ur.), Sprache der Politik, Politik der Sprache, Turia & Kant, Dunaj 1996, str. 184–205.

A Voice and Nothing More

2012-02-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10763

Mladen Dolar

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.

The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels—the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice—and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.

About the Author

Mladen Dolar taught for 20 years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of a number of books, most recently (with Slavoj Zizek) Opera’s Second Death.

Mladen Dolar: Hegel and Freud

2012-02-18T18:21:00.001-08:00

2012-02-17T15:29:00.003-08:00

2012-02-17T15:29:00.001-08:00

2012-02-17T15:28:00.001-08:00

2012-02-17T15:27:00.001-08:00

2012-02-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

Hegelian inconsistent Totality

2012-02-17T05:38:00.001-08:00

As benign as Lucifer: The privatization of water

2012-02-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / February 9, 2012

Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so... The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.

SAN RAFAEL, California -- There hasn’t been much rain this season where I live. Personally, I don’t mind much. I like sunny days, summer weather, dry fairways at San Geronimo. The deer are not very happy, having to spend more time on my street than they’d prefer but they’ve had to come down from the hills a bit looking for food.

Where I live the reservoirs are still mostly full from the last winter’s rain and we will not experience any delays or service interruptions. I pay for water every month, the local water district sends a bill, costs maybe 30 bucks if everybody showers a lot and there are loads of clothes.

Drinking water, all I have to do is open the tap.

I take water for granted, did even during drought years when we recycled water for the garden and to flush toilets. Shower with a friend, the saying went, and we did, although that didn’t really seem to save much water.

Every year about 2 million people, most of them children, die from lack of water, either directly or indirectly through lack of sanitation; that’s twice as many people as the United States killed in Iraq. Estimates of international agencies put the number at 1.1 billion who do not have access to enough water to drink, cook with, or properly bathe.

Water in Marin County is a public utility. There’s a water board elected by the voters and various projects from time to time. For most of my life I was not even aware that water might be a problem for some people, blissfully wrapped in the Bay Area cocoon. What I’d heard seemed to be passing news bulletins. Droughts somewhere, I wasn’t sure. Relief efforts.

I’ve also been ignorant about nearly everything else in the world. I don’t think I really got how deeply evil some corporations were. I didn’t understand how money worked, nor what the World Bank was about, nor the International Monetary Fund. They sounded benign. They are about as benign as Lucifer.

I certainly didn’t understand how the World Bank and some huge corporations were, in concert, working to kill millions of people by depriving them of access to water. I do now.

Of course, their public relations departments would go berzerko at such a charge. For my opinion on public relations departments, see Bill Hicks on YouTube.

We’re helping all of those people, the World Bank would say. We’re sponsoring important developments and laying pipe all over the place. Without us, hell, that water would just lay there underground not doing anybody any good. That’s not only what they would say, it’s what they do say.

If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet, and which falls from the sky and runs in rivers above and below ground, you might think that water is a common property, owned by the human race. That’s pretty much been true for a couple of thousand years.

It has long been accepted throughout the world that, according to Indian author Vandana Shiva, “water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights,” and “water is a commons... it cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity.” Water is the basis of all life. It is preposterous that it might be owned and that some may be thereby deprived of it.

Thanks, however, to the World Bank, which is actually just the operative arm of the largest U.S. banks and whose policies can bring down governments -- c.f. Italy and Greece in the past few months alone -- the commons argument is quickly dying. Most Americans, being inhabitants of a nation which does not generally have these worries, are unaware of this.

Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so. Everyone had to have water, even if they rode bicycles to work or took public transit. The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.

But with the help of the World Bank and friendly governments such as the U.S. under Bill Clinton, stipulations could be included in trade agreements and in loan conditions to developing countries.

Programs grew quickly in India, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines. They’ve now spread to Canada, England, Turkey, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, El Salvador, and even China.

The impact has been to dramatically, and fatally, increase the cost of water, especially to the poor and for small agriculture, while simultaneously degrading its quality. Corporations such as Coca-Cola, Bechtel, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, and the French company, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, have bought off local governments, imposed horrendous conditions, and in some cases murdered people who have tried to stop them.

Maybe you’re thinking, Coca-Cola? How can that be? Things go better with Coke! But no, they actually don’t. And Bechtel? Why, that’s a Bay Area company, voted near the top of employers people like working for. I mean, it’s not as though we’re talking about Halliburton here.

Everywhere water privatization has gone there are stories of widespread misery. Quite literally, every country listed above is a horror story, with the exception of Argentina because the government there, and the people, kicked Suez’ sorry ass out (along with the World Bank). But we’ll focus on just two or three. Whatever I don’t get to in this column -- I’ve got more than 50 pages of notes and printouts -- you can find by typing in the name of a country, water, and the World Bank. That ought to do it.

The first water privatization story I ever heard was out of Bolivia. It seemed that Bechtel, somehow, had gotten hold of the country’s water supply. I didn’t understand how that was possible, plus I’d never associated Bechtel, which is mostly a construction outfit once run by Reagan’s pal (and Secretary of State) George Schultz, with water. What could that possibly be about? As it happens, Bechtel is involved in over 200 water and wastewater projects in more than 100 countries around the world.

If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet... is a common property, owned by the human race.

Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a semi-desert region. Water is a scarce precious resource. In 1999, the World Bank told Bolivia that in order to obtain a much-needed $600 million in international debt relief, it would have to privatize Cochabamba’s public water system, giving the concession to a Bechtel subsidiary, International Water.

The Bolivian Congress caved in, passing the ‘Drinking Water and Sanitation Law’ in October of 1999, ending government subsidies to municipal utilities and authorizing privatization. International Water took over in Cochabamba. The minimum wage is less than $100 a month, but IW raised the price of water to an average of $20 per household. The impact was immediate: many poor families had to choose between food and water.

The people rebelled. In January 2000, peasants formed the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life and through mass mobilization shut down the city for four days. Within a month a million Bolivians marched to Cochabamba and stopped all transportation in the city.

The Bolivian government pretended to give in, promising to roll back water prices; it never did. In February, the Coalition organized a peaceful march demanding that the October 1999, law be repealed, the water contract terminated, the inclusion of ordinary people in drafting a resources law, and the cancellation of ordinances permitting privatization. The government responded by imposing martial law.

The media was censored, activists were arrested, and several protesters, including a 17-year-old boy shot in the head by soldiers, were killed.

But the people would not bend. Finally, after demonstrations which rocked the country, the government was forced to revoke the privatization legislation. The water company (and its debts) was surrendered to the people, and the Coalition held public hearings to start democratic management and planning.

Bechtel, and its allies inside the government, refused to quit. They harassed and threatened activists and leaders of the Coalition. In November 2001, Bechtel filed a lawsuit before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, which happens to be located on the grounds of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The ICSID holds its sessions in private. The public and the media are barred from the proceedings.

I’ve written before about how the world’s largest banks control nations by forcing them into positions of debt from which they can’t escape. It’s a simple but elegant mechanism. Simply loan money to a government which desires to -- choose one or more of the following –– steal it, give it to their friends, buy weapons, build infrastructure, and then enjoy the leverage you’ve got when they can’t quite service the debt.

It’s how Spain was able to crush Haiti forever on the imposition of a debt for Haitian independence. It’s how nearly all Latin American countries have been controlled for decades, making deals to stave off bankruptcy by borrowing ever greater sums and, for the dubious privilege, sacrificing the public welfare and in many cases democracy.

It’s how the World Bank and the IMF were able to impose on Italy and Greece so-called "austerity measures" which screw the poor, privatize public resources, and install as President in each country a recent big shot from Goldman Sachs by way of the IMF.

That’s why the Kirchners sent such shock waves through the world’s banking giants when they got themselves elected in Argentina and promptly told the World Bank to go fuck itself.

But for the most part, in most places on earth, regardless of the people living there, the unholy alliance between multinational corporations, the World Bank, and governments with flexible ethics has produced vast profits for the principals and increasing misery for the people.

India is another classic example, although there it is Coca-Cola, which has essentially appropriated the water needed for agriculture, which is despoiling large portions of the country.

Although its public relations whores have recently described the corporation as “a leader when it comes to environmental issues,” the facts are quite different. One classic example would be in the Plachimada community in the state of Kerala. Coke opened a bottling plant there in 2000; the community immediately suffered from chronic drought and polluted water. The reasons are hardly in dispute. As Indian journalist Arjun Sen wrote in 2003,

Three years ago, the little patch of land in the green, picturesque rolling hills of Palakkad yielded 50 sacks of rice and 1,500 coconuts a year. It provided work for dozens of labourers. Then Coke arrived and built a 4-acre bottling plant nearby. In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, owner of the small holding, could manage only five sacks of rice and just 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry because Coke draws up to 1.5 million litres of water daily through its deep wells...

To make matters worse, the bottling plant was producing thousands of gallons of toxic sludge and, as the BBC reported, disposed of it by selling the carcinogenic material to local farmers as "fertilizer."
That’s a “leader when it comes to environmental issues”? Christ, who finished second?

Needless to say, many people in India have fought against the Coca-Cola operations but they’ve been unable to overcome money and vast political resources of the corporation. The company is able to extract groundwater free of charge, except for a small fee for discharging wastewater. It makes exploiting India too valuable to give up. About a dozen years ago, the cost of industrial water in the United States was roughly $5 per 10,000 litres. In India, the price was three cents.

By several reliable estimates, there have been in excess of 25,000 suicides by farmers over the last decade, a majority of these in the western and southern states, no longer able to feed their families because Coca-Cola has destroyed their farms.

Popular protest finally forced the closing of the Kerala plant, at least temporarily, but the corporation simply shifted its operations to other areas of Southern India. Other companies besides Coca-Cola have begun to grab a piece of the action, all of this facilitated by the World Bank, which is promoting the privatization of water in India and all over the world.

The northern territories are also at risk. Another bottling plant, which opened in 2000, is located in Mehdiganj, where company extraction has caused water levels to fall more than 6 meters. Crops have failed and livelihoods have been destroyed. Local activists throughout the country, trying to rally opposition, have discovered that Coca-Cola, in league with the wealthier segments of the polity, have simply rerouted pipelines to bypass villages entirely.

“What we see happening with Coca-Cola has been happening all over the country,” says Tom Palakudiyil of Water Aid. “The rich (are) able to acquire powerful pumps and extract more and more water with no limits.”

It is not only Coca-Cola sucking up the Indian water. In partnership with Enron -- yes, that Enron -- it operated the Dabhol plant and is involved in water privatization in Coimbatore/Tirrupur as part of a consortium with others.

As internet journalist Tom Levitt reported two years ago,
Sitting at the bottom of the pile are the small-scale farmers. Without adequate water supplies, the 70 percent of Indians who make their living from agriculture have nothing. The Bundelkhand region in northern India is a typical example of what happens when the water runs dry. Although never a lush region, the area has now completely lost the ability to sustain small-scale agriculture.
Many thousands of villages have been unable to get water even from tankers and have been abandoned completely. The entire society is being violently altered by what amounts to wholesale theft of the nation’s water. And, of course, larger forces are prepared to “help” those most in need.

One of the powerful forces driving the growing problem worldwide has been the World Bank which, in late 2009, had the astonishing temerity to say that “under current practices” one-third of the world’s population would have access to only half the water they need by the year 2030. The report then recommended that $50 billion be invested annually by governments and business in water management projects.

Coca-Cola, which uses enough water each day to meet the entire world’s water requirements for 10 days, enthusiastically endorsed the World Bank report.

To fully appreciate how powerful the World Bank is and how significant its "recommendations," consider that it is able to wave large sums of money in front of political leaders in any country, offering not only cash which may or may not be diverted into personal bank accounts but financing for massive projects which both enrich major contractors and, for a while, please a lot of people.

The debt incurred, as you know from periodic references on the generally useless mainstream U.S. media, cannot be paid back. Many governments don’t much care at the time of the original loan, of course, because by the time the interest becomes onerous those politicos will be retired on their estates.

Any country faced with a large debt, and there are many, is forced by the IMF and the World Bank to privatize water. It is a common demand of these entities as one of the conditions of a loan. They also insist on creation of policies which guarantee “full cost recovery” and the elimination of internal government subsidies. In Ghana, for example, thanks to the World Bank, the forced sale of water at "market rates" required the poor to spend up to half of their earnings on water.

This is worldwide, it is growing, and it is killing people.

Add to this equation what happens when nations do not wish to borrow themselves into a hole. They mysteriously find themselves in wars. Ask Libya. And in the aftermath of wars, there is enormous wealth to be made.

Consider again our friends at Bechtel. Being run out of Bolivia has not daunted them, no indeed. Within a month of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bechtel acquired a $680 million contract for "rebuilding" the country we were about to destroy.

As described by Vandana Shiva in her article, "Bechtel And Blood For Water: War As An Excuse For Enlarging Corporate Rule," "The U.S. led war first bombed out Iraq’s hospitals, bridges, water works, and now U.S. corporations are harvesting profits from ‘reconstructing’ a society after its deliberate destruction. Blood was not just shed for oil, but for control over water and other vital services."

Our old friend George Schultz, board member and senior counsel to the company where he once served as president, wrote a September, 2002, newspaper OpEd in which he was a positively thrilled cheerleader for the destruction yet to come: “A strong foundation exists for immediate military action against Hussein and for a multilateral effort to rebuild Iraq after he’s gone.” How’s that for putting a price tag on human misery?

Now, let’s talk about Mexico.

The situation in Mexico is especially dire, and its impact is of course felt directly by the United States since it impacts the desire of people to cross the northern border illegally, and contributes, with NAFTA, at least indirectly, to the drug wars near the border.

Coca-Cola is big in Mexico, very big. It is the number one Coke consuming nation in the world. Its impact on the water supply has been catastrophic. The company spends more than $500 million annually on advertising. It also imposes quotas on small shop owners in exchange for promotional items such as tables, chairs, and refrigerators with the Coke logo.

“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous."
At the same time, and not coincidentally, 12 million people have no access to piped water and 32 million have no access to proper sewage. Coca-Cola’s resource monopoly simultaneously creates a scarce water supply and an abundant supply of Coke. The country is also the second largest consumer of bottled water, much of it sold by guess who.

The process of making Coke requires at least two liters of water for each liter of the finished product; some estimates are as high as five-to-one. The business end is covered by dozens of water concessions from the Mexican government which handed the company the legal right to take water from, as of 2008, 19 aquifers and 15 rivers, many of these in indigenous territories. They have also picked up the right to dump toxic waste in at least eight different public water sources.

The process of privatization has nearly swallowed the entirety of the country’s water. Yet the country hasn’t received much in return from Coca-Cola. In 2003, the company paid $29,000 for water concessions in the entire nation; in 2004, their profits from the bottling plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, the largest in the country and second largest in the world, alone reached $40 million.

An internet article by journalist Monica Wooters in 2008 described the situation in Chiapas, which gets nearly half of Mexico’s total annual rainfall and contains a large percentage of its surface water.

The bottling plant is located at the foot of Huitepec, a mountain overlooking the city, protected in part by a Zapatista ecological preserve. Huitepec is on top of an enormous underground aquifer, which is the key source for Coca-Cola’s water for the plant. In 2004, the company used 107 million liters from this aquifer, enough to supply water to 200,000 homes -- more homes than currently exist in San Cristobal.

There’s no actual record of the size of the aquifer, and the company, if it has estimates, is not saying, however the company’s operative subsidiary, FEMSA, has begun looking for new water sources in Chiapas. In addition, the waste created by the plant is often toxic, containing lead, cadmium, and chromium. The city has not imposed controls on dumping, nor does the central government, and there is now a risk of contaminating the water table.

The central Mexican government does not recognize indigenous communities as having any rights to participate in the legal proceedings concerning water concessions. Coca-Cola, via FEMSA, has achieved what is essentially a monopoly over water rights. In 1996, the Zapatista rebellion, which roiled the country for a considerable time, succeeded in gaining a measure of local voice in water decisions, however in 2001 the legislature overturned the agreements which the central government had made.

The impact around the world of the privatization of water is calamitous.

In each of the countries cited earlier, there are similar stories about privatization: the destruction of agriculture, the escalating cost to the poor, the concomitant rise in associated diseases and infant mortality. In many places, the private corporations, in league with corrupt, venal governments, simply rob inhabitants of one of the necessities of life. In many places, corporations are assisted by extortionate lending practices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In many of these, the United States and its State Department play significant roles.

Privatization of water is making inroads in the United States. In Sitka, Alaska, which is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes, the Blue Lake Reservoir holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it does not need any treatment.

Now, under the auspices of True Alaska Bottling and S2C Global, hundreds of millions of gallons are being siphoned into tankers and shipped to Mumbai, and from there to several cities in the Middle East. Water is being turned into a global commodity.

“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.” He may be right on both counts. Commodities are sold to the highest bidder for the biggest profit. They have nothing to do with human needs or even human survival.

A former vice president of the World Bank said, “The next world war will be fought over water.” If he’s right, he’d better be well-armed because most of the rest of the world will be looking for sons of bitches like him.

[Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]

2012-02-11T17:55:00.001-08:00

2012-02-11T05:51:00.001-08:00

A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek

2012-02-10T17:10:00.001-08:00

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/10/theres-this-slovenian-saying/

By BRADLEY G. BOLMAN and TARA RAGHUVEER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Published: Friday, February 10, 2012

FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia with Slavoj Zizek.

When Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek visited Harvard for a lecture on the ontology of sexual difference last October, FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 sat down to discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia.

Fifteen Minutes: What is the role of academia at an institution like Harvard in the current global crisis?

Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!”

No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on....

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory.

Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”

Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”

But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”

FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify?

SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?”

Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work.

What does [Occupy] mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today.

That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change [the] mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008.

FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict?

SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I [would] choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you.

Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock.

For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even [American political scientist] Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. [The world is] confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient.

No, it is clear we have to start thinking.

And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions....

Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger.

FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them.

SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.

For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this.

Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent.

FM: Thank you so much for the interview. Can we get a photo with you?

SZ: Okay, okay. But I hate my stupid face. Oh, this photo will look like something that should be titled “Dumb and Dumber.” Ugh, my stupid face. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s a Slovenian saying. It looks like it’s been pulled out of a cow’s ass.

MARX RELOADED RELEASED

2012-02-10T00:13:00.001-08:00

http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/marx-reloaded-17920

February 9 2012

DIRECTED BY Jason Barker
STARRING Jason Barker, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

This engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Karl Marx.

Shane Herrick

The American filmmaker explains how an innovative new videogame inspired him to pose 12 film stars the most challenging of moral dilemmas.
“We are in deep shit, and we know it. But secretly, we don’t really believe it can all fall apart.”

As the global economy continues to boil, and national debts and bailouts continue to heave into the trillions, these words, by rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ring louder than ever. Time to dust off your copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and put capitalism back under the microscope.

An engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc, Marx Reloaded examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Marx, posing the question of whether late capitalism is a sustainable economic force and whether communism could provide a more viable alternative.
Barker calls on several established minds to provide a balanced stream of information. Through interviews with the likes of Zizek, Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt of ‘Empire’ fame, and French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the film shines a light on the many causes of the financial crumble, creating a compelling dialogue of Marx’s theories on capitalism as they apply to its contemporary form.

As the film comes to a close, it seems the focus falls less on the idea of blame, as capitalism as the sole culprit, or on the viability of another form of communism despite the spectre of Soviet horrors, but more on the transformative power of new ideas. Through the slightly comical animated Matrix metaphor with Marx as Neo and Trotsky as Morpheus, the doc poses the question of “Which pill?” do we want to take: blue or red? Maybe neither.

As such, Marx Reloaded becomes more of a call to action: it is no longer about choosing from what is and has been, but of acting towards creating a third pill or ditching the pills all together; to finish reading, to start writing, and try something else.

Marx Reloaded is showing at ICA London from February 10-16. Book tickets now at ica.org.uk

Nobody has to be vile

2012-02-06T05:55:00.001-08:00

London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile

Slavoj Žižek

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.

Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).

Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins

2012-02-06T05:21:00.000-08:00

Gary Younge, guardian.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins

Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions

Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".

Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."

The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.

This is not new. But since a 2010 supreme court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and unions, it has become particularly acute. Moreover, the contributors can remain anonymous. The organisations that are taking advantage of this new law are known as Super Pacs. Even at this early stage of the presidential cycle, their potential for framing the race is clear. In the whole of 2008 individuals, parties and other groups spent $168.8m independently on the presidential election. This year on Republican candidates alone, where voting started less than a month ago, the Super Pacs have reported independent expenditures of almost $40m. In 2008 election spending doubled compared with 2004. This year industry analysts believe the money spent just on television ads is set to leap by almost 80% compared with four years ago.

Money in American politics was already an elephant in the room. Now the supreme court has given it a laxative, taken away the shovel, and asked us to ignore both the sight and the stench.

The only real restriction is that there should be no co-ordination between the candidate and the Super Pac. In practice, this is little more than a fig leaf. A few weeks ago one of the ads, funded by the Super Pac supporting Gingrich, was slated for its many brazen inaccuracies. At a campaign stop in Orlando, Gingrich told supporters: "I am calling on this Super Pac – I cannot co-ordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you – I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film."

Romney is no less compromised. His former chief campaign fundraiser and political director work for the main Super Pac supporting him, which was set up with the help of a $1m cheque from an ex-business partner. "This legalism of 'no co-ordination' is a filament-thin G-string," wrote Timothy Egan in the New York Times recently. "Everyone co-ordinates."

Money alone can't guarantee success. Santorum spent around 74 cents a voter in Iowa and narrowly won; Perry spent around $358 per vote and came a distant fourth. Debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role. But the fact that money is not the sole determinant doesn't mean it's not the key one. Two months ago Gingrich's surge in Iowa was halted after Romney's Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Romney's commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich's Super Pac injected several million dollars.

This is not a partisan point. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the government should limit individual contributions – with a majority among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The influence of money at this level corrupts an entire political culture and in no small part explains the depth of cynicism, alienation and mistrust Americans now have for their politicians.

The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. As a whole, the polity's median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation's top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that's before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.

The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.

Last week in a Massachusetts Senate race, both the Republican incumbent and his likely Democratic challenger signed a pact agreeing not to use third-party money. The trouble is that the agreement is completely unenforceable. Already at least one pro-Republican group has refused to commit to it.

Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade.
[....]

White Supremacists Love Ron Paul

2012-02-06T05:11:00.001-08:00

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9801-white-supremacists-love-ron-paul
[....]

Hacktivist collective Anonymous struck a gold mine with Operation Blitzkrieg - an effort to hack into and shut down White Nationalist (WN) websites and forums. Anonymous leaked thousands of emails and private messages from the white supremacist network American Third Position, which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anonymous also leaked the address, phone number, social security number and resume of White News Now owner and administrator Jamie Kelso on this website. But in leaking the emails and messages, Anonymous also discovered that a vast number of A3P members claim to be high-ranking members of the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul's campaign has some serious explaining to do if this is true. Read what the SPLC has to say about A3P:

The American Third Position is a political party initially established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party has big plans to run candidates nationwide.

The SPLC also has quotes from Kelso and Johnson, in detailed profiles from their website.

"No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race.... Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States." - Bill D. Johnson, 1985

"... in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival ... The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit." - Jamie Kelso, 2006
In leaked private messages, Kelso claims that he and Johnson are top organizers for Ron Paul's campaign.

"I'll give you some more real-life examples of WN folks like us who are very successfully navigating back and forth between great White Nationalism and full mainstream activism. I'll introduce you to folks like William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the A3P, who is simultaneously Ron Paul's #1 man in Southern California. When Ron has VIP get-togethers at $2,000 a plate they are in Bill's dining room on his 80-acre estate."

Kelso also boasted repeatedly about meeting with both Ron and Rand Paul during the 2011 CPAC for three consecutive days.
"Then I'm heading to DC to meet up with Ron Paul and Rand Paul, personally, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12.

"Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Rand Paul. I'm in a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen.

"We'll be meeting with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Bill and I got to talk with Ron tonight by phone."

In private messages, Ron Paul organizers in A3P forums essentially admitted to each other that Ron Paul's base was overwhelmingly white, and ripe for inclusion in their own network. They even spoke of being the bridge being the White Nationalist movement and Ron Paul supporters.

"All of us who have helped organize events among these Ron Paul millions are keenly aware that 98% of these folks are White (look at any photo of a Ron Paul rally ... look at my photos of the crowds of 15,000 each on the west lawn of the Capitol on July 12, 2008 and at the Minneapolis counter-convention on September 2, 2008), and that almost all of these White folks want the non-White invasion of our White lands stopped yesterday."

"Anyone who can't see that Ron Paul is the best viable candidate from a pro-White perspective is not bright enough to be of any value to the pro-White movement."

"The most important of those innovations is BRIDGING from our tiny EXPLICITLY pro-White movement to the huge IMPLICITLY pro-White revolution that has been gathering ever since Ron Paul started it rolling in mid-2007."

Even when confronted with any of the ugly, bigoted remarks in his newsletters, or the more recent evidence that Ron Paul actually signed off on each newsletter before they went public, or when shown the picture of Ron Paul posing with campaign donor Don Black of Stormfront, Ron Paul's campaign has soldiered on. But his campaign owes the people and the media a direct response to A3P's claims that Ron and Rand Paul met in private at CPAC with a former Klan leader's right-hand man.

Ron Paul supporters are always quick to dismiss accusations of racism when they point to his opposition to the drug war. Indeed, his pro-decriminalization platform along with his anti-war credentials and his advocacy for tighter regulation of the Federal Reserve have won supporters from the right and the left. But now, no mainstream American should be able to throw their support behind Ron Paul with a clear conscience until he openly disavows his associations with the white supremacist movement and returns all the money donated to his campaign from its leaders and members.
[....]

Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory

2012-02-05T07:07:00.001-08:00

http://downthetubescomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/call-for-papers-from-akira-to-zizek.html

FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2012

Call for Papers: From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory

Papers are now being invited for the academic comics tome Studies in Comics (volume 3.2).

Guest editor Tony Venezia tell us this special issue - sub-titled From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory - seeks to provide a forum for new articulations between comics studies and contemporary cultural theory.

Be warned, it's heady stuff for those of us with low attention spans, perhaps.

"The importance and continued relevance of post-structuralist/postmodernist thought, the Frankfurt school’s studies of mass culture, McLuhan’s media theory and Bourdieu’s critical sociology are rightly acknowledged," notes Tony.

"Such figures dominate theoretical academic discourse on comics, as in other areas of cultural studies, often at the expense of engagement with alternative strands of critical thinking.

Rather than risking stagnation, Tony argues comics studies needs to "critically engage with theoretical paradigms not yet sourced". And that's the brief for this volume.

Submissions are welcome from scholars and enthusiasts that explore the conjunctions of comics and cultural theory. These could be engagements with the work of specific thinkers or emergent schools including, but not limited to:

Bruno Latour and ANT – Michel Serres – Paul Virilio – eco-criticism – thing theory - N. Katherine Hayles – Teresa de Lauretis - Franco Moretti – Manuel De Landa – Manuel Castells - cognitive capitalism – transmedia narratives – Giorgio Agamben – Édouard Gissant – Jacques Rancière – Friedrich Kittler – non-representational theory - speculative realism/materialism - Alain Badiou – Zygmunt Bauman – Rosi Braidotti – Antonio Negri – Jan van Dijk - affect theory – Lev Manovitch - Kojin Karatani – visual culture studies - and Slavoj Žižek...

Articles should be 4,000-8,000 words from any discipline with a strong critical focus. Abstracts should be received by 1st May 2012 in the first instance.

Please send 300 word abstracts to studiesincomics@googlemail.com and include the word ARTICLE in the subject heading. Please indicate the intended word count of the article.

Completed papers will be required by 15th August 2012. All submissions are peer reviewed and papers must be in English. Reviews of publications and exhibitions are also welcome, as are creative submissions, by the same deadlines indicated above.

- More info: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=168/view,page=2/

Summer School, Universität Bonn

2012-02-04T06:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.philosophie.uni-bonn.de/aktuelles/third-annual-international-summer-school

Third Annual International Summer School
"The Ontological Turn in Contemporary Philosophy" (July 2 - 13, 2012)

Organizer:
Professor Dr. Markus Gabriel
Chair in Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (Bonn University)

Keynote Addresses/Visiting Professors:
Prof. Ray Brassier (American University, Beirut)
Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol)
Prof. Martin Hägglund (Harvard/London Graduate School)
Prof. Graham Harman (American University, Cairo)
Prof. Slavoj Žižek (Ljubljana, NYU, Birkbeck, European Graduate School)

Course Description:

What is the world? What do we mean when we speak of the world in philosophy and claim things such as true thought being about the world? Is the world "out there," as Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore's "absolute conception of reality" suggests, or is it a horizon or regulative ideal guiding our epistemic practices?

In metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology it is common to speak of the world without bothering to explicate what this term means. Even though it features in debates concerning our access to the external world and even in book titles like Mind and World, it usually does not seem to express more than the vague realist assumption or platitude that not all objects or facts are made up, hallucinated, or in some way or another constructed by thinking subjects. Much of the 20th century's linguistic turn, both in the analytical and in the hermeneutical/phenomenological traditions, assumes that the world is what we have access to with truth-apt thought, yet also is that which might be distorted by our attempts to grasp it as it is in itself. Over the last decade, many voices (such as Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Boghossian, to name a few) have urged that the overall territory of the debate regarding the position of thinking in a world of facts is fundamentally confused by missing the very facticity of the world. This has triggered a thoroughgoing return to realism, prominently figuring in the thought of the avant-garde movement of "speculative realism" or "speculative materialism," as it has been labeled. Interestingly, the debates often associated with Badiou's ontology and the critique of all transcendental philosophy in Meillassoux's After Finitude have, in a recent turn, led to a reassessment of German idealism, for example in the work of Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Slavoj Žižek. On a closer look, it turns out the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel's criticisms of Kant can be read as attempts to overcome transcendental epistemology and themselves motivate an ontological turn.

This year, we will discuss an array of perspectives on the ontological turn developed by the organizer and visiting professors in recent work. In particular, we will address the concepts of speculative philosophy, the relation between transcendental philosophy and ontology in general, the issue of contemporary forms of realism and materialism, and the prospects for a suitably realist or materialist reading of figures such as Schelling, Hegel, and Derrida. The philosophers assembled will present and discuss their recent work in the form of a lecture followed by a seminar.
[....]

2012-02-04T06:36:00.001-08:00

Romney Isn’t Concerned

2012-02-04T06:18:00.001-08:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/krugman-romney-isnt-concerned.html?_r=2

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

[...]

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.

Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.

So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.

So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?

And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.

And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

London Conference in Critical Thought

2012-02-01T06:26:00.000-08:00

Žižek and the Political

http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/zizek-and-the-political/

Posted on January 31, 2012by londonconferenceincriticalthought

Stream Coordinator: Chris McMillan

Arguably the most prominent critical theorist of our times, Slavoj Žižek has regularly intervened in contemporary political debate over issues such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Nevertheless, there is little consensus over the value of these interventions or the effectiveness of Žižekian theory as a mode of political practice. Whilst Žižek is often readily enjoyed as a philosopher of culture and ideology, or an adept reader of Lacanian theory or German idealism, significant doubt remains over the political credentials of his theory. Indeed, for many Leftists’ Žižek’s work exemplifies the tragedy of our times; full of damming of critique without any concrete solutions. This stream invites papers to critically engage with these wide-ranging debates around the political difficulties and potential of Žižekian theory.

Whilst not seeking to prescribe any particular responses, papers from a broad range of perspectives might consider Žižek’s relationship to;

- Marxism and political economy;
- Democracy and the state;
- Communism and the ‘communist hypothesis’;
- Ideology or the politics of ideology and enjoyment;
- The political prospects of psychoanalysis;
- Broader theoretical papers that reflect upon the structural possibilities for Žižekian political engagement are also encouraged.

"The Mask of Anarchy"

2012-01-27T05:15:00.000-08:00

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Written after the massacre carried out by the British Government, at Peterloo, Manchester 1819

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
'Thou art God, and Law, and King.

'We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our Purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.'

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering - 'Thou art Law and God.' -

Then all cried with one accord,
'Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!'

And Anarchy, the skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:

'My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me -
Misery, oh, Misery!'

Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses' feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:

Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,

It grew - a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper's scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.

On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.

With step as soft as wind it passed
O'er the heads of men - so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, - but all was empty air.

As flowers beneath May's footstep waken,
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

And the prostrate multitude
Looked - and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt - and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their own indignant Earth
Which gave the sons of England birth
Had felt their blood upon her brow,
And shuddering with a mother's throe

Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood, -
As if her heart had cried aloud:

'Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

'What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell,

'So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying whilst I speak.

'Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

'Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More that e'er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

'Paper coin - that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

'Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

'And at length when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain
'Tis to see the Tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you -
Blood is on the grass like dew.

'Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood - and wrong for wrong -
Do not thus when ye are strong.

'Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their wingèd quest
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
When storm and snow are in the air.

'Asses, swine, have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!

'This is slavery - savage men
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do -
But such ills they never knew.

'What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery:

'Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

'For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.

'Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.

'To the rich thou art a check,
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.

'Thou art Justice - ne'er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold
As laws are in England - thou
Shield'st alike the high and low.

'Thou art Wisdom - Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which Priests make such ado.

'Thou art Peace - never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.

'What if English toil and blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood?
It availed, Oh, Liberty,
To dim, but not extinguish thee.

'Thou art Love - the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee,

'Or turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy belovèd sake
On wealth, and war, and fraud - whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

'Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

'Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou - let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.

'Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.

'Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.

'From the corners uttermost
Of the bounds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan,

'From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -

'From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -

'Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around

'Those prison halls of wealth and fashion,
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -

'Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold -

'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -

'Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

'Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses' heels.

'Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

'Let the horsemen's scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

'Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

'And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

'Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,

'The old laws of England - they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo - Liberty!

'On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

'And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, -
What they like, that let them do.

'With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

'Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

'Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand -
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

'And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

'And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

2012-01-25T14:25:00.001-08:00

La Commune (Paris 1871), directed by Peter Watkins (2003)

2012-01-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/commune.htm

The Paris Commune of 1871 - a brief historical background

MARCH 1871: Adolphe Thiers, chief executive of the provisional national government, is alarmed by the revolutionary activities of the Paris National Guard, an armed militia of some 260 battalions organized by the previous government to help defend Paris against the Prussians in the last days of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. The social situation in Paris is appalling, with massive unemployment and people still suffering the after-effects of the Prussian siege of Paris. Increasing socialism and militancy have been accompanied by the formation of many ‘red clubs’, which were supported by many of the National Guard battalions, especially those recruited from the working class arrondissements (districts) in the capital.

On March 18, Thiers makes a foolhardy (some say deliberately provocative) attempt to seize the cannon of the National Guard, and is foiled by the women of Montmartre. The women appeal to the government soldiers, many of whom refuse to fire on the people of Paris and reverse their muskets in a gesture of solidarity. Within a few hours Paris is in a state of insurrection, and the Mairies (town halls) of most arrondisements within the capital are in the hands of the rebellious National Guard. During these feverish hours, an angry mob has seized two government Generals, one of whom was involved in trying to capture the cannon, briefly held them prisoner, then summarily executed them against the wall of a garden in Montmartre. The firing squad included members of the National Guard as well as disgruntled government troops.

Thiers and his government hurriedly decamp to Versailles to join the National Assembly (with a majority of Monarchists from the recent elections). Henceforth the government forces are known as the ‘Versaillais’, and the National Guard and the Communards in general as the ‘Fédérés’ (in line with their vision of a loose-knit federation of Communes throughout France). A Central Committee of the National Guard occupies the abandoned Hôtel de Ville (the principal town hall governing Paris) and announces preparations for new municipal elections. On March 26, the left-wing gain enough votes to establish a socialist-oriented ‘Commune’ - which will last until May 28. On March 28, the Commune installs itself at the Hôtel de Ville, and for the next two months does its best to run the administration of Paris and to implement a programme of social reform, while fending off a growing siege from the Versaillais, who advance closer and closer in a singularly brutal war fought on the western edges of the capital.

The Communards try to introduce a series of radical social measures, e.g., to separate the Church from the State and establish a lay education system, give pensions to unmarried women, abolish night-work for bakers, introduce professional education for women, etc. But the lack of time and sheer disproportion in numbers (by May Thiers has rebuilt a standing army of 300,000) forces the issue, and the Versaillais army enters Paris on May 21 through an unguarded gate in the outer walls. Thus begins la semaine sanglante - ‘the bloody week’. In an orgy of reprisals, the French army, under the direction of its most senior generals, kills between 20-30,000 men, women and children in a series of bloody struggles for barricades right across Paris, before finally eliminating the last blocks of Communard resistance in the working class 11th, 19th and 20th districts.

Why this film, at this time?
We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the conjunction of Post Modernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking in the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalization, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered “old fashioned.” Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta interviews Slavoj Žižek

2012-01-20T05:26:00.001-08:00

Red Ink For Our Walls!

2012-01-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

Democracy’s inviolable tenets are useless in articulating our unfreedom
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279483
‘What Do They Want?’
• Spain, May 15: Street protests, inspired by the Arab Spring, against global capital and its baleful effects
• New York, Sep 17: The Occupy Wall Street movement kicks off
• Oct 15: Demonstrations across Europe and Asia as part of global protests. In London, protesters camp for days around St Paul’s Cathedral, near the stock exchange.
***

In thinking about the Occupy Wall Street protests and similar outcries around the world, I was reminded that some years ago the British writer John Berger described how “the multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed”.

“The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc. With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning.”
Let the questioning begin.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have the answers. In fact, we’ve bombarded the protesters with questions, just not the right ones yet.

“But what do you want?” we ask. “What are your concrete demands?”

This is the archetypal question addressed by a male master to a hysterical woman, a scene from bygone days: “All your whining and complaining—do you know at all what you really want?”

Such a question aims precisely at precluding the true answer—its point is: “Tell it in my terms or shut up!”

It’s a question that effectively blocks the process of translating an inchoate protest into a concrete project.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are drawing attention to two key points. First, that the global capitalist system has destructive consequences: consider only the hundreds of billions that were lost due to unbridled financial speculation.

Second, that economic globalisation is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Large economic transactions dependent on international players cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms, which are by definition limited to nation-states. Thus, institutional democratic forms of the old sort are increasingly unable to capture the vital interests of the people.
The crux of the Wall Street protests is this: how to expand democracy beyond its state/multi-party political form, which is obviously impotent when faced with the destructive consequences of economic life?

There is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today. There’s an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth journalistic investigations and television reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime.

The “democratic illusion”, the blind acceptance of the institutions of democracy as the only and the right force for change, actually prevents radical change.

What is as a rule not questioned, however, is the democratic-liberal framework of fighting against the excesses of capitalism. The explicit or implied goal of such critiques is only to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy through pressure from the media, government inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But we never ever question the democratic institutional framework of the state of law. This is the sacred cow that even the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism—think of the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.

Consider the Spanish version of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the indignados (the angry ones). They dismiss the entire political class, from right to left, as corrupted and controlled by the lust for power. Yet the indignados address their demands for change to—whom? Not to the people themselves: The indignados do not (yet) claim that no one will do it for them, that (to paraphrase Gandhi) they themselves have to be the change they want to see. Their outcry is pitched toward those who are in control—exactly those they are protesting against.
Marx did not believe in locating the question of freedom in the political sphere proper. He would not have agreed with the way western institutions commonly assess degrees of freedom when they want to pass judgment on a country: Are there free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected?

The key to actual freedom, Marx believed, resides rather in the “apolitical” network of personal relations, from the market to the family. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things merely by “extending” democracy. It’s outside the realm of legal rights that radical changes should be made. “Democratic illusion,” the acceptance of institutional mechanisms of democracy as the only and the “right” force for change, simply prevents radical change.

In mid-April 2011, news reports stated that the Chinese government had prohibited films and television series that deal with time travel and alternate theories of history, charging that they introduce frivolity into serious historical matters. Evidently, the Chinese consider even the fictional escape into alternate reality too dangerous.

In the liberal West, we do not need such explicit prohibitions; ideology exerts enough power over us to prevent alternate narratives of history from being taken seriously. We censor ourselves. There are certain questions we would never ask.
In an old joke often attributed to the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.”
After a month, his friends receive the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

Is this not our situation today?

We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink.

What this lack of red ink means is that, today, the terms we use to designate the conflicts that surround us—“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights”—are false. They mystify our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think about it.
We “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
Let’s give the protesters red ink.

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie

2012-01-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

by Slavoj Žižek

London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/01/11/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie

How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, meaning collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed from that.

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.

The same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. What follows is a permanent struggle over who gets the rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance of being exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. The world market, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is now ‘a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system’. In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to

Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson describes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’: so-called failed states (DR Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the ‘war on terror’. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, through to the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

Some say that this new form of capitalism provides new possibilities for emancipation. This at any rate is the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, which tries to radicalise Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. Marx, as they see it, was historically constrained by the notion of centralised, automated and hierarchically organised mechanical industrial labour, with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Hardt and Negri are here describing the process that the ideologists of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of self-organisation and multi-centred co-operation. The difference is that Hardt and Negri are effectively faithful to Marx: they are trying to prove that Marx was right, that the rise of the general intellect is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the opposite claim: Marxist theory (and practice), they argue, remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: what effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution: they tried to steer the revolution making it into yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is that what Hardt and Negri celebrate as the unique chance to overcome capitalism is celebrated by the ideologists of the information revolution as the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’ capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis has some weak points, which explain how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers of them becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran and then reaped the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the new bourgeoisie gets wages, and even if they own part of their company, they earn stocks as part of their remuneration for their work (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

[...]

Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since they would be the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought about by the existence of a bourgeoisie) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? The former Communists, meanwhile, are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are comfortably provided with a surplus wage as a means to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the ongoing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse, if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum wage). These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers. This remuneration is economically irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success. Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find any level of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review

2012-01-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/12/religion-for-atheists-de-botton-review?newsfeed=true

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review
A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion

Terry Eagleton
guardian.co.uk

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. George Steiner and Roger Scruton have both been among this company at various stages of their careers. The agnostic philosopher Simon Critchley, who currently has a book in the press entitled The Faith of the Faithless, is one of a whole set of leftist thinkers today (Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben) whose work draws deeply on Christian theology. In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Pope is that they don't believe in God. It is rather like coming across a banker who doesn't believe in profit.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
by Alain de Botton

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. The 18th-century Irish philosopher John Toland, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of a prostitute and a spoilt priest, clung to a "rational" religion himself, but thought the rabble should stick with their superstitions. There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John. Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence.

One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of "consoling, subtle or just charming rituals" to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear.

In Comtist style, De Botton also advocates secular versions of such sacred events as the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Catholic Mass and the Zen Buddhist tea ceremony. It is surprising he does not add Celtic versus Rangers. He is also keen on erecting billboards that carry moral or spiritual rather than commercial messages, perhaps (one speculates) in the style of "Leave Young Ladies Alone" or "Tortoises Have Feelings As Well". It is an oddly Orwellian vision for a self-proclaimed libertarian. Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn "how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper". Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there's something believers can get their teeth into …

• Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale.

Sharpe on Lacan

2012-01-11T02:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/
Matthew Sharpe
[...]
c. Theoretical Project
Lacan’s avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalize what he termed “the Freudian field.” His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud’s theoretical writings:

1) a theory of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure;
2) the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for 3) the formalization of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness;and
4)the construction of an account of the development of the “civilized” human psyche.

Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Lacan’s work is characterized by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve’s hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.

2. Lacan’s Philosophical Anthropology
a. The Mirror Stage
Lacan’s article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I” (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is “decentred.” The key observation of Lacan’s essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this “jubilation” as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a “body in bits and pieces,” unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependent for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.

The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan’s reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals’ sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the “organic” or “natural” development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud’s Ego and Id).

The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in “Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis,” is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: “I hit him!” and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world.

Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy…).

b. Desire is the Desire of the Other
It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud’s theorization of sexuality, Lacan’s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan’s stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child’s attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others.

Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire—directly—as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others’ desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.

Lacan articulates this decentering of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently “natural” as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Écrits, become episodes in the chronicle of the child’s relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents’ dissatisfaction or impatience.

In this light, Lacan’s important recourse to game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to formalize the possibilities available to individuals in situations where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan’s article in the Écrits on the “Direction of the Treatment” spells out, he takes it that the analytic situation, as theorized by Freud around the notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation. In that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher’s wife in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The said “butcher’s wife” thought that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud’s theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfillments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of the analyst. In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the dream was the woman’s wish that Freud’s desire (for his theory to be correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfill her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.

c. Oedipal Complex, Castration, Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The principle that desire is the desire of the Other is also decisive in how Lacan reformulates Freud’s theory of the child’s socialisation through the resolution of its Oedipal complex in its fifth or sixth year. Lacan agrees with Freud that this event is decisive both in the development of the individual, and in the aetiology of any possible subsequent mental illness. However, in trying to understand this stage of subjective development, Lacan distances himself from Freud’s emphasis on the biological organ of the penis. Lacan talks instead of the phallus. What he is primarily referring to is what the child perceives it is that the mother desires. Because the child’s own desire is structured by its relationships with its first nurturer (usually in Western societies the mother), it is thus the desire of the mother, for Lacan, that is the decisive stake in what transpires with the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In its first years, Lacan contends, the child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that the mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for the mother- a fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its fifth or sixth desire, however, the father will normally intervene in a way that lastingly thwarts this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing renunciation of the aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother, and not any physical event or its threat, is what Lacan calls castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys and girls are normally submitted.

The child’s acceptance of its castration marks the resolution of its Oedipal complex, Lacan holds, again shadowing Freud. The Oedipal child remains committed to its project of trying to fathom and fulfil this desire. It accordingly (and famously) perceives the father as a rival and threat to its dearest aspirations. Because of this, in a maverick theoretical conjunction, Lacan indeed likens the father-child relation at this point (at least as it is perceived by the child) to the famous “struggle to the death for pure recognition” dramatized in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In this struggle, of course, the child invariably loses. But everything turns, according to Lacanian theory, on whether this loss constitutes a violent humiliation for the child or whether, as in Hegel’s account of “Lordship and Bondage,” its resolution involves the founding of a pact between the parties, bound by the solemnification of mutually recognised Law.
If the castration complex is to normalize the child, Lacan argues, what the child must be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire of the mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come to see that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law that exceeds and tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French between nom (name) and non (the “no!” to incestuous union). When the father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the symbolic father) Lacan’s argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention that is also recognised by the mother, as a socialised being, to be decisive. This body of nomoi is what Lacan calls the big Other of the child’s given sociolinguistic community. Insofar as the force of its Law is what the child at castration perceives to be what moves the mother and gives the father’s words their “performative force” (Austin), Lacan also calls it the “phallic order.”

d. The Law and Symbolic Identification
The Law of the father is in this way theorised by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother. A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. As Lacan quips, when the child accedes to castration, it accedes to the impossibility of it directly satisfying its incestuous wish. If things go well, however, it will go away with “title deeds in its pocket” that guarantee that, when the time comes (and if it plays by the rules), it can at least have a satisficing substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is that the individual’s imaginary identifications (or “ideal egos”) that exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an “ego ideal.” This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless).

e. Summary
So, to repeat and summarise: Lacan’s philosophical anthropology (his answer to the question: what is it to be human?) involves several important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By drawing on Hegel, game theory, and contemporary observations of infant behaviour, he lays greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the intersubjective constitution of human desire. In this feature at least, his philosophical anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as Levinas, Honneth and Habermas. Equally, since for Lacan human desire is “the desire of the other,” what he contends is at stake in the child’s socialisation is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying object for the mother, a function which is finally (or at least norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father. Human-being, for Lacan, is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking animal (what he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to be “inmixed” with the imperatives of, and stipulated within, the natural language of its society. [see Part 2] Particularly, Lacan picks up on certain cues within Freud’s texts (and those of Saint Paul) to emphasise the dialectical structuration of human desire in relation to the prohibitions of Law. If the Law of the father denies immediate access to what the child takes to be the fully satisfying object (as expounded above), from this point on, Lacan argues, (at least neurotic) desire is necessarily articulated in the interstices of what is permitted by the big Other. And it is characterised by an innate and “fatal” attraction to what it prohibits as such, which is why he placed such central emphasis throughout his career on the enigmatic Freudian notion of a death drive.

f. Lacan’s Diagnostic Categories
Finally, it should be noted that, because of Lacan’s reformulations of several of Freud’s key notions, Lacan’s diagnostic heuristic differs markedly from Freud’s. For Lacan, what is decisive in understanding mental illness is not the conflict between the embattled ego and its two more “irrational” psychic bedfellows, the superego and the id. It is how the subject bears up with respect to the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on “the inverted ladder of the signifier,” within the phallic order of its society’s big Other. The question to be asked, for Lacan, is: how fully has the subject acceded to its symbolic castration?, and- as such- how fully has it overcome the transitivity and aggressivity characteristic of the earlier infantile stages of its development?

As in Freud, Lacan stipulates three major classes of mental illness, all of which are situated by him with respect to the terms of this question, and which (as such) are elevated by him to something like three existential bearings towards the condition of being a decentred socialised animal. According to the Lacanian conceptualization, the neurotic is someone who has submitted to castration, but not without remainder. His/her symptoms stand testimony to a lasting refusal of, and resentment towards, the castrating agency of the big Other. The pervert is someone who has only partially acceded to castration. For him/her, the Law does not function wholly to repress or render inaccessible what s/he deeply desires (the maternal body). Because of this, this Law comes itself (either in its prosecution, or in its sufferance) to function as the object of her/his desire.

Finally, the psychotic is someone who has never acceded (or been drawn to accede) to the symbolic order of social interchange bound by the name of the father. For him/her, this order of the big Other, in which people follow the Law “because it is the Law” can thus only ever appear to be a semblance. As is most clear in the delusions of paranoiacs, s/he will thus permanently be prey to the delusion that there must be some “Other of the big Other” (for example: aliens, the CIA, God) behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the social charade.

3. Lacan’s Philosophy of Language
The component of Lacanian theory for which it is perhaps most famous, and which has most baffled its critics, is the emphasis Lacan laid on language in his attempt to formalize psychoanalysis. From the 1950s, in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions, Lacan instead described the unconscious as a kind of discourse: the discourse of the Other.

There are at least three interrelated concerns that inform the construction of what one might call Lacan’s “philosophy of language.” The first is the central argument that the child’s castration is the decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject. The second is his taking very seriously what might be termed the “interpretive paradigm” in Freud’s texts, according to which Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of interpretation. -The third is Lacan’s desire to try to understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the “magical” power of the word.

a. Language and Law
In Part 1, in recounting Lacan’s view on the resolution of the Oedipal complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such importance was touched upon. For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective. By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities. Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature of Lacan’s “philosophy of language.” Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan’s position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or laws for the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too, “learning is based on believing” (Wittgenstein). Particularly, Lacan asserts a lasting link between the capacity of subjects to perceive the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and their acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention. We will return to this below.

b. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation
Lacan’s contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of language. This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that “lives” through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, “the unconscious” does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and “external” objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.

Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted to systematize this contention, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that “it speaks”/ca parle. A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly. For example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat.

Just as one might metaphorically describe one’s love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud’s papers “On the Psychology of Love,” Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object (for example, a car) by naming one part of it (for example: “a set of wheels”). Lacan’s argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did …). According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls “the battery of the signifier”) to give indirect vent to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow.

Lacan’s Freudian argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the “punch line” of jokes pack their punch by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of amusement. In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a “slip of the tongue,” what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc., to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression.

Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or—as Lacan variously put it—”quilted.” Before this time, they are what he calls “floating signifiers,” like to the leading premises of a joke.

The sense of this position can be easily demonstrated. One need only begin a sentence by proffering a subject, but then cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to this in accordance with linguistic convention. For example, if I say: “when I was young I…” or “it’s not like…,” my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it is that I mean. At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying “when I was young I ran a lot,” or whatever.

This understanding of sentences as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers “float” until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan’s emphasis on the future anterior tense. Sense, he argues, is always something that “will have been.” It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below). Or else, at sentence’s end, it is something that we now see with the benefit of “twenty twenty hindsight” to have been intended all along. This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future. Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later time that casts the whole behavior into relief in a wholly different light, and makes its sense clear.

c. The Curative Efficacy of the “Talking Cure”
Lacan’s emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freud’s intervention promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations of these behaviors that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it. A successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological reality of the body, changing the subject’s bearing towards the world, and dissolving his/her symptoms.

The need to explain this power of words and language is a clear and lasting motive behind Lacan’s understanding of language. His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way. In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make itself manifest. The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessions. Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognizes or symbolizes the force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears. So here the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desire. What this can accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for recognition. This is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein he again shows the influence of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit upon his most central concepts. It synchronizes exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan’s stricture concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of individuals’ exchanges with others.
But, for Lacan, it also shows something vital about the language in or as which the subjects’ repressed desires are trying to find a vent. This is that language is above all a social pact. As Lacan wrote in the Écrits: “As a rule everyone knows that others will remain, like himself, inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a rule of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which is almost always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake… I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith…” (Lacan, 2001: 154-155). Lacan’s idea is that to speak is to presuppose a body a conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor doesn’t “get it,” the true meaning of what I wish to convey always will emerge, and be registered in some “Other” place. (Note that here is another meaning of the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other is the place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth of what we say, whenever we speak.)

This is why Lacan’s philosophy of language is to be read in strong opposition to any philosophical account (whether Lockean, descriptivist or phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to the communicative act. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject’s past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start. To quote Slavoj Žižek on this Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an Other supposed to know its truth: “The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of “prolongation of communication by other means’”: the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.

The implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message … This … is the basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning …” (Žižek , 1989: 73). Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan, is this supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of my communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless “slips” and symptomatic behaviours. In terms of the previous section, transference is the condition of possibility for the quilting of the meaning of floating signifiers that occurs even in the most basic sentences, as we saw. What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this process. The subject, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to the Other are quilted, and return to him “in an inverted form.”

What has occurred at this point, on Lacan’s reckoning, is that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in the manifestations of his unconscious are integrated into the subject’s symbolic universe: the way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her community’s natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that now s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her identity, but an integral part of this identity. Lacan’s stress is thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this interpretation does not add new content to the subject’s self-understanding, so much as affect the form of this understanding. An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the s/he sees her past, reordering the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come to be ordered. A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process is that of the “master signifier.” Master signifiers are those signifiers to which a subject’s identity are most intimately bound. Standard examples are words like “Australian,” “democrat,” “decency,” “genuineness.” They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves. They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet.

Lacan’s understanding of how these “master signifiers” function is a multi-layered one, as we shall see in more detail in Part 3. It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes from how a subject’s identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself as a “communist,” the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a “liberal.” “Freedom” for him comes to mean “freedom from the exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric.” “Democracy” comes to mean “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Equality” comes to mean something like “what ensues once the sham of the capitalist “equal right to trade” is unmasked.”
What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new “master signifiers” which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their relations to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of “decency” that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of “master signifiers,” which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.

4. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Ethics
Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar (in 1959-1960) to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the position on ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Its central topic, in line with what we examined in Part 1 concerning the intersubjective structuration of subjective desire and identity, is the desire of the analyst as that Other addressed by the patient and implicated in the way s/he structures his/her desire through the transference. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position through explicit engagement with Aristotle‘s Nichomachean Ethics, as well as Kant’s practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, Lacan’s ethics accord with his metapsychological premises, examined in Section 2, and his theorization of language, examined in Section 3.

In this Section 4, accordingly, we will see Lacan’s understanding of ethics as a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be read as a consistent post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Section 4 is divided into three sub-sections. The first two develop further Lacan’s metapsychological and philosophical tenets. The first sub-section involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of the “master signifiers.” The second sub-section involves an exposition of Lacan’s notion of the “fundamental fantasy.” The final sub-section then examines Lacan’s later notion of “traversing the fantasy” as the basis of his ethical position.

a. Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan assigns great importance in his theorization of the psychoanalytic process to what he calls “master signifiers.” These are those signifiers that the subject most deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the way s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan’s idea about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that they add to the subject’s field of symbolic sense. It is rather the efficacy they have in reorienting the subject with respect to all of the other signifiers which structure his/her sense of herself and the world. It is precisely this primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master signifiers are actually “empty signifiers” or “signifiers without a signified.”

As with all of Lacan’s key formulations, the notion that the master signifiers are “signifiers without signified” is a complex one. Even the key idea is the following. The concept or referent (or both) signified by any “master signifier” will always be something impossible for any one individual to fully comprehend. For example, “Australian-ness” would seem to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the self-identification: “I am an Australian.” The Lacanian question here is: what is “Australian” being used by the subject to designate here? Is “Australian-ness” something that inheres in everyone who is born in Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on through the medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply some virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have? However, even if we take it that all “Australians” share some basic virtues, which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon be feasibly drawn up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who share in valuing each individual trait we standardly call “Australian” (for example: courage, disrespect for pomposity)? And, since “Australian” would seem to have to aim at a singular entity, not a collection, or else some grounding quality of character that could perhaps unite all of the others, which is this? And is this “essential” quality- again- simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or what?

What Lacan’s account of “master signifiers” thus emphasizes is the gap between two things. The first is our initial certainty about the nature of such an apparently obvious thing as “Australian-ness.” (We may even get vexed when asked by someone). The second thing is the difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or naming something that would correspond to the “essence” of “Australian-ness,” beneath all the different appearances.

What Lacan indeed argues, in line with his emphasis on the decentred self, is that our ongoing and usually unquestioning use of these words represents another clear case of how the construction of sense depends on the transferential supposition of “Others supposed to know.” Though we ourselves can never simply state what “Australian-ness,” etc. is, that is, Lacan argues that what is nevertheless efficient in generating our belief in (and identification with) this elusive “thing” is a conviction that nevertheless other people certainly know its nature, or seem to. Just as we desire through the Other, for this reason Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief through an Other. (For example, in the Christian religion, priests would be the designated Others supposed to know the meaning of the Christian mystery vouchsafing believers’ faith.)

At this point, it is appropriate to recall from Part 1 Lacan’s thesis that castration marks the point wherein the child is made to renounce its aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother. A subject’s castration amounts at base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is the injunctions of the father- and through his name the conventions of the big Other of society- that govern the desire of the mother. The “master signifiers” are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly that- despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them- they nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what “really matters” about human existence. While no Christian believer may know what “God” is, nevertheless s/he will be in no doubt of the transcendent importance of whatever It is that this word names.

Lacan thus is drawing together his philosophical anthropology and his theorization of language when he defends the position that it is the consequence of “castration” that subjects are debarred from immediate knowledge of what it is that the “phallic signifiers” signify. He is also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin to the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred from immediate access to things in themselves. Lacan’s argument is that it is this lost “signified,” which would as it were be “more real” than the other things that the subject can readily signify, that is what is primordially repressed when the subject accedes to becoming a speaking subject at castration. When the subject accedes to the symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous union, and the sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is necessarily debarred.

b. Lacan’s Conception of Fantasy
If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he deploys in this process is what we recounted above, when we noted how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a “decentred” manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan’s further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been debarred from must be held in reserve by the “big Other” whose law it is that discernibly structures the mother’s desire.

What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of subjects against the losses that they take themselves to have endured when they acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis.

Lacan strived to formalize the invariant structure of this “fundamental fantasy” in the matheme: $ a. This matheme indicates that: “$,” the “barred” subject which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to (”) the fantasised lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as “a,” is called by Lacan the “object petit a,” or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position with respect to the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or some other “little piece of the Real”) that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing.

Lacan’s argument is that the fundamental psychological “gain” from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity.

This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” and elsewhere that the “Woman,” with a capital “W,” “does not exist.” Note then that the deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The “no!” of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces.

The key point that supports Lacan’s position is the stipulation the objet petit a is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the “object gaze.” Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian “gaze” is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a “blind spot” in the subject’s perception of visible reality, “disturbing its transparent visibility” (Žižek, 1999a: 79). What it bears witness to is the subject’s inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein’s Ambassadors. What is singular about this “thing” is that it can literally only be seen from “awry,” and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears.

Here then is another meaning to $ a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that “re-presents” the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly “external” perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else—as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one’s double—the cost is that one’s usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no “objective” reality independently of this subject. The logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly “lost” object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.

c. The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
Lacan argues that the subject is “the subject of the signifier.” One meaning of this claim at least is that there is no subject proper that is not a speaking subject, who has been subject to castration and the law of the father. I shall return to this formulation below, though, for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is the apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the same time as being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is no subject without language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject constitutively lacks a place in language.

At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan is simply restating in the language of structuralist linguistics a claim already made by Sartre, and before him Kojeve and Hegel (and arguably Kant). This is the claim that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named within a natural language, like other objects can be (“table,” “chair,” or so on). It is no-thing. One of the clearest points of influence of Kojeve’s Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the emphasis he places on the subject as correlative to a lack of being (manqué-a-etre/want-to-be), especially in the 1950′s. Lacan articulates his position concerning the subject by way of a fundamental distinction between the ego or “moi“/”me” and the subject intimated by the shifter “je“/”I.” The subject is a split subject, Lacan claims, not only insofar as—Freud dixit—it has consciousness and an unconscious.

When Lacan says the subject is split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always evince the following two levels. The first is the ego, or subject of the enunciated. This is the self wherein the subject perceives/anticipates its imaginary unity. Since the ego is an object, according to Lacan, it is capable of being predicated about like any other object. I can say of myself more or less truthfully that “I am fat,” or “honest,” or anything else. What my enunciated sentence will speak about in these cases, for Lacan, is my ego.

But this is to be distinguished from a second “level” of subjectivity: the subject of the enunciation. Here as elsewhere, Lacan’s position turns around his philosophy of language examined in detail in Part 2. The distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated follows from Lacan’s understanding of what “speech-act” theorists like Austin or John Searle would call the “performative dimension” to language. Speech-act theorists emphasise that the words of given speech-acts are never enunciated in a vacuum. They are always uttered in a certain context, between language speakers. And through the utterances, subjects effectively do things (hence Austin’s title How to Do Things With Words). This is particularly evident in cases like commands or promises.

When I make a promise (say: I promise I’ll meet you at 5:15) I do not primarily make a claim about an existing state of affairs. It is what I have done that matters. What I have done is make a pledge to meet you at some future time.
Lacan’s key argument, alongside that of Austin here, is that all linguistic acts have two important dimensions. The first is what Austin would call the constative dimension. Lacan calls this the level of what is enunciated. Words aim to express or represent factual states of affairs in the world. The second is the performative dimension, that Lacan calls the “level of the enunciation.” The subject of the unconscious is the subject of the enunciation, Lacan insists. This is one way he expresses the elementary Freudian hypothesis that, in symptoms and parapraxes, the subject says more than s/he intended to say. What s/he intended will usually be captured in the explicit content of what s/he has enunciated.

Nevertheless, in his/her body language, or in a second chain of signification indicated by her/his mispronunciation (etc.), something other than what s/he intended will be conveyed to the analyst. This second chain of signification as it were “happens”- it is performed for the “Other supposed to know” before it can be explicitly and consciously enunciated by the speaking individual.

Lacan’s distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciated can be exposed further through examining his treatment of the liar paradox. This is the paradox of someone saying: “I am a liar.” The paradox is that, if we suppose the proposition true (“person x is a liar”), we at the same time then have no reason to believe he is telling the truth when he says: “I am a liar.” As a liar, he can only be lying when he says this. But what this means is that we must suppose that he is a sincere truth-telling person. Lacan argues that this is a paradox only insofar as we have wrongly collapsed the distinction between the subject enunciated in the sentence, and the subject of the enunciation. A better understanding of the meaning of this utterance can be garnered by presenting the speech-act in both its two dimensions, as a case wherein (to formalize): person x says: “I am a liar.” The point is that the “I” in the spoken sentence here is what Lacan calls “the subject of the enunciated.” Of this ego, it may (or may not) be true that s/he is a liar. Yet, this ego is in no way to be identified with what we have called “person x” in the above formalization. “Person x” here is not the subject spoken about. S/he is the person speaking. And Lacan’s point is that it this subject of the enunciation that addresses itself to the Other supposed to know in analysis, despite whatever egoic plays and ploys the analysand might masquerade before his/her analyst in what s/he enunciates. The hysteric, Lacan thus says, is someone who tells the truth about his/her desire (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of lying or at least being indifferent to the factual truths of which she speaks (at the level of the enunciated). The obsessional, by contrast, lies or dissembles the truth of his/her involvement in what s/he speaks about (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of always telling the truth (at the level of what s/he enunciates).

Lacan’s position is that, when subjects wish to speak about themselves, the subject of enunciation is always either anticipated--at the beginning of the speech-act; or else missed--at the end of the speech-act, whence it has come to be falsely identified with the ego. In line with his prioritization of the future anterior, he comments that the subject always “will have been.” In philosophical terms, we can say that the Lacanian subject is a presupposition of any speech-act (someone will always be speaking), yet impossible to fill out with any substantial content.

It is for this reason that Slavoj Žižek has recently drawn a parallel between it and Kant’s unity of apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason. Lacan himself, in his seminar on the logic of fantasy, strove to articulate his meaning by a revision of Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum: “I am not where I think.” The key to this formulation is the opposition between thinking and being. Lacan is saying that, at the point of my thought and speech (the subject of enunciation), there I have no substantial being that could be known. Equally, “I am not where I think” draws out the necessary misapprehension of the nature of the subject in what s/he enunciates. If Lacan’s subject thus seems a direct psychoanalytic restatement of Sartre/Kojeve’s position, however, it needs to be read in conjunction with his doctrines concerning the “master signifier” and the “fundamental fantasy.” Lacan says that master signifiers “represent the subject for other signifiers.”

Given his identification of the subject with a lack of being, a first register of this remark becomes clear. The master signifiers, as examined above, have no particular enunciated content or signified, according to Lacan. But the Lacanian position is precisely that this lack of enunciated content is correlative to the subject. In this way, his theorisation of the subject depends not only on a phenomenological analysis, as (for example) Sartre’s does in Being and Nothingness. If the subject is the subject “of the lack of the signifier,” Lacan means not only that it cannot be objectified at the point of its thinking, as I examined above. The subject is—directly—something that emerges at the point of- and because of- a lack in the field of signification, on his reckoning. This was already intimated above, in the section on the “logics of the fantasy,” which recounted Lacan’s position concerning how it is that subjects develop regimes of fantasy concerning what Others are supposed to know in order to ground their own belief in, and identification with, the master signifiers. The point to be emphasised now is that these master signifiers, if they are to function, cannot do without this subjective investment of fantasy. Lacan’s famous claim there is no metalanguage is meant to imply only this: that there is no field of sense that can be “quilted,” and attain to a semblance of consistency, unless subjects have invested their partial, biased perspective upon that field.

This is even the final and most difficult register to what Lacan aimed to express in the matheme: $ a. As we saw in Part 3, ii, the subject is correlative to the fantasmatically posed lost object/referent of the master signifiers. We can now state a further level of what Lacan implied in this matheme, though. This is that in fantasy what subjects misrecognize is not simply the non-existence of the incestuous-maternal Thing. What subjects primordially repress is the necessity of subjects’ implication in the play of signification that has over-determined the symbolic coordinates of their lives. The archetypal neurotic subject-position, Lacan notes, is one of victimization. It is the Others who have sinned, and not the subject. S/he has only suffered.

What is of course occluded by these considerations (which may be right or wrong from a moral or legal perspective) is how the subject has invested him/herself in the events of his/her life. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic investment of the subject in the “Others supposed to enjoy,” who are supposed not to have been made to undergo the castrating losses that s/he has undergone. As Lacan reads Freud’s later postulation of the superego, this psychical agency is constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father supposed to have access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother’s body denied to the child. Secondly, what is occluded is what Freud already theorised when he spoke of subjects’ adaption to and “gain” from their illness, as a way of organising their access to jouissance in defiance of the demands of the big Other. Even if the subject has undergone the most frightful trauma, Lacan argues, what matters is how this trauma has come to be signified subsequently and retrospectively by the subject around the fundamental fantasy. S/he must be made to avow that the subject-position they have taken up towards their life is something that they have subjectified, and have an ongoing stake in.

This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan quips that the injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton dasein!--eat your existence! He means that at the close of the analysis, the subject should come to internalise and so surpass the way that it has so far organised your life and relations to Others. It is this point, accordingly, that the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis is announced. Lacan’s name for what occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility. To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorizes, is to cease positing that the Other has taken the “lost” object of desire. It is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself as a means to compensate for the experienced trauma of castration. One comes to accept that castration is not an event with a winner (the father) and a loser (the subject), but a structurally necessary factum for human-beings as such, to which all speaking subjects have been subjected. What equally follows is the giving up of the resentful and acquisitive project of trying to reclaim the objet petit a from the Other, and “settling the scores.”

This gives way to an identification with the place of this object that is at once within the fabric of the world, and yet which stands out from it. (Note that this is one Lacanian reading of “where It was, there I shall be”). The subject who has traversed the fantasy, for Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its desire. This desire is no longer fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy. S/he is able to accept that the fully satisfying sexual object, that which would fulfil the sovereign desire of the mother, does not exist. S/he is thus equally open to accepting that the big Other, and/or any concrete Other supposed by the subject to be its authoritive representative(s), does not have what s/he has “lost.” Lacan puts this by saying that what the subject can now avow is that the Other does not Exist: that it, too, lacks, and what it does and wants depends upon the interventions of the subject. The subject is, finally, able to thereby accept that what it took to be its place in the order of the Other is not a finally fixed thing. It can now avow without reserve that it is a lacking subject, or, as Lacan will also say, a subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of this desire has no final term. Rather than being ceaselessly caught in the lure of the object-cause of desire, this desire is now free to circle around on itself, as it were, and desire only itself, in what is a point of strange final proximity between Lacan and the Nietzcheanism he scarcely ever mentioned in his works.
[...]

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

2012-01-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

Slavoj Žižek’s masterwork on the Hegelian legacy.

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape: whether in the name of the pre-rational Will, the social process of production, or the contingency of individual existence. Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the dominant philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity; a period with which our own time shares startling similarities.

Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

Hackers expose defence and intelligence officials in US and UK

2012-01-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/08/hackers-expose-defence-intelligence-officials

Security breach by 'hacktivists' reveals email addresses of 221 British military staff and 242 Nato officials

Ed Pilkington in New York and Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk

[...]
Thousands of British email addresses and encrypted passwords, including those of defence, intelligence and police officials as well as politicians and Nato advisers, have been revealed on the internet following a security breach by hackers.

Among the huge database of private information exposed by self-styled "hacktivists" are the details of 221 British military officials and 242 Nato staff. Civil servants working at the heart of the UK government – including several in the Cabinet Office as well as advisers to the Joint Intelligence Organisation, which acts as the prime minister's eyes and ears on sensitive information – have also been exposed.

The hackers, who are believed to be part of the Anonymous group, gained unauthorised access over Christmas to the account information of Stratfor, a consultancy based in Texas that specialises in foreign affairs and security issues. The database had recorded in spreadsheets the user IDs – usually email addresses – and encrypted passwords of about 850,000 individuals who had subscribed to Stratfor's website.

Some 75,000 paying subscribers also had their credit card numbers and addresses exposed, including 462 UK accounts.

John Bumgarner, an expert in cyber-security at the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a research body in Washington, has analysed the Stratfor breach for the Guardian. He has identified within the data posted by the hackers the details of hundreds of UK government officials, some of whom work in sensitive areas.
Many of the email addresses are not routinely made public, and the passwords are all encrypted in code that can quickly be cracked using off-the-shelf software.
Among the leaked email addresses are those of 221 Ministry of Defence officials identified by Bumgarner, including army and air force personnel. Details of a much larger group of US military personnel were leaked. The database has some 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military.

In the US case, Bumgarner has found, 173 individuals deployed in Afghanistan and 170 in Iraq can be identified. Personal data from former vice-president Dan Quayle and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger were also released.
Other UK government departments have been affected: seven officials in the Cabinet Office have had their details exposed, 45 Foreign Office officials, 14 from the Home Office, 67 Scotland Yard and other police officials, and two employees with the royal household.

There are also 23 people listed who work in the houses of parliament, including Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, Lady Nicholson and Lord Roper. Corbyn said he had been unaware of the breach, adding that although his email address was public he was disturbed by the idea that his password could be cracked and used to delete or write emails in a way that "could be very damaging".

Nicholson, speaking on a phone from Iraq, said she had no idea that her personal information had been hacked. She said she was very unhappy that private individuals had had their fundamental right to privacy violated. "To expose civil servants is monstrously unfair," she said. "Officials in sensitive areas like defence and the military could even be exposed to threats. Guarding data like this is extremely difficult, but it's not impossible, and we should do a great deal more."

The hacking has had a big impact because Stratfor offers expert analysis of international affairs, including security issues, and attracts subscribers from sensitive government departments.

The British victims include officials with the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) responsible for assessing intelligence from all sources, including MI6 secret agents.

A former deputy head of Whitehall's strategic horizons unit is listed. The unit is part of the JIO based in the Cabinet Officeand was set up four years ago to give early warning of potential serious problems that might have an impact on Britain's security or environment.

The extent of the security risk posed by the breach is not known. Bumgarner said officials who did not take extra precautions in securing passwords through dual authentication or other protection systems could find email and other databases they use being compromised. "Any foreign intelligence service targeting Britain could find these emails useful in identifying individuals connected to sensitive government activities," he said.

British officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were aware of the hacking but it did not pose a risk to national security. Passwords for their communications within Whitehall would be different from any used to access the Stratfor sites. Whitehall communications would also be protected by extra security walls, officials said.

However, they added that their personal communications could be at risk if individuals used the same password as they used to access Stratfor for their bank accounts and other personal communications.

A government spokesman said: "We are aware that subscriber details for the Stratfor website have been published in the public domain. At present, there is no indication of any threat to UK government systems. Advice and guidance on such threats is issued to government departments through the Government Computer Emergency Response Team."

Stratfor has taken down its website while it investigates the security breach. The company says it is "working diligently to prevent it from ever happening again".
[...]

Welcome to the civil-liberties-free zone

2012-01-09T19:37:00.000-08:00

http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/09/civil-liberties-free-zone-in-chicago
COMMENT: SHAUN HARKIN

Rahm Emanuel's clampdown on civil liberties goes beyond his goal of silencing opposition to next May's gathering of the global 1 percent, says Shaun Harkin.

CHICAGO MAYOR Rahm Emanuel wants to set up his own personal police state to accommodate the warmongers and budget-slashers who will attend a conference of the global 1 percent in Chicago in May.

Emanuel is giddy about the "opportunity" to host simultaneous gatherings of the U.S.-dominated NATO military alliance and the Group of Eight (G8) club of powerful industrial nations also dominated by the U.S., set for May 19-21. The last time both entities met together was in 1977 in London.

"From a city perspective, this will be an opportunity to showcase what is great about the greatest city in the greatest country," said Emanuel. "It's an opportunity for the city of Chicago economically, but also a message internationally about why Chicago is a city that's on the move, and if you're thinking of investing, Chicago is a place to invest."

Meanwhile, civil liberties will become a scarce commodity.

In December, Emanuel introduced a package of proposed ordinances, to be voted on by the Chicago City Council, that demand dramatically higher fines for anyone arrested during the summits, more surveillance cameras and the daily closure of city parks and playgrounds until 6 a.m.

The ordinances would also increase minimum fines from $25 to $250 for anyone found "resisting arrest"--and the law is careful to specify that "passively" resisting, such as going limp in classic civil-disobedience style, is also included. Maximum fines would increase from $500 to $1,000, and in some cases to $2,000.
The spineless Chicago City Council--which recently rubberstamped Emanuel's job-busting and social-services-slashing budget with a 50-0 vote--is set to vote on the ordinances on January 18.

The new ordinances would also empower Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to "deputize law enforcement personnel"; make cooperative agreements with a host of state, federal and local law enforcement agencies; and forge agreements with "public or private entities concerning placement, installation, maintenance or use of video, audio telecommunications, or other similar equipment."

This last measure would buttress the city's existing "Big Brother" surveillance network, augmenting more than 10,000 public and private surveillance cameras--the most extensive and integrated system in the nation, according to experts.
Emanuel's proposals are also clearly intended to "neutralize" any number of other potential headaches. For one, Emanuel wants to set up new hurdles for Occupy Chicago, which has plans for a spring mobilization in early April. In the fall, Emanuel ordered mass arrests that successfully thwarted Occupy Chicago's repeated efforts to establish an encampment in a public space.

But Emanuel is also faced with growing protests among teachers, nurses and community activists faced with school closures, and cuts to city mental health services and other programs.

According to the Chicago Reporter, "Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the department is treating the Occupy Chicago protests as a bit of a dry run, and they've considered the way they've dealt with protesters so far to be a success."

From the first announcement that the joint summits would be held in Chicago, there has also been a systematic media campaign to smear social justice protesters as hell-bent on "violence" and "destruction." In particular, the Chicago Sun-Times ran sensational front-page articles featuring burning buildings and confrontational scenes.

Emanuel wants to use a media-generated hysteria to justify the massive security operation and discourage wider participation in the protests.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SPENDING TENS of millions of dollars on security and feasts for powerful politicians and officials who oversaw the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or who imposed austerity across the world will be hard for many people to stomach.
This is especially true in a city where the mayor has forced through layoffs of librarians, the closure of desperately needed mental-health clinics and schools, and other cuts to the city's already battered social safety net. And Emanuel is planning for more, with massive concessions demanded from Chicago teachers and transit workers.

But despite the intimidation and demonization, networks of Chicago-based and national activists have been organizing since August to challenge the twin entities of the G8 and NATO, as well as the assault on civil liberties.

Mass protests, a People's Summit and many other events and actions are being planned by students, trade unionists, antiwar organizers, faith-based activists, Occupiers, anti-eviction activists and many others. These groups have joined forces to say no to the NATO/G8 agenda, and to put forward an alternative based on equality, democracy and solidarity.

But as far as Emanuel is concerned, this runs contrary to his own plans to host an event that caters to the interests of the city's corporate elite--and those of his former boss, President Barack Obama, who Emanuel served as White House chief of staff until he left in October 2010 to run for mayor.

By mid-May, the 2012 presidential election will be in full swing, and Democrats are hoping that Obama's prospects for reelection will be enhanced by playing a central role in the summits. According to an anonymous administration official, the NATO/G8 meetings offer Obama "with the opportunity to continue his leadership of our most important security alliance, to fulfill commitments made by allied leaders in Lisbon in November 2010, and to sustain our joint work to revitalize NATO to prepare it to effectively meet challenges of the 21st century."
The White House thus hopes to use the Chicago summit to reassert the global role of the U.S. in both economic and military terms.

Officials will tout what they consider the Obama administration's foreign policy achievements, including support for regime change in Libya and ending the war in Iraq. Economically, the summit presents the U.S. with a bully pulpit to lecture Europe on how to avoid an imposion of the eurozone economy that would drag down the world economy.

Pivotal, too, for the U.S. is the exclusion of China--the clear rival to the U.S. in coming decades, economically and politically--from both bodies.

Though there are fears that its economic growth will slow in the next couple of years, China now has more billionaires than any other country except the U.S., along with $2 trillion in foreign assets--while the U.S. has $2.5 trillion in net debts. China is the world's leading manufacturer and looks set to become the world's primary importer by 2014--a massive turnaround from 2000 when U.S. imports were six times China's, according to the Economist.

China's growth, the economic crisis and the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan have combined to exacerbate the sense of anxiety among U.S. policymakers and the broader public about "American decline." A Pew Global Attitudes Survey captures this statistically: when asked which country is the world's leading economic power, 43 percent of Americans answered China, while only 38 percent believe the U.S. is still number one.

So what could be better for the U.S. and President Obama than a global platform staged in Chicago to present their message about what needs to be done.

But here's what they don't say: The global 1 percent have become even richer in recent years, and they want to stop anything that might disrupt the growth of their staggering vast wealth. So elite will gather to justify austerity for the purpose of stabilizing world capitalism, defend the concentration of wealth and power among the tiny few--and pay lip service to reducing hunger, climate change and inequality.

Writing from Kabul in Afghanistan, veteran peace campaigner Kathy Kelly captured the disconnect between those who embrace the G8 and NATO and those who feel the brunt of its dictates:

Hillary Clinton, President Obama, former war-hawk representative Emanuel and other undisputed militarists in government seem to see Chicago as a city obsessed with power, a city determined above all to be tough and strong. Carl Sandburg famously depicted Chicago as the city of big shoulders, and it often seems too easy for political leaders and generals to confuse the strength involved in shouldering shared burdens with the very different kind of "toughness" that drives a fist or a nightstick.

NATO/G8 summits have been met with protests wherever they have been held. In 2001, at the height of the global justice movement, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Genoa, Italy, to show their opposition to G8 policies. With this in mind, Chicago's mayor is ready to go to any length to protect the architects of war and global inequality.

But his efforts aren't going unnoticed. John Kass, a conservative Chicago Tribunecolumnist, criticized Emanuel's "ruthless amassing of new powers" by comparing him to a Roman dictator:

[T]here seems to be a new, imperial Rahm on the horizon: Emperor Rahmulus. Rahmulus wants more power over police, so that his police chief may immediately deputize members of other law enforcement agencies should Rahmulus decree. This means he might be able to deputize the Melrose Park cops--perhaps even the Melrose Park Fire Department--if he feels the need.
And he wants more control over contracts, transforming the already-neutered Chicago City Council from eunuchs to ghosts. "I'm doing what is appropriate for a unique event with a unique attention to the city," Emanuel told reporters last week. "We'll do it to make sure we have an orderly process. This is not a big deal. This is a one-time event...This is temporary, and this is just for this conference."

Oh, sure. It's just temporary. The last guy who said new powers were only temporary was Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars saga...

In fact, Emanuel's dispatch of the City Council is only a means to an end, says Kass:

The mayor will have sweeping contract powers to take care of this one and that one because he feels like it, with little if any legislative oversight. And that befits a political system where "democracy" is largely symbolic, as it was in Albania for most of the last century.

So we'll have heads of state gathering in Chicago to nibble hors d'oeuvres with Rahm's business friends, and they'll make contacts and deals and more business. Taxpayers will pick up much of the cost. The suits will praise President Barack Obama's Chicago. And if history is our guide, then young protesters will be dragged away, their heads bouncing along the curbs.

Kass' assessment is on the money. In fact, Emanuel has acknowledged [1] that he has no intention of making "temporary" any of the measures designed to clamp down on civil liberties.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TO FUND the massive security operation, Emanuel was handed a $54.6 million grant by his friends in the federal government. The mayor's office won't say how much it wants to raise in addition to this federal funding, or how it will spend any contributions, but it has tapped seasoned corporate networkers, including former Sara Lee Corp. CEO John Bryan, to lead the effort.
Within corporate and political circles, Emanuel's fundraising skills are seen as legendary.According to reporter Shia Kapos [2]:

Before he headed out of town for the holidays, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tied up a loose end of business. He secured a $2 million sponsorship donation for the upcoming NATO and G8 summits, which will land in Chicago in mid-May. Add that to the $50 million or so already in the bank.

Yep, the latest infusion should put to rest any question of whether businesses want their names attached to an event that draws protests. Christie Hefner, the former Playboy Enterprises Inc. CEO who now serves as executive chairman of Tucson, Ariz.-based Canyon Ranch Enterprises Inc., said as much at a recent Executives' Club of Chicago meeting.

The media's collaboration in the whole spectacle of trumpeting the summit while demonizing protesters shouldn't come as a surprise--especially at the Sun-Times, whose board has a longstanding relationship with the city's new boss. According toCrain's Chicago Business reporter Greg Hinz [3]:
At least eight of the 12 board members of the new company [that owns theSun-Times], Wrapports LLC, have donated to Mr. Emanuel's campaign fund in the past year, collectively plunking down $241,000 that I found in a quick survey of Board of Elections disclosures. Included: $25,000 from the Sun-Times' new chairman, Michael Ferro Jr., and $105,000 from Mr. Emanuel's frequent visitor at City Hall, Grosvenor Capital Management L.P. chief Michael Sacks.

City officials have made organizing extremely difficult by stalling on repeated attempts to discuss march and rally permits. However, NATO/G8 activists have joined with Occupy Chicago to "Occupy City Hall" and other actions to demand the right to protest and other basic civil liberties.

Persistence is paying off. The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War and Poverty Agenda [4] celebrated a victory when City Hall was forced to backtrack on denying permits for Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. MB Real Estate, the company managing Daley Plaza for the city, had earlier announced it would not be issuing any permits during May 15-22, but more recently, the city's Public Building Commission wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union to say that "Daley Plaza will be open to public assembly and public activity" during the summits.

In the coming weeks and months, the struggle to defend the right to assemble and protest will be crucial. In the next week, for example, Chicago unions, religious groups, Occupy activists and students will be spearheading a campaign to get Chicago aldermen to vote against Emanuel's proposed ordinances when they come to a vote in the City Council on January 18.

We should do everything we can to mobilize those from near and far who want to show the representatives of the global 1 percent that they and their policies are not welcome in Chicago--or anywhere.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Published by the International Socialist Organization.
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [5] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

[1] http://www.suntimes.com/9793714-417/rahm-emanuel-on-duration-of-nato-g8-rules-i-made-a-mistake-real-simple-ok.html
[2] http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20111217/ISSUE01/312179973/no-question-biz-backs-nato-g8-summits-here
[3] http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20111222/BLOGS02/111229926/rahm-has-deep-financial-ties-to-new-sun-times-owners
[4] http://cang8.wordpress.com/
[5] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

2012-01-09T11:46:00.001-08:00

Fugazi: "Do You Like Me?"

2012-01-09T11:42:00.000-08:00

2012-01-09T07:53:00.000-08:00

Guerrilla Warfare by Ernesto "Che" Guevara

2012-01-06T17:06:00.000-08:00

Guerrilla Warfare By Ernesto Che Guevara

'The Lacanian Real' converted into Persian

2012-01-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.ibna.ir/vdcayin6y49nuy1.tgk4.html

Slavoj Zizek's "The Lacanian Real: Television" is converted into Persian by Mahdi Salimi. According to Zizek, television vacates us of meaning and even disarms us of the ability to weep or laugh.

IBNA: This book is a complete translation of a seminar by Slavoj Zizek on television made in 1987 in New York.

Referring to the Zizek's rereading of Jacques Lacan (French philosopher, physician and psychoanalyst), he said: "Despite its brevity, this text offers a very good idea of different stages of Lacan's thought. For instance, the text familiarizes the reader with the concept of 'The Real' in three phases of Lacan's thought. Besides, Zizek's keen view of everyday reality through popular phenomenon of television once again proves his loyalty to Slovenian School of psychoanalysis."

Salimi continued: "Followers of Slovenian School make political readings of psychoanalysis and meantime draw on everyday phenomena for illustrating their opinions. Following this strategy Zizek probes into political and philosophical aspects of Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis and comes up with a radical political reading of Lacan. For doing so he also cites Jacques-Alain Miller's reading of Lacan."

He went on to say that this Slovenian theoretician always finds an appropriate thought model for describing phenomena; in fact, the models are exploited out of the phenomena under survey.

Salimi continued: "Zizek has a good theoretical background and never takes the meanest aspects of everyday life for granted. I mean that although he sometimes is trapped into populism and simplicity, his clear thought system and strategies make him an outstanding and autonomous critic."

For instance, he added, he illustrates his ideas of The Real with an example from the television. It usually broadcasts short comedies that are immediately followed with a laugher sound.

Zizek states that even in Greek tragedies there was a chorus in charge of the comic or tragic effect. In Zizek's opinion, by doing so sometimes the television frees us of the charge of laughing or crying and actually empties us of all meanings – the meanings that we could have extracted from the scenes by ourselves.

This act means infusion of ideas upon the audiences and by doing so, the television is attempting to omit the great Other.

In fact Zizek's main goal in this speech is not to illustrate Lacan's ideas with the phenomenon of television, but rather to defamiliarize a well-known and popular phenomenon known as television.

The first issue of "The Lacanian Other" is published in 1150 copies and 94 pages by Roshd Amouzesh.

Id: 126444
Topic url: http://www.ibna.ir/vdcayin6y49nuy1.tgk4.html
Iran Book News Agency (IBNA)
http://www.ibna.ir

Rick Santorum Protects the Freedom of Con-Men

2012-01-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

By Charles P. Pierce

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rick-santorum-freedom-6633251

Rick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of "dependency" and "freedom," and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one.

Begin simply with the place last night's even took place. It was an assisted-care facility/nursing home run by Rockingham County here in the southern part of New Hampshire. It has disabled residents on Medicaid and it has 200 people in its nursing-home section, almost all of whom are on Medicare. It is a government-run facility, and a very well-regarded one, which is impossible because, as we all know, the government has no business interfering with the health-care "market." The facts about this facility will become important later on. Stay with us.

You can also tell he's energized because he's back to being the legendary dick he's always been reputed to be by those who knew him best in Washington. A kid from Haverhill, Mass., got up to ask a question, and Santorum hung him out to dry for the benefit of his assembled fans from New Hampshire. While discussing President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which the president made because the congressional Republicans refused to give his nominees a hearing, because the congressional Republicans don't want the NLRB — a fully legitimate agency of the federal government — to work, the grandson of a coal miner sneered, "I'm suurrrre they'll be soooo friendly and hospitable to American business." His entire pitch now is an extended nyah-nyah in the general direction of whatever White House exists at the moment in his imagination.

"You can't be trusted with freedom."
"He believes you are incapable of freedom."

"The president believes you need him. He'll solve all your problems. Remember all those people at the rallies in 2008? People would say, 'Oh, Mr. President, I know you'll help me with this.' He convinced Americans that they needed to believe in a president. You want a president who believes in you."
(I use italics because there is no "Seventh Grade Sarcasm" function on this computer. Sorry.)

You can also tell he's energized because he's not at all shy about taking his more outre views out for a walk. Take Iran, for a moment. Did you know that the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons in Qom? (Santorum couches a lot of his answers this way, in the manner of a middle-school civics teacher who's read Time twice this month.) Do you know why? Well, he's going to tell you. Qom is a holy city to the Shi'a population of Iran. (The return of the 12th Imam is mixed up in this somewhere, too. Listening to Santorum on Iran is like accidentally tuning in one of those ancient astronaut documentaries on the History Channel.) "It is a very important town dealing with the end times for Shi'a Islam," he says.

In other words, Rick Santorum believes that the current Iranian regime is building a nuclear weapon not merely as leverage for power in that region and the world, and not merely to defend itself, and not merely, as he himself says, "to protect itself from retaliation while it engages in acts of terrorism." He believes it is building a bomb, and is more than likely to use it, in order to bring on the end times and the return of the 12th Imam.

(And you are not incorrect in wondering at this point how he feels about those millions of evangelical Christians over here who encourage belligerence on the part of Israel because of their desire to see the big show open on the plains of Megiddo, starring the famous Disemboweling Christ, action hero of the Left Behind novels. Rather not have those folks influencing nuclear policy myself.)

But he doesn't really reach full bloom until he's talking about ethics, and decency, and "living a moral life." It is here where his sanctimony, his hypocrisy, and his carefully refined dickitude truly burst forth in interesting ways. He was asked last night about the recent revelations of "insider trading" among members of Congress. He began his answer carefully, parsing the legitimate difference between actual insider trading of the kind that takes place on Wall Street, and the kind of thing in Congress most recently exposed by 60 Minutes in which members of the Congress trade on information concerning pending laws that might effect certain industries.

Forgive me for a moment if I now bring out the tin drum again and point out that, as one of Jack Abramoff's primary rentboys in the Senate, Santorum is well qualified to make this Jesuitical distinction. But then he goes on to make a learned simpleton's disquisition on why we have of laws in our society, and we move deeply into the upper branches, the lush green canopy, that overarches his entire purpose in public life, at least as he sees it.

"The point is, this is something we shouldn't even have to have a law for," he says. "People should behave ethically. When people don't behave as they should, we gotta pass laws. Now we have a law, and it has to be enforced, and that means someone has to hire staff to enforce it, and these are people that you pay for, and all because people don't live decent moral lives like they should. If people don't live good decent moral lives, government is going to get bigger."

(As with so many things, Mr. Madison said it better: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.")

Let us unpack this, shall we? First we have the mournful condemnation of the various members of Congress who did these dastardly but altogether legal deeds, which is very rich coming from a guy — tin-drum alert — whose brief on behalf of one of the greatest scams in the history of the Republic included:

Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

His efforts on behalf of the K Street Project, which eventually redounded to the great benefit of Abramoff, landed Santorum on a watchdog group's list of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress in 2006. And thus did Rick Santorum enable people to avoid living decent moral lives and, by his own logic, thus is Rick Santorum a primary architect of big government in this regard. Ron Paul Is Right!!!!

Even Santorum's unremarkable contention that, if it weren't for criminals, we wouldn't need laws, is wholly reminiscent of the preacher caught out behind the barn with a sheep. Like every other Republican candidate, Santorum favors repeal of the Dodd-Frank law, which was passed as a rather pale attempt to rein in the excesses of the financial industries. He calls it "job-killing." Just last night, he announced his support for a lawsuit contemplated by the Senate Republican leadership to fight President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another appointment held up by those same Republicans because they do not approve of a law duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. Santorum doesn't like that law, either. Last night, he made quite a show of not remembering the name of the CFPB.

But, wait. Don't we need this law? Don't we need a law because a bunch of Wall Street pirates declined to live "good, decent moral lives" as they were stealing most of the national economy and wrecking what was left? Don't we need a law because those people, declining to live good, decent, moral lives, looted pensions, cheated people on mortgages, and left one poor county in Alabama in hopeless debt from now until the 12th Imam really does come back? Aren't the people behind credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of the vehicles of exotic economic pillage the real reason why government had to expand its power in this area? Here, alas, possibly with the sound of Jack Abramoff's voice echoing softly in his ear, Rick Santorum wants people to live "good, decent moral lives" and, yet, if they don't, well, that's just the way it goes.

Let us all be free again to be swindled the same way.

Rick Santorum is yet another example of a conservative to whom "freedom" means protecting the free speech rights of con-men. That's how he managed, during his demi-victory speech in Iowa, to compare much of the social safety net to the actual fascism his grandfather fled Italy to avoid. He treats caveat emptor as a basic principle of human freedom. Toward the end of the evening, he got into a long wrangle about health-care and announced his support for "the Ryan plan," the Medicare phase-out designed by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. Remember now where he said it — in a well-regarded government-run nursing home containing 200 patients, all of whom depend on Medicare for one reason or another. Rick Santorum believes that these people are not free. If they were, they'd get up tomorrow morning and shop for the best deal they could find on an open market, which naturally would be run by people in the insurance industry who are living good, decent moral lives, especially in their business practices. It was about here where I fell out of the tree.

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?

2012-01-06T04:37:00.002-08:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/05/have-the-super-rich-seceded-from-the-united-states/

The Joke is on the Rest of Us

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?
by MIKE LOFGREN

It was in 1993, during congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

That was just the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the cold war many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others, like Chuck Spinney, predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation Warfare, and the inability of national armies to adapt to it.

The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state, and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues; by 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950; by 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. Who has skin in the game now?

As is well known by now, Schwarzman benefits from the “Buffett Rule:” financial sharks typically take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus knocking down their income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. But that’s not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game benefits: the 6.2-percent Social Security tax and the 1.45-percent Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income tax rate less than half the top marginal rate, he is shorting the Social Security system that others of his billionaire colleagues like Pete Peterson say is unsustainable and needs to be cut.

This lack of skin in the game may explain why Willard Mitt Romney is so coy about releasing his income tax returns. It would also make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed,” as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown, when he is really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. The chances are good that his effective rate for both federal income and payroll taxes is lower than that of many a wage slave.

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years – a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies – and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists, and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

MIKE LOFGREN retired in June 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Obama versus civil liberties

2012-01-06T04:37:00.001-08:00

Far from being the exception, the undermining of constitutional rights is standard operating procedure under capitalism, regardless of which politicians are in charge.

http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/04/obama-versus-civil-liberties

THE U.S. military can indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without trial--that's the latest of our supposedly "inalienable rights" sacrificed by the Democratic former constitutional law professor who currently inhabits in the White House.
After promising during his campaign to roll back the abuses of the Bush administration, Barack Obama has spent the last three years pushing through attacks on civil liberties that Republicans could only dream about. He is eliminating all doubts that the Democrats are as firmly committed as the GOP to strengthening the national security state at the expense of our rights.

As part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama on December 31, the military--under the authority of the president--is empowered to hold anyone "who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners...without trial until the end of hostilities."
According to legal scholar Jonathan Turley [2], the NDAA represents "one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country."

Even the liberal New York Times, which regularly praises the Democratic Obama administration, described Obama's announcement that he would sign the bill [3] as "a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency."

The ACLU's Laura Murphy pointed out that the last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was the Internal Security Act of 1950, passed during the McCarthy era. Then-President Harry Truman vetoed the Internal Security Act of 1950, but Congress overrode the veto.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wrote [4], the Internal Security Act:
authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other "subversives" without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these "war on terror" policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He's not even the Candidate Obama of 2008, who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive, and who condemned indefinite detention as "black hole" injustice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN THE New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal wrote [5], "It's stunning that the president is willing to sign a bill that might effectively turn the right of habeas corpus into a mere privilege--even for citizens."
But it's not so "stunning" once you compare this measure with the Democrats' record on civil liberties over the past several years--from capitulation to the Bush administration on the USA PATRIOT Act and similar abuses to their own measures during the Obama years.

Beyond Obama's failure to honor his promise to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay--thus embracing the idea of indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism--his administration has overseen a vast expansion of executive power and attacks on rights that includes: failing to prosecute war crimes, whether committed by U.S. soldiers or former Bush administration officials; continuing the use of warantless surveillance; actively prosecuting Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers who have exposed war crimes; carrying out unlawful detentions on U.S. soil [6] and repressive, illegal treatment of those accused of "materially aiding" terrorists; massively expanding the use of unmanned drones to attack and kill so-called "terrorists" (and, often, innocent civilians who happen to get in the way); carrying out extra-judicial assassinations of foreign nationals and at least one U.S. citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki); defending the right of the president to do so free from oversight by invoking "state secrets"; continuing the prosecution of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. on the flimsiest of evidence for crimes like "material support" of terrorism.
In other words, the Obama administration has shown its willingness at every step to trample civil liberties in the service of expanding executive power--and justify it by invoking the "war on terror."

Obama did attach a "signing statement" to the NDAA, proclaiming that he doesn't wantto use the massive power which he was granting to not only his own, but to successor, administrations. "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists," he wrote.

But then why enshrine such heinous power into law? The answer is that Obama is only too happy to have such a weapon at his disposal.

Even more laughable was Obama's assertion that his administration's so-called accomplishments in the "war on terror" have "respected the values that make our country an example for the world."

Maybe an example of the ruthless pursuit of power. But not respect for civil liberties or human rights.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE QUESTION some might be asking is how Obama--the former law professor who promised to uphold the rule of law and protect civil liberties--could have so fully embraced the policies he has?
The answer isn't a personal failing on Obama's part, but that he and the Democratic Party are as committed as the Republicans to expanding and upholding U.S. power around the globe as the Republicans. Part of ensuring that is strengthening of the national security state to silence and repress any perceived threats to that power--whether at home or abroad.

In the 1950s, such attacks were aimed at socialists and communists. Today, the Obama administration claims its repressive laws are aimed at "terrorists." But combined with developments like an expansion of FBI spying [7], they can and will be used to silence dissent at home.
Consider Obama's former chief of staff and the current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. In preparation for planned protests against the NATO/G8 summit in Chicago in May, Emanuel is seeking permanent changes to city ordinances that would: raise fees for violations of parade regulations from the current $50 to a minimum of $1,000 per violation; double fines for protesters accused of resisting or obstructing police; restrict to two hours the time period for permitted demonstrations; restrict gatherings at public parks and beaches; and allow Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to "deputize law enforcement personnel" and forge agreements with state, federal and local law enforcement agencies.
Or remember the many instances over the past months in which peaceful Occupy protesters were harassed, beaten, pepper-sprayed and summarily arrested from coast to coast--for even attempting to exercise their right to speak out against the system.

Far from being the exception, this is how the state operates in a bourgeois democracy. Violence and coercion are used when necessary, and stated principles of democracy are continuously undermined, regardless of which party is in charge.

We're encouraged to believe that the state stands above society as an impartial arbiter. But at heart, the state in a capitalist society protects those at the top--the 1 percent whose wealth dominates and directs the way the state is run.
The war on our rights at home is connected to U.S. wars abroad--and the pursuit of U.S. imperial interests around the globe.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle will claim to support and uphold the Constitution, but as soon as ordinary people begin to exercise our constitutional rights and agitate for change in a way that might actually impact the system, our "rights" become expendable.

That's why Obama's decision to sign the NDAA into law was not surprising in the end. But it's important in the coming months for activists to hold Obama accountable for his actions.

As Jonathan Turley rightly points out [8], beyond Obama's specific shredding of civil liberties, there is a broader danger--that those who might otherwise speak out against such measures will keep quiet because the Republicans, on the surface, seem so much more awful:

[P]erhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what [Obama] has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first Black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush...In time, the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties.
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Published by the International Socialist Organization.
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [9] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

[1] http://socialistworker.org/department/Opinion/Editorials
[2] http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/02/final-curtain-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-of-citizens-into-law-as-final-act-of-2011/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html
[4] http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/
[5] http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/more-rubble-from-the-military-detention-cave-in/
[6] http://www.thenation.com/article/165334/unlawful-detention-us-soil
[7] http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/22/picking-up-where-bush-left
[8] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/29/opinion/la-oe-turley-civil-liberties-20110929
[9] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Negativity in Hegel and Freud

2012-01-04T17:13:00.001-08:00

Good Interview from 2004

2012-01-04T06:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

I. WHY STALINISM WAS MORE
PERVERSE THAN NAZISM

THE BELIEVER: You have raised many eyebrows with your controversial rethinking of today’s accepted positions in philosophy. For example, you have said that Stalinism is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust. Can you describe your interest in Stalin here and why you think that his regime is a greater problem philosophically than Nazism?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on, ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot be rationalized philosophically here.

Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?

SŽ: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, “You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.

SŽ: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of Marxism in the twentieth century—critical theory of the Frankfurt school—obsessed over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism. Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

BLVR: Any conclusions?

SŽ: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

II: THE END OF LIBERAL MODESTY

BLVR: So you obviously strongly disagree with this liberal reading of the ideology behind World War II. This leads me to think about how in your work you are known to criticize liberalism, as it is manifested in political correctness, pragmatism, American academia, etc. So would this be your criticism of this way of thinking?

SŽ: First of all, I don’t have any big problems with liberalism. Originally, liberalism was quite a noble project if one looks at how it emerged. Today it is a quite fashionable criticism, with feminists, anti-Eurocentric thinkers, etc., to dismiss liberalism in principle for preaching the equality of all people, but in reality privileging the white males of certain property, addressing automatic limitations.

The next usual accusation is that liberalism is ultimately founded in what the American moral-majority religious Right likes to call secular humanism: the idea is that there is no Supreme Being or mystery in the universe. Their criticism is that this idea—that the ultimate prospect of humankind is to take over as master of his own destiny—is man’s arrogance, criticizing that it always misfires and so on.

First, I don’t think it is as simple as that, for two reasons. It is a historic fact that at the beginning, the idea of human rights and all of those liberal notions, effectively in a coded way implied the exclusion of certain people. Nonetheless, in this tension between appearance and reality (appearance: everyone has human rights; reality: many, through an implicit set of sub-rules, are excluded), a certain tension is set in motion where you cannot simply say that appearance is just a mask of the reality of oppression. Appearance acquired a social emancipatory power of its own. For example, of course at the beginning, women were excluded, but then very early on, women said, “Sorry, why not also us?” Then blacks said, “Why not us?” And workers, and so on. My point being that all of these groups that criticize liberalism emerged out of these early bourgeois liberal traditions. It set certain rules—this tradition of universality of human rights and so on—and in this way it opened up the space. So that is the first thing to say for liberalism.

BLVR: So even though liberalism was started by a limited few, built inside of it is the ability for all others to use it to their benefit?

SŽ: Yes. The second thing to say for liberalism is that originally it was not an arrogant attitude, but it was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War. In the seventeenth century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience, the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space where these inherently different commitments can be practiced. Again, I don’t see anything inherently bad in this project.

BLVR: Neither do I. But last year I attended a lecture you gave in which you vehemently attacked liberalism. Can you help clarify this for me?

SŽ: The problem that I find today, with liberalism, not economic liberalism, but radical human-rights liberalism, is the philosophical approach. The saddest thing to happen in the last thirty years is the loss of the belief that we had in communism, and even in the social-democratic welfare states of the West, the accepted fact that the fate of humanity is not simply an anonymous fate. This belief that some blind fate does not control us, that it is possible, through human collective action, to steer development, is gone. I think what happened in recent years is that this logic of blind fate returned. Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded? A certain type of question, and it needn’t be put in the old-fashioned Marxist way as class struggle, but the general anticapitalist question, basically has disappeared.

BLVR: Generally speaking, yes. But I disagree, as would I think a number of others, that everyone accepts global capitalism. What about the antiglobalism movements that have been taking place all over the world in the last decade? Seattle, Genoa, etc. What do you think of these groups?

SŽ: Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way, reemerging. But the idea is that the fundamental conflicting areas are no longer those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more horizontal differences between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance; the problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on. So then the basic problem becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad, of course we should fight for this, but I don’t think that this horizon—within which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating difference—is the fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics (minority politics, gay rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the basically antagonistic character of society. This radical questioning has simply disappeared.

For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time to time, she pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but it’s totally abstract, what it’s basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic.

But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

III: ORGANIC FOOD, NEW-AGE
SPIRITUALITY, AND NEW CARS

BLVR: OK, so you think that these antiglobalist movements aren’t asking the right questions and this can be really dangerous. I can see what you’re saying. This reminds me of the example that you gave in On Belief about the health-food market. How purchasing organic food, though seemingly good in intention, can really be a bad thing because of how it is appropriated. Can you explain what you meant by that?

SŽ: More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and in this sense, I think that it’s even more interesting to see how trends which were originally meant to be subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption. Ecological food, organic food, green products, and so on—this is one of the key niche markets today. Let’s take a typical guy who buys organic food: he doesn’t really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance. It’s the same way as if you have stonewashed jeans, you don’t really buy it for the jeans, but you buy it to project a certain image of your social identity. So again, you are not buying a product, you are buying a certain social status, ideology, and so on.

BLVR: Does this also include your model of “Western Buddhism” as new-age philosophy being a product that can be purchased in capitalism (true Buddhism not being able to exist outside of the East)?

SŽ: Yes, you know why? Because this basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential, essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

BLVR: OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

IV: THE DANGERS OF EASTERN
SPIRITUALITY IN THE WEST AND
THE REVOLUTION OF ST. PAUL’S
CHRISTIANITY, ALL THROUGH
THE EYES OF AN ATHEIST.

BLVR: Do you believe in God?

SŽ: No, I am a complete atheist.

BLVR: Your book The Puppet and the Dwarf deals with St. Paul. In fact, it celebrates St. Paul’s Christianity in contrast to other forms of spirituality, i.e. gnosticism, new-age spiritualities, etc. So why would an atheist defend Christianity?

SŽ: Today, spirituality is fashionable. Either some pagan spirituality of tolerance, feminine principle, holistic approach against phallocentric Western imperialist logic or, within the Western tradition, we have a certain kind of rehabilitation of Judaism, respect for otherness, and so on. Or you are allowed to do Christianity, but you must do a couple of things which are permitted. One is to be for these repressed traditions, the early Gnostic gospels or some mystical sects where a different nonhegemonic/patriarchal line was discernible. Or you return to the original Christ, which is against St. Paul. The idea is that St. Paul was really bad, he changed Christianity into this patriarchal state, but Jesus, himself, was something different.

What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family, worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way, taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established order is balanced.

But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism.

BLVR: That is a really interesting point. I’m not religious at all, but when it comes to religions, I’ve always really distrusted new-age spiritualities.

SŽ: I agree. So let’s at least be clear of where in the West this fascination with Eastern spirituality originated. Of course when I advocate Christian legacy, I make it very clear that this legacy today is not alive in the Catholic or any Christian Church. Here I am kind of a vulgar Stalinist; churches should either be destroyed or turned into cultural homes or museums for religious horrors [laughs]. No no no, it’s not that, but nonetheless, a certain logic of radical emancipation exploded there. And all original emancipatory movements stopped there. This should be admitted. So the point is not to return to the Church, to rehabilitate Christianity, but to keep this certain revolutionary logic alive. I mean this is the good news that the Gospel means: you can do it, take the risk.

V: IDENTIFICATION WITH FICTIONAL
MOVIES, WITH MURDERS

BLVR: So then is your problem with the rest of Christianity the ideology of institutionalized religion?

SŽ: This is not ideology. Ideology for me is a very specific term. Ideology, in a classical Marxist way, has nothing to do with what we usually take as an ideological project. The project of radically changing social orders, this is not, per se, ideology. The most conformist, modest empirical attitude can be ideology. Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah. I claim that the minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology. Every ideology does this. Which is why, the worst ideology today is post-ideology, where they claim we are entering a new pragmatic era, negotiations, plural interests, no longer time for big ideological projects.

BLVR: So even post-ideology is ideological?

SŽ: For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Let’s say that you are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping around with other men. And let’s say that you are totally right, she is cheating. Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true or not true, but why you invest so much in it—what needs does it fulfill? It’s the same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have capitalism without individualism, without tensions, capitalism which would magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between productive capital and labor.

BLVR: So there is no escaping ideology? We are always participating in it?

SŽ: I would say that this just brings about a certain tendency that was here all the time. Like if I go to a more general phenomenon like reality TV, the lesson of it is much more ambiguous, because the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are really doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed. The true reality TV would be to plant cameras and really shoot people unaware of their being watched.

BLVR: That exists already.

SŽ: I wonder if they would be able to go beyond that level, because it’s basically the same as snuff movies. I claim that the way we identify with fictional movies, with murders, is not that we identify it, no: the awareness that it’s not true is part of our identification. Even when we cry and so on. Because, imagine watching a detective story, and someone is shot. If you were to learn that he was really shot, it would ruin your identification with the story. There was this Polish movie from the mid-sixties, a historical spectacle about a pharaoh that has a scene where they sacrifice a horse. And the way that it is shot, they throw lances at the horse, and you can see bleeding. It’s obvious that they are really killing the horse. And it was a dramatic point, people in Poland protested, people in the West didn’t want to see the movie. So you see how much more refined identification in the movie is.

BLVR: We have a strong identification with fiction.

SŽ: My point is this: the problem is that of acting. I think that there is only one radical conclusion here, with reality soaps, that we are seeing people acting themselves. And the conclusion that I would draw is that it is not so much that it is fake, but that in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona.

VI: NOSTALGIA AND
IRRATIONAL POWER

BLVR: What do you think of the fact that California has an actor for governor?

SŽ: What I would like to avoid here is precisely this cheap conservative cultural criticism that this shows the decadence of our times. As if at some point politicians were substantially better—I don’t believe that. The fact that Bush is president is worse for me, because he is not even a good actor, and probably not much more intelligent. You never know what will happen. Schwarzenegger has advisors around him and they may give him good advice. I never quite agreed with the simple dismissal that there is no substance; when was there substance in politicians? The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on. A politician is more of…

BLVR: An actor that mediates?

SŽ: Yes, there is a dimension of identification of a master figure and so on. And for all that, it doesn’t matter if an actor does it. The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors. But even this I am tempted not to simply dismiss as a bad phenomenon. Here I agree with Habermas, who made a very intelligent remark. It’s not so much that times are worse today, but that imperceptibly our standards are higher. For example, we don’t have feminism today because women are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

For example, recently I read a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with David Mamet’s Oleanna, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically, it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his power in all of its irrationality.

BLVR: That’s like your example of the employee and the boss. You said that when the boss claims to be buddies with the employee, he is actually exploiting the employee more, in that he is covering up all of his power, though in actuality, it still exists.

SŽ: Yes, these are the problems for me. The fact that something appears as irrational unjustified power, it’s not simply that it’s horrible authority. It is precisely when authority declines and you have the first steps towards a more equal tolerant attitude. So again, my lesson here is kind of a pessimistic one, but not pessimistic in the sense that nothing can be done. Pessimistic in the sense that maybe the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed. Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

At this level, I quite liked a modest movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The guy who doesn’t accept that he is in prison and dreams to get out, when he is let out, he hangs himself. And the guys who accept that they are really there, they are the ones who can really break out. So there are alternatives and in alternatives, a certain sense of false opening, in that it’s not necessarily so bad, maybe luck is around the corner, we can change things; those are the ideal ideological tools to keep you enslaved. The system functions through the idea that it can be changed at any point. So maybe the first step is to see that it can’t be changed, that it’s pretty closed.

VII: LACAN AND
FASHION CATALOGUES

BLVR: I would like to go back to the problem of people acting as personas of themselves. This sounds very Lacanian, in the sense that we do not experience the world directly, but by interpretation. The real is itself, mediated (in this case through acting as a persona). Could you describe for me your basic insight into Lacan’s work and what you think is his idea of philosophy?

SŽ: Lacan was a French psychoanalytic theorist, who despised philosophy officially. For Lacan, the discourse of philosophy is of a complete worldview which fills in all of the gaps and cracks. And Lacan’s idea is that precisely what we learn in psychoanalysis is how cracks and inconsistencies are constitutive of our lives. So officially he was against philosophy, but the paradox is that Lacan was constantly in dialogue with philosophy. In his work, there are even more references to Plato and Hegel than to Freud himself.

BLVR: So even though Lacan didn’t want to define the world concretely, he was a kind of philosopher himself?

SŽ: Obviously, Lacan was playing philosophy against itself. The idea being very simply that in our experience of the reality of the world, we always stumble upon some fundamental crack, incompleteness. What appears as an obstacle, the fact that we cannot ever really know things, is for Lacan itself a positive condition of meaning. There is a kernel of philosophy here, what philosophers call ontological difference; this is this experience of a rupture as a fundamental constituent of our lives. So to cut a long story short, for Lacan (and I try to further develop this idea, based on his insight), to properly grasp what Freud was aiming at with the death drive (the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy), is to read it against the background of negativity, a gap as fundamental to human subjectivity, so in other words to philosophize psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this way is no longer just a psychiatric science which develops a theory of how we can cure certain diseases; it’s kind of a mental and philosophical theory of the utmost radical dimensions of human beings.

BLVR: So Lacan was reading Freud’s death drive, the desire to self-destruct, as a good thing, philosophically speaking. Incompleteness and cracks, themselves being the place where difference is created.

SŽ: Exactly.

BLVR: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?

SŽ: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics have attacked me, saying how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system.

Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants

2012-01-02T17:10:00.001-08:00

How Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill
Naomi Wolf

http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

I never thought I would have to write this: but—incredibly—Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention — but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one’s lawyer’s calls are monitored, witnesses for one’s defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

They may have supported this bill because—although it’s hard to believe—they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that ‘at most’, low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.

Our leaders appear to be supporting this bill thinking that they will always be what they are now, in the fading light of a once-great democracy — those civilian leaders who safely and securely sit in freedom and DIRECT the military. In inhabiting this bubble, which their own actions are about to destroy, they are cocooned by an arrogance of power, placing their own security in jeopardy by their own hands, and ignoring history and its inevitable laws. The moment this bill becomes law, though Congress is accustomed, in a weak democracy, to being the ones who direct and control the military, the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else — as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.

Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be ‘they’ who are targeted for arrest and military detention: but sadly, Parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains to power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process. There is no exception to this rule. Just as I traveled the country four years ago warning against the introduction of torture and secret prisons – and confidently offering a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could name a nation that allowed torture of the ‘other’ that did not eventually turn this abuse on its own citizens — (confident because I knew there was no such place) — so today I warn that one cannot name a nation that gave the military the power to make civilian arrests and hold citizens in military detention, that did not almost at once turn that power almost against members of that nation’s own political ruling class. This makes sense — the obverse sense of a democracy, in which power protects you; political power endangers you in a militarized police state: the more powerful a political leader is, the more can be gained in a militarized police state by pressuring, threatening or even arresting him or her.

Mussolini, who created the modern template for fascism, was a duly elected official when he started to direct paramilitary forces against Italian citizens: yes, he sent the Blackshirts to beat up journalists, editors, and union leaders; but where did these militarized groups appear most dramatically and terrifyingly, snapping at last the fragile hold of Italian democracy? In the halls of the Italian Parliament. Whom did they physically attack and intimidate? Mussolini’s former colleagues in Parliament — as they sat, just as our Congress is doing, peacefully deliberating and debating the laws. Whom did Hitler’s Brownshirts arrest in the first wave of mass arrests in 1933? Yes, journalists, union leaders and editors; but they also targeted local and regional political leaders and dragged them off to secret prisons and to torture that the rest of society had turned a blind eye to when it had been directed at the ‘other.’ Who was most at risk from assassination or arrest and torture, after show trials, in Stalin’s Russia? Yes, journalists, editors and dissidents: but also physically endangered, and often arrested by militarized police and tortured or worse, were senior members of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor.

Is this intimidation and arrest by the military a vestige of the past? Hardly. We forget in America that all over the world there are militarized societies in which shells of democracy are propped up — in which Parliament meets regularly and elections are held, but the generals are really in charge, just as the Egyptian military is proposing with upcoming elections and the Constitution itself. That is exactly what will take place if Congress gives the power of arrest and detention to the military: and in those societies if a given political leader does not please the generals, he or she is in physical danger or subjected to military arrest. Whom did John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, say he was directed to intimidate and threaten when he worked as a ‘jackal’, putting pressure on the leadership in authoritarian countries? Latin American parliamentarians who were in the position to decide the laws that affected the well-being of his corporate clients. Who is under house arrest by the military in Myanmar? The political leader of the opposition to the military junta. Malalai Joya is an Afghani parliamentarian who has run afoul of the military and has to sleep in a different venue every night — for her own safety. An on, and on, in police states — that is, countries with military detention of civilians — that America is about to join.

US Congresspeople and Senators may think that their power protects them from the treacherous wording of Amendments 1031 and 1032: but their arrogance is leading them to a blindness that is suicidal. The moment they sign this NDAA into law, history shows that they themselves and their staff are the most physically endangered by it. They will immediately become, not the masters of the great might of the United States military, but its subjects and even, if history is any guide — and every single outcome of ramping up police state powers, unfortunately, that I have warned for years that history points to, has come to pass — sadly but inevitably, its very first targets.
[...]

Video

2012-01-02T11:06:00.001-08:00

Call to Protest: Slavoj Žižek urges renewed resistance | Video ...
Slavoj Žižek is regarded as one of the ideological pioneers of the Occupy movement, but he says its demands don't go far enough. Žižek sees no future for ...
mediacenter.dw-world.de/english/video/#!/355883/...

‘Reflections on Islamic Art’: A new way to talk about Islam, and art

2012-01-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

M. Lynx Qualey
Mon, 02/01/2012 - 10:26

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/579516

“Reflections on Islamic Art,” edited by Ahdaf Soueif, appears at a time when Islamic art is surging back into fashion.

Soueif’s collection, published in November 2011, pairs art from Doha’s monumental Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) with creative writing from twenty-seven internationally acclaimed authors.

The MIA is a recent contribution to the world of Islamic art, having opened its doors in 2008. But it is not the newest addition: In November 2011, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new permanent installation, the awkwardly but inclusively titled, “Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.”

To coincide with its re-vamped collection of Islamic art, the Met also issued a new book of images and essays: “Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

The two publications — “Masterpieces” and “Reflections” — come at roughly the same time, both inspired by work in major museums. But the two projects are markedly different. “Masterpieces” is a coffee-table book, with beautiful images and “informative essays” about the history of Islamic art. Critic Maymanah Farhat, who reviewed the Met’s new installation for Jadaliyya, writes that the installation itself uses the old language of Orientalism, taking “great care to describe the ‘lavish,’ ‘sumptuous,’ and ‘superb’ qualities of these objects.”

The project of “Reflections,” on the other hand, is to shake off this language. The collection won’t give readers a crash course in Islamic art history. But it does offer poems, stories and essays that re-invigorate our understanding of Islamic art, Islam and art.

In her introduction, Soueif explains the idea behind “Reflections” through the email she sent to potential contributors: “‘The Museum,’ I wrote, ‘lends itself particularly well to the idea of this book — that there will be one piece that speaks to you, or a group of pieces that sets of a train of thought/feeling — and that out of this will come a response in words or images…Does this appeal?’”

For the project, Soueif chose a diverse range of excellent writers and thinkers, including art historian Oliver Watson, mathematician Marcus de Sautoy, scientist Jameel al-Khalili, filmmaker Sherin Neshat, philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Egyptian novelists Youssef Rakha and Radwa Ashour.

Each was allowed the freedom to engage with the museum in a way meaningful to them. Some had particular things they were looking for: Youssef Rakha wanted to see his beloved Sultan’s Seal, which is reflected in his latest novel of the same name; Radwa Ashour was looking for a penbox from Granada. Others found new-old things: Lebanese novelist Jabbour al-Douaihy discovered a portrait of the Saint Jerome that set off a series of childhood memories.

The collection ranges widely. But throughout, authors return to the idea of re-inventing the narratives of art and Islamic empire. Some authors, like Pankaj Mishra and Tash Aw, take a new look at Islam’s successes. Mishra comments on Islam’s “astonishing flexibility, its ability to adapt to new conditions” and the Malaysian Aw remarks on Islam’s multiculturalism: “No one told us that we were, in fact, part of a grand narrative of inclusiveness.”

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek goes farther still, re-writing a narrative of Islam as the “third way.” He writes: “Insofar as we tend to oppose East and West as fate and freedom, Islam stands for a third position which undermines this binary opposition — neither subordination to blind fate nor freedom to do what one wants, both of which presuppose and abstract external opposition between the two terms, but a deeper freedom: to alter or to choose our fate.”

Zizek also tries to re-invigorate our idea of art, reminding readers that these museum pieces were once part of daily life. Poet James Fenton, in his essay “A
Great Carpet Fragment and a Great Carpet,” also addresses the relationship between life and art, noting that the proper way to view a great carpet is to stand on it.

Not all the essays are equally good. Palestinian writer Suad Amiry’s is a surprising disappointment. But most of the authors took their charge seriously, and were inspired not just to write beautiful creative work, but to shake off old ways of talking about Islam and art and to invent new ones.

As part of his essay, Egyptian poet and novelist Youssef Rakha dreams a conversation with Abdulhamit II in which the two share a handshake and a cigarette. Rakha examines the shorthand with which contemporary Islam has been identified — “beard, burqa, and bomb” — and goes on to imagine another path. He rejects the Anglo-European path of “integration into the rat-race of smoke-free capitalism” and notes that the way forward might just be through Islamic art.

He writes: “Reason, science, and art are perfectly valid aspects of the Muslim legacy, after all.”

Where Were the Wall Street 'Perp Walks' in 2011?

2012-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

By Danny Schechter, Al Jazeera
01 January 12
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112258031251868.html

As every media critic learns, the worst sin of our press is not its blatant biases, or crimes of commission, but rather the pervasive patterns of omission; what's left out!

Already, with two weeks to go, the Associated Press has crossed the finish line with the top choice of the newspapers it serves. Perhaps in the outdated spirit of Mark Twain's famous dictum that: "There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe - only two - the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press on earth", their pick for story of the year is the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The AP can't bring itself to label it for what it was - a state-sponsored assassination.

As ever, the mainstream/lamestream - call it what you will - media tails after people in power and promotes/validates their great achievements, even when it was an extra-judicial murder in the dead of night.
Institutional power is their main beat and they beat it to death with every deadline and every headline.

There is no utterance by any political hack - like most of the GOP presidential menagerie - that goes unreported.

On the progressive side of the street, 2011 was 'All Occupy All The Time', with the growing movement against economic inequality getting the most glowing attention.

I am certainly in this camp even if the encampments are mostly gone, with a TV documentary, several radio shows, countless articles and blogs, and now, a book collecting all my output, called, what else, but OCCUPY?

And yet, the story we have yet to see is the one that will ultimately define this era of avarice and insult in a year of media obsession in the US with the Kardashian wedding and break-up, the Michael Jackson trial, and the daily scandal that is there to titillate and drive up ratings.

It has yet to happen and most media outlets are not focussing on why. I am referring to the lack of any real investigation of Wall Street crimes, and the indictments of wrongdoers. I am talking about "perp walks" by guilty Wall Street CEOs on their way to joining Bernie Madoff in some institute of incarceration.

Lack of Investigative Oversight
This is not a call for revenge, but for justice. The reason: the barely exposed chain of criminality that started in some salon of securitisation and then rippled across the world, bringing down countries and economies. It has its origins in Wall Street, where three industries colluded as a cabal to sell fraudulent subprime loans and then transfer fees and foreclosures from poor and middle class Americans to themselves.

Where is the examination of the pillars of our "FIRE" economy - Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. They became the interconnected cogs in a leverage machine to enrich themselves while plundering the rest of us.

So far, this story affecting so many millions has not really crashed through in the 1 per cent media machine with a few exceptions here and there.

If you want to find out about this story of the year and years past, in all of its disgusting detail, you can't just trust major media. You have to read Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, a music magazine, or blogs like Mandelman on Ml-implode.com, Naked Capitalism, Credit Writedowns, ZeroHedge, ProPublica, or Amped Status.com, to cite a few.

TV show host Dylan Ratigan has been a lonely voice on MSNBC while academics like former bank regulator William Black and former Bank economist Michael Hudson speak out frequently on the criminal environment that Wall Street has wrought in alternative outlets.

Journalists like Robert Scheer, Greg Palast and Chris Hedges write regularly on issues that from time to time make it into the columns of New York writers like Paul Krugman, Getrchen Morgensen, Frank Norris and James Stewart. All these opinion pieces rarely lead to follow-ups in the news section.

Overseas, the Telegraph in London has made this a beat as has Max Keiser's programmes on RT and Press TV. There have been some Al Jazeera docs, but business channels like CNBC prefer to focus on greed by colourful bad guys, not the more boring but ultimately criminal practices by banks.

Most of our media is mesmerised by the antics of individuals, not the impact of institutions, Most media outlets are parochial, unwilling to see the economy as globalised force, with the US playing a major role.

'Too Big to Question'
Just as many outlets did not warn us about the coming market meltdown, most are not warning us today about what will happen if the depression we are already sinking into deepens.

The military is making contingency plans as things get worse; reports the Telegraph, "The military planning work has come to light after The Daily Telegraph disclosed last month that British embassies in the eurozone have been told to prepare emergency plans for the demise of the euro and the possible civil disorder that could follow."

This could be one reason for the passage of the new NDAA defence authorisation bill that provides for rounding up dissidents branded as terrorists while suspending legal protections.

Already, a European economic think-tank called LEAP, with a history of credible projections, warns soberly, "Already insolvent (the US) will become ungovernable bringing about, for Americans and those who depend on the United States, violent and destructive economic, financial, monetary, geopolitical and social shocks."

Does anyone really believe that our political leaders in both parties know what to do? Along with the Fed, they have been pumping trillions into the economy to mostly no avail. The promised recovery has yet to show its head.

The trends forecaster, Gerard Calente, is more despairing than most prognosticators, even predicting the possibility of a revolution.

He saves his fiercest words for "media morons" who avoid the stories that matter most, noting:

"And the bigger they got, the more untouchable they became. TV Money Honeys, fast-talking finance finaglers, Nightly News anchors, Sunday Morning Beltway Blowhards, and Talk Show Tough Guys genuflected, scraped, kissed up and bowed down before those magnificent men in their money machines.

When these kings, queens and aristocrats of 21st-century commerce spoke, their ex cathedra judgments went unquestioned. Thus, when they warned that if the "too big to fail" were allowed to fail the world financial system would collapse, their conclusions went unchallenged. No evidence was provided, no proof was needed, and no explanation was tendered. Harvard, Princeton, Yale ... the White Shoe Boyz had spoken. They who invented the "too big to fail" were "too big to question."

What Matters Most Is Covered Least
So here we are once again at year's end debating our picks for the most important news stories of the year, and peering into a future that most of us don't want to see, as a narrow view stifles our politics and vision becomes a word reserved for eyeglass ads.

What matters most is covered least. The financial industry is likely to expose itself and bring itself down before the media does the job it should be doing this by demanding reform consistently.

I may have been dissecting news too long because I think I may have written many of these words before. In the year ahead, I am going to try to keep writing about the resource rich - even as I become more resource "challenged" while talking about what's not in the news but should be.

I will be doing my bit by reviving a Media Channel as Mediachannel1.org with our colleagues at OpEdNews.com and invite readers to remember and revitalise the words of my radio colleague, San Francisco's, "Scoop" Nisker, who ended his newscasts with these words:

"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs for Newsdissector.com. His latest book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street. For information and to share your comments, write: dissector@mediachannel.org

Keynes Was Right (says Krugman)

2011-12-30T09:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

They should have known better even at the time: the alleged historical examples of “expansionary austerity” they used to make their case had already been thoroughly debunked. And there was also the embarrassing fact that many on the right had prematurely declared Ireland a success story, demonstrating the virtues of spending cuts, in mid-2010, only to see the Irish slump deepen and whatever confidence investors might have felt evaporate.

Amazingly, by the way, it happened all over again this year. There were widespread proclamations that Ireland had turned the corner, proving that austerity works — and then the numbers came in, and they were as dismal as before.

Yet the insistence on immediate spending cuts continued to dominate the political landscape, with malign effects on the U.S. economy. True, there weren’t major new austerity measures at the federal level, but there was a lot of “passive” austerity as the Obama stimulus faded out and cash-strapped state and local governments continued to cut.

Now, you could argue that Greece and Ireland had no choice about imposing austerity, or, at any rate, no choices other than defaulting on their debts and leaving the euro. But another lesson of 2011 was that America did and does have a choice; Washington may be obsessed with the deficit, but financial markets are, if anything, signaling that we should borrow more.

Again, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.
The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity — and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago.