Easy intro to Fredric Jameson…

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/modules/jamesonideology.html

FREDRIC JAMESON builds on the work of previous theorists in his understanding of ideology. He is particularly influenced by Jacques Lacan and those post-Marxist theorists who have made use of Lacan's distinction between reality and "the Real" in order to understand ideology (Louis Althusser, Chantalle Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau). (See the Lacan module on the structure of the psyche.) At one point, Jameson quotes Althusser's Lacanian definition of ideology: "the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence" (Postmodernism 51). Those "Real conditions of existence" remain, by definition, outside of language. History therefore functions for Jameson as an "absent cause," insofar as, in its totality, it remains inexpressible; however, it nonetheless does exist as that which drives real antagonisms in the present (for example, between social classes). We may not be able to get out of ideological contradiction altogether; however, Jameson asserts the importance of attempting, nonetheless, to acknowledge the real antagonisms that are, in fact, driving our fantasy constructions.

Jameson also makes it clear that there is not one ideological dominant in any period. In this, Jameson follows Raymond Williams' useful distinctions among "residual" ideological formations (ideologies that have been mostly superceded but still circulate in various ways); "emergent" ideological formations (new ideologies that are in the process of establishing their influence); and "dominant" ideological formations (those ideologies supported by what Louis Althusser terms "ideological state apparatuses"; e.g. schools, government, the police, and the military). Jameson insists on the value of such a model because "If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable" (Postmodernism 6).

By determining the dominant of our age in his book, Postmodernism, Jameson hopes to provide his reader with a "cognitive map" of the present, which then can make possible effective and beneficial political change. The problem with our current postmodern age, according to Jameson, is that "the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity" (Postmodernism 49). Any effort to contest dominant ideology threatens to be reabsorbed by capital, so that "even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it" (Postmodernism 49). Given such a situation, Jameson argues that what is needed is a "cognitive map" of the present, one that reinjects an understanding of the present's real historicity. Jameson compares the situation of the individual in postmodern late capitalist society to the experience of being in a postmodern urban landscape: "In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples" (Postmodernism 49). The notion of a "cognitive map" enables "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (Postmodernism 51). Jameson expands this concept of cognitive mapping to ideological critique, suggesting that his task is to make sense of our place in the global system: "The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale" (Postmodernism 54).

One "cognitive map" Jameson for example turns to is Algirdas Greimas' semiotic square, which he calls "a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself, that is, as a mechanism, which, while seeming to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions, remains in fact locked into some initial aporia or double bind that it cannot transform from the inside by its own means" ("Foreword" xv). Using Greimas' semiotic square, Jameson seeks to find the dominant ideological contradictions of a given text or cultural work. (For more on the semiotic square, see the Greimas module on the semiotic square.)

[...]

USA continues move toward Authoritarian State-Run Capitalism

U.S. Admits Surveillance Violated Constitution At Least Once

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/surveillance-spirit-law/

by Spencer Ackerman

The head of the U.S. government’s vast spying apparatus has conceded that recent surveillance efforts on at least one occasion violated the Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.

The admission comes in a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassifying statements that a top U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to call attention to the government’s 2008 expansion of its key surveillance law.

“On at least one occasion,” the intelligence shop has approved Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to say, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that “minimization procedures” used by the government while it was collecting intelligence were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” Minimization refers to how long the government may retain the surveillance data it collects.  The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against unreasonable searches.

Wyden does not specify how extensive this “unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how many Americans were affected by it.

In the letter, acquired by Danger Room (.pdf), Wyden asserts a serious federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That section — known as Section 702 and passed in 2008 — sought to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance efforts. The 2008 law permitted intelligence officials to conduct surveillance on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least one party on a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Government officials conducting such surveillance no longer have to acquire a warrant from the so-called FISA Court specifying the name of an individual under surveillance. And only a “significant purpose” of the surveillance has to be the acquisition of “foreign intelligence,” a weaker standard than before 2008.

Wyden says that the government’s use of the expanded surveillance authorities “has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law” — a conclusion that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence does not endorse. 

The office does not challenge the statement about the FISA Court on at least one occasion finding the surveillance to conflict with the Fourth Amendment. Danger Room initially misunderstood the letter to mean that its author, top intelligence official Kathleen Turner, made the statements she was merely informing Wyden he could to issue publicly without revealing classified information.

But this is a far cry from how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper typically describes the new FISA law. When the law was up for reauthorization this spring, Clapper wrote to congressional leaders to say its renewal was his “top priority in Congress,” (.pdf) as the law “allows the Intelligence Community to collect vital information about international terrorists and other important targets overseas while providing robust protection for the civil liberties and privacy of Americans.”

Suspicions about abuse of the government’s new surveillance powers are almost as old as the 2008 expansion of the law. In 2009, citing anonymous sources, the New York Times reported that “the N.S.A. had been engaged in ‘overcollection’ of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic,” if unintentional. The Justice Department told the Times that it had already resolved the problem.

But as the American Civil Liberties Union noted in a May letter to lawmakers, “There is little in the public record about how the government implements” the expanded law. An ACLU Freedom of Information Act request discovered that the Justice Department and intelligence bureaucracy refer to “compliance incidents” (.pdf) in their internal accounting of the new surveillance — which seemed to suggest difficulty staying within the broadened boundaries of the law. (Full disclosure: My wife works for the ACLU.)

Wyden has been a lonely congressional voice against renewing the government’s broadened surveillance powers. Last month, he quietly used a parliamentary maneuver to stall the renewal after it passed a key Senate committee.

Wyden’s argument was that the government had not fully disclosed the extent of its new surveillance powers. 

It argued to Wyden that it is “not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the [FISA Amendments Act].” Separately, the National Security Agency insisted that it would violate Americans’ privacy even to tally up how many Americans it had spied upon under the new law.

[...]

Democracy is the Enemy: here's one reason

Sheldon Adelson gave half of June donations to pro-Romney super PAC

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/casino-magnate-sheldon-adelson-gave-half-june-donations-210441246.html

by Chris Moody

Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney's campaign for president, raised about $20 million in June, more than three times the amount pulled in by the main super PAC behind President Barack Obama's re-election bid.

Just under half of the donations came from Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, who each donated $5 million apiece to the effort.

The group also received gifts of $1 million or more from a handful of sources, including Boston-based private equity leader John W. Childs, Texas-based real estate investor Harlan Crow and businessman Bill Koch. 

Foster Friess, who supported former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's Republican primary bid, gave $200,000.

So far this calendar year, Restore Our Future has raised $52 million and has $23 million left in cash on hand, according to financial disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission Friday. The June haul is a significant boost from May, when the group raised $4.9 million.

Priorities USA Action, which supports Obama, took in $6.1 million in the same month.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene from WelcomeAnthropocene on Vimeo.

We Need Centralization without Totalitarianism: here’s one reason

http://climatepolitics.wordpress.com/

by Johannes Urpelainen, Ph,D.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Expertise and Credibility in Climate Change,” reports the results of an analysis of the expertise of climate scientists. The results are not particularly surprising:

1) Among scholars who publish regularly on climate, an overwhelming majority accept anthropogenic global warming.

2) Most of the scholars who contest anthropogenic global warming have a less credible scientific record than those who accept.

While this should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on climate science, I doubt it will convince the skeptical public. 

The reason is that in addition to the most obvious interpretation of these facts — scientific expertise leads individual scholars to accept the strong evidence for climate change — alternative "theories" may resonate with skeptics:

1) Perhaps skeptics are systematically not allowed to publish in journals, so that they seem less experienced than other scholars?

2) Perhaps the public pressure to accept anthropogenic global warming is particularly heavy among top scientists?

3) Perhaps the authors of the study are themselves supporters of anthropogenic global warming, and thus use data selectively to make their case?

This brings us to the deeper problem with climate science and the media: it does not matter much how credible the evidence for climate change is, as long as influential special interests continue to benefit  from  contesting it. Almost any fact regarding the credibility of climate science can be explained away using a conspiracy theory, and individuals who are already inclined towards rejecting science are probably also inclined towards accepting such conspiracy theories. Thus, deeper institutional changes may be necessary to improve the public understanding of climate science.

Adding Iron to Ocean Would Backfire, Study Suggests

By Charles Q. Choi

http://www.livescience.com/11112-adding-iron-ocean-backfire-algae-study-suggests.html

Fertilizing the oceans with iron — a tactic that "geoengineers" have proposed to fight global warming — could inadvertently spur the growth of toxic microbes, warn scientists who analyzed water samples from past iron-fertilization experiments.

Toxin-producing algae that thrive on iron and can contaminate marine life are more widespread than suspected, the researchers said.  The finding could impact proposed iron-fertilization projects.

"This work definitely reveals a wrinkle in those plans," said researcher Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California.  "It is much easier to break an ecosystem than it is to fix one."

To combat rising levels of carbon dioxide — a "greenhouse gas" that traps heat from the sun — some researchers have suggested seeding the oceans with iron. That, they say, would help spur the growth of the marine plants known as phytoplankton that naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air. [Should We Geoengineer Earth's Climate?]

However, recent findings suggest that even a massive phytoplankton bloom would result in only a modest intake of carbon dioxide. Now Coale and fellow researcher Mary Silver find that iron-fertilization projects could also trigger rapid growth of harmful algae.

"Large areas of the ocean have very little iron in them — that's why the waters there are so clear and blue, because these plants can't live there to cloud the waters," said  Silver, a biological oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's the same as you see with plants in a garden — if they don't have enough nitrogen and phosphorus, they can't grow. If these ocean plants don't have any iron, they can't grow."

Algae known as Pseudo-nitschia generate toxic domoic acid. These diatoms occur regularly in coastal waters, and when their populations boom, the toxin can contaminate marine wildlife, poisoning the birds and marine mammals that feed on polluted fish, and closing shellfish and sardine fisheries.

These algae were once thought limited to coastal waters. Now researchers find they are common in the open sea as well.

"There was nothing in the science journals suggesting that such toxin-producing algae are so widespread in the open sea, nor documenting that they can get very abundant," Silver told LiveScience.

Normally, Pseudo-nitschia cells are sparse in the high seas, "so they don't have much effect," Silver said. "But these species are incredibly responsive to iron, often becoming dominant in algal blooms that result from iron fertilization. Any iron input might cause a bloom of the cells that make the toxin."

In 2007, on a research cruise to study iron chemistry in the Gulf of Alaska, Silver and her colleagues often discovered Pseudo-nitschia in samples collected at sea. Analyses back in the lab revealed the associated toxin was present, too.

Silver then teamed up with Coale to analyze old water samples collected during two iron-fertilization experiments conducted in 1995 and 2002.

"We thought the toxin would have broken down, but it was still there," Silver said.

The researchers also investigated water samples from three expeditions in the North Pacific independent from the iron-fertilization experiments. Their analysis indicated that waters throughout the Pacific naturally contain Pseudo-nitschia linked with neurotoxin.

Oceanic blooms of this algae probably occur due to iron deposited by volcanic eruptions, dust storms and other airborne sources, Silver said.

"It is a natural phenomenon and likely has been for millions of years," Silver said. "But those are sporadic occurrences. To do iron enrichment on a large scale could be dangerous, because, if it causes blooms of Pseudo-nitschia, the toxin might get into the food chain, as it does in the coastal zone."

"We should have viable strategies to remove carbon from the atmosphere," Coale told LiveScience. "Iron fertilization is still one option in our toolbox, but now the label on the box must read, 'Caution, may produce harmful algal blooms.'"

The scientists detailed their findings online Nov. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Big changes coming 20-30 years from now; here's one reason