I realize this has already been all over the web, but nonetheless…
This video condenses everything wrong with American establishment politics in the last six years. John Kerry stands there and “politely” tries to answer the young man’s questions as the police carry him away and brutally shock him with tazers, all in full view of the Senator. Similarly, the Democrats have stood there and responded politely as the administration has torn apart civil liberties, engaged in torture, started an unjust war, reduced environmental restrictions, and done everything they can to favor the wealthy-elite.
Jodi Dean has written a post responding to Frank Rich’s article describing Americans as apathetic.
Someone in the NYT today, I think Frank Rich, describes Americans as apathetic. The hopeless situation of the war, the recalcitrant lies of the White House and the cynical shallowness of the Democrats, has made Americans turn against even fictional accounts of war.
People might be turning away, not watching the President continue to lie to our faces, trying to tune out the falseness of Petreus (I kept thinking of Doctor Zaius). But it isn’t out of apathy. It’s something else, something that it not quite trauma, but close. Perhaps it’s a kind of profound depression, a depression that shopping and you tube and Britney can neither cure nor cover.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think even conservatives and most Republicans are depressed. It’s not just a left thing anymore. The manic obscenity of Fox News doesn’t have its characteristic triumphal air of self-satisfied mockery. It’s mean and tired, and tries to hide its own awareness of the pointless incredible losses we’ve inflicted under a manic ADD, moving around from false issue to lurid story and hoping people we think it’s news. They won’t. And that’s likely part of the appeal. Any real news adds to the depression.
Is it even depression, or is it sheer numbness? We see events like this take place, and figures like John Kerry do not even raise their voice to intervene and later issue press releases hoping no one was seriously hurt (get some spine you asshole). We watch figures like General Petraeus give testimony before the Senate, presenting a report filled with lies and omissions, yet all the administrations claims are reported exactly as the administration would like, without question. The administration even gets to say that we’re having a troop withdrawal, when in fact this was planned from the beginning and simply returning us to pre-surge levels. To add insult to injury, MoveOn’s ad attempting to draw attention to the ridiculousness of the Petraeus report becomes the topic of discussion, rather than the war itself, and 22 Democrats vote in support of a resolution denouncing the ad. We witness events such as the gross injustices in the Jena Six story, which seem as if they come from some archaic past. Today men were pulled over on Louisiana driving a pick-up truck with nooses tied to the back. Everywhere there are images of gross stupidity, ugliness, injustice, hatred, but also experience a profound sense of powerlessness to do anything about it.
In The Reality of the Mass Media Niklas Luhmann claims that media technology has the capacity to make certain events seem more frequent and omnipresent than in fact they are, by perpetually drawing attention to instances of these events. Thus, when an idiotic public school teacher prevents a student from reading the Bible because he doesn’t understand the first amendment and that it prevent him from leading students in prayer, religious affairs, etc., not students, this story is picked up in the news and creates the impression that such things are going on everywhere. Similarly, when a child is kidnapped or molested, the omnipresence of reporting on this event creates the impression that there is an epidemic of such occurrences. According to Luhmann, this phenomenon serves a moralizing function for the social system, by steering the system to create legislation and other acts that prevent these occurrences. Luhmann’s reasoning is similar to Nietzsche’s in Beyond Good and Evil (or is it The Gay Science) where he argues that the criminal actually serves the morally useful function of reproducing morality.
Is this what is really going on? Is the world really this ugly, stupid, unjust? Or is this a sort of illusion produced by the magnifying effect of media technologies. At this point, tending to my garden looks like a fairly good option.
Larval Subjects . 
September 22, 2007 at 1:21 am
Larvalsubjects, it is precisely this type of talk that has me scared.
How could you, an intensely disciplined, hyperintelligent theorist dealing with Marx and Deleuze, be tempted to go tend the garden when you are confronted, yes, confronted, with an object that, to you, “condenses everything wrong with American establishment politics in the last six years”?
This type of incident thrills me, a lowly starving artist, with its potential for some kind of political event, much more so than a Frank Rich article ever would. Is there something you know that I don’t? Is there a reason why I should feel as resigned as those on the leftist blogosphere? Why would this incident create a feeling of resignation among the intellectuals who have devoted their lives to studying politics and philosophical notions of justice? It seems to me that this type of thing should make leftists EAGER to get up on platforms and expound at length about Badiou, about state power, about…anything! I think people in your position fail to see their inntrinsic value in our larger culture, hence your earlier confessions of futile feelings. I know TONS of kids who would scramble to hear a noted Leftist scholar stand in Union Square and speak about how this incident somehow relates to current strains of leftist theory.
I ask this in all respect and deference: Would you do such a thing? Would you stand and address a public protest about this incident?
September 22, 2007 at 6:53 pm
“Is this what is really going on? Is the world really this ugly, stupid, unjust?”
yes. but what might be important to think about is the limits of this ‘world’–it isn’t the world, it is ‘a world,’ so it isn’t solid, complete, or whole. It is fragmented, unsteady, ruptured. Perhaps the situation looks different if you don’t oppose world and illusion but see the illusions (or, better, the amplifications of some things rather than other things) as an aspect of the world, as elements in and of it.
September 23, 2007 at 3:07 am
I’ve always thought that those who ceaselessy categorized the world as “ugly, stupid, unjust” could themselves only be categorized as such, but with the added debasement of “cowardly”.
Of course, I don’t mean you, larvalsubjects, but rather those whose categorization of the world as such has led them to the sorts of apathy, dread, depression, etc, that you referred to in the post, as a mode of living as opposed to a temporary dip in spirits. You would fall into this category if you retreated forever into your garden, and, judging from your posts here, I’m sure you wouldn’t survive long there.
With the decline of the symbolic’s efficacy comes the unprecedented power of having the space to construct one’s own symbolic efficacy. Is this what Jodi means when she says “don’t oppose the world and illusion see the illusions as an aspect of the world”?
The world SHOULD always be viewed as being “ugly, stupid, unjust”, as well as cowardly, not in terms of categorization but rather in terms of characterization. I quiver at the thought of a world where these characterizations could somehow cease to be applied when needed.
You ask if this perception is an effect of the selective magnifying lens of media technologies. YES! But, as Jodi said, they magnify only “a world”, not “the world”. In fact, don’t you think that if overnight the media applied its distortion to “the world”, within 24 hours we would all either be buried in our own gardens or liberated and ecstatic? I’m not being a chomskian here, just a speculative hack poet.
Jodi is right to answer “yes” to your question, but to take it further, the world is worse than you think. It should not take the media to tell you that. You can feel it on the margins of your own world, repressed by media magnification and whatever it is that gets you through the day. Something about the dustmoats floating in the late afternoon sunlight of your own symbolic world will speak it to you. And the power to always be able to remind yourself, through affect and emotion as well as intellect, that the world is worse than you think, is what is the opposite of cowardice, ugliness, and stupidity.
When the world has got me down, I turn off all the lights and listen to Coil’s “Musick To Play In The Dark”:
“wise words
from the departing:
‘eat your greens, especially broccoli’
remember to
say thank you
for the things
you haven’t had.
by working the soil
we cultivate the sky
hmm-hmm…we embrace
the vegetable kingdom.”
…and after side two, up go the lights and the world is bearable and beautiful again.
September 28, 2007 at 5:55 pm
An inherent stoicism? Or just numbness? I don’t know. I myself feel hopeless just trying to answer the question.
September 30, 2007 at 9:42 am
Ok, I just now saw the full video of this (I’m abroad, so I’m kinda out of the loop), and I got to say, watching the video stirs certain forces in me, that I wished I were in that video, in that room of students, and, I don’t know, shout out maybe, don’t really know what to say, but release the forces that the student (I think) hoped to raise among his fellow students, the forces that were stirred up even more, seeing that student hemmed in by those cops, restrained, tassered to the ground . . . “What the f**k! What did he do? Why are you arresting him? What did he commit? Does he not every right to be here, to ask questions, to raise his voice, to, like he said, after having heard this politician speak for two hours, be given at least two minutes of his time to ask questions?”
I know some students did this, but for the most part, I saw students that were just sitting there, bored even maybe: “What the hell are you doing? Do you see what’s happening here? And you’re just sitting there? Letting this happen? You’re sitting there, actually wanting to stay?”
And to John Kerry: “Yes, what did you do as Bush took us to war? What did you do in the face of the fraud speculations (don’t know how valid these are) that supposedly would have made you president? What are you doing now, as this student has been hemmed in, pulled out of the position of discourse that he has every right to occupy, every right to raise his voice to express these intensities inside of him, that were, actually, trying to support you, tassered . . .? What are you doing just looking there, at this scene, at this gross injustice–like the injustice of the last, what, six years . . . What did you do then? Just looked as well? You? You were the face of the opposition available to us against that other tyrant? You are an opposition? Maybe your fate does serve you right. Maybe, after all, it’s right that you did not become president.”
I feel angered, indignited, but also hopeless because there’s nothing I can do . . . except hope that there are more students like this guy, and less of the guest supposedly being protected by the cops, those agents of the State . . .
September 30, 2007 at 11:11 am
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