Ghost of the Machine, part 1: Anima and Ideological Illness

One of the great things about being an academic is, simply, I get paid to read Derrida. This summer, I have been enjoying, simulataneously, Paper Machine, his meditations on books, archiving, and "the mechanicity in language, the media, and intellectuals" (check out "The Word Processor" if you are feeling self reflexive), and a wonderful article Geoffrey Bennington wrote called "Derrida and Politics", that wonders why Derrida never made any specific political pronouncements: He's Derrida, he doesn't make specifice pronouncements, he asks hyper specific questions. You figure it out.

Another great thing about being an academic is having Derrida pinging around your head like a spaceball ricochet while absorbing more cable news than a human being should. If you didn't catch Ann Coulter's surly drunk routine (complete with black sunglasses) on Hardball last night, then you missed "Ms." Coulter's most incoherent ideological nonsense to date. What's worse, her "fans" ate it up, as though being an ill informed boor is the mark of some intellectual and moral genius. Chris Matthews, predictably, made her look like an asshole.

Speaking of ideologues and assholes, watching the equivocating of Cheney about his shadow government, scourged by the light of day in the great Barton Gellman and Jo Becker expose (essential reading, if you haven't already) has been fun, troubling (well, not really, we all knew anyway), and fascinating through the Derridian lens.

Dick Cheney is an interesting character who, based on his own statements, is not a character at all, but a ghost in the machine, being both legislator, and executive, and yet, neither.

The machine, of course, is the our government, or rather, the manner in which we speak and write about our government as the mechaniations which seem to work contrary to the welfare of the people. This, distilled, is the complaint of both conservatives and liberals. The solutions to this complaint, of course, vary.

It is in this complaints, or rather, these complaints, for though the complaint is the same, the perceived solutions are different, thus the valence of the complaint itself is different, the trace of of the complainer's ideology becomes apparent, either in the qualification of the solution, or in the qualification of the complaint itself, the underlying ideology is laid bare.

Bare ideology is, of course, the meat and potatoes of a professional pundit and hustler like Ann Coulter to the extent that one could upon her as a kind of W.A.S.P golem, a body that was animated by solemn, arcane, recitations from Fukuyama's "The End of History", with a copies of the the Federalist Papers strapped to the head and arms, phylactery style, that perfectly, with all the subtlety of Frankenstein's monster, defends the corporatist, patriarchal, ideology of her maker. A golem is the ultimate agent of victory at all costs.

Humorous as this account might seem, if we apply further tension to this idea of a golem, removing the pseudo cosmis negligence embedded in both its folklore roots and its absurd recasting here, what are you left with, in essence, is a host, the "raw material" for the kind of parasitic ideology that birthed the NeoConservative Movement, while, at the same time, infecting the body politic to the point that the Goldwater Conservatives, and their rational, if flawed, reading of the Constitution, are all but extinct on the national level.

What is left are hosts to this ideological illness, some infected through a fear of Communism, some infected through a fear of terrorism, some infected through a fear of homosexuals/immigrants/ ad infinitum, but in every case, fear feeds the parasitic ideology, and though the phenomenological experience of the host could, and should, kill the parasite, its epistemological justification of its continued existence is the continued existence of uncertainty, and of fear, and, as long as the ideology is fed, its powers of denial, both of the phenomenological and the rational when they contradict the doctrine, or contextualize the uncertainty, are all encompessing, reducing the host to a golem, or perhaps, more aptly, an automaton, a mechanized object that's sole purpose is perpetuation of the ideology, and the infestation of others by praying on the most primal: the fear of the dark, if you like.

Part II: Infections of the Machine.