The Ghost of the Machine, part IV: George's Ghost

Finally, we left to consider the Machine, and elucidate the title of this series.

Typically, we think of the "ghost in the machine" much as we think of gremlins: an unexplained malfunction, or breakdown, of equipment.

This we can explain, because this we have brought on ourselves. At the end of the day, despite however painful the road, however much we regret being asleep, we got the government we deserve.

There are no ghosts in this machine of government. George Bush and his President, Dick Cheney, the Hamlet and his Ghost, are not infestations of a particular virulent ideology, and are likely not historical anomolies.

While Hamlet is driven mad to avenge the death of his father, no such motivation exists in this tragedy. Instead, George's ghost, in his spectral fourth branch, is the trace of what has always been, made material. This administration has manifested its extra-constitutional reach with a maliciousness that is shocking, and, in an inversion of the Shakespearean tragedy (or perhaps no inversion at all) is that ghost is more important than the protagonist. Or that the protagonist, acting in the stead of the ghost, becomes a kind of illusory overlay for the ghost, who, by will, becomes more material. Hamlet becomes a kind of ghost because he ceases to think critically, becoming only a vessel for the revenge of his father, who is materialized by Hamlet's actions. Hamlet becomes a kind of golem, with a singular purpose.

But the "ghostly" Cheney is not Ghost of the Machine, either, in the same way that Hamlet's father materialized through Hamlet's singular actions, though Cheney himself is constituted through ideology and materialized in its malicious praxis, in the activities of disinformation, propagation, and historical malfeasance. Cheney himself is another agent, the man behind the curtain, while the big green disembodied figure head blusters about being "The Decider".

The Ghost of the Machine is, simply, that a machine, as defined and programmed according to a Constitutional Schematic, exists at all. The Ghost of the Machine is the notion that the Machine is a ghost, an illusion to keep us satiated while we are "freely" choosing between coke and pepsi, the illusion that ideology plays no part in our lives, the illusion that we can learn nothing from Marx because of the Soviet Union, the illusion that our form of capitalism is the best thing since coke. Or pepsi.

What that ghost conceals is what all ghosts reveal: Foul play. It's not that the machine has been infested with ideological agents, it that the machine has been replaced by ideological agents, golems of capital: Corporate Personhood.

These "persons" are ideological agents, but not like the true believer or the bureau/technocrat made cynical as a jailers, but real golems, created for vicious accumulation capital by rich oligarchies. Their speech is freer than ours. They literally get away with murder. Their voices shout down ours.

Thus, behind that illusory ghost of democracy-machine is Fortress America, with its guard tower "manned" by these golems, consciousless monsters in the machine gun nests, guarding the wall.

This panopticon, which circumscribes every discourse, is not absolute, for the very illusion its walls and towers hide behind is the seed of its destruction: The "trace" of democracy only reminds the inmates of what they long for, the real, not ostensible, not surface, not coke vs. pepsi, not "less filling, tastes great" politicking, but REAL DEMOCRACY. The establishment is superficial expression of Fortress America, with all its prejudices, its death trip consumerism, "serious" people, preemptive wars, dreams of absolute market-empires, the homogeneity of going everywhere in the world, and finding a Big Mac: This is fascism in a clown suit. This is now.

Let us look to what can be, should be, must be:

"So when I speak of a 'democracy to come', I don't mean a future democracy, a new regime, a new organisation of nation-states (although this may be hoped for) but I mean this 'to come': the promise of an authentic democracy which is never embodied in what we call democracy. This is a way of going on criticising what is everywhere given today under the name of democracy in our societies. This doesn't mean that 'democracy to come' will be simply a future democracy correcting or improving the actual conditions of the so-called democracies, it means first of all that this democracy we dream of is linked in its concept to a promise. The idea of a promise is inscribed in the idea of a democracy: equality, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press - all these things are inscribed as promises within democracy. Democracy is a promise. "

Keep the promise. Think through surfaces. Keep the promise.