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.

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.