The Ghost of the Machine, part III: Fortress America

(Note: I think I only have one more left...)

Slight Return...

In the reduced binary that is life in the United States right now, an inversion that has taken place, with superstition being privileged over reason, with the only "reason" allowed being the fuzzy logic by which Thomas Aquinas "logically" proved the existence of God (or Santa Claus, for that matter) over a thousand years ago.

All other science is to be judged on its ability to turn a profit: The computers by which they tabulate and spy, the guns by which they bring forth "democracies", the bombs by which they threaten the mortal souls of the rest, all bring forth profit because the reinforce ideology, and the reinforced/coerced ideological subjecation is the proof of the ideology's righteousness, its natural facticity, and thus, its self generated reality; the gut feeling, if you will.

Returning to Government as the Machine, it must be completely understood that this machine is in no way automatic; it must have be given commands, it must be programmed to operate in a specific way. The Government-Machine is the same everywhere, because it is the circumscription of human beings confronting other human beings, while at the same time being reconcilliation of humans through morality. A machine that is both without us, and within us.

What is variable in the Government-Machine(hereafter GM) is its programming, how it is set up to circumscribe human beings, how it is commanded to intercede in human beings confronting each other. The GM is always the same in its purpose: What is variable is how it carries this out.

To quote Gilbert from The Revenge of the Nerds, "Only a human can be inhuman", and while, in the context of the complaint of the machine of government, what needs to be remembered is there is no automation here: This machine needs operators ensure that it functions as its programming dictates. These operators are the "human" face of the supposedly inhuman Government-Machine.

If only a human can be inhuman, and machines, particularly this one, seem inhuman, it is because, in fact, it is all too human, all too subjective. All governments are made of people, who are subjects, and ends, in and of themselves. This is a given.

What happens between the birth of a normal human being and the emergence of a "public servant", an operator of the GM?

Michel Foucault, who spent a great deal of his life thinking about power structures, would likely argue this emergence of the "public servant" is rooted in the operational binary of the panopticon, that those who would enter this machine do so because they find society to be corrupt, criminal, or just plain wrong. They become operators to correct this, believing that they are serving their fellow citizen in this way.

However, in becoming operators, the contradictions emerge: The Government-Machine is Human, and thus subjective, yet the GM is constantly threatened by that very subjectivity, because such a subjectivity is messy, unpredictable, and above all, not harmonious. In order to resolve this contradiction, the operator must rethink his/her relation to the machine: For the machine to work efficiently, then it becomes necessary to privilege Government-Machine over those who it circumscribes, because, after all, the GM is us, right? The justification for this must be an ideological one, because only in ideology is there the schematic for the more efficient machine, and a more harmonious society.

In this ideological turn, the operator, whose purpose had been the care and maintance of the machine, becomes an operative, an ideological agent if you like, whose world view becomes the transcendent schematic for the most efficient machine and the most harmonious society. As in always the problem with notions of transcendence, the question of subject is a question of convenience: Does the subject represent a threat or contradiction to this transcendent schematic? The possibility of this is a terrifying unknown, and, thus, as an unknown, a perpetual threat, that needs to be supressed or destroyed. If Foucault's Panopticon is to be extrapolated to society, then its towers are I.S.A's-the defining features of our society. That "public servant", doing the "public good" (with such a generalization uncovering the belief that the public is to be placed above the concerns of any one individual). These operatives defend the towers: Clergy, Pundits, Bureaucrats, Bankers, Deans, Lawyers...these are the guardians of the towers, each ostensibly defending their own interests while, in effect, defending the walls, defending the structure as a whole. The most efficient machine, the most harmonious society, demands all of these parts work for the good of the "public".

The notion of a transcendent schematic is in and of itself a right wing notion, because these questions of efficiency and harmony are only answerable with strict conformity, or rather, the subjegation of the subjects, and the obsession with preserving institutions which serve no purpose aside from an ideological one (the traditional ones; marriage, the flag, English only, etc.) while simulataneously dismantling those institutions whose purpose would be to protect the subjects from subjegation (Law, Finance, Media, Education).

The institutions may change, but their towers, their shells, remain, to be filled with collaborative ideological agents whose sole existence is predicated on installing the transcendent schematic, and by doing so, changing the programming of the GM. This is necessary because of unknown threats from enemies abroad (outside of the walls), but, most dangerously, inside the walls. Thus, those protections become weapons against us, ironic billy clubs swung at our skulls by the ideological agents like the fat racist prison guards they are.

This friends, as you know, has already happened, and how.

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.