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 II: Infection of the Machine/Dr. Zaius and the Cave

"Remember the words that we say tonight/But don't say a word once we're in the light" (Kelly Willis "Wait Until Dark").

What lies in the darkness; waiting, cloaked, hidden, is our fear, or rather, fear itself: The root of fear is uncertainty, a queasy feeling that something is going to come and upset our little patch of the world as constituted by its phenomenological experience, or, in other words, what we think we know about our reality based on our being part of it.

It is what we have gleaned from being an agent in phenomenological space that we create from our experience in order to understand the "world". However, there is another space enveloping this narrow, solipsistic space which transcends our experience, yet is very much present in it, something we know exists, could exist- a contingency, if you like, but we are either in denial of, or made ignorant of, by Ideological State Apparatuses, such as religion, government, and media.

Sartre would argue that we are unaware because we wish to be, and thus, his concept of Existential Angst is tantamount to denial of trancendent, yet very physical, reality. Gramsci and the Marxists would argue that it is by virtue of a metaphysical class consciousness, reinforced, and constructed by the Ideological State Appartuses, that we are made unaware by design. Both thinkers have commented at some length about problematic, if not impossible, escape from what Sartre referred to as "facticity", or the material conditions of existence, which, by extension, must include Ideological State Apparatus.

By ostensible contrast, the Right (capitalists, neoconservatives, the religious right, free marketers, economic libertarians and readers of Ayn Rand) put themselves, philosophically, in opposition to the above, asserting free will and free thought, the freedom which comes from an unrestricted, unregulated market, the transcendence of reality that stems from the accumulation of wealth, the trancendence of death that stems from believing the above. The Right would assert that Existential Angst is exclusively to atheists, and it is only in a Marxist-based society,that we find such a thing as an Ideological State Apparatuses, because, in a free country, no such thing can exist, because we are all masters of our own destiny, and our success, or failure, is contingent on faith and will; faith in the market, faith in a deity, and the will to pursue both at all costs.

This affirmation of Right world view is, of course, an affirmation of their ideological underpinning for this reality, and, by extension, an assent to the oppositional nature of their world view to that other, the left in total: afterall, it was Lucifier, the Son of the Morning Star, who sat at the left hand of God, and look how that turned out...

In affirming this opposition so totally, the right wing uncovers its own contradiction, and unwittingly shakes it for the world to see in a grotesque strip show: The farther right they go, the more they show. If, as they claim, we are a Judeo Christian Nation, and, as an extension of that faith, evolution is untrue, as at least three of the presidential candidates plus the sitting president claim, then how can this monolith be anything other than an ideological state apparatus posing as God's Law? Indeed, if we are masters of our own destiny in this Judeo Christian Nation, then why the rush to legislate morality if this is not the work of an ideological state apparatus?

Indeed, in the post industrial, informational late stage capitalism that is the United States in this first decade of the new millenium, the right wing has effectively spun a reality different from the one the rest of the world lives and loves and toils and suffers under everyday. But this isn't the Matrix: This is denial, a purposeful ignorance, and a negative assertion of will. The true believer denies evolution because it contradicts the ideological construction which gives them a sense of purpose, comfort, in a confusing world. Unable to negotiate the phenomenological space in which they are presented with choices, unable to reconcile their own impending death with the responsibility of actually doing something for themselves, asserting their will positively, they retreat into religion, into paranoia, into idealogy, becoming ministers, criminals, or radio talk show hosts, what ever dulls the pain.

There are, however, other types of agents and thus, agencies, which operate in the Ideological States of America, on the right wing, and these agents are, in fact, not true believers at all, though, like Dr. Zaius, they defend the faith at all costs, knowing the terrible secret in the cave, knowing the illumination reveals, hidden in shadows, the mechanations, the gears, the circuits, of the Ideological State Apparatus; a human doll that talks is equivalent to a myth of free will, for example, and without this myth, the claims of the Right as being the defender of liberty, of the real America, of free will, must be exposed as for the terrible fraud it is. The infection of the machine is not with religious zealots, but cynical opportunists, furiously pulling levers, pushing buttons, and desperately trying to seal the cave up: Afterall, "there is no contradiction between faith and science-true science".

Part III: The Ghost of the Machine.