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 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.