(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.
