Ghost in the Wire

Well, dear readers, it has been - what's that? Oh, right. Ahem. Well, dear reader, it has been some time since last we visited. What can I say? A new baby means new rhythms to life, new norms of the home, and a lot of giddy, nervous, excitement. I trust you'll be forgiving.

I'm currently sitting in the Logan International Airport in Boston, having just consumed some Legal Sea Foods clam chahdah - the same clam chahdah that has been served at the last seven presidential inaugurations, responded to some student emails, and scanned some of my favorite web sites. And with still two hours and change to go before they shuffle me on to my plane, I decided it was time to give the Ghost its due. So here we are.

Parenthood definitely ruptures one's personal time and space and sutures it in new and for the most part entirely pleasant ways, but it doesn't do much to the temporal continuum floating around outside the confines of your particular oikos. Case in point, I'm waiting to return home (to my partner and child) after spending around four days in Boston for this year's NCA Convention, which seemed pretty damn content heavy despite my leaving functionally two days before its completion. No problem there - debaters are used to doing this sort of thing every other weekend, so I remain confident in my ability to rebound, even if I'm no longer as young or as debaterish as I once was.

Alright, all of this as a long setup to discussing the content of the conference itself, or at least a small subset of that content, which is of course why you, the reader, visit this humble node. Wednesday was a seminar on Ernesto Laclau, his use of Lacan, and, following from that, the general possibilities and consequences of incorporating psychoanalysis into political thought. Professor Laclau presented a summary of findings from the "assigned" readings, his new book On Populist Reason, and a concluding chapter in the critical reader devoted to his work. A short presentation was also given by Jelica Sumic-Riha of the University of Ljubljana, which attempted to both constrain Laclau's appropriation of Lacan and to connect (and then differentiate) Laclau's project from thinkers interested in similar issues, for example Ranciere and Zizek. Conversation - very good conversation - ensued. I'd name names, but I'm not one to argue and tell.

Instead, let me summarize briefly Laclau's concern in On Populist Reason, which I think is a brilliant, if perhaps necessarily incomplete, discussion of the political ontology of populism.

This year's story arc, the ascendency of Caesar and his eventual assassination on the Senate floor is, to my mind, one of the most powerfully orchestrated arcs I can recall. The moment of death, in which Caesar struggles to pull his robe towards his face and over his butchered body, struck me with an incredible force, as did Naobi's death. Kudos to HBO on another stunning success.

I presented on this paper/chapter this past weekend, and since I had previously discussed it, and as the conclusion is going to change substantially, I thought I'd go ahead and share it, in the hope of getting some feedback.

"To treat the materiality of mediation seriously and with a greater specificity, which is also to attempt an understanding that there can be no concept of materiality sans the media that disseminate the concept proper, requires a transition from a more conventional logic of representation to a more ecological appreciation of mimesis as the scene of communication. It is in this scene, this theater, that meanings are produced, disseminated, and interpreted, and more so, it is this theater that determines, at least in part, the inventional and interpretive possibilities that admit this hermeneutic process. Sylviane Agacinski explains: “Media spaces, the current locales of democratic visibility, are again a matter of a theatrical structure, even if we are dealing with the screen. This structure organizes the 'production' of power as much as of public opinion. It is theatrical, essentially and not by accident, because for a people, it is a matter of seeing and hearing itself.” This is not a question of representation, in which critics read a text an artifact in order to understand that X signifies Y, but rather a question of mimesis, in which critics engage the artifact as an argument for what qualifies as the appropriate theater for the dissemination of reality. The power of the modern media networks rests in their ability to sell themselves as the proper space in which the public can see themselves seeing the world (this provides at least a reasonable explanation for the inane strategy by which Fox News repeats, ad nauseum, that its coverage is - 'fair and balanced' — it isn't a question of fooling anyone into thinking that Fox News is objective, but rather the act of inviting the conservative portion of the public to view themselves as fair and balanced).

Very briefly, by way of a closing remark, let me follow through on a suggestion already made. If I am asking that critics call into question a certain representational politics in their work, one that often justifies itself by affirming a political determination of materiality as something outside the text, let me suggest a renewal and enriching of mimesis as a potentially more productive endeavor. Mimesis, like so much of critical vocabulary, is a difficult target to lock down, especially because the meanings assigned to it vary radically through the course of history and the passing of time. Most conventionally understood as a more technical or originary term for imitation, “mimesis” in fact broaches a much broader theme, one that signifies the whole breadth of interactions with and determinations of presentation. This no doubt includes imitatio, but it does so because of a certain theatricality at work. In the primary orality of ancient Greece, one learned by imitating the rhythmic patterns embedded in the great epics and poems of the day. Speaking was thus inherently theatrical, since the discourse had to have a hook – much like contemporary pop music – if it was to be memorable. If the rhythmic intonations were easily imitated, through routinized movements of the body, pattern repetition, and the parsing regularities of inflection, then the task of memory was all the easier. Mimesis has many guises – imitation, repetition, similarity, surreality, even representation – but these guises are bound together by the virtual, theatrical particularities of their modality, the different ways in which the scene is set, in the case of each and every discursive act, through the material substrate that mediates its manifestation. Mimesis is, as Gebauer and Wulf note, “always concerned with a relational network of more than one person; the mimetic production of a symbolic world refers to other worlds and to their creators and draws other persons into one's own world.” It is within its capacity to create these worlds that we can determine the history of différance as (in part) a history of the media through which it is invented."

Thoughts? And while I'm self-citing, see also this related discussion of representation and criticism.

No, not as in Anderson Cooper. I'm neither that pretty for that grey.

I mean 360 as in Xbox 360. Oh yes, before I forget, I want to note I sat next to a gentleman from Microsoft who had one in a carry-on, as he was traveling the country before heading down to the launch party down in the Mojave Desert. Suffice it to say that while I can afford neither the financial cost for time involved, I want one.

I want to continue my review and discussion of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason, a book that I think makes some stunningly insightful arguments, even if I also think that the book suffers from some important limitations.

As I mentioned previously, Laclau develops an extremely convincing model of how it is that populist demands interact and enact hegemonic relations through the use of empty signifiers. Crucial to this relationship is the idea that the population (and their demands) are structured by an irreducible heterogeneity, which can only be bridged by concrete efforts to articulate shared identities. These efforts are possible because, despite the heterogeneity at work, everyone shares their differences as an equivalence, that is to say, that because everyone is different, and because each demand is different from every other demand, the only means by which identity and/or a demand can be articulated before or against another identity or demand is through a discourse that presupposes this difference. In other words, this irreducible difference is in fact both the bane and the possibility of democratic politics, for without its theoretical root, there could be nothing like an antagonism, and thus no means by which to demarcate political struggles.

Three immensely valuable conclusions follow.

1. Populism is understood as the critical fulcrum upon which our understanding of contemporary politics is based. Rather than an aberration or some demagogic monstrosity (a view often taken in works on populism), populism is in fact the basic structure of all democratic politics. This matters because it helps us to understand how to work for particular agendas without requiring the pretense of a revolution; it means that activism carries within it real possibilities not tied to some larger temporal horizon. Indeed, it would dispense with that horizon for anything other than purely strategic motives (for example, using that horizon as an empty signifier, or a modality of some signifier).
2. It means that rhetoric matters. As the process by which certain empty signifiers achieve dominance over others, rhetoric holds a privileged place within any thinking of politics, be it theoretical or analytically concrete. This is important, because there are a lot of models of political thought of late (and I'm thinking most explicitly of some psychoanalytical models like Stavrakakis') in which politics is explained entirely from a structural basis (that structure can be psychical, material (in some sense of capital), or what have you, and Laclau offers a war of rescuing the particular from the sublimating threat of the universal.
3. It offers a way of thinking politics and rhetoric in general, and populism in particular, without recoursing to dialectics and without offering any shifty recentering of the subject. This has obvious theoretical benefits, but I won't go into them here.

Now, as for limitations, there are two relatively pronounced one that merit consideration. Mind you, these are not faults with the argument, but rather limits to the argument itself. These limits may confound the argument, but that is by no means certain.

Did I mention I recently joined Long Sunday? No? Well, I did. This week, they're having a reading group on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," and I posted my contribution today. I call it "The Auratic Economy of the Critique of Violence," and you should feel free to read it at your leisure, assuming you have a lot of leisure time.

I'm also posting it in full after the fold, now that some time has passed.