Ghost in the Wire

For me, 2005 goes down as probably the best year of my life. In terms of family, which is to me the most fundamental ground of my existence, I got engaged to a woman I love more than oxygen, experienced the creation, genesis, and birth of my beautiful baby daughter (who, having now turned two months old, has recently started sleeping in four hour chunks! I pray it continues), grew closer with my parents and sister, and even managed to referee three cats and one dog, eventually crafting them into a fully functional animal family. Professionally, I've had better years, but I'm relatively pleased on that front as well. Hell, even this blog, which I never thought would develop into much more than a space for me to think through type, has developed an audience beyond my expectations (even Jay Rosen stopped by to say he liked the place - not bad at all). All in all, 2006 has some stiff competition from its predecessor.

That being said, and having read Jodi Dean's reflective post about our chosen profession, I do find that the New Year often provides a space for melancholic reflection, sort of a sustained engagement with the temporal nature of existence and the irrevocability of the passage of time. Sure there's the usual New Year resolutions: be good, be fit, be happy, etc. For me, I always give up a food or two (last year was ketchup, this year gelatin and non-dark chocolate). But there's also that sort of existential angst, that anxiety over one's choices, sometimes choices in the future, sometimes in the past. It's often a productive anxiety, sometimes a destructive one, but its presence is somewhat of a New Year constant. Or at least I hope it is. If there's one thing I really, really enjoy about being an academic, it's that I am encouraged to be reflective, to think about the world around me and my place within it. I try to encourage my students to do the same. Sometimes I succeed, but sometimes not--usually not I suppose--but I try, and I like trying. Cultivating a sense of critical reflection can be pretty damn difficult, or at least a tough sell to those who just want a degree so they can start making money. Between normal, "real world" careers and the exigencies of daily living, time for reflection can be difficult for folks to procure, and often the plenitude and platitudes of Americana actively work to discourage reflection. I'm always saddened by this, even if I know that it's inevitable to some extent. Heidegger described human beings as uncanny, as possessing an Unheimlichkeit, an uncanniness, or more literally a sense of not-being-at-home. The danger, he noted, was not that humans would or wouldn't find their home, but rather that they would lose their sense of not being there, and so stop searching, when it was the search that really mattered. I've always been rather taken with that concern.

This of course leads up to the other subject of this post, the mysterious extra second. If you haven't been following the controversy, and are unaware that the cosmic order is playing dangerously fast and loose with the mechanical mapping of time by which we understand the universe, let me give you a very quick primer. Earth is just not keeping pace with our measurement of it, and so it needed an extra second this year, just one little second, so our cesium-tickers could once more correctly align with the Earth's geological clock. This "leap second," the first in seven years, is a bit controversial because, well, it raises thorny philosophical issues about the nature of technology and its role in imposing a temporal picture of the world upon the world itself. Alright, that's not exactly the controversy - it's actually that it's hard to adjust for leap seconds because they're only added when needed, the Earth is continuing to slow, which means there might be two leap seconds per year at some point, and the whole thing is just annoyingly inconvenient - but I think there are thorny philosophical issues here, and we'll just assume that they subsume the rest of the debate.

Now, having just referenced some Heidegger, you might expect that I'd be against this whole extra second thing. But you'd be wrong. I'm for it, precisely because that extra second affords me some extra time for reflection, for thinking academic-like. It's not a lot of time, but hey, in a hectic world, we need all the room for reflection we can get. That, and I'm being serious here, I actually appreciate that such a temporal anamoly - the artificial insertion of a leap second, based on perceptions of necessity - actually does a fantastic job of highlighting how perfectly malleable is our sense of time and of timing, and how it is that so-called vulgar time operates by means of an almost constant struggle, or at least a constant perseverence and policing, without which day would be night and night would be day, dogs and cats would frolic together, and Ming the Merciless would begin his bloody reign. These sort of disconnects, in which the real world tricks the mechanical world, seducing it into following its rhythms even as the mechanical world thinks it's more accurately mapping the contours of the Real, remind us that even in the world around us, the world we take so very much for granted, we are never really at home, never truly comfortable, and never free of the need for reflection. So Happy New Year, and Happy Extra Second. I hope we all put both to good use.

Having just finished the revisions to my chapter for the rhetoric and materiality collection, a chapter entitled "Shades of Derrida: Materiality as the Mediation of Differance," I have been thinking a bit about propaganda, and how it operates. I'll write a few more posts on this eventually, hence the preemptive number assignation, but for now, let me include a brief snippet from the paper regarding the mimetic character of propaganda:

"[My focus on mimesis as a critical substitute for representation] induces some tension with other ways of thinking materiality, especially ways that rely fundamentally on a logic of representation. Class relations, for example, are always just that, relational, and thus always the subject of a representational field and an intersubjective assessment of the differences within that field. To speak of anything like an objective relation or an identity requires a prior ontological submission to representation, one that I believe is both dangerous and heuristically impoverished. Discussions of propaganda probably offer the easiest evidence of the problem facing such a critical perspective, and why it is I think a greater appreciation for the theatricality of mediation — of mimesis — can enhance critical efforts. Fox News, for example, is without doubt a reality-challenged mouthpiece for the Republican party, but it gains the progressive critic little to expose the obvious lack of factual verisimilitude in its coverage nor does it substantively help the media critic to explain away Fox's rhetorical appeal by asserting that propaganda operates by convincing people that they aren't actually seeing propaganda [I'm referring fairly explicitly to Bob McChesney's comments in OutFoxed and elsewhere]. For either critical approach to seem remotely coherent, one must believe implicitly in either the sheer stupidity or the overwhelming and inexplicable avarice of Fox's viewing audience, a persona that hardly assists leftists interested in changing the Fox viewer's political imaginary and that hardly bodes well for those who argue for substantive improvements in the production quality of our news media. Such huffing and puffing may have its uses, to be sure, but it ultimately flounders against the walls of those brick houses ostensibly sullying the rhetorical landscape.

A mimetic understanding offers a much more robust insight into the operations of televisual propaganda. News networks do not gain adherents by properly representing the world, as is, nor by “tricking” the populace into thinking exactly that, but rather the tele-communing power of the modern news/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 the ones who are fair and balanced. It is this theatrical staging, this invitational mimicry, that explains the popularity and success of Fox News. Trying to assess and understand its success by analyzing its representational practices misses the mark—and the medium—entirely."

So functionally, propaganda operates via an invitational identification, one properly mimetic in character, and not representational. That's my argument in a nutshell, I think. There are some implications for the related concepts of ideology and the political imaginary (check out Mark Madsen's recent posts on Charles Taylor), and I think that my argument may require a more sustained investigation. For now, comments and criticism are helpful, so feel free to add some.

Regarding Jeff's recent discussion of Bugeja's rant against technologies newer than the library, I noted in passing my use of the term technostalgia to describe that sort of rhetorical oddity. I use the term in a piece on Heidegger and radio, and for the sake of offering a bit more of an explanation, since I didn't offer that much in my comment, here's a few paragraphs from the end of the paper that attempt to explain the use of the term.

"The problem here is not that media and technology are objectively distinct but rather that engaging technological objects — “the things themselves” — as evidence merely of the technological blinds critique to the spiritual in-between made possible by the mutual translation between objects and their subjects; subjects and their objects. Media must be understood as more than technologies, not because of a particular heuristic truism, but because otherwise this regressive approach to the technological advances of any era will continue to generate incommensurate drives, founded in a sort of technostalgia, in which thinkers bemoan the present technological moment precisely because its presence cannot measure up to the tortured univocality their theorizing demands of it and look to a technological predecessor as a means of reestablishing their selves, their world, and their politics.i I use the term technostalgia here not to describe something as simple as a yearning for the past, but rather a particular formation in which a comfort with already established media ecologies becomes wedded to certain ways of thinking subjectivity and spirituality in such a way that newer and shifting media ecologies come to constitute the “outside” of that comfort zone...

[T]he theme of technostalgia finds its analogs in a number of media scholars who continue to align themselves with particular ontological precepts. Simply by way of a hypothetical, and knowing full well that a more sustained and critical reading would be required before being able to conclude anything, let me very briefly offer two potential examples: Harold Innis and Neil Postman. Innis famously remarked that his “bias is with the oral tradition, particularly as reflected in Greek civilization, and with the necessity of recapturing something of its spirit.” He spoke of balancing particular media environments, but he was pretty explicit about where the spiritual center of culture found its historical grounding. Like Heidegger, Greek orality was idealized as a community and an ecology in which everything had its place. It might be worth charting how significant the spiritualist rhetoric was in Innis' explication of Greek society. A similar trajectory can be traced in Neil Postman, prominent media ecologist and thinker of technology, who has argued for returning to the thoughts of those unafflicted by nearly every modern medium: the political philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like Heidegger, Postman exhibits similar fascination in the near-prophetic power of the era’s poetry and appreciation for our “place” in the world, and while happier about the airplane, Postman nevertheless reverts to spiritual dicta, fearing that the modern age has lost its ability to dream, and yearning for a quasi-religious transcendence through which to ground human existence. Echoing Heidegger’s hope and terminology, Postman elsewhere contends that unlike the calculative reason of the twentieth century sociologist, the novelist of preceding centuries “proceeds by showing.” As I noted earlier, the epideictic potential of showing offers us hope, but it will require significant theoretical and practical articulation. A less charitable reading of Postman finds a scholar who believes we will simply, through sheer dint of will, return to the age of showing, and all might yet be made aright, if – and this is a big if – we can just hold onto that past strongly enough.vii This avid humanism (and we could group Innis in with Postman here) no doubt has laudable qualities, but it also flies in the face of humanities research and thinking since the 60s, and requires a belief in a subject somehow unique and ontologically distinct from the media ecologies that form it. The critical task of this essay offers a different way of responding to and thinking about how our media continue, in McLuhan's words, to work us over completely.

Ultimately, the problem lies not in a longing for a simpler technological past, but rather with the injection of the politics of spirit into that longing, banishing from media the uncertainty of the in-between and the haunting spirit of its attendant ghosts. The allure of the lost spirit is always already a particular political allure, full of political consequences in how we theorize technology, the subject, and ideology. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, with new media continuing to redefine itself in the digital and virtual frontiers, the challenge posed is the same, if more urgent challenge posed by all media once marked as new: to discover ways of interrogating their contingent benefits and dangers without replicating the same technostalgiac drives that have plagued the critique of technology since Plato’s condemnation of writing."

I was going to write a long post about James Frey's use of hoax and hyperbole, about how we might think his Million Little Pieces of Fiction as a fun and productive lens through which to view the current political climate, but then I read Jerry Stahl's piece in the LA Times, which does what I wanted to do, but does it better, funnier, and uses more words. Read it. And if you don't laugh, well then, it's obvious that you've never had your cheek bone shattered and your genitals abused by overzealous prison guards. Nay, guard dogs.