Ghost in the Wire

After a relatively long downtime, Ghost will be seeing new content, and possibly some new underlying software. I've changed how comments are handled a bit in order to reduce spam, so don't be alarmed if you post and nothing shows up yet, or if you post and your html is suddenly missing. Spambots do exact their pound of flesh, you know... *grin*

So where have I been? Meditating, actually, as I've developed a keen interest in Zen Buddhism, which I've been practicing fairly regularly since last I posted. Zen is, in some ways, anti-conceptual so I have thus far been unwilling to simply insert Zen into Ghost's previous material and framework, but I will begin to talk out some of its intellectual history alongside some of the other work and concerns that animate this site. Also, for those who remember the old days, expect some other announcements regarding prodigal returns in the next few months.

I've just started a dropcash campaign for the incorporation of Progressive Commons. We could really use your help, so if you're interested, please feel free to contribute.

For those of you Alfred Jarry fans out there - you know who you are, and who you aren't - the only home-brewed journal to traffic in the science of imaginary solutions has a new edition, and this one is all about machines. You can preview or pick up a copy of Pataphysica 3 over at lulu.com. Enjoy.

Btw, Pataphysica 3 is edited by the mysterious and affable Cal Clements, who is well worth reading about.

Yesterday, my partner and I took some time to see An Inconvenient Truth, the movie based on Al Gore's discussion about the reality and dangers of global warming. As many reviewers have already noted, the film is surprisingly good, with the best moments actually coming from Gore's presentation itself (done on Keynote, from what I can tell), which is incredibly impressive. I would encourage anyone with the opportunity to see the film (its release is somewhat limited) to do so.

The consequences of warming/climate change, much like the consequences that would have attended further degredation of the ozone layer had not international action been taken, are vast, predictable, and utterly horrendous. And so it comes as some surprise that the political imaginary (at least in the USA) has been so resistant to incorporating these consequences. Much of this is due, no doubt, to a coordinated effort on the part of big oil and other corporate interests who would be most adversely affected by the legal and social changes that would need to happen if we took climate change seriously. But this can't explain everything. People are not sheep. They have the capacity to make decisions - not necessarily informed decisions, which are notoriously difficult to come by given the glut of information available and the woefully inadequate norms that govern the news media's parsing of that information - and so we need to do a better job of understanding why it is that certain decisions become easier, why it is that short-term comforts trump long-term consequences when it comes to this particular issue.

I stress this issue because, as most are well aware, the same reluctances and willful ignorance did not take hold when it came to ozone depletion, nor were those who opposed the expansion of peaceful nuclear power stymied by the public's lack of imagination. People were concerned about the long-term consequences as well as the immediate dangers, and policy was adjusted accordingly. And indeed, thanks to the Montreal Protocol and its sundry supplemental accords and amendments, we are finally seeing evidence that the international effort paid off, and the ozone "hole" is slowly diminishing in magnitude.

So what explains the collective inability to mobilize the public imaginary around the dangers of climate change? For now, I'll simply ask the question; later I'll offer some very provisional attempts to answer it. Until then, you bright minds out there should feel free to tackle it.

For Jodi et. al., from an essay I published in 2003:

Originally presented in August 1936 at the 14th International Psychoanalytic Conference as "Le stade du miroir," then revised and delivered at the 16th International Psychoanalytic Congress in July of 1949, Lacan’s "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" begins by noting how a male (not female) child’s "recognition" of his "own image in a mirror" results in an "illuminative mimicry" as the child realizes that its actions are mirrored in the image before it. One notices the heavy emphasis on the visual (illumination, image) and its connection to thinking (re-cognition). The third paragraph of the address clarifies the nature of the mimicry: "a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment…" One can picture the child, slowly moving his arms or head in a series of gestures, realizing that those gestures are reduplicated in the image before him (albeit a bit reversed by a trick of the light), smiling and laughing with the insight that he is the image.

But before explicitly linking this visual recognition to the theory of the mirror stage, the address does something curious at the start of paragraph four: it casually notes that this pattern of image recognition among children "has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror." Whether intended as a pun or not, the semantic slippage between reflection-as-image and reflection-as-thought demonstrates not only the visual and spatial structuring of language but also the tenuous distinction between the specular object of the imaginary and the binary calculus of the symbolic. As a term, the "imaginary" is only a linguistic marker—just another signifier within the register of the symbolic—but its written existence stresses its status as an image—a series of marks on paper that must then be filtered through the symbolic. As with signification in general, the word as grapheme – a graphic image – makes sense through a diacritical assessment, a differentiation from those other graphic images that precede and accompany it, and as such, every encounter with an image will entrain the symbolic register. The line between the symbolic and the imaginary is, to say the least, somewhat indistinct.

One of the problems that I have with those brave souls longing for the Revolution, the moment when the workers rise up and utopia begins its long march toward realization, is that so much of the discourse of socialism vs. capitalism requires a homogeneity to the latter that simply does not obtain in the world around us. American capitalism is vastly different from Japanese capitalism; both are radically different from the German version, and so on. Even within the U.S., we have different versions going on in different places, and I suspect we lose something fairly fundamental when, for the sake of critical lubrication, we pretend as if the commonalities between capitalist systems are sufficient enough to warrant scant attention and engagement with their differences.

When it comes to environmental policy this lack of attention poses some difficulties. The choice becomes something like "revolutionary consciousness" or apathy towards capitalist structures. In capitalism, so the argument goes, economic interests have trumped environmental interests - as if the two are somehow such ontologically different animals that the relation between them must be one of distinction, wherein one will triumph over the other. As Aenesidemus puts it: "Having bred generations of well-adjusted capitalists, we find them incapable of adjusting their accounting tables for externalities."

This is, of course, total nonsense. We have bred generations of inbred, poorly adjusted capitalists, who are thus unable to account properly for externalities. The great trick of American capitalism has been to produce a system of externalities for which the company controlling the means of production and distribution are not responsible, and then to wed this system with a naturalized belief that those externalities must now be solved or confronted by governments and the taxes that help them function. Let me note one obvious example: packaging. Packaging is one of the many ways in which a company sells its product. It is a semiotic system that provides a clear and convincing benefit (indeed, much money is spent to ensure that this benefit will correspond with maximized profit and sales), be it the simple designs of the iPod packaging or the colorful, convoluted cardboard and styrofoam wonders that house infant ExerSaucers. And although companies are responsible for (i.e. they must internalize the cost of) the production and shipping of these packages to various sales venues, they are not responsible for the elimination of those packages. Instead, publically funded landfills shoulder the responsibility for that elimination, in effect levying a general tax that supplements corporate income by excusing them from fully being responsible for the objects or services a company produces. Sure, many of the individuals that comprise that public may not own iPods and may never buy ExerSaucers, but they will still, each in their own way, pay to have that company's packages stored as trash.

For environmental activists, then, the solution may not be to fight or retard capitalism, but rather to celebrate a capitalism that is more capitalist, more free market, than the leading capitalists would like. Make Apple responsible for their packaging (Apple has great design values, but their packages are ridiculously wasteful). Make developers pay for the cost of subsequent road widenings and sewer system expansion (which would raise the price of new developments, thus slowing sprawl). Provide a way to assess the costs of this current externality and leverage those costs in such a way that they must be internalized (which would make cradle to cradle technology extremely attractive).

I'll return to this theme in a bit.

George Bataille, writing in the work that would overshadow his fetish-friendly fiction, declared that "it is not necessity but its contrary, 'luxury,' that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." What defines a society is not how it is that it handles scarcity or maximized utility; rather, following Bataille, societies are defined by how they attempt to expend and resolve their excesses.

I started thinking about Bataille recently when, despite all its cheesiness and bad acting from Renee Zellweiger, I finally watched Cinderella Man. I was transfixed. As those who followed my work with Progressive Commons might recall, I have a real fascination with Depression era movies, especially the recent slate of sports- and class-based triumph films (Seabiscuit, Greatest Game Ever Played, etc.). But what struck me most about Cinderella Man was not the boxing, nor the acting (though Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti are both exceptional in the film), but rather the pathos of scarcity and need that the film produces. Be it the lack of milk, the longing for meat, or even hiding food from a fancy restaurant in a napkin in order to take it home, the film does an extraordinary job depicting the emotional torment of a life and society of scarcity. Not a perfect job, but an excellent one nevertheless.